Year 3, Month 10, Day 22: We Have Three Days To Learn To Live Under Water

The Jerusalem Post goes Old Testament, in a column titled, “Noah vs. Isaiah: The Torah Of Climate Change.” The final few paragraphs:

THIS BRINGS us to this week’s reading from the Prophets, which provides a strong counter-balance to Noah’s complacency. Isaiah is the prophet par excellence: He admonishes people to change their behavior, speaks truth to power, and lifts the spirit of a nation with visions of redemption and covenants.

Specifically, Isaiah says this week that just as God promised that “the waters of Noah nevermore would flood the earth,” (Isaiah 54:9) so does the Creator promise never to abandon Israel. Isaiah is the leading light of “social justice prophets,” and whose “light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42:6) designation imparts on us, as Elie Wiesel teaches, a special burden: the responsibility and privilege to rebel.

Noah is the luckiest guy on the planet.

Yet not for other reason you might think.

Noah had a non-burning source of light.

“Tzohar ta’ase lateyva” (Gen 6:16), which some of the commentators say was a precious jewel that glowed and provided light in the ark.

The future of life on the planet is wrapped up in the number 350. To prevent the “end of the world” by adding more than 350 parts per million carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, there needs to be non-fossil-fueled “rays of light.”

We have today all the renewable technologies necessary to power and light the world, yet missing is Isaiah’s fiery spirit. Noah’s spirit of acquiesce dominates; therefore, the waters are rising.

So let’s rise to the challenge. Are there any prophets or rabbis – indeed, any Jews – out there willing to decree solar power a mitzvah and burning the fossil fuel remnants of lost and drowned worlds an abomination? Or perhaps, within five years, a crime against humanity?

Only my father’s side of my family was Jewish, but I’d like to think of myself as having an Apikoros quality. Sent October 15:

Leave aside the terrifying mathematics of atmospheric CO2 for a moment, and contemplate the extraordinary miracle embodied in the fossil fuels that we burn every day. Each unit of fossil energy is the long-preserved sunlight of a time innumerable eons before humanity emerged on Earth. 450 million years ago, during the Carboniferous era, giant trees stretched their branches and leaves to the sun, turning solar energy into living matter before dying and joining a slow accumulation of matter on the forest floor, there to concentrate into pools of oil or deposits of coal.

Human beings, no matter what their origins or beliefs, universally regard the very old as worthy of respect. Whether it’s an ancient document, a building hallowed by millennia of use, or a story passed on through countless generations, we venerate these reminders of our species’ long and magnificent history. How, then, can we in good conscience continue to irresponsibly burn the sunlight of Earth’s early life?

The casual consumption of fossil fuels is an environmental tragedy, a moral predicament, and a profound insult to the antiquity of our planet.

Warren Senders