[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 98 (Thursday, June 18, 2015)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E926-E928]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 RABBINIC LETTER ON THE CLIMATE CRISIS

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, June 18, 2015

  Ms. SCHAKOWSKI. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to submit a Rabbinic Letter 
on the Climate Crisis.
  Today, Pope Francis released the Papal Encyclical, calling on all of 
us to address the global crisis of climate change. But the Encyclical 
was not the only religious document this week calling for bold action. 
The Rabbinic Letter demonstrates that leaders in the Jewish faith share 
the commitment to meeting perhaps the greatest challenge of our time.
  The Rabbinic Letter was initiated by seven leading rabbis from a 
broad spectrum of American Jewish life: Rabbi Elliot Dorff, rector of 
the American Jewish University; Rabbi Arthur Green, rector of the 
Hebrew College rabbinical school; Rabbi Peter Knobel, former president, 
Central Conference of American Rabbis; Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, 
director of the Social Justice Organizing Program at the 
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College; Rabbi Susan Talve, spiritual 
leader of Central Reform Congregation, St. Louis; Rabbi Arthur Waskow, 
director of The Shalom Center; and Rabbi Deborah Waxman, president of 
the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. They were joined by Rabbi 
Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, a leader of the Orthodox community.

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  This letter makes clear the scope of the problem we face in 
combatting human-induced climate change. It also identifies clear and 
indisputable principles of the Jewish faith that prove that action on 
this issue isn't just smart from an economic and public health 
perspective--it's morally and religiously justified.
  I thank the 360 Rabbis who have already signed this letter, and I 
urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to follow the guidance of 
these religious leaders on this critical issue.

To the Jewish People, to All Communities of Spirit, and to the World: A 
                 Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis

       We come as Jews and rabbis with great respect for what 
     scientists teach us--for as we understand their teaching, it 
     is about the unfolding mystery of God's Presence in the 
     unfolding universe, and especially in the history and future 
     of our planet. Although we accept scientific accounts of 
     earth's history, we continue to see it as God's creation, and 
     we celebrate the presence of the divine hand in every earthly 
     creature.
       Yet in our generation, this wonder and this beauty have 
     been desecrated--not in one land alone but 'round all the 
     Earth. So in this crisis, even as we join all Earth in 
     celebrating the Breath of Life that interweaves us all--

     You sea-monsters and all deeps, Hallelu-Yah.
     Fire, hail, snow, and steam, Hallelu-Yah.
     Stormy wind to do God's word, Hallelu-Yah.
     Mountains high and tiny hills, Hallelu-Yah (Psalm 148)

       We know all Earth needs not only the joyful human voice but 
     also the healing human hand.
       We are especially moved when the deepest, most ancient 
     insights of Torah about healing the relationships of Earth 
     and human earthlings, adamah and adam, are echoed in the 
     findings of modern science.
       The texts of Torah that perhaps most directly address our 
     present crisis are Leviticus 25-26 and Deuteronomy 15. They 
     call for one year of every seven to be Shabbat Shabbaton--a 
     Sabbatical Year--and Shmittah--a Year of restful Release for 
     the Earth and its workers from being made to work, and of 
     Release for debtors from their debts.
       In Leviticus 26, the Torah warns us that if we refuse to 
     let the Earth rest, it will ``rest'' anyway, despite us and 
     upon us--through drought and famine and exile that turn an 
     entire people into refugees.
       This ancient warning heard by one indigenous people in one 
     slender land has now become a crisis of our planet as a whole 
     and of the entire human species. Human behavior that 
     overworks the Earth--especially the overburning of fossil 
     fuels--crests in a systemic planetary response that endangers 
     human communities and many other life-forms as well.
       Already we see unprecedented floods, droughts, ice-melts, 
     snowstorms, heat waves, typhoons, sea-level rises, and the 
     expansion of disease-bearing insects from ``tropical'' zones 
     into what used to be ``temperate'' regions. Leviticus 26 
     embodied. Scientific projections of the future make clear 
     that even worse will happen if we continue with carbon-
     burning business as usual.
       As Jews, we ask the question whether the sources of 
     traditional Jewish wisdom can offer guidance to our political 
     efforts to prevent disaster and heal our relationship with 
     the Earth. Our first and most basic wisdom is expressed in 
     the Sh'ma and is underlined in the teaching that through 
     Shekhinah the Divine presence dwells within as well as beyond 
     the world. The Unity of all means not only that all life is 
     interwoven, but also that an aspect of God's Self partakes in 
     the interwovenness.
       We acknowledge that for centuries, the attention of our 
     people--driven into exile not only from our original land but 
     made refugees from most lands thereafter so that they were 
     bereft of physical or political connection and without any 
     specific land--has turned away from this sense of 
     interconnection of adam and adamah, toward the repair of 
     social injustice. Because of this history, we were so much 
     pre-occupied with our own survival that we could not turn 
     attention to the deeper crisis of which our tradition had 
     always been aware.
       But justice and earthiness cannot be disentangled. This is 
     taught by our ancient texts--teaching that every seventh year 
     be a Year of Release, Shmittah, Shabbat Shabbaton, in which 
     there would be not only one year's release of Earth from 
     overwork, but also one year's sharing by all in society of 
     the Earth's freely growing abundance, and one year's release 
     of debtors from their debts.
       Indeed, we are especially aware that this very year is, 
     according to the ancient count, the Shmita Year.
       The unity of justice and Earth-healing is also taught by 
     our experience today: The worsening inequality of wealth, 
     income, and political power has two direct impacts on the 
     climate crisis. On the one hand, great Carbon Corporations 
     not only make their enormous profits from wounding the Earth, 
     but then use these profits to purchase elections and to fund 
     fake science to prevent the public from acting to heal the 
     wounds. On the other hand, the poor in America and around the 
     globe are the first and the worst to suffer from the 
     typhoons, floods, droughts, and diseases brought on by 
     climate chaos.
       So we call for a new sense of eco-social justice--a tikkun 
     olam that includes tikkun tevel, the healing of our planet. 
     We urge those who have been focusing on social justice to 
     address the climate crisis, and those who have been 
     focusing on the climate crisis to address social justice.
       Though as rabbis we are drawing on the specific practices 
     by which our Torah makes eco-social justice possible, we 
     recognize that in all cultures and all spiritual traditions 
     there are teachings about the need for setting time and space 
     aside for celebration, restfulness, reflection.
       Yet in modern history, we realize that for about 200 years, 
     the most powerful institutions and cultures of the human 
     species have refused to let the Earth or human earthlings 
     have time or space for rest. By overburning carbon dioxide 
     and methane into our planet's air, we have disturbed the 
     sacred balance in which we breathe in what the trees breathe 
     out, and the trees breathe in what we breathe out. The 
     upshot: global scorching, climate crisis.
       The crisis is worsened by the spread of extreme extraction 
     of fossil fuels that not only heats the planet as a whole but 
     damages the regions directly affected.
       Fracking shale rock for oil and ``unnatural gas'' poisons 
     regional water supplies and induces the shipment of volatile 
     explosive ``bomb trains'' around the country.
       Coal burning not only imposes asthma on coal-plant 
     neighborhoods--often the poorest and Blackest--but destroys 
     the lovely mountains of West Virginia.
       Extracting and pipe-lining Tar Sands threatens Native First 
     nation communities in Canada and the USA, and endangers 
     farmers and cowboys through whose lands the KXL Pipeline is 
     intended to traverse.
       Drilling for oil deep into the Gulf and the Valdez oil 
     spill in Prince William Sound off the Pacific have already 
     brought death to workers and to sea life and financial 
     disasters upon nearby communities. Proposed oil drilling in 
     the Arctic and Atlantic threaten worse.
       All of this is overworking Earth--precisely what our Torah 
     teaches we must not do. So now we must let our planet rest 
     from overwork. For Biblical Israel, this was a central 
     question in our relationship to the Holy One. And for us and 
     for our children and their children, this is once again the 
     central question of our lives and of our God. HOW?--is the 
     question we must answer.
       So here we turn from inherited wisdom to action in our 
     present and our future. One way of addressing our own 
     responsibility would be for households, congregations, 
     denominations, federations, political action--to Move Our 
     Money from spending that helps these modern pharaohs burn our 
     planet to spending that helps to heal it. For example, these 
     actions might be both practical and effective:
       Purchasing wind-born rather than coal-fired electricity to 
     light our homes and synagogues and community centers;
       Organizing our great Federations to offer grants and loans 
     to every Jewish organization in their regions to solarize 
     their buildings;
       Shifting our bank accounts from banks that invest in deadly 
     carbon-burning to community banks and credit unions that 
     invest in local neighborhoods, especially those of poor, 
     Black, and Hispanic communities;
       Moving our endowment funds from supporting deadly Carbon to 
     supporting stable, profitable, life-giving enterprises;
       Insisting that our tax money go no longer to subsidizing 
     enormously profitable Big Oil but instead to subsidizing the 
     swift deployment of renewable energy--as quickly in this 
     emergency as our government moved in the emergency of the 
     early 1940s to shift from manufacturing cars to making tanks.
       Convincing our legislators to institute a system of carbon 
     fees and public dividends that rewards our society for moving 
     beyond the Carbon economy.
       These examples are simply that, and in the days and years 
     to come, we may think of other approaches to accomplish these 
     ecological ends.
       America is one of the most intense contributors to the 
     climate crisis, and must therefore take special 
     responsibility to act. Though we in America are already 
     vulnerable to climate chaos, other countries are even more 
     so--and Jewish caring must take that truth seriously. Israeli 
     scientists, for example, report that if the world keeps doing 
     carbon business as usual, the Negev desert will come to 
     swallow up half the state of Israel, and sea-level rises will 
     put much of Tel Aviv under water.
       Israel itself is too small to calm the wide world's 
     worsening heat. Israel's innovative ingenuity for solar and 
     wind power could help much of the world, but it will take 
     American and other funding to help poor nations use the new-
     tech renewable energy created by Israeli and American 
     innovators.
       We believe that there is both danger and hope in American 
     society today, a danger and a hope that the American Jewish 
     community, in concert with our sisters and brothers in other 
     communities of Spirit, must address. The danger is that 
     America is the largest contributor to the scorching of our 
     planet. The hope is that over and over in our history, when 
     our country faced the need for profound change, it has been 
     our communities of moral commitment, religious covenant, and 
     spiritual search that have arisen to meet the need. So it was 
     fifty years ago during the Civil Rights movement, and so it 
     must be today.
       As we live through this Shmittah Year, we are especially 
     aware that Torah calls for

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     Hak'heyl--assembling the whole community of the People Israel 
     during the Sukkot after the Shmittah year, to hear and 
     recommit ourselves to the Torah's central teachings.
       So we encourage Jews in all our communities to gather on 
     the Sunday of Sukkot this year, October 4, 2015, to explore 
     together our responsibilities toward the Earth and all 
     humankind, in this generation.
       Our ancient earthy wisdom taught that social justice, 
     sustainable abundance, a healthy Earth, and spiritual 
     fulfillment are inseparable. Today we must hear that teaching 
     in a world-wide context, drawing upon our unaccustomed 
     ability to help shape public policy in a great nation. We 
     call upon the Jewish people to meet God's challenge once 
     again.

                          ____________________