Published: 4 October 2019
Last updated: 5 April 2024
I had known about climate change for many years, of course. I went to see Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth back in 2006, and remember feeling shocked and disturbed. This lasted for a few weeks, maybe months, and then it disappeared off my radar. Certainly, in recent years, I hadn’t given the issue much thought.
I was busy with a full-time job and two young children; I had no headspace, let alone time, to think about such seemingly abstract and far-away issues. And I probably thought there were plenty of good people working on this issue. Basically, I had my head in the sand.
Over the first few months that my sister and I met, I started to hear people talking not about climate change but about the climate emergency and the need to act with speed and urgency if we are to prevent an irreversible chain of catastrophic impacts that could render large parts of the planet uninhabitable, or, worst case scenario, see the extinction of humankind.
Over these months, I experienced feelings of intense fear, grief, and anger. I felt a sense of disbelief that people weren’t running around in the streets like Chicken Little shouting “the sky is falling, the sky is falling”, because the sky may not be falling, but the ice is melting, the oceans are dying and the earth is burning.
One of the key moral lessons of the Holocaust is not to be a bystander.
And then one day, the penny dropped. I was talking to the CEO of Courage to Care, an organisation in our community that does important work educating non-Jewish school students about the Holocaust. He told me that their focus was not on the events of the Holocaust, but on one of its the key moral lessons – not to be a bystander.
They usually talk to students about not being a bystander to racism or even the bullying they see in the school yard. As we were talking, it occurred to me that climate change is the greatest catastrophe confronting humankind, yet so many of us are standing by, letting it happen. We are being bystanders.
I thought about my kids, 20 years from now, looking at me and asking, “Twenty years ago when the world still could have done something, everyone knew what was happening. You knew what was happening. What did you do?” It felt unbearable to me to imagine saying to them, “I did nothing. I just carried on life as it had always been.” It became clear to me that I was not going to be a bystander.
With a background as an educator and public speaker, I decided to do what I did best. Together with my sister, I developed an interactive presentation aimed at raising awareness about climate change, initially among our personal and professional networks. We wanted to take them on the same journey to “awakening” that we had been on.
In March, we invited 14 friends and colleagues to my home to participate in our first session. Among the attendees were four people who had been engaged with the issue for far longer than me and had been thinking about doing something to mobilise the Jewish community. We decided to form the Jewish Climate Action Group, with the aim of raising awareness and inspiring action in the Jewish community.
Jewish philanthropy is helping to solve many of our social problems and are great benefactors to arts and culture. However, climate change is a societal issue that we are not engaging with in a significant way.
So why a Jewish climate group? Eytan Lenko, one of the group’s co-founders, wrote in a recent op-ed piece in the Australian Jewish News: “Australia’s Jewish community is one of the most engaged and organised in the country. We have strong institutions that get involved in national issues such as marriage equality, refugees and the rise of racism.
“Many of us individually volunteer with our schools, synagogues, sporting clubs and the care of our elderly. Jewish philanthropy is helping to solve many of our social problems and are great benefactors to arts and culture. However, climate change is a societal issue that we are not engaging with in a significant way.”
The Jewish Climate Action Group is working to change that. We have run numerous sessions, adapted from the one I developed with my sister, for small groups in people’s home, raising awareness about the climate emergency and providing a Jewish perspective on the importance of taking personal responsibility and action.
In May, we held an event attended by over 200 people and called on the Jewish community to “vote climate” in the federal election; to add climate policy to the mix of issues they would take into consideration when deciding who to vote for.
That election saw a party returned to power with climate policies that were rated four out of 100 by the Australian Conservation Foundation. Despite this, we are determined to keep moving forward.
We have plans to evolve our group into a small but potent professional organisation that will harness the social capital and philanthropic culture of the Jewish community to create a powerful movement advocating for and acting against climate change.
Illustration: Avi Katz
