We must all be activists for the planet

MY MEMORY BEGINS with green hills opposite the house where I was born. Love of nature has framed my life. I seek God in all life: trees, birds, animals, the human spirit. “No place is devoid of God”.

I want my children to inherit the same wonder as I did. Every one of us shares a responsibility to all the world’s children to bequeath to them a viable, biodiverse, sustaining and beautiful planet. Judaism views creation as a daring and profound act of trust. God places the world in the care of our human, unreliable hands.

Therefore, I feel guilt and terror at the devastation of the world’s beauty. When on Yom Kippur I say “Bagadnu - We have betrayed,” I experience visceral shame at belonging to a generation destroying God’s earth. The kabbalists called a sin ‘“tearing branches off the tree of life”. Once this was a metaphor. Now it’s the literal truth.

We must change our attitudes and our conduct. The environmental crisis is caused by how we consume; better choices will make for a better world and we need to take them quickly.

But that is only part of the truth: this is also a crisis of values, a moral and spiritual challenge to the excessive role consumption plays in our lives. Most of us possess more material things than any generation preceding us. Yet, driven by incessant marketing and the ready provision of endless products, this makes us want more and more.

Judaism has always regarded justice, compassion and the service of God and life as the supreme values. We must not displace them with the idolatry of wealth, economic growth and power. These are only the means to an end: caring for all life. We must urgently re-educate ourselves to care for all life.

That is why two of my heroes are David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg; why I believe we must all be activists for the planet. Every home and community should have a policy on consumption and waste and put the environment high on its charitable priorities.

Eco Synagogue, developed in the UK following the lead of Eco Church, helps congregations assess and change practices in the use of kitchens, buildings and land, and maximise their influence through teaching and preaching on the lives of their members and the surrounding community.

Waste is an easy place to start. The principle of Bal Tashchit was developed by the rabbis from the Torah’s specific prohibition of cutting down fruit trees and turning them into instruments of war, into a comprehensive ban on all needless waste.

I’m dismayed to see kosher bakeries sell challot in individual plastic bags which are then put into plastic carrier bags. I’m tempted to declare such practices unkosher.

The same applies to single use plastic cutlery and throwaway cups and plates. One of the first steps a synagogue can take is to stop using them at kiddush and communal functions. This change has put an end to my synagogue throwing away 30,000 plastic cups per year.

Wherever possible, leftover food should be given to the hungry through local organisations doing similar work to the Israeli NGO Leket Yisrael, or Oz Harvest in Australia. Food that cannot be saved should be composted.

A deeper challenge concerns what we buy in the first place. I am a passionate vegetarian. This is both out of concern for animal welfare, tsa’ar baalei chaim, the avoidance of animal suffering, and because of the huge environmental cost of raising cattle and growing the fodder they require. The dairy industry is also implicated; while not a vegan, I have cut my dairy consumption considerably.

If before we took a product off the supermarket shelf, we had to watch a 20-second video showing us the true cost of the item, the conditions in which the workers and growers lived, the effect on animals, the impact of the chemicals and water used on the land, and the environmental price in transport, I am convinced that we would radically rethink our habits of consumption.

Only buy clothes you intend to wear at least 30 times, I recently read. I am trying to practice the “Do I need it” test, before buying clothes or throwing away anything supposedly old or outdated.

We have recently changed our private car from diesel to electric. As a rabbi, I didn’t want to model worst practice. But even this is not the ideal; the future will lie not in private ownership, but in sharing cars and city bikes.

I’ve determined to cut my flying. I put it to my community that we should use rail whenever we can, holiday nearer home, and, when we must fly for work or to visit family or friends, we travel less often but stay longer. We have negotiated a rebate to the synagogue for any member who moves from fossil to green electricity.

These are only beginnings. But we must all make a start, then inspire and challenge each other to better practice. We should spend more time in nature, experience the joy of belonging to the wider life which fills this living, breathing world, and urgently support rewilding and reforesting projects near our home and across the globe. We can and must help regrow the heart and lungs of the world.

It’s said that individuals make no difference, that this is a matter for governments and multi-nationals. I disagree.

Maimonides taught that the fate of the world is exactly balanced; our next action will tip the scales for good or bad. The destiny of life itself is in the balance. Our generation’s actions may make all the difference.

Illustration: Avi Katz