By way of sobering prologue.

 

‘I have no illusions about the Jews here becoming a Quaker community. That would be too good to be true.’ So wrote Judah Magnes in 1930, at a time when the great Reform rabbi, Zionist but also prominently pacifist chancellor of Jerusalem’s recently created Hebrew University was becoming increasingly exercised (in the wake of Arab attacks on the Yishuv) on Jewish responses which pointed towards a future in Israel-Palestine of intolerance and violence. 

 

It might seem somewhat odd, not to say counter-productive, to begin a piece on the potentially positive role of Jews in response to climate change by throwing into the equation the most controversial and contentious of issues in contemporary Jewish discourse. And not least by introducing a figure who even back in the period before the creation of Israel -  when  Palestine was  ruled by the British -  was notably out of step with mainstream Jewish political and religious tendencies. Why, one might ask, risk total alienation of my audience, at the outset, when I am trying to seek their support ? The problem is that when one is trying to say something both very different and very difficult in terms of what it demands of people, there is rarely an easy, or gentle way to do it. Magnes thus comes to my aid as a  prophetic figure who like Martin Buber, his great co-worker in the task not just of Arab-Jewish reconciliation but also universal healing, was prepared to insistently speak out against the grain of ephemeral popularity.

 

At stake in the here and now is not simply the fate of a seminal stretch of the eastern Mediterranean, or even whether it can be resolved through violence or non-violence. The evolving contours of anthropogenic (human-made) climate change encompass all of us on this precious planet, Jew and gentile alike. And implicit in that process will be a rapidly accelerating trajectory of mass, self-inflicted violence on a global scale.

 

The key question I pose here is not what can political, economic or other elites  do to avoid that outcome but rather what role, if any, do we as Jews have? And if the answer is affirmative, what exactly is it? To be sure such questions coming from an individual who though immersed in modern Jewish history, by any other token would be described as ‘secular,’ must, again, sound decidedly odd. All my life I have been asking myself an albeit clumsy question which precedes the others: ‘what is the point of being Jewish?’ The answer may itself have developed slowly and tortuously. But now it reverberates loud and clear: the point lies in the nature of today’s all-encompassing crisis. And hence of bringing an essentially Judaic resource into interplay with humanity writ-large to meet it.

 

This piece begins thus: if we are to continue to think of ourselves as  Jews in this present crisis of climate change, then by the same token we are required to dig deep towards our historical origins to recover the essence of a  Judaic purposefulness in the world - one which, as Magnes inferred, we have somehow elided, forgotten or, for the sake of more material conveniences, chosen to ignore. Equally, if not more difficult to swallow, is a further implication. If we are to be true to our communal but universalist purpose as we face the ‘long emergency’ of the 21st century, then, especially for ourselves in the diaspora, the outcome of the struggles within, without, for or against Israel, can no longer be the raison d’etre – wherever we politically stand – which define our Jewish selves. The safe and sound future of the Jewish community in today’s Israel may be necessary to our Jewish well-being but it can no longer be sufficient. Again, listen to Magnes in that same 1930 tract, suitably entitled ‘Like All the Nations ?’: ‘Palestine cannot solve the Jewish problem of the Jewish people. Wherever there are Jews there is the Jewish problem. It is part of the Jewish destiny  to face this problem and make it mean something of good for (hu)mankind’.

 

These provocative lines return us to the quote with which we began. And hence the gap Magnes recognised between a Jewish potential for purposefulness in the world and actual everyday Jewish realities. If most of us as individuals, community, or communities have not through our own volition grasped this tension, how could it possibly be that we might collectively strive for a way forward on the climate change issue recognisable to others as  ‘good’ and’ true’?  Should we simply accept the limitations inherent in the contemporary Jewish (or general) condition? Or could it be that Jewry’s self-realisation of its prophetic role could reveal itself through the very urgency of this special moment in ‘time’ and thereby unlock the gateway towards our own self-transformation?

 

Humanity at its twilight

 

‘And it was finished, the heaven and the earth. Now it was unformed and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’ Can we imagine a world in which the promise of creation has been unravelled backwards ?  In place of the bible’s optimistic genesis with all its myriad life-forms, and ourselves, homo sapiens, at some seeming apex; a complete, irrevocable dissolution? There is something almost blasphemous in the sheer utterance.  Even in the unveiling of the end as offered in those other, later Judeo-Christian texts of the apocalypse, the end may seem to spell earthly devastation but still with the promise of a new beginning.

 

What we may be facing now would appear to offer no solace, no glint of millenarian salvation. Should we respond by blocking up our ears to the earth scientists who are warning us of the worst ? The likes of the two James’: Hansen and Lovelock, or more in the swing of UK public engagement, Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Institute, or David Wasdell from the Apollo-Gaia project, have been for some time talking not just of a global warming more dramatic and accelerated than anything offered in consensual estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  but of greenhouse gas (ghg) accumulations in the atmosphere so embedded, and of combined earth feedbacks so exponential, that whatever we may  belatedly attempt to do to halt the consequences the effect will be as nought as the  biosphere follows its own inexorable, self-regulating path.  And what will happen as the natural thresholds which have sustained life on earth are crossed? Perhaps, a collapse of life forms the magnitude of which has not happened since the Permo-Triassic extinction event of some 245 million years past. With this key difference, of course, that first cause this time will be a thoroughly anthropogenic one.

 

Urbane academics at the twilight may still argue about what moment in historical, or even pre-historical time humans set themselves on this course of self-annihilation. There will be a lot of talk of hubris, perhaps even of that fateful passage in Genesis where God seemingly commands the first men to have dominion over the sea and the earth and of all living things. Yet the fact remains that the accelerated countdown to planetary Nemesis has been of very recent occurrence, as bound up with an even more uber-hubristic notion that a globalised material transcendence could be arrived at without biospheric consequence simply by appropriating and guzzling a finite source of sequestrated solar energy (in other words, fossil fuels) as power for the project. As we now know from the carbon count (see, for instance,  Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, ‘Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. 366:1882 (2008), pp. 3863–3882), what has come to pass as a result is more than simply a planetary blow-back. Indeed, as we head into the vortex it will be more than academics who will wonder with amazement at not only how the conjuring trick could have been perpetrated without serious demur for so long but equally how all this could have developed out of a Western culture steeped in notions of limits, restraints, nay, even of the principle of deferred gratification.

 

That these notions owe more than a little to a Judeo-Christian tradition may rather suggest that if Middle Eastern-born monotheisms may have been part of problem they may also, on a very practical level, have something to offer by way of an answer.  Jews have sometimes been flatteringly referred to as practical idealists though, in the face of this global challenge, I see very little communally, outside very particular circles, that amounts to either idealism or praxis.  But is there another Judaic route into this issue, not so much through the religion’s grounded rationality but, if one prefers, though its more transcendent, and by implication subversive tendencies?

 

Like its chief offspring, Christianity, Judaism is teleological in that it carries in its very conceptualisation an idea of human history with a purposeful beginning and end. The Judaic version has always had embedded within it a notion of humanity working towards a restoration of that which was at the very outset both promised and realised. Never in Judaism, however, has this process of healing been imagined as ethereal or, alternatively, deferred to some other (after) life. On the contrary, read, for instance, that most remarkable of all Jewish prayers, the Kaddish and it is evident that this is a religion suffused with the notion that God’s kingdom has the potentiality to be established on earth right now, in our own time and place. To be sure, this sense of imminent eschatological realisation has been tempered, moderated even diminished, through Jewish ‘time.’ The explanation we may read as one of sheer necessity: not least following the collapse of those Palestinocentric efforts in the 1st century CE to overcome what politically stood in the way, either through direct violent revolt or that lateral, spiritual path as most extraordinarily represented by Jesus. Thereafter, rabbinic Judaism had little choice but to concentrate on the creation of internalised codes of practice geared towards ensuring the survival of a precarious minority community in a dangerous world. It was this circumspect response which dominated Jewish behaviour throughout the centuries of primarily diaspora existence, as only finally ruptured in the 20th century by the attempted obliterative assault on the entirety of Jewry posed by Nazism on the one hand, and the essentially secular Jewish breakthrough to an imagined normalisation of condition, as most obviously posed by the idea of creating a sovereign Jewishstate, on the other.

 

The point of stating this historical experience, however, is so that we can reaffirm Judaism’s fundamental ethical premise. As the 1997 Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, (p.513) neatly summarises: 

 

Israel is a proleptic community, established by God in the midst of time to represent the harmony which was intended by God in creation, and which will in the end be the whole human case. 

 

Again, certainly, there is in this statement an inherent tension (affecting all the monotheisms) between the ‘now’ and that which is ‘to come.’ But the key to that overcoming in the Judaic case surely lies in that wonderful word: proleptic. It means literally ‘anticipation’. Thus, what a group of once disparate clans believed they had entered into in the biblical narrative was a brit : a covenant with the Almighty which demanded of them a collaborative cross-generational participation in an act of restorative healing, and which, through dugma eshit - leading by  example -  would in the fullness of ‘time’ embrace  within the prophetic promise all the other peoples of the earth. Put to one side the quid pro quo aspect of the brit : God’s granting of some special Jewish ‘space,’ geographical or otherwise, called Israel;  a Jewish collective responsibility to be a ‘light unto the nations’  (Isaiah 42:6) entailed not just living the ethical life but in an anticipatory sense as if  et ketz,’endtime’ were already upon us.

 

Of course, all we have to do is look at biblical record is to see even then how the community fell short of its chosen task. Just like all their neighbours the Jews became mired in power politics, grandiose statist ambitions, even genocidal violence dressed up as holy war. Which is why the message of the prophets is so thoroughly compelling. They not only spoke truth to power, they forecast what would happen if kings and people failed to heed the path of peace, social justice and kindness to the stranger. In thereby anticipating catastrophe borne out of human greed and corruption, they also imagined another, better world borne out of a Judaic embrace of right-living.

 

By this juncture one might fairly respond by saying, yes, but what has any of this to do with being Jewish now, let alone with how that relates to climate change? And my answer would have to be: absolutely everything. It’s perfectly true that the Judaic texts are not awash with ecological consciousness. There is succour there for those who wish to garner it but the texts are primarily concerned with people-people relationships not people-planet ones. Certainly, one can make the necessary connect through Judaism’s fundamental tenet of piku’ah nefesh :‘the saving of life’ above all other things. But it is only when one cross-references that principle with Judaism’s time-centred, indeed in some critical sense, time-synchronised telos that a Jewish purposefulness in the here and now begins to become apparent.  Of course, yet again, one might say that one hardly has to be Jewish to recognise that future climate change is determined by past and present human actions. The science can tell us that. And from which Judaic rationality would not demur. But the point is not about the clinical assembling of the evidence.  Or even, over and beyond that assemblage, offering either a risk-assessment or the need to think in terms of some precautionary principle.  Prescience, as more than simply science, should be telling us that we are way beyond that. Only upon knowing the future as if it were the present might we envision the consequence for good or ill. And so act accordingly.  

 

This would mean grasping the now as if it were not ‘any’ time but et ketz time. A further quintessentially, Jewish figure in the prophetic tradition: the one we know as John the Baptist, is reported as proclaiming it thus from the wilderness ‘ The time is at hand : believe and change the way you live.’ (Mark, 1:14)  The words of prophets are prone to fall on deaf ears.  Especially for the majority of urban, even metropolitan populations of the West inured to comforting themselves with the idea that global warming is no more than background noise: distant, ungraspable, even invisible until, that is, the storm, the wrenching fire, the drought-ridden famine, or the flood bursts into their sanguine lives. ‘What can I do about it anyway ?’ is their constant refrain. And so it is the same for most Jewish people, the vast majority of whom these days are also climate-insulated, city dwellers.  With this key difference: they have no excuse. As human time runs into its hour glass a rabbinically- ordered marking of time - or even concentrated prayer in anticipation of messianic renewal - has no choice but to make way for that ever more insistently ticking eschatological clock. Indeed  if we are to be Jews at all  at this given moment, then the prophetic imperative to heed is also one to act : for the now and the future, for humanity and biosphere, and as if they were all one. 

 

What is to be done? 

 

Many modern Christian theologians (and indeed secular commentators) have mused how recognition of crisis might translate into a special opportune time – kairos –  in which the sort of paradigm shift in human thinking and acting like that which the Baptist sought, occurs. For Jews, the prophetic calling might suggest that we ought to be there already. Indeed, it was no slip of the pen when that great 20th century Jewish thinker Buber, called one of his major tracts - about radical Jewish action in contemporary times - paths in utopia, not paths towards utopia.

 

 One might pertinently rejoinder, but why should it matter what Jews think or do in this thoroughly secular age? Why indeed would anybody much care? And anyway, how exactly would this Jewish transformation work?  These are, in fact, interlinked questions and ones to which here I can only give the briefest  of answers. But let me, at least, make a stab at them as a basis for further, ongoing debate.

 

Jewish diaspora demographics are today unusual in the degree to which they correspond with the major hubs of Western city existence. Increasingly comfortable if not wealthy, highly socially mobile and extremely well educated, contemporary Jewry, for all its internal diversity, plurality and contradictions cannot in any sense be considered a marginal element within the Western body-politic. It may be a minority set of sub-cultures but in other respects we might treat it as a microcosm of that larger trans-Atlantic society, which also, of course, happens to be at the very apex of the forces which are driving the climate crisis. Indeed, as Jews are disproportionately represented in the cultural, as well as political and economic structures of a contemporary Western hegemony, any collective Jewish shift towards a practical anticipatory realisation of what now needs now to be done could not but have significant knock-on effects. 

 

The issue, then, is not that Jews qua Jews are currently in any way forerunners to the systemic shift which needs to take place. If we were, for instance, trying to locate a community living in the West which is practising a largely carbon-free, sustainable and resilient right-living our search would first and foremost take us to the doors of the Older Order Amish of Pennsylvania. But the very fact that the Amish have physically separated themselves from the Western mainstream, rather than, in the majority Jewish case, living in its interstices, determines that they can fulfil little by way of an anticipatory role. Movement forwards in the West can only come, at least insofar as it is by example, from a group, or groups, who are voluntarily prepared to change their basic carbon-intensive modus operandi. There is, of course, no civic reason why Jews qua Jews might volunteer for this task. Their willingness to do so could only arise out of a self-understanding of their religious purpose. 

 

Which must bring us on the singularity of this particular moment with all its et-ketz : kairos resonances. What we have all witnessed over the last year is a quite extraordinary spectacle where, faced with economic meltdown, our Western leaders looked a once in a lifetime (perhaps once in a species-time) opportunity for a change of course – and blinked. Their kairos moment could have led to a reconceptualisation of the entire system’s operating premises, re-directed to a proper preparation of humanity for the real biospheric challenge ahead. Instead, they threw the opportunity away, abdicated responsibility, and so proved themselves pathologically incapable of thinking in anything other than in terms of restarting the globalised economic growth machine that is leading to planetary destruct. From corporate-state we have in a twinkling of an eye, moved to state-corporate: yet with nothing in the basic grounds rules changed at all. The ‘moment’ in other words has passed and, Obama or no, we can expect nothing from our political or business elites which (tinkering apart), will meet the magnitude of the crisis : except, that is, through eventual mass violence of one form or another.  

 

From where can hope emanate in such circumstances? Is it so ludicrous to propose that only an ethnical-cum-religious dimension entered into the social, even political arena is now all that remains if we are to claw back any vestige of our sanity and clear-mindedness ? To suggest that the primacy of ethical, life-affirming principles could be the grounds upon which humanists and those of all faiths might find common cause is surely no more than a truism. Where Jews have a specific task in this greater whole, is in a rational but rapid reformulation of themselves as a model community of anticipation. And for which they actually already have an entirely Judaic yet modern blueprint.

 

Aubrey Meyer’s visionary Contraction and Convergence proposition (you can read more on this in  Meyer’s‘The Case for Contraction and Convergence,’ in  David Cromwell and  Mark Levene, eds., Surviving Climate Change, The Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe, London: Pluto Press, 2007, pp. 29-56),  is not only at fundament about piku’ah nefesh, it also in its insistence on an time-ordered reconciliation of all humanity by way of equal carbon entitlement is nothing less than eschatological in its vision of a world community which has arrived at its ethical end-goal. But Meyer’s proposition, of course, does not openly speak in these prophetic terms. Utterly grounded in the climate science, its purpose is to find a practical framework by which yearly, incremental carbon reduction can be brought to safe-limits. And its method is social justice. While all humanity will converge to a common carbon point, it will be the rich countries who will have to do almost the entirety of the ‘contraction’ to meet the overall targets, and in the process  –  through the tradability of entitlements – enabling the poor and disadvantaged the investment not only for clean sustainable technologies but a belated meeting of their fundamental right to wellbeing. 

 

A Jewish community which takes to its soul this ideal of and makes of it a goal of practical implementation is one which is truly fulfilling its time-honoured purpose. It would also in the process be helping to break an actual log-jam. Contraction and Convergence has been much theorised but what is arguably needed now is visible evidence that it can be made to work in a Western environment where the ‘sacrifice’ has to be made. Normative Judaism through its historic orthopraxy is particular suited to this exercise. Traditionally Jews lived by a very tight code of rules and observations governing every aspect of conduct and behaviour in their daily lives. Large numbers of the religious still do so. Re-orientating these guidelines to a template governing a sustainable life-style would not as an idea be that revolutionary. In the sense that it would actually involve a thorough-going programme of transition to low-energy living it would be as far-reaching as could be conceivably imagined. 

 

Implementation would not simply mean changing light bulbs, turning down the central-heating thermostat, getting on one’s bike, or even eschewing car or air travel. It would mean rethinking individual, family and community economic and energy priorities;  where the wherewithal existed issues of home location and financial investments : in other words ploughing them instead into renewable, preferably local energy (and other socially sustainable) projects;  possibly relinquishing or down-sizing of participants’ current jobs and attempting to replace the hours with more socially and environmentally valuable projects; teaching one’s children not just intellectual but practical skills of self-sufficiency and resourcefulness (including most obviously, growing most of one’s own food); getting them to engage with life and work, built and natural environment issues which challenge standard, materialist-driven (hence redundant) contemporary aspirations and in their place setting long-term goals associated with  learning to live in and with the planet, not against it.  

 

Is this all moonshine? Clearly, if one’s starting point is the British Jewish community as most of it is today, the answer would have to be a resounding ‘yes’. The very fact that my own efforts to organise open public meetings about climate change in London, specifically angled at Jewish audiences, failed, at the first hurdle for lack of interest is, alas, indicative of just how far removed the majority of the community is from the question as posed.  To revert, indeed, to Magnes’: if one were to ask:  can Jews become Quakers, or better still Amish? the answer, would, of course, be absolutely ‘no’. So, what in heaven’s name, is the point of this exercise if all along it has been a fantasy?

 

Yet all I have done here is set out the preconditions as to why Jewish people have the potentiality to be pathfinders for radical change; the futility thus lying less in the imagining and more in those humdrum realities of normative time which afflict both Jew and gentile. Yet this is not the entirety of the picture. In the 20th century, Jewish anticipation of a better world repeatedly broke through onto the global stage in all manner of political and cultural arenas.  To be sure, then as now, where the protagonists were themselves Jewish, they rarely made a point about their backgrounds; where they did so at all often only to stridently pronounce their thoroughly secular identification. There is, indeed, a paradox at the heart of what is being propounded here: the proleptic imperative at the heart of the Judaic has been most profoundly pursued in recent times, not within the community, but outside it. But then, perhaps, that simply acts as a reminder that one doesn’t have to be literally Jewish to be ‘Jewish.’ ‘ The day is short the task is great,’ proclaimed the great 1st century  rabbi, Tarfon..But if those within the tent are unable to respond to this injunction, then, in heaven’s name, let a new brit arise to fulfil it.  One thing though is certain and it is encapsulated in that famous self-searching question of another great sage, rabbi Hillel : ‘if not now, when?’

 

First published in Manna, Number 107 Spring 2010

 

An earlier version of this article appeared in volume 37, issue 2 of Friends Quarterly, (May 2009).