I was asked to give the prayer at an Earth Day event for a new friend. She is a charismatic, Baptist minister, a chaplain at a local hospital, and the sister of a congregant. My response? Who me? Surely with all of her friends there might be someone else better suited, better equipped to pray. But she is a new friend and it is at Morton Arboretum. I love the Morton Arboretum. And I don’t like to disappoint.
What could I say that would be meaningful? She described the group as a fourth Jewish, a fourth Christian and a fourth heathen. How could I bridge all those gaps?
My father loved places like this. He was a scientist. He was a biologist, a botanist, a geneticist. We spent more Yom Kippurs in the woods reveling in nature than in synagogue. He worked for Barry Commoner, who coined the term ecology, so my father was one of the first ecologists and together we celebrated the first Earth Day in Evanston in 1970. But he was not someone who prayed. So again, what could I say as the daughter of a Jewish atheist on this beautiful Earth Day.
And then the prayer fell into my lap.
Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar wrote a called Counting Omer. In the back of the book there are prayers for special days. Here is the one for Earth Day:
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai said:
Three thins are of equal importance—
Earth, humans and rain.
Rabbi Levi ben Chiyata said:
To teach that without earth, there is no rain
And without rain, the earth cannot endure.
And without either
Humans cannot exist. (B’reisht Rabah 13:3)
Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakki…used to say:
If you have a sapling in your hand
And someone should say to you that
The Messiah has come,
Stay and complete the planting and then go
To great the Messiah (Avot D’Rabbi Natan 31b)
When you reap the harvest of your land,
You shall not reap all the way
To the edges of your field or gather
But you shall leave them
For the poor and the stranger
I the Eternal am your God (Leviticus 19:9-10)
But ask the beasts and they will teach you
The birds of the sky and they will tell you
Or speak to the earth and t will teach you
The fish of the sea, they will inform you.
Who among all these does not know
That the hand of the Eternal has done this? (Job 12:7-9)
Compiled by Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar
Look around you. Earlier this week looking at what I now believe is an ornamental pear tree in full blossom etched against a bright blue sky, I was reminded of the Louis Armstrong song:
I see trees of green, red roses, too,
I see them bloom, for me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world.
I see skies of blue, and clouds of white,
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world.
Look around you. What a wonderful world.
Appreciating nature is the first step. Being inspired by it. Awed by it. Wowed by is the second step. The third step, as we are doing today, is to fulfill the sacred obligation to take care of it.
We have an obligation to take care of this wonderful world and to take care of the people who take care of us. That is why we are here today. To raise money for a scholarship in the name of a teacher, Jerry Hart, a teacher of science, who brought many to this deep appreciation of nature.
So I added to Karen Kedar’s prayer. I used the words of an old Girl Scout grace.
“Back of the bread is the flour and back of the flour is the mill and back of the mill is the wind and the rain and the Father’s will.”
And the one line blessing from the Talmud: Brich rachamana, malka d’alma, marei d’hei pita. You are the source of life for all that lives and Your blessing flows through me.
Thank you for this amazing day. For the food we are about to eat. For Olive who called us all together. For the connections between all of these people. For friends and family. For the people who serve the food. For the people who prepare it. For the truckers who brought it. For the farmers who planted and sowed and watered and hoped and prayed and for the G-d who brings forth bread from the earth for all.
And it was a glorious day. But there is more. A woman came up to me afterwards and thanked me for speaking. Not at the Arboretum, but at an event back in February. Because I spoke at the Long Red Line Billion Women Rising event at the Gail Borden Library, she got the courage to go get the help she needed. Not me alone but also Mary who spoke powerfully about trauma and how to overcome it. Not me alone but together with the Community Crisis Center and others like Vicky and Denise, who helped organize that event. The midrash and the Koran both teach if you have saved one life it is as though you have saved the world. On Earth Day, we received the gift of knowing. Because of this I have the strength (and the courage) to complete the next book on Hope and Healing.
On the way to the Arboretum, I heard a radio program I love, On Being with Krista Tippett. http://onbeing.org It, too, seemed focused on Earth Day. And I confess, I didn’t hear the whole program with Margaret Wertheim. A physicist, she is making crocheted coral reefs http://crochetcoralreef.org/about/index.php to so that we have a model of the coral reef it were to die out. This week there was an announcement from NOAA scientists that the coral reef might die out if we don’t stop releasing so much C02 in the air. The very thing that my father had worried about when we were celebrating the first Earth Day.
All that by itself was intriguing. It is a constructive response to a desvesting problem. She says that people are totally freaked out by climate change. But what captured my imagination the most was what she said about community. When billion of corral polyps coming together they can build the Great Barrier Reef. The crocheted corral project is a human analog of that. Look what we can do together. Individually we are insignificant and powerless but together, look what we can do. She said that alone we would be overwhelmed by climate change and alone we can do little if anything about it. The power and greatness of the coral project. Insignificant alone but look what we can do together. But together as community we can.
We have a sacred obligation to repair the world. We call that tikkun olam. It comes right at the beginning of Genesis. We have a sacred obligation to be caretakers of the earth. To be partners with G-d. Again right from Genesis. To not destroy, bal taschit. But no one can do this alone. “Ours is not to finish the task, neither are we free to ignore it.” It takes the power of community.
I have been writing a lot about community lately. On Earth Day, we learn (or more accurately relearn) the power of community. Coming together as community saves lives. Coming together as community saves the planet.
And that is one of the beauties of Congregation Kneseth Israel. We build community by planting winter wheat and counting the omer. We build community when we volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. We build community when we volunteer for PADs and the Crisis Center. We build community when we collect non-perishable food for the Kol Nidre food drive and for the Martin Luther King food drive. We build community when we plant our community garden and feed the hungry, playing out the words from this coming week’s Torah portion. We don’t glean to the edges of our field. We provide for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and in that process we build our own community.
Then I walked back up the hill with my new friend Olive and we reveled in our commonality and the beauty of the bright yellow daffodils and the bright green new growth. It seemed the world was bright, covered with new leaves just coming out, looking like lace against the bright blue sky. Louis Armstrong was right—what a wonderful world. Our job is to protect it, to guard it, to guide it—in community. I am filled with hope.