When my daughter was six months old, and I had just competed leading High Holiday services, exhausted, and my partner was on parental leave, available, we spent a month driving around a very small camper van in Australia and New Zealand.
One of the places I fell in love with was the Australian Blue Mountains. The landscape was so striking and it’s the place we did our first hikes with our little bundle in a carrier. At night we opened the tent of our van and stared up at a starry night sky.
Now that place is on fire and we have no idea if it can/will ever recover.
I wanted to frame my discussion of the Australian wild fires / climate change with this personal memory because we are hard-wired to care more if we have a personal connection to something. The scale of the fires is so huge that we can forget or find it hard to take in the scale of the loss.
There is a lot of research about how we are more likely to protect nature if we foster a relationship with nature. I’ve written before about how we can and should get outside (David Suzuki’s 30 x 30 challenge in May, for example).
My Toronto community is going to do a special “Green Shabbat” program, focusing on how we can incorporate more plant-based foods into our diet and the impact that can have. We are also approaching the Jewish Holiday of Tu B’shvat, the new year of the trees, which also reminds us that one of the ways we connect to nature is by eating it! Also, that the Jewish tradition including text, holidays, law, and rituals around food reinforce our connection to nature and how we need to work to preserve and protect it.
Eating more plant-based meals is one of the best things we can do to help combat climate change. And getting together in community for cooking and eating, including the sensory experiences of singing together, kneading challah, and tasting delicious food, all of that is good for our well-being and, yes, our resilience. If you aren’t in Toronto, I wonder whether you might consider hosting a vegetarian Shabbat meal. Get together with friends and family to cook, and eat, and celebrate, and then - you know, casually - discuss the climate crisis. There are many things we can do, including voting, advocating, and reminding everyone that this is something that affects all of us and we are in this fight for the long haul. Yes, it’s about what you eat and buy. But it’s about much more than that. I love this piece from the New York Times called How to Stop Freaking Out and Tackle Climate Change that pretty much sums it up.
These are tough times and, especially as the climate crisis worsens, we need to train our resilience. We need to lean into community. We need to foster a commitment to action for, truly, it is the only antidote to hopelessness.
If we come together as our small communities to do something as simple as make a meal, enjoy plant-based cooking, take time to rest and rejuvenate at the end of the week, we remind ourselves that we can come together to do bigger and much needed actions that will combat climate change.
I don’t know how we are going to fix the problems that have led to a world on fire, but I know for sure that in order to fix it we will need resilience, community, and action.
Photo from the New York Times