On Yom Kippur, Jewish teachings match pope’s environmental encyclical

SCRANTON — Rabbi Daniel Swartz asked the crowd to close their eyes and imagine the first thing that comes to mind at the word “environment.”

“How many of you had people in that image?” he asked as their eyes opened. Most people shook their heads.

“We separate ourselves from the environment,” Rabbi Swartz said. “If you understand the environment is where we live … then it becomes a little more important.”

On Wednesday, the spiritual leader of Scranton’s Temple Hesed led a discussion that matched segments of “Laudato si,’” Pope Francis’ environmental encyclical, with texts from the Torah and Jewish thinkers from ancient to modern times.

Environmental mandates in the Torah range all the way back to the Jewish prophets, with versus like Isaiah 5:8, reading “Woe to those who add house to house and join field to field, til there is room for none.” From the Leviticus Rabbah, he quoted a metaphorical story of sitting in a ship, while one man drills a hole into the hull beneath him. When his companions asked what he was doing, the man replied, “I am only boring a hole under my part of the ship.”

Rabbi Swartz also referenced “Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis,” signed this year by 350 North American rabbis and released ahead of the pope’s encyclical. That document called out the “great Carbon Corporations” for extracting enormous profits from the destruction of the Earth, then using those profits to influence elections and push fake science to confuse the public.

The discussion took place on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and the first full day of Francis’ visit to the United States. Twenty people of Christian and Jewish faiths attended the discussion, including a Catholic priest and several nuns.

Sister Loretta Mulry, IHM, brought up the wave of natural disasters accelerated by climate change that have struck the U.S., including the drought and wildfires now ravaging California.

“The effects of our progress, which turns out not to be progress, are staring us right in the face,” Sister Mulry said.

Several people focused on climate change’s daunting scale. Some thought the problem might correct itself as the consequences of carbon pollution become more evident.

Climate scientists predict melting polar ice caps will cause widespread sea level rise, flooding coastal regions. Changing growing regions and more severe droughts and floods will also disrupt agriculture, causing food prices to rise. Both will cause millions of deaths, which could bring balance to the system, some argued.

Others took the more optimistic view that an abrupt social change can stop the worst of the warming. While it may too late for many adults, children can still learn a new way than current American consumerism.

In a capitalist society like the US, creating incentives is the best way to reward environmental solutions while discouraging pollution, argued Ken Miller, DDS.

What Francis and other religious leaders bring to the issue of climate change is an “appeal to our better selves” and faith that a better world is possible, Rabbi Swartz said.

‘We separate ourselves from the environment. If you understand the environment is where we live … then it becomes a little more important.’

RABBI DANIEL SWARTZ

Temple Hesed