Sermon: Noach – The Whole World in Your Hands
Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 5 November 2016
Next Sunday night where you are sitting is going to be transformed into a beautiful hall with twenty or more round tables. A couple of hundred people will be enjoying fish and chips and a bottle of wine and getting themselves ready for one of Alyth’s most popular social events – our annual supper quiz. In a spirit of healthy competition, the folks there will be answering fiendish questions rather cleverly put together by the organisers.
From my experience the way to win it is to have a table which spans generations with at least one person who can answer sports questions and one who knows West End musicals. But it doesn’t really matter if you win or your table comes 20th a good time will be had by all – tickets are still available from the Synagogue office individually or for a whole table. It’ll be a really nice evening.
But why do we have to wait for next Sunday night for our quiz. I am sure there are many sharp people in this morning’s congregation. So though there are no prizes I am going to start our Shabbat quiz right now.
First question is easy. What is the population of the world right now? Is it just over 5 billion, 6 billion or 7 billion. That’s right 7.35 billion according to the United Nations (Department of Economic and Social Affairs). Looking back then, what was the population of the world when Reform Judaism began in Germany in the 1810s – 3 ½ billion, 1 billion or 2 billion? From the same source it was 1 billion.
Imagine that – a world with one seventh as many people, just 15% of today’s population – and of course a sense of endless resources to support our growth which began to be exploited in earnest in the coming century, supporting development, industrialisation and an extraordinary growth in living standards in many parts of the world.
How long ago was the world’s population half of what it is now? When were there 3.6 billion people in the world? By 1869, 1969 or 1919? The answer is the shocking 1969 – when I was a boy of six there were half as many people in the world. No wonder it felt calmer than it does today. No wonder there were fewer cars on the road, so my parents could let me out on my bike with few worries. But it was also a time when regular waves of starvation around the world killed people, when we barely knew what was happening in parts of the world with the much slower communication of the day.
When Noah and his family come out of the Ark they experience the covenant of the rainbow. The beauty of the rainbow in the sky is, in the Torah, God’s communication to them that He will never destroy the world again. They can live on in confidence that humanity’s course is free from outside control.
But with this confidence comes a heavy responsibility. In Genesis 9 (1-3) God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fertile and increase and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you shall be upon all the animals of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky, everything that moves on the earth, and upon all the fish of sea; they are given into your hand. Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat; and also all the green plants, I give you all these.”
You do not need to believe that God and humanity are in communication with each other for this blessing to have meaning. So now to our last Shabbat quiz question. What percentage of the world’s plant activity is found in ecosystems under human control – land we farm, plantations we manage, forests we harvest, woodlands and parkland we enclose. Is it 10%, 60% or 90%. With 7.3 billion humans on the earth only 10% of the worlds plants are not under human control. And it’s the same with animals. Our domestic and farm animals together with ourselves greatly outweigh the number of every other type of large animal on the earth.
If you find Biblical legends a bit hard to take then truth in the Noah story may not be the world covered entirely by a flood, it may not be that of the ark filled with all the animals two by two, but the truth of the story certainly is that the animals of the earth and the green plants have, with 7.3 billion of us, been given into humanity’s hand. So much so that the Dutch Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen says that we have now entered a new geological era – the Anthropocene – the era where human activity determines the behaviour and situation of the planet. He dates the beginning of this era to the invention of the steam engine in the late 18th Century. Human activity here means the way that we farm, the scale on which we change the balance of chemicals in the air, the way that we allocate resources between us, the environmental costs of the meat we eat and more.
There are different attitudes that you could have to this growing, progressing level of human responsibility. You could say that we can use whatever we need of the earth’s resources because in future generations we will be able to find alternatives. Two hundred years ago we gained energy by burning wood and coal, now we burn oil. What’s the problem? Or you could be cautious about the future and be sure that we use only what is renewable within a generation, sun, wind, bio-fuel.
You could say that with 7.3 billion and more people to feed we should be able to eat anything that is good for human nutrition and culturally or religiously allowed, because all is given into our hand. Or you could say that given that It takes seven pounds of feed to produce a pound of beef (How the Chicken Conquered the World, Smithsonian June 2012) with all of the environmental stress that creates we should restrict our eating with an eye to the future, less meat, more vegetable protein.
We could live as God’s blessing at the end of the Noah story implies and see ourselves as humans, individually and collectively as in control of and responsible for this planet – for the future of humanity. Or we could take the rainbow covenant at face value and see the planet as able to look after itself. The trouble is whilst God said he would never destroy the world, in the next breath so to speak he said that it is given into our hand – which means that we could destroy it, especially if we do not respect the earth’s natural cycles. Two thousand years ago in Midrash Genesis Rabbah 34:11 Rav Aha said that failure to work with nature was the sin of the generation before the flood – they gave birth but did not bury, they sowed but did not reap, they made no change in their behaviour in winter to summer. It meant that the world could not function and was doomed.
These choices are starkly present for America as it goes to the polls on Tuesday (November 8th 2016). Will the nation with the largest impact on the world’s environment elect Donald Trump to be its president who said: Obama’s talking about all of this with the global warming … a lot of it’s a hoax, it’s a hoax. I mean, it’s a money-making industry, OK? It’s a hoax, a lot of it. (Speech in South Carolina, December 30, 2015) or Hilary Clinton who said: I believe in science. I believe that climate change is real. (Democratic National Convention, July 28, 2016).
How much will Americans continue to see the world as our responsibility if they elect Trump who said:
You know, look, it’s weather, and we have bad floods. … And frankly, it’s been that way for so long … weather changes and you have storms, and you have rain, and you have beautiful days. But I do not believe that we should imperil the companies within our country. (CNN Sept 24 2015)
Or Clinton who said: Now, some will say, ‘We’ve always had hurricanes. They’ve always been destructive.’ And that’s true. But Hurricane Matthew was likely more destructive because of climate change. (Miami Oct 11, 2016)
I am certain what a Jewish attitude to human responsibility for planet earth has to be. It is underlined by the comparison made by biblical scholar Judy Klitsner in her recent book “Subversive Sequels in the Bible” between the stories of two men vulnerable in a wooden boat on the storming waters of the world. Noah’s ark, massive, unwieldy just floats along, out of control. Through God’s good grace it finds dry land and human responsibility begins. But Noah has to suffer the consequences of the destruction of humanity and the environment.
Jonah meanwhile is the prophet fleeing away from responsibility on a boat on the sea to the furthest place he could possibly go – Tarshish. Jonah is assaulted by storms until he says “It’s for me to make a change”. He dives into the waters and via just enough being saved by the legendary great fish makes it to dry land and Nineveh where he takes responsibility and asks the people to change. They do – because that is what God wants – that we do the right thing, not that humanity should be destroyed because of our lack of care for each other. Jonah’s name is even the same as that of the dove who brings the olive branch back to Noah to say there will be dry land again – Yonah in Hebrew.
As we head towards 8 billion, we are likely to get there by 2025 at the latest, each of us should not be the vulnerable mute Noah, but rather be the changing Jonah – reducing our energy use, reducing our use of land through changed eating, being aware of how our hand, our power makes the world more liveable and preventing ourselves from destroying it. It is today that the rainbow covenant is truly operative. The answer to the question about the world is that humans are in control of and responsible for this planet. The whole world is in our hands.