Dear JCOGS family,
Tonight @ 6 p.m. in person and online, we celebrate Shabbat with our monthly focus on the year of Shmitta. Shmitta is the seven-year cycle where our ancient Israelite ancestors took time off of farming, letting the land lay fallow, releasing debts, freeing servants, while focusing on creating community.
Today, I offer you two truly incredible writings from our JCOGS community connected to Shmitta. The first is a powerful poem by one of our members Sara Lourie, who gracefully bridges nature and the divine. In her words: “To be one with nature is to be one with G-D… Together, let us lift up this vision and offer it to our broken world.”
The second is a piece by Paul Stewart, chair of the JCOGS green team. He invites you to help plan a momentous spring 2022 Music Festival dedicating JCOGS efforts to stop climate change.
In other words, prayers and music in action.
This year of 5782, we use this ancient wisdom of Shmitta to consider how we can connect ourselves closer to nature and to G-d. Read on.
Tihiyu bri’im, stay safe, be well. Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi David
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Spirituality
By: JCOGS member Sara LourieHow often do we slow down? Stop? Truly take in the natural world? Look outside ourselves to the wondrous gifts from G-D that are our guardians and mentors and friends in the journey through life?
True spirit is all around. Lift up your head! Breathe in, breathe in deeply! Spirituality is the river of life, worthy of sacred honor.
All life is connected; there is but one spirit. We are an inseparable part of the greater whole - that is the essential truth of our being. Our human endeavors are raised up when we are open and we feel the spirit of the natural world flow through them.
Give thanks to the trees and the plants that take in what we exhale and give life sustaining oxygen back to us. Give thanks to the vegetation that feeds us and to the lakes, the mountains, and the heavens that nourish our minds, replenish our spirit, and ignite our awe and curiosity.
To be one with nature is to be one with G-D. To connect with the source and force of life. To pray.
Together, let us lift up this vision and offer it to our broken world. Let each of us contribute our deepest self to the collective journey towards a more peaceful, abundant, balanced, sustainable world, cherishing the interconnectedness of all life.
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It’s time to stop global warming
By: Paul Stewart, chair of the JCOGS green teamWhen I was 5, my friends and I would ride bikes around the block, chasing trucks spraying DDT to kill the mosquitos. That was 1961.
The next year, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in the New Yorker magazine. According to rachelcarson.org, “She identified human hubris and financial self-interest as the crux of the problem and asked if we could master ourselves and our appetites to live as though we humans are an equal part of the earth’s systems and not the master of them.”
A decade later, the first Earth Day was organized to ask school children and adults alike to protect the natural world which was rapidly being cleared and replaced with heavy industry, urban skyscrapers and sprawl suburbia. There was such an enormous outpouring of public sentiment from that and other protests around the country that the United States Congress created the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water Act, all of which continue to protect places like Vermont from industrial pollution and unbridled development.
With the landscape somewhat protected, the 1980s shifted the focus to the lakes and forests of the northeast that were being decimated by acid rain, something many in power vehemently denied and falsely claimed to be the fabrication of alarmist tree huggers. But it was real--so real that every lake in the northeast became inhospitable to native flora and fauna. Once again, public outrage led governors of northeastern states to band together and prevent midwestern states from sending acidic pollution from their coal-fired power plants our way.
Which brings us to the present, where lakes, rivers and streams in Vermont and elsewhere look clean to the naked eye but are so polluted with runoff from industrial, agricultural, motor vehicle traffic and other unregulated pollution that algal blooms are pervasive in Lake Champlain and most other
places around the country. While the smokestacks also appear to billow clean air, they are laden with carbon dioxide and other deadly pollutants that are uncontrollably heating the planet with devastating effects we are all too familiar with. I think you know where this is going.
The planet is once again calling on us, the general voting public, to take action, this time to save all living things from virtually assured demise. It’s not a comet slamming into the earth. It’s something much more insidious, like the frog in Al Gore’s movie “Inconvenient Truth”, which was put into a pot of warm water and didn’t jump out because the water temperature only increased gradually until it was cooked, which is what we’ll be if we don’t take action now!
Fortunately, we all have an opportunity to take action now and save our planet, the only one we currently know. If you want to participate in organizing a blockbuster, musical, impactful spring Music Festival for 2022 that demonstrates what it will take to create a real impact against climate change, please join the JCOGS Green Team by emailing me (pauls@act.earth). I’m pleased to represent JCOGS in ushering in the beginning of the end for global warming.
