Die Off

A few years ago I was commiserating with a neighbor over the beastly temperatures we were experiencing. (They were even worse than those of this year!) I made the mistake of mentioning Global Warming. I say mistake because my neighbor, face flushed with anger, said through his tight lips, "God would not let that happen to his world!"

It became obvious to me that my neighbor had as his religious belief a profound trust in a deity that operated this planet and all things on or in it. I never argue or try to minimize the beliefs of others and I attempt to be truly respectful of them. In this case I mumbled that I understood his point and left it at that.

Over the years I have been regaled by Young-Earth believers, Jews for Jesus, and agnostics as well as well-meaning but insufferable bores with their own take on God and the universe. As far as Global Warming is concerned I've come to see conservative republicans along with the oil, coal, automobile, and logging industries as total non-believers (or minimizers) of the global warming threat.

Let's see how the Hebrew Bible (otherwise known as the "Old Testament") handles the role assigned to us humans. Now this can be a problem because reading the bible and extracting meaning by us modern civilized beings could cause us to miss some major points. The rabbis, from ancient times to the present, have developed a system of exegesis or interpretation that they call midrash that has helped generations of Jews understand their own Bible. Since we started by talking about global warming, here's a midrashic explanation of the story of creation:

In the hour when the Holy One created the first human being, God took Adam before all the trees of the Garden of Eden and said: "See My works, how fine and excellent they are! All that I have created I have created for you. Think upon this, and do not corrupt and desolate My world; for, if you corrupt it, there is no one to set it right after you."

Rabbis Albert Vorspan & David Saperstein, Tough Choices, Jewish Perspectives on Social Justice, UAHC Press, NY 1992


Well, darn! You mean that Brazil shouldn't be leveling the Amazon Forest or that the U.S. shouldn't be sawing down the Tongass National Forest in Alaska? You mean that the Japanese shouldn't be decimating the shark population to make shark fin soup, or that we shouldn't
be dumping waste from our oil wells in the Caribbean and killing the coral reefs?

Did you know that we are in the midst of the greatest die off of animal and plant spoecies in the Earth's history?