Climate Justice Shabbat sermon

“Ha-Shofet Kol Ha-Aretz lo Ya’aseh Mishpat?!” “Will the Judge of all the Earth not do Justice?!” demands Abraham, our moral ancestor, in this week’s Torah. 

“Ha-Shofet Kol Ha-Aretz lo Ya’aseh Mishpat?!” “Will the Judge of the all the Earth not do Justice?!

It is one of THE most profound human questions. 

That is — put another way — is there justice in the world? And does the long arc of history really bend toward that justice? Can we hope and demand moral accounting from the world? 

“Will you sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?” demands Abraham of the Divine, of the Universe, of the cosmos. In other words, why do bad things happen to good people?

AND, perhaps more intensely, how do we understand sharp disagreement amongst us? Sodom and Gomorrah was clearly a divided city. If it had not been wiped out, what was the path to reconciliation for its citizens??

I suspect many of us come to this Shabbat more battered and bruised than even normal in these times. Again, Jews and the Jewish community — and Antisemitism — were the centre of national British debate. Absolutely exhausting and distressing for all of us, no matter our take on the bigger picture… The second lockdown was declared last weekend and the gates closed at midnight two days ago… And if, like me, you’ve been glued to the US elections… there have been some very dark moments indeed. Even if, like me, you feel your presidential ticket is now on the way to winning… it is very very hard to understand how 70 million people (BIGGER than the whole of the UK!) thought so fundamentally different from you, voted so differently.

How do we understand it?

“Strong disagreements are healthy. .. We may be opponents but we’re not enemies.” That’s what Vice President Biden has continuously been reminding us, continuously been saying. And, absolutely, our own Jewish tradition very much believes in “machloket l’shem shamayim,” ‘disagreement for the sake of Heaven,’ ‘disagreement, as it were, from a sincere, profound place.” This past month, every story we’ve been reading together in the Talmud on our Wednesday education evenings has been about that — how Dialogue and dialectic and two poles of opinion is built into the world…

Disagreement may be healthy, but I cannot believe the racism and misogyny and xenophobia and hatred unleashed by the Administration of my homeland is healthy!

So where does that leave us?

There is a famous midrash, a rabbinic story about this week’s Torah portion…

“Ha-Shofet Kol Ha-Aretz lo Ya’aseh Mishpat?!” says Abraham. “Will the Judge of all the Earth not do Justice?!” he asks the Divine.

And the Midrash says — this was Abraham and God’s conversation here, in other words:

Abraham is saying to God here, “You, God, want to hold your Creations, humanity and the world, to strict account. OF COURSE you do. You are the God of Justice. You believe that if we do wrong (as many in Sodom and Gomorrah have been doing), we should face consequence. You — God, the Universe — are set up so that what we do MATTERS. If we do wrong, there are effects!” says Abraham.

“But you, God, are also the God of Mercy and Compassion. You nurture us when we are frightened. You comfort us under the wings of your close Presence, the Shechinah. You love us as a parent loves their children, whether we do wrong or right. And you do not want us to suffer for every mistake we make, everything that we do unknowingly wrong. That part of you, the compassionate part, would let even the worst of us off the hook. Would understand us in our frailty,” says Abraham.

“SO, God, you want to ‘hold the rope at both ends,’ both to punish us out of your commitment to STRICT and TRUE justice, and to forgive us, to love us forever, from your place of great mercy. If you pull the rope too hard toward Justice, the world is so full of evil that if you requite truly all our bad behavior, we would all be like Sodom and Gomorrah, we would all need to be destroyed — for the harm we do and the harm we are complicit in every day. BUT if you only see us in mercy and compassion,  and love us, as indeed even the worst of us deserve to be loved, we will never learn. We will never grow. We will live forever in your Chesed, in your parental loving-kindness, and hurt each other further, without boundary, without the restraints that you, God, have set.”

You must therefore hold the rope forever at both ends, says Abraham. That is your challenge.

Indeed, perhaps it is a Dialogue after all, the answer:

But not one between two opposing human opinions on the way forward — but one where we must, indeed, we must, hold with compassion that all those we resent, especially at this moment of deep disagreement, both here in our society — within the Jewish community and more broadly — we must hold that those we resent (and sometimes even hate in our hearts) were also once children, and are deserving of love.

And we also must, like Abraham demands of God, be mindful of Justice. And when we destroy our world, our climate — as we have been reminded today that we are doing — and when we destroy each other, each of us in that image of God, that child, we must demand justice be done for that wrong. And we must rectify it.

So we too hold the rope at both ends.

AS the British poet Maggie Smith writes:

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

“Ha-Shofet Kol Ha-Aretz lo Ya’aseh Mishpat?!” says Abraham. “Will we, those who hold the Judge of the all the Earth, to account, not also hold the rope at both ends, seeing with both the eyes of strict justice and the eyes of boundless compassion, to both ourselves and others?

“This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

Shabbat Shalom.