The following essay is excerpted from JCAN-NYC’s High Holiday Packet (5781/2020), a collection of divrei torah, essays, and liturgical suggestions for weaving climate change into the Days of Awe. We hope rabbis will find it particularly helpful. Please read and share with your congregation.
Facing the High Holidays in A Year of Breath Denied
5780 is the year of breath denied.
George Floyd ז׳׳ל was murdered while saying, “I can’t breathe,” which has become the heartrending rallying cry of the movement for racial justice. Floyd’s terrible death came as thousands of Covid-stricken patients struggled to breathe, many attached to ventilators that tried to breathe for them.
Climate Change Continues
In the background of this national tragedy, the murmuring Greek chorus of a planet on fire continued its rhythmic chant of destruction, even as our attention turned to other urgent issues.
· Siberia is on fire: in June, temperatures hit a record 100º Fahrenheit – north of the Arctic Circle.
· Unprecedented clouds of locusts swept across Africa and South Asia, devouring farmers’ crops.
· Excessive heat warnings and advisories covered 50 million Americans at one point in July.
· Temperatures soared and fires tore through the West: Death Valley, California hit 130º F, breaking the world temperature record. A rare “fire tornado” was sighted as nearly 2 million acres (and counting) burn in California, and hundreds of thousands flee in Oregon.
· Heat seized the Middle East, from Eilat (111 degrees) to Baghdad (a record-breaking 125 degrees), where people fainted in the street from the heat.
· A May climate study found that unlivable hot zones, which now cover 1% of Earth’s land (e.g, the Sahara) will encompass a fifth of the land by 2070 – a possibly fatal threat to billions of people.
Climate change, too, is a crisis of breath. In many places, people are so hot that even breathing is a labor. The air itself is changing as we burn fossil fuels; we inhale about 50% more carbon dioxide with each breath than our ancestors did, because we’re spewing 152 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution into our atmosphere every day, as if it were an open sewer. Our lungs are struggling: asthma rates are rising as the world warms, and as pollutants emitted from fossil fuels damage our lungs.
These burdens fall disproportionately on the poor and on people of color. Blacks and Latinos are twice as likely to die from the coronavirus as whites. And African-Americans are 75 percent more likely than others to live near facilities releasing hazardous pollution, like oil and gas refineries. Poor air quality, in turn, may worsen the effects of Covid: a horrible cycle of inequality, breath denied, and death. Even before Covid, air pollution claimed an astonishing 7 million lives each year, according to the WHO.
A Biblical Understanding of Breath
How can we go on this way, choking?
On Rosh Hashanah, we recall this event:
וַיִּיצֶר֩ ה' אֱלֹקִ֜ים אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֗ם עָפָר֙ מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה וַיִּפַּ֥ח בְּאַפָּ֖יו נִשְׁמַ֣ת חַיִּ֑ים וַֽיְהִ֥י הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְנֶ֥פֶשׁ חַיָּֽה׃
The Holy One formed the adam of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and the adam became a living soul.
In this verse, many commentators see the odd synthesis that is humanity: a mammal made of earthly building blocks (“formed of the dust of the ground”), frail and mortal like all life…and a semi-divine being sustained by God’s breath, capable of transcendence (“[God] breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”).
Breath is something we usually take for granted. You are breathing unconsciously as you read this. Neil Armstrong was breathing, unconsciously, as he walked upon the moon; Harriet Tubman, as she smuggled slaves North; Shakespeare, as he wrote Hamlet; Yohanan ben Zakai, as he escaped a dying Jerusalem. With breath unimpeded, we are capable of dizzying human achievement, truly “living souls,” neshamot chaim.
One day a year, on Rosh Hashanah, the baalei tokeah (shofar blowers) are commanded to breathe consciously, to control their exhalation, channeling it into a horn — which may mystically represent the blowing of the original Divine breath into Adam.
But say you impede our breath? We become mere animals, physical stuff, עָפָר מִן־הָאֲדָמָה (“dust of the earth”), brought precipitously back in to our bodies. We cannot blow shofar, we cannot write poetry; we can neither travel to the moon nor even the next room. Stop our breath completely, and we die.
Rabbi Yisroel Salanter, founder of the mussar movement, deemed this physical frailty to be a remarkable asset. Commenting on this verse in Genesis, he says we are spirit, נשמת חיים, yes; but also “dust of the ground,” creatures of the “lower realms.” God made Adam a frail mammal, says R. Salanter, “in order that he should know and feel the pain and misery of others, share in their suffering and their longings, understanding the needs of other people, their lives and their wants, their desires and yearnings” (in Shearit Menachem, quoted in Iturei Torah, vol. 1). It is our very earthliness that makes us capable of empathy, says R. Salanter. Thus, when we struggle to breathe, we are reminded of our common humanity.
Climate change, Covid, systemic racism: all are crises down here in the lower realms, among the dust of the earth – crises of physical pain and misery, systemic violence, even atmospheric physics. The fires of climate change are choking our lungs, the virus is taking our air, and the burden is falling upon communities of color and the poor.
The year 5780 has reminded us starkly of our collective frailty; for many, it has also awakened a wellspring of empathy, reminding us of our interdependence, the suffering of our neighbors – be it the massive marches for racial justice, the countless ways people have cared for others during this pandemic, the firefighters battling infernos in the West. We have been reminded that we’re all just trying to breathe.
May the year 5781 be a year of healing – and breath restored.