The Chatelaine's Keys

admin September 27th, 2010

I don’t usually re-run pieces so soon, but we’re coming up soon on the annual reading of Parshat Noah at our shul, and I’m fond of this piece. In fact, I’m so fond of it that I’m actually turning it into a novel at the request of a publisher.  Since I have to write another book first, and officially I promised Eric I wouldn’t go straight into another book, it might be a bit before it is done, though.

If you aren’t Jewish, you may not realize that Jews read the entire Torah (the five books of Moses) every single year.  We’re about to finish the cycle - and we have an enormous party (Simchat Torah) to celebrate, and then get right up and start doing it again.  This cyclical, repetitious reading means that you have to go and find something new in every reading - and fortunately, there’s a lot to find. By rights I should be writing something new, but I’m a little under the gun right now, so you’ll have to bear with last year’s new.

We started six years ago, on these sixteen overgrown acres.  The house was falling down and had a resident skunk under the porch, the barn hadn’t housed anything but rats for 10 years, at least, and at first it seemed like a nature preserve for blackberries and multiflora roses.  Nearly everyone thought we were crazy to leave good jobs.  Nanny quit hers for good, after 28 years of pounding algebra into the heads of 12 year olds, and I took a job as a substitute teacher and drove a plow in the winter.  Back then, Jeff had just graduated community college,  and his girlfriend lived up this way, so he came too and gave his old man a hand, while living in an old trailer we bought at auction.

We scraped out a garden and started to grow, dusting off skills from both our childhoods.   I apologized to my own Dad in heaven for cussing so hard when he made me hoe beans.   Nanny and Jeff got up on the roof and put up new shingles so it didn’t leak anymore, and I fixed up the barn and put in a workshop.  And then we set to gathering in.  How come?  Well, with all the things that are coming this way – the rain and the floods, the drought and the heat, the hard times – it just seemed like someone ought to gather things in, before they all disappear.  I don’t know if it was Nanny or me who wanted it first – she jokes that she told me “G-d told me to tell you to build an ark.”  But I was thinking it too – how could you not, as so much is swept away?

First there were seeds, as we sat wondering what we’d all eat in the years to come.  We ordered from catalogs like Baker Creek and Fedco, and we joined Seed Savers.  The first year we planted a little of everything, and decided what we liked best, and preserved it.  There were hard choices – we couldn’t grow everything and still save seed, but we made them.  Later we got to be friends with the gal down the road, Amy and her two little ones, and since she had no time for gardening, she let us grow some of our seed crops in her yard, in trade for the vegetables.  She brings the boys down to visit the animals, and gives Jeff a ride to his job sometimes.

We planted an orchard, mostly old varieties, but some of the best of the new ones – nuts and apples, pears and peaches and some oddities like medlars and quinces and honeyberries.   We also transplanted some wild berries, and saved seeds from the wild apple trees and planted those to expand the possibilities.  After berrying one day,  I told Nanny she’d best start getting out her canning kettle to preserve them, and she told me that I’d better get my hairy old-man ass into the kitchen and start learning to can with her, if I didn’t want to have to bring a new wife into this ark.  I considered the new wife for a while, but decided I didn’t have time to find one, so I might as well go help out.  I  let Nanny see that I was considering it, though. 

Jeff and his girlfriend got us started with animals - they read about chickens  in an article, and so we got two old breeds – Dominiques and Silver-Laced Wyandottes.  They chicks lived behind the woodstove until we got sick of them, and I finally fixed up a space in the barn for them.  I’m not sure if the chickens or Jeff or her lease being up was what made Dinah decide to move in with Jeff, but now there are two of them in the trailer and coming up to eat.  We don’t mind, though, Dinah’s a nice girl, and a smart one – she’s getting Jeff more interested in the farm, and less in that computer game he plays.  She asked us recently if we’d consider letting her brother and his wife put a trailer on the back end of the land in exchange for them putting up sheep fence.  We’re thinking on it.  He’s a nice guy, Aaron, and a hard worker, and times have been hard for those in the construction business.

Well, by the time we’d gotten the seeds mostly down, we had gotten the sheep – we set them to clearing out the old orchard and eating down the grass.  They are an old, old breed, with horns and spots, and Dinah wanted to learn to spin the wool, and then taught Jeff and Nanny.  We bought a good ram and set to lambing, which began in a snowstorm in April, and continued until all of us were cranky and snappish for lack of sleep – but all the lambs survived and so did we.  We ate lamb stew that winter, and sold the rest to the neighbors.

Nanny always wanted a cow, and so she bought Nephila, our Milking Devon.  There’s no accounting for taste – I don’t like cows, and Nephila doesn’t much like me.  Me, I’ve still got my eye on two beautiful draft horses, a matched pair of American Creams just like that ones my Daddy had when I was a boy.  The man who is selling them is moving out – he’s losing everything, but he says he thinks he can get his stallion to get Marcy bred before he sells her.  That will leave me Matty, the gelding to learn to log with and hopefully, there will be a foal in the springtime. We need those horses.

 And then the next addition to our ark came, the one we didn’t really expect – Hamish and James came on home up from Atlanta, with their two little girls. Hammy had been unemployed for almost two years, and James was making the money with his nursing salary, but James’s hours were cut back and they were finding it harder and harder to get by.  Well, they lost the house, and now they’ve come up here, where it isn’t so hot and so dry.  Nanny and I are just through the moon to have the girls up here all the time – they take the bus down the long hill to school in the morning and come back and play with the animals in the afternoon.  Hamish is home with Nanny and has a plan for building a spring house and for setting up a small fiber business.  James is doing shifts at the hospital down the hill.

We bred Nephila, and we bought a Jersey/Dexter cross as well, because by now with three families up here on the hill, one cow’s milk wasn’t quite enough.  James learned to make cheese, and sells the raw milk we’ve got to spare down at the hospital to other nurses and doctors.  I don’t think its legal, but with all that’s going on, no one is watching anymore.  And we started grafting our own fruit and nut trees, and I sold them at the school sale and online.  I gave a lot of them away too – every kid that read 25 books got a tree to plant.  I figure the more people holding on to things, the harder it is to lose them.

Angelina was old enough to do 4-H, and she wanted an animal to take care of, so we got rabbits.  We chose silver foxes, which were endangered, and discovered they really did breed like rabbits.   Jeff looked at the latest spate of litters and said, “Dad, I don’t think they’re endangered anymore.”

Angie’s doing great with them – keeps records, sells them, and we use them for meat.  But now she’s set her heart on getting llamas – she wants to raise them for fiber and guard the sheep.  And we do have coyotes…  What can I say, but that I’m a sucker for my grandkids.

With only three of us on the land with regular jobs (Jeff got hired to do construction and laid off again, and started back at the community college to get his paramedic certification), money is tight.  The taxes are up, because revenues are down, and services, well, they might or might not happen.  The town used to contract with me to do the plowing, but now I’m mostly relying on private clients, and with no insurance, we just hope none of us get sick.  I planted some elderberries and roses for a good supply of vitamin C.

I took Angelina and Gracie out to help me dig holes on the hillside, back of the south pasture, for black walnut trees.  I told the girls that someday, they’d harvest nuts from these trees, and maybe build things from their wood.  Gracie asked “but where will you be, Grampa?”  I told her I’d be under the trees, helping them grow, and in the new barn they’ll build from them someday, when the old one finally rots away.  “I’ll be right here with you girls, on this ground, watching you take care of the trees I planted.”

Nanny’s mother has started getting forgetful, and we just got a call that she had a bad fall accident.  I think it is time to talk about bringing her out here, so Hammy and Jeff and I are building on a place for Louisa to live, with a ramp and a bathroom.   And we’re busier than bees.  Speaking of which, Hammy ordered two hives, and has started planting drifts of flowers and herbs to attract native pollinators – to make a sanctuary for them.

Speaking of sanctuaries, we’re keeping count of the insects and animals that we’re finding on our property – we know how hard it is for the wild things as it gets warmer and warmer.  And we’re planting new trees and new crops that might last out this century.  I think peaches will grow here now, and maybe pecans…  I wonder how many more years we’ll tap our maples?   I don’t pray that much – I’m not a very religious man, I guess, but when I do,  I pray for the maples and the girls.   I’ve stopped praying for rain though.

The rain came – and came and came –  and washed a lot of our crops away this year, down to three handsbreadths into the soil,  but fortunately, we’d never planted all our seed, and we never leave the ground bare, so there wasn’t too much erosion.  We lost some of the lambs to coyotes, and we got a llama for Angelina – and one for Grace, too, who may only be four but wasn’t going to be left out.  But mostly for the coyotes.  The flooding killed the furnace, so now we only have the wood stoves – but there’s plenty of wood on the property, and we’re coppicing now, so we don’t take too much off.   It was a hard year, but we’re still here. 

People ask me about it all the time – they see the sign down at the end of the road with what we’ve got for sale, or they hear me talking at an auction about why they should plant trees, and they ask about our lives.  By most standards, we’re very ordinary – every village used to be an ark in a lot of ways – they had their own varieties of vegetable and animals that were particular to their place.  I’m just doing what everyone did once – taking care of my own and a little more than my own. 

A neighbor down the road just asked if he could help us out in the garden in exchange for some produce – they aren’t doing so well there, no work at all.  I said sure, even though James’s hours are cut back and Nanny’s frantic with moving Louisa over.  The phone lines were out for three days, and Nanny couldn’t get in touch with her Mom or any of the folks who look in on her.  It is a frightful thing, but such things happen – so it is good that Louisa will be with us.  I’m talking with our same neighbor about making sure we look in on all the folks up this hill if the snow gets bad or the roads wash away or the power is out for more than a few days.

We’re harvesting nuts – the old hickories on the property and the new hazels.  And we’re waiting – the mail brought us news last - Shane has been let off stop-loss, and he’s not going to re-up.  And Mari’s pregnant, the one he met and married so far away, so they are coming back here!  They don’t want their baby to grow up in this world without family to help. 

They’ll be here later this afternoon – and we’re all of us out here in the pasture where we’ll plant the new vineyard and the nut trees, waiting – the cows and the sheep and the two llamas and their new little baby, the chickens and the geese, Marcy and Matty and their little colt Ararat, Louisa in her wheelchair, Hammy and Daniel with Angelina and Grace, Jeff and Dinah, Aaron and Lisa and their little boy, Jacob, and Nanny and me.  I guess we’ll have to go in soon, since it is starting to rain, but long as we can, we’ll be here waiting, and once we go in, the door will be open.

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Sharon October 23rd, 2009

Drowning is not so pitiful

As the attempt to rise

Three times, ’tis said, a sinking man

Comes up to face the skies,

And then declines forever

To that abhorred abode,

Where hope and he part company—

For he is grasped of God.

The Maker’s cordial visage,

However good to see,

Is shunned, we must admit it,

Like an adversity. - Emily Dickinson

This is the second of three pieces for world Climate Action Day/Global Healing Shabbat, on the relationship of Parshat Noah to climate change awareness and response.  A Rabbi asked me to write a model sermon, and although I lack sufficient Jewish learning to do as good a job as I suspect she will, here it is.   The third piece will comprise part of my talk on climate change at Mercer University’s “Caring for Creation”  conference, and I’ll publish it here after I get back from Georgia, in early November (In all three cases, what’s most important to me about this is the central question - what kind of people are we, both individually and collectively?

The ark was not politically feasible, it was merely necessary.  Had Noah had something less than the voice of G-d to order him, or had he required the aid and consent of his neighbors, what are the odds that the ark would have been built?  Even had Noah been the driving force alone, it is hard to imagine the completion of the ark - how does an agrarian farmer otherwise find the time to build so vast a creation, to begin, as we are told, from the planting of the cedar trees that would make the boat possible, and go forward.  In the face of uncertainty, he must have faltered.  The ark could only be possible because it is so very necessary.

I was struck by this thought when I read the article about the results of Oxford’s “Four Degrees” conference, particularly the Obama administration’s rejection of what is needed because of the problem of political reality:

“Four degrees of warming would be hotter than any time in the last 30 million years and it could happen as soon as 2060….’Political reality must be grounded in physical reality or it is totally useless,’ John Schellenhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research told the audience.

Schellnhuber recently briefed US officials from the Barack Obama administration, but he says they chided him that his findings ‘were not grounded in political reality’ and that ‘the Senate will never agree to this.’

He told them that the US must reduce its current 20 tonnes of carbon emissions per person to zero tonnes per person by 2020…”

This is the rapidly emerging consensus among major climate scientists - that we have wildly underestimated climate sensitivity and that mitigating climate change will be incredibly difficult - not impossible, just incredibly difficult. Zero tonnes per person sounds impossible, but it is not - it allows for a gradual build-out of renewable energies so that we can preserve what is most essential, and a lifestyle that is completely viable, if hard to remember.  We have only to look back a few hundred years, to find a humanity where zero tonnes was the norm - and with those renewables, with the best of modernity, there’s every hope for a life that is viable, if hard for most of us to imagine.

It is also the rapidly emerging consensus of nations that there’ not going to do any such thing. China has recently announced that it saw 4 degrees as a much more reasonable target anyway, and even the campaign to focus attention on the goal of 350 ppm has found it incredibly difficult to affect policy - we’re still making policy arrangements based on old science and politics, not on the physical reality.   A recent study found that if all the most rigorous extant policies contemplated in every nation in the world were to be implemented, we’d still cross the 2 degree tipping point and head on to a world of 4 degrees. 

We are not living in the world of material realities - the science is increasingly clear, the world scientific consensus increasingly universal.  Nor are we living in the realm of G-d’s law, or moral reality. I know of no faith that would permit us to do the harm we will do by unchecked climate change - no faith that would permit us kill those we will kill by our way of life, no faith that would permit us to destroy all we would destroy.  Nor would anyone bound by a moral system that recognizes the rights of others to live, the rights of others to have a world to live in permit this.  All faiths and all secular moral systems do not agree on much, but in this, they are utterly united.

Religious life is, at its root, an attempt to set limits on our actions within the world. Implicitly, all faiths must acknowledge that we can murder, we can destroy, we can rape, we can burn.  And thus, we set to restricting our rights to do so - and all faiths also restrict how we use our material world, recognizing that some portion of it belongs to G-d.  Thus, we Jews are bound to leave a share of our fields to feed the birds, and another to the world’s poor.  Thus we are bound to the shmitta, to leave fields fallow, to restore the land.  Thus we are bound to the Sabbath, to the idea that every human being has a space in which she or he should be fully free.  Thus we are bound to the Jubilee, which says that none of us have the right to an unjust share of wealth in perpetuity - all these things are only partly ours, the other part belongs to G-d, and he requires that we recognize those limits.  The rules are different in other faiths, but they share the characteristic of trying to limit our harm, and to make us recognize our place in the order of creation. 

I would argue that for those of us who feel ourselves bound to a faith, failing to act on material realities is not merely an act of surpassing foolishness, or even an act of moral evil (for allowing others to die unnecessarily, and creating the conditions that will kill them is, in every religious system, a profound evil, and the projected death toll for  a four degree scenario exceeds 1 billion human lives.)  There’s more to it - to deny the material realities of the biological world, is also a rejection of G-d.

This essay evolved from two strains of thought. The first one goes back to my undergraduate days, when I struggled to parse out my analysis of Paradise lost for my senior thesis - the questions that Milton raised about the relationship between G-d and others stayed with me for years - they played a part in my doctoral dissertation as well, and have intruded in many ways into my religious life.  The second comes from a discussion we had about Parshat Noah on the peak oil interfaith discussion list.  The discussion ranged over a wide variety of perspecctives and thoughts on Noah, including how we read Isaiah 54:9 and G-d’s promise to never again sweep away the world in a great flood.  But my thinking about this was particularly struck by the question asked by Phillip Harris - does G-d have a stake here?  Does G-d risk anything?

My answer to this is yes, that we see in the first two portions of the Torah - from “In the Beginning”  through the flood, the story of human failure - of a people moving rapidly from the first sin to completing the catalogue of human sins, both sexual (the Nephilim) and violent (Lamekh), but also a story of G-d’s sense of loss. 

The G-d of the old Testament/Torah may be ineffable, but he’s also capable of a great deal of emotion - satisfaction and pleasure (and G-d saw that it was very good) and also anger and sorrow (Isaiah 54 6 tells us that G-d related to us as a wife, forsaken and grieved in spirit, who was refused; while 54:8 tells us that G-d “in a little wrath” turned away from us). 

Why is G-d so distressed that we have failed?  G-d may be omnipotent, but having endowed us with the capacity to choose - to choose to sin, to choose not to, to choose to follow G-d or not, he has the reaction that most parents have to rebellious and ill behaved children - a sense of rejection and loss.  G-d created the conditions for goodness and set us free.  And we screwed up. 

More importantly, G-d’s omnipotence does not create invulnerability in the realm of emotion, meaning, reputation - sure, G-d can start again and make anything he wants, but again, like all parents, he wants *these* children, he cannot escape his investment in us.  Nor can he escape the fact that he desperately wants us to remember and recognize him - the wicked, we are told in the Parsha, had ceased to recall G-d.  Only Noah remembered G-d.

It is the most natural desire imagined, one we reproduce ourselves when we create life - in our children.  We long for acknowledgement, for relationship. G-d is manifestly upset to have lost this with us - and he responds by turning away, by closing the relationship to all but one man.

Now there’s some question about how good a person Noah is - the Torah says that Noah is righteous “among his generation” which isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.  The great Rabbinical commentator Rashi suggests that in fact, Noah wasn’t all that special.  The modern commentator Aviva Zornberg argues that it is the time in the ark, tending G-d’s creation, serving the animals - reversing the hierarchy of dominion, and demonstrating by that service that having a special place in creation is a mark of responsibility for creation, rather than a free hand at its destruction -  that makes Noah righteous - not his actions before the rain began to fall. 

At a minimum, all of us have to ask why Noah didn’t do as Abraham did, and defend his generation, defend the innocent, at least the children who could not have been given over wholly to wickedness.  Abraham has the nerve to argue with G-d in the defense of humanity.  In all the Parshah, Noah never speaks. 

But G-d saves Noah anyway, whether he was truly good or simply better than a bad lot, G-d  saves him and his family.   G-d does not start wholly over.  Instead, G-d gives Noah and his family a great task - to shepherd his creations through a terrible event, to preserve them and rebuild them, and locks them in a dark piace filled with lions and bears, and demands that they endure, and hopes they will come out transformed.

We are, at least in part, I think, meant to doubt the outcome - whether it was a good idea for G-d to preserve Noah and his family, in the hopes that a humanity would follow that would remember him.   And at the end, G-d elects to promise that he will never destroy the whole world by flood again - we are told in Isaiah that his anger led G-d to turn his face away from us, to deny us, to cease to recognize us.  He promises he will never do so again.

Some people take Isaiah 54 to mean that because G-d promised never again to send a great flood, that means that the worst outcomes of climate change cannot occur.  I would strongly disagree - G-d promised that G-d would never turn his face away from us again. But he did nothing to ensure that we would not turn our faces away from G-d, and destroy the earth’s fertility and promise ourselves.  This was part and parcel of keeping Noah - and thus, the possibility that we might reject the G-d who loves us again.  We have that choice -  we can reject G-d so badly that we allow billions of beloved humans to die.  We can reject the limits G-d sets upon us so clearly that we can bring about a great flood, or the fire next time as drought and wildfire devour our land and turn fertile pasture to desert. 

G-d endured his own crisis in Noah - the crisis of betrayal - the metaphor in Isaiah, of a wife who turns to her husband and is refused, forsaken is a startling way of describing G-d’s sense of loss when we rejected G-d.  Anyone who has ever loved another can imagine the shocking pain of that gesture.  And G-d chose, having endured it, to promise that no matter what we do, he will never turn his face from us again. 

But has humanity had such a moment?  This first covenant is on G-d’s side alone, a promise to Noah and his descendents.  Did we ever choose never to turn our face away from G-d again?  Is it possible that right now, in this moment, as we stand on the brink of another flood, we are now being asked to make the same choice that G-d made - to commit to an eternity of acknowledgement, or to destruction beyond measure.

We have imagined that we could have G-d, we could pray to G-d, we could remember G-d, without fully remembering or recognizing G-d’s creation - without service to the creatures of the world.  We have imagined that we could love G-d without loving his world, or even without knowing it.  We have imagined that G-d’s laws, which carefully describe the ways that we are morally *responsible* for all plant and animal life, and our entire home, do not really, truly apply to us.  But, of course, they do, and we stand at a crossroads, very nearly our final moment to decide whether we acknowledge that responsibility.

And thus, we are like those politicians who say “a hard rain is going to fall?  Well, that’s not something we can deal with politically, so give us a different answer.”  The reality is the same, and we are choosing, even if we choose to pretend there is no choice.  No matter how little we like the choices we are given, they are our choices - ark or drowning.  The rain falls whether we choose to believe it will fall or not.  The consequences of our actions exist whether they are politically feasible or not.  The deaths of human beings, alive, beloved of G-d are on our hands whether we choose to acknowledge them or not.  We betray G-d in our rejection of his material realities, and in our rejection of G-d’s moral realities.

In a basic sense all of the first portion of the Torah can be said to say this - we are a creation of G-d.  We are part and parcel of creation, bound by the same laws - physical and moral - as the rest of it.  We owe a share and a responsibility to others - to other human beings, to the birds of the air and the fish of the sea and all of the creatures that G-d pronounced “tov.”  Neither our moral responsibility - to save lives, rather than take them, to protect animals rather than destroy them, to love one another as G-d loves us, to preserve the land rather than rape it - nor the laws of physics are up for discussion. 

The story of Noah and Isaiah 54 promise us that G-d will never again turn his face from us - no matter how angry at the destruction we wreak.  No matter how sorrowful, at the harm we do to ourselves and our children.  No matter how much pain we give G-d, G-d will watch, and his face will be turned towards us, like a father to angry teenagers, like a mother to children that no longer want her. 

Now is our chance - perhaps our very last chance to live in a world that bears any resemblance at all to the one in which human beings learned their first and most profound lessons.  We too have to choose - will we keep our faces turned to G-d, and live with our material realities, pay any price, do whatever is needed to preserve our future and fulfill our responsibilities?  Or will we turn away finally, and entirely from G-d, leaving ourselves with an empty faith, divorced from the world into which we were created, and so far distant from G-d that we cannot see if G-d weeps,  for the rain that is coming down.

Shalom,

Sharon

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