Fire & Brimstone, Lost in Torah

I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

With the festival holiday of Shavuos falling on a Saturday, I lost my way in Torah.

Now I’m a week ahead.

So I didn’t miss a week of writing after all, like I thought!

Thus, I shouldn’t be writing about Shlach Lecha, but I will anyway.

Because I had a hellish week—not including (and no pun intended about) the Canadian wildfire smoke blanketing all of us in the northeast of the U.S., portending apocolypse.

Because our borders are fake anyway, right?

We all breathe the same polluted air, and we need to take care of our Earth, as the Torah tells us again and again.

Putting that aside, the kind of week I’ve had fits perfectly with “the spies” of next week’s Parsha, Shlach Lecha.

These so-called spies are sent to scout out the Promised Land and bring a report back to Moses.

What they find, and the fear they feel, is blown way out of proportion.

They’ve been told, after all, that this will be their land, and that God will help them attain it.

Yet, they come back spreading rumors of giants, not thinking of the consequences to their actions.

The people go into a panic, and even into mourning.

They believe they are done for.

We, also, may think we are done for, what with these wildfires out of control.

But we need to be careful with this kind of thinking.

It’s the opposite of useful.

Mourning is not the reaction we need.

What we need is action.

We need to scream and clamber until our press and our governments respond appropriately to the situation.

The same is true for the other story I was planning to tell.

In the professional organization of Jewish Renewal clergy, an email went out from someone accused of sexual harassment.

This person slandered one of his accusers names, singling her out, stating that she, and she alone, had caused him to lose his job.

When some of us spoke out against this very false accusation and slander, we were silenced by the overseers of our listserv.

We were told the listserv was not the proper place for such discussion.

Prayers went out “to the accused and the accusers,” and many of us were outraged by this “spiritual bypassing.”

Misinformation and slander were somehow allowed, but correcting the falsehood was not.

Yet, an ethics complaint had been brought three years ago, and has never been resolved.

Meanwhile, others are in danger because of a Code of Silence.

Still, many responded to our outrage with “Me too! I have tried and tried to be heard.”

Many had since given up, feeling isolated, alone, and shunned.

In cases of sexual harassment, there is so much misogyny (which I talked about last week), much of it internalized, the reactions of others is shocking.

But through our clambering, refusing over and over again to be silenced, something has been done.

We have shaken things up, and the Ethics Committee is finally moving forward.

It’s a small win, only one step forward, yet it feels big.

We are not the only religious organization, Jewish and other, that needs to revamp its Code of Ethics.

Since the Me Too movement began a few years ago, our U.S. government still has a long way to go to make things easier for complainants. (You can listen here to an incredibly enlightening episode of This American Life about this situation.)

But the more we clamber, the more we will be heard.

I think it’s the same with climate disaster.

Prayer for the Earth is only a small part of the answer.

When we hear of a climate disaster as an “act of God” or a “natural disaster,” this is misinformation.

What we need is action.

And we have to keep at it.

Until they hear us.

And say Amen.