Whose responsibility is climate change?

For years, climate change has been in the corner of my peripheral vision. It has been like a mould growing in my bedroom. Every time I’ve seen it, I’ve quickly turned away and pretended it wasn’t there. Acknowledging the problem would mean I have to do something about it. But what? I don’t know how to deal with it. Isn’t there somebody professional that can sort it out?

It’s not that I haven’t been aware of climate change. At university, many of my friends campaigned on it so enthusiastically. They understood the problems. They campaigned for fossil fuel divestment, transition to renewable energy, commitments to meet carbon emission reduction targets. And I pretended to understand what they were saying. I cared about it, but only because they cared about it.

One of my first jobs was working for an amazing charity called People & Planet. This organisation supported activists to campaign on issues of political import. The campaigners in the office were split into two teams: those focused on people, and those focused on the planet. You can guess which side I was on.

I was campaigning against sweatshops and labour rights violations. The other team campaigned on… something to do with the environment. Wind turbines maybe? I honestly don’t think I ever knew. The planet campaigners had graphs and maths and scientific facts. Our campaigns team had people crying out for solidarity as they took on their bosses. It was easy to identify with factory workers. It was much harder to identify with changing global temperatures. I didn’t understand it, so I took it to be somebody else’s responsibility.

If the goal of Extinction Rebellion was to give people a wake-up call, in my case they have succeeded. Over Pesach, London was suddenly disrupted. Cars pulled to a standstill. Every day they were on the news as old ladies got arrested and carted off in police cars. They forced me to think. If these people care so much to take on that level of responsibility, there must be something important happening.

I decided to do my research. Like any good rabbinic student, I started with a sacred tradition: watching Netflix. It turns out there are a lot of documentaries about nature if you’re not actively avoiding thinking about the death of the planet. There was a show about coral. An easy start, I thought. Corals are pretty and everyone loves the ocean.

It turns out that most of the ocean’s coral are now dead. Overheating of the ocean has caused the coral to bleach and die, leaving white skeletons along the seafloor. This means that the natural habitat for so much of our sealife has been destroyed, possibly beyond repair.

That mould I talked about in my bedroom suddenly looked a lot bigger. I’ve ignored it for so long that it’s taken over the house and the foundations are at risk.

Somebody has to do something, I thought. If the oceans have been so depleted, how much more damage is being done unseen to our forests, fields and wildlife? I don’t want to think about it. I know I must. Extinction Rebellion warns us that humanity itself may become an endangered species if we do not act.

Somebody has to do something. But who? One of the critiques of the climate movement has been that it puts too much responsibility onto individual consumers and not enough onto the biggest perpetrators of pollution and destruction: corporations. The CEOs of the world’s biggest gas, oil and coal companies have a lot more to answer for than individuals who use plastic straws or take baths instead of showers.

But if the world’s top richest exploiters of the environment disappeared tomorrow, what would happen? New CEOs would emerge in their place. Mining would not stop, nor would oil extraction. People would continue to fill up their cars with petrol. Loggers would keep chopping down rainforests. As long as our global economic system is predicated on constant growth, expansion and exploitation of natural resources, our living planet will remain under threat. Only systemic change of how the world’s resources are distributed and consumed will fundamentally help save the planet.

This isn’t a call to revolution. Although I am hardly opposed to such a thing, revolution does not answer the question I am posing. I am not asking what must be done, but who must do it. Whose responsibility is climate change anyway? By putting the onus onto global system change, it can make the much-needed action feel too abstract and inaccessible. In his groundbreaking book on Jewish messianism, Gershom Scholem observes the paradox that the more grand and utopian Jewish visions of the future have been, the less likely people have been to act on them. If we set the bar too high for the change we want, people will fall into the despondency of inactivity. We will end up waiting on God to fix the problems that are incumbent on us.

Saving the planet should not be considered a radical, messianic idea. It should be plain common sense that if we want to live to old age and hand over a healthy world to  our grandchildren, we have to reverse climate change and restore our natural world now.

None of this is to let the big companies and governments off the hook. They may well be the biggest cause and have the most power to affect change, but the responsibility has to lie with us. All of us.

This week’s parashah is Kedoshim. It is the Torah’s greatest hits, bringing together laws concerning sacrifice and ritual purity with moral rules about respect for the elderly, empowerment of the Disabled and justice for the poor. “A holy people you will be,” it begins. “For I, the Eternal One, am holy.” It does not ask to be responsible because we are capable, nor because we are at fault, nor because we understand. It tells us to take responsibility because that is what God does. Every one of us is tasked with the moral welfare of the world, for no less reason than that doing so is a holy act.

It goes further, teaching us not to show deference to the rich or favour to the poor. Everyone is liable. Everyone must do justice. We may not be able to do everything, or fundamentally change society on our own, but we have to act as if the responsibility falls on us personally.

The Talmud teaches us that every Jew is responsible for every other. The midrash teaches us that humanity has been granted stewardship over the earth. While Judaism is a profoundly collective religion, it is also a call to every individual to do justice. My responsibility to tackle climate change comes, then, not as a citizen, consumer, worker or even as a human being, but as a Jew commanded by God to be holy.

With all that in mind, I have run out of excuses. I can no longer ignore climate change. I cannot plead ignorance. I cannot hope that people more expert will sort it out. I cannot blame CEOs without doing anything to hold them to account. I cannot say we need system change without working to bring it about. I cannot wait another day.

The responsibility for climate justice lies with me. I am still very uneducated and will need a lot of guidance, but I know I must make a start. I have joined Extinction Rebellion Jews. And I hope you will too.

I gave this sermon on 11 May at Manchester Liberal Jewish Community. As it stands, the lectionaries of the Liberal and Orthodox movements, as well as of Israel and the Diaspora, are out of synch. In the land of Israel, Pesach traditionally has seven days, while in the Diaspora it traditionally has eight. This means that for Diaspora Jews there is an additional Shabbat that falls on Pesach, while for Israelis, the lectionary resumes one week earlier. For the next few weeks, then, different synagogues will be out of synch. The early Jewish reformers felt that there should be no difference between Israel and the Diaspora, since we no longer laid a religious claim to Israel, so ordained that our calendars would align. As a result, most progressive synagogues would have been reading Emor this Shabbat, while most Orthodox ones read Kedoshim. I chose to read Kedoshim not to make any theological or political point, but simply because I prefer that parashah.