Altrove/Elsewhere – “Shemini Atzeret”

By Daniel Leisawitz*

“L’estate 2017 non verrà ricordata solo per il caldo, ma anche e soprattutto per i gravi problemi di siccità”.

According to Dr. Michele Brunetti, researcher at ISAC-CNR (Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), “[the] summer of 2017 will not only be remembered for the heat, but also, and above all, for the severe problems of drought. Although it may have been easy to overlook the grave danger of climate change this summer where I live, in the northeastern United States, the residents of Italy, and much of the rest of the world, were afforded no such indulgence.

Italy suffered through stretches of record heat in June and August, reaching an apex on Aug. 4: the hottest day ever recorded for many cities in Sardegna and across central Italy. The prolonged extreme heat was problematic enough, but it was compounded by record drought across the peninsula. By the end of August, the average rainfall total reached a deficit of -41%. As if to put this scarcity of water in millennial terms, the news that the city of Rome had decided to close the spigots of many of its hundreds of ceaselessly flowing fountains in an effort to conserve water was splashed across the front pages of newspapers, and images of centuries-old fountains sitting dry under the baking sun were shown repeatedly on tv.

The temperatures have since come down in Italy, just in time for us in the Western Hemisphere to endure other symptoms of climate change: increasingly powerful hurricanes which devastated Caribbean islands and parts of the U.S. mainland, and raging wildfires in northern California.

Of course, it makes little sense to cite individual meteorological events or natural disasters as evidence of climate change. It is painstaking analysis of the overall global climate system – not local weather – that provides data that scientifically prove the existence of climate change, accelerated and exacerbated by human activity.

If the headlines and science were not enough to call this to our attention, then perhaps this past Thursday’s holiday of Shemini Atzeret should do the trick. It is on the occasion of this annual holiday that Jews the world over insert a key phrase into the second blessing of the ‘Amida prayer, which we will continue to say daily until the spring holiday of Passover: “mashiv haru’ah umorid hageshem” (“He makes the wind blow and the rain fall”). Shemini Atzeret marks the symbolic beginning of the rainy season in Israel, during which the vast majority of the region’s yearly precipitation will fall.

It’s easy to imagine why Jews living in Ancient Israel would institute this tradition of praying for rain from October to March. After all, their lives depended on it. We all know what happens when there is “famine in the land of Canaan” (Gen. 42:5): a few hundred years of Egyptian exile and slavery. But why should modern-day Jews, who may just as likely be living in the U.S., Italy, Argentina or Russia as in Israel, think at all about whether rain is falling on a sliver of land on the western coast of the Mediterranean Sea?

Placing theological, ethnic, and familial considerations aside, this seemingly irrelevant snippet of liturgy reminds us of the fundamental interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated places, particularly with regard to a global climate system which is too large and complicated for the non-expert to comprehend: certainly not on an intuitive level, where the current day’s local weather is all we have immediate experience of. Whether or not it is raining in a country 4,000 miles away actually does have more of a material impact on us than we may think.

This should give us particular pause at this moment, as wild fires still rage, and communities are still in mourning and recovery from hurricane damage. And as the government of the United States, the second largest emitter of CO2 (producing more than all the countries of the EU combined – Italy is no. 16 on the list), has begun steps to rescind the already too modest Clean Power Plan, in a cynical and near-sighted bid to shore up political support in coal-mining states.

We cannot in good conscience pray for rain in Israel at the same time as we ignore the consequential role we play in disturbing the climatic system through which that very rain is delivered.

*Daniel Leisawitz is the Director of the Italian Studies Program at Muhlenberg College (Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA). The artwork is by Abraham Cresques a 14th-century Jewish Spanish cartographer.