Earth Etude for Elul 24

Past, Present, and Future

by Thea Iberall, PhD

~I’m at a shoreline retreat rocking on the dining hall porch. I’m thinking about how vulnerable everything is: people, the land, nature. I’m thinking about my own fragility. Flags above me are flapping in the breeze, a precursor to the remnants of the hurricane that will be hitting us tomorrow. I’m scrolling through the news on my phone: a white politician wanting to win an election, a famous black man complaining about biased treatment by an airline crew. The ocean has a steady presence, like a heater in the walls.

I’m reading about American life in 1850. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing revving engines, machines, and coal. A Whig was running for president. A famous former slave was complaining he can’t travel in whites-only train cars. Someone already knew greenhouse gasses could heat up the Earth. People were glad the Great Compromise was reached because it stopped a civil war. A huge sigh of relief, no matter how vulnerable the Compromise made runaway slaves and everyone else. Little did they know 11 years later the Civil War would begin anyway. 750,000 would die from bayonets, rifled muskets, and dysentery while armies slashed and burned whole forests, and sharecroppers drained Southern lands of nutrients.

It’s like us. Little do we know what’s in store after the next election. We might sigh in relief, or not. But then what? Will some blue or red states secede from the Union? Maybe there will be another civil war. Whatever happens, we’ll still be burning fossil fuels and heating up the planet. I had dysentery once.

How bad will the remnants of the hurricane be? I’m rocking and the wind is rising. I can feel the ocean’s presence, the salt in the air, an underground hum, how we fear the dark. I drove here using gasoline.

T’shuvah means reconnecting to our core nature. It means coming back to the place that matters in us. We have a choice to fight the chaos or else complain about its dreariness. Waves are rolling landward and picking up energy. The path is unknown, and there are consequences to our decisions. Whichever one decides, first take a breath and prepare before the frissoning storm.

Thea Iberall, PhD, is on the leadership team of the Jewish Climate Action Network-MA. Iberall is the author of “The Swallow and the Nightingale,” a visionary fiction novel about a 4,000-year-old secret brought through time by the birds. In this fable, she addresses the real moral issue of today: not whom you love, but what we are doing to the planet. Iberall is also the playwright of “We Did It For You!” – a musical about how women got their rights in America, told by the women who were there. Along with her family, she was inducted into the International Educators Hall of Fame for creative teaching methods. In her work, she bridges between heart and mind and teaches through performance, the written word, poetry, sermons, workshops, and storytelling. www.theaiberall.com.

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