By Deborah Secular

So long as the earth exists, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

This week we read the story of Noah, who builds an ark to escape the flood of G-d’s wrath! We ask questions such as, was Noah that good, or was it just in his generation? Compared to WHAT?

The flood story makes me (and a lot of people!) think about climate change. Humanity is terrible, G-d gets mad, and sea levels rise! But an important difference is that (at least how it’s told) in the Torah version, all of humanity really deserved what happened. In the case of modern human-caused climate change, there are big differences in how much different people are contributing to the problem. An increasingly globalized and deregulated economy allows corporations headquartered in powerful countries to deplete less powerful ones, in a world order that remains from the days of more direct colonization. The abundance we have access to here in North America is the basis of modern consumer culture, which gets us accustomed to using much more than we need, while it strips us of the ability to create alternatives.

These imbalances have been on my mind lately as I scroll through posts about the Dakota Access Pipeline. The violence and colonialism inherent in industrial capitalism is so horrifyingly apparent. It is important to see the struggles native people are leading at Standing Rock not only through the lens of global systems, but first and foremost as the latest time they have had to defend themselves from ongoing colonial violence. Here is a cool syllabus of resources about it that I heard about and have been reading through.

Judaism gives us so many tools for connecting ourselves to the land, seasons, and rhythms of nature. Noah’s story, for example, reminds us of our vulnerability to disaster and our reliance on land for life. I

think that getting in touch with these parts of our traditions is crucial to breaking out of the logic of capitalism which makes over-using resources and ignoring people’s livelihoods normal, acceptable, and profitable. I hope our tradition and history will also help give us the empathy to rise up in the ways we can to help put our world back in touch with our planet.