In July of 1988, someone looking into Lake St. Clair, the relatively small lake sitting between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, discovered a tiny striped shell stuck to something underwater. It was less than an inch long, about the size of a fingernail. Nobody knew it at the time, but this was about to become one of the most expensive fingernails in American history.
The animal was a zebra mussel, native to the Black and Caspian Sea region of Eastern Europe. An oceangoing ship had apparently taken on freshwater ballast somewhere in Europe, crossed the Atlantic, entered the Great Lakes, and dumped that water here. Along with the water came microscopic zebra mussel larvae. It was one of those moments where mankind managed to significantly rearrange an entire continent without realizing we had done anything at all.
The mussels loved America. Apparently, the immigration process went very smoothly for them. A female can produce hundreds of thousands of eggs in a season, and the larvae drift through the water until they find something hard to grab onto. Rocks are good. Docks are good. Boats are good. Municipal water pipes, power-plant intake systems and anything else important to civilization are especially good.
Within roughly a decade, zebra mussels had spread through all five Great Lakes. Quagga mussels, a closely related invasive species, spread with them and eventually became even more dominant in many places. Together, these tiny animals fundamentally changed one of the largest freshwater ecosystems on earth. They filtered enormous amounts of plankton out of the water, altering the food supply available to native species, clogged water-intake pipes and attached themselves by the thousands to anything that remained underwater long enough. Federal officials estimate that invasive mussels have caused billions of dollars in economic damage around the Great Lakes.
We fought back. Utility companies developed chemical treatments and expensive cleaning systems. Boats were inspected and decontaminated. Governments created monitoring programs, regulations and public campaigns begging people not to transport mussels from one lake to another. Scientists investigated everything from pesticides to genetic methods of control. We spent decades trying to answer the same question: what do you do when a tiny animal from Europe moves into the Great Lakes and reproduces faster than your government can print warning brochures?
In 1990, only two years after the zebra mussel was first identified in Lake St. Clair, researchers John French and Michael Bur of what is now the U.S. Geological Survey began examining the stomach contents of freshwater drum in western Lake Erie. The freshwater drum is not exactly the bald eagle of American wildlife. Many fishermen regard it as a “trash fish,” the thing that annoyingly grabs your bait while you're trying to catch something you actually want. But the drum has something unusual hidden in the back of its throat: teeth.
Not the sharp teeth we normally picture on a predatory fish. Freshwater drum have specialized crushing teeth deep in the throat that change shape as the fish matures. In larger fish, the tooth surface becomes broad and molar-like, almost like a biological nutcracker built for crushing hard shells. Long before anyone in North America had ever heard of zebra mussels, the freshwater drum was already swimming around Lake Erie with exactly the machinery needed to pulverize them. French and Bur discovered that the larger drum were eating zebra mussels almost exclusively. The invasive mussel had barely arrived, and one of the native fish had already added it to the menu.
At first, researchers were cautious about how much difference this could really make. A drum can only crush mussels within a certain size range, and nnobody imagined that one species of fish was going to simply eat the invasive mussels out of several Great Lakes. But this past June, researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey published a new analysis of freshwater drum in western Lake Erie. They estimated that the drum were consuming an average of over twenty pounds of mussel meat per acre every year, enough predation that scientists now believe the native drum may have a much greater impact on invasive mussels than previously expected. The fish we weren't particularly impressed with had apparently been working overtime, nights, and weekends.
The drum wasn't working alone. In the early 1990s, researchers began examining diving ducks feeding on Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair. What they found was astonishing. Zebra mussels showed up in over 90% of the bellies of many species of ducks (my favorite is the bufflehead in case you were wondering). Tens of thousands of migrating ducks had discovered that the invasive species covering the bottom of the lake was also an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Then there were the lake whitefish, one of the most commercially important fish in the Great Lakes. The mussel invasion devastated the stocks of Diporeia, a small high-energy bottom-dwelling creature that whitefish had relied upon heavily for food. This should have been terrible news for the whitefish, and it was. Their populations fell dramatically. They became thinner. It got so bad that fishermen who had been fishing whitefish for generations were beginning to consider career changes.
But the whitefish went on the offensive, it changed what it ate. Whitefish began consuming dramatically more mollusks, including zebra and quagga mussels themselves. While they couldn’t get into the hard shells of adults, they began feeding on the larvae and the young mussels. Researchers found that whitefish populations were consuming enormous quantities of invasive mussels each year.
By 2015, a team of Great Lakes scientists looking at the transformed Lake Michigan food web found something they had not expected. Despite a major decline in the lake's basic productivity and the collapse of important prey species, populations of major predators and lake whitefish had remained stubbornly high. Their scientific paper used a wonderful phrase to describe what was happening: “counterbalancing mechanisms” inside the food web.
Counterbalancing mechanisms. I love that phrase because it is the scientific way of saying, “We did not see that coming.”
To be clear, zebra and quagga mussels have not disappeared. Nature did not neatly return Lake Michigan to 1987, apologize for the inconvenience and send everyone a refund. The invasion caused enormous damage, and the Great Lakes today are profoundly different from the lakes that existed before the mussels arrived. Some of those changes may never reverse.
But the system did not simply sit there helplessly either. Ducks changed what they ate. Fish changed what they ate. Predators began placing pressure on an animal they had never encountered before. A native fish that few people particularly valued turned out to have a mouth designed to attack an ecological problem that didn't exist when the mouth was designed.
And this is not an isolated story.
In 1935, Australia had a beetle problem. Beetle larvae were damaging sugar-cane roots, so government scientists came up with what seemed like an ingenious biological solution: import giant cane toads from Hawaii. Cane toads had supposedly helped control agricultural pests elsewhere, so Australia brought over 101 adults, bred them and released roughly 2,400 young toads into the sugar-cane fields of Queensland.
There was just one small problem, the toads did very little to control the beetles. But they did prove spectacularly good at being toads. Cane toads are large, voracious, extraordinarily fertile and highly poisonous. Australia had no native toads, so many Australian predators had never encountered anything like them. An animal would see what looked like a large, slow-moving frog, eat it and discover in short order, that this had been a fatal idea. The toads spread across northern Australia, poisoning native predators and becoming one of the country's most notorious invasive species. Almost ninety years later, the Australian government still says there is no broad-scale method capable of eradicating them.
Then researchers in Western Australia started finding cane-toad corpses with neat incisions in their chests. Large toads had their hearts and livers removed while the poisonous glands and gallbladders were left behind. Cameras eventually revealed the surgeon: Australia's native water rat, known as the rakali. The rats had figured out how to turn the toads over, open the relatively vulnerable underside, eat selected organs and avoid the toxic portions that could kill them.
We imported the toad because we thought we understood how to control a beetle. The toad ignored our plan. And then rats learned surgery.
There is something wonderfully humbling about all of this. We human beings are enormously intelligent. Hashem gave us a brain capable of splitting atoms, landing rovers on Mars, and developing an app that can have dinner delivered to your front door without requiring you to speak to another human being. We are supposed to use that intelligence. The Torah's first description of mankind's role in the natural world is that Hashem placed Adam in Gan Eden “לעבדה ולשמרה—to work it and to guard it” (Bereishis 2:15). We are not commanded to sit under a tree and watch the world run itself. We were given responsibility.
But responsibility is not sovereignty. The Midrash on Ecclesiastes describes Hashem taking Adam around Gan Eden and showing him the world He had made. Hashem tells him, “ראה מעשי כמה נאים ומשובחין הן—See My works, how beautiful and excellent they are,” and then warns him, “תן דעתך שלא תקלקל ותחריב את עולמי—Take care that you do not ruin and destroy My world” (Koheles Rabbah 7:13). Notice the last two words, את עולמי, My world.
Adam was given the garden to work. He was never given the deed. That remained with the Creator and Owner of the world. The One who created Adam and Eve on Rosh Hashanah, and gave them explicit instructions, “Enjoy everything I made for you, but don’t eat from that which will bring death to humanity. Trust Me, I created it and I know what’s good for you.” But hours later, they were sampling from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and indeed mortality came crashing down on humanity.
Our job on Rosh Hashanah is to try to reverse that terrible decision made on that day, to go back to saying to God, “You created this world, You are the King, and we will follow Your plan this time.” This is one of the central ideas of Rosh Hashanah. The Gemara tells us that Hashem says, “אמרו לפני בראש השנה מלכיות... כדי שתמליכוני עליכם—Recite before Me on Rosh Hashanah verses of kingship... so that you make Me King over you” (Rosh Hashanah 16a).
Hashem is the ruler of the world whether we like it or not. Only He can restore the world when we mess it up. Only He can give rats instruction manuals for toad surgery, and new menus to ducks and whitefish. But Rosh Hashanah is our opportunity to make Him King over us, because we have the free will to recognize His sovereignty or ignore it.
The question is not whether Hashem is the ruler, the question is whether we are willing to live like subjects today and that is much harder.
We like the idea that Hashem is King when it means He can give us the things we want. It gets more complicated when kingship means that His plan is THE plan, His rules are THE rules, and our carefully researched, exhaustively rationalized, color-coded, highly optimized plan for how life is supposed to unfold is approximately as successful as importing cane toads to control beetles.
We do this constantly. We decide how our child should turn out, which person we should marry, how quickly our business should grow, which job we should get, how much money we should make, when a medical problem should disappear, and exactly which door Hashem should open next. Then when reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate with the presentation we prepared for it, we become frustrated.
There is nothing wrong with planning. There is nothing wrong with ambition. There is nothing wrong with doing everything responsible and intelligent within our power. That is לעבדה ולשמרה. We are supposed to work the garden. But we are not the King of the garden.
The Mishnah says, “עשה רצונו כרצונך—Make His will your will” (Pirkei Avos 2:4). Rabbeinu Yonah explains there that a person should strive “ולא להפריד רצון הקב"ה ית' ורצונו אך לעשות שניהם דבר אחד—not to separate Hashem's will and his own will, but to make them one,” until all he wants is what Hashem wants (Rabbeinu Yonah on Pirkei Avos 2:4:1).
That is Malchus, that is giving Hashem Kingship. It does not mean we stop trying. It means we stop confusing trying with controlling. Chazal put the division of responsibility into five words: “הכל בידי שמים חוץ מיראת שמים—Everything is in the hands of Heaven except fear of Heaven” (Berachos 33b). Choice is ours, the result is His.
There is tremendous relief in that recognition. If I am king, then every outcome is my responsibility. Every unexpected development is evidence that I failed to control something I should have controlled. Every setback means the kingdom is malfunctioning because of me. But if Hashem is King, my responsibility is both enormous and limited. I have to choose correctly. I have to work honestly. I have to make His will my will. But I do not have to control the universe.
The zebra mussel arrived in Lake Erie less than forty years ago. The freshwater drum had been swimming there all along, carrying crushing teeth in the back of its throat for a problem that had not yet arrived.
I don't know why Hashem allows one ecological system to recover better than another. I don't know why some problems develop “counterbalancing mechanisms,” and others leave permanent scars. Rosh Hashanah does not ask us to pretend we understand the King's plan. It asks us to recognize that there is a King.
This Rosh Hashanah, perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is to surrender a our imagined sovereignty. Keep up with the responsibility. Keep up with the work. But give the throne back.
The world is Hashem's garden. Let's work it. Let's guard it. Let's make wise choices inside it.
And then let's let the King be King.
Because that is the beginning of a Sweet New Year.
Parsha Dvar Torah
This week’s parshios, Nitzavim and Vayelech, contain the last discourse that Moshe gave the Jewish people on the day he died. At the end of Parshas Nitzavim Moshe tells the Jewish people the following, "I invoke as witnesses against you this day, heaven and earth: Life and death have I placed before you, blessing and curse. choose life in order that you live, you and your descendants, to love Ha-shem, your G-d, to obey Him and to cling to Him; for He is your life and the length of your days, to live on the soil that G-d swore to your forefathers- to Avrohom, to Yitzchok, and to Yaakov- to give them." (Duet. 30:19-20)
While this is a very powerful statement designed to remind Jews that a spiritual life and a relationship with G-d is imperative for life, there seems to be some redundancy in Moshe's statement, "For He is your life and the length of your day." Isn't your life the same thing as the length of your days?
Rav Simcha Bunim Bonhart of Peshischa, (1765-1827), one of the leaders of Hasidic Judaism in Poland, gives the following answer in his work, Kol Simchah. When we look at the world we usually see two types of people. There are those that take great pains to stay in top form and prime health. They don't smoke, drink, or overindulge in food. They exercise regularly, floss every night and ensure that they get enough sleep. They are usually blessed with "length of days" as a result of all the pain and effort they invested in their lifestyle. Others, however, follow the maxim, "Live Hard, Die Fast, and Leave a Good Looking Corpse!" They smoke, drink, eat whatever they want, and stay up to all hours of the night partying (yeah, just like me, sitting at 1:37 AM writing this email to the soft sound of elevator music!!!). Many would say that those folk live "the life," but usually they don't get to experience the length of days. (We all know that the better something tastes, the less healthy it probably is!)
But here Moshe is telling the Jewish people that the spiritual life, the one imbued with Torah and a relationship with G-d, is not like that. Within it, one will find both "the life," an exciting dynamic life, and "length of days." Torah is what gives us the ability to Live Hard, Die Late and Leave a Good Looking Legacy!
Parsha Summary
This Parsha begins the description of the last day of Moshe's life. Moshe called together the entire Jewish nation, from the lowliest water carrier to the highest elder. He brought them together for a renewal of the covenant that they accepted at Sinai. But this covenant contained one key difference. It included an acceptance of liability not only for an individual's own action, but also for the deeds of all other members of the Jewish nation. We don't regard other Jews as separate entities, loosely held together by similar experiences, a common language, or ethnic commonality; rather we are all tiny parts of one national soul.
If your left hand was being bitten by a rabid dog, your right hand wouldn't stand by, saying, "Will you look at that! No wonder must people are right-handed, left hands have such bad luck!" Your right hand would spring to action, trying to wrench the Doberman off the other hand! This is because both hands are part of one being. Likewise, if a Jew sees another Jew falling into the lure of sin, he can't stand by idly and do nothing, he must attempt to help him. (However, if one assesses that his attempt to help the person will have a negative result, he is commanded to desist from action.) Based on this covenant, being a good guy just isn't enough, we need to spread our goodness to others in order to be the Ultimate Jew!
Here, the Torah adds another warning against idolatry. (Idolatry is the most oft-repeated prohibition in the Torah. Serving idols involves denying the Source of everything, including yourself. There can be nothing worse than this, as it causes all your deeds to be focused in the wrong direction, thus making you a complete failure!) We are told about how we will be exiled from our land if we continuously serve idols. G-d always treats us the way we treat Him. If we deny Him as our source, He says, "You don't recognize me as your protector, your source? No problem, I will remove My protection from you." Without G-d's protection, it is clear that we can't survive (please see Exhibit A, the Land of Israel). We will immediately be driven from our land.
Ha-shem continues by promising us that when we do recognize Him and return to Him, He will have mercy on us, and bring us back from all the exiles to which we have been dispersed. He will rejoice with us the way He rejoiced with out forefathers.
Moshe then tells the Jews to recognize that the Torah he presented to them is not found on a distant island or on a far away star, to be reached only by a perilous journey. "Rather, the matter is very near to you, in your mouth and your heart- to perform it." (Deut. 30:14) Here, we see the crucial three things we need to be able to serve G-d properly - mouth, heart, and body. We need to want the right goals (heart), which will cause us to verbalize our desires (mouth), and then our bodies will perform that which we wanted and verbalized.
The Parsha concludes with Moshe calling the heavens and earth as witnesses to his rejoinder that the Jews pick life, that they choose good over bad, righteousness over evil. He calls the heavens and earth as witnesses because they are eternal, and will always be there to testify whether we are keeping our part of the bargain and choosing right over wrong. Additionally, there is lesson to be learned from them. Even thought they get no reward or punishment, theheaven and earth fulfill G-d's will, shining brightly every day, bearing fruit and produce, exactly as G-d wills them to. We, who do get reward and punishment, how much more should we do exactly as G-d tells us.
Next is my favorite verse in the entire Torah. "I have placed life and death before you, blessing and curse, and you shall choose life, so that you will live, you and your offspring." (Deut. 30:19) So many religions encourage their followers to do the right thing to earn great reward in the next world. In Judaism, while we do believe there will be a great World to Come, we don't use that as our selling point.
Moshe tells the people, "Choose Life! So that you will live, you and your children!" He tells us to keep the Torah because that will give us the most incredible life possible! I’m a social worker, and I see that the Torah way of life averts so many of the ailments of modern society. It is no wonder that Jews following a Torah lifestyle have drastically lower rates of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and violent crime compared to mainstream society. So, please remember to choose the Torah life, not for the best next world (although you’ll get it), but for the best of this world!
Quote of the Week: Never try to catch two frogs with one hand. – Peter Gribenes
Random Fact of the Week: In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.
Funny Line of the Week: All my life I thought air was free, until I bought a bag of chips.
Have a Dynamite Shabbos,
R’ Leiby Burnham