For 8 days of Hanukkah, my True Love said to me:

“Help heal My Earth!”

 Hanukkah brings with it again this year three crucial teachings about healing our Mother Earth from the ravages of global scorching

The Green Menorah, a Tree of Light that is a fusion of human craft and Earth’s growth. On this Shabbat we read the Prophetic passage from Zechariah that emplaces the Temple Menorah as part of a tiny forest of olive trees that give forth their oil straight into the Menorah.  

We breathe in what these Trees of Light breathe out; they breathe in what we breathe out. We take new inner strength by breathing in the God Who breathes all life, by opening our eyes  to the Source of all Light in this wintry season of our dark foreboding.

We realize that Hanukkah teaches: We humans are not lords of the Earth, but part of the Earth. These trees feed us as we feed them. Read a little further to see how we at The Shalom Center are ourselves doing this, with your help.


The tradition of resistance to Imperial Antiochus and his Empire’s desecration of the Temple –-- a resistance crystallized in the teaching by Zechariah: “Not by might and not by power, but by My Spirit [b’ruchi — or even, “by My wind!”]. We take new inner strength to resist the Empires of our day – Big Carbon – that today are burning, despoiling, desecrating the Holy Temple Earth of all cultures and all creatures.  We take new inner strength not only to resist harm but to heal and grow the sprouts for our own Trees of Light.

The legend that one day’s worth of olive oil lasted for eight days –a teaching that we ourselves can minimize our use of oil and coal and unnatural gas; can through conservation and the sustainable use of sun and wind reshape our country and the world; can shave off seven-eighths of the fossil-fuel burning that is scorching earth and killing thousands.

That is our own Green Menorah commitment. We ask you – after lighting your menorah each evening – to dedicate yourself to making the changes in your life that will allow our limited sources of energy to last for as long as they’re needed, and with minimal impact on our climate.

Day 1: Hanukkah begins Saturday evening December 24; so we ceremonially say farewell to Shabbat before we light the candle to honor the first day.  We take note that the same evening, the Christian community is also celebrating the coming of new light into a world that seems dark.   Look carefully at the candle and notice that at its heart there is a spot of dark, like  a seed that sprouts into a glow of light.

We might, as we watch the candles flicker, talk about the darkness that has fallen on our country and indeed on our hopes for healing our wounded Mother Earth  -- and what for each of us it means to rellght the candle of rededication, of commitment, of action.

You might take a few minutes to order on Amazon two colorfully illustrated Waskow-Berman books: The Rest of Creation and The Looooong Narrow Pharaoh and the Midwives Who Gave Birth to Freedom.  If you order them on Sunday they will arrive before next Shabbat, when you can enjoy reading them on  the Shabbat of Hanukkah. Click here.
https://www.amazon.com/Looooong-Narrow-Pharaoh-Midwives-Freedom/dp/069275721X/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=069275721X

Day 2: This year, Monday December 26 is a national holiday.  If possible, choose today to not use your car at all. Spend some of the day outdoors, enjoying Earth. Choose one day each week when as we move into the new secular year, you will not use your car. Every day, lessen driving: use public transit, bike, walk. Cluster errands.  Carpool. Don’t idle engine
beyond 20 seconds.

Day 3. Home and workplace: This Tuesday morning, call your electric-power utility to switch to wind-powered electricity. (For each home, 100% wind-power reduces CO2 emissions the same as not driving 20,000 miles in one year.)  Urge the top officials of your workplace to arrange an energy audit and switch to wind-powered electicity.

Day 4. National policy. In the morning, call 202-224-3121 and ask to speak to the Senators for your state. (If you are from DC, with still no Senator, call Senators McConnell, majority leader, and Schumer, minority leader.)  

Urge your Senators to oppose President-elect Trump’s appointments of three rapacious wolves to "guard” the Garden of all Earth, our common home, our common future:  Exxon boss Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State ;   anti-EPA extremist and denier of climate crisis Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general who sued the EPA for trying to reduce CO2 emissions, to be chief of the EPA; and Rick Perry,  ex-Governor of Texas who sits on the board of Energy Transfer Partners, developer of the Dakota Oil Access Pipeline that tried to mutilate the sacred lands of the Sioux Nation and endanger the great Missouri River, [To read more, please click on "Read More" in red just below.]

 An Interfaith Healing Seder for the Earth: Ten Plagues, Ten Healings

Today, April 4, 2016, we are presenting a revised version of this Seder, originally published in 2013. Today is the 48^th anniversary of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King in  1968. It is also the 49^th anniversary of his most profound and troubling speech: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” a speech he delivered in 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City to the assembled “Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam.”  In it he called on all Americans to struggle against the “deadly triplets” that he said afflict our lives: racism, militarism, and materialism.

And today is the 47^th anniversary of the original Freedom Seder, which in 1969 radically altered the Seder’s focus by weaving the liberation struggles of Black America together with the ancient story of the Israelite liberation struggle out of slavery to Pharaoh.

The original Freedom Seder addressed the most urgent crisis of that day, and drew together Jews and Christians, black and white.  And in the decades since, for many many thousands of people it liberated the Passover Seder itself to address other deep issues: liberating us from immoral and self-destructive wars, affirming the rights of immigrants and of  people trafficked into the slave trade and of exploited workers, liberating us from fear and hatred among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

To honor the memory and wisdom of Dr. King and to renew the life-giving energy of the Freedom Seder, today we are sharing with you a new Passover Seder. It challenges the Corporate Carbon Pharaohs of today that are bringing a new Ten Plagues upon our planet. And it celebrates the Ten Healings of our wounded Mother Earth that we should undertake. 

The Seder begins with a journey into the streets to challenge today’s Pyramids of Power.  Some may want to organize such a journey; others may simply want to use the Haggadah, the Telling, that we present below, in their family or community Seder. 

This year, on Friday, April 22, the first Seder begins in the evening of Earth Day. As befits a Seder for the whole Earth, this Telling is rooted in the Jewish tradition and includes in its flowering passages from other traditions.

Let me call your special attention to new approaches to the meaning of charoset and the welcoming of Elijah,  to the Ten Plagues and Ten Healings,  to a whole new song and a new verse in “Go Down Moses,” to a new translation and a new melody of an old psalm.

With blessings of freedom and community, of shalom, salaam, peace, Earth! --  Rabbi Arthur Waskow

WISDOM FOR THE JOURNEY
“I felt as if my legs were praying.”
— Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, coming back home from the voting-rights March in Selma, Alabama, 1965
“Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.”  — Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1970

CHALLENGING THE PYRAMIDS OF POWER

The people gather at a central point, perhaps a synagogue.

The people move into the streets. Chanting and singing as they go, carrying a portable large-sized globe of Planet Earth,  they walk toward a Pyramid of Power of our own day: perhaps an office of Exxon or BP, or a coal-fired power station, or a bank that invests

Recent controversies within Hillel International, the “home” for many Jewish college students of diverse backgrounds and beliefs, have made public in a sharper way a profound spiritual issue confronting American Jews and their “official” organizations.

The spiritual issue: When does strong support from many American Jews for the State of Israel and its Jewish citizens as an emergency refuge, as a creative culture, as a defender of Jewish interests, as a member of the Jewish family, become idolatry of the State?

First, the background of the Hillel controversy; then, an examination of what idolatry is:

The controversy surfaced most publicly when Swarthmore College Hillel announced they would refuse to abide by rules handed down by “Hillel International” that would limit what Jewish organizations and speakers were allowed to speak there. Hillel International then threatened to disaffiliate Swarthmore Hillel.

The debate within Hillel began in 2011 when its official managers adopted a policy that prohibited having speakers or partnering with organizations that “deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state; delegitimize, demonize or apply double standards to Israel; support boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS] efforts against Israel; or foster an atmosphere of incivility.”

Applying these rules, Harvard Hillel refused to allow a former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg, to speak at Hillel because co-sponsors of his speech included a group of pro-BDS students in the Palestinian Solidarity Committee along with J Street U and two Hillel-affiliated groups, Students for Israel and Progressive Jewish Alliance. -

Responding to this exclusion of Burg, first Harvard students and then a growing band of Jewish students across the country created “Open Hillel,” arguing for a policy of welcoming broad debate and inclusion of Jews of varied views and action about Israel as Hillel welcomes Jews of varied views and action about prayer, gender, sexuality, economic policy, political party, theology, and every other issue.

More recently, Hillel International announced it had become formal partners with AIPAC, an American lobbying group that almost always strongly supports Israeli-government policies when it meets with and encourages campaign contributions to Members of Congress.

Open Hillel raised strong concerns about the effect of Hillel’s privileging AIPAC in this way, as against other Jewish organizations that strongly differ with Israeli government policy. Open Hillel urged that instead, AIPAC continue to be treated as one voice among many in the voices Hillel encourages to speak in its venues..

Then Swarthmore Hillel proclaimed itself an “Open Hillel.”

Swarthmore Hillel’s refusal to knuckle under to Hillel International’s restrictions has put “Open Hillel” and the whole debate over what is “not allowable” to say in American Jewish life on the public agenda-- not only in the Forward & the JTA but also on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

For me, all this raises some basic questions of the Spirit.

What is idolatry? Worshipping any being – person, object, institution, community – as if it were Divine. “Carving it out” and “bowing down to it” as the Ten Commandments describe and forbid. (Exod. 20: 4). Not only “carving out” a physical object, a statue, but carving out from the One Great Flow of Life a piece that must not be criticized, not be questioned. A piece not only to be loved and honored for its usefulness and beauty, not only to be seen as a temporary aspect in service to that Unity  -- but treated as an Ultimate, Unchangeable good.

The Hillel International prohibitions make the State of Israel, and indeed only one version of it, into an idol.

 I understand the urge to do this. The Rabbis told a tale in which they searched and searched for the yetzer hara (the evil impulse) toward idolatry, hoping to destroy it. They finally found it — in the Holy of Holies!  We most easily make an idol of something that has a lot of sacredness in it.

What is the alternative to idolatry of Israel? Idolatry of any thing?

The alternative is celebration of the God Whose Name is "Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, I Will Be Who I Will Be."  I am Becoming. Never stuck.

That was /is/ will be the God of the Burning Bush, Who called Moses to resist Pharaoh and calls us to resist all pharaohs. (Exod. 4)