Shabbat Va-eyra

Written by Rabbi Dr Charles H Middleburgh Friday, 16 January 2009

Professor Immanuel Velikovsky was a byword in the 1950s and 60s for scholarly eccentricity.  An eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, friend of Einstein and a significant player in the earliest days of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, what really made his name internationally-speaking was a book called Worlds In Collision which advanced the theory that in the 15th century BCE a comet, passing close to the earth, changed its orbit and axis causing innumerable disasters and calamities mentioned in ancient mythologies and religions; 52 years later it made another pass, this time causing the earth to stop rotating and causing more catastrophes.  A further 7 centuries on, Mars made a closer than usual pass of the earth, initiating a range of new disturbances, and afterwards the celestial order was re-established.

As if this volume, which caused a scholarly firestorm to erupt around him, was not enough, in 1952 Velikovsky published a book called Ages in Chaos the core thesis of which was that the histories of Ancient Israel and Egypt are five centuries out of step, thus demanding a radical re-adjustment of the dates of all the major events of the Hebrew Bible. 

One of the most important of these was the Exodus from Egypt, and about this, and especially its plagues, Velikovsky made a shocking pronouncement:  the dating of these events should be shifted back some 350 years before their conventional date because of a document called the Ipuwehr Papyrus, containing an ancient Egyptian poem which describes an Egypt afflicted by a series of natural disasters and thrown, as a result, into chaos, and which some scholars suggest depicts the plagues detailed in Exodus.

Few outside specific scholarly circles remember the name of Immanuel Velikovsky today, and even fewer give any credence to his theories, but at the peak of his powers and productivity he was a most forceful figure whose views and person aroused the strongest of feelings.
This Shabbat, as we immerse ourselves in the plagues with which God struck Egypt to facilitate the Israelites’ triumphant liberation, the last thing on most minds will be their historicity and date, rather it is the morality of them and what they say about the deity – here more than almost anywhere else in Tanakh an amoral manipulator with far more concern for personal vanity and reputation than the impact of actions initiated in heaven. 

How we deal with the challenges that this poses will be dictated by our relationship with the text, and also with God, and it would be understandable if these weighty issues blinded us to aspects of the text that are just as powerful, and possibly even more relevant.

For me what impacts the most is the description of the actual plagues, and the sense of natural events being ratcheted up so many notches that they move from being seasonal nuisances to life-changing disasters; and as I think of the plagues in this way natural human empathy requires of me that I remove myself from my own smug and self-satisfied ‘Goshen’ and stand shoulder to shoulder with the Egyptians in their suffering, feeling their bewilderment, their anguish and their terror. 
As each plague fell upon them, disrupting their lives and livelihoods, shaking their emotional core and physical resilience, they would have felt a profound sense of disbelief that what was happening to them was actually occuring; they would have pinched themselves as things went from bad to worse and wondered where and how it was all going to end.

For a number of years now, whenever I read this section of Exodus, and especially today when we recite the blessing for Rosh Chodesh Shevat, the month which contains the New Year for Trees, I think not of plagues afflicting people but of disasters striking the earth, and I think of climate change, of global warming, and of the calamities which will shake our world and our lives just as the plagues shook the Egyptians, and which will change things for us even more dramatically than theirs were changed millennia ago. 
 
For, apart from anything else, Egypt was able to rebuild itself without its Israelites, whereas if even some of the milder prognostications about climate change are realised there will be no hope of such accommodation for us.

Among the many things which he initiated at the close of last year, in advance of his inauguration, one of the most exciting was the moves that President Obama made with regard to the issue of climate change and combating global warming.  In his second policy statement as President-elect, Mr Obama repeated his campaign commitment to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% and invest $150 billion in energy saving technologies. 

In December he followed this up by appointing Professor John Holdren, a globally respected physicist, to run the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the climatologist Jane Lubchenco to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Nobel laureate Professor Stephen Chu to the Department of Energy where he will focus his attention on the development of alternative energy sources.

After eight disastrous years of a presidency which denied that climate change was even occurring, let alone that responsibility for it should be placed on human shoulders, that willfully abused sites of outstanding natural beauty or scientific interest for the grossest commercial reasons, that frustrated international efforts to achieve universal reductions of emission levels and treated the champions of these causes with contempt and derision, President Obama’s approach is refreshing, welcome and hopeful.

We look forward to America giving both impetus and leadership to the steps that have to be taken if we are not to bequeath a world to our grandchildren that will be a cursed inheritance for which they will, with the greatest possible justification, villify us.
 
The worlds of environmentalism, conservation and climate change have had their mavericks, but unlike Immanuel Velikovsky whose theories have not acquired greater credence with the passage of the years, those of writers such as Rachel Carson, James Lovelock, E O Wilson, Mark Lynas and others have proved to be correct as the years have passed since they promulgated their theories, and if anything their prognostications are darker now than when they were first expressed.

It is almost beyond question now that levels of global warming will take place, whatever we do to slow down the process, that will change the world forever; a mere two degrees of warming being enough to make every European summer as hot as that of 2003, when 30,000 people died from heatstroke in Europe alone.  And if that is something your value system is capable of rubbing along with, then ponder on the fact that a mere two degrees of global warming will be enough to cause the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and if that happens sea levels will rise by 7 metres.  And if you live on high ground and think that this too would be bearable, ponder on the fact that two degrees of global warming would also be enough to wipe out a third of all species alive today as habitats changed beyond recognition...and then ask yourself whether such a world would really be one in which you would wish to live, or with whose enormous and for us unimaginable challenges you would wish your grandchildren to have to wrestle.

In Va-eyra, a vain and capricious deity plays games with the Egyptians as an exercise in reputation enhancement; [never mind the motifs of slavery and liberation which seem, in some instances to take second place to the deity’s PR], and as a result the lives of countless innocent men, women and children are adversely affected; but the tragedy, though major, is still localised. 
Nevertheless, it is a proud hallmark of our religious tradition that we do not gloat over the suffering of the Egyptians but rather that we diminish our own cup of joy come Pesach as a sign of solidarity, and an acknowledgement of the truism that while liberation brings suffering to innocent and guilty there is no reason for us to rejoice in it.

Our exercise in empathy in this regard must be a template for us, and a goad to place ourselves at the forefront of efforts to do our bit for a planet that is the only home we shall ever know and which deserves better from those who inhabit it.  As a new year for trees approaches, we have a festive day which is a prime opportunity for us as Jews to reaffirm our closeness to the earth, and our responsibility to preserve and protect it and the life it nurtures.

In the past it may have been acceptable to dismiss the wilder theories of climatologists and environmentalists, to view them as monomaniacs, green obsessives or fantasists, to comfort ourselves with the thought that things couldn’t possibly get as bad as these men and women were suggesting.  But their views have now become mainstream, they are widely accepted by intelligent people everywhere, politicians and scientists, and millions of ordinary men and women, and it is now up to us to act on them and do what we can, however small, to arrest a process that threatens so much that we cherish.

As I contemplate the Egyptians beset by the ten plagues, afflicted by swarming insects, skin diseases, sudden darkness and the death of those they loved, I feel their fear and anger, their terror and powerlessness; I feel it emotionally, and when I do that I begin to feel it physically too:  that terror and helplessness may yet be our lot and that of our descendants, and how any rational person could contemplate that prospect without immediately deciding to do whatever they could to prevent it coming to fruition, or at least to arrest it, is quite beyond my comprehension.

Rabbi Dr Charles H Middleburgh