My Climate Story
Rabbi Danny Eisenberg
In order to better appreciate where this website is coming from, it might be helpful for me to relate my own journey and questions that I confronted along the way.
Early days
It began in 2008. After concluding 9 years of yeshiva studies in Israel, I returned to my home-town of Sydney to engage in Jewish education and rabbinical work.
During my first year back, I was approached by someone I knew who had, at one time, been interested in Torah observance. He wanted my help. He was now an environmentalist, no longer religiously observant, but wanted to make a public presentation on the Torah’s position on protecting the environment. He needed help finding source material. “You rabbis should really be getting involved in this,” he urged me, “We’re destroying the planet.” And with that he began to tell me what scientists were saying about humanly-caused global warming, or – as it’s technically known – Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).
This was not a challenge I was keen to undertake. Environmental activism came with all kinds of connotations that I had no interest in being associated with - left-wing ideology, hippy culture, alternate lifestyles.
Furthermore, I reasoned to myself, the Orthodox world is not getting into a flap about global warming. Secular liberals have warned of apocalyptic scenarios for many decades, whether by nuclear war or overpopulation. People who believe that there is a Master of the Universe need not fear. Presumably the scientific evidence is speculative; and even if not, presumably this is part of Hashem’s plan.
It is not the job of Torah Jews to be engaged in environmental activism, I thought. Orthodoxy’s notion of “Tikkun Olam” (“repairing the world”) does not mean joining Greenpeace, as some Jewish groups would have us think, but perfecting the world spiritually through engagement in Torah and mitzvot.
A range of questions
From those initial sentiments I distilled a series of cascading questions, very familiar to students of Gemara, which challenged the basis of my environmentalist friend’s claims.
Some of these related to the physical reality:
Do we really know that the climate is warming and will continue to warm?
Even if we do know that, can we really be sure that humans are the primary cause?
Even if we are the primary cause, is it really true that climate change is “destroying the planet”?
Some were theological:
If we do entertain the possibility that we are destroying the planet, where does Hashem feature in all this? Doesn’t He run the world? Would He actually let us destroy it?
And if we say that He would let us destroy it, how would the Torah’s utopian vision of redemption come to fruition?
And if He is letting us destroy it, does that necessarily mean that we should take action to save it? After all, maybe it is His will that we do indeed destroy it and fighting that outcome is like trying to play God!
Alternatively, is it not possible that it is His will that an impending calamity should inspire a global call to spiritual action, of teshuva (repentance) and tefilla (prayer), rather than a call to physical action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
Others questions were more practical:
If we say that Hashem would want us to take physical action to save the world, does mankind have the capacity to do so?
And if mankind as a whole does have that capacity, do we as individuals have a responsibility in this regard? After all, each individual only contributes negligibly to the problem in the first place, and nothing any particular individual will do will even make a dent in the problem. Maybe governments have a responsibility to take action, but Orthodox rabbis?
With all of these questions piled up, I was quite confident that I could put the issue to rest with a clean conscience.
A Wakeup Call
Fast forward nine years. In 2016, after several years dedicated to rabbinical work, I began working in computer software development. Without ideology playing any part, the first job I found was at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, based at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney. There I would work with climate scientists who were constructing computerized models to simulate climate behavior. My job was to write software which would enable them to evaluate how well their models were performing. It was here that I once again seriously encountered the issue of Climate Change. I would now have to examine whether my dismissive position would stand up to scrutiny.
After much examination and contemplation of the issues, I reached the conclusion that although my questions were indeed good questions, they also had good answers.
I found myself at the intersection of two worlds - the world of Torah and the world of climate science - with a unique vantage point to examine how they connect and impact upon one another. So began a journey to seek to navigate this fascinating terrain and articulate a Torah position on the issue of climate change, an area which is becoming of ever-increasing concern and discussion globally.
This is the story behind Torah & Climate, inspiring the kinds of questions it seeks to address.
See the video below which outlines some of the conclusions I reached about climate change and what guidance the Torah would have about it.
