I had the very special honour to attend a 90th birthday event for R. Leah Novick, an old friend and shining member of the cohort of the founding generation of the movement for Jewish Spiritual Renewal. When it was her turn to speak, she asked each of us to close our eyes and think about ways in which we could help save/heal our planet.
That question was also voiced during a session at the annual OHALAH conference. At one point during a session, participants started asking what they could do. It was interesting, in a way, to hear people admitting that they really weren’t clear about what in fact they could do.
For many years, I have been advocating that the work of facing the climate crisis begins at home, with a willingness to make changes and even sacrifices to demonstrate to ourselves and to those whom we influence how real this crisis is. I continue to urge people to make changes, to give up some immediate pleasures for the benefit of generations to come, just as our grandparents who immigrated to North America and I continue to be baffled by how even we in Jewish Renewal justify our indulgences.
At the end of a small group session, I happened to mention that I’m a rabbi living in a place with no Jewish community. One of the participants wanted to know what a Jewish Renewal rabbi was doing in such a place. His question, which we discussed in person after the conference, prompted the revival of this blog.
I have been living on this small island for the past sixteen years. Initially, I believed that the Holy One had guided me here because it was no longer affordable to live in Boston. Since I am a Canadian, returning to Canada gave me health insurance at one tenth the cost of the limited insurance I had in Boston and that likely either saved my life or at least saved me from bankruptcy when I had a heart attack nine months after moving back. And, needless to say, I was most grateful for this guidance.
Lately, however, and especially as the effects of the climate crisis began to be felt here, I started hoping for further guidance in finding an opportunity to do good work in the world. It is hard to get on and off the island and so going to demonstrations is not possible. I am too old to become active in our politics which I think I would do if I were fifteen years younger.
And so it turned out that my next, and likely last deployment is to help my local community, my Hornby family, to renew itself and come together to do what we can to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change here, in our own neighbourhood, And so I stood for the position of president of the Hornby Island Residents and Ratepayers Association (HIRRA). In this, I am part of a wonderful team of caring people working on providing housing to our summer workers (Hornby is a tourist destination which is experiencing what all tourist destinations are experiencing these days), recommending changes in our zoning and by-laws, and improving the messaging about Hornby.
While I loved the challenges and rewards of having been the Rabbinic Director of ALEPH, one of the deans and teachers in the AOP, and I still love being the person organizing Reb Zalman’s files, I am equally grateful for the opportunity to bring whatever skills and experience I have to this small yet wonderful place and community.
One way in which I do this is to write a column for our monthly paper in a style which I think many of you will recognize. So, starting soon, I plan to share these columns with you and I hope you will see them not as me tooting my own horn but as a simple example of bringing a renewed Jewish spirituality to a world in which, numerically at least, we are only a very small part, and in a language which is more universal.