Changing the World

Children see things adults used to be able to see but have grown blind to. I have strong memories from my own of childhood of experiencing another world besides the one I was living in. It seemed evident to me that a world of such complexity, wonder and beauty would not exist all on its own, with no place in or connection to a larger reality. I felt like I was living in a single room in a palace, and though I got barely a glimpse into the other rooms, it just seemed logical that a builder would not create only one sumptuous room like the one I was living in, standing all on its own. There had to be more.

And with my child’s eyes, I sometimes saw another reality bound up in this one. Not yet inured to wonder, all it would take is the flight of birds, the croak of a bullfrog, or the stars in the night sky to capture my mind and connect me to something other than the physical reality I encountered. Later, I got words for that experience: “The whole world is filled with Your glory” (Isaiah 6:3).

Rav Yerucham Levovitz, the Mussar supervisor of the Mir yeshiva in Europe in the 1930s, spoke about “nature” [teva] and “a quality above nature” [ma’alah min ha’teva], and he insisted that they were entirely one and the same. You can look into the world and see only “trees and rocks,” he said, even though, right there within that, there is another shimmering reality that is the spiritual presence within the natural.

Nature has become in our eyes “trees and rocks” only because of stupefaction and material-mindedness, which weakens the connection, and there became for us a separation, and we closed our eyes from seeing the light of God in nature (Da’at Chochmah u’Mussar p.233).

Think of the implications.

When nature is only “trees and rocks” and nothing more, then the world is but a warehouse of commodities to be plundered for maximum profit. Among the many consequences of that contracted worldview is the unabating crisis of global heating that year after year is wreaking havoc in floods, heat waves, fires and other catastrophes.

That was the attitude of the hunters who exterminated the sea otters along the coast of where I live. There was money to be made. But with the otters gone, the population of their major food source, the sea urchin, exploded. Sea urchins eat kelp and with no restraint on the growth of the urchin population, they decimated the kelp beds – underwater forests that shelter and feed diverse marine wildlife, buffer shores from strong waves, and, crucially, absorb massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The lush underwater world became a desert. Now that the otters have been reintroduced, the kelp is beginning to recover.

When we attune to perceiving the glory of God in the rocks and trees, our approach to nature will embody reverence [yirah], restraint [histapkut], and responsibility [achrayut].

“Nature” then becomes not only something to use, but also something to honour. And “nature” in this perspective is not just what we encounter in the charming world of a park but anything that lives and breathes, and that includes other human beings.

My spirituality is not divorced from socio-political reality and when I see refugees losing their protected status and being hunted down, or Jewish businesses being destroyed by arson in my own country, or West Bank settlers seizing land by force, or the killing of civilians defended as the cost of peace, or the exclusion of non-binary people from public life, and so much more, I hear the voice of Pharaoh: “Who is God, that I should obey his voice …? I know not God.”

That quote shows up in the Book of Exodus in verse 5:2. It’s soon after that we learn about the hard heart of the Pharaoh, and God gives Moses instructions for initiating the first of the plagues. The devastation of Egypt follows.

That’s where we are in our world right now. The many forms of hard-heartedness that we see and experience are not just emotionally lacking in compassion, they echo loudly, “Who is God, that I should obey his voice …? I know not God.” And they deny “The whole world is filled with Your glory.” Thus we have no basis for expressing surprise as we see plagues multiplying in our world and appearing right on our doorstep.

What situates what I am thinking within the Mussar perspective is the necessity that I turn the lens back on myself. I can’t just point to the hardheartedness and spiritual insensitivity of the world out there and moralize; I am obligated to interrogate myself in search of my own hard-heartedness and spiritual insensitivity, and then make effort to change. I have miniscule influence over global realities, but I do have full responsibility for what goes on within the four cubits of my own personal life.

I’ll close with a story that I have told many times but bears repeating.

In 1923, the Chafetz Chaim was asked to be the keynote speaker at the first Agudath Israel convention in Vienna. He was asked specifically to speak on the subject of how he became the renowned sage that he did. The Chafetz Chayim said that he saw the deficiencies in the world, and he decided he had to make effort to change it, but he failed. He then focused his attention on changing the Jewish world and he had no impact. So, he said, he then sought to change the Jews of his country, Poland, and he again failed. Now, he said, he would focus on changing the Jews of his town, Radin, but to no effect. So, he said, he decided to work at changing the Jews of his own synagogue, and that, too, came to nothing. So, he put his attention on changing the members of his own family but he couldn’t. It was then that he said, “Let me change myself.” And when he changed himself, he became the “Chafetz Chaim” and he changed the world.

Which brings us to: How do you perceive the divine glory infusing the reality all around you?

I would love to hear your comments.

Alan