This is the story of how a panel about Climate Change at a Tisha B'Av service in Los Gatos, California transpired.
Seeds were planted in 2008 when I volunteered for a bicycle advocacy non-profit in Tel Aviv. I helped with various technical affairs such as publishing a monthly digital newsletter, GoogleApps administration, and leadership on a website project. Somehow, I took notice of 350.org, probably via Greenprophet, a gem of a news blog about sustainability in the middle east. 350.org's website enabled people to create actions and meetings in their own hometowns and this modeled exactly what this non-profit needed. With core activities in Tel Aviv, we wanted to enable other cities such as Jerusalem, Haifa, and Ra'anana to mature and organize further without starting from scratch while keeping in touch and in sync with the umbrella organization.
Little did I know that those hours spent as a volunteer had sown seeds of activism. And when I quit my job last year, the change of pace evolved into predictable daily and weekly rhythms with a balance between time spent in the present with my children, self care and self reflection---just the right climate for dormant seeds to sprout. Over spring I attended a fossil fuel divestment meeting in Silicon Valley where a few local churches were represented. Perhaps I could take this issue to the synagogue where my daughter’s attended preschool? And so it began without haste. A meeting with the rabbi and a few weeks later I found myself sitting in on a meeting of social action volunteers where I was to present my idea: "I'm concerned about Climate Change. There is a movement I’m involved with called ‘Go Fossil Free’, perhaps we could do something too?”
The events that happened next took me by surprise. Those handful of volunteers liked the idea and wanted to do something, not next year but sooner. Tisha B’Av, only 6 weeks away was the perfect fit the rabbi proclaimed and the date was sealed. “It would be powerful if someone from our own community could speak”, they said. I swallowed and nodded my consent, not certain to what I had just committed to. The group knew a few others who might speak too and they would be invited to a followup meeting.
I was so inspired by how easily the event transpired that I ended my speech on a hopeful note,
Through groups and communities working together as citizens with heart and intention, our world can change.
In my speech, I knew that it was important to tell a story, to tell the audience about my experience and so I began with those volunteer days living in Israel and I returned to the biking theme several times in the speech.
Studying Tisha B’av was also inspiring. The Jewish heritage is rich and I wrote,
Tisha B’Av is our community’s collective appointment with grief, sadness, and despair.
which I compared to the feelings I experience when reading news about one climate disaster or another. Below is the speech in its entirety. Thanks for reading!
I was living in Tel Aviv when Mika, my first daughter was born. Nearly every day I’d bike to the large urban park, Park Ha’yarkon that defines the northern boundary of the city. I would bike to picnics and barbecues, for playdates and solitude. But biking in the city was another story. As I biked the short distance to Mika’s daycare, I became Indiana Jones in a Temple of Doom strewn with booby traps and obstacles to discourage the young cyclist. On narrow sidewalks I weaved between pedestrians, dog poop, and stray cats. As if avoiding poisonous darts, I would duck beneath overgrown hedges. Cars and scooters parked in the bike lanes forced me onto the roads where buses threatened to roll over me. My favorite day of the year was Yom Kippur---no cars---pedestrians and cyclists could traverse the city without fear.
I day dreamed of changing the situation single handedly but, really what could I do alone? So, after further frustration and thought, I joined a handful of other volunteers at Israel B’Shvil Ofanaim, the national bike organization that lobbies in support of bike legislation and infrastructure.
Last year was the hottest year on record. It was also the year I quit my job at one of the Valley’s hottest tech companies. I’ve been mindful of Climate Change for awhile, but last year was a turning point. During my slow traffic heavy commute up and down highway 85 to Palo Alto, I decided to hear the science firsthand and listened to the audio book Storms of My Grandchildren, by NASA climatologist Dr. James Hansen. In 1988, Hansen testified before congress about Climate Change. He was the first to raise broad awareness of the subject. Parts of the book are technical, very sleepy, and its a wonder I survived my daily commute. The book is also scary. Rising sea levels, super storms, ocean acidification, droughts, mass extinction, fossil fuel subsidies, and political inaction. Hansen believes that for life on our planet to remain stable we must maintain carbon dioxide in the atmosphere around 350ppm. We hit 400ppm this May. In National Geographic it was written that the last time CO2 levels were this high, "it was between 2.6 and 5.3 million years ago". Climate Change is scary.
Mika will start first grade this fall and my daughter Zoe attends preschool here at Shir Hadash. Together we ride our bikes to school. When she rides up Blossom Hill Blvd I give her “rocket pushes”. A rocket push is a maneuver where, while peddling together uphill, I place one hand upon her back and give her a great shove, transferring some of my momentum to propel her forward. Once, while crossing the bridge over Highway 17 on Blossom Hill Blvd, I slowed and paused, as if I had arrived for an appointment to gaze out over the endless stream of vehicles. Suddenly, I became overwhelmed by immense feelings of grief, sadness, and despair. I was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the problems facing this next generation, facing my children.
Tisha B’Av is our community’s collective appointment with grief, sadness, and despair. I imagine all of us standing together on that bridge, overwhelmed yet embracing those dark emotions. In preparation for this appointment, the weeks leading up to the holiday include restrictions on physical and social joys like weddings, music, new clothes, and (like me) getting a haircut. It is said that G-d is absent. And on the holiday itself we fast. Tisha B’Av is also the turning point where we push through to hope. The purpose of emotions like grief, fear, and despair are to evoke transformative change and summon strength for action. It is said that the Messiah will be born on Tisha B’Av, how appropriate.
In February of this year, I travelled to Washington DC to witness the largest climate change rally in history. I left inspired by the diversity of the crowd of 50,000. There were children and grandparents, veterans and police officers in uniform, Native Americans and hipsters, blue collar, white collar, hippies and businessmen. This is a moral problem affecting everyone, but what can we really do alone?
In an interview with Bill Moyers, Annie Leonard creator of Story of Stuff says, “When we’re faced with problems as gigantic as disruption of the global climate, our consumer response is to buy green products, switch our lightbulbs, reject bottled water, or carry a reusable bag to the store. Those are all very good things. But they’re not about making the transformative change we need right now. To do this, we need to step out of our consumer role and into our citizen role and work together, through community and our democratic institutions. Perfecting our day to day eco-choices can be a step in the right direction, or it can be a distraction if we’re deluded into thinking that we’ve done our part since we shopped at Whole Foods.”
She goes on to say, “Today’s mainstream media is deeply invested in maintaining business-as-usual and an honest assessment of the current climate situation leads to the realization that fundamental shifts are essential in our economy, our transportation, our built environment, and much more.”
I believe the national conversation and mainstream media reflect a consciousness which is suppressing those dark emotions. There is a campaign underway across this country, called GoFossilFree, kicked off by 350.org, the organization founded by Bill McKibben and named after Dr Hansen’s target for sustainability on Earth, 350ppm CO2.
The strategy is that the conversation played out by the mainstream media will transform as headlines are made by public, educational, and religious institutions that declare their intention to purge their foundations, endowments, and pension funds from financial investments in fossil fuels such as coal, tar sands, oil, and natural gas. Bill McKibben’s moral call is “if its wrong to wreck the climate, its wrong to profit from that wreckage.”
Today, there are active fossil free investment campaigns at over 300 universities, 100 cities and states, and a handful of religious institutions. Commitments have been made by San Francisco, Santa Monica, Berkley, and Seattle. A commitment was made by the national religious body United Church of Christ, and by the San Francisco State University Foundation. And just last week, a large Norwegian pension fund and insurance firm removed 19 fossil fuel companies from its financial products to ensure long term returns declaring such investments to be “worthless financially” in the future. Their decision was based upon the release of a report by UK thinktank Carbon Tracker which states that 60-80% of fossil fuel reserves need to be left in the ground if the worst effects of climate change are to be avoided
I’ve joined a handful of volunteers here in the Valley working on this issue. Our current goal is to support a fossil free Stanford. As community members at large of Stanford University, you can support this campaign by signing a petition at the information table outside in the Oneg Room or after Shabbat go online to support one of the local campaigns at Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, Deanza College, and the City of San Jose.
And what about Tel Aviv? Today she is certainly not the Temple of Doomed Cyclists with over 100km of bike lanes, a bike share program like those found around the world in Paris, Montreal, New York, Barcelona, and DC. Through groups and communities working together as citizens with heart and intention, our world can change.