The Exile to Come

It is often said that the foundation of the state of Israel represents “Reishit Tzmichat Geulateinu,” the first flowering of our redemption, the long-awaited bookend to close out the centuries of Jewish exile that began in the year 70 AD with the sacking of the Temple in Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans.

It is pretty to think of Israel as such, but it is almost certainly untrue. It is more likely that the first flowering of our redemption will turn out to have been a false budding, the sort that happens on an unseasonably warm day at the end of winter when the plants, deceived, reach out to the sun, only to be humiliated later by the sudden return of the frost.

A new era of exile lays in wait. It is both near and far — the end result of a process which we think of as slow but which is, in truth, dizzyingly fast.

Despite decades of hand-wringing about existential threats, this exile will have nothing to do with a nuclear Iran or conflict with the Palestinians. Contrary to what the politicians told us, the Jews will not be driven out of the land by those they called our enemies. Rather, we will leave humbled, as refugees, with those enemies alongside us.

The threat worth worrying about will turn out to be the one that almost no one worried about: the climate. No wall will be able to keep it out. No military operation will be able to suppress its force. No special trait of Israeli resilience will be able to withstand its peril.

An Uninhabitable Future

To believe such a thing requires no knack for prophecy. The science is clear and overwhelming. In the coming century, increasing global temperatures, rising seas and extreme weather events will push people from their homes all around the world. At the low end, we are looking at tens of millions of climate refugees, for whom no legal category currently exists. A great many of them, we can reasonably assume, will come from the Middle East, where summer temperatures already border on ranges that one can only call unbearable.

According to researchers at MIT, large portions of the Middle East will be uninhabitable by as soon as 2050. This uninhabitability will first affect the region of the gulf, where oil-rich nations have already resorted to installing outdoor air conditioning systems to make outdoor life endurable.

By 2050, Israel, along with other Mediterranean nations, will still be habitable, but it will already be in the throes of a transformation that will come to disfigure the land beyond recognition. According to the Institute for National Security Studies, an independent think tank at Tel Aviv University, rising temperatures will take a drastic toll on Israel’s economy and public health.   The heat that Israelis associate with high noon in August will scorch throughout the year, both day and night. Air conditioning, now considered a convenience, will become a form of life support.

Air conditioning, now considered a convenience, will become a form of life support.

But heat won’t be the only feature of the changing climate. Indeed, it may not even be the most dire. Trends of decreasing rainfall, already observable, will worsen. As water scarcity increases, crop failures will become more commonplace. And all of this will take place against a backdrop of rising sea waters, which threaten to submerge Israel’s coastal cities, causing mass displacement and billions of dollars in damage.

One might imagine that because they dwell in a coastal country in a hot and arid region, environmental consciousness would come naturally to Israelis. But according to Yossi Abramowitz, president and CEO of Energiya Global Capital, this is far from the case.

He relates a joke: “If God called the chief rabbi and said, ‘I’m going to flood the entire world in one week,’ the rabbi would go back and say ‘guys, we have one week to learn how to live under water.’” In other words, Israelis, famed for making the desert bloom and for drying the malarial swamps of the Hula Valley, have an outsized view of their own ability to adapt to whatever circumstances nature may throw their way.

But the Israeli mentality is a small obstacle compared to the systemic and political realities that prevent Israel from taking substantive action on the climate crisis. “Gas and oil always fight renewables and they have a very big political footprint here that distorts all decision making,” Abramowitz laments. “Not only that, but we live in a country in which there is an election almost every year. To fight climate change, you need to have strategic long term thinking, which is the opposite of what we have here.”

Abramowitz believes that the tide could change. His own Jerusalem solar firm continues to transform the energy system in Israel and Africa while convincing the government that a reliance on fossil fuel is both wasteful and dangerous, especially in countries like Israel, where the resource of sunlight is so abundant.

Fortunately, his ideas are catching on. Just last week, Israel’s Environmental Protection Minister Gila Gamliel greeted the Biden administration with a pledge to join the United States in its goal of transitioning to a 100% carbon-free energy system, declaring that Israel will be “a solar light unto the nations.”

This is heartening, but we would be remiss in heaving any sighs of relief just yet. Both America’s and Israel’s most ambitious plans are regarded by experts as too little, too late and too slow. We are beginning to push down on the brakes, but we are still skidding towards disaster. A third exile looms.

The Third Exile

In some ways, this impending exile from the Holy Land is but an aspect of a much longer process in Jewish history of exile from nature. “There was a real break between Temple Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism,” says Rabbi Nate DeGroot, who serves as associate director and spiritual director for the Jewish environmental organization Hazon. “Temple Judaism was so embodied. We were all sharing a particular land. Our entire tradition was place-based and in tune with agricultural and lunar cycles. The destruction of the Temple radically shifted this relationship to land and started a long process of removal from nature.”

For DeGroot, part of his work as a rabbi is to help Jews restore that former sense of wholeness with nature. “After being expelled from the garden of Eden, Adam’s curse was toil for bread by the sweat of his brow until he returns to the earth. The peshat (simple) way of understanding this is that God means ‘until you die.’ Another way to see it would be that God is saying, ‘you will be in a combative relationship with the land until you make teshuva — repentance — with the land.’”

But teshuva is the work of individual souls, and Rabbi DeGroot knows that the climate crisis requires something more — something which, on its very face, seems daunting — if not impossible: the transformation of our entire society’s relationship with nature.

“We need a revolution of values,” he says, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. “It’s said that when they were building the Tower of Babel, if a man fell to his death, everyone kept on working. Only when a brick fell would they weep. That’s us. We live in a society in which we prioritize profit over people. We prioritize the brick over the person.”

The Heart of the Matter

When asked why the Temple was destroyed, the sages said nothing of imperial ambitions, or of the relative size of the Roman army versus that of the Hebrews. Rather, they answered that the Temple was destroyed because of Sinat Chinam, baseless hatred of Jew against Jew. They skipped over the peshat — simple — answer to the question, the one that spoke to the externality of things, and moved right to the heart of the matter.

I wonder, then, what future Jews will say when asked (as they surely will be) why it was that we let the earth go to waste? Will anyone be wise enough to skip past the peshat answers — the ones about fossil fuels and parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere — and speak to the heart of the matter? If so, what will they say about us, about our blindness, our apathy, and our denial?

Philosopher Timothy Morton has offered one explanation for our species’ remarkable failure to act. He has described climate change as a “hyperobject,” an entity so unthinkably vast, diffuse and unlocalized that it defies easy conception, becoming ungraspable. In failing to see and to understand, we fail also to respond.

In reality, however, climate change is not an ungraspable hyperobject. It is indeed something very near to us, in our mouths and in our hearts to respond to. Seeing it as such requires only that we find ourselves within it.

We cannot wait for someone else to solve this problem for us at no cost. It is us, in this very moment, who are responsible. We are responsible for educating ourselves about the reality of the situation, for insisting that our local and national government take strong action now, for getting involved (as donors, organizers and activists) with the groups that are doing the most to address the crisis. We are responsible as individuals, who must consider the impact of the choices we make as consumers of products, garments and food.

We are responsible also for one another. Climate change will touch us all — but not all at once and not evenly. Sadly, the countries of the global south, those who have contributed least to the crisis, will likely pay the highest price. As our planet changes and resources become scarcer, we must never harden our hearts to our fellow humans, no matter who or where they are.

The possibility of averting the worst consequences remains in play, waiting to see how we will act. It just may be that we rise to the occasion. The world will still be altered, but we will know that when it came time to choose between complacency and action, between denial and honesty, that we chose justly.

Looking back on such a choice from that not-so-distant future, we may indeed regard it as the true first flowering of our redemption.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.