Category Archives: News

Misplaced Zeal

The powerful swell of voices on Broadway, thirteen stories below Agudath Israel’s offices, did more than disturb my concentration.  A thousand people were blocking traffic and loudly chanting in unison, the roar less redolent of “Hashem hu ho’Elokim!” at Neila’s end than of what I imagine “Kill the Jews!” must have sounded like during pogroms. Which was ironic, considering that, in light of the cause and location, a large number of the shouters were likely Jewish.

The “Flood Wall Street” event was but a weak echo of what had taken place a day earlier, when an estimated 300,000 people (including members of close to 100 Jewish groups, parts of the “Jewish Climate Campaign”), participated in the “People’s Climate March” on the West Side of Manhattan.  But the smaller demonstration was large enough and loud enough for me.  I had to wonder what made the chanting seem so sinister

It may have had to do with something the late writer Michael Crichton famously asserted, that people “have to believe in something that gives meaning” to their lives, and that “environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.”  (And, I’d add, even for some who may believe in a Creator but just don’t fully trust Him.)

Environmentalism, Mr. Crichton elaborated, posits “an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature,” then “a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge”—i.e. technology and exploitation of natural resources—and that “as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all.”

“We are all energy sinners,” he concluded, paraphrasing the new religion’s world-view, “doomed to die, unless we seek salvation.”

MIT Meteorology Professor Richard Lindzen similarly labeled environmentalism a religion, its devotees convinced “that they are in possession of a higher truth” and intolerant of “heretics, or ‘climate change deniers,’ to use green parlance.”

And so it may have been religious zeal that I heard in the din from below.  And while zeal is a good thing when sourced in commitment to the true religion, its emergence from a misguided one is cause for alarm.  (See: Medieval Christianity, Contemporary Islamism…)

To be sure, the earth’s climate is changing.  But it has changed many times over the millennia, even over recent centuries. Enviro-zealots are convinced that the current climate change signals the end of the world (or, at least, the destruction of the world as we know it), and that humanity is at fault for the impending doom (and has the power to head it off).

Some of us, though, feel that a passuk we recite daily – “Tremble before Him, all the earth; indeed, the world is fixed so that it cannot falter” (Divrei Hayomim 1 16:30) – reassures us that Hashem has built self-correcting mechanisms into nature, and that our zeal should be reserved for Torah-study and mitzvos.

For daring to challenge the contemporary party line, though, anyone in the least skeptical about the planet’s prognosis is vilified by those who believe that humans can break and, alone, make the earth.  The protesters were not just vocal and loud, they were angry.

A recent ScienceTimes section in the New York Times was dedicated largely to cris de coeur about climate change.  Hidden among the Chicken Little alarms, however, were some interesting tidbits.

Like the fact that polar bears on Hudson Bay, deprived of ice coverage, and thus seals, in the summer, are feasting instead on a windfall of snow geese, birds that, due to the same warming that caused the ice to recede, have migrated north from the American south and Midwest.  And that some varieties of soybeans “grow especially well in high carbon dioxide levels.”  And that in naturalist Diane Ackerman’s words, “A warmer world won’t be terrible for everyone and it’s bound to inspire new technologies and good surprises…”  And that Mongolian herders, deprived by drought of grasslands, have been moving to cities, where members of families of erstwhile nomads are now gainfully employed and enjoying the benefits of electricity and indoor plumbing for the first time.

None of which is to deny the possibility that we do well to explore alternate energy sources and pollute less.  It’s only to note the deep complexity and unpredictability of change in the natural world, and the great resourcefulness and creativity that Hashem has planted in human minds.

And to lead us to consider that environmentalism may be but the latest of the “isms” about which Rav Elchonon Wasserman, zt”l, warned.

© 2014 Hamodia

Malignancies

There’s nothing remotely funny, of course, about rabid Islamists beheading innocent Westerners they have kidnapped (or their fellow Muslims, for that matter).

Yet, there is something bizarrely droll about the characterization of such slaughter, and in particular its filming and the dissemination of the resultant videos, as a “recruitment tool.”  According to experts like Peter Neumann, who directs a center for the study of political violence in London, that is the videos’ goal, based on past successes in attracting new recruits.

What I found almost humorous was the unthinkability (to put it mildly) of any group of normal human beings seeking adherents by murdering people on camera.  Can you imagine the Mormon Church cutting off the heads of gentiles (its name for non-Mormons) in order to attract worshippers?  The Republican party, to entice independents?  The Rotary Club, to garner new members?  The local Jewish Federation, to lure donors?  You get the droll.

And then the all-too-serious question presents itself:  What does it say about a cause that it attracts people by means of the gleeful shedding of innocent blood?  And a corollary:  What does it say about the people so attracted?

It is fashionable to seek to “understand” forces and individuals who do malevolent things, to put the acts into a “context” that makes them if not justifiable, at least comprehensible.  There are times, though, what seems to be evil is, in fact, just evil, pure and simple.  Like our times.

Likewise fashionable these days are attempts to characterize the Islamic State movement, against which President Obama has effectively declared war (explaining that “There can be no reasoning – no negotiation – with this brand of evil”), and other Islamist hordes as not warranting a determined response by the civilized global community.

For all the odiousness of the groups’ means, the geopolitical fashionistas (hesitant Europeans and American isolationists alike) argue, such militants don’t threaten us directly.  ISIS’s goal, in particular, is only to establish a Muslim caliphate in Eastern lands, not to harm the West.  We have no camel in such races, they protest, no business involving our country in disputes that, in the end, are between this version of Islam and that version of Islam (and those, and those other ones too).

Intriguingly, though, current events have served up a compelling metaphor here.

For there is another deadly world crisis out there, likewise far away; (for the most part) and the larger world is determined, rightly, to deal with it.  No one counsels ignoring it for its distance.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says the number of Ebola cases in West Africa is increasing, and has asked UN member states to donate $1 billion to tackle the epidemic. President Obama announced that the United States will send troops, material to build field hospitals, additional health care workers and medical supplies to the tune of $75 million.  The World Bank is promising $200 million to deal with the crisis. The World Health Organization has pledged $100 million.  Britain is delivering a field hospital to the area.  $181 million has been promised from the European Union and $50 million from the Gates Foundation.

Ebola, which results in uncontrolled internal and external bleeding and easily spreads itself around, is evil.  Yes, yes, the virus is morally innocent, just doing what its DNA compels it to do.   But from the perspective of thinking, feeling human beings who affirm life as an invaluable gift, the disease is a scourge, something to be fought and driven into submission, ideally eradicated.  Even though it is “way over there,” doesn’t threaten most of us directly and, historically, has asserted itself only on the African continent.

Millions of people in Africa are threatened by Ebola, and it is not easily contained.  It thrives on ignorance (like that of villagers who have killed health workers, believing they are the cause of the disease) and attacks not only those who contract it casually but but exemplary human beings (like such health workers) as well.

Is not the biological scourge we all know must be routed a stunning counterpart to the sociopathic one that produces its own rivers of blood?

Comparing people to a disease has, understandably, become anathema in civil discourse. But such rhetoric is offensive because it is employed imprecisely or carelessly.  Sometimes, though, it is an apt metaphor. Like when applied to groups that exult in slaughter of human beings, that seek to spread and whose recruitment tools include mugging behind masks for the cameras before cheerfully slitting throats.

© 2014 Hamodia