And a small youth shall lead them

“HEY BUD, WHAT PART of your Torah portion are you thinking of writing about? What’s interesting to you in B’ha’alotcha?” My son Amichai’s barmitzvah was coming up.  As his mother and a rabbi, I  wanted to help him develop a meaningful barmitzvah D’var Torah, where he would mine our tradition to further his thinking on issues that concern him and impact his behaviour, and in turn allow him to teach and inspire our community.

Ami had a quick answer. “The quail!

Did you know that the Israelites said they wanted to go back to Egypt because they missed having free meat, so God gave them crazy amounts of quail. They ate it and then died of a plague. It makes no sense,” he shouted. Then, he asked a compelling question: “Why would God give them what they want and then kill them for taking it?”

Our synagogue rabbi-educator had helped Ami use Sefaria.org to find rabbinic answers and when he returned to the site, he found Rashi’s teaching that the Israelites begged for quail even though they possessed cattle. Ami recognised a desire for freedom to mean having abundant luxury without having to give up precious resources.

Ibn Ezra furthered the idea saying that rather than being satisfied with what they had, in gathering so much quail, the Israelites demonstrated that they wanted more than enough.

“Mummy, this is exactly what you remind me when I want too much. You quote Ben Zoma, who says: ‘Who is rich? The one who is satisfied with their portion!’” Ami immediately saw a direct parallel to our environmental condition, saying, “We are killing the planet because we want more than we need, all the time, without having to pay the price or take responsibility for it!”

At 13, Ami shares with so many of his peers an overriding moral and political concern for climate change, and its impact on our future on this planet. In our neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York, he has already experienced a deadly tornado and the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.

Our children know the impact of climate change is not in the distant future but during their life spans. As Ami wrote in his D’var Torah: “Climate change affects me as a New Yorker because the rising sea waters are on pace to put the Statue of Liberty underwater by the year 2100. That’s when I will be my Nana Shirley’s age.”

Our children cannot trust the covenant of the rainbow to mean the Earth will never be destroyed by floods again, and our children see that God cannot protect us from disasters we bring upon ourselves.

And often, it is our children who are telling us to pay attention and take responsibility. In his Torah portion, where I saw lampstands, trumpets and warnings about gossip, my son found a message of environmental responsibility.

Ami wrote: “Often, in trying to satisfy ourselves, we don’t think about how the generations ahead of us will be harmed. The industrial revolution made it easier to mass produce all kinds of things, which had the effect of making it seem as if food, clothes and other things that we buy, are easy to come by, and that we don’t have a lot of direct responsibility for the impact of making and getting them.

“We get it, and forget it ... As we pollute the earth with plastic crap, we turn it into a burning wasteland. I bet you don’t think of that when you eat a burger or order a box for home delivery online. I know that I don’t.

“The consequence of the Israelites’ selfishness was that they were killed. If we don’t change our actions towards global warming and climate change, then that could happen again - but to us.”

It is our responsibility not only to teach our children, but to learn from them. We can teach them of the past, but they are reminders of our responsibility for the future. Genesis instructs us that we are stewards of creation, and that our first responsibility is to bear children. The rest of our tradition is rife with the instruction to be responsible for teaching our children.

However, it is Isaiah, whose messianic vision of the wolf lying with a lamb, who teaches “… and a little child shall lead them.” Many adults decline to take action on climate change because we worry that our small acts will not have enough impact. Yet our children are those who will suffer most if we do not try. And it is their vision and idealism that can inspire us to take action.

Again, from Ami: “I hope that you recognise that there is a problem with how we are negatively impacting climate change, and that while it was broken some time ago, we have inherited a problem that we need to fix.

“Like the Israelites, we have two choices: eat lots of meat and risk climate catastrophe within 10 years, or respond differently to our cravings and live a full life. If we want to survive on this planet, we need to stop expecting our meat to come to us without any responsibility attached to it.

“One way you can take responsibility is to look up how to reduce your carbon footprint and pick one of the ways to reduce yours. I love meat, but I plan to try to limit the meat I eat. If we all take part in making change, we can impact the climate for the better.”

The prophet Joel says “the old dream dreams, the youth see visions”.  As experts are working around the world to develop creative solutions to the climate crisis, it is up to us to will the visions of our children into reality.