There's No Ark

I’m not quite old enough to remember when Dinah Washington won the Grammy for “Best Rhythm and Blues Performance” in 1959 with her hit single, “What a Difference a Day Makes,” but, man, what a difference a day really can make! Just a day or two ago, for example, I was thinking that the elevation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was going to be the long-term game-changer in the history of our American republic over these next few decades, the event that would, by replacing a swing voter with a reliably Conservative legist, would end up having the most lasting impact on my children’s generation and my grandchildren’s. But now, in the wake of the report issued earlier this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists brought together by the U.N. to advise the worlds’ leaders about the short- and long-term effects of climate change, things seem entirely different. Yes, the decisions of the Supreme Court will still matter. But the sudden realization that the consequences of failing to address the key environmental issue of our day will begin to manifest themselves dramatically and irreversibly within a quarter century—that is to say, within the lifetimes of many who are alive today and most of their children and almost all of their grandchildren—is clearly news in a whole different category of importance.

The report was written 91 scientists from 40 countries who analyzed more than 6000 earlier scientific studies, and their conclusions can be summed up easily: if the emission of greenhouse gases continues at the current rate, then the atmosphere will rise to about 2.7° F. (=1.5° Celsius) over preindustrial levels by 2040, which rise will bring about at least some of the effects formerly associated with a much more precipitous rise of 3.6° F. (=2° Celsius) rise. Like most people, I would once have thought that a half-degree difference would be negligible. This report effectively lays that fantasy to rest. (The 2040 date is an estimate, by the way; what the report found inevitable is that the 2.7° F. threshold will be passed some time between 2030 and 2052.) More to the chilling point, that specific threshold will only the beginning if we continue on our current path without serious effort on the part of all industrialized nations to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Indeed, the report declared it more or less inevitable that the second threshold, the 3.6° F. one, will more or less inevitably be crossed later this century. Since children born today will be 82 in 2100, this is not just a dour picture of some distant version of our world that the scientists are painting, but one featuring the version of the world many of the children born this week will personally experience. And the effects of this kind of environmental catastrophe, needless to say, will not respect international borders or property values. In this specific matter, we will either all survive or, to quote Ben Franklin, we will all hang together.

And we really are talking serious horror-movie stuff here. Fifty million people, and not only in our own nation but in countries across the globe as well, will be exposed to serious coastal flooding by 2040 if the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions is not curbed. 350 million people worldwide will be exposed to drought-like situations in which there simply will not be enough water equitably and fairly to be shared by all. The coral reefs that protect countless miles of coastline will begin to disappear. If the ice that covers Greenland and Antarctica melts (which is a possibility by the time we cross the first threshold but a virtual certainty if we cross the second), the seas will rise by feet, not inches, and stay there not for years but for centuries. As a result of environmental havoc, the world’s economy will be altered in a way that, to quote the report, simply has “no documented historical precedent.” Are we having fun yet?

Our nation, once at the forefront of environmental activism, has turned its back—or at least our political leadership at the top has turned its back—on the whole issue, which political posturing has so far been most visibly manifested in the President’s announced intention of withdrawing the United States from the Paris Accord of 2015, something that cannot actually happen until 2020 but the initial preparations for which are already underway. (Brazil, the seventh-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, is likely to elect as its new president someone who has announced his own intention of withdrawing Brazil from the Paris Accord as well.) It is true that the American delegation formally accepted the conclusions of this new report. But the State Department responded to that development with an announcement to the effect that the delegation’s endorsement of the reports’ findings “does not imply endorsement by the United States of the specific findings or underlying contents of the report.” In other words, our expert scientists on the ground accept the report but the government simply won’t.

And that brings me to this week’s Torah portion.

Story Hour began earlier this week in our Early Childhood Center at Shelter Rock and that means that I have already begun spending time every Tuesday morning reading to the boys and girls enrolled in our program. Sometimes I read books of general interest and sometimes of more distinctly Jewish interest. But when I can I like to read books based on the weekly Torah portion. This is distinctly easier some weeks than others, but it was a piece of cake last Tuesday because the school owns, not one or two, but a dozen different books retelling the story of Noah and the flood.

Some are more inventive and cleverer than others. (My temporary favorite is the one about the extremely unfriendly reaction the pair of termites got when they attempted to take their place with the rest of the world’s fauna in Noah’s wooden ark.) But all have one thing in common, which is that—given that these books are all pitched at very young children—they all skip over the crucial background detail that sets the stage for the rest of the plot: that God, sickened by the apparently irreversible extent of human depravity, has determined to eradicate humanity from the face of the earth by drowning all living things (except the fish, I suppose) and then starting over with a new version of humankind that will have Noah and his wife as their progenitors rather than Adam and Eve. And, indeed, that is exactly what does happen: Humanity 2.0 gets off the ground precisely as the waters recede, Noah and his family exit the ark, and his sons and daughters-in-law set themselves to repopulating the globe.

All traces of any of the above are omitted in every single one of the books retelling Noah’s story that we have in our Nursery School.  There are depicted in those brightly illustrated pages no panic among the soon-to-be eradicated and no hysteria as people attempt to claw their way to safety. There are certainly no bloated corpses floating alongside the ark as it bobs up and down on the sea that covers the face of the earth, let alone millions of them. Nor, needless to say, is there ever any reference to the countless numbers of animals that must too have died or to the horrific way in which they must have drowned when the waters lifted them up and they at some point simply had no strength left to tread water any longer. Instead, the story, sanitized and ready for sale to pre-school audiences, is focused solely on the fun Noah and his family must surely have had on the ark as they got to know all the animals and enjoyed their time aboard as though the ark were some sort of primeval cruise ship.

I hardly have to explain that the reason the story is so drastically and irremediably truncated is precisely because we don’t want our children to be terrified. Not by a God who once chose to eradicate humankind because of the wickedness of its ways. Not by a world that feels safe enough most of the time but which can apparently turn into a death trap from which none may flee almost without anyone noticing. And least of all by the notion that some actions have ineluctable consequences…and that we sometimes simply cannot avoid the results of our own actions and have therefore no choice but to face the consequences of what we ourselves have wrought.

In Nursery School, that works well enough because we really don’t want to terrify the three- and four-year olds who look forward to Story Hour each week. But those of us who come to pay attention this Shabbat when the story of Noah is read aloud will hear an entirely different tale and, at that, one with a set of morals that sound not just ominous in light of this week’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel but terrifyingly and deeply chasteningly so: that not everything broken can be repaired, that there are consequences to actions that simply cannot be undone with regret or after-the-fact effort, that there are prices to be paid for failing to heed the words of people who know way more about the world than you do…and that wishing it weren’t so does not alter the situation at all.

The flood in Noah’s day could easily be described as the world’s first environmental catastrophe, but the story ends soothingly with God’s promise never to visit such a thing on humankind again. The possibility, on the other hand, that we ourselves might one day be the authors of a parallel kind of world-wide catastrophe is not raised in the text. Perhaps it should have been!