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Good Morning.
Last Wednesday I conducted Annabel’s funeral. Diagnosed with cancer five years ago, Annabel took the attitude: ‘Whatever time I’ve got left, I’m going to use to make the world more beautiful.’
I’m taking her resolve with me as we enter a bleak period in the Jewish year, three weeks of mourning, culminating in the Fast of the Ninth of Av. We remember the sacking of the Jerusalem Temple, the destruction of Jewish life across history, and all the destructiveness in our world today.
I love people, animals, birds and trees. When I see how we kill each other and treat nature with contempt, how forests burn and waters are poisoned, my heart aches with fear and grief.
That’s when I remember Annabel, and the wonderful Matt Biggs of Gardener’s Question Time. Looking out on a piece of wasteland during chemo, he redesigned it into a gorgeous garden so that others would find solace while having their infusions. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining,’ he said in his final broadcast, ‘but if it doesn’t have one, make it!’ He saw nature as God’s home, and understood its healing powers.
There’s a rabbinic maxim: When your heart is broken, try to cling to creativity, not destruction.
So many people do just that. There’s Gabrielle, who breeds turtle doves, a lovely bird with rust-and-black wing feathers, almost extinct in Britain. She’s inspired twenty-eight local farms to grow hedgerows with the seeds these doves need. Now hundreds are flying and nesting free.
Across our faiths, EcoJudaism, Eco Church, Eco Sikh, Eco Mosque and Eco Temple, we’re working together to plant and restore. It’s the opposite of climate crisis denial, and we’re doing it with love.
Malini Mehra, of London Climate Action Week, which just ended, writes how ‘in the big story of climate, love is underrated…[T]hat’s a mistake. People protect what they love. It’s the single most powerful driver of action.’
‘I don’t love only hedgehogs,’ says Hugh Warwick, trustee of the British Hedgehog Society and author of A Prickly Affair. But you start with what you love.
The love that drives us is fierce. It’s deep love for people, nature, the whole interdependent community of life and above all for the children, to whom we’re determined to leave a thriving, wonderful world.
Destructiveness, taught the rabbis, comes from causeless hatred. It’s causeless because it brings only more hate. Creativity comes from causeless love, love whose only purpose is to make the world more caring, just and beautiful.