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FD: We need to be resilient when it comes to medical challenges and cancer. We need to be resilient when it comes to climate change and species extinction. But instead of focusing on a hot crowded denuded world, we can focus on the resilient potential within nature and within us.

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DW: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. My guest today is Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb. Fred is the rabbi of Adat Shalom, a vibrant Reconstructionist congregation in Bethesda, Maryland, and he's also the chair of COEJL, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life. Fred, thanks so much for being here today.

FD: Delighted and honored.

DW: I'm so excited to talk to you. We're talking as the holiday of Tu B'Shevat approaches; that's the 15th of the month of Shevat, and it is known as the holiday of the trees, the new year of the trees, when, at least in the land of Israel, the trees start to fruit a little bit. They show the first signs of life after a winter. For those of us in the northeast, in the northern hemisphere, it is often still deep winter, but even on the Jewish calendar, it's a harbinger that warmer times and blooming is coming. And so our conversation today... We're going to talk a bit about what it is that ecological insights and approaches both to the world and, from within and to Jewish teaching, Jewish living, might offer us today.

DW: And I'm especially excited about this conversation because when I think about resilience, when I started thinking about resilience as a way of diving into Jewish teaching, Jewish living, Jewish being, a lot of the reading I did on resilience was from the field of psychology. And one of the things that I've become aware of in part through our conversations is that there's an equally rich vein of writings on resilience from an ecological or environmental perspective. And they are very, very complementary, but there are different emphases and different foci, and so I'm really interested in the conversation that marries these or that mines deeply from the ecological discussion.

FD: Great. So Tu B'Shevat is actually a great place to start, because it's listed in the Mishnah as one of four annual Rosh Hashanahs. So we have our big one that we know from the fall, and then there's one for kings and other things in the sort of political and economic realm, and Tu B'Shevat as the new year of the trees, was originally based on a tax law. It was a tithing question of how old is the tree; for the first three years that you let it grow, the fourth year is a donation, all the fruit, and then the fifth year, you keep 90% and donate 10%. Although, actually, the donation is higher than 10 going forward. So, economics and trees are linked from the very get-go, 2,000 years ago in our tradition, but of course, "tree" is also a metaphor for spiritual, or call it psychological, that which is deepest "hokhmah", wisdom, that then becomes Torah. Of course, "Etz Chayim Hi", a tree of life is wisdom. A tree of life is Torah. So we have had for the entire duration of the Jewish experiment, this thorough intermixing of the ecological and natural with the economic, the political, the systems, and in turn, those two affect the personal, whether that's spiritual or psychological.

FD: So I sort of think of it as a triad; there's the personal experience, there's the systems angle, and then there's the ultimate system, which is of course the Earth. Ecology is study of the house, study of the whole, and so any other -ology, except in cosmology, is in some ways a subset of ecology. And when environmental thinking isn't right there at the center of those conversations, then we're being too atomistic, and we're actually missing something very important. Because especially in the 21st century, with seven billion people, and a denuded and warming planet, we can't talk about individual spiritual satisfaction or communal sustainability when it comes to our congregations and havurot or any other communities without also addressing the study of the house.

DW: It's very, very important. I do really feel like this is the moment where an environmental sensibility, which is sometimes dismissed or at least within my lifetime has been, people have chosen to dismiss it as radical or fringe, that it is increasingly... It must be the starting point from which we act. It was from that world, certainly from Jewish teachings and from other religious teachings, and then in modern times from this environmental sensibility that teaches us that we are all interconnected, that we are all interdependent. And it's been this really important set of teachings, sets of platforms for advocacy, and we can't not be bowled over by the importance and by the power of this understanding. 

FD: Absolutely. I think you're addressing the question of interconnection, and the watchword of our faith from Deuteronomy Chapter 6, "Sh'ma Yisra'el Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad." "Echad" is in some ways the most important of those words, "one." The thing that we are taught...

DW: Let's translate that for everybody. So that's the... If there is a creedal statement in Judaism, that's the "Sh'ma"; "Hear, O Israel... " A lot of different ways to translate it. Fast translation: "Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is Echad, Adonai is one." Go for it.

FD: Right. And so "Echad" is actually, I would argue, the most important of the words there, because that's the point of the sentence, is to describe to us with the action of listening, the nature of God, which is to say the nature of existence, and oneness is a huge component of that. So unity is ascribed to God, and therefore ascribed to us who are created in God's image. As an early Zionist poet Shaul Tchernichovsky reminded us, maybe the divine image is not only limited to people, but we can see it to a certain extent in all of nature. And just read the Psalms, including the ones that we sing on Friday night or Saturday morning out of the liturgy. And nature is an actor, nature is alive, nature is generative, and nature is resilient. That's not insignificant.

FD: So with all of that, there's a reflection of the world made by its maker as us being one; humanity as one, creation as one. And that is an essential insight. We need it more than ever in a fractured era on intergroup relations, when we realize that we have more in common than we have differing across religious and other historic differences among people. We need to extend that as well to species. On a hot and crowded planet, we can't afford for it to be humanity only, because that of course is a path we go down at our great and clear peril. There's one other piece that I want to focus on before I forget, which is it's not just interconnection, but it's a positive spin.

FD: "Resilience" is a beautiful word. It has positive connotations. Much else in the environmental world, things I've already said like, "hot" and "crowded" are very negative. It brings up... It raises our hackles and gets our defenses up. When we know that what we really need is sustainability, to be in it for the long haul. That should be positive. And resilience is a reminder that just as natural systems are resilient, including trees, particularly deciduous ones that drop their leaves and we call it fall, and in winter, things look "dead", yet we know the sap is starting to rise somewhere around this month of Shevat, and soon enough we'll see the buds.

FD: And that kind of resilience; we get knocked down, we get up again, ain't nothing gonna keep us down, trees are in some ways the template for that. So it's important to remember that with everything about resilience, we can focus on the negative that which we need to be resilient from or around, and that's too obvious; we need to be resilient when it comes to medical challenges and cancer. We need to be resilient when it comes to depression and life challenges. We need to be resilient when it comes to climate change and species extinction. But instead of focusing on a hot, crowded, denuded world, we can focus on the resilient potential within nature and within us.

DW: It's so wonderful. I think one of the things that I'm trying to do in this podcast series is talk both about attitude, an attitudinal perspective, and the other is about a behavioral perspective. So what is the... That's one of the things that I found so rich about using the term "resilience", is it pushes me... It doesn't push me, it invites me to look at Jewish practices, Jewish teachings in a way that's very affirmative and very oriented toward the positive, in a way that I just found very, very energizing. And then secondly, beyond the attitude that frequently... Because Jewish life is about a life lived. So there are practices or there are behaviors that I can take on that bring that attitude into concrete, interactive or behavioral ways of being. You were telling me before we started recording about a wonderful experience in your family, in your community's life that was... I think it sits at an intersection of everything that we're talking about both attitudinal and behavioral, psychological, ecological, and also communal, and I wonder if you would share that story? 

FD: I'd be honored. So part two is going to be about shmita or the sabbatical year, but we get there in a funny way. My daughter Sara just celebrated becoming Bat Mitzvah in front of 500 folks at Adat Shalom, literally, the past...

DW: Mazal Tov.

FD: Thank you. Literally this past Shabbat. She and every other Adat Shalomer knows that I laid down a challenge in 2013 in advance of the last sabbatical year by the traditional account, that at the end of this cycle, I wanted "shemitah" to be an English word. And I talked about shemitah, or the sabbatical year, and it's a complex interrelationship of ecological, social justice, communal resilience and personal spirituality. They're all rolled into one in the form of sehmitah.

DW: And the core that is that in the seventh year, we take a rest. It's a...

FD: We take a rest, we force even our low-wage workers, our servants, to take a rest. We force the land take a rest, or we stop overusing and abusing it, and that means that we need to rely on that which grows naturally. All of the systems... Economy begins with agriculture, we used to be 95% agrarian, and now in modern America it's more like 3%. But that level of specialization isn't always a good thing because we're still ultimately dependent. So if we go back to biblical pre-industrial times, an agrarian orientation is also the economic and the political reality. One year in seven, many times in everyone's lifetime, the systems grind to a halt and we need to be small enough and connected enough and resilient enough, connected to each other, connected to nature, in order to be ready for that, and if we're ready for that, we're ready for anything. And I would say that society as a whole, particularly with the things that got us to climate change and got us to the kind of loss of species that we're seeing today, have made us ever less resilient, so that were there, God forbid, major war or pandemic, or massive solar flare, or any of the other things; artificial intelligence, you name the things that are on the horizon that we might need to be resilient from, and by and large, we're not.

FD: We're in this era of specialization and very few of us cross-train, very few of us would be able to do our own subsistence agriculture, us meaning presumably members of most Reconstructionist congregations with some very happy exceptions. But similarly, who among us could be a cobbler to make shoes? Who among us knows pulleys well enough to figure out how to move heavy objects in a post-oil era? And that era is coming and it may be coming sooner and more catastrophically than we would hope, and the more we plan for it, the more we think environmentally, the more we think in systems terms, the less catastrophic it will be to transition to a post-oil era. Which is why all of this is both headed under Tu B'Shevat, but also headed under resilience.

DW: So I interrupted you because you were going to talk about Sara's Bat Mitzvah and shemitah as a feature of that, so...

FD: Right. So thank you for reminding me. Shemitah is the punchline now to a joke, and so after Sara wrapped up a beautiful devar Torah, as she said, "Lastly, for the sake of the many rabbis here, I wanna say one more super Jew-y thing: shemitah," and she just said it like that and the house came down, I mean the crowd roared, except for my family and friends from away, from non-Adat Shalom, they're like, "Why is that funny?" But it is that much of a punchline, and then she went on to say "No, really, tradition."

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FD: Right. Beautifully delivered. An hour later, we had the Oneg, and then we reassembled, and our homegrown Klezmer band was playing, and this beautiful freylich celebration around 2:30 in the afternoon on a very cold winter day, and a pipe burst and the fire alarm went off, and we had to move outside.

DW: So the rabbi's kid, everybody there, plus in midst of a celebration...

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FD: And this wonderful intergenerational Klezmer band of mostly Adat Shalomers of multiple generations in the same family in a couple cases, they just literally took their trombone and their clarinets and what they had, even bongo, and just went outside and led the group, and in the cold waiting for the fire engine to come and for the crew to give us the "All clear", we kept going with Klezmer music and dancing in the parking lot in freezing temperatures. And I remember thinking, because you and I have been in this conversation, "Oh I have to tell Deborah about this. This is resilience."

DW: This is resilience. This is resilience with a soundtrack even. [chuckle] Resilience where you dance. I think that that's interesting because when I talk... I'm making a leap here, but when I talk sometimes about why I am Jewish... You were talking earlier about the resilience of nature, and you and I, I'm sure, both hear people frequently say "I'm spiritual but not religious," and they'll say "Oh I'm spiritual and I go out in nature and I'm filled up by that." And I too, am very deeply moved by the natural world and the beauty that's contained there and the resilience, the fact that I often quote a line from Bloom County and Opus the Penguin saying, "Morning, life's reboot button." And what a redemptive... Our morning liturgy has words for it: 

Mehadesh bekhol yom tamid ma'asei bereishit. "Every day, creation is renewed" -- that's an interpretive translation. But what an amazing thing that renewal happens each and every day. And I am religious. I'm part of the Jewish community because it gives me vocabulary to talk about it. I can make that quote because it pushes me on the day that I'm not inclined to go outside to remember those times when I go outside, and because it gives me a community of people. And I'll often talk about how it gives me a community of people to celebrate with when I'm happy, when there are simchas like your daughter's bat mitzvah, and it gives me a community of people to mourn with when I'm sad, whether it's in the face of a personal loss or whether it's in the face of a collective trauma. Many of our congregations gathered people together after the recent election or after 9/11 or after Rabin's assassination to come together in community.

DW: Your story, there it is all at once; there's the celebrating, and there's also the, not the mourning, but there's the little mini-catastrophe, what certainly could have felt like a mini-catastrophe right then and there, and then to have it be, because you're all together, because you have this orientation and you have this capacity, that you can sing and dance while also taking the appropriate steps to safeguard the situation and presumably repair and move on from it.

FD: Exactly. Love what you said, and want to underline about the community and tradition, like opening the prayer book, and there in the liturgy is resilience. Because in communities like ours, Adat Shalom, the hundred other Reconstructionist affiliates, community and tradition are spoken of in the same breath, and each of them in turn has both an individual and a collective piece. Our communities are places where we find meaning and connection and redemption, but there are also places where we do tikkun olam to make the world a better place. And our tradition has a set of resources for each of us in our times of challenge and crisis, and it also has prescriptions for what the world ought to look like. And that's why I keep coming back to shemitah like a broken record, because [in] four different places in the Torah, we have a prescription for something that is neither capitalistic nor socialist.

FD: There is something powerful and in-between that says, "Let there be free enterprise. Let people play and have incentives to get ahead. And inequality will grow in a six-year cycle, but on the seventh year, we press a reset button, and we're all in it together," and we remind ourselves of that. And then there's even harder reset button to press every fiftieth year, in the Yovel, after this Jubilee, after seven sabbatical cycles, where even land goes back. It's the equivalent of a complete redistribution of wealth. So we have this wonderful hybrid system that says we need to be small scale, we need to be sustainable. Things in 50 years need to have the same potential that they do now, which means we can't keep warming the world, we can't keep driving other species out of it.

FD: We owe it to our descendants to give them in another Jubilee cycle the same opportunity and beauty that we have access to, but we can still have fun and we can still make profit and we can still play games and we can still get ahead between now and then. Shemitah is a place to set the needle. It's an asymptote, right, the vertical axis on a graph; something that we never quite approach but the curve gets ever closer to. We're never going to follow a biblical sabbatical year. The letter of the law was probably not ever done, and was probably not a great idea then, and it would be an even worse idea now. But the status quo is is a pretty bad idea as well, and some of the alternatives that we've seen like communism are also pretty bad ideas. But our tradition has these resources, and those resources are connected to values, and those values are connected to individuals. And where all of those come together, just like the tree that drops its leaves but the sap rises, that's resilience.

DW: It's so interesting. I just said to someone today that Judaism is an intergenerational project. Judaism is a relational project. And I so appreciate your framing of that inter-generationality, both looking backwards that we can draw on these ancient insights and these ancient practices, and from then to this day, they are orienting us to the next generation, and what are our obligations and what are our responsibilities, and ideally, what are our opportunities so that the next generation can, A, live, and B, ideally flourish. So it's beautiful.

FD: Amen.

DW: Yeah, Amen. Well thank you so much, Fred, what a wonderful conversation. It feels like there's so much more we could say, but this is at least a taste. I really appreciate your being here today. I'd like to thank my guest, Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb for our wonderful conversation on an ecological approach to resilience, on Tu B'Shevat, on shemitah. I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman and you've been listening to Hashivenu: Jewish Teachings On Resilience.

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