Rabbi Ed Rosenthal, Angle - news agency for science and the environment
A few years ago I taught at a small university in Florida a number of students about the "throw". I told them about the symbolic ceremony that is performed on Rosh Hashanah, where we "throw away our sins" by throwing bread into a water source, and which is designed so that we can start the new year with a pure heart. Towards the end of the lesson, one of the students asked me: "Rabbi, there are too many human 'sins' in the water, why don't we remove some of them instead?"
This led to a conversation about the commandment "Bel Tashchith" - the prohibition in the Torah against creating unnecessary waste and destruction, and about the millions of tons of garbage and plastic that are thrown into the sea every year. The students taught me that every minute the world is bought A million plastic bottles, most of which end up being landfilled or dumped in the environment, reaching the sea and polluting it. They taught me that in the United States alone, about 35 are thrown away a year A billion plastic bottles – and the total amount of plastic thrown away is enough to circle the earth four times!
According to Report of the World Economic Forum from 2016, by 2050 the weight of plastic in the oceans may exceed the weight of fish in them. In 2018 alone, no less than481.6 billion plastic bottles. If all these bottles were stacked together, the massive mountain that would be created would be significantly higher than the Burj Khalifa building in Dubai - the tallest building in the world.
The evidence is amazing. Humans are flooding the oceans with plastic and pollutants, destroying them. The story is very simple: we live on a planet with about 71 percent of its surface covered by water. If the ocean dies - we all die.
I present a different approach to the crisis facing the marine environment. Let's look at what humanity has done to marine environments, not from the point of view of science - but from our point of view as Jews.
remove human sins from the sea
The discussion I had with the students gave me a very innovative idea: "Throw it upside down". Instead of throwing our sins into the water, my disciples decided to remove human sins from the sea. 5 students cleaned the beach near their campus, and collected almost 35 kilograms of waste from it. They didn't because science told them there was too much plastic in the ocean. They did not do this because environmentalists say that pollution is harmful to nature. They did this because they recognized that our tradition required it of them. The commandment "don't corrupt" is important, and the students saw the trash and plastic as a blatant violation of it. They saw all the single-use plastic products on the beach as harmful waste. They saw all the trash around the marine vegetation as unnecessary destruction. They heard the call of our tradition, and it led them to the water.
I am unapologetically ethnocentric. I believe that when Jews intervene in any issue, a fundamental change takes place. But we are not involved, collectively, in efforts to protect and restore the marine environment. We have so much to do to ensure the future of the Jewish people, that sometimes it seems that we simply do not have the time and energy to fight for the environment. Well, it's time to open our eyes and look beyond ourselves. If we don't fight to secure the future of our planet, there will be no future for any of us, whether Jewish or otherwise. Tikon Haim is the only environmental organization in the world that focuses exclusively on the marine environment through the prism of the Jewish tradition. Our mission is clear: to share the spiritual wonders of the sea from a Jewish perspective, to raise awareness of action in the Jewish community and to encourage it to face the many threats facing the marine environment.
As a first step and as a simple starting point, we continued the tradition of "reverse toss", and the program has grown considerably beyond the original 5 students. This year, 115 teams from 16 countries have registered for the activity so far, and new ones are joining every day.
The Tikun Hayam organization, and Noam Bedin, director of the "Dead Sea in Renewal" association, which coordinates the program in Israel, invite the Israeli public to join Jewish communities around the world, and take part in our annual "reverse throw", which will be held on September 12. For more information, registration for beach cleaning and leading a team, click HERE.
Rabbi Ed Rosenthal is the CEO of Bei Hillel of Florida's Sunshine Coast in Tampa Bay, and the founder of Tikun Hayam.
More of the topic in Hayadan:
