Sinclair Lecture Series Part 4

Hazon: The Jewish Lab for Sustainability

For this series, we’d like to offer some framing - Sukkot ends, each year, with a prayer for rain. Talmud tractate Ta’anit begins by asking what happens – and what we should do – if the rains don’t come.

The acute crisis of COVID-19, against the backdrop of the creeping challenge of a warming climate, are shaking our sense of invulnerability to the natural world. And they are challenging our societies’ capacities to effectively respond. We need deeper sources of wisdom to orient ourselves to these challenges.

Jewish wisdom about coping with a climactic crisis – and plague – is distilled in tractate Ta’anit, which addresses how we should respond when a change in the weather threatens our lives and livelihoods. As different as our reality is from the Talmud’s, both the rabbis and contemporary environmentalists converge on the view that dangerous disruption to the weather requires a response that touches our lifestyles, behavior and spiritual consciousness.

In these four consecutive lectures, Rabbi Yedidya Sinclair argues that people respond to existential danger from the weather through shifts in behavior and consciousness that reverberate across the divide separating pre-modern and post-modern awareness. Through exploring these places of mutual resonance between the Talmud’s world and our own, we will frame a new-old theology of climate change that offers hope to overcome this critical challenge.