Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Disappearance of Bees

Honey bees have become the canaries in our mines; their mysterious and massive disappearance reveal the manifold costs of human misappropriation, exploitation and destruction of nature. Chip Ward is a former public library administrator and grassroots activist turned writer/advocate. His book, Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West, is an account of his campaigns to make polluters accountable, and Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land explores the cutting edge of America's conservation movement. He writes from Torrey, Utah. The following passages are taken from his July 2007 essay, "Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys: The Case for Resilience," which appeared in TomDispatch.

One of The Christopher Reynolds Foundation's current grantees, Spikenard Farm in Illinois, is devoted to understanding and renewal of natural honey bee communities.

Also: read Elizabeth Kolbert's essay, "Stung," in The New Yorker issue of August 7, 2007. And listen to Kolbert's 8-minute discussion, "Bearish on Bees," by clicking here.


Our current economic system is designed to maximize outputs and minimize costs. (That's what we call efficiency.) Efficiency eliminates redundancy, which is abundant in nature, in favor of finding the one "best" way of doing something -- usually "best" means most profitable over the short run -- and then doing it that way and that way only. And we aim for control, too, because it is more efficient to command than just let things happen the way they will. Most of our knowledge about how natural systems work is focused on how to get what we want out of them as quickly and cheaply as possible -- things like timber, minerals, water, grain, fish, and so on. We're skilled at breaking systems apart and manipulating the pieces for short-term gain.

Think of resiliency, on the other hand, as the ability of a system to recover from a disturbance. Recovery requires options to that one "best" way of doing things in case that way is blocked or disturbed. A resilient system is adaptable and diverse. It has some redundancy built in. A resilient perspective acknowledges that change is constant and prediction difficult in a world that is complex and dynamic. It understands that when you manipulate the individual pieces of a system, you change that system in unintended ways. Resilience thinking is a new lens for looking at the natural world we are embedded in and the manmade world we have imposed upon it.

In the world today, efficiency rules. The history of our industrial civilization has essentially been the story of gaining control over nature. Water-spilling rivers were dammed and levied; timber-wasting forest fires were suppressed; cattle-eating predators were eliminated; and pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics were liberally applied to deal with those pesky insects, weeds, and microbes that seemed so intent on wasting what we wanted to use efficiently. Today we are even engineering the genetic codes of plants and animals to make them more efficient.

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Bees Drop Dead

The recent collapse of honeybee colonies across the United States provides a compelling example of how we removed resilience from a fundamental ecological service -- pollination -- to make it more efficient and the unexpected blowback we are now suffering from that. In this case, there is little resilience in the manmade system of food production that relies on healthy populations of commercial bee colonies to pollinate crops and too little resilience left in the natural world for bees to recover quickly from whatever is wiping them out.

Pollination is a fundamental process that happens many ways -- birds do it, bees do it, even butterflies and moths do it. But humans who grow food rely almost exclusively on bees; and not the hundreds of species of wild bees either, but one bee, the European honeybee. Sometimes resilience in nature is the availability of diverse options to fall back on in times of disturbance, but even when there is one choice, like bees for pollinating crops, there are still resilient features, redundancies that we eliminate at our peril. For hundreds of years, numerous dispersed and varied bee populations meant that a scarcity of bees here could be compensated for by an abundance of bees there. Not anymore. We have grabbed this key ecological process to maximize its use and have wrung out what resiliency there was.

Although the widespread disappearance of bees from our landscapes sounds like the stuff of melodramatic science fiction, like those movies about Ebola virus or asteroid strikes, the situation is both dire and all too real. Bee-tracking experts estimate that, across 26 states, between a half-million and a million of 2.4 million bee colonies have collapsed this year. Because many fruit, vegetable, and seed crops, worth about $12 billion annually, rely on the most affected bee, the European Honeybee, for pollination, bee loss will translate into increased food costs for consumers and a potential loss of food variety as well.

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Michael Leunig

This note comes by way of my refrigerator, where I just posted this admonitory observation of the incomparable Australian cartoonist and social critic Michael Leunig.

Leunig is a treasure not to be missed. He is 5th generation Australian, in his early 60s now, something of a national treasure among Australian progressives. He has a very interesting website of his own, with writing about his work and his politics. A well-informed admirer, who maintains a Leunig appreciation website called Curly Flat, has described Leunig as follows:

Though his profession may be listed as "cartoonist" on his tax return, Michael Leunig is much more. Although his work is at times incredibly mirth provoking he is not so much a humorist as an observer, philosopher, commentator, historian of the absurd and catalyst for free thinking. Born in East Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) in 1945, Leunig subsequently evolved in Footscray, an eclectic inner industrial suburb, until his success as a satirical political cartoonist afforded him the means to escape the city in favour of the gentler ambience of nearby country environs. From his early work in the 60's when he was published in such diverse journals as Newsday, Woman's Day and the controversial London Oz magazine, Leunig developed his distinctive pen style and eye for the ridiculous which led to publication in 1974 of his first book The Penguin Leunig (see elsewhere on the site for a complete anthology). These days he lives somewhere near Melbourne where he is a regular contributor to the local daily broadsheet The Age and fridge doors all over the country. While most Australians are familiar with his work, few could tell you anything about the man and yet through his cartoons, know everything about him. By all accounts he is indeed shy, gentle and pensive, and his work reveals him to be cynical, witty, sensitive, deeply spiritual, emotionally precarious, at times depressed and always insightful. A dysfunctional genius perhaps.  Michael Leunig simultaneously defines and defies most Australian stereotypes, and I, for one, am thankful.

On a similar and complementary theme:


And a final moment of contemplative wisdom:

Evtach v'lo efchad – I will trust and not be afraid

Editor's preface

The words are from Isaiah. They serve as the text of the following reflections on the theme of trust by Joshua Boettiger. The occasion was his formal installation as rabbi of Congregation Beth El, in Bennington, Vermont, in May 2007.

Erik Erikson proposed that the development of trust is the first, most primal task of human development, shaped by the character of the relationship between mother and infant in the first year of life -- a task never completed, evolving in dynamic balance with mistrust throughout the life cycle, underlying our capacity and expression of hope and care for ourselves and others.

Joshua says that evtach v'lo efchad "is more a prayer than a statement of fact." When that prayer is consciously drawn into our regular and evolving practice, it becomes an instrument of the enduring task of human development Erikson describes.  So the insights of psychology and religion unite and serve a fuller understanding and experience of our lives.
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I want to welcome everyone here this evening, and I want to thank you for coming. I won’t repeat the names of those we are particularly grateful to tonight, but I do want to name and thank one person who has done an extraordinary amount of work, and who has done an extraordinary job around making this installation weekend happen -  Carrie Greene.

I first came up to Bennington six years ago as the rabbinic intern at Congregation Beth El – and felt a real kinship with this town, with the area, with the Jewish community, and essentially said to myself: I’d love to find a town like that to settle in when I get ordained. And so, you know, sometimes you can’t stand in the way when poetry wants to have its way with you – it felt deeply appropriate when this job opened up in my final year of seminary.

Even though the congregation and I have been working together now for nine months, it feels important to mark the beginning of this relationship. And I love what Adam said in his opening remarks around challenging one another. A chavruta in Judaism is one’s study partner. Chavrutas are supposed to learn together and debate l’shem shamayim, for the sake of heaven. The chavruta relationship is a sacred relationship, each partner working to bring out the best in the other, recognizing the unique gifts in the other, challenging the other lovingly. I think this model of chavruta, of being partners in study, is a fitting one to describe the relationship between a rabbi and a congregation. In Judaism, learning together is an act of serving God. It is said when two study Torah together, God is present. When this many of us study Torah together – which in a very real sense we are doing tonight – there’s a lot of God in the room. It’s a privilege to have come into this community, and to have been welcomed in such a full way. I don’t take this for granted.

As it says in the program, tonight provides an opportunity to mark where Congregation Beth El is at this moment in time. It’s an amazing history. People who I talk to are always saying, that was originally built as a synagogue? There’s been Jews in Bennington that long? And indeed, 2009 will be our centennial as a community. We have gone through different incarnations and resurrections – and it is really an inspiring story throughout. We treasure our small, strong community, and we treasure our relationship with the larger community in Bennington and beyond.

One other person who I want to thank, who I feel deserves special mention is Rabbi Howard Cohen – who served Beth El and the larger Bennington community for twelve plus years, who put so much of himself into this work and this synagogue and this town. And, among other things, did so much to bring our communities of faith in this town together around common projects.

The theme we are working with tonight is evtach v’lo efchad. I will trust and I will not be afraid. I have been turning this verse over in my head these past weeks. Of course it is easier said than done. Though it originally comes from Isaiah, we say it during the havdalah ritual, a time when we are reluctant to say goodbye to Shabbat, a time when the sky is darkening, a time of transition, a time when our prayers are most filled with longing, a time of fear mingled with hope. And we hold up a full cup of wine, and we say: I will trust and I will not be afraid. It’s more of a prayer than a statement of fact. Aviva Zornberg says one only says, don’t be afraid, when one is, in fact, afraid.

This past Yom Kippur, we talked about fear, and what a healthy relationship to fear might look like – so it feels appropriate now, to turn towards trust, to explore what that might look like to really learn how to move and live our lives from a place of trust. To choose trust, at least as much as we’re able.

In the world we live in, we have grown increasingly accustomed to the politics of fear, and it seems, in my experience, that the automatic fallback place, or default position is often one of fear, even if it’s subtle. That if we’re not conscious of it, we tend to make our decisions - as individuals, communities, and as a nation - from a place of fear. We want to preserve, and so much around us announces so often how much we are in the process of, or at risk of, losing. Starting with the earth, I guess, and the environmental crisis, which I believe is the most pressing issue of our time – and working out, or in, from there. It seems too easy to move through the world as if it were a place of scarcity, and the best case scenario is simply holding on to what we have. So how to respond, how not to despair?

It strikes me that trust is not something that just shows up one morning and announces itself. Perhaps trust comes in small moments, but then it retreats again. Maybe trusting is something we need to learn how to do, that it is an acquired skill. It has been occurring to me more and more that trust - the intention to cultivate trust – needs to be a practice. What does this mean? We need to develop habits that cultivate trust. Trust is not passive. Trust creates its own reality.

I think this is among the primary roles religion can play: it can give us practices that teach us how to trust.

There is the Jewish tradition of giving tzedakah (charity), or of hospitality, or of prayer that I might name as some trust practices, but of late, I have been thinking about the havdalah ritual itself. Now we do this ritual at the end of Shabbat, when there are three stars in the sky. We bless the wine, the spices, the light from the candle, distinction itself – all as a way of bringing some of the spirit of Shabbat with us into the week. This ritual is the beginning of a trust practice When it’s Shabbat, we are in Shabbat mind – mochin gadlut, as the rabbis called it, ‘big mind. Shabbat is trust. It’s essentially saying, OK, we’re all together now, we’re in this Shabbat mind of abundance and fellowship, but the regular week is about to begin – how can we hold onto this reality as we go back to our lives? Put differently, how can we remind each other to trust when we fall back into the daily rhythms of fear?

There’s a Rebbe Nachman story of a King and his faithful advisor. The advisor tells the king that there is a diseased wheat crop, and everyone in the kingdom has eaten from this diseased wheat and become mad. The men realize that either they eat of the crop and become mad as well – or – they don’t eat of it. But if they are sane and everyone else is mad, it will appear as if they are the ones who are mad! This feels a little bit like fear as it drives our society – that we’re catching this fear from what we eat, what we take in, or imbibe, as we go through each day.

In the end, they decide to eat the wheat, but before they do so, they each put a mark on the other’s face, so that, even in the midst of madness, they can look at one another, and be reminded by that mark, by the other, of what is really true. So we could call this the mark of trust in the other’s face. How much we need each other. One person cannot have enough trust by himself. And the rabbis say that about the mitzvot as well. There are 613 mitzvot in the Torah, but an individual cannot keep all those by him or herself. We need a community to keep them – literally. So we can remind one another. We can look at each other and say: right, it’s OK to trust.

How can trust become an embodied verb, and not just a mental decision? How do we live it into action? When ritual works, it works because it is embodied. The cup of wine is full on havdalah. That is the first reminder. There is enough. The world – at its core – is an abundant place. The spices wake us up. They are sweet. When we hold up our hands to look at the candle, we see the play of shadow and light – we see that both exist, and we must be true to each, and aware of each. We cannot afford a Pollyanna approach. And as my stepdad told me before I left to travel in Europe after high school, Trust, but bind your camel. And the final blessing is the blessing of separation in general. In Judaism to make something holy is to set it aside. Maybe this seems counterintuitive since we’re talking about coming together, but each of us expresses our trust by just trying to love who is right in front of us, or near us, or by choosing a tradition or a craft, or our work – and trusting that through this particular focus, in the end it will serve the greater community. Committing to the small tribe teaches us about commitment to the larger tribe.

And then we close the ceremony by singing Eliyahu Hanavi, Elijiah the Prophet, which is our Jewish version of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” It’s a commandment in Judaism to hope.

Rabbi Arik Asherman of Rabbis for Human Rights, who spoke in the area this past week, said in his peacemaking work, he needed to trust that relationship can be transformative. That even in the darkest times in Israel, he needed to trust that encounter, even with one person, could change things. So perhaps trust is also about allowing ourselves to believe in real transformation through encounter.

May we continue to become practitioners of trust. May we learn to recognize the mark of trust in each other’s faces.

Fear - Yom Kippur reflections by Joshua Boettiger

My son Joshua Boettiger is rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Bennington, Vermont. He offered these thoughts as a Yom Kippur sermon in the fall of 2006. Some of Joshua's other reflections are in The Rabbi's Blog on the congregation's website. As he notes below, he and I have talked often over the years about the themes he discusses here.

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There’s a Hasidic story where a holy rebbe went on a journey and failed to lock the door of his house. While he was away, a crowd of demons entered and took over his dwelling. When the rebbe returned and opened his door, the demons rushed at him, ready to devour him. The rebbe slammed the door shut and prayed. Then he took a deep breath and opened the door again. At once, the demons pounced but as they reached for the man, he bowed low and acknowledged their presence. An amazing thing happened. Half the demons disappeared but the biggest and strongest were left, and they leapt at the rebbe. He reached out to them and offered them hospitality. Could he give them drink? Cook them a meal? At this, the rest of the demons disappeared – all but one who was the chief. This demon was huge and very fierce. It was not going to be deterred. It opened its jaws, showing the sharpest of teeth, and as it came close, the rebbe put his head right inside the demon’s mouth. At this point, the chief demon also disappeared and the rebbe had his house back.

Listening to NPR the other morning, I heard Arianna Huffington talking about her latest book, which is about fearlessness and how we can all achieve a state of living without fear. I thought of how in so much self-help terminology, fear is talked about as an emotion to overcome, something that keeps us from realizing our true potential. Judaism is counter-cultural in this respect. Yirat HaShem, translated as ‘fear’ or ‘awe’ of God, is a traditional Jewish value, understood as a necessary ingredient in one’s spiritual life, particularly at this time of year. So I wanted to look more closely at Yirat HaShem, what exactly is holy fear? Put differently, what is the role of fear in our lives? Is there such a thing as good fear and bad fear?

At first, fear is a gift given to us. We need it for survival. As Joy Cowley writes, “fear might be an uncomfortable emotion but it is the gift connected to our survival…As new infants we blink at strong light, flinch at loud noise, cry when we experience hunger and discomfort. In early childhood it is our fear that helps keep us safe.” And yet children have an instinctive sense as well for when to confront their fears, when a particular fear is perhaps no longer useful. Cowley is a Catholic thinker who also writes children’s books, one of which is about a farmer who discovers a giant weta in his bed (I don’t know what a weta is either). A mother wrote to Cowley, complaining that her four-year old insisted that his six-year old brother read him the story each night before bed, but then would later wake up screaming that there was a giant weta in his bed. Cowley points out that even though it was terrifying, the four-year old was insisting upon hearing it every night, and was somehow actively dealing with his fear.

Fear is obviously a reality for adults, too, it’s one of our core human experiences. So the question for most of us is not whether or not fear is a good or a bad thing, but rather, how to be in relationship to fear. Arguably, much of our lives and our decisions are affected by our relationship to fear. And it was the same for our biblical ancestors. God tells Abraham, Al tira, Avram. Don’t be afraid. Which, as Torah scholar Aviva Zornberg points out, is a clue that fear was present, that is signifyingthat Abraham was afraid. It’s like Bob Dylan singing, “Don’t think twice it’s alright.” There it is – you’ve just thought twice. You don’t tell someone to not be afraid unless they are feeling afraid. Moses, Rachel and Sarah – all ancestors living with fear. One of God’s names is Pachad Yitzhak, the fear of Isaac. In our sacred stories, fear is one of the ways that we come to know God. In fact, along with love, fear is probably one of two chief paths we have to God.

In our own family narratives, we can probably name the fears that were lifelong companions for our parents and grandparents, our siblings. Entire generations share certain fears. For the one that grew up during the Great Depression, for instance, it is the fear of not having enough. Some of our family’s fears we’ll never know because of how closely many of us guard our fears. And we guard for good reason: in our society, fear is likely to be viewed as a weakness, not to be aired in public. Some fears are related to the stories of our lives. My father lost his father at an early age, and because of this experience, he would probably say that the fear of abandonment has been a companion for him ever since.

When I was little, like almost every child, I was terrified of the dark. There was a crack on the ceiling above my bed that haunted me. Wanting to help, my mother put a band-aid over it, and I subsequently became afraid of the band-aid. My persistent dream was of a man coming down the chimney with a sack to put me in and take me away (maybe this dark and thinly veiled Santa Claus imagery accounts for why I chose Judaism as my path and not Christianity). But as I got older, my fear of the night stayed with me, unabated, and when I was eleven, my parents found a psychologist to whom I could talk to about my fears. In an effort to make me comfortable, he spoke about movies and such, but he kept going on until I was aware that the hour was almost up, and so I worked up my courage and blurted out, “I came here because I was afraid of the dark!” In some ways, even today this fear is just as strong, though it has transformed. I have made some amount of peace with the actual nighttime, but the fear of the dark grows with me and finds new things to attach onto. Fear of the night is fear of what we can’t see. I think in my braver moments, personally and professionally, I am able to step forward towards the fear, and blurt out, “I came here because I’m afraid of the dark!”

In many ways, we are a society driven by fear. At the Interfaith Council meeting last week, one of the ministers who has been in town for years bemoaned the fact that we haven’t been able to get the Bennington Banner to cover events like the interfaith prayer service, or volunteer projects where teens help the elderly. Instead, what sells papers are the grizzly car accidents, the abductions, and the untimely deaths. This was one of the central messages in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 – how our media routinely keeps us terrified. So each day on the news we read of violence, loss, destruction, and tragedy. How are we supposed to process those stories? Vanessa and I were talking about this over breakfast at the Blue Benn, and she said that a natural reaction to what we read every day in the newspapers would be grief – but how can we feel that much grief? So instead we respond with fear, with slowly building up a wall of fear to distance ourselves from those terrible events. We practice a fear that leads to distance, rather than a compassion that leads to closeness.

On a hike a few years ago, I asked my father – who is making a lot of appearances over this Yom Kippur - if he considered fear to be a useful emotion. He said he thought it was, because in his thinking, fear is relational – it is something real that invites us into relationship with whatever or whoever it is that we’re afraid of. And where there is the potential for relationship, there is the potential for real work and transformation. Anxiety on the other hand, he said, was less useful – because with anxiety, there is no relationship. In anxiety, one is just spinning round in one’s own head.

I want to turn to the notion of what our tradition might mean when it speaks of yirat hashem / fear of God. For those of us who do not find resonance with the idea of a rewarding and punishing deity, we probably relate less to yirat hashem as fear of getting smitten from above by a well-placed thunderbolt. But let’s take that anthropomorphic image away and see where we’re left. What is the role of fear in our spiritual lives? And when I say spiritual lives, I’m talking about our daily lives, because the daily regular stuff that life is made of is where Judaism has always said spirituality plays itself out.

Art Green has said that we don’t know what yirat hashem could be: it’s usually death or suffering that we fear – and that’s not the same as fear of God. But what if fear of God could be understood as fear of change? If change is the only constant in our universe, what if God could be defined as change? I think of one of Yehuda Amichai’s – whose yahrzeit was last week - final poems called “Jewish travel: change is God and death is his prophet.” I think of the fall: driving on Kellystand Road a few days ago - blue sky, wind and sun, leaves falling, the mountain positively on fire with color – thinking there is absolutely nothing here I can hold onto. This fall, this season we’re in right now, is about nothing if not change. I don’t even know what to say I love because it’s changing so fast. I felt love and fear. Was this a moment of yirat hashem?

If we’re conscious about it, perhaps the fear of change doesn’t go away, but we learn to see it as a companion, or as a houseguest. Sometimes we slam the door on it and pray, sometimes we bow to it and fix it dinner, sometimes we even stick our head in its jaws. If we’re conscious of our fear, perhaps we don’t act out in unhealthy ways when we feel afraid. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks about the trop in the movie, “Beautiful Mind” – where the mentally ill protagonist’s voices are embodied and each is a figure in his life. When he is sick, he thinks they are real – and it brings him great suffering. As he gets well, he knows they are not real, but they are still there, hanging out with him, almost like old friends or old companions. He sees them, but does not react to them unconsciously. By the end of “Beautiful Mind,” the protagonist still sees his collection of characters, but he has befriended them. He has brought them into the light where he can see them better. Which is one thing we can do when we are afraid of the dark.

How do we know when we’re in healthy relationship to fear? Cowley says that simple awareness is usually enough. We can ask, “What is it within us that feels tight and restrictive? What thoughts harden our lovely soft hearts? What ideas do we hold in a tight fist? What takes us forward on our sacred journey and what holds us back? Where is the clutter in our lives and how do we name it? How do we fill that inner emptiness that was created for God?”

The commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, and your might comes after the sentence, “What does the Lord your God want of you except that you fear the Lord your God, and walk in his ways.” (Deut. 10:12) Green says that “Judaism has always insisted on the proper balance of love and fear as ideal for maintaining the religious life.” There is a kabbalistic kavannah, or intention, that someone praying begins his prayers with: L’shem yichud kudsha brich hu, uschinte bidchilu ur’chimu l’yached shem yud hey b’vav-hei b’yichuda shelim b’shem kol Israel. For the sake of the unification of the Blessed Holy One’s name, in love and fear, in the name of all who wrestle with God. In love and fear. God’s name is shorthand for how God is manifest in the world. It is our task to make sure that God’s name is unified on this earth, meaning that God’s presence is real to us. And we experience God in moments of love and moments of fear.

The Australian cartoonist, poet and mystic Michael Leunig writes: There are only two feelings. Love and fear. There are only two languages. Love and fear. There are only two activities. Love and fear. There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks, two results. Love and fear. Love and fear.

There is a famous rabbinic saying, reshit chochma yirat hashem: the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God. This has always been difficult for me to understand: I couldn’t relate to fear of God as a phrase or emotion. I tried translating fear as ‘awe’ for a while – but that didn’t feel quite right either. Norman Fischer, one of my meditation teachers, has helped me understand this: The ancient rabbis wanted us to be afraid, he says. We spend most of our lives resisting fear – that what we call fear is not actually the direct experience of fear, but the feeling of resisting fear, of trying to keep it at arm’s length. He says the goal is to let ourselves be afraid when we feel afraid, to actually experience the fear. To say, fear is happening – and to not fight it off.

My dad and I have had a chavruta around fear for years. And after sending him a draft of this he wrote back with these thoughts: “So yes, perhaps there is such a thing as good fear and bad fear. Good fear is fear expressed, unleashed, felt, embraced, shared, drawn into relationship, in the light. Bad fear is fear resisted, contained, held at bay, or tightly inside, rejected, in the dark.”

On Yom Kippur, we come forward and put our heads into the jaws of our fears. We acknowledge our habitual avoidance of that which makes us afraid – and we see the connection between the avoidance of fear and hurting other people and ourselves. On Yom Kippur, fear is infused into the liturgy, we call God by the name of fear, we feel our fragility and the change swirling around us. May we be willing. May there be mercy.