Rabbinic laws on land, about humanity’s interdependence, can guide climate change fight

A couple of decades ago, an old controversy was rekindled when climbers found the body of George Mallory buried beneath the ice on the north face of Mount Everest. A broken altimeter in his shirt pocket suggested that Mallory might have reached the summit before dying on the descent. If so, he would have been the first man to stand atop the world’s highest peak, beating Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay to this feat by 29 years.

But when news of this discovery reached Hillary, then 79, he remained remarkably unperturbed. With the cool understatement of a British peer, Sir Edmund told a television reporter, “Coming down is also important.”

This dynamic is especially evident in the book of Exodus. After a series of peak moments — leaving Egypt, passing through the Red Sea, and hearing God speak from Mount Sinai — Torah turns to more mundane matters, addressing the stuff that happens when the revelation ends and the adrenaline rush wears off.

We learn that if you open a pit on your land and leave it uncovered, you must pay restitution if another person’s animal falls into it. Next, the text teaches that if your ox is in the habit of goring other animals, you are required to recompense their owner for any gored beasts. Similarly, if your herd grazes on another’s land, you must compensate the landowner for the damage. Finally, if you start a fire that spreads to your neighbor’s property, you must pay restitution to that neighbor.

This is where the seemingly small things turn out to be extraordinarily significant — both then and now. Coming down is also important. Rabbinic laws around damages can serve us well as we wrestle with the existential danger of human-caused climate change.

Many of the ordinances that we receive after descending from Mount Sinai address disputes around land usage. Here in Idaho, and throughout much of the Western United States, personal property rights are too often seen as sacrosanct. This attitude is tied to the false myth of rugged individualism, the libertarian notion that everyone has an unfettered right to do whatever they wish on their own land.

Jewish law disagrees.

In the balance that my tradition establishes, individual rights must be weighed against communal concerns — and when there is a tension between the two, the latter usually takes precedence. Talmud insists that I refrain from planting a tree on my property if its roots will destroy my neighbor’s cistern. A landowner cannot open a tannery on her property if the rank odor and pollution produced by that industry would be a nuisance to nearby residents. Farmers must even consider their neighbor’s needs when deciding what to plant in their fields — if, for instance, the neighbor is a beekeeper, one should attempt to refrain from sowing crops that make for bitter honey.

We cannot ameliorate catastrophic climate change until we learn to think in a more communitarian manner. If everyone feels free to do whatever is in his or her short-term economic interest, we will destroy our planet. We’ve lived this way for far too long, wreaking irrevocable harm upon our environment in the process.

Still, it’s not too late — if we recognize the imperative to curb our individual desires for the sake of the common good. No one can turn back global warming on their own. Our very survival depends on our ability to think more like our ancestors, who recognized their interdependence with one another and the rest of the creation.

Divided, we will fall. God calls us, now, to recognize what binds us and to live accordingly.

This story was originally published March 8, 2020 at 7:00 AM.