One of the most popular social events every year at many Synagogues is the annual Supper Quiz. Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue is no exception. We’ve got one organised for 23rd February 2025 this year – with fiendish questions, great company, a mixture of great and slightly naff prizes and the obligatory Fish and Chips. We can’t do all of that in the middle of a Shabbat service though there are no prizes I am going to start our Shabbat quiz right now.
First question is easy. What is the population of the world right now? Is it just over 6 billion, 7 billion or 8 billion. That’s right 8.16 billion according to the United Nations (Department of Economic and Social Affairs). Looking back then, what was the population of the world when Reform Judaism began in Germany in the 1810s – 3 ½ billion, 1 billion or 2 billion? From the same source it was 1 billion.
Imagine that – a world with one eighth as many people, just 12.5% of today’s population – and of course a sense of endless resources to support our growth which began to be exploited in earnest in the coming century, supporting development, industrialisation and an extraordinary growth in living standards in many parts of the world.
How long ago was the world’s population half of what it is now? When were there 4 billion people in the world? By 1874, 1974 or 1924? The answer is the shocking 1974 – when I was a boy of eleven and started secondary school there were half as many people in the world. No wonder it felt calmer than it does today. No wonder there were fewer cars on the road, so my parents could let me out on my bike with few worries. But it was also a time when regular waves of starvation around the world killed people, when we barely knew what was happening in parts of the world with the much slower communication of the day.
When Noah and his family come out of the Ark they experience the covenant of the rainbow. The beauty of the rainbow in the sky is, in the Torah, God’s communication to them that He will never destroy the world again. They can live on in confidence that humanity’s course is free from outside control.
But with this confidence comes a heavy responsibility. In Genesis 9 (1-3) God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fertile and increase and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you shall be upon all the animals of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky, everything that moves on the earth, and upon all the fish of sea; they are given into your hand. Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat; and also all the green plants, I give you all these.”
You do not need to believe that God and humanity are in communication with each other for this blessing to have meaning. So now to our last Shabbat quiz question. What percentage of the world’s plant activity is found in ecosystems under human control – land we farm, plantations we manage, forests we harvest, woodlands and parkland we enclose. Is it 10%, 60% or 90%. With 8.16 billion humans on the earth only 10% of the worlds plants are not under human control. And it’s the same with animals. Our domestic and farm animals together with ourselves greatly outweigh the number of every other type of large animal on the earth.
If you find Biblical legends a bit hard to take then truth in the Noah story may not be the world covered entirely by a flood, it may not be that of the ark filled with all the animals two by two, but the truth of the story certainly is that the animals of the earth and the green plants have, with 8.16 billion of us, been given into humanity’s hand. So much so that the Dutch Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen says that we have now entered a new geological era – the Anthropocene – the era where human activity determines the behaviour and situation of the planet. He dates the beginning of this era to the invention of the steam engine in the late 18th Century. Human activity here means the way that we farm, the scale on which we change the balance of chemicals in the air, the way that we allocate resources between us, the environmental costs of the meat we eat and more.
There are different attitudes that you could have to this growing, progressing level of human responsibility. You could say that we can use whatever we need of the earth’s resources because in future generations we will be able to find alternatives. Two hundred years ago we gained energy by burning wood and coal, now we burn oil. What’s the problem? Or you could be cautious about the future and be sure that we use only what is renewable within a generation, sun, wind, bio-fuel.
You could say that with 8.16 billion and more people to feed we should be able to eat anything that is good for human nutrition and culturally or religiously allowed, because all is given into our hand. Or you could say that given that It takes seven pounds of feed to produce a pound of beef (How the Chicken Conquered the World, Smithsonian June 2012) with all of the environmental stress that creates we should restrict our eating with an eye to the future, less meat, more vegetable protein.
We could live as God’s blessing at the end of the Noah story implies and see ourselves as humans, individually and collectively as in control of and responsible for this planet – for the future of humanity. Or we could take the rainbow covenant at face value and see the planet as able to look after itself. The trouble is whilst God said he would never destroy the world, in the next breath so to speak he said that it is given into our hand – which means that we could destroy it, especially if we do not respect the earth’s natural cycles. Two thousand years ago in Midrash Genesis Rabbah 34:11 Rav Aha said that failure to work with nature was the sin of the generation before the flood – they gave birth but did not bury, they sowed but did not reap, they made no change in their behaviour in winter to summer. It meant that the world could not function and was doomed.
These choices are starkly present for America as it goes to the polls on Tuesday (November 5th 2024). Will the nation with the largest impact on the world’s environment elect Donald Trump to be its president who said: Obama’s talking about all of this with the global warming … a lot of it’s a hoax, it’s a hoax. I mean, it’s a money-making industry, OK? It’s a hoax, a lot of it. (Speech in South Carolina, December 30, 2015) or Kamala Harris who said: For years, one of the missing pieces in our strategy to fight the climate crisis is that we have not invested at scale in community climate action. For years, the people of the community have not been given adequate resources to implement climate solutions that match the magnitude of the crisis we face. (Speech in Baltimore, July 23, 2024)
I am certain what a Jewish attitude to human responsibility for planet earth has to be. It is underlined by the comparison made by biblical scholar Judy Klitsner in her recent book “Subversive Sequels in the Bible” between the stories of two men vulnerable in a wooden boat on the storming waters of the world. Noah’s ark, massive, unwieldy just floats along, out of control. Through God’s good grace it finds dry land and human responsibility begins. But Noah has to suffer the consequences of the destruction of humanity and the environment.
Jonah meanwhile is the prophet fleeing away from responsibility on a boat on the sea to the furthest place he could possibly go – Tarshish. Jonah is assaulted by storms until he says “It’s for me to make a change”. He dives into the waters and via just enough being saved by the legendary great fish makes it to dry land and Nineveh where he takes responsibility and asks the people to change. They do – because that is what God wants – that we do the right thing, not that humanity should be destroyed because of our lack of care for each other. Jonah’s name is even the same as that of the dove who brings the olive branch back to Noah to say there will be dry land again – Yonah in Hebrew.
As we head towards 9 billion, we are likely to get there by 2037 at the latest, each of us should not be the vulnerable mute Noah, but rather be the changing Jonah – reducing our energy use, reducing our use of land through changed eating, being aware of how our hand, our power makes the world more liveable and preventing ourselves from destroying it. It is today that the rainbow covenant is truly operative. The answer to the question about the world is that humans are in control of and responsible for this planet. The whole world is in our hands.
