For the life of me, I cannot figure out why more people don’t get it. The truth is this: we are killing ourselves, and it is happening a lot faster than we thought. The glaciers are melting; the sea-level rising; droughts are persisting; floods are raging; crops are failing; people are dying all because we are entrenched in a dead-end, cat-in-a-sack misguided pursuit of energy sources.

Cushioned Americans may be the last to feel it. But here’s the bottom-line: there is nothing that we do that does not begin and end with the earth and its treasures. If we trash them or exhaust them or otherwise debase and abuse them, they will either rear up and attack us (as in hurricanes and floods) or collapse in a heap before us (as in our water tables, wildlife and perhaps even life-giving bees). Either way, we are doomed.

You don’t have to be an environmentalist or activist or visionary to be moved to do  something. You only need to be a realist to see that our Twentieth Century technologies and our Twenty First Century appetites are bound in a self-destructive embrace. We have to intervene and realign these two.

The good news is that the solution is within our grasp. To make it happen, the Jewish community must get in the game big time. Now. We must focus on two things:

(1) We must use our celebrated minds and means to lead the charge in the next technological revolution. We need to re-focus our resources and creativity on designing and financing truly green energy, the kind that never runs out and that doesn’t leave any waste; the kind you don’t have to wrest from the earth but capture in mid-flight: sun rays, wind power and ocean movement. We should not spend a penny more on extracting fuels but on harnessing them. We should be designing ways to convert the inexhaustible pulsing of the universe into energy that lights our cities, runs our businesses, warms our homes, preserves our food and powers our transportation.

Jewish money and Jewish brains can once again help change this world for the better. It is something that the altruist and the greedy and all the folks in the middle can all agree on. For there is no doubt this frontier, like all those that came before it, will reward its pioneers with riches. But this time, everyone, including the earth, will benefit.

(2) We must use the teachings of our tradition to re-center our values. Modern society has made an idol out of engorgement. Bigger cars, bigger houses, bigger pay checks; bigger body parts; bigger portions. When the product is small, we market it with bigger packaging. We believe that bigger is happier, safer; that more is better. But we know, and studies tell us, that we are not one wit happier, and hardly healthier, have no more friends and no more leisure and no more pleasure, than our “smaller” parents and grandparents before us. The bulky, bulgy, bloated life doesn’t get us to Paradise. And yet we somehow delude ourselves into thinking that while this purchase or that paycheck or the last deal didn’t get us there, the next one surely will.

Sustainable satisfaction, true contentment, comes from a life lived in seeing the goodness we have, not the stuff we don’t. Judaism teaches us to dream and explore; to dare and innovate. It encourages enough dissatisfaction for progress and growth to thrive. That is what we do on the six work days. But it also teaches us to pause and rest and look and appreciate, and to see how little it takes to truly feel full. That is the magic of Shabbat, and a lesson the world needs to learn once again.

Shabbat does not come when our work is done. If that were the case, Shabbat would never come. Rather, our work is done when Shabbat comes. Amidst all that we don’t have, Shabbat shows us what we do have. Amidst our yearning for more, Shabbat shows us what we have in abundance. Paradoxically, it is in doing nothing but being with our friends and family; eating with them, talking with them and basking in their company; acknowledging our dependence on others and the world, that we grow sated, wise and happy.

Learning to hold these two in balance, desire and contentment, appetite and ease, is the grand message of Shabbat that we must again teach ourselves, and the world. And we haven’t a moment to lose.

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