Spirituality, Religious Communities and Climate Change – A Conversation with Joelle Novey

Geoff Mitelman: I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman. I’m the founding director of Sinai and Synapses. And sitting here, in the next Zoom box over to me is Joelle Novey, who is the director of Interfaith Power and Light for DC, Maryland and Northern Virginia. And we actually met online through a project through the AAAS, through the world’s largest scientific organization, the Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion, and have known a lot about the work of Interfaith Power and Light. And I’m excited, Joelle, to be able to talk with you here this afternoon.

Joelle Novey: It’s great to be here. Thank you so much.

Geoff Mitelman: So, I know that you are Jewish because I see that you’ve got the Yasher Koach and the “be strong” poster in the background here.

Joelle Novey: Right.

Geoff Mitelman: And would love to hear a little bit – for those of you who don’t know about Interfaith Power and Light – what exactly Interfaith Power and Light does, and your role there, and how that connects to your sense of Judaism and how that influences the work that you’re doing.

Joelle Novey: Yes. Thank you so much for having me. Interfaith Power and Light is working in about three dozen states with congregations of all faith traditions. And the basic idea is that anybody who is going to any flavor of congregation can gather together and work together to respond to climate change as a moral issue. And the affiliates tend to be loosely coordinated, and to really respond to local needs. And the Interfaith Power and Light affiliate that I direct is focused on congregations in DC, Maryland, and Northern Virginia – so we are working with hundreds, if not thousands, I would say, congregations of every flavor, where folks are coming together to think about what a faithful response to the climate crisis would look like. And to the question of, “Well, what does it mean to me, as a Jewish person, to respond to the climate crisis?” I mean, this is the question that we’re asking everyone we work with to live inside of, right? Like, “Who am I in this moment, and how am I called to live out my values with respect to what is happening to our world?” And I live inside that question and have different answers each day.

But I think the one I’ll share right now that I’ve been thinking about a lot is from Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb, a real leader of the Jewish environmental ethic of this generation, has assembled some different Jewish texts that might inform our response to the climate cris. And one of the texts he assembles is kind of a discourse about the situation in which we would violate Shabbat to save a life. So the rabbis, as you know, held Shabbat in very high esteem, and anything that would break the rules of the Sabbath was a big deal. And yet, they said, “Anytime a life is at stake, we set aside the rules of Shabbat, and we save a life” – so then there’s this whole discourse over the generations about exactly when that’s necessary. And one original text says, “Well, at the advice of a skilled local healer, if a doctor says it’s necessary, we break Shabbat to save a person’s life.” And then it raises the question of a situation where there is not scientific consensus – “One doctor says it’s necessary, and another doctor says it’s not. So, can we break Shabbat to save the person’s life?” And the answer comes back “yes.” Even the doubtful situation, if there’s not scientific consensus, we break Shabbat to save the life. And then it’s like, “Well, what if there’s no expert, no doctor? We have to make our judgment ourselves.” And the tradition says, “Well, even doubtful, danger to human life makes the law lenient. You still break Shabbat to save the life” – at least in Rabbi Fred’s document.

Yosef Caro, the medieval commentator, gets the last word. He says, “the person who rushes to do this, who rushes to break Shabbat in the case of a doubtful danger to human life, that’s praiseworthy. And the person who stops to ask more questions and futz around and delay, that’s a murderer.” So, what I try to bring forward from the Jewish tradition into my daily work as a climate activist is a fierce spirit of intervention when life may be at stake. And if I have to choose between being hesitant and asking more questions and moving forward with taking action, I try to err on the side of taking action, because life may be at stake, and we need to bring everything we have to that work, even when every single question and detail is not yet clear to  us.

Geoff Mitelman: A couple weeks ago, we talked with Rabbi Daniel Schwartz, who’s at COEJL. And one of the things that we were exploring is the challenge of the climate crisis, is that it is almost by definition, a global climate crisis. There’s been a push – I think we can debate as to how and why this push happened – but there’s been a push of, “Okay, we’ve got to do individual actions of, like, recycling and make sure you turn your lights off.” And those are things that I think feel good, but they don’t actually address the bigger issue here. So how do we address this question on a more communal, or state, or nation, or global level, when so much of the focus – at least in America – is “What do we do as an individual?”

Joelle Novey: So everybody who works in climate gets asked this question: “What’s the one thing I can do?” What’s the one thing that one person can do? Because people feel overwhelmed and they want to be able to take action on their own. And Bill McKibben has started saying, “Don’t be just an individual.” So that’s his answer. So, we are going to need to build a massive climate movement powerful enough to change laws and to hold very powerful polluters – corporate polluters, who are the primary drivers of this crisis – accountable. The nice thing is, those individual actions –we kind of can feel in our heart that they’re not at the scale of the problem. And so, they don’t give us a lot of hope because they feel too small. But if you join with neighbors and people of other faith traditions to pass a stronger clean energy law in your state, and that becomes a leader for the United States, and then the United States is a stronger voice in these global negotiations that we have coming up, that starts to get at the scale that feels appropriate to the crisis.

So, I guess the short answer to your question is: Join advocacy movements that are going to change laws. To me, that’s the only way we can be part of the solution. And I don’t want folks to take their discomfort and worry about the climate crisis and direct it into their own personal recycling, or their own personal practices. We can all cultivate more spiritual practices that support the kind of world we want to be together. But ultimately, there are very powerful corporate polluters that have caused a lot of harm, are causing harm, will continue to cause harm, if we don’t join together and create something stronger and more compelling to everyone.

Geoff Mitelman: So I want to play in, or go into a little of where some of the challenges are, because there’s at least two that I’m thinking of on sort of on both sides of the coin here – and would love to hear your reactions and how you navigate these kinds of issues. Because on one side, there’s obviously Interfaith Power and Light. It works across the religious and political spectrum, and [is] really trying to be a strong moral and religious voice to address the climate crisis. And so, there are lots of people who are, “Yes, I’m 1000% on board. Let’s work together.” I’ve got to believe that there are faith leaders who are not so on board on combating the climate crisis, that there’s a lot of personal autonomy, and we can sort of guess as to that, where there’s an overlap of often white, evangelical Christianity that overlaps with a level of conservative Republicanism, and that there can be some pushback there.

And I’m also thinking – and you probably know much more about this than I do – but over the last week, the Jewish community has been in a big brouhaha with Sunrise DC, which from what I understand, the Sunrise Movement as a whole is an incredible voice for addressing climate change. But there was a statement that was pretty problematic to the Jewish community by a single, one of –

Joelle Novey: By a single one of their local hubs.

Geoff Mitelman: By a single one of their local hubs – the DC. The Sunrise Movement as a whole actually had a very nice statement in response to that. But it does become challenging of when you’re dealing with religion, because there are so many different religious communities, so many different religious values, that politics can become very messy. And you’ve got to ally with people that you wouldn’t want to ally with otherwise, or you’ve got to make compromises. So how do you navigate all of these minefields in so many different spaces?

Joelle Novey: Well, you’re certainly right that the climate issue has become very politicized, unfortunately. And I’m just finishing – actually, I have it right here, I can do a little promo. I’m just finishing Katharine Hayhoe’s new book, Saving Us, which raises a lot of the questions you just asked. But certainly, it’s silly because, of course, the thermometer is not partisan, and the trees that are blossoming earlier around the Northern Hemisphere are not doing so out of allegiance to Democratic or Republican ideologies. But for a variety of reasons, the climate science and the implications of it have become very politicized.

And that’s where I think we have to make a call to people’s real integrity about their religious and moral commitments. I’m quoting Katharine Hayhoe again. She says, “We don’t have to ask people to become someone else. We only have to ask them to become more fully who they are,” that every single person listening to me today, and every single person of every religious tradition or none, already have the values you need to be someone who can take action on climate change, because anyone you care about will be badly impacted by climate change. Any part of the world you care about will be harmed by climate change. Any species of animal you love will be harmed by climate change. And any religious tradition or value system you follow probably talks about repairing harm that you have caused, and taking care and preserving the things you value into the future.

So, the first thing I would just do is invite people to ask themselves: What are your deepest values? What do you most care about and what is happening to our world if we continue to burn fossil fuels and pour this heat-trapping climate pollution to our atmosphere? What will happen to the things you care the most about? I don’t have to tell you what I care about. I want to hear what you care about. And in all of our workshops, after we’ve talked a little bit about that, I have folks turn to a neighbor – and I finally get to do it in person again, after many months of the Zoom version of this – but turn to a neighbor and ask, “Why does climate change matter to you?” And we practice that, like strengthening that muscle of being able to use words to talk about this sometimes challenging, very difficult thing, and say, “Why does climate change matter to you?”

I would say Katharine Hayhoe, I just mentioned, is an example of an Evangelical Christian. And to know that in every religious tradition, certainly, and in every community in general, there are already voices articulating an authentic climate response grounded in those values, in that tradition. So, you don’t usually have to start from scratch. If you are Sikh, you can look into the work being done by EcoSikh, an organization that’s already trying to cultivate an authentic Sikh response to the climate crisis. And I could tell you stories about almost every religious community, values-based community, tradition, where you’re going to find those folks doing that work already, and you just have to join them.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, there’s a background in community organizing, that two questions that I love, which are “What keeps you up at night?” and “What gets you out of bed in the morning?” and being able – that people become much more willing to advocate when they are using their own words, and trying to be able to help them figure out the language that they can use, and “Why is this important?” and ultimately dealing with “What are the practical steps that we need to be taking?” but rooting it in, “These are core values that we hold.”

I wish I saw the exact number – I could remember the number – that I saw this morning, but I saw somewhere that there is something like 70% of Americans from all across the political spectrum [who] feel like there’s something that needs to be done. And we don’t realize how broad a base there is to be able to do this kind of work.

Joelle Novey: And the statistics I’ve seen are similar. There’s a whole body of research called the Six Americas of Climate Change Opinion. Anthony Leiserowitz and Ed Maibach are the two scholars who have sort of led that work. And they categorize Americans’ climate change opinions into sort of six buckets. And then they show, with the size of the circles, how many are in each bucket. And the big thing to remember is that those really dismissive people who don’t want to hear about it, and are going to push back and get into fights with you about whether climate science is real and the climate crisis is an important thing to address, is this little circle over here. Unfortunately, the people who are truly alarmed and their hair is on fire, like you and me, about the climate crisis, is also a smaller circle. But almost everyone else you’re talking to is somewhere in the middle. They’re concerned, they’ve heard something about it. They’re wondering. Sometimes people push this away because it’s upsetting, or because they don’t know if there’s anything they can do about it, or because they assume that because their colleagues and friends aren’t talking about it, that they’re not interested. So, they don’t bring it up. And then this also has a scientific name. There’s now a “spiral of climate silence.” So if you don’t want to talk about it, and then you don’t hear your friends talking about it for the same reason, then nobody talks about it, and then we really can’t solve a global problem that we can’t talk about.

So I think, yeah, a lot of the community-organizing basics that you might be familiar with from other settings do apply here. But I think there are some distinctive challenges with the climate problem that make it – first of all, the ways in which the climate crisis is already impacting our lives sometimes are not as visible to us. Like we can say, “Oh, wow, that strong storm – wow, my home has flooded three times in the last ten years and that’s more than it used to be.” But there’s a way in which the climate crisis is, unfortunately, because of its pace and because it’s about changes in the frequency of things over time, just regular people have a hard time experiencing it without the help of data to see. You have to really look at a graph to see, “Wow, global average temperature is going up and it’s going up faster and faster. And that fits in with some of my personal experience and helps to explain it.” But I can’t just personally experience global average temperature. So that’s one thing that I think is a challenge in community organizing around this issue, is that you first have to help folks see the way some of their personal experiences, of changes in their own backyards or changes in their own experiences of the weather, fit into patterns that the data show us are global and trends over time. I think that’s what is most felt and urgent, sometimes. I think more and more people, as you said, are coming to understand their experiences as connected to these larger stories, but it is a special challenge.

And as I said, I think the other thing is there’s this particular hesitance to talk about climate change. And part of why Katharine Hayhoe had this TED talk, and then she wrote this book that expands on that talk, really just asking people to have those conversations and giving them some advice for how to have successful conversations about this issue, and really taking it on as something that we can talk about, because if it’s too scary to talk about, we definitely can’t work together to make it better.

Geoff Mitelman: Although, what’s so hard as you’re talking about that it needs to come down on an individual and conversational level. And yet, that is not the level at which we need to address this issue. And so it becomes really hard, because you’ve got to make it to get people passionate about it and advocating. It needs to be direct, and personal, and something that gets them out of bed, just saying, like, “I need to be able to do this.” And yet, it’s global, it’s abstract, it’s hard to get your head around, as opposed to like, 9/11 – people could see, that was something like, “This is something that we need to do,” and it went too far on the other side in my mind, of trying to address that, right, but that’s like, “Oh, my God, we’ve got to deal with this here and now,” as opposed to global climate change – “Well, that’s down [the road]. That’s in the future. That’s lots of people who are involved here.” It’s harder to get people connected to it, I would think.

Joelle Novey: Right. One thing that feels important –  and even I struggle with keeping in touch with this, especially on a rough week like this one, for this work – but is helping people imagine that the world we’re building together is really something to be excited about. I’ve gone around in a lot of congregations. We talk about the problems that burning fossil fuels is causing for people and for the world and for the future. And then I have them close their eyes and I say, “Okay, in a few years, we’ve totally transformed this community to fully reflect the values of this tradition – whatever, to really live out Lutheran values with respect to this science that we learn today. Walk around and see what it looks like.”

And people have this very strong vision of like, “Oh, there would be solar panels on the roof, and there’d be, like, food growing in the garden, and a whole rain garden in the back, and people would be making food together, and we wouldn’t have bulletins anymore because we would project it on a screen so we would save paper,” I don’t know. There was a Muslim community I was with, and I did this exercise, and as people opened their eyes, they shared it. And one young woman said, “No more plastic water bottles on Ramadan,” in a future vision in which this community had totally internalized this reality.

So, I find over and over again that we have to talk about the very negative consequences of a world in which we do not act and get people to really understand their choices in this moment – our choices in this moment. But I also really believe in envisioning the world as it will be, that we are building through these transformations and getting people to see, “Wow, that’s actually a really life-giving, nourishing – it’s a healthier world than the one we have now in so many ways.” And to be excited for that future, and not just fearful of the alternative.

Geoff Mitelman: As you were talking – it’s a different question, but as you’re talking, when you were saying, people saying from their Lutheran values, from their Muslim values, from their Sikh values – you’re coming at it from your Jewish values here. When you do work through IPL, do you partner with somebody in that community? If they fly you in and parachute you in, then, “She’s a wonderful person, but who is she? As opposed to, like, “Wait, no, this is the pastor. This is this person.” And you can be the expert on this work. But being able to say, “I need to be in conversation with somebody on the ground locally that this community is going to have a relationship with.”

Joelle Novey: Yeah. I mean, certainly parachuting in is not our style. We’re trying to form ongoing relationships. We’re building a movement, and we’re building the local religious environmental movement. And to us, that means forming long-standing relationships with – often we call him “the green sheep” in each community. There’s often, like, at least one person in every religious community who already feels this – maybe they struggle to articulate it, but they already deeply feel that to live out their values or their faith fully, they have to think about the impact on the world and the earth. So we try to find and support and encourage and equip those “green sheep” for the long haul. And then, when there are moments when we need faith voices to speak out in the public square in support of bills or opportunities, or opposed to pipelines or whatever, we try to be ready to mobilize those folks that we’ve been building those relationships with for the long haul. So that’s our model of organizing.

I think you’re absolutely right that I’m not the best messenger for every community, and that it’s more important that the messenger be the right one than it be me. So we have a speakers’ bureau of people from many different faith traditions who are prepared to talk in communities about, and to open that conversation in a way that’s really grounded on authentic and builds trust with the communities that we’re getting to know.

And, so much of what I’m inviting people to do is to name their own values and to ask themselves, “What would living out my own values look like in this moment?” So, the fact that I’m usually a guest in someone else’s faith community is actually a good discipline for me, because it’s not my place to say, “If you were being really consistent [with your] values, you would be doing this or that,” because I don’t have to. If I ask that question, the answer comes. And people – one of the things I love about this work (and I’m so grateful to be working in faith communities on this issue) is that the kind of people who stay, you know, who come every week to a faith community or community of meaning, are striving to live out their values. They are striving to be connected with each other and to something larger. These are really the world’s best people. I get to live in the land of human goodness in this work – and not every climate activist can say that. So these are some really good people who are thoughtful, and want to do right in the world, and want to think about the impact of their choices. And so, all we’re doing is situating the climate crisis where it belongs, in a context of moral conversation, of like, “How are our choices impacting other people? How are our choices impacting the larger world and the things we hold sacred? How are our choices impacting the world as it will exist in the future?” I mean, these are kind of unprecedented questions in some ways, but they are basically moral questions.

Geoff Mitelman: And what it sounds like is that more than trying to convince the unconvinceable – which is, in my mind, kind of a fool’s errand – that you’re more interested in being able to create a network and being able to tap into the resources that already exist all across North America. And when I say “resources,” I kind of mean the spiritual resources, the moral resources, the relational resources. And that becomes actually a much louder voice than the small percentage of the people who – if their voices get drowned out, we can actually have a much greater impact of having people speak out.

Joelle Novey: Yes. And it’s been my experience – I mean, I’ve literally been talking to people in circles of folding chairs in their church basements or fellowship halls for many weekends for most of the last 12 years. And I can say, very, very rarely, at least in that setting, does anyone say, “This is all bunk and I disagree and I’m not listening anymore.”

And my personal belief, just having experienced it out in the field, is that if we acknowledge some of the difficult feelings that are brought up by thinking about the climate crisis – if we say before we start, “This is kind of hard stuff – I sometimes feel like really frightened and upset.” You might feel like you don’t want to be here anymore, you want to think about lunch or you want to think about wish you’d gone to a different workshop. And I just kind of warn people that they might have some difficult feelings. And then when it’s getting intense, I show on my face as we’re talking about it that I feel anguish about this information, too. I’m not just cheerfully sharing something with them that’s bringing up a lot of negative emotion. And then, when we get to the most intense moment, we all take a deep breath and they turn to a neighbor and process what is coming up for them.

And my personal going theory is that if you can acknowledge, predict, name and hold space for people’s feelings about climate conversations, you can head off a lot of the resistance by just making space for some of those feelings. And the other thing that I found that is very key is – I don’t do it explicitly, but I set up my presentation so that anyone in the room who’s not sure what to make of this is watching multiple members of their own community whose opinion they do care about express concern. So, I don’t say. “Here are the ten terrible things that will happen if we keep putting heat and trapping climate pollution into the atmosphere.” I say, “What are some of the things you’ve heard could happen if we don’t do anything about this?” And then, ten different people in this person’s community – I don’t know who that guy is in the back, some guy who watches Fox News, but if that guy’s there, he then hears 10 people he respects in his own community, who is his peer group, saying, “Well I’m really concerned about rising sea levels, and I’ve heard that there will be a lot of refugees, and I’ve heard about mosquito-borne disease and the unfair way that’ll play out.”

And by the end, you’ve had a very strong demonstration of the fact that, “Oh, this is something my community is concerned about.” And their concern is authentically felt. And that’s the norm we’re setting in this space.

I can’t say I never get confronted or never get disagreed with in public, but that’s my working, I should say – I just want to say to anyone who’s wondering, who’s listening out there, that my usual expectation at this point, is that most people are really heartbroken when they think directly about this. They already, at some level, are aware of it. And what they really need is a safe container in which to think about what they want to do about it.

Geoff Mitelman: And what’s interesting is that the science is, and has been, pretty clear for a long time. And I think that’s also – I find that a little bit of a challenge in the Jewish community, because everyone in the Jewish community already knows this, right? You don’t have to convince anybody in the Jewish community – very few people in the Jewish community. but the problem is the emotion.

And [I’ve] been thinking a lot of the parallels of climate change and vaccines, and how we deal with these kinds of questions, of “Why do some people not accept the science?” And it’s not because they’re stupid, and it’s not because they don’t hear it. I think it’s because there are some fears. There’s always certainly a level of misinformation, for sure – of not being able to acknowledge the different fears that may exist, whatever those fears may be, and being able to hold that container of those fears and anxieties allows [them to say] “Okay, I feel that. Now what? It’s okay to feel that. Now what do we do?”

Joelle Novey: One of my colleagues in this work told a story specifically about the Jewish community where he was before a climate action Zoom event of some kind. He asked everyone to do some kind of meditative [exercise] – “take a deep breath and close your eyes,” something like that. And while that was going on, someone was writing in the chat, like, “Let’s get started already.” And I thought that was such a… not just in a Jewish community, but in so many spaces where we are so uncomfortable sitting with the feelings. And I find myself doing this too. We are so uncomfortable being like, “What am I avoiding when I try not to feel this? What am I trying to get away from?” And I’ve been really trying myself and encouraging people around me – I think about the kind of fierce protective energy, going through the pandemic, and thinking about my aging parents, and thinking about my young kids. I have this sort of fierce protective energy. Like, I will do anything I can to keep them safe, and that is not something I’m ashamed of. And it’s not something that I have to apologize for. It’s something I hold with my head up, and really strongly. This is something – I will fight as hard as I have to, to keep the people I love safe.

And at the end of the day, that’s really what – when we find ourselves avoiding the feelings that come when we think about climate change, I would invite people to get in touch with: What does it feel like to fight, with all your might, for the things that you love the most in the world? Like, we are in the fight of our lives, and we didn’t choose that. And sometimes it really sucks. It’s hard to be in the fight of our lives. But wow, there is no shame in being enraged and fighting as hard as we can for the things that we love in this moment, and to kind of own that as something that we can own fully and not sidestep it all and not contain it all.

If I may, a Jewish image that I found helpful is that God attacks Jacob and wrestles with him. We’re coming up on November – I think we’ll read this. So, this mysterious angel wrestles with Jacob in the middle of the night. It’s like, not a fight he chose. He gets injured. It’s like really an ugly thing. But then he says, “Wait, don’t let me go until you’ve given me a blessing.” So he sort of wrests a blessing out of this fight that he didn’t choose. And that’s sort of what I’m trying to bring to this work, is like – we did not choose this, and it’s really awful that we are the generation that is, mostly not of our own choosing, in this moment where we’re the first generation to be experiencing a climate crisis and the last generation that’s going to be able to do anything about it. But I am sort of like, holding on in this death grip with this fight, and saying, “But I’m going to insist that it blesses us.” I’m going to wrest a blessing from this moment by seizing it as an opportunity to connect across traditions and calling our bluff about some of the dumb things that have kept human beings from working together in the past. And I am going to wrest a blessing by insisting that we build a world that repairs a lot of the errors that were made in the world that we had before. So, I’m trying to hold on to that as, like – there’s no shame in this fight, right?

Geoff Mitelman: And the worst that’s going to happen is that we’re going to have cleaner air, cleaner water – that’s the only downside.

So, there was a question that came through the chat, which is that – and I don’t know if the science is accurate, I’m trusting that the science is clear and accurate here. It says:

“The scientists who have studied the climate in ancient and biblical Israel have found that back then, it was much more moderate. Yet even centuries ago, desertification was underway and has become especially notable over the last couple of centuries. And actually, we see that even the last couple of decades – with the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee and the Aral Sea – scientists have found that the climate has been changing during the time of the Second Temple, even earlier. So clearly, a lot has changed since Israel was called ‘the land flowing with milk and honey.’ What accounted for the changes over the last thousands of years to these more recent changes? What seems to be an ongoing process?”

And I have my own thoughts and ideas, but I would love to hear if there’s work that you’ve done or people that you’ve worked with in this space to help answer this question.

Joelle Novey: So, if I understand correctly, I think the question is: There have always been changes in the world’s temperature, even dramatic changes over time. And our current global temperature range, I believe, is not totally unprecedented in hundreds of thousands of years. I think if you go back far enough, you can find some precedent for the current global temperature. So, “How do we explain this recent phenomenon as caused by human beings burning fossil fuels?” I think is the question that I heard.

Geoff Mitelman: Yes, that’s kind of what I understood as well, yeah.

Joelle Novey: So, the short answer is, my understanding is that the current warming is much more rapid than any previous variability. And you just have to look over those charts. There’s always been some variability in our global average temperature, even for the whole entire world, even over a number of years. But there’s just no precedent for the rapidity with which – even the wiggling has kept going, but the average around which the zigzag is zigzagging has been going rapidly up. And this is me talking as a non-scientist, and I welcome your helping me out after this. But also, if you explore all the alibis, if you explore all the other explanations – not just natural variability, but like, maybe this is because something about the energy from the sun has been changing, or maybe this is something about volcanoes, or all the different alibis that climate skeptics throw out there – you can show within the data that they don’t explain our current phenomenon. For example, my understanding is that the energy from the sun has been decreasing over the same time period that our global average temperature has been rapidly increasing. So, the sun has an alibi, basically, in terms of explaining the most recent warming.

So, that’s the other thing. Is if anyone asks this question in good faith, and they really want to understand, “How do we know it’s human beings who are driving the current climate crisis?” There are a number of good short explanations out there. I think the one I would recommend is – I keep mentioning Katharine Hayhoe, because I think she’s like, just one of the world’s most masterful climate communicators. But she’s made a bunch of videos called “Global Weirding.” “Global Weirding” on YouTube – you can search that. And if you search “global weirding,” she has a number of short videos, and one of them, I believe, is, “How do we know that it’s human-made?”

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. First I heard of “global weirding” was from Tom Friedman. I think that’s a much more accurate term of all the changes that have been happening in so many different ways. And the chat  – the response was, “Does climate have a mind of its own? How much can we change versus how much do we have no control over?” And I think that’s an important piece. I’m assuming you know Karenna Gore and the Center for Earth Ethics, and we talked with her and with Andrew Schwartz, who also works there. And he was talking about work that he’s done in an interfaith setting, particularly with indigenous people. And Abrahamic traditions tend to say that we have a responsibility to take care of the earth, whereas more indigenous people would say, “That’s ridiculous, the earth takes care of us.” I think that’s an important framing, of at least recognizing that our perceptions of our relationship to the earth may be different based on what our religious traditions are. And so, what are the assumptions that we’re coming into these conversations with?

Joelle Novey: Yeah, I would add – no, just because I think that last question points to the fact that we are in an unprecedented situation, and that our ancient traditions – all of them – could not fully envision this situation. And I think that can be a little bit lonely, and I think it’s okay to say that out loud, right? If you’re someone like me, who’s in a Hebrew Bible-based tradition, you can look and say, “Okay, there’s the story of Noah.” We can look for examples in our tradition of texts and stories that sort of feel applicable. And yet, it’s so clear, if you read those stories, that to the authors of those stories, only God could mess with the weather, right? And maybe that’s what it means to have the climate “have a mind of its own” – “only God could mess with the weather.” Human beings were at the mercy of God. This is how, for example, if there’s text in our daily liturgy as Jews, that if we don’t listen and learn God’s ways, then God will stop up the skies, and we will be driven off the land by changes in the climate. I mean, that’s the model of sort of harsh justice that exists around climate in our inherited teachings. And the idea that the science is telling us, which is that for the first time ever – in the history of ever – [that] human beings are the driving force behind our earth’s climate systems, and our burning combustion, our burning things, is driving this story for the first time – I mean, that is disorienting to people. And it’s a real challenge to all of our theologies, like, writ large. Whatever you mean by theology, the idea you were raised with of how the earth and the universe works with respect to human beings is probably challenged by the reality of climate science, if you take it in.

And that’s why I want to be really – I just want to hold people gently and be compassionate about how disorienting that can be to take in and not skip over it, but to really say, “Yes, we are asking you, we are asking ourselves, we’re going to have to re-understand our role in the world to understand this science.” And that can be disorienting, and it can be upsetting, and it can feel like a kind of betrayal of the theology you used to have, and to really hold ourselves and each other gently through that, rather than being dismissive of it – because it’s huge.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, that leads nicely to the last question that I want to ask, which is that in rabbinic tradition, you always end with nechemta, with something that is comforting and where there’s hope. So I would love to hear: What are elements where you are finding some hope? Because it can be very, as you said, disorienting, and there’s existential despair, and it can be very heavy to be dealing with these global issues. So where is there hope to be able to be found right now? Or where do you find hope right now?

Joelle Novey: So, I was remembering the Pope’s encyclical, Laudato Si‘. I’m one of the Pope’s encyclicals’ Jewish fans. So, he has a paragraph that says, “All is not lost, because as long as we can still feel like God’s grace at work in our hearts, we have the dignity to make choices. And that dignity is ours, and no one can take it from us.”

And to me, this is a teaching about – as long as human beings, including ourselves, can still make choices, then all is not lost, because this problem was caused by human choices. And so, we can address it and take care of each other with human choices. I’ll say, and asking ourselves every day, “What is my role in this? What can I do to live out my values with respect to this issue?” I think faith traditions really help us figure out how to fit in with much bigger “What is my role in this world? What is my role? How can I sort of live in a righteous way with respect to everything else that’s going on and all the things I’m part of?” And that’s ultimately a religious question that we all need to ask with respect to this moment.

I particularly wanted to raise up before we leave – there are five young people who are hunger striking in front of the White House today. They have been there for seven days, only drinking water. And I encourage anyone who has not heard some of the videos of what they are asking for, and how they are trying to get the attention of the President and the Senate that is debating the climate provisions in the Build Back Better Act right now – they are trying to ask everyone to listen to them and to listen to what’s at stake, from their perspective, about the future that they have on this earth, and the future they want, and the future that will be only possible if we take dramatic action for climate repair right now.

And I guess that gives me hope, even though it’s very heartbreaking in some ways, to watch. It gives me hope because I think they are really asking themselves what can they do, right? And they are just five people, but they’ve really captivated a lot of people’s attention through the power of their example and their power of their leadership. And I’m getting a lot of energy from thinking about, “Well, if they can do it, how can I follow their lead?”

Geoff Mitelman: Well, thank you, Joelle. And that’s some of the power I know of Interfaith Power and Light, which is not just the very functional work that you’re able to do of building relationships, but being moral exemplars and being able to set examples, to be able to inspire other people and to be able to create relationships and examples all across the religious world and political world – to be able to say, this can be a shining example for people to be able to emulate. This is something that we can do. This is something that is achievable, and this is something that is deeply rooted in our values. So thank you so much for sharing your work and the crucial work that you’re doing here.

Joelle Novey: Thank you. It was great to talk to you.

Geoff Mitelman: And if people want to find out more, that’s Interfaith Power and Light. And they can also see through your chapter of ipldmv.org.

Joelle Novey: You’ve got it. And we’re @IPLDMV on all the social media as well. So you can find us Facebook, Twitter, et cetera.

Geoff Mitelman: I encourage everyone to be able to follow on social media. You can follow us at Sinai synapses or me. I’m at Rabbi Mitelman. We have this conversation every Tuesday at 2:00 ppm eastern at Jewishlive.org/SacredScience.

Next week we’ll be talking with a longtime friend of Sinai and Synapses, Professor Stuart Firestein, who is at Columbia University, author of the excellent books Ignorance: How It Drives Science and Failure: Why Science is so Successful. So we’ll be talking about that next week. I hope you’ll join us then. And thank you all for taking the time with us this afternoon.

Joelle Novey: Thank you so much. Bye.