I wanted to write something else this week, but I've been thinking environmentally lately, for a lot of reasons.
One was a major reason I never got to write a Shlomo's Drash last week. Due to the sloppy seconds of a hurricane, the nearby rivers flooded. Apparently while leaving its banks, the Des Plaines River decided to visit a switching box for telephone and internet to my office, silencing all landlines for days. Throughout the Mississippi river valley and of course the coast of Texas, there were incidents of flooding and damage far worse than ours. Yet in many of these places the damage from mold has only just begun, both to buildings and to the people living in them. I have a friend and colleague who was a relief worker from Katrina, who still suffers from a severe mold infection she picked up getting food facilities operational in the aftermath of Katrina.
Another reason is a phrase from last week's portion Ki Tavo in Deuteronomy 28:27.
27. The Lord will strike you with the pox of Egypt, and with the swellings, and with the scab, and with the itch, from which you can not be healed.
It mentions many diseases and during our usual Saturday morning Torah discussion after the Torah service, a physician in my congregation noted how powerless it seems physicians were in this scenario. I countered with an interesting thought: this is about not curative medicine but preventative. This is a matter of environmental health. Many of those diseases start with waterborne parasites and bacteria and lack of care for the water supplies.
This week we read
19. I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your seed may live; [Deuteronomy 30:19]
I've thought a lot about that in terms of our environment. Much of what I do for a living is making sure what is in the natural world around us does not hurt us. As terrifying as a tiger lion or rattle snake looks, such animals are no where as dangerous or kill as many people as Tuberculosis or HIV, which are completely invisible. Such is true with bacteria like species of Salmonella and Shigella or the parasite Entamoeba histolytica. These are found in contaminated waters and foods which look perfectly edible or drinkable, yet they kill millions yearly.
I thought of Snow this week in all the flooding. Not the white stuff but the man, John Snow. Another friend and college will be on sabbatical in England this year. My first question to her was “are you going to The Pump?” In my profession as a health inspector, we may inspect thousands of water pumps, but there is only one Pump. Near 39 Broadwick Street in London is the pump that in 1854 Dr. John Snow and Reverend Henry Whitehead deduced was the source of a cholera outbreak, one of the first to connect water supplies with the disease. By removing the handle and preventing people drinking the water, they ended the outbreak which claimed the lives of 616 people.
A white powder that wasn’t snow was also on my mind – powdered melamine. It’s all over the news feeds I read. In china, Close to 13,000 children have been hospitalized and close to 40,000 more have been affected due to the practice of not adding enough milk to infant formula and covering up the lack of protein by adding melamine. The material has been collecting in infant’s kidneys causing painful kidney stones.
19. I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your seed may live; [Deuteronomy 30:19
From the heavens come rain which falls and finds their way into rivers. From some of those rivers water seeped into the earth, making water tables and aquifers. From wells dug into the ground, like the inhabitants of Broadwick Street in the 1800’s, some get their water. As I write this, I’m looking at the blue water of Lake Michigan, the source of my drinking water, which too has had it problems with Cholera and Salmonella, till the lock I’m looking out upon helped to reverse the flow of the Chicago River.
Moses challenges us in Deuteronomy
15. See, I have set before you this day life and good, and death and evil; 16. In that I command you this day to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that you may live and multiply; and the Lord your God shall bless you in the land which you are entering to possess. 17. But if your heart turns away, so that you will not hear, but shall be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them; 18. I announce to you this day, that you shall surely perish, and that you shall not prolong your days upon the land, to which you are going over the Jordan, to enter and possess.[Deut. 30:15-18]
We are given the responsibility for the commandments. We can do them or we don’t. Many of them affect the environment around us and the people around us. We can be unethical in our business dealings, putting poison in food to make a bigger profit. We can ignore not just the widow and the orphan but the sources of water that they drink. We can exploit the soil until there are no nutrients left in it. Because it is too expensive or too much of a bother, in many ways in our world, we can not bother to put that parapet on the roof. To do any of these leads to the curses, the chemical, microscopic and some not so microscopic demons that will attack and defeat us.
To do the commandments we must obey them on many levels if we are to live healthy. It is not God’s punishment, but our own foolishness that brings cholera outbreaks. We must remain diligent against the attackers. Moses says there is no real cure for this stuff. As we have learned with antibiotic resistance, there is only prevention; there is only the fence around the Torah.
Writing the Drash for Nitzavim means the end of year 5768 and the beginning of 5769. While I fell into this life through a series of odd coincidences and what I thought of as curses, the prevention of disease, Environmental Health, is my life calling and the biggest blessing in my life. 5769 will be a year where that will be true more than ever as I step up to several new tasks on the national level. How we treat the environment and how it treats us determine a lot of our own health.
As 5769 begins, remember to choose life.
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