Joseph, Moses, Environmental Damage, Political Revolution

The Israeli government just announced that it is considering withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change and other international environmental bodies — and this a mere week after its Environmental Ministry warned of rising sea levels causing salty water to infiltrate the country’s freshwater aquifers, making them undrinkable and unusable for agriculture! If the present government claims to have religious support, let’s see how the Torah relates to such environmental issues.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, the Bible provides ample evidence as to how humanity suffers from climate change – not only physically but socially and politically as well. I’ll focus on two quite familiar biblical stories with a hero at its center, each dealing with the social and political upheaval following each environmental catastrophe. First, Joseph as a dream interpreter; then Moses as a climate change predictor – the main topic in last week’s Torah reading and this week’s too.

Joseph started out with dreams about his future in which he predicted he’ll be lording over his brothers and parents. Perhaps with such experience as a dreamer, he was able later to correctly interpret Pharaoh’s dream about seven fat cows consuming seven lean cows, and then seven full-bodied sheaves eating seven lean ones (Genesis 41: 1-8). In short, they foretold of seven great harvest years to be followed by seven years of severe drought.

The solution? Saving the initial years’ surplus for the lean food years. What is of special interest in this is the socio-political consequence. If until then most Egyptians owned their own farming land (a proto-capitalist, agrarian economy), the drought would radically change that: Genesis 47:19 “Wherefore should we die before your eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be bondmen unto Pharaoh; and give us seed, that we may live, and not die, and that the land be not desolate.”

20 So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine was sore upon them; and the land became Pharaoh’s.

The drought’s aftermath turned the entire Egyptian people into what was called in the early modern world “indentured servants” – and the country’s economy was nationalized. Quite a revolutionary turn of events that would have left Karl Marx (“servants”) and Ronald Reagan (“nationalized economy”) apoplectic.

A couple of centuries later, again in Egypt, Moses demanded of Pharaoh to “Let My People Go” i.e., be released from slavery (at least temporarily). When the latter refused, a series of ecological disasters hit the country – from the Nile turning red (possibly a gigantic algae bloom) to locusts and other environmental hoards devastating the land. The tenth plague – all of Egypt’s “firstborn” (possible a euphemism for the reigning elite) died – perhaps a direct result of the nine previous pestilences.
In any case, the result was that Egypt lost its main cheap manpower, the Israelite slaves – here too a revolutionary development, maybe the first time in “recorded history” of a successful slave revolution. Indeed, we know from the actual historical record that supremely powerful Egypt started to decline around 1100 BCE, approximately a century or so after the Israelites purported escape from Egypt. Given that this biblical account was written many centuries later, it is not beyond reason that all three phenomena – Egypt’s disastrous ecological “plagues,” the loss of its massive slave workforce, and the country’s decline – were related historically.

It goes without saying that whether or not all this is based on historical reality, the fact is that climate change and socio-political revolution have always had an ongoing relationship throughout human history. Indeed, human “modernity” was able to emerge only after the end of the Ice Age around 15,000 years ago, freeing up land for the “Agricultural Revolution” (not all climate change has negative consequences, but that one started from a prior, very cold and inhospitable condition).

One other example should suffice: Europe’s “Black Plague” in the mid-14th century killed a third to half of the continent’s entire population (this during its Little Ice Age)! The social result: serfs left the farms to strike out on their own, salaries skyrocketed due to the dearth of workers, and religion declined precipitously (“where was God when we needed him?”). What followed was the end of feudalism, the weakening of the Catholic Church, and the start of the Renaissance along with the first signs of proto-democracy.

It goes without saying that all this has contemporary relevance. Earth is our “home.” If in our own house the kitchen is continually getting too hot, the nearby seashore is periodically flooding our basement, or termites keep on infesting the walls, we can move to a different place. But the globe is the only abode we have, so if we can’t move elsewhere, we’ll be tempted to turn the place upside down in anger or frustration. Very few people really want that, especially given how such past “revolutions” turned out.

What we need today are some more wise, Genesis-era Pharaohs to listen to, and accept, the dire warnings of contemporary Josephs (and Moses). Severe climate change is on the way. For those who wish to maintain the contemporary socio-economic system that has brought great wealth (and health) to the world, the issue of global warming, rising sea levels, more extreme weather patterns, should not be political footballs to be kicked around but rather existential issues that everyone should accept as “Torah from Sinai.”