Yom kippur pledge stop destroying the planet 2/10/14 http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/high-holy-days-2014/holy-day-opinions/.premium-1.618923
I stood on the bima on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, leading the morning service at Ansche Chesed, my beloved synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As I sang the words “the pious will celebrate with joyful song; evil will be silenced and all wickedness will vanish like smoke,” I thought about the meaning of this third-century liturgical poem. How is evil to be silenced, or, as the verse continues, “the tyranny of arrogance” removed from the earth?
Two weeks later – in October, 2012 – I moved to Israel with my husband and then-toddler twins. The following Yom Kippur, last year, could not have been more different. In the morning I pushed my kids in their stroller through the quiet, searing-hot streets to synagogue, and two hours later took them home to nap. In the afternoon I read my children the book of Jonah. No cars were on the roads outside, but in their place were cyclists, tricyclists and scooter riders – lots of them, mostly children.
The dearth of drivers on the Day of Atonement – as well as the shutdown in commerce and industry – has aprofound impact on the environment in Israel: On Yom Kippur, the smoke literally vanishes. According to research published last year by Dr. Ilan Levy, a research fellow at the Technion’s Center of Excellence in Exposure Science and Environmental Health, air pollution plunges in Israel as virtually all motorized traffic comes to a halt. Levy’s data showed that nitrogen oxide – a greenhouse gas and major ingredient of smog – falls by up to 98 percent and to near-zero at some sites in Tel Aviv and in the small city of Modi’in.
I couldn’t find the answer as to why even secular Israelis stop driving on Yom Kippur, or when or why the cycling tradition originated. But the phenomenon prompted me to wonder: For non-observant Jews, who may choose not to fast or pray, and even for those who do, why not meditate upon the environmental significance of Yom Kippur, and how we might change our destructive habits for more than just one day?
I stood on the bima on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, leading the morning service at Ansche Chesed, my beloved synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As I sang the words “the pious will celebrate with joyful song; evil will be silenced and all wickedness will vanish like smoke,” I thought about the meaning of this third-century liturgical poem. How is evil to be silenced, or, as the verse continues, “the tyranny of arrogance” removed from the earth?
Two weeks later – in October, 2012 – I moved to Israel with my husband and then-toddler twins. The following Yom Kippur, last year, could not have been more different. In the morning I pushed my kids in their stroller through the quiet, searing-hot streets to synagogue, and two hours later took them home to nap. In the afternoon I read my children the book of Jonah. No cars were on the roads outside, but in their place were cyclists, tricyclists and scooter riders – lots of them, mostly children.
The dearth of drivers on the Day of Atonement – as well as the shutdown in commerce and industry – has aprofound impact on the environment in Israel: On Yom Kippur, the smoke literally vanishes. According to research published last year by Dr. Ilan Levy, a research fellow at the Technion’s Center of Excellence in Exposure Science and Environmental Health, air pollution plunges in Israel as virtually all motorized traffic comes to a halt. Levy’s data showed that nitrogen oxide – a greenhouse gas and major ingredient of smog – falls by up to 98 percent and to near-zero at some sites in Tel Aviv and in the small city of Modi’in.
I couldn’t find the answer as to why even secular Israelis stop driving on Yom Kippur, or when or why the cycling tradition originated. But the phenomenon prompted me to wonder: For non-observant Jews, who may choose not to fast or pray, and even for those who do, why not meditate upon the environmental significance of Yom Kippur, and how we might change our destructive habits for more than just one day?