1) the idea of interruption as something religions do - Judaism preeminently:
A theology of interruption demands that we … act as if the interruption were the Real, and the other stuff of our lives the Distraction. ... Religions structure the practice of interruption, which is a moment of justice, or beauty, or compassion, or grace, in such an unjust world. ... Interruption is, of course, the very method of teaching and learning and ethical decision-making in Jewish thought, and one interrupts with story on story on story, each disagreement challenging the half-finished sentence of the previous argument.
She of course had done that very thing - story on story on story - by giving us not one but two accounts of the time before Noah's flood.
2) the idea of the Sabbath as a model for structured interruption, and the way it might be used to inspire ways of breaking out of the mindset of a modern civilization rushing us toward climate disaster:
Shabbas actively ceases the marketplace exchanges and all the frenetic, mechanical action of the world, all the digital zinging, all the traveling, all the writing, all the finishing of things into other things. One interrupts the natural order, the cease-less cycle—to cease, to make an in-between— rupting or breaking the totalizing cycle of events. Break the six-day week, and make a Shabbat, an event that is exactly not in the natural order, the people are commanded from Sinai. And every six years, break the bonds to the field and the seed time and harvest time and make a stop for justice, make a Sabbatical Year....
Zoloth suggests ways in which scholars might structure in interruption by the realities of climate challenges, perhaps by tithing a tenth of time in a class, or reading time in a week, for climate issues. Or what about at the level of institutions?
We could create an AAR Sabbatical Year. ... once in every six years, we would pause. Following the biblical cycle, we could chose to not meet at a huge annual meeting in which we take over a city. ... What if instead of coming together, we spread out over the land, as it were, and read out papers to one another at our own universities and institutions? What if we could meet, each of us in our own city and turn to the faces and the needs of our fellow citizens? What if, on that day, we taught the poor, volunteered in local high schools or community colleges, or the prison, the hospital, the military base, the church, mosque, synagogue, or temple, at a place that is not your own, worked at planting an orchard or a garden, served food to the poor, offered our teaching, offered to learn? What if we turned to our neighbor—the woman who cleans the toilets, the man who sweeps the sidewalks—and included them in the university to which we are responsible? We would then be actively making an interruption in our lives, saying by this act: I will sacrifice to save my planet.
I had to inform the students that I've heard nothing about plans for the 2021 AAR Sabbatical Year she proposed - but it's looking like our hand may be forced for 2020!
3) an account of the contribution religions, for all their liabilities, might make to helping us learn to not to flee from knowledge of impending climate chaos but rather learn to interrupt our lives and the life of our unsustainable civilization.
First, religions confront the enormous terror of each as we face death, with narratives that allow us to imagine our good life as part of a larger story, in which we are mortal, broken, old, and yet beloved.
Second, religions allow ordinary people to believe in their own power to change unjust situations.
Third, religious traditions allow for prophecy. To imagine the future, to call for repentance, to see a day coming that can be imagined, changed, redeemed, all of this is possible: the road to the impossible is open.
Fourth, religions are without borders. Just as medicine can be sans frontières, religions allow us to consider ourselves to be global members of covenants far deeper and far broader than national boundaries.
Each of these is an distinctive gift, and shows how religion might play more than a supporting role in ecological awareness and action. I hope students are getting that sense of the significance of religious modalities from my course, but I'm not confident of it. Arguably this is a place where being "spiritual but not religious" doesn't measure up. Likewise difficult to access was the last thing I hoped students might get from Zoloth's talk.
4) a sense of the power of "scriptural reasoning" - the kind of thinking that a constant engagement with scriptural texts make possible. You can't interrupt stories without more stories, and can't experience these interruptions as openings rather than shuttings-down, without a rich sense of the abiding presence and relevance of a set of shared texts. Zoloth demonstrates this approach throughout. The model for the interrupted AAR sabbatical, for instance, was a moment described in the Mishnah. But it's really there from the start, with Genesis 5 and Surah 71, the latter of which provides the central idea that people flee from the warnings which might save them. And for people more biblically fluent than I, it's there in her opening words, too:
We are living in the Last Place. There is no other world for us, no second chance. This one world is so beautiful, with the sweet green willows shushing in the August breeze, and the halting, diamond turns of water from small plastic sprinklers, the ordinary grace of a swerve of bright white birds and the spun net of high, floating clouds. The blue–green weed called miner's lettuce, abundant in the sidewalks of the city, the first snow on the black iron railings, the wet tear and tear of it, and the shocking shimmer: the yellow of oak in October. The trailing guitar from a block away, the way that wood rubs dark gold and soft from use, the crack of a hammer, clear and high, the sway of each of us on the train, in wet wool coats, the bodies of others in the soft black coats, elbows, the downward glancing grin, the way the old man down the alley whistles a song he learned as a boy. Seedtime and harvest time, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, always and again.
That last phrase is from Genesis 8:22, after the flood, and coming at the end of God's decision not again to destroy His creation, although humanity remains wicked.
So rich, so demanding: religion and religious studies at its best!
