Beltane and the Greenhouse Moon
Rough Draft for my Radical Roots of Religion class project.
Inflection points. Distrust of previously treasured institutions. Colleges and Universities. Religion. The U.S. Government. Labor unions. Science and scientists. A sense that the game of life has a cheat code known only to certain races and genders. An at the most basic level knowing that the game no longer needs new players.
Too. That moment in history, ours, when extravagant corporate and consumer spending pushed onto, then well beyond, the boundary between sustainability and self-destruction. Sea levels. Hurricanes. Shifting garden zones. Coral bleaching. The sixth great extinction. And, in spite of clear evidence, no effective measures taken.
Also, paradoxically, a time when individuals report feeling alone. Lonely. More people, less relating. A time when any moral or ethical sense gets shredded by those in positions of power meant to ensure them. A time when the future is not all it used to be.
Yes. Our time. And a propitious time it is. There’s a saying in politics, never waste a good catastrophe. Why? Because when the zeitgeist sinks lower and lower, people will be open to a change. Sometimes any change.
Look at all the MAGA voters who support the peaceful transfer of wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest. Who applaud the pulling back of American support from a world riven by factionalism and despair.
We are at an inflection point. A political, climatological, religious inflection point. This is not the time for incremental change, tweaking old menus for social change. No. This is a time for dreamers and schemers. For people willing to reconstruct, reimagine, re-form their own most basic assumptions about life and its purpose.
The four figures we studied in this class: Kaplan, Heschel, Reb Zalman, Art Green each had radical rethinking to do. And they accepted the task.
As Jews in that tradition and yet liberated from it as a constriction, we find ourselves the ones alive now. Thrown, as Heidegger put it, into this inflection point, with sages as guides, but as guides only. They cannot walk this path for us.
It is up to us to find a new way, one that encompasses Gaia consciousness, a non-supernatural God, action against injustice, and Art Green’s embrace of old forms with new meaning.
A new way that shakes the foundations of metaphysics-as Kaplan did. One that sees the points of cleavage in the religious world and embraces them, challenges them. As Kaplan and Reb Zalman did. One that lives into Judaism as a reservoir of knowledge and ritual, yet a Judaism always adding new knowledge and reconstructing old rituals. As Art Green and Rabbi Rami Shapiro are doing.
And, we must do it together. How? If I have time left, let’s discuss.
Here’s an example of a place to start metaphysically:
Addenda: “A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics—the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they’re right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread.
In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter—living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function.”
They argue that the basic laws of physics are not “complete” in the sense of supplying all we need to comprehend natural phenomena; rather, evolution—biological or otherwise—introduces functions and novelties that could not even in principle be predicted from physics alone.
Hazen came across Szostak’s idea while thinking about the origin of life—an issue that drew him in as a mineralogist, because chemical reactions taking place on minerals have long been suspected to have played a key role in getting life started. “I concluded that talking about life versus nonlife is a false dichotomy,” Hazen said. “I felt there had to be some kind of continuum—there has to be something that’s driving this process from simpler to more complex systems.” Functional information, he thought, promised a way to get at the “increasing complexity of all kinds of evolving systems.””