Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg

Good Morning, ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people:’ these beautiful words from Isaiah open the Seven Weeks of Consolation which begin now, and lead up to the Jewish New Year. Yet only days ago was the bleakest date in the Jewish calendar, the Fast of the Ninth of Av, marking the destruction of Jerusalem. The embers of the fires that devoured God’s temple were still red hot in memory; the surrounding hills, once forested, were devastated. Yet the rabbis insisted on proclaiming Isaiah’s words of comfort. How dared they? How could they be so brazen! Would we say, “Take comfort!” while the flames near Madrid and Bordeaux are burning, bringing horror to the people, fire-fighters, animals? But the prophetic message was not: ‘Don’t worry. It’ll all be okay.’ Rather, it is ‘We must look on disaster, then take hope, not by turning away, but by living differently. ‘Prepare a highway for God,’ Isaiah continues: ‘Make the world better,’ he demands. I thought of his words as I cut turfs to help Tracy and Roger Mclachlan rewild their 91 acres at Bac Dhub in the Highlands. We were building leaky dams to raise the water level of a stream so that it would rewet and restore the peatland. In short, we were doing what beavers do naturally. ‘The peat will regrow one millimetre per year,’ Tracy explained. ‘But it’ll absorb more carbon than trees.’ It’s her pledge to the future. I compare that one millimetre per year to the forest fires raging forward and shudder. Where’s your comfort, Isaiah? But I know that countless local groups worldwide are saying: ‘This is our place, our park, trees, birds. We’re determined to do everything we can for our world, our children, our future.’ I speak to Simon Oldridge, Co-founder of the National Emergency Briefing UK, in which the country’s leading experts on security, health, food and weather tell the climate crisis as it is. The film of the briefing has already been screened to over 2,000 groups. ‘People feel better when they’ve seen it,’ Simon explains. They say, ‘The issues aren’t being boxed away. There are things we can do. People feel motivated.’ Action from the bottom up is great, Simon acknowledges. ‘But we need urgent, galvanising leadership from top down,’ because this is about everything: energy, agriculture, how we eat, travel, insulate homes. That’s Isaiah’s message. ‘Look up and see!’ he insists. This is God’s world. Take comfort, not by turning away, but by treating creation with the love, justice and respect it demands.