Forward
10-09-1998
Jewish Environmentalists Beat GE With Willow Sticks
NEW YORK -- A band of Jewish environmental activists,, armed only with willow branches, will confront one of America's largest corporations Sunday on the shores of the Hudson River.
The protest against General Electric is planned for the last day of Sukkot, known as Hoshana Rabbah, which this year falls on October 11. The Jewish environmentalists say they plan to beat the ground at Beacon, N.Y., with the willow branches and pray for the protection of the earth from poisoning.
The ceremony has drawn smirks from GE, which says the substances being protested are not harmful and that the Hudson is cleaner than it has been in years. But Jewish environmentalists say they are doing God's work by demanding that GE begin the process of removing thousands of pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls that the company legally dumped in the river for years, until the chemicals were outlawed in 1976.
'The damage inflicted on the earth and on human beings is not a cost that they accept into their own bookkeeping. The society as a whole and the earth as a whole pays those costs,' said Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of the Shalom Center, which organized the protest ceremony. The Shalom Center, a division of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, says its mandate is tikkum olam, the repair of the world, including 'seeking peace, pursuing justice, healing the earth and building community.'
The sally is the latest in a 15-year political battle fought over several areas of the upper Hudson River. Advocating for cleanup, the Environmental Protection Agency lists PCBs as a probable human carcinogen and released a report in July that PCB levels are rising at 'startling' rates in the Hudson River. The New York State Department of Health recommends that women of childbearing age and children under 15 not eat any fish caught in the Hudson. Armed with scientific studies of its own, GE says that levels of PCBs are declining, that the chemicals pose no carcinogenic danger to humans and that dredging the river would be 'devastating to the area.'
For the moment, GE stands to gain the upper hand in this scientific sparring if language in an appropriations bill passes in Congress as expected. The bill, which would also provide funding to the EPA, would direct the EPA not to initiate any dredging projects before a study by the National Academy of Sciences is completed.
Endorsed by Rep. Gerald Solomon, a Republican from the Hudson Valley, the language is not legally binding, but a spokesman from his office made the congressman's position quite clear: 'It is in the agency's best interest to follow the recommendations of the body that's funding it.'
In the long-short tradition of social activism, however, Rabbi Waskow and his followers will gather to recite hosannas for everything from aardvarks and armadillos to zucchinis and zinnias, drawing on Sukkot's traditional concerns with rain and water to focus on the Hudson. In addition to the willows, which Rabbi Waskow suggests 'connect us with the immediate needs for rain,' the participants will carry the holiday's traditional lulav and etrog, and a Torah scroll, chanting liturgy written for the occasion by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the spiritual guide of the Jewish Renewal movement. Special guests remarkable for their 'eco-healing' efforts -- quite possibly including Pete Seeger, who will be sailing on the Sloop Clearwater at a nearby pumpkin festival --will be offered a chance to carry the scroll.
'Heed the warnings and take action!/Calloused hearts must shed their hardness./Holy fervor speeds our tikkun,/Never more to spoil the Earth,' wrote Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi as part of a longer poem to be read for inspiration at the ceremony.
Calling it a 'profoundly sacred political action,' and invoking Abraham Joshua Heschel's famous civil rights-era comment, 'My legs were praying, ' Rabbi Waskow hopes to inspire Jewish participation beyond his own small group. 'The question for me,' he said, 'is, how do we shape this event so we are talking to the God beyond but also the God within...so each of the people who hears about it will be moved to action.'
Rabbi Waskow called on the key institutions of Jewish life to put environmental healing on their agendas. 'Part of what I hope here is that doing this will move people in the mainstream Jewish frameworks -- in the federations and the synagogues -- to take this up as a serious issue,' he said.
Jewish environmental ceremonies celebrating other bodies of water, inspired by the Hudson River event, will also take place in Oregon, Virginia and Michigan, and in London, Johannesburg and Vancouver. But it will take more than willow beating and hosannas to clean up the Hudson River.
GE spokesmen responded to news of the Hoshana Rabbah ceremony with amusement -- and with the denials that PCBs may be carcinogenic in humans that have marked GE's involvement with this issue for the past 15 years.
'PCBs do not pose health risks,' GE's chief executive officer, John Welch Jr., announced at a shareholders' meeting not long ago. 'We simply do not believe that there are any significant adverse health-effects from PCBs.' Spokesmen charged the activists with playing politics. 'We would hope that the celebration is done on the basis of fact. The river has undergone a spectacular recovery. It's cleaner, more vibrant than it has been in years,' a GE spokesman said.
Ethnic NewsWatch SoftLine Information, Inc., Stamford, CT
