Pay Attention

“And God appeared to Moses, because he had turned aside to look.” - Exodus 3:4

The Torah is full of big, splashy Hollywood-ready miracles. An entire sea splits in half. Pillars of cloud and fire alternate leading the community by day and night. A mountain explodes with lightening and thunder and the sound of blasting shofars.

By comparison, the miracle of the burning bush-- a little thorny desert shrub that smokes and smolders but, strangely, is not consumed-- doesn't seem particularly impressive. At first glance, Moses himself doesn't even recognize the miraculous quality of what he sees. Only when he turns aside and goes in for a closer examination does he realize that he is witnessing something quite extraordinary. Only then does he hear the Voice of God calling his name.

Lawrence Kushner, a contemporary Reform rabbi and scholar of Jewish mysticism, suggests that we have long misread the story of the burning bush. He writes, “The burning bush was not a miracle. It was a test: God wanted to find out if Moses was capable of paying attention to something for more than a few minutes... There is another world, hidden right here within this one, whenever we pay attention.”

As modern urbanites, we are able to go through our daily lives mostly unconscious of the natural world. Yet, over the last fifty years, the environmental movement has taught us that the future of this planet largely depends on our ability to pay attention to this hidden world: We have must learn to pay attention to the fragile, intricate web that connects all living things. We must learn to ask questions about the origins of the products we use and the foods we eat. We must learn to see the ways, big and small, that our personal consumption choices impact the health of the whole biosphere. It is with good reason that Nigel Savage, the founder of Hazon, has called our era “the age of awareness.”

The choice of whether or not to live in a state of awareness can have profound results. Moses could have walked past the burning bush without a second thought; but, by paying attention he gained the opportunity to bring a message of liberation to his People. We too can ignore our environment, but it will be at our own peril. If we hope to become responsible stewards of this planet for future generations, we must begin by opening our eyes and hearts. We must begin by paying attention.

Rabbi Adam Greenwald is the Revson Rabbinic Fellow of IKAR, a Jewish community that stands at the intersection of spirituality and social justice (www.ikar-la.org). He was ordained by the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in May 2011