Sometimes, a major disaster can turn out to be a chance for rescue. The oil spill on Israel's coast, the worst ecological disaster the country has seen in 40 years, could be one. The findings are still unclear, but what is clear is that the massive oil leak has been catastrophic for animals and plant life on our coastline, and will dog us for months to come. The images of sea turtles suffocated by oil will stay with us for years.
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When I was starting out in the environmental movement some two decades ago, I missed something. As Dov Khenin describes it, we thought that if we only opened the polluters' eyes, we could create change. Because who isn't in favor of clean air and water? We were wrong. We fell into what ecologist Garrit Hardin termed back in 1968 "the tragedy of the commons." In capitalist reasoning, something has value when it belongs to someone. When someone belongs to everyone it belongs to no one.
The Baba Kama Tractate tells of a man who was cleaning his yard of stones, throwing them out into the street. A passing Hassid asked him, "Why are you throwing stones from a place that does not belong to you to a place that does? The strone-thrower dismissed him in wonder, until the day he tripped on one of the stones that was in the common area and was injured. The Talmud describes the responsible view of the common as "Hassidism."
We need to admit that Israel lags behind the western world in everything having to do with environmental responsibility and legislation. While European countries and even the Gulf emirates are working on plans to wean themselves off oil dependency, we are looking to invest in the "black gold" that is choking off our future. The existing oil laws do not allow close supervision of oil and gas drilling. Do you want to guess which tycoons blocked any changes to it?
A plan that costs nearly a billion shekels ($306 million) proposes building an oil pipeline from the bay of Eilat to the Mediterranean Sea, ending at the refinery area of Ashkelon. Rather than getting rid of the 4,000 dunams (988 acres) of one of the most ecologically dangerous places in Israel, the plan would massively increase the quantity of oil concentrated there. Rather than protect the Arava region, which already choked on some 5 million liters of oil that spilled into the Evrona nature reserve in 2014, the danger will increase manifold, at our expense.
Amazingly, environmentalism and the economy are now heading in the same direction. Solar energy and renewable energy in general are the hottest things in energy high-tech all over the world. But the "startup nation," awash in sunlight, is leaving the field to the leaders of future trends. The oil disaster is a slap in the face that should wake us all up.
The most-quoted Midrash tells of the task god gave to the first human. The order to protect the environment is not only a moral and legal obligation, or just an economic opportunity. It is also one of the most important Jewish values.
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