The Torah implies that Noah remained speechless when he saw the earth’s desolation after the great flood. The Zohar says he wept.
I feel horrified, torn in the guts, and desperate for the poor people whose lives have been ruined by the destruction of the Karkhova dam.
World Jewish Relief, who launched an immediate appeal, are doing their utmost to support many of the tens of thousands of people who have had to be evacuated. They’re working through the local agencies with whom they have long-standing relationships, focussing on providing for the immediate needs of clean drinking water and food.
In Kherson, they’ve helped move all the equipment out of the low-lying Jewish community centre to the synagogue which sits on higher ground. The city’s population is extraordinarily resilient. The grandmother of a congregant has remained there with stalwart courage and determination throughout the war, despite the town being on the front line. Now, too, she doesn’t want to leave.
We’re keeping an eye on the long-term consequences too, World Jewish Relief told me. These are unknowable and all but unthinkable. I spent an hour with Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski who runs the London-based welcome centre for Ukrainian people displaced by the war. I thought I’d gone to offer solidarity. In truth, I went to receive it from this wonderful man.
‘It’s Ukraine’s richest black earth that’s being destroyed,’ he said. The region helps feed the world. Covered in floodwaters, then left full of debris and without irrigation, tens of thousands of hectares could easily become semi-desert. ‘Countless mines have been washed away with the floods,’ he added. ‘They’ll be covered in silt and almost impossible to detect.’I thought of children, decades from now, going off innocently to play in what look like safe fields…
It’s a disaster not only for humans, but also for domestic animals and wildlife. The bishop showed me a video sent to him from the area by Whatsapp of a Ukrainian soldier donning one of those pink doughnut inflatable rings people play with at the seaside, before stepping far out into the floods to save a desperate dog.
But no one can rescue the drowning wildlife or restore the unique habitats lost, swamped not just by flood waters but by the pollutants carried with them and deposited in their wake. President Zelensky is probably right to call this the greatest human-made disaster since Chernobyl. Ukrainian ecologists have long been assessing the tragic environmental consequences of the war.
‘The earth was full of violence,’ says the Torah, presenting, not entirely convincingly, God’s reasons for bringing the great flood. The destruction of the Karkhova dam was not the fault of the earth. The earth and nature are blameless; they, and tens of thousands of human beings, are victims. They are entirely helpless in the wake of this deluge. The heart aches for them. The violence is entirely caused by so-called homo sapiens.
Precisely who is guilty of destroying the dam, and how they did it, are the subjects of intense debate. Military intelligence will sooner or later uncover the specific details. But whatever the case, those who started this war of aggression hold ultimate responsibility.
Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, co-founder and trustee of EcoJudaism
