What does spirituality have to do with addressing climate change?
This week, climate change chaplain Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner talks with me about how spirituality– a capacity to bear witness to suffering and a commitment to collectively mending the world in every moment–can support our climate work. As the world inflames our nervous systems with an onslaught of alarms, spirituality can help us make sense of the chaos, help us feel less small in the work we do, feel grounded despite all the uncertainty, and, most importantly, connect us with others who care as much as we do. Rabbi Ora invites us to imagine every moment as a kind of “hospicing” moment, and “apocalypse” as a kind of revealing, rather than just an end. What skills do we need in order to bear witness to the suffering of beloveds near and far? How can we hold it all?
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Shownotes
- Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner’s website and more about her resources, Exploring Apocalypse
- CIIS program in Climate Psychology Certificate
- The BTS Center’s program for Climate Chaplaincy
- Panu Pihkala and Anya Kamenetz’s resources on ecological grief on the Climate Mental Health Network’s website
- Panu Pihkala’s website
- Thomas Brown poem
- Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” information
- “I contemplate a tree” excerpt by Martin Buber
- Interbeing concept in Buddhism
- A piece about Tikkun Olam and climate change
Transcription
ORA: We're drinking from this firehose of grief and fear and overwhelm. Alarm bells are going off, these alarms really become part of our nervous system.
RAY: Welcome to Climate Magic, where we talk about the relationship between climate change and our hearts and minds. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray, a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt and fellow climate despairing human. I interview experts, activists, and random people as we dive deep into the emotional life of climate politics.
How do our brains, nervous systems, and the culture we live in shape our ability to confront climate change? How can we unlock the emotional and mental capacities that these difficult times demand of us? Join me as we explore these questions on climate magic.
ORA: Paying attention to existence is important when we’re living in a time of climate change because it helps the present moment to not be stolen away from us.
RAY: Today I'm speaking with Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner. Rabbi Nitkin-Kaner is also trained as a trauma informed climate change chaplain and a meditation teacher. Over the past 16 years or so, she's worked in prisons, hospitals and congregations to support people through hard times. She is certified through the California Institute of Integral Studies New-ish program in Climate Psychology, as well as in clinical pastoral education, intergenerational trauma, and yoga and meditation. She created a practice specifically to bring these skills of witnessing and processing trauma and grief to climate work called Exploring Apocalypse. Exploring Apocalypse is her response to the “what is your climate magic?” question. It is how Rabbi Ora applies her rabbinic and pastoral inclinations to the present challenge of global warming.
I wanted to talk with Rabbi Ora because a lot of people would say that the climate crisis is really a spiritual crisis. Whether they mean that the climate crisis is being caused by our lack of spiritual appreciation for the sacred earth and a lack of moral obligation to each other, or whether they mean spirituality would move us more quickly and collectively toward climate action, spirituality is nonetheless an essential aspect of thinking about our inner dimensions of the climate emergency.
I hope you enjoy this conversation. Rabbi Ora is a light. Let's dive in.
Welcome to the show, Rabbi Ora. How are you doing?
ORA: Thank you so much, Sarah. I'm so glad to be talking with you today.
RAY: I've learned about your work because we swim in similar circles. And therefore, I know that you're okay with just diving right into the deep end. I wanted to ask a warm up question, which is not really warm, it’s hot right away. Do you have a story of a particular spiritual or emotional reckoning around the climate crisis?
ORA: Oh, you want to start with a reckoning? Yeah.
RAY: Your personal story? Yeah. I figured you could handle it. I’m like, “She's a rabbi. She can go there.”
ORA: I think that I am having moments of continuous reckoning with the climate crisis. Right? I never had a conversion moment where I went from everything is fine to everything is profoundly challenged, and everything is falling apart. And I think that's rare. I think that if you ask folks who work in the sphere of climate change and climate emotions, climate science, climate activism, often folks have a kind of conversion moment, which is, you know, ironic.
But like I was saying, for me, I think there are so many moments of reckoning. So I am thinking of a moment I had yesterday. So I have a baby who's two months old. I was sitting at my computer. I was wearing her in a carrier. So smelling her sweet head with its tufts, fluff of hair just under my chin. And I came upon an article through LinkedIn, and the article was about fears of drought and flooding in subsaharan Africa.
And so I felt grief, and I felt a profound sense of ineffectiveness, and I felt anger at my ineffectiveness, and I felt gratitude for my position. You know, I am a white Jewish woman who lives in Connecticut in the United States. And I started thinking about, oh, where should my partner and I, potentially move to in the coming years to be able to give our child the best life, the best access to resources that she could possibly get. And then I felt guilt that I have the ability currently to make these kinds of choices.
And so I think that's all a reckoning, right? And, you know, and that was just what was happening in my head and my emotions. I, you know, I took a minute to check in with myself and ask myself what's happening in my body. And I noticed that my shoulders were tight. I noticed that my breathing was not deep. I noticed that I had a vague sense in my body of really like wanting to run, wanting to move and then, you know, so what did I do with all that? Well, I finished reading the article and I closed out that tab and I went back to the Microsoft Word document that I had been typing into, and I continued to type.
And so, you know, I think we're all continuously having these moments of revelation, these moments of reckoning, and they sit on our heart. They sit in our heart. They sit in our bodies, and then we just go on about our days. And I think that's really profoundly difficult. And it's an experience that so much of us are having day in and day out, hourly, minute to minute. And so I think all of these mini- moments of reckoning are really an invitation. They're a call to us to ask, so what do we what do we do with all this?
RAY: Yeah, I love that you described it not as one conversion moment, but the sort of, painful, chronic sense of something being wrong and the feeling of carrying that in your mind and heart and body and the juxtaposition of that every day with the smell of your baby's head and the Word document there. And the daily grind of life kind of carrying on and giving us a sense of like, oh, I think that's just normal. No, just a second ago they felt totally apocalyptic, and now they're normal. Kind of a whiplash of that.
I wanted to sort of use that as a lens into how you got to the work that you're doing, and how you would describe what you currently do as your work. So you have chaplaincy going on. You have trauma informed practices. What are you doing? And what is that magic you're bringing to the climate world through your lens?
ORA: Yeah, yeah. So I am a climate change chaplain, and the way that I came to this work was really a lifelong paying of attention to suffering, which wasn't volitional. It wasn't on purpose. It's just the way that I've always been. And so I remember as a child, a young child walking on the streets of downtown Toronto, where I grew up, and seeing folks who were unhoused and watching my parents walk past them without really acknowledging them. Watched dozens and hundreds of people pass them by. And I had this feeling of bewilderment and outrage and sorrow and this feeling of, you know, how can this be? How can we pretend that we're not seeing someone asking for our help?
And so that noticing of suffering and the outrage and the sorrow that came with it, continued in some of the volunteering that I did in my teens and 20s. In my late 20s and early 30s, I worked with wrongfully incarcerated folks, in prison in Louisiana and also with exonerees. So formerly wrongfully incarcerated folks. And I also worked as a chaplain in hospitals, in prison settings with elders in hospice. And again, there was a chronic noticing of suffering for me and a developing sense of the profound value of being a witness to folks who are in a space of confinement, and to folks who are in a space of confronting really issues of suffering and issues of life and issues of death.
So I like to start with folks on thinking about what conventional chaplaincy is, because I think that can be really helpful as a basis to better understand climate change chaplaincy. So if we ask the question, where do we typically find chaplains working? It’s in hospitals. It's in hospice like you mentioned. It's in prisons. It's an elder care facilities and then less well known, but we also have chaplains working in post natural disaster spaces, in movement spaces, and also, on police forces and also in, in the military.
And like I was saying before, these are places where people are really being forced to confront their own vulnerability and/or they are places where they're being forced to confront others’ vulnerability and the limits of their bodies, the limits of their minds, the limits of their hearts, the limits of their lives, of their lifespans.
So turning our attention to climate change, this is really also what climate change is doing to us as well. But it's not confined to a particular environment like the walls of a hospital. It's everywhere and it's all around us, and it's happening past, present and future. So climate change is, you could say, forcing us or you could say inviting us to engage with vulnerability and to engage with the limits of our and others’ bodies and minds and hearts and lives.
But again, it's not a temporary experience. It's a prolonged or you could even say permanent experience of liminality. And I think that because of that, it's a space of continuous transformation. So we are being invited to experience the present moment as a space of continuous transformation, which is really, really hard. Right? It's not easy.
RAY: Well, liminality, when you say liminality, I'm assuming you mean this kind of like trying to be in an in-between space, in between life and death, in between strength and vulnerability or any two kind of polar opposites? Kind of balancing act in space. And by definition, that is uncomfortable because it isn't stable.
ORA: Yeah, yeah. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. So we are in an experience of extended otherness, of extended kind of in betweenness between what we used to know, what we had become familiar with and what is to come. And we don't quite know what is, what is yet to come. And that is really, really uncomfortable because uncertainty is really uncomfortable.
RAY: Yeah. And in psychology they have this sort of metric like how tolerant are you of instability or uncertainty and you know, uncertainty avoidance and uncertainty intolerance and these kind of keywords that happen in psychology to think about, you know, are people able to deal with difficult issues. And I think that, you know, your background also in trauma and intergenerational trauma, has a lot to do with that, right? That, uncertainty intolerance is oftentimes if, if a person has experienced trauma or inherits trauma in their bodies through intergenerational trauma, they may not actually have a ton of tolerance for uncertainty, it might be even more diminished. Or if they've done a lot of healing work around it might be even more robust than the average person who doesn't have trauma. Which is to say, no average person doesn't have trauma. So I should say that differently. But, right, this kind of like assumed, you know, sort of normative metric of like- absent of trauma, what would your nervous system allow you to handle in terms of uncertainty? And how does trauma play into that? I'm wondering, yeah, since your background and you, you know, wrote a thesis on it, I think I've introduced an intergenerational trauma as kind of your expertise. I'm wondering if you can bring that lens into what we're talking about here, too.
ORA: I think we are living through a time of collective and individual traumatization. You know, I don't know about you and your engagement with technology, your phone, your computer. But, you know, I think my experience and what's very common for many of us is, you know, you wake up, you pick up your phone, you open your computer, and there's an onslaught of devastation just coming at you.
And as human beings, I think we’re profoundly not built to be taking in that much loss. And that much fear and that much hopelessness. But that has in just a few years, become the norm. And so we're drinking from this firehose of grief and fear and overwhelm and I think that what ends up happening is alarm bells are going off, alarm bells are going off out in the world– we have people yelling, our house is on fire, metaphorically. We have people yelling our democracy is falling apart. We have people yelling there are genocides happening in the world.
And I think that we're hearing the alarms and instead of acting or running or moving in response, because that's traditionally how we would respond if something was on fire, literally, these alarms really become part of our nervous system, a chronic part of our nervous system, a chronic and continuously activated part of our nervous system. And one of the basic hallmarks of trauma is that when you are experiencing a traumatic moment or an extended traumatic time, you're not actually able to process reality as it's happening. It's like it doesn't, the body, the brain, the heart is not actually able to integrate reality.
That's why I think that chaplaincy and not just chaplaincy, but simply hearing one another, listening to one another, asking one another, how are you doing? And really listening to the response allows us to witness one another, particularly when we can't see ourselves in the moment of shattering, and particularly when we can't hold ourselves through this time of shattering. And so being witnessed when we can't witness ourselves, that's so vital. And again, that's both the role of a chaplain, and that's also the role of beloveds in community. That's the role of me. That's the role of you. That's the role of family members. That's the role of friends. That's the role of colleagues. Ideally, being able to see and hold one another when we aren't fully able to see and hold ourselves.
RAY: I love what you're inviting here as, well, this is not chaplaincy just for some sort of like, end of life thing, or the moment of passing the threshold of some kind. There's no threshold. It's a constant threshold, if you will. This sort of bearing witness to the inflammation of that chronic alarm system going off that you described. Right. You've just put it into some beautiful context that this is not just a one event thing. So, thank you for that. Yes. I feel all of a sudden, like, maybe I could use some of that bearing witness. That sounds like a good thing for, you know, the beloveds around me and for me to do for my beloved. So thank you. That was beautiful.
You have been trained in the in area of Reconstructionist Rabbi and interdenominational climate change chaplaincy. What is that?
ORA: What.
RAY: Are those things? What are those pieces? I'm sort of putting one piece in at a time to your bio. Like, tell me. Unpack that one.
ORA: Yeah. So Reconstructionist Rabbi. We all contain multitudes.
RAY: We're just going to pick apart a few of your parts. Not all of them.
ORA: Wonderful. Yeah. So, Reconstructionist Rabbi. So Reconstructionist Judaism is one of the denominations of Judaism. So folks tend to be more familiar with Orthodoxy, with Conservative Judaism, with Reformed Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism is, you know, is another one of these denominations. It tends to, practically speaking, offer a home to folks who are real questioners, who are loving wrestlers with tradition and with God. It offers a home to a lot of Jewish Agnostics and Jewish atheists. And it's for folks who want to be living a meaning-filled life that is informed by the traditions of the past, by our inherited Jewish rituals, myths, stories, but also takes into account the realities of living in the present moment and in a secular world.
RAY: Great. And that sounds to me like that's part of the interdenominational part too, sort of welcoming in that sense, to a lot of varieties of practice, including perhaps people who don't identify even with the Jewish inheritance.
ORA: Yeah, exactly. And so, one of the aspects of my work that I find valuable in terms of my learning and my growth and also has become, an important value for the work that I offer to other individuals and communities is being able to work not just across denominational lines within Judaism, but also working across denominational ecclesiastical lines with folks from many other faith traditions and with folks who don't identify with a faith tradition, with a religion, or have experienced profound wounding around a faith tradition in their youth and chose out of a need to protect themselves or out of a sense of values not in alignment with the value of their inherited tradition to distance themselves entirely validly from religion.
And so when we were you know, we spoke a moment ago about being large and containing multitudes, you very beautifully, spoke about the complexity of my experience of, again, being with my baby and her carrier and taking in all this devastating news about climate change. You talked about the complexity, the multiplicity of that experience. And I have a dear friend who is a Buddhist priest, and what he calls that is the dirty mixture. He calls it the dirty mixture of life, not dirty in the sense of bad, but dirty in the sense of intermingled and complex. And so, you know, I wouldn't have that wisdom if I wasn't in relationship with, if I wasn't working with folks from a wide variety of different traditions.
RAY: This raises the question of, sort of the broader question of is spirituality uniquely situated in general? Not just Judaism, but like you said, you sort of have this chaplaincy orientation, this cross and interdenominational approach. Folks are seekers, as you said, folks are loving wrestlers, you describe them, with God, I love that description. Is there a role for spirituality in general that you're sort of putting your eggs in the basket of spirituality, even if it's not a particular version of it? If we speak about it writ large, you know, under a large umbrella. What's the role of spirituality in thinking about the climate crisis? Is it necessary or is it just a particular tool that people who need it can sign up for.
ORA: Okay. So let's go back to basics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. And what is spirituality. Excited to answer them. But what is spirituality. What do we mean when we say I had a feeling you say that. Oh here we go. Yes. It's very hard to pin down so I'd love to hear. What do you mean by spirituality? What do I mean by spirituality? Yeah. Yeah.
RAY: Great. Well, I mean, I don't obviously have a thorough answer for that, but I think for the purposes of this question, what I think I'm trying to get at is there are people in the world of psychology studies that say, you know, there's only, psychology is the most essential set of tools for leveraging human change against climate change. Or you have people who are in, like maybe geophysics who would say this set of tools over here in geophysics– we need these things the most. We won't get anything else done if we don't have these things. Or you have people in, let's say, policy who say nothing's going to happen unless we plan and we have policy and law that shepherds everybody in the systems all in the right direction.
And I have a hard time getting on board with any one thing myself. So I'm a little bit of like a let's have it all kind of person. My theory of change is we needed all of it everywhere, all the time. But sometimes those approaches to change are in conflict with each other, too. So that gets at a dirty mixture right there.
But spirituality is like another one, right? So some I have heard lots of folks who are more working climate change spiritual spaces or religion spaces who would say we simply the very fact of our climate crisis is a sign of a spiritual crisis, and spirituality is the most essential tool to deal with this. We will not be able to deal with it without it.
And so I guess that doesn't define spirituality for you. But I think what I'm asking is, from the perspective of someone whose bread and butter is working in a spiritual space with people to help people touch this issue through a spiritual dimension. And when I think of that, I think of it's larger than themselves. There's something I often think that spirituality is the thing that makes people get over the sense of feeling small, right? Like they're not just alone in all of this, whatever they do is not futile, it’s part of a larger project. It expands their smallness beyond themselves. They're doing this work for some other higher purpose, let's say put it in quote marks there. That's I guess that's what I'm chewing on here. Like, do you need to have that to help you overcome some of the stagnancy and apathy and maybe even denial that often stymies our work on climate change?
ORA: Yeah. Beautiful reflection, beautiful questions. I loved what you said about spirituality being an invitation to feel oneself as not so small and so isolated and so alone in the world. You use the word need. And I heard an inherent should, like do we need spirituality to face the climate crisis holistically?
RAY: It's a little bit of a trick question.
ORA: Should we? I really reject the finger wagging that's inherent to any and every siloed way of engaging with the climate crisis. Right. You know, and I think for another, another time, another conversation, why are we building up these self-aggrandizing silos of our own areas of expertise? But, you know, don't get me started on that.
So I think most basically, climate change is eroding our most basic sense of trust. It's eroding our trust that our home, our planet, will be able to sustain life indefinitely. And it's eroding our trust that the future will be better than the past. And those are two profoundly fundamental and profoundly basic ways that humans have been engaging with living on our planet since time immemorial.
And so it's so profoundly painful, and it's so profoundly challenging to be living in a time where our most basic sense of trust is falling apart or shattering and being eroded. And so from that perspective, you know, I would call that a kind of spiritual crisis. And, you know, I put you on the spot and you very graciously answered my question, like. What is spirituality? So.
RAY: I didn't really.
ORA: It was okay. It's wonderful. It was wonderful. So, you know, I'll offer an official definition. And I know this because, you know, I have looked it up. You know, you didn't have the chance to look it up. So, you know, so an official definition of spirituality, and this comes from the National Consensus Project for Palliative Care. I just like it. I think it's graspable. So spirituality is “how a person seeks and expresses meaning, a purpose and connectedness to the self, to others, to nature and to the sacred.”
So connection to the self, to others, to nature and to the sacred, is spirituality. And I think that climate change is transforming these individual aspects as well. Right. You know, just as a thought experiment, you know, you work primarily with young people. Are you able to, you know, think with me about how they are experiencing, an erosion or a disconnection to self or to others or to nature, to the sacred?
RAY: Yeah. It's interesting, the description when you said, I think that we could describe this as a spiritual problem or a spiritual matter. My mind went directly to, oh, the word I prefer is existential. And which isn't to say that's a better word honestly, I just noticed myself doing that. And I think the reason is because if I brought up to my students, ah! I have a diagnosis for you. Everything you're sharing with me, you're having a spiritual crisis. I think some of them would go Yes, totally! I'm lacking the sacred in my life. I'm lacking larger purpose beyond myself. All those things. Right. And the secularization of the world. Not necessarily the kind of like, sacrilegious part, but like the lack of animus, a lack of sacredness in the world is something that's causing the climate crisis, and we don't value the sacredness of the things around us– the animals, ecosystems, the air, or whatever, human life– enough to do enough about it. And that feels like a moral problem. And spirituality is certainly an answer to that, or an epistemology or a way of being in the world that would support a more moral set of ethics and actions and behaviors. The reason existential is a word that comes to my mind is because to me, if I use that word, more students go, yes.
ORA: Yeah.
RAY: Because it feels like saying spiritual without actually saying spiritual. You know, I don't know. So for whatever it's worth, yeah, I think and I also don't know, I think a lot of students, if they already come in with, traditions in their families, like for example, if they're native or if they, you know, come in with a faith practice in their in their background, they're more likely to, bring that up. But I think in general, environmental students, environmental studies students tend to think that their spirituality doesn't have a place in that, in the room. I think that's my thoughts.
ORA: Yeah, yeah. And I think that is because, or one of one of the reasons for that is that for centuries and centuries, religion, which I think is different than spirituality, religion has been pitted against science. And so, you know, you're either in the silo of science or you're in the silo of religion. And, you know, I think religion offers us, can offer us some valuable ways of engaging with the climate crisis. Right. So, religion can offer us specific religions, can offer us meaningful stories, meaningful myths that ground us and that help us feel seen and that put our present moment in perspective. Religion can offer us a connection to community, you know, a place in which we feel together and a place from which we build together. And basically, religion can offer us metaphors and similes and ways of thinking that allow us to nourish ourselves and order our lives. So that's religion.
But I would say that religion is within, you know, religion is a small circle within a much, much, much broader circle, of spirituality aka existentialism. And I don't think there's significant difference between them. And my take on spirituality is that spirituality is simply about paying attention. It's just about paying attention to what is and to what could be.
And one of the fields that nourishes me is poetry. And there is this 19th century poet, named Thomas Brown, and he has this gorgeous poem, I think the title is something like, “if thou couldst empty all thy self of self,” and it's, a beautiful metaphor of God looking us over, looking an individual over and saying, you know, you are full of self. You are like a shell that is fully inhabited. You are all replete with self. You are all replete with very thou.
And so I think the invitation of spirituality is to not empty one's self of self. Right? To be in self, to be in self, engaging with the present moment, with reality, with what is, but also simultaneously about being open to something beyond the narrow confines of the self. So something beyond the confines of our ego, something beyond the confines of our fears, something beyond the confines of our striving.
And so I think that spirituality or paying attention to existence, we could say, is important when we're living in a time of climate change, because it helps the present moment to not be stolen from us. It allows us to remain connected to the moment, to the self, to others, to nature. And all of these connections are sacred. All of these connections are sacred. Whether or not you believe in a small G god, whether or not you believe in a big G God, all of these connections are sacred and are a reminder that we are all part of this changing world.
RAY: Yeah, I love that, and I, I do think that connection with the more-than-human, with existence, with each other, with ourselves, you know, can one have that and not have something like spirituality? I don't think so. Right? And I think what you're doing is we create a much bigger umbrella to say if you have that awareness and what you said attention, that attention to your existence and to these relationships by itself, that it is in itself is spirituality. And so it's not such a big scary thing to say, Is it a spiritual connection? Like you are somehow, feeling some sort of magical electricity go through every time you recognize that tree is a thou, you know, like it's a, you know, I'm referring to Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” there, right. Which I'll put in the show notes, but I, I sometimes teach that “I contemplate a tree” aspect, from his from his book, I and Thou, and just explore this like how do how have sort of Western religious traditions try to grapple with, with the, an interdependence that, of course, is law much longer in indigenous traditions and in other, other traditions in Buddhism is called interbeing this kind of recognition of interconnection that is more of a spiritual or religious, I'll stick with spiritual, perspective. Thank you. That was beautiful.
I was going to ask you, particularly about grief because of course, you're in the chaplaincy world. That's an emotion that's probably one of the highest registered words you work with. And of course, there's climate grief, things going on. And you don't have to be a chaplain to be deeply steeped in the world of grief. But, you quoted on your website, Jamie Anderson's “ grief is just love with no place to go.” I love that quote, too. I love thinking about grief, not as a scary thing out there that we might encounter one day, but just as the, a partner to love, you know, comes with love. And who would want to deprive their life of deep love? Nobody. So it will, it is going to come with the grief too and sort of finding some welcoming space for that about how it's a testament to what we love.
I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about grief. You talk about cumulative grief and disenfranchised grief and anticipatory grief. There's also, of course, things like ambiguous loss, all these kinds of clunky words that the English language, people are trying to come up with to help us grapple with the grief that's unique to things around climate change. I'm wondering if, from your work with this, your expertise with this, you can help us think through understanding climate change through grief in some of these, you know, new, more granular words about that folks are playing around with them that you are also doing work with clients and stuff in your in Exploring Apocalypse, which I haven't asked about. Yeah. What's Exploring Apocalypse. What's that?
ORA: You know, what should I answer that first and then we can go back?
RAY: I think so I think so I think that's do that.
ORA: What is Exploring Apocalypse? So Exploring Apocalypse is the name of my climate chaplaincy practice, and I think it warrants an explanation. Why did I choose to name my practice Exploring Apocalypse? You know, big words, long words, I mean.
RAY: Sign me up for that! That sounds fun.
ORA: Right? Exactly. So starting in 2020, when I was serving as a congregational rabbi, I kept hearing folks in my congregation, my friends, my colleagues, people on the internet, people at large, I kept hearing folks using the word apocalypse to describe either the present or the near future. And sometimes they were mentioning apocalypse tongue in cheek. Sometimes it seemed like they were using it reasonably seriously, and sometimes it was a kind of mix or melding of the two.
So I started to get curious about, you know, why is this word apocalypse so fitting? Like, why are so many folks using the word apocalypse to describe the present or the near future? And, you know, if we look up the dictionary definition of apocalypse, it's a very serious event resulting in great destruction and change, and that's coming out of Christian eschatology. So Christian notions of the end of the world, which we see primarily or originally in the Book of Revelations in the Christian Bible, and part of the Book of Revelations is profound and prolonged destruction. So, freshwater turns to blood, the sea boils, you know, armies with hundreds of millions of warriors lay waste to the earth. Mountains fall to the ground. You know, very vivid descriptions of the end.
And I started to ask myself, okay, but what happens when we feel like we're living in an extended apocalypse, when it's not just, oh, the end, but when it's end, then end then end then end. What does it do to us when we have this sense that disaster is both here now, but it's also something that we're continuously anticipating. What does it do to our sense of safety, our sense of trust, our sense of efficacy in the world, our sense of agency.
And I'm a huge language nerd. So I was like, what is the original meaning of the word apocalypse? And I discovered that it comes from Greek and it means to uncover, a means to reveal. So we could say that we are living in a time of apocalypse and go with, you know, apocalypse meaning destruction.
But we could also say we are living in a time of apocalypse, meaning a time when much is being uncovered and much is being revealed in the world. And then also, of course, in us, because we are a part of the world. And so my work as a climate change chaplain with Exploring Apocalypse is to help people explore their fear, explore their grief, look at, what are their particular visions of the future. What happens after the end that they are imagining? What happens when they get small? What happens when they imagine themselves to be larger and more effective than their wildest possible dreams and connected to a world of people who want very much for the world to continue to exist.
And so how do we do all that from a place of soft attention, and from a place of care and from a place of connection? So there's more information on my website if folks want to learn more about, you know, the name Exploring Apocalypse, I would say, you know, it's an invitation into thinking what happens beyond our worst fears.
RAY: That's that's beautiful. So again, sort of saying in this liminal space, not just this is really uncertain and uncomfortable, but this liminal space is an opportunity for that transformation. So that kind of reframe of thinking about apocalypse as a birth of some kind, of something that if we could imagine it, we could maybe build it.
ORA: Exactly.
RAY: And I think that work is not something we're trained to do in school. We're not trained to do it, maybe in churches and our organized religious spaces, we might be a little bit. But, you know, for the most part, our mainstream places that students are coming up through my classes with have very, very, very little capacity and skill around imagining what's possible.
And I think that one of the big epiphanies that I've come to and working with climate anxiety and young people is, wow, we need to do a lot of work there. So this sounds like that's one place where our work overlaps, which is really cool.
Yeah. And I mean, do you think that there's something to be said about grief uniquely there about these different types of grief? I just was sort of hoping you might parse out how grief, through climate change, might be understood in these more granular or terms like cumulative or disenfranchized or ambiguous loss. Or are those useful categories for your work?
ORA: They're both extremely useful, and I have so much gratitude to the folks who are working at the forefront of climate psychology, climate emotions research. You know, Panu Pihkala work has been foundational to my understanding of climate emotions and Anya Kamenetz and, you know, Climate Mental Health Network, those are all, you know, wonderful, wonderful resources.
And, you know, there's so much out there now, if we look for it, parsing our climate emotions, I think it's so valuable because we know that if we can't name what we're experiencing, in some ways it's like we're not actually experiencing it. We can't see it as real and valid for ourselves, and we can't communicate it to others and ask for witnessing and ask for being held and ask for the caring that we also desperately need in this time. So I have so much respect for and gratitude for these, these lists of climate emotions. And I think that there's often kind of a disconnect between, like, what am I actually experiencing? And this like naming of a feeling. So I want to I want to get, as you said, granular and practical and specific.
One of the hats that I wear is, offering support groups for different populations. So for the last few years, I've run a support group for young people who are grappling with the question of whether or not to bring a biological child into a world of climate change.
RAY: Wow. That's appropriate, given you're a new mom. Wow. This must be a personal journey for you.
ORA: Yeah, 100%. I mean, you know, we are all grappling with all of this personally, professionally, politically, existentially, spiritually. We're in it, right? We're all in it. But there's a way of looking at the particular kind of grief of, let's say, a person who wants to be a parent, wants to bring a child into the world and care for them and nurture them and see them grow up. And they decide not to have a child because either they are concerned about the impact of the child on the world being an additional consumer. And/or they're concerned about the impact of the world on the child. Right? They're concerned about their child growing up into profound change, into profound deprivation, into times of disaster. And so they decide not to have a child. And for the rest of their life, they live with a kind of continuous grief and a continuous loss for what might have been. So we can call that by many names, you know, we can call that a complicated loss. We can call that an ambiguous loss. We can call that a loss that society doesn't at present moment fully recognize. But that person is walking around having made a life for themselves around this, this pocket of grief that they are continuously going to be holding for the rest of their lives. So, you know, that's just one example of the kind of grief that someone might experience in this time of climate change. And they're so varied and they're so multiple and they're so profoundly tender.
RAY: Yes. And that kind of, need to name it. But also the inevitable limitations of putting it in a taxonomy of some kind. Yeah. So yes. Thank you. That was a really powerful example.
We hear a lot about the tradition of tikkun olam. This is a sort of, you know, for anybody who might not know much about Judaism, they might know about that. Can you unpack that and talk a little bit about how that's really become a very, well, I think, a very beautiful way. But I'm telling you what, I think you can share whatever you think of how Judaism is pulling on traditions to meet the polycrisis and maybe that's a start for you. I'm just sort of giving these little bits to start, but you can reject that and go whatever direction you want. Go for it.
ORA: Yeah.
RAY: And how does that had to do with climate change?
ORA: Yeah, I could speak about tikkun olam. My love of it, my challenges with it for days and days.
RAY But you know, wrestling. Loving wrestling again. Yeah.
ORA: So tikkun olam is this notion that comes from esoteric Kabbalistic Judaism, but at its core, what it says is that our world contains brokenness and that we are partners with God, with the sacred, with one another, partners in healing some of that brokenness throughout time. And what this is rooted in is the story of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. The very beginning. It says “in the beginning,” and it's an accounting of creation. And so, according to this mythic story, we have God creating the world in six days. And then on the eve of the sixth day, through to the seventh day, God rests from the work of creation.
And on that first Shabbat, God takes a temporary pause in creating. And we see that because, you know, not to geek out too much again on etymology, but in the Hebrew, the word for creating, the verb is an infinitive. So “to create”, “la’asot”, and so the nature of the infinitive is that it is something that is continuously happening. So our world is a world not that God created and then presided over, not that God created and is just like watching us screw up. Our world is a world in which creation is continuously unfolding, and so there is always more to be done through the work of our hands. So tikkun olam, ‘tikkun”, to heal, to put back together, to mend “olam”, our world.
RAY: Thank you. I can see why that's something that is arising a lot in conversations about climate change. Okay, so getting personal again. But maybe it feels good to. What's your personal practice of spiritual grounding?
ORA: So I get asked this question a lot.
RAY: Well, we all want to know because we want to do it. You must have it all figured out.
ORA: Exactly. So I will say, just like every single one of us, I do not have it all figured out.
RAY: Oh, gosh. Okay. Press delete. We're going back.
ORA: And so, you know, I'm happy to share my own practices. And, you know, I have shared them in public spaces before. I've talked about how, when I'm feeling overwhelmed, I go outside and I lay down on the earth and sometimes my neighbors or the people walking by me in the park are concerned.
RAY: We need to normalize lying down on the earth more. We really do.
ORA: You know, I find it helpful to engage with different elements. So, you know, taking time, maybe rituals occasionally with water. You know, a personal care practice is really talking with my loved ones. But the reality is, number one, I haven't figured it all out. None of us have. None of us ever will. We're just continuously trying. Right. And number two is what works for me one day doesn't necessarily work for me another day. And certainly all the more so then what works for me, what I'm telling you, go lie down on the earth, may not work for you at all. So you are the expert on yourself, right? And I don't mean just you Sarah. I mean you writ large, everyone who's listening, you're the expert on yourself, right?
You know whether meditation is your vibe or whether meditation feels like punishment. You know, whether going swimming in the ocean is nourishing to you or whether it's a terrifying experience. So you already have within you a sense of what you need. So how can you get quiet? Or how can you get a little bit quieter? How can you clear away the swirl to make room for an awareness of what's nourishing for you. And that's it. It's simply a question of what would nourish you moment to moment to moment.
RAY: Thank you for that. Thank you for sharing what I'm understanding in talking to you as your unique climate magic, which is that you are trained as a rabbi, you are trained in intergenerational trauma, you studied it and you live it. You have personal experience with having a child in this moment and being in a support group for folks who are thinking about that deeply. You're also doing all of the work of thinking through grief as not just a one time event, but happening all the time in our lives and bearing witness and supporting and caring for beloveds as the solution in your mind, the solution that you want to choose in the work you do to the climate crisis. So I really appreciate you spelling that out. Thank you so much.
ORA: Thank you so much, Sarah. And it was just such a lovely and nourishing experience to be in conversation with you. And I'm so appreciative of the work of this podcast and of the very important work that you do in the world. So thank you.
RAY: Thanks Ora.
You've just been listening to my conversation with Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner, founder of the climate chaplaincy practice Exploring Apocalypse. You can find Shownotes for our conversation and listen to more episodes of Climate Magic on khsu.org. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
