An Environmental Confession for the High Holidays

by Rabbi Lawrence Troster for the Huff Post

The Jewish month of Elul is the last month in the year and marks the beginning of the season of repentance that culminates with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Ten Days of Repentance, also known as the High Holidays.

The Jewish concept of repentance is called Teshuvah ("return" in English) and one of the critical aspects of repentance is the act of confession. In the High Holiday liturgy are numerous public confessions that are couched in general terms for a whole series of sins.

Jews confess primarily in public rather than in private, and in general terms rather than in specifics, because this allows everyone in the community to confess without shame or embarrassment. Public confession also binds the sins of one person to that of the whole community so that all take responsibility for one another. While Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) once wrote that we confess in specific terms only for sins between one person and another, sometimes it is worthwhile to confess publicly for other kinds of sins. If we have sinned against a particular person, we are supposed to go to them, confess and ask forgiveness. If they have died, we are supposed to go with a minyan of ten people and confess over their graves. In all our acts of repentance, we are supposed to try and undo the damage we have caused.

While the traditional list of sins is fairly comprehensive, the time has come to add a new one: the careless destruction of Creation. At a conference for Jewish environmental scholars that I once attended, I heard an environmental educator say that we can become more environmentally aware and responsive by publicly confessing our environmental sins. He then proceeded to do so. Everyone there laughed a nervous laugh of embarrassment, because we all realized, without saying a word, that we all have such sins to confess.

I, too, have committed environmental sins in my life. Here is one that would be more fitting to confess over a river in Northern Ontario (you will soon see why), but because this is the season of repentance, I do it now.

When I was sixteen, as part of my summer camp program, I went on a canoe trip in Northern Ontario and I participated in a frog massacre. I had been going to this camp in Haliburton for nine years, and now I was a CIT (counselor in training). Five of us and a "tripper" (a counselor who specialized in taking out canoe trips) set out in two canoes from the middle of Algonquin Park for a six-day trip that would take us to North Bay.

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