The title of the movie reminds me of one of my favourite Rebbe Nachman Hasidic stories:

From his [Rebbe Nachman] window facing the market place, he saw one of his followers, a certain Haikel, hurrying down the street. He called to him and invited him up.

“Haikel” he said, “have you seen the sky this morning?”

“No, Rebbe.”

“And the street, Haikel, have you seen the street this morning?”

“Yes, Rebbe”

“And now, do you see it still?”

“Yes, Rebbe, I see it.”

“Tell me what you see.”

“People. Horses. Carts. Gesticulating merchants, excited peasants, men and women coming and going, that is what I see.” 

“Haikel, Haikel,” said Rebbe Nachman, shaking his head. 

“In fifty years, in two times fifty years, there will be-on this very spot-a street like this one and another market similar to this one. Other carriages will bring other merchants to buy and sell other horses. But I shall no longer be here and neither shall you. So I ask you, Haikel, what’s the good of running if you don’t even have time to look at the sky?”

It also reminds me of the verses in Tanakh that talk about the inspiration we can get from precisely the opposite, looking up to the heavens:

A song for ascents. I turn my eyes to the mountains; from where will my help come? (Psalm 121)

Lift high your eyes and see:
Who created these?
He who sends out their host by count,
Who calls them each by name:
Because of His great might and vast power,
Not one fails to appear. (Isaiah 40:26)

When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and stars that You set in place, what is man that You have been mindful of him, mortal man that You have taken note of him. (Psalm 8)

For those that have seen the film, this is exactly what people needed to do and eventually did, with their own eyes – look up. In this instance the simple act of looking up would open their eyes to the fact that a comet the size of Mount Everest is heading to Earth. The implication I believe for our times is the urgent action needed to avert the climate crisis, which is staring us all in the face, if only we would just look up.

There has been a lot of discussion about the film and it seems that the critics are still undecided about this latest all-star Netflix blockbuster. It’s not funny enough. It’s not clever enough. It’s too simplistic. I give it a personal rating of 7.1/10. I loved the cast, the jokes, the smashing of some of the idols of our times, even if at times it is a little over the top. 

I think most importantly the film raises some pressing moral issues that we still need to grapple with. These are the big issues of our times, issues that we (humanity as a whole) collectively face in 2022 and beyond. When it comes to the big moral issues of our day, I always ask myself, what would Rabbi Sacks say? If he were alive, it would not be unusual to find his own commentary on the film, as he occasionally did name drop a contemporary film in some of his essays. Sadly, in his absence, I like many others are grappling with how to navigate an uncertain world without his leadership and clarity of vision. 

Over Chanukah I was lucky to receive, Rabbi Sacks’ latest book “The Power of Ideas – Words of Faith and Wisdom” as a present. This work is unique from his others in that it is a compilation of Rabbi Sacks’ public writings in The Times and other publications as well as his BBC radio broadcasts for Thought for the Day. After watching the film, I realised, that in his published words, there was still guidance and inspiration to be sought, precisely on the issues that the film brings up. Ever since he died, I have been re-reading his works with renewed vigor and a sense of responsibility to keep them alive and pass them on to whoever is willing to listen. I hope the small selection below will give the reader a taste of his wisdom and pray that Rabbi Sacks’ philosophy of hope rubs off on us all in these trying times.

Prayer

The final scene of the film shows the main characters, the three main scientists that discovered the comet, sitting all together at the family dinner table of Dr Randall (Leonardo DiCaprio). By this point in the film, everyone knows that the mission has failed, the comet will shortly hit earth and humanity is doomed to go the way of the dinosaurs. It is an incredibly poignant scene. Before they eat their final supper, they turn to the most unlikely character, Yule, to say a prayer. I was impressed that the writers included this in the film at all but more than just including it, it was powerful and meaningful in its portrayal of the universality of prayer, especially in times of need. Here is what Rabbi Sacks wrote in The Times about prayer:

Prayer 7 January 2006

It is, said the eleventh-century poet Judah Halevi, to the soul what food is to the body. Starve a body of food and it dies. Starve a soul of prayer and it atrophies and withers. And sometimes prayer is all the more powerful for being said in words not our own, words that come to us from our people’s past, hallowed by time, resonant with the tears and hopes of earlier generations, words that gave them strength and which they handed on to us to use and cherish.

I have thought for some time now that the current mindfulness trend reflects a deep-seated spiritual void that has so painfully afflicted Western society ever since the 60’s. However, what Rabbi Sacks shows is that real prayer can do so much more than just mindfulness and self-fulfilment. It is about bringing people together, in community. About connecting us to those that came before us and deriving strength from their strength. It is also about gratitude. The final line before the world is destroyed is said by Dr Randall “We really did have everything, didn’t we?”. Here Rabbi Sacks words continue to inspire, what is prayer about? Is it a childish wish list we ask God for or something deeper?

Prayer teaches us to thank, to rejoice in what we have rather than be eternally driven by what we don’t yet have.

It shouldn’t have taken Randall to get to the end of the world to realise this point. Prayer helps us feel this happiness daily. In one of Rabbi Sacks’ essays on the parsha he recommends a daily activity to do as a family, to look for the things that we are grateful for and to say them out loud to each other and this is exactly what the characters did at this final meal, it is never too late.

Family

Stopping for a minute and thinking about the choice of a meal for the final scene is also significant. In 2008 Rabbi Sacks wrote a list of new year resolutions in The Times here is one of them:

Resolutions 5th January 2008

Spend time with your family. Make sure that there is at least one time a week when you sit down to have a meal together with no distractions – no television, no phone, no email, just being together and celebrating one another’s company. Happy marriages and healthy families need dedicated time.

I think this is a message many of us learned during the corona crisis, where many of us for the first time perhaps found ourselves at home 24-7, eating breakfast, lunch and dinner with the kids. I remember working in Central London, leaving before the kids woke up, returning after the kids went to sleep. I recall thinking to myself, is this it? Is this my life for the next 40 years – not seeing the family? Spending quality time with them? It is a powerful idea and one that needs refreshing, eating together, talking together, celebrating together.

Climate Change

The films main theme is climate change and key to understanding climate change is understanding man’s position in the scheme of creation and man’s responsibility also. In addition to Rabbi Sacks’ key commentary on this in his final book published before his death called ‘Morality’, in 2008 he also penned the following for The Times:

Climate Change 5th April 2008

Genesis I is best understood not as pseudo-science, still less as myth, but as jurisprudence; that is to say, as the foundation of the moral law. God created the world; therefore, God owns the world. We are His guests – strangers and temporary residents, as the Bible puts it. God has the right to specify the conditions of our tenancy on Earth. The radical message of Genesis I is that Divine sovereignty is constitutional. God rules not by might, but by right, and so must we. So Genesis I can be restated in terms with which even the most avowed secularist might agree. The world does not belong to us. We hold it as trustees on behalf of those who will come after us. Renouncing our ownership of the Earth is all we need to ground what is surely the fundamental point of the story itself: that we are here to protect, not destroy or endanger, the Earth and all it contains.

There is a human arrogance that can manifest itself in different contexts, but it all stems from the same source. It might be a scientist that thinks he has all the answers, a politician that believes the state can solve all problems, a doctor that thinks he controls death or even a tech billionaire that thinks there is an algorithm for everything. This is something we saw all the main characters in the film suffer from at some point. It is reflected in the warning Moses gives the Israelites before his death, do not say:

 “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.”

Does faith have a role to play in solving the climate crisis, does Genesis I give us the fundamental understanding necessary to appreciate our position in the world and how we should use it. Be humble, very humble. Perhaps this is a key lesson we are being taught during this corona crisis.

Unity

Rabbi Sacks’ seminal work was his Dignity of Difference. A key foundation of faith (based on the Bible) is the revolutionary idea that on the basis that we are all created in the image of God, we should be capable of respecting and giving dignity to people that are different to us. This universalist message resonated strongly, especially in the world of 2002 following the WTC bombings and subsequent aftermath.  This idea is particularly relevant when you consider the films main premise, of a natural disaster like a comet coming to destroy all of mankind. This final piece I am bringing here could easily be a direct comment on the movie itself from Rabbi Sacks, written in The Times.

Natural Disasters 15th October 2005

Why then do we expend so much energy on ethnic conflict, war and terror? Why do we so unthinkingly deplete the Earth’s resources, pollute its atmosphere, threaten its biodiversity? Why have we allowed some to grow rich beyond imagining while millions starve and die? All these things come from a world of narrow horizons, where what matters is me, here, now. If natural catastrophe has one blessing, it is its ability to make us forget, for a moment, our personal comfort zones and enter into the plight of others – so different, so far away, yet so like us.

Being made in the image of God, we have more that unites us then divides us. Let us take this chance to unite, all religions and none, to solve the worlds problems together. To heal a fractured world.

Post Script on Looking Up

With thanks to a good friend of mine for pointing out this wonderful piece of Rabbi Sacks here on parshat Beshallach.

“This is one of the enduring themes of Tanach: the importance of looking up. “Lift up your eyes on high, and see who has created these things,” says Isaiah (Is. 40:26). “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From there will my help come” said King David in Psalm 121. In Deuteronomy, Moses tells the Israelites that the Promised Land will not be like the flat plain of the Nile Delta where water is plentiful and in regular supply. It will be a land of hills and valleys, entirely dependent on unpredictable rain (Deut. 11:10-11). It will be a landscape that forces its inhabitants to look up. That is what Moses did for the people in their first battle. He taught them to look up.

No political, social or moral achievement is without formidable obstacles. There are vested interests to be confronted, attitudes to be changed, resistances to be overcome. The problems are immediate, the ultimate goal often frustratingly far away. Every collective undertaking is like leading a nation across the wilderness towards a destination that is always more distant than it seems when you look at the map.

Look down at the difficulties and you can give way to despair. The only way to sustain energies, individual or collective, is to turn our gaze up toward the far horizon of hope. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that his aim in philosophy was “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle”. The fly is trapped in the bottle. It searches for a way out. Repeatedly it bangs its head against the glass until at last, exhausted, it dies. Yet the bottle has been open all the time. The one thing the fly forgets to do is look up. So, sometimes, do we.”