It was Tuesday afternoon when I first noticed the shadows turning orange. I remember the uncomfortable feeling that came with it, a sense that we were going to see more. And here we are at the end of the week, sitting in unhealthy air, with health agencies warning that it is now dangerous even for healthy people to spend time outside.
Where did this bad air come from? For another year now, New York City sits in the smog and smoke of Canadian wildfires. Hundreds of fires have broken out across Canada, and we are breathing their consequences.
Sitting in this haze invites reflection, and two ideas in particular stand out.
The Equilibrium We Disturbed
Why now? I do not remember, years ago, sitting through summers of orange, unbreathable air. Many explanations have been offered: prolonged droughts, warmer summers, earlier snowmelt. But one theory is especially striking. For decades, wildfires were systematically suppressed. The natural cycle of spontaneous fires, which periodically cleared forests of accumulated debris, was interrupted. Dry organic material built up over generations. So when fires finally did break out, there was vastly more fuel to consume than nature would ever have allowed to accumulate on its own.
In trying to save the forests from fire, we created the conditions for far worse fires.
This is precisely the insight of the Meshech Chochmah in Parshas Kedoshim. He explains that Hashem is found within natural ecosystems. In a natural ecosystem, there is an equilibrium, a perfection in the interlocking of every element of the system. When we intervene and manage it according to our own designs, we may succeed in protecting one detail, but we cannot account for the full complexity of what our interference sets in motion elsewhere. We solve the problem we can see and create problems we cannot.
The lesson is not that we should never act, but that we must approach the natural world with humility and respect, not merely regulation. There is a wisdom embedded in creation that precedes our own.
Nothing Happens in a Vacuum
Here is the second reflection. We are standing thousands of miles from any of these fires. Not one of them is anywhere near us. And yet we are breathing air whose quality index has crossed into levels deemed unhealthy for the general population.
A fire raging in a northwestern province of Canada affects people on the East Coast of America. This is a vivid reminder that nothing we do exists in a vacuum. The world is interconnected, and effects travel.
And these fires are like ideas. Ideas that are bad, that are evil, are not constrained to the places where they originate. They find a way of wafting across continents, across the world, and they can create destruction wherever they land. Smoke does not respect borders, and neither do dangerous ideas.
Breathing It In
As we sit through this event, waiting for the air to clear, these two ideas are worth holding onto: the importance of equilibrium in the natural ecosystems of this world, which we must manage with respect and humility rather than mere regulation, and the sobering power and movement of ideas, which travel far beyond their point of origin.
The orange shadows will fade. The lessons should not.
Photo by Adrian Newell on Unsplash