Apocalyptic Paradise - Rosh HaShanah Morning 5786

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

I don’t know how many of you grew up listening to the brilliant satirical songs of Tom Lehrer, but we sure did in my home.  Tom Lehrer was a brilliant Jewish guy from Manhattan who went to Harvard at age 15, stayed on for grad school in mathematics, became a professor, and had a flair even as an undergraduate for performing his own satirical songs.  As a teen he was  a camp counselor, where one of his campers was little Stephen Sondheim.  While teaching math at Harvard he performed at small nightclubs, and then recorded and self-produced an album of his own tunes.  He sold it by mail order only, and in a few record shops around Cambridge, Mass., and expected he’d make a few bucks on the side.  But surprisingly, he ended up successfully selling so many albums by mail order that he had to re-press the record a bunch of times and he sold those all out, too.  And then, after he did his US military service and worked doing secret things for the NSA, he eventually ended up on the nightclub circuit, and was signed to a record company.  He recorded a couple of more albums, wrote the songs for a popular TV show and then another one, and was a national sensation—but then suddenly retired from performing, went back to teaching college, and eventually moved to Santa Cruz where he taught a workshop in musical theater at UCSC.  As he said at one point, “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”  His performing and recording careers were brief, if meteoric.

Ah, but those few, precious Tom Lehrer albums, with brilliantly constructed original songs like “Pollution”, “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Masochism Tango” and “National Brotherhood Week”—and perhaps his most famous song, a parody of the Major General’s song from Gilbert and Sullivan elucidating all “The Elements”: Tom Lehrer’s songs were witty, brutally funny, so cleverly rhymed and arranged as to become a kind of soundtrack for my own misspent childhood—and perhaps testimony to my family’s unusual sense of humor.  And of course, he later wrote the ubiquitous “Hanukkah in Santa Monica”, to my knowledge his only contribution to Jewish music.

Well, when Tom Lehrer passed away in July of this year, I couldn’t help but remember that for a project at Emerson Jr. High in Westwood, California a friend and I created a slide show—very multi-media back in the day—set to Tom Lehrer’s “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” a kind of anthem about mutual nuclear destruction.  There were brilliant rhymes in the song, like “There will be no more misery when the world is our rotisserie” and “when the air becomes uranious we will all go simultaneous”, and it dealt with the then-prevalent sense that the world could go up in a big mushroom cloud at any moment.

As a kid who grew up learning how to duck and cover, Tom Lehrer provided welcome comic relief from the stress of thinking that it could really all end at once. 

But of course, the notion that everything will come to an end someday in disastrous fashion did not begin with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor is it even a modern notion.  It is, in fact, quite an old one.  The term Armageddon comes from the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, in which a slightly elevated city in Israel called Megiddo—that’s where the English of Armageddon is derived from, Har Megiddo, Mt. Megiddo—lies at the border of the Emek Yizrael, directly on the crossroads between the sea road and the road intersecting it coming in from the east in Israel.  It was the site of many cataclysmic battles in antiquity.  The great prophet Ezekiel chose to locate his idea of the final terrible battle of all time there, at Mt. Megiddo, Har Megiddo, between the forces of two equal and awful armies.  Thus, was born the term, and the idea, of Armageddon.

In any case, this old idea that the world is on the way to a terrible, sudden end has been in the minds of many people quite recently.  Perhaps not as it was in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, back when we used to have atomic bomb drills regularly in grade school in which we ducked under wooden desks as though their pine and laminate surfaces would save us from nuclear annihilation.  But just this summer we saw Vladimir Putin threaten NATO with his arsenal of nuclear weapons if they intervene against his brutal assault on Ukraine; last spring the Islamist theocracy in Iran was close to acquiring nuclear weapons in order to threaten to commit genocide on Israel, before Israel with some US aid turned the clock back on their atomic aspirations.  North Korea, a nuclear power with ballistic missiles and ruled by its own insane dictator, continues to spout threatening rhetoric about nuclear annihilation to anyone who will listen.  Israel—well, I’ll talk about Israel on Yom Kippur.  That’s a whole different topic.

This end-of-the-world stuff is all a bit disturbing.  Now, mind you, some people always believe that we are on the sliding slope of self-destruction of our entire planet.  But whether or not there is any immediate likelihood of this, it is notable nowadays that a rather strange trend has emerged among super-rich tech moguls.  Sophie and I were introduced to this phenomenon on our wedding trip four years ago to the lovely island of Kaui in Hawaii. 

Near where we got married, on the north shore of Kauai not far from the town of Kilauea, one morning we saw a number of big construction vehicles lined up, ready to drive into a private building site of some kind.  We asked the locals what was being built.  “Oh, that’s Mark Zuckerberg’s compound,” they answered.  It turns out that it’s the biggest construction project on that part of the island, possibly on the entire island. 

So we looked it up, and the details of this Facebook and Meta centi-billionaire’s secretive Hawaiian retreat are somewhat available online.  Besides the usual luxuries you might expect in a super-rich person’s ultimate island retreat, Mr. Zuckerberg’s new home includes an entire, extensive underground level that will survive a nuclear attack.

I’m told that this is now standard for billionaire’s homes, a subterranean super-basement filled with whatever one might need to live luxuriously after the annihilation of all civilization and most of humanity.  Apparently, these tech plutocrats are now all building submerged retreats to survive (and remain entertained) through the next great human calamity. 

Whether it’s space, the ocean’s darkest depths or everlasting life, uberwealthy tech leaders are infamous for grandiose visions of where their deep pockets might take them. Among these is the dream of getting away from taxes, governments and even the apocalypse by escaping to some remote place — such as their underground bunkers on islands in the Pacific.

In addition to Hawaii—Larry Ellison of Oracle, also Jewish, has an underground complex under his developments on the island of Lanai, of which he owns 96%—there is New Zealand, which researchers say is the best place to live out the apocalypse, a destination of choice for billionaires and their bunkers. One organization, backed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, has set out to build “startup communities that float on the ocean with any measure of political autonomy,” including a project in French Polynesia.

Recently, crypto enthusiasts have started transforming an island purchased from the government of Vanuatu — a Pacific nation made up of more than 80 islands — into what they call a “blockchain based democracy.”

“Satoshi Island is not a separatist, libertarian or survivalist movement trying to escape from government oversight or possible zombie apocalypse,” a spokesperson for its developers said, likening it to “a private membership club or private golf course,” provided you want to play golf after nearly everyone on earth is dead.  One would assume that tee times will be easier to obtain.

Many of the multi-billionaire tech-bros, from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel to Larry Ellison, have constructed these underground bunkers with elaborate living facilities, all designed to withstand nuclear attack and to allow for years of subterranean life after the great final war.  These shelters incorporate advanced features like renewable energy systems, air and water filtration, and, of course, many luxury amenities. Companies that specialize in building these luxury survivalist billionaire bunkers have names like Atlas Survival Shelters and Survival Condo.  These are now the true status symbols of the super-rich, who are planning to survive the end of the world as we know it in these elaborate underground lairs. 

I’m not sure when it became the goal of the billionaire class to not only separate themselves from ordinary humanity—super rich people have always done that—but to believe in the end of that same humanity and plan on being the only ones left alive on the island when the reactive dust settles, or after global warming drowns the planet.  It sure seems to be what they think is going to happen. 

And lest we forget, there are also the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos’s who are planning on colonizing Mars to start everything over when our Earth-bound human society fails.

As media theorist Douglas Rushkoff puts it, the survivalist billionaires' mindset comes down to this essential question: "How much money and technology do I need to insulate myself from the reality I'm creating by earning money and using technology in this way?"

OK, so super-rich people are always weird, and have always been incredibly odd throughout history.  The number of them, like Warren Buffet, who preserve some grasp on normalcy is pretty tiny.  If you doubt that non-tech super rich people are peculiar, watch “The Crown” TV series, or, really, any show about super-wealthy folks set in any period of history, from ancient Rome to the Gilded Age to the Kardashians and Vanderpumps.  Mind you, it’s not as though the US Robber Barons of the 1890s were exactly normal folks with happy family lives—hi, there, John D. Rockefeller—nor were the Medicis much fun to hang around with, nor the Borgias.  We are talking about some twisted people.

I guess that if absolute power corrupts absolutely, absolute wealth apparently does much the same but perhaps in even weirder ways. 

Still, this obsession with the apocalypse is disturbing.  It demonstrates that instead of seeking to improve the world or even prevent its destruction, the wealthiest people on the planet are in fact planning ways to escape it all, survive what they view as the incipient annihilation, and take no responsibility for trying to save it. 

This desire to escape the world’s coming disasters is not new, of course.  There is a famous, apocryphal story about a millionaire in the 1930s—back when a million dollars was a whole lot of money—who decided to escape the coming cataclysmic annihilation he saw coming.  After all, in the mid-1930s the Depression was everywhere in the world, fascism was on the rapid rise in Italy, Germany, Japan, and Spain, there were major wars in Africa and Asia, and the world really looked like it was headed for disaster and going to hell in a handbasket, as they said back then.  This prominent millionaire decided to move to the most remote place he could find, way off in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, buy land, set up a compound, and escape all the horrors that were coming.  He had enough money to do so, and he did.

The name of the remote island he chose for his escapist paradise?  It was called Iwo Jima…

Now a particularly odd, and much more factual, source for this idea of fleeing to a Pacific Island paradise to escape Armageddon comes out of an obscure U.S. government law called the Guano Islands Act of 1865, which allows any American who finds large amounts of bird fertilizer on an unclaimed island to designate it a U.S. territory.  Which goes to show that this notion of creating paradise away from the corruption of civilization is, at least in part, full of guano.

So, a few words on the Jewish understanding of the end of things, the acharit hayamim, the end of days.  While we Jews may have invented the idea of an ultimate judgment day, and a messianic age, we always—always—have seen it as a distant, mythical concept, arriving only when God deems it to be the right time, which it never is.  In the meantime, the foundational Jewish belief is that we all have a responsibility to seek to improve the world, to perform a form of Tikun Olam, to heal the planet of the injustice, warfare, and ecological damage our species has inflicted upon each other and on God’s creation.

As Jews, our role is to work to improve the world as it is and seek to turn our society into what we wish it would become in the most positive way.  It is never to withdraw from it and bunker down in safe, secure comfort, playing video games while it all goes up in smoke.   

We aren’t supposed to fiddle while the planet burns… or drowns.

Now it is, of course, possible for humanity to destroy the earth nowadays.  I don’t personally think we are so much closer to that than we used to be—the Cuban Missile Crisis certainly brought us to the brink a long time ago—and I believe that as a species we have the capacity to overcome the many challenges we face now.  But in order to do so we simply cannot hide from the responsibility that we all have to prevent apocalypse, and to heal our planet.

We have more super-rich people now than we have had since the 1890s, and they have the ability to actually perform Tikun Olam, to heal the world, instead of preparing to run and hide from its destruction.  May they learn this speedily and soon.  But one thing more.

Unless you are one of these tech-bro billionaires—and if you are, I certainly hope you contribute to our Beit Simcha Capital Campaign before you leave for your bunker in the South Pacific—but unless you are one of them, we have something important to discuss today.

Because Judaism insists that our responsibility is always to one another.  That we have a moral imperative to try to prevent disasters, to help and aid our fellow human beings.  We don’t believe in survivalist bunkers in which a chosen wealthy few can avoid the destruction of our species.  We don’t even believe in monasteries or convents, in withdrawing from the world to discover our spirituality in isolation.  We believe firmly that our role, always, lies in community. 

Al tifrosh min haTzibur, the Ethics of the Ancestors in the Mishna insists: don’t separate yourself from the community.  Instead, work to improve it, to make it better, more respectful, more giving, more empathetic, more just, more honest, more caring. 

Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t build yourself a multi-million dollar underground lair to wait out the coming storm.  I’m saying no one should build them, no one should be wasting resources that could help human beings right now. 

What we learn on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, what we always learn in Judaism, is that we are each responsible for one another, Kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh, and all of us have a collective responsibility to our society.  If we are allowing our society to go down the drain, to drown in a global warming flood, to explode in an avoidable nuclear war, to lose its values, moral principles and legal protections, well then, we have to get out of our bunkers, our siloes, even our La-Y-Boy recliners and get to work fixing things.

As Pirkei Avot also says, lo alecha hamlacha ligmor, v’lo ata ben chorin l’hibateil mimenah, you may not have the capacity to finish the work, but you are not free to neglect it.  And the work, at this season of return and throughout the year, is to engage, to participate in community, to try hard to fix the many wrongs in our world.

We may not, individually, have the financial resources these super-rich bunker builders have.  But we do have an amazing Jewish tradition based in justice and compassion, and the knowledge that we can, if we set our minds, hearts, and resources to it, bring healing to a damaged world.   

It’s not so much to try to do in this new 5786 year: engage.  Work for the good.  Eschew evil.  Know that you have the ability to build trust and community, to be a strong part of your own congregation, to care about other people.

It’s what Judaism requires.  And what we can each do, in our own special way, right now.

L’Shana Tova Tikateivu v’Teichateimu.  May you be blessed with a good, healthy, and sweet year.