Mi ba'esh u'mi ba'mayim - who by fire and who by water.
Our liturgy stopped being a metaphor a long time ago. You can take action this election; Victoria votes on 28 November.
For a thousand years Jews have read those words as a meditation on the unknowable. Now we have dates and numbers. This year we did not have to imagine it. We only had to read the news.
Recent years have turned the political and social discourse away from climate change and the collapse of ecosystems worldwide. Our hearts and minds have been focused on the devastation of war, on the erosion of democracy, the rise of antisemitism and the safety of our people, our families, our children.
But the world burns, flash floods and landslides wipe out entire cities, and populations of critically important species are wiped out by the new strain of bird flu. A bleak outlook. But we are not powerless.
Who by fire and who by water?
Water. On the morning of 26 August, a section of glacier roughly 600 metres wide sheared off a mountainside on the Nepal–Tibet border and fell around two kilometres into the valley beneath it. The wall of ice, rock, mud and water that followed raised the Trishuli River by up to nine metres in half an hour. It took out thirty-two bridges and some forty kilometres of road. It buried Timure and Syaphrubesi. More than 1,000 people are confirmed dead and close to 4,000 are still missing. Authorities have begun burying the unidentified in mass graves. That same river valley flooded with devastating impacts last year.
Fire. On 7 January 2026, in the second month of a heatwave, fires began across Victoria. Temperatures passed 48°C. Winds gusted above 100 km/h. By the time a State of Disaster was declared on 10 January, more than 400,000 hectares were alight (that’s about 200,000 MCG ovals). Around 300 homes were destroyed or badly damaged. A person died. On 9 January alone Wildlife Victoria fielded 1,135 calls; a normal January day brings 350.
The smoke reached Caulfield and Ripponlea and St Kilda. We breathed it on the way to work.
No single fire and no single glacier collapse can be attributed to climate change the way a broken window can be attributed to a thrown rock. But what is not in dispute is the loading of the dice. A warmer atmosphere holds more water and delivers it in shorter, more violent bursts. Warming destabilises high-altitude ice and permafrost and fills new glacial lakes behind walls of unconsolidated rubble that were never engineered to hold anything. Warming lengthens and intensifies the fire season in Australia and turns days that were once merely hot into days that are unsurvivable for many.
These are not two unrelated tragedies in two unrelated countries. They are the same physics, arriving at two addresses. And they arrive unevenly. Nepal contributes a meagre rounding error of global emissions and is paying in bridges, villages and unidentified bodies. Australia is among the world's largest fossil fuel exporters. Whatever else that is, it is a moral fact, and it belongs in a Jewish conversation.
Why this is a Jewish question
Shomer. Guard. Watchman. It is the first job description humanity is given. In Bereishit, the human being is placed in the garden l'ovdah ul'shomrah, to work it and to guard it. Not to own it. To guard it.
We have pikuach nefesh, the saving of a life, which overrides nearly everything else in our tradition. And we have story of Honi, who sees an old man planting a carob tree that will not fruit for seventy years, and asks him why, and is told: I found a world with carob trees in it because my grandparents planted them; I am planting for my grandchildren. A tale of responsibility, the importance of planting for future generations and the impact one person can have on the world.
Our community has several years in which it has been near impossible to look up. The unbearable grief upon grief has been deep and heavy, we cannot pretend otherwise. But the Earth’s atmosphere did not pause out of respect. The physics ran the whole time we were not watching.
What is actually at stake on 28 November
This is a state election, and state governments hold more of the relevant levers than most people realise: the electricity grid and the pace of the renewables build; whether households and renters get help to get off gas; planning controls in fire and flood zones; native vegetation clearing; funding for threatened species recovery, for the Country Fire Authority and SES, and for the wildlife emergency response that buckled this January; public transport; building standards that decide whether a house built this year is survivable in 2050.
Notice that none of this is a sacrifice. Electrified homes are cheaper to run and healthier to live in. A renewables build is a construction workforce in regional Victoria. Cleaner air is fewer asthma admissions to hospital for our kids and our parents. Better fire planning protects farms, insurance premiums and Country all at once. Well-managed landscapes hold water and carbon, securing a liveable future for us all.
The choice on offer is not comfort versus virtue. It is cheaper, healthier and safer versus more expensive, sicker and more dangerous. We should stop letting anyone frame it otherwise. Whoever forms Victoria’s government in December will make those decisions for the next four years, the four years in which the state's ageing coal generators come offline whether we are ready or not.
This year the lesson has been delivered to us twice without our asking: once in January in smoke, and once last week in water and mud. We are the generation that got the warning in writing, with photographs, in our own lifetime, in our own state.
We are not powerless. On 28 November, Victoria hands out ballot papers. It is a very small piece of paper, and it is the most direct instrument to influence the future most of us will ever hold. Speak to your local candidates, find out their position and ask them what they are will to commit to for securing a safe and healthy environment, a future where we can all thrive. While Jewish safety will be front and centre in all our minds, we also have the chance to use our vote to plant a carob tree for our grandchildren.
Shanah tovah u'metukah — chazak ve'tikvah
Bushfire image source here: Over 300 buildings destroyed in Australia bushfires - Pressmediaofindia
An aerial view shows houses damaged and deluged in sludge in the aftermath of flash floods at Trishuli Center in Nepal's Nuwakot district on September 1, 2026. Getty Images
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