“Over the last 28-year cycle, we have suffered from pollution and the depletion of natural resources,” said the festival founder, U.S.-based artist Eva Ariela Lindberg, in a news release. “Let us use this extraordinary opportunity to co-create the next cycle by seeking alternative solar energies and a purer environment, recharging ourselves and learning how to honor the earth, our neighbors and ourselves. This is a time to renew, and bring fresh blossoms to our world for the next 28-year cycle.”
In the United States, 14 Jewish organizations have joined to launch BlessTheSun.org, a Web site with links to various educational materials and ideas for April 8 activities. The site asks users to sign a Covenant of Commitment in which they “pledge to hasten the day of environmental healing, social justice and sustainable living for all.”
Charlatans are always quick to add a new idol to their racks. They do seek to turn this into something it is not at all.
The blessing is a statement of recognition that the sun’s 28-year period is a demonstration of G-d’s amazingly well ordered universe, and how all was made and maintained exactingly so for man.
The same blessing is used for lightening and thunder, and for seeing great natural wonders the first time.
The delight of this blessing is in the details of when it is said, and also how it compares to the other blessings that use the same words, and to blessing said at the new moon, and how it relates weeks to years and years to months, and the complex yet human-centric, nature of the calendar and celestial motions.
If there is any current social leitmotif to be associated with it today — that would be be a Joy in the majestic dynamics and awesome concern and detail shown in the Design of Creation. That is, a rebuke of Darwin’s theory and it’s inheritors near the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth!
Still, it is far more than that.