Novelist Michael Diamond embraces Jewish 'cli-fi'

by staff writer and emails

 

Michael Diamond lives in Washington D.C. and writes a blog called  ''Torah Obscura'' for The Times of Israel online blogging platform. We recently made contact by email when he told me: "I have been serializing my Jewish cli-fi novel on the blog for some months now, but never had a name for the genre. Thank you! It's less Dan Brown than David Mitchell 'Cloud Atlas', if you're a fan of that one."

I asked Diamond how he found me on the internet. Without missing a beat, he replied: "I had been toiling away on the Times of Israel blogs for about a year-and-a-half, starting out with somewhat offbeat Torah commentary and then for the last seven months serializing my novel, 'Undivided: the Redemption Inquiry  about the destruction of the planet and its eventual Resurrection at the hands of an AI Moshiach. Unless you are a star, the blogosphere can be a rather lonely place. That's why I got so excited when I stumbled upon your work with the cli-fi genre. Who would have thought that there was such a thing as Jewish ‘cli-fi’? The term ‘cli-fi’, for climate fiction, was totally new to me. And the fact that there was a Jewish form of it was an added bonus. That's when I realized that I was a writer of Jewish ‘cli-fi’! The novel I have been serializing is woven around a number of important Jewish themes, and of central concern is the deterioration of the environment. It all fit! And as I searched the term on the web I suddenly discovered a trove of kindred spirits, as well as possibilities for publishing my writing."

''Let me backup for a minute and return to you, Dan," he continued. You are a fellow blogger at The Times of Israel who has been toiling in the ‘cli-fi’ fields since you helped to coin the term in 2011. I looked up your ''Cli-Fi Report'' website online and some of the articles linked to it as well as the broader ‘cli-fi’ universe. I can see that that for you  this has clearly become a cause célèbre. You have morphed yourself into a promoter of this crucial perspective on the planet and are tirelessly presenting the public with access to critical climate awareness through the arts.''

''However, in my experience in recent years, all is not well on the cli-fi front. 'The Kingsman' movie franchise appears to be a repository for conservative politics. When I saw the movie I could not believe they were able to persuade a bunch of decent minded actors to portray the climate scientist as the villain, fulfilling many a right-winger’s fantasies. The same was true of the Disney movie, 'Tomorrowland,' starring George Clooney, a noted liberal activist, in 2015. Both movies portray the arch-villain as a climate scientist and climate change as the purview of a cabal of elitists. It looks to me that the cli-fi wars are well underway."
" Now that we all have a handle to slap on this literary and cinematic phenomenon, we can get to work trying to save the planet in yet another way. The climate change activism world has long been plagued with difficulty getting traction in the greater community, and certainly on the American political stage. You, Dan, are one of the people spearheading the effort to use this force for the good. You have has also pointed out that it can be packaged as a particularly Jewish force. There is clearly a subculture of rabbis who make it their business to link stewardship of the planet to Jewish values. Whatever the angle, I hope to be part of the Jewish cli-fi insurgency.''

Whether it's by blogging, writing in the mainstream press, promoting movies and books, or simply going to movies and reading books and talking about it, we all can plug in to this stream of vital energy directed at inspiring humans to actually do the work to save our planet from the depredations that we have wrought upon it, Diamond notes. Even if you're not so sure how much of the damage has been caused by purely human factors, we still need the motivation to do what we can to bequeath a living world to our children and our children's children and anyone else who survives beyond the next 20 years. This is a moral imperative supported by the beliefs of just about every religion on the surface of the planet, and by most enlightened atheists and agnostics. It’s pretty simple -- take care of the place where you live.

"Pass it on," the ''Torah Obscura'' columnist concludes.

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About Michael Diamond

Michael Diamond is a writer based in the Washington, D.C. area. He practices psychiatry there and is a doctor of medical qigong. He has published verse, fiction and translation in Andrei Codrescu’s journal, The Exquisite Corpse; in the journal Shirim courtesy of Dryad Press; in the online journal for Akashic Press; in New Mexico Review and in The Journal of the American Medical Association. He lives in the suburbs with his wife, an artist and illuminator of Hebrew manuscripts, their dog, two cats, a cockatiel named Peaches and a tank of hyperactive fish. He has had a strong interest in Torah since first exposed to traditional stories as a child. Over the course of his life he has run the gamut of spiritual exploration of many world traditions of meditation and mythology. For the last several decades he has landed squarely in the traditional Jewish world. His writing is informed by all of this experience, by his curiosity about today's world and by his desire to mine the Jewish experience for its hidden and revealed wisdom. Torah Obscura, as in camera obscura, from Latin, meaning "dark room", also referred to as a pinhole camera, exploiting the optical phenomenon that occurs when an image of a scene outside of a chamber projects itself through a small hole and can be seen on the inner surface of the chamber. A glimpse of an otherwise invisible world afforded by a small aperture for light.