A United Synagogue dayan has made an impassioned address warning of the dangers of climate change.

In a Shabbat sermon to coincide with COP26, Dayan Ivan Binstock, senior rabbi of St John’s Wood Synagogue, said that the decisions taken at the Glasgow conference “will be of vital importance for us all”.

He noted that in Parashat Chayei Sarah, “we read how Rivka fetched water for Eliezer and his ten camels. They had just arrived from a trek from Israel, across the desert. It was a long journey, about 1,000km. They needed a convoy. A camel can drink up to 100 litres of water in ten minutes, which is why we can understand how Rivka went back and forth to the well, drawing buckets up and down, until she had supplied water for all. There was no question in her mind that there wouldn’t be enough water or that the well would run dry.

 “Yet there are approximately one billion people in the world today who do not have access to clean drinking water.”

Dayan Binstock continued that in some places where the water supply had been reduced, it was the result of “corporations not being mindful of the ecological consequences of their actions. For example, soft drink bottling plants not only extract colossal amounts of water but also cause ecological imbalance in the region by disturbing the deeper aquifers through heavy-duty borewells.”

Talmud sages had a saying: Olam keminhago noheg – the world will proceed on its course. “The sun will shine, the rain will come, the crops will grow, the tides will come in and go out. And so it has been for thousands of years.

“But now, we are facing the prospect of the world no longer continuing to run its course. We run the risk where the sun will not merely shine, the sun will burn. The rain will not merely fall, the rain will flood. The seas will rise and the viability of many countries will be threatened.”

Whatever the outcome of COP26, “ultimately, it will be up to each and every one of us to implement these decisions in our lives. We will need to be more responsible in our use of energy, in our use of natural resources and in our disposal of waste.”