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Leading Green!

By on March 6, 2015 in Jewish Greening Fellowship

At JGF’s Leading Green conference, held February 10th in collaboration with the Wiener Educational Center of UJA-Federation of New York, we celebrated the New York Jewish community’s response to climate change and gave practical tools to Jewish communal leaders interested in starting the greening process. The conference was a resounding success, with over 100 people in attendance from a broad range of institutions and greening backgrounds. Times of Israel covered the event. UJA-Federation of New York CEO Eric Goldstein, faith and climate scholar Karenna Gore, and solar entrepreneur Yosef Abramowitz praised the greening work undertaken by the Jewish community and encouraged the audience to continue their greening efforts. Wendy Seligson (14th Street Y), Aliyah Vinikoor (Jewish Theological Seminary), and Rabbi Jason Nevarez (Temple Shaaray Tefila) described how greening has both transformed their institutions and changed their own lives for the better. Many other JGF fellows shared their expertise during small table conversations about specific greening topics (e.g., composting, solar power, and greening with kids) and breakout sessions on facilities, environmental education, and greening/disaster preparedness for vulnerable populations. Participant feedback has been quite positive, and many attendees have expressed interest in starting to green their institutions or in being part of […]

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Keeping Our Balance: Purim, Freud, & Copenhagen

By on February 19, 2015 in Newsletters, Nigel

The Hebrew month of Adar begins tomorrow, which in the Jewish calendar signals joy. The Hebrew phrase is “marbim b’simchah” – when Adar comes, joy increases. This idea opens a fascinating window onto a tension between western tradition and Jewish tradition. In the heyday of therapy, from Freud to maybe the 1980s, the critical injunction in Western tradition was “go with the flow.” Don’t suppress your emotions. Let it out. Feel the feelings. We’re in a slightly different phase nowadays – we’ve moved on to behavioral psychology backed by experiential data. So now we have evidence of some of the things that will make us happier. (The good news: turns out that the “O” in JOFEE – getting outdoors more – does make us happier. The bad news for those in the northeast: the optimum temperature for being outdoors is 57 degrees…) I’m struck that Jewish tradition seems closer to the results of experiential psychology than to Freud. Jewish tradition believes that it can make a claim on us that would in some sense override our “natural” emotions. You are obligated to mourn on Tisha B’Av – even if you just did an IPO and made $50m the week before. […]

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The Taste of Shmita

By on February 11, 2015 in Shmita

By Rabbi David Seidenberg “May the Merciful One turn our hearts toward the land, so that we may dwell together with her in her Sabbath-resting, the whole year of the Shmita!” Harachaman hu yashiv libeinu el ha’aretz l’ma’an neishev yachad imah b’shovtah kol sh’nat hash’mitah! It was erev Rosh Hashanah – just before the Shmita year began – when I wrote this prayer to add to Birkat Hamazon (the blessing after meals) during the Shmita or Sabbatical year. I was trying for months to come up with a blessing for the Shmita, but it just wouldn’t come. It works that way for me: I can only feel the quality of a particular holy time or season when that time is upon me. It is a kind of living in the present that can be wonderful, and it can make ritual enormously fun and truly profound, even if it makes meeting deadlines harder. When I wrote this blessing, I also prayed in my heart that these words would not just be beautiful, but that they would actually be something I could experience, this year, in Israel. So when the opportunity came to join a delegation to a Palestinian farm to replant […]

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Transformation and Challenge

By on February 5, 2015 in Adamah

by Rachel Cohn, Adamah fellow, Fall 2014 Three months at Adamah has convinced me of the tangible realness of both transformation and its daily challenges. Judaism here is so rich and so vibrant and still full of the contradictions and choices we face outside of this loving intentional community. Sometimes we won’t get along.  We don’t always ask each other the right questions to show that we care. Sometimes we don’t have the words to explain the pain we carry with us or to ask for the right wells of wisdom in our tradition that can help us heal.  Our communities still aren’t enough to feed everyone’s souls, to get it right, to make peace in a real way, to help us each see the light of god in each other.  There is so much here that is alive in our spiritual practice, and still – we need to do more.  This simultaneously breaks my heart and makes me realize that I have to try anyway, to bring what I can amidst the brokenness, because what else is there to do? Maybe this is the process of becoming more ourselves:  this also happens every day. Sometimes it means openly sobbing […]

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In the Shmita Year, Lifting the Burden of Pay Day Loans

By on January 8, 2015 in Shmita

by Ari Hart The beginning of 2015 is also the halfway point in the year of shmita, the once in seven years when the Bible commands that land be left fallow — a tradition that is followed today in a number of symbolic ways. One of the powerful practices of the shmita year is society coming together to erase oppressive debt, in a practice called shmitaat kessafim — the release of money. In biblical times, those trapped in debt would eventually wind up in chains as slaves. A year of release from debt stops that cycle. Today, 12 million Americans are trapped each year in a cycle of payday loans. These are small loans marketed as a quick, easy way to tide borrowers over until the next payday. However, the typical payday loan borrower is indebted for more than half the year with an average of nine payday loan transactions at annual interest rates of more than 400%. Could you afford a loan at 400% interest? Do you think seniors living on a fixed income could? They can’t. Which is exactly why payday loans are marketed so heavily to them and other vulnerable communities — so that they have to […]

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Shmita Reflections on the Origins of Teva

By on December 17, 2014 in Shmita

By Amy Meltzer I’m no farmer. The amount of produce harvested from everything I’ve ever planted would surely not top ten pounds. The impact of adapting the agricultural principles of shmita to my life in Northampton would be fairly insignificant. But like all educators, I have planted scores of metaphorical seeds. Of all those seeds, nothing has produced as bountiful a harvest as those that were planted at Isabella Freedman in the Fall of 1994, the very first season of Teva. A quick summary, before I wax metaphorical. In 1993, after two years of teaching at Nature’s Classroom, I sat in my mother’s office and wrote a letter describing my dream of a residential environmental-education program for Jewish day schools. I made a few dozen copies and mailed them to every winterized, kosher camping facility within three hours of NYC. (Ah, the hubris of youth!) Eric Robbins, then director of Isabella Freedman, called me into his office. “I love the idea,” he said. “Let’s give it a try.” I created a “brochure”, which was inadvertently printed with the back cover on the inside, and a mailing, which I hand-addressed to almost every Jewish Day school in the Northeast. We received exactly […]

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Become An Energy Maccabee

By on December 17, 2014 in Jewish Greening Fellowship

Hanukkah is a holiday about a small band of revolutionary activists who, against all odds, routed the Assyrian Greek Empire, retook control of the Temple in Jerusalem, and there witnessed an energy miracle: a vial of oil kept the Temple’s menorah aflame for eight days instead of one.  In short, Hanukkah is a holiday about energy use, rededicating our buildings, and rebelling against the established system — the perfect holiday for all of us dedicated to greening our institutions and our lives. This Hanukkah we celebrate the rededication of buildings with cleaner and more efficient ways of using energy, like the following: Temple Israel Center of White Plains uses solar energy to power its ner tamid, the eternal light at the front of the sanctuary that recalls the ancient menorah rekindled on Chanukah. With the help of the JGF, staff members from JASA Brighton Beach, Friedberg JCC, Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, and Temple Israel Center of White Plains recently attended a GPRO training on how to retrofit and maintain a green building. For more information on future GPRO trainings, visit Solar One. On November 20, JCC of Staten Island rededicated itself to using clean energy by installing a 103 kW […]

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When Israel Isn’t a Black and White Story

By on December 10, 2014 in Cycling, Israel, Israel Rider Blog

Marcy Perlman Tardio rode on the 2014 Arava Institute & Hazon Israel Ride. She is a mother, grandmother, and homebirth midwife living in Brooklyn. This piece was originally published online at Haaretz.com on December 1st, 2014. Many within my multi-cultural circle of family and friends refused to support my participation in a charity bike ride in Israel, an ‘oppressor’ and ‘colonialist’ state. The year following my kidney transplant, over a decade ago, I rode in the Hazon charity bike ride in New York. I rode then to honor my older son, who had gifted me the kidney, and to celebrate my new-found health. Through the organizers I learned of a counterpart ride that took place in Israel; several weeks ago, I returned from the Hazon-Arava bike ride, where I completed 230 miles from Jerusalem to Eilat. Despite the challenges of the heat and the terrain, my most unexpected difficulty had emerged before I even sat in the saddle: Persuading my peers to donate to a charity effort that would take place in Israel. At the time of my first ride I had joined a synagogue. My younger son already attended Jewish day school. I, the daughter of culturally Jewish, left wing, secular […]

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The Earth Belongs to Whom?

By on November 18, 2014 in Shmita

By Deirdre Gabbay As we move through liturgical time, we are called upon to embody the various mindsets that Torah wishes specifically to cultivate. During Pesach we meditate on the meaning of slavery and freedom, and in particular on freedom as being a fundamental embodiment of Divine intention for us, as intrinsic as life itself. I believe that as we move through the liturgical period of Shmita, we are called upon to embody an awareness of the earth as belonging to God, and to reflect and elaborate upon the implications that arise from this particular axiom of faith. In Parashat B’hukotai, God reveals with utter transparency the purpose of the earth. We learn that the earth itself will bring forth the reward for building the society envisioned in Torah, by means of its rains, its soil, its vegetation. A hospitable climate leads to productive landscapes. Sufficiency and contentment allow us to be numerous and healthy, at peace internally, and so strong that our neighbors do not threaten us. As a result we find ourselves in possession of the inner and outer peace that we are told is the highest blessing that God wishes to confer on us, and for which […]

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