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Topic: Holidays

Sukkot, Market of the 4 Species at Bnei Brak by Flavio@Flickr

Closed for Sukkot

By on October 16, 2011 in Holidays, Sukkot

The Hazon offices will be closed through October 21st for the holiday of Sukkot. Staff will return to the office on Monday, October 24th. We’d like to wish everyone a chag sameach and happy holiday. Please check out our Healthy, Sustainable Sukkot Resources. What’s Sukkot? MyJewishLearning.com has a Sukkot 101 that covers the basics. If you live in New York City, Westchester, or Long Island, we invite you to learn about Care to Share, our first annual citywide and volunteer fresh produce drive running through October 18th (The Jew and the Carrot has a few words about Care to Share, too). Check out Repair the World’s Sukkot round-up of blog post about “homelessness, poverty and hunger, as well as sustainable agriculture and the environment.” Read Pursue’s round up of resources to “help raise your awareness of the justice issues associated with Sukkot.” The Jew and the Carrot discusses “a few reasons why it is especially important to eat locally and sustainably during Sukkot” and has a complete menu for a meatless Sukkot feast. How are you making your Sukkot more healthy and sustainable? Share your tips in the comments below! Photo by Flavio@Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons.

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Sukkot Mishpacha

By on October 4, 2011 in Colorado, Events, Holidays, Sukkot

October 11, 4-6 PM Red Wagon Organic Farm, 7694 N 63rd St, Longmont, CO $10 for children, adults are free. Celebrate the harvest festival of Sukkot at Red Wagon Organic Farm. We will enjoy a hay ride and will learn about Sukkot with Rabbi Rose from Congregation Har HaShem. We will also make a special project and then meet for a Sukkot celebration and picnic dinner. Please pack dinner for your family and bring a can or box of food to donate to EFAA (Emergency Family Assistance Association)! (more…)

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Rabbi Steve Greenberg

Crowning God King

By on September 27, 2011 in Holidays, Reflections

By Rabbi Steve Greenberg, Hazon Board Member Originally posted on Siach: An Environment and Social Justice Conversation Every year, as the summer winds down I begin to look forward to the high holidays.  While I surely enjoy the family and the food, for me it’s the chill in the morning air, the haunting music and the power of the liturgy that excite me.  My partner and I seek out singing-communities on the high holidays.   I can’t wait to be carried away by the once-a-year melodies and from the beginning of September they waft through my brain in anticipation.   The music expresses ecstatic joy, longing and dread and this mix of emotions is reflected in the poetry of the liturgy. (more…)

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CSA Pick Up

Care to Share

By on September 26, 2011 in Food, Holidays, Sukkot, Tzedek/Justice, Video

UJA-Federation of New York — in collaboration with Met Council, AmeriCorps, and Hazon — invite you to participate in our first annual Care to Share citywide and volunteer fresh produce drive. Care to Share will take place from Monday, October 3 – Tuesday, October 18, 2011, encouraging volunteers to symbolically fulfill the Jewish custom of gleaning, a custom tied to the harvest season and the Sukkot period. Traditionally, farmers leave the four corners of their fields unharvested so the needy can glean from the fields with dignity. (more…)

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Uri L’Tzedek’s Food and Justice Haggadah Supplement

By on April 6, 2011 in Food, Holidays

In a quest to introduce discussion of food, social justice, and ethical consumption to the Passover Seder, Uri L’Tzedek has created the Food and Justice Haggadah Supplement.  Along with the Uri L’Tzedek team, 26 collaborators contributed essays that make up the supplement, among them Nigel Savage, Hazon’s Executive Director. Uri L’Tzedek is an Orthodox social justice organization whose mission is to fight suffering and oppression. Through their work in community based education, leadership development and action, they aim to create discourse, inspire leaders, and empower the Jewish community towards creating a more just world.  In the Food and Justice Haggadah Supplement, they have created a thought-provoking collection of short reflections on topics including hunger, labor and exploitation, responsibility to the poor, ethical consumption, ethics of eating, and redemption, all of which build from the structure and story of the Seder.    Scattered throughout the supplement are various “ACT” suggestions, featuring easy ways that readers can transform all of these ideas into action. In his contribution, Nigel explains that Passover teaches consciousness, restraint, and the responsibility to share with others, and urges the reader to apply these lessons to all meals during the rest of the year.  He ends by reminding Seder-goers, […]

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Beyond “The Four Worlds”: Creating Meaning in Your Tu B’Shvat Seder

By on January 14, 2011 in Nigel, Tu B’Shvat

by Nigel Savage January 14, 2011 Next Wednesday night, January 19th, there’ll be a full moon in the sky: the full moon of Shvat. The indigenous Israelites from whom we descend celebrated this as the start of the year for the natural world. Like lots of elements of Jewish tradition, we never forgot it, even as its meaning has changed over time. Skip forward to 5771, aka 2011. Tu B’Shvat’s a great holiday, and there’s every likelihood there will be a record number of Tu B’Shvat seders this year. But here’s a question: what’s all this stuff about the four worlds? (more…)

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Tu B’Shvat: From the 1600s to Today

By on January 5, 2011 in Tu B’Shvat

As the largest Jewish environmental organization in the country, Hazon hopes you will celebrate the holiday of Tu B’Shvat as a Jewish Earth Day and use our website resources to rekindle or deepen your feelings of gratitude for the bounty of the earth and take more steps towards preserving our world. Tu B’Shvat begins sundown January 19th and we encourage you to hold a seder! In the Middle Ages, Tu B’Shvat was celebrated with a feast of fruits in keeping with the Mishnaic description of the holiday as a “New Year.” In the 1600s, the mystic kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria of Tzfat and his disciples instituted a Tu B’Shvat seder in which the fruits and trees of Israel were given symbolic meaning. The main idea was that eating ten specific fruits and drinking four cups of wine in a specific order while reciting the appropriate blessings would bring human beings, and the world, closer to spiritual perfection. The mystical kabbalistic Tu B’Shvat seder has been revived and is now celebrated by many Jews, religious and secular. Special haggadot have been written for this purpose, including our own. (more…)

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Compare and Contrast

By on September 2, 2010 in Holidays, New York Ride, Nigel

Dear All, This year, Hazon’s New York Jewish Environmental Bike Ride ends late Monday afternoon, and just two days later, Rosh Hashanah begins. The Hazon 10th Anniversary NY Ride will end at Riverside Park at 79th Street on Monday, September 6th at 3 PM with a group ride up Riverside Drive to the The JCC in Manhattan at 76th and Amsterdam. In addition to dancing and singing at the JCC, the Adamah Fellows will have a farm stand inside of the JCC with fresh produce, pickles and dairy products. The closing ceremony will start at 4 PM on the roof of the JCC. The NY Ride is one of Hazon’s largest fundraisers for the year, allowing us to continue our important work. Please consider sponsoring a Rider this year in celebration of Hazon’s 10th anniversary. The close conjunction in time prompted me to think about them in relation to each other… This year they’re about the same length in time. They’re both marathons, of sorts. They both involve pushing ourselves: even if you ride a bike – or go to shul on Shabbat – you don’t normally ride 120+ miles in two days, or spend 10+ hours in shul. (And […]

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Isaiah Berlin, Shavuot and the Rides

By on May 17, 2010 in Holidays, Nigel, Rides

San Francisco, CA Monday 17th May 2010 48th day of the omer, 5770 Dear All, There is a notion in Jewish tradition of “hiddur mitzvah” – beautifying the mitzvah. It means something like “going above and beyond.”  Hiddur mitzvah is the beautiful table cloth for Shabbat, the flowers, the fine china; also the freshest produce from your farmer’s market or your CSA, and the time spent cooking from first principles, rather than just buying something pre-cooked. The omer is a sort of rorschach process, in which we see in each day some reflection of our own life in the sefirot, and vice versa Hiddur mitzvah in relation to counting the omer means not merely counting – actually saying the bracha and counting each day, on the evening of the omer – but, coming back to it through the day; having a real sense of each day of the omer as distinct from each other day, and being conscious of it, and reflecting on it.  (I’d add that there is a relationship, in some sense, with the evolution of the first 49 years of your life; each is distinct and, just as the omer culminates in Shavuot, I’d argue that the first 49 years of one’s life […]

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Shmita & the Unified Religious Personality

By on March 1, 2010 in Holidays

Hazon, together with the Jewish Farm School, invite you to be a part of the Shmita Project, whose purpose is to consider the role of Shmita, the Sabbatical year, in our lives. Shmita Project encourages people to do that in two ways: through using the laws and values of Shmita as the conceptual framework for creating a more sustainable Jewish community and a more sustainable world. Second, to encourage practical application of Shmita laws among individuals and communities. In honor of this week’s Torah portion which discusses the laws of Shmita, I would like to explore some of the themes behind the laws. There are three things which the Torah calls “Shabbat Shabbaton.” The first is Shabbat itself, the second is Yom Kippur, and the third is Shmittah. These three concepts: Shabbat, Yom Kippur and Shmittah, can be seen as pathways to the unification of the spiritual/religious personality. On an ordinary weekday it is all too easy to maintain the distance between our spiritual life and what we might mistakenly consider our ‘secular life.’ We are caught up in the decidedly non-spiritual routine of the workplace, the highway, and the shopping mall. On Shabbat however, we are granted a sanctuary […]

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Chanukah Miracles and Climate Change

By on December 3, 2009 in Climate Change, Holidays

By Daniel Bloom, Hazon Program Associate Traditionally on Chanukah we celebrate the curious episode of a jug of oil, enough for one day, miraculously burning for eight days. The rabbis debated the exact nature of the miracle. Amongst the many possibilities, one opinion suggests that the oil was divided into eighths, each of which burned for an entire day. Another opinion claims that after filling the menorah on each of the first seven nights, the jug remained full. It is apt that we will be thinking about burning oil when the world’s leaders meet in the coming days for the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The Conference represents the best opportunity so far for the community of nations to tackle the issue of climate change on a global scale and discuss concrete plans and targets for the reduction of greenhouse emissions. Nonetheless, there is reason to be skeptical. First, we may assume that the leaders of the world’s nations lack the political will to commit to serious change, and second, that even if leaders were to make a commitment, a top-down nation-state driven campaign would have little impact in changing global emission patterns. These two claims are undoubtedly interrelated. […]

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Save the Earth! Save Us! Joy and Desperation on Sukkot

By on October 8, 2009 in Climate Change, Holidays

Dr. Mirele B. Goldsmith, Hazon board member Sukkot is my favorite holiday.  I love spending time outdoors in the sukkah. And I love the joyful emphasis on thanksgiving and celebration.  But the message of Sukkot is more complicated than it appears.  Sukkot encourages us to appreciate and enjoy the bounty of nature, while at the same time it reminds us that life is fragile.  Just like the sukkah, which will topple in a strong wind, we are vulnerable to the unpredictable forces of nature. The particular aspect of nature that we focus on during Sukkot is water.  In the Land of Israel our ancestors were keenly aware of their dependence on rain.  So while Sukkot is a celebration of the past year’s harvest, it is also a time to pray for the rain that will insure the harvest in the year to come.  Each day during Sukkot we wave the lulav, a bouquet of plants associated with varied water sources, and call out to the heavens to save us with life-giving rain. By the final day of Sukkot our mood has changed.  Cries of joy have become cries of desperation.  By tradition this is the final day of the high […]

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Tisha B’Av, Copenhagen and Climate Change

By on July 28, 2009 in Climate Change, Holidays, Israel

Rabbi Yedidya (Julian) Sinclair, Director of Education, Jewish Climate Initiative, and Hazon Rabbinical Scholar Recently I was asked an interesting question by an Israel environmental leader. “I was a bit surprised and somewhat dismayed,” he began, “to find out that the date chosen for the Copenhagen Planning Seminar was also Tisha B’Av.” A bit of background for the uninitiated: 1.         The Copenhagen Summit in December is a gathering of world leaders that aims to bash out a successor agreement to the Kyoto protocol that will limit CO2 emissions going forward. It is widely seen as a critical moment in the global effort to address climate change. 2.         The particular Seminar spoken about here is a gathering of Israeli environmental NGO’s that will propose an Israeli position for the Copenhagen Summit. Israel has not so far taken an official line on global warming. That is probably about to change. The new environment minister, Gilad Erdan, is one of the very few in recent years not to see the appointment as a consolation prize for not receiving a “real” ministerial job.” Erdan gets it. He understands that the environment really matters. The Tisha B’Av seminar includes a meeting with him. 3.         Tisha B’Av […]

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