69 results for author: Owner of Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL)


Jewish Energy Guide: Ten Torah Tweets for Creation Care

Summary: In 140 characters or less, COEJL Governance Committee member Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb puts a modern twist on environmental messages from the Torah. Today the environment — God’s Creation, our one and only home — needs all the friends and all the help it can get. People of faith have rich traditions that should place us among Creation’s most passionate defenders. Somehow, though, despite strong statements from religious leaders and much scholarship at the intersection of religion and ecology, the message hasn’t sufficiently gotten through. So maybe some spiritual sound bites on sustainability — ...

Jewish Energy Guide: Forming a Green Team

Summary: A key aspect of successful greening initiatives is the presence of a Green Team. Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield, co-founder and former director of the Jewish Greening Fellowship, offers tips for success when creating a Green Team. A Green Team is a group of people who come together at least every four to six weeks to set greening goals for their community and who work between meetings with other members of the community and external partners to implement those goals. A Green Team can be as few as four people or as many as 24, but the most effective Green Teams have these characteristics: Click here to read the full article Rachel ...

Jewish Energy Guide: The LEED-Certified Office

Summary: The American Jewish Committee (AJC) was the first national Jewish organization to have a LEED certified office building. Kenneth Bandler, the director of media relations at AJC, writes about their commitment to sustainability through continued green renovations and other office initiatives. Eight years ago, we set a goal to become the first national Jewish organization to receive green building certification through the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. The task was made a bit easier because we own our own headquarters building in New York. But transforming a 1950s ...

Jewish Energy Guide: Let the Sun Shine

Summary: Benjamin Kahane, an engineer who designs photovoltaic solar energy systems for SunEdison, outlines the current state of solar power and its potential as a transformative energy source. There are two major types of solar power technologies: photovoltaic and solar thermal. The United States has about 500 megawatts of operational solar thermal power, most of which comes from the largest single project, a 354 megawatt plant in California’s Mojave Desert. Photovoltaic power is much more widespread, mostly because it is a much more scalable technology. The total U.S. grid connected photovoltaic capacity in 2010 was 2,152.5 ...

Jewish Energy Guide: The Lowdown on Natural Gas and Hydraulic Fracturing by Dr. Mirele Goldsmith

Summary: Dr. Mirele Goldsmith discusses natural gas and hydraulic fracturing, a new method of unconventional extraction, and weighs the risks and benefits of increased natural gas consumption. She stresses that even though natural gas emits less CO2 than coal, it is still a fossil fuel and its extraction comes with significant risks. Natural gas is a fossil fuel formed hundreds of millions of years ago out of the decaying remains of plants and algae in ancient oceans. Natural gas is found in a variety of geological formations. In the past, natural gas wells were drilled in areas where layers of impermeable rock lay above more porous, oil and ...

Jewish Energy Guide: The National Synagogue Goes Green — Hallelujah! By Jen Singer

Summary: Jen Singer, the founder and chair of the Green Committee at Ohev Shalom: The National Synagogue, explains how her synagogue became the first in the country to be recognized for energy efficiency, with Energy Star certification from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It was my love of the environment and dedication to living life as an observant Jew that led me to start the Green Committee at Ohev Sholom: The National Synagogue in Washington, D.C. From modest beginnings, after just a few years, we already have made a big impact. This year, our synagogue became the first in the country to be recognized for energy efficiency with ...

Jewish Energy Guide: Green Your Office by Rabbi Lawrence Troster

Summary: Most people spend the vast majority of their time in offices. Author of the book Mekor Hayyim: A Source Book on Water and Judaism, Rabbi Lawrence Troster provides a guide for making physical workspaces green in this article. Holiness can be created anywhere; it is not confined to the synagogue or home. In Judaism’s holistic approach to life, the exercise of making a livelihood is critical — the presence of God also should be felt in the way we conduct our business. There is a considerable classical and modern literature on Jewish business ethics, and now that area of ethics should include environmentalism. In Jewish ...

Jewish Energy Guide: Social Justice and Climate Change by Rabbi Jill Jacobs

Summary: The clash of rich versus poor is a concept going back to Talmudic times, but today it takes a new meaning in reference to the environment. Rabbi Jill Jacobs was recently named to The Forward’s list of 50 influential American Jews and to Newsweek’s list of the 50 most influential rabbis in America, and in her article she hopes to influence your social view on how the waste of the wealthy impacts the environment of the impoverished. While the wealthiest individuals, corporations, and nations use far more than their share of our natural resources, the poorest individuals and nations will pay the price in lives, healthcare ...

Jewish Energy Guide: Repair the World’s Climate by Bill McKibben

Summary: For Bill McKibben, climate change is not only a practical problem but an ethical one. With its distinct moral legacy, the renowned environmental activist and founder of 350.org believes the Jewishe environmental movement is perfectly positioned to respond to the ethical dilemmas at hand. In the last 20 years, I’ve watched the religious environmental movement grow from nothing — less than nothing, really. Twenty years ago, liberal religious communities thought of the environment as something to get to once poverty and war had been defeated, and many conservative faith groups viewed it as suspiciously pagan. Click to ...

Jewish Energy Guide: The Jewish Greening Fellowship

Summary: Dr. Mirele Goldsmith explains the background, purpose, and stunning accomplishments of the first cohort group of the Jewish Greening Fellowship, a campaign of the UJA-Federation of New York to green Jewish institutions. The Jewish Greening Fellowship was designed, implemented and directed by [Rachel] Jacoby Rosenfield. A key decision was made to provide funding directly to each agency to defray the expense of the staff time devoted to the fellowship. By supporting the salary of the fellow, the fellowship was able to insist that every fellow spend four to six hours per week on greening activities. Agencies in the fellowship also could ...

Jewish Energy Guide: Making your Synagogue a Green Holy Place

By Rabbi Lawrence Troster Summary: Synagogues are important community spaces, but also important spaces for demonstrating a commitment to environmental values. Rabbi Lawrence Troster, the rabbinic director at J Street, provides detailed instructions on how to green your synagogue. It is often the case that many religious communities have an initial burst of environmental programming that is often followed by a long period of inactivity. While all institutions need time to rest after launching a new initiative, the religious institutions that enjoy the most environmental success are the ones that demonstrate persistence, and that are ...

Jewish Energy Guide – Shavuot: Cheesecake, Temptation and Conservation

By Rabbi Natan Levy During the 2011 riots here in London, teachers and social workers were said to have been among the looters. British Prime Minister David Cameron called them opportunistic criminals. Perhaps temptation simply got the best of them. Yielding to temptation may be pandemic in our culture. When we argue about mitigating climate change, the discussion is often framed as a question of progress versus conservation — but it may ultimately be revealing the tension between temptation and self-control. The average American releases about 19 times the amount of carbon into the atmosphere as the average Guatemalan; the ...

Jewish Energy Guide – The Rainbow Connection: Rainbow Day and Creation

By Rabbi David Seidenberg “I have set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and the Earth.” (Genesis 9:13) Millennia before Kermit the Frog sang about the Rainbow Connection, the very first Rainbow Day marked the connection between God and all animals. The biblical flood began on the 17th of the second month, exactly one lunar year and 10 days — or one complete solar year — before Noah, his family, and all the animals that were with them left the ark, on the 27th day of the second month. But just before they left, God made a covenant with them that there would never again be a flood of water to ...

Jewish Energy Guide – Al Gore: The Importance of Jewish Climate Change Advocacy

By Al Gore I’m writing to tell you how excited I am by the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life’s plans for the Jewish Energy Covenant Campaign, how ready I am to help, and how much I encourage all of you who have been a part of COEJL’s mission to do all you can for the success of the most important project you’ve undertaken. It couldn’t come at a more critical moment. As someone who works to follow developments all over the world, I believe that decisions on global warming and energy that will be made in coming months by Congress, the White House and the world’s governments will shape conditions ...

Jewish Energy Guide: Energy’s Answer is Blowing in the Wind

By Benjamin Kahane For hundreds of years, humans have used wind to pump water and grind grain, mostly with small windmills. Large, modern wind turbines are used to generate electricity for individual use and to feed into the electric grid. Wind turbines generally have three blades and, because higher altitudes yield higher wind velocities and lower turbulences, the turbines are mounted on tall towers to capture as much energy as possible. As the blades turn, the central shaft spins a generator to make electricity. In the United States, total wind power constitutes a little more than 1 percent of the total country’s energy output ...

Jewish Energy Guide – Renewable Energy Policy in Israel: Past and Present

By Naomi Lipstein and Dr. Alon Tal The ability to harness energy has been essential to life since the start of humanity. This ability, of course, has come in many different forms and has gone through massive transformations over the centuries. In the 18th and 19th centuries, coal fired the steam engine — arguably the most vital technology of the Industrial Revolution. It was the discovery of oil that allowed the revolution to flourish even further in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in essence altering civilization. Today, there is little we do without using some form of energy. Energy is necessary for the production of food and ...

Jewish Energy Guide: The Power of Advocacy

By Rabbi Steve Gutow Inside and outside the pages of this guide, you will read and continue to read about bad things happening — to our Earth, to our fellow people, to our collective spirit — and, though we may wish it away, bad things likely will continue to happen for a very long time to come. This, of course, is discouraging, leading many among us to give up and forget about addressing these problems. But that would be a mistake. After all, it is our Jewish responsibility to help repair the world. That is, indeed, why we, as Jews, are here — to try to make life better. And not just better for our friends and families, or ...

Jewish Energy Guide: Green Your Home

Summary: David Krantz, president and chairperson of the Green Zionist Alliance, shows how easy it is to go green at home. He offers up some interesting tips to help you get started! Compact fluorescent light bulbs use about a quarter of the energy of their traditional incandescent lighting brethren. Compact fluorescents last for years, and although they contain mercury, it’s still less than the amount of mercury released into the atmosphere by producing the extra amount of energy needed to power conventional bulbs. But the best option may be LED bulbs. They don’t use mercury and they only use about a quarter of the energy of compact ...

Jewish Energy Guide: Washington’s Green Shuls

By Joelle Novey Every Jewish community I have visited strives to honor the words of the Torah. Physically, we adorn the scroll beautifully, carry it carefully, touch it lovingly and read from it publicly. Spiritually, we pray that our hearts will open to its teachings, we study its words and generations of commentary on its words, and we affirm in community that its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are paths of peace. To many Jews, the thought of a ripped or damaged Torah scroll is almost physically painful. In the Tanya, a classic work of Hasidic philosophy, Rabbi Shneur Zalman writes that the actual words God used to create ...

Jewish Energy Guide – Nuclear: Carbon-Free but Radioactive

By Benjamin Kahane Nuclear energy isn’t quite a fossil fuel, since unlike coal, natural gas and petroleum, nuclear is not powered by fuel that developed over millennia from pressurized dead organisms — but nuclear isn’t renewable, either, since it uses a finite non-renewable fuel source. Nuclear power also presents many environmental problems, such as how to handle its radioactive waste product, and, in extreme circumstances, is disastrous, such as in Chernobyl, Ukraine, and recently in Japan. Nuclear power is sometimes confused as a sustainable or renewable power. It is not, simply because there is a finite amount of ...