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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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 Californ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
