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Earth Etude for Elul 26: You Were Wrong
by Ben Weilerstein
~ I
You were wrong about environmentalism, man, no that’s not what I think no, I’m not really an environmentalist because if I say I am you’ll say in your head I’m saying things you don’t think need to be said, out loud, at all so, no, I’m not an environmentalist and I don’t feel a rush of flight, of my heels lifting up off the ground when I recycle a plastic bottle not like I do when I recite over and over again until it doesn’t leave my head for years, “stop! the! pipeline!”
or something like that, y’know my voice ...
Earth Etude for Elul 25: Bees, Fireflies, and Stars
by Ruah Swennerfelt
~ The bee was busy, humming around me and traveling from flower to flower, while I was sitting and weeding. I stopped my work to take a closer look and was amazed to see that, as the bee dove deep and touched a certain spot in the flower, the flower reached its stamen up to the bee’s butt and deposited some pollen. This interaction occurred again and again. I saw so clearly how the bee and the flower miraculously co-evolved for them each to survive. I stopped my weeding task and sat still, contemplating this complex planet of ours and the wonders ...
Blurbs for “Who Stole My Religion? Revitalizing Judaism and Applying Jewish Values to Help Heal Our Imperiled Planet”
• What People Are Saying about "Who Stole My Religion? Revitalizing Judaism and Applying Jewish Values to Help Heal Our Imperiled Planet"
The many endorsements below show that it is not just the author, but also many other people – of various perspectives – who think their religion has been “stolen,” but who still believe that religious values have relevance to current issues. It is our hope that the voices of the people who submitted the statements below, as well as many more voices, will be raised to help revitalize Judaism and other religions and ...
Earth Etude for Elul 24: What Is Remembering?
by Steph Zabel
~ What is remembering?
As I’ve ponder this question over the past several days, the following thoughts have come to me…
Remembering is a return to wholeness and truth: a wholeness of self, of spirit, of place in the world. When we remember who we are, why we are here, and how we relate to the world around us, these remembrances — these truths — infuse our lives with richness and radiate outwards to all the lives around us.
I think that remembering must also paradoxically involve forgetting… For instance:
When we remember that all ...
Earth Etude for Elul 23: Tandem
by Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman
Biking home on Orchard Street
With the wind behind me, and Jamaica Pond
Wrinkled and clear beyond the houses,
A peregrine falcon winged down
A feathered grace, gliding on my right.
For a breath, two, we flew side by side.
My grief, of late, has become more precise.
There are worlds
Beyond worlds, the eons will stretch
Over bedrock and magma, blue and green.
There is life and Life and God unending
No matter what ...
Why Perform a Rite That Kills Chickens as a Way to Seek God’s Compassion?
During the ten-day period starting on Rosh Hashanah and ending on Yom Kippur, Judaism's holiest day, Jews seek God's compassion and ask for forgiveness for transgressions during the previous year so that they will have a happy, healthy, peaceful year. Yet, many Jews perform the rite of kapparot (in Ashkenazic Hebrew kappores or in Yiddish, shluggen kappores) in the days before Yom Kippur, a ritual that involves the killing of chickens.
Kapparot is a custom in which the sins of a person are symbolically transferred to a fowl. First, selections from Isaiah 11:9, Psalms ...
Earth Etude for Elul 22: Earth Rituals
by Molly Bajgot
~ This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resour...
Earth Etude for Elul 21: The Food We Eat
by Leora Mallach
~ The severe drought affecting the northeast this growing season is causing farmers to apply for federal disaster relief (they must prove at least 30% crop loss to qualify). According to USDA data, Massachusetts topsoils were 25% drier in July 2016 than the 10 year mean, and there are mandatory water restrictions in many towns.
The National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), established at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1995, tells us:
Drought is an insidious hazard of nature. It is often referred to as a "creeping phenomenon" and ...
Earth Etude for Elul 20: An Old Problem
by Rabbi Jacob Siegel
~ I like to think of climate change as an old problem.
True, human-made climate change and the potential it has to wreak disaster on our earth’s ecosystem are new and unprecedented. Every year extreme temperatures rise and extreme weather events become more common. These are challenges we have never faced.
On the other hand, this is an old problem. We, as the Jewish people, know what it means to face a crisis of existence after a cataclysmic destructive act − the destruction of the Temple – which itself was destroyed because of a moral ...
Earth Etude for Elul 19: Canopy to Heaven
by Judith Felsen, Ph.D.
~ There is a canopy of trees that open to the worlds above
so those who come to rest beneath their arbor
can transcend both worlds.
Their trunks are pillars reaching heights
we dream to touch and do not dare to try,
and yet we come to rest and seek reprieve
from weariness of life within their shelter.
Can you see this canopy within yourself,
its crown and all its glory yielding to still greater heights?
This resting place was made for you
and offers you its peace and wisdom
in release from ...
Earth Etude for Elul 18: Help the Honeybees
by Susie Davidson
~ I always enjoy perusing the Jewish holiday-themed emails from Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Philadelphia-based Shalom Center.
Earlier this year, Rabbi Waskow pointed out that Earth Day ended just as Passover began. "As the traditional Haggadah says," he quoted, "In every generation we face destruction -- and so in every generation all of us -- every human being -- must seek freedom, justice, and healing anew." Waskow suggested passing around an inflatable Globe at the end of the Seder, and singing a song that began:
We have the whole world in ...
Latest Book Review of “Who Stole My Religion? Revitalizing Judaism and Applying Jewish Values to Help Heal Our Imperiled Planet”
WHO STOLE MY RELIGION: Revitalizing Judaism and Applying Jewish Values to Help Heal Our Imperiled Planet. By Richard H. Schwartz, Ph.D., With Rabbi Yonassan Gershom and Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz.
BOOK REVIEW by Judy Carmen:
Like some of the prophets of ancient times, Dr. Schwartz is courageously calling on the Jewish people to return to their core values and take up the challenge of healing the earth and bringing peace and justice to all living beings. This is no casual reprimand. Dr. Schwartz is warning his Jewish readers, as well as people of all ...
Earth Etude for Elul 17: Ode to Water
by Rabbi Laurie Gold
~ Walt Whitman’s beautiful poem, “The Voice of the Rain”, has always moved me. I hope you appreciate it, too.
And who are thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form’d,
altogether changed and yet the same,
I descend to have the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, ...
A Rosh Hashanah Message: Is God’s ‘Very Good’ World Approaching a Catastrophe?
Rosh Hashanah commemorates God's creation of the world. The “Ten Days of Repentance” from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur is a period to evaluate our deeds and to do teshuvah (repentance) for cases where we have missed the mark. Sukkot, which starts a few days after Yom Kippur, is a holiday in which we leave our fine houses and live in temporary shelters (sukkahs) to commemorate our ancestors’ journey in the wilderness. Hence, the upcoming weeks provide an excellent time to consider the state of the planet's environment and what we might do to help shift the world onto a ...
Tips for a Native Garden
~ Although late summer or early fall may seem like an odd time to begin a garden, it is a great time to plan the garden and get plants and flowers into the ground before cold weather hits. If you are thinking about planting a garden, consider creating a native garden as the best way to restore native ecosystems and be kind to the environment. What better way to follow the important goal that Judaism teaches to "till and tend God's creation, the Earth."
Why Use Native Plants?
Before planting a native garden, it is important to have a grasp of what native plants are. By ...
Earth Etude for Elul 16: Choosing Again to Be Good
by Joelle Novey
~I had the opportunity to sit with good folks of many faiths over the last year as we studied the words of Pope Francis’ Encyclical on ecology, Laudato Si.
Also this year, I had many moments of feeling overwhelmed by the bad things in our world that seem so much bigger than any one of us: the irrevocable and global suffering already being caused by our damaged climate; the harm being done to black bodies and spirits by the pernicious persistence of racism; the unrelenting meanness of this year’s presidential campaign rhetoric.
W...
Earth Etude for Elul 15: Water and Clarity of Mind
by Carol Reiman
~ The month of Elul comes round again, time to prepare for what comes next. Yom Kippur melodies rise, twist, turn in on themselves. Time to look in on my self, to find the familiar in a new way, to find my marker in the year.
Drawn to water for clarity of mind, sitting by brook or sea returns me to calming rhythm. Rushing thoughts ebb and flow through my meditation. As the currents go their ways, all settles into place.
In the water space, my boundaries blur; I am a dot in something big, feeling a depth within. Mixing old and new, ...
Earth Etude for Elul 14: Paradox
by Rabbi Katy Z. Allen
~ An individual's ability to accurately perceive changes in the rate of violence in the world over human history is near to impossible. Truly understanding global fluctuations in violence requires knowledge of events over such a vast breadth of space and time that it is essentially beyond a human's ability to comprehend. Which of course doesn't stop us from trying. Steven Pinker has tackled the concept, and he reports us that violence in the world has been going down steadily over the millennia, the centuries, and the decades. Pinker has ...
Earth Etude for Elul 13: A Tall Order
by Hattie Nestel
~ Creating the earth and all within was the gift of G-d.
Opening our eyes to see the situation the world is in, and in particular the destruction of all G-d gave us, is the work of the people.
How shall we begin the job of righting the wrongs done not only to the environment but to people dependent on the environment going through catastrophic changes. Daily we hear of forest fires burning thousands of acres and untold numbers of trees and wildlife. It takes thousands of firefighters to stop such fires. How can we imagine consequences of those ...
Earth Etude for Elul 12: In the Shadow of the Rabbi’s Tree
by Hody Nemes
~ I spend my days entombed in a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan. I am writing these words in an eight-story apartment building.
As the world urbanizes, and as the urban sprawls further afield, we spend our lives increasingly surrounded by the human-made – brilliant engineering, beautiful cityscapes, wonderful in their own way, yet sometimes painfully lacking. A wonderful other sort of beauty, the emergent beauty of ecosystems -- of field, forest, coral reef -- is increasingly harder to find.
Thanks to climate change and other massive societal ...