Judaism and the Environment

The following is the text of a presentation I gave for my work, it's more "personal" in nature than I prefer to post on here. But it's time for a new post, so I thought I would recycle it.

Lately I've been thinking about the tensions between religions and the environment though, so I'll do a little article providing a counter argument to what I've presented here.  Debating with yourself is fun right?!

Environmental justice, a concept dear to many of my contemporaries, is for me also greatly intertwined with my Jewish background.

Judaism is a culture and tradition that I was born into, but a faith that I didn’t truly ascribe to until relatively recently. In Florida I grew up with a bit of ambiguity surrounding what it meant to be Jewish. My mom, a Lutheran from Illinois, converted to Judaism when she met my dad who had a typical “Mizrahi” or Middle Eastern Jewish experience growing up in Iran. Both are agnostics who attend a reform congregation and decided to send my sister and me to an orthodox day school for six years. Confusing is one way to frame this sort of upbringing, but I think it was the ever present political and at times religious dinner discussions that probably were my formative influences in how I approached faith. 

I believe that environmental justice is a form of social justice - not only because human beings are inevitably intertwined with the fate of the Earth, but also because we have a responsibility towards that which is other and furthermore greater than ourselves. I think that the Earth certainly commands such respect. The Hebrew word for land is “adamah” from the root “adam,” which means man. In the creation story God creates humankind from the Earth; a particularly astute observation by our ancient ancestors, but it’s a teaching that we’ve departed from in the modern age as we’ve become, well, increasingly less and less human. These days it seems that we rarely feel the “adamah” the land within our being “adam” or human.

Judaism is a religion that is tied to the land; from its explication of our very being, down to the myriad of laws that are supposed to govern our interactions with the land. Last year I worked at the Urban Adamah Program in Berkley, which is a Jewish organization that is attempting to create a farm that observes Jewish agricultural and moral laws. I had an opportunity to explore contemporary applications of Jewish traditions on the food justice movement, which involved everything from practicing “Pe’ah”, which literally translates to corner – a practice where you leave a portion of your harvest for those in need of food. Or even the simple act of saying a bracha a line of prayer before eating and creating the intentionality around the piece of food that I was about to consume, was portrayed with new understanding perhaps because for the first time I was growing a large portion of the food that I was eating.

The symbiosis between these two values: Judaism and environmentalism to me is evident. Yes I would probably still be interested in environmental work if I wasn’t Jewish, but I’m not sure that Judaism could exist without it’s connection to the environment.  My own relationship to environmental justice has been nurtured through Judaism and provides deeper meaning and motivation for me as go on to exist with the aim of positive impact in this world. I believe that environmental justice is a form of social justice - not only because human beings are inevitably intertwined with the fate of the Earth, but also because we have a responsibility towards that which is other and furthermore greater than ourselves. I think that the Earth certainly commands such respect. The Hebrew word for land is “adamah” from the root “adam,” which means man. In the creation story God creates humankind from the Earth; a particularly astute observation by our ancient ancestors, but it’s a teaching that we’ve departed from in the modern age as we’ve become, well, increasingly less and less human. These days it seems that we rarely feel the “adamah” the land within our being “adam” or human.

Judaism is a religion that is tied to the land; from its explication of our very being, down to the myriad of laws that are supposed to govern our interactions with the land. Last year I worked at the Urban Adamah Program in Berkley, which is a Jewish organization that is attempting to create a farm that observes Jewish agricultural and moral laws. I had an opportunity to explore contemporary applications of Jewish traditions on the food justice movement, which involved everything from practicing “Pe’ah”, which literally translates to corner – a practice where you leave a portion of your harvest for those in need of food. Or even the simple act of saying a bracha a line of prayer before eating and creating the intentionality around the piece of food that I was about to consume, was portrayed with new understanding perhaps because for the first time I was growing a large portion of the food that I was eating.

The symbiosis between these two values: Judaism and environmentalism to me is evident. Yes I would probably still be interested in environmental work if I wasn’t Jewish, but I’m not sure that Judaism could exist without it’s connection to the environment.  My own relationship to environmental justice has been nurtured through Judaism and provides deeper meaning and motivation for me as go on to exist with the aim of positive impact in this world. Judaism is a religion that is tied to the land; from its explication of our very being, down to the myriad of laws that are supposed to govern our interactions with the land. Last year I worked at the Urban Adamah Program in Berkley, which is a Jewish organization that is attempting to create a farm that observes Jewish agricultural and moral laws. I had an opportunity to explore contemporary applications of Jewish traditions on the food justice movement, which involved everything from practicing “Pe’ah”, which literally translates to corner – a practice where you leave a portion of your harvest for those in need of food. Or even the simple act of saying a bracha a line of prayer before eating and creating the intentionality around the piece of food that I was about to consume, was portrayed with new understanding perhaps because for the first time I was growing a large portion of the food that I was eating.

The symbiosis between these two values: Judaism and environmentalism to me is evident. Yes I would probably still be interested in environmental work if I wasn’t Jewish, but I’m not sure that Judaism could exist without it’s connection to the environment.  My own relationship to environmental justice has been nurtured through Judaism and provides deeper meaning and motivation for me as go on to exist with the aim of positive impact in this world.