Each week, over Shabbat dinner we engage in an experiment in mindfulness. Moving through the Shabbat table liturgy we are forced to think about two things: how does our wine and challah taste and where did then come from?
During the weekday, I eat akin to Homer Simpson, eating too much and beginning each bite before finishing the one before. On Shabbat, we are forced to take a step back. First we remember through blessing the wine and challah that food is a gift, and it is from God. (Of course it’s a law to bless our food on the weekdays as well even the most pious Jew would argue that there is something different and special about Shabbat blessings.)
In addition, the Shabbat liturgy forces us to follow an order. I’ll admit that I’m a fork loader. The more I can taste in a given bite the happier I am. But on Shabbat, we don’t mix. First we taste the wine. Then we taste the challah. Only then do we get to eat everything else. Shabbat is our chance to pause, taste our foods, and enjoy the difference in taste at each step in our ritual.
For this reason, it couldn’t be any more perfect that Tu Bishvat, the holiday where we usually celebrate the unique tastes of nature and look closely at how we relate to God’s world, falls on Shabbat. It is during this holiday that we are encouraged to go above and beyond what we do every week, to be mindful of our food in all aspects. This coming Saturday, at Congregation Beth Elohim when the clocks strike 6PM we will combine the best of Shabbat and Tu Bishvat.
Taste of Tu Bishvat will be an experiment in mindfulness. Like the Shabbat table liturgy we’ll take the time to really taste our food (through meditative practice) and to study and discuss where our food comes from by looking at issues of sustainability and eating. The night will end with a havdallah service as we say goodbye to Shabbat and Tu Bishvat. Cost is $18. To register click here.
Taste of Tu Bishvat is a program of Brooklyn Jews and the Jewish Meditation Center of Brooklyn. It is co-sponsored by the AJWS-ADODAH partnership.
The official blog of domestic justice issues, jspot.org, brings you critiques and thoughts on last night’s State of the Union address by Jewish social justice leaders from around the country:
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post from Yoni Stadlin, founding director of Eden Village Camp. Many of you celebrated at this summer’s Bereishit Festival or you may have justheard of them through the grapevine. As we look toward our next Jewish holiday of Tu Bishvat, we invite you to hear Stadlin’s inspiring story. Oh yeah, and thanks to three huge Jewish organizations for investing millions in such an awesome project!
My name is Yoni Stadlin, and I am a redwood-tree-sitter. Redwoods are the tallest trees in the world, can grow up to 300 feet tall, and can live for two thousand years! I lived aloft in redwood trees for two months of my life. Tree-sitters are people who live up in trees that are slated to be cut down, on the wager that no one would cut down a tree with a person in it.
Tree-sitting has been effective in protecting huge groves and helping change many policies, but many of these ancient beauties have been logged nonetheless. Ninety-five percent of coastal redwoods in the northwest U.S. have been logged for making things like decks, playgrounds and tools. The practice of clear-cutting – leaving no trees standing – has turned huge, lush, vibrant and ancient redwood forests into eroded wastelands, destroying habitats, contaminating water, and massively increasing our species’ footprint on this planet.
Imagine, people in trees! One person, name Julia Butterfly, lived aloft for two and a half years on a suspended platform in a tree named Luna. Imagine where you were two and a half years ago, and imagine being held by a gigantic tree from then until now. Imagine seeing no doors, not one building, road or florescent light, and your feet never touching the ground. This is what I did for two months, and I loved it. More »
Shabbat at the Hazon Food Conference is an exceptional experiment in pluralism. I wish I had the time to comment on it, but perhaps that will be saved for reflections tomorrow evening once I’m back home. For now, I will report on the sessions I sat in on today. The first involved a private meeting with current and future rabbis (and the occasional educator) and Nigel Savage, the director of Hazon and a true visionary. The second session, titled “The Vegetable Monologues,” after “The Vagina Monologues,” focused on the stories of three Jewish, female farmers. Before Havdallah, I attended a session of the status of Genetically Modified Organisms in Halakhah put on by Zelig Golden, an environmental lawyer with the Center for Food Safety and Rabbi David Seidenberg. More »
Julia Levy spends her evenings and weekends as the NYC Foodzie Scout looking for the next best flavors in NYC. Foodzie.com is San Francisco-based start up: an online marketplace for independent producers where you can buy and sell products from local farms and independent growers. Drop her a line.
As Jews around the world remember the miracle of oil lasting for eight nights, be creative with the presents you give: select treats from eight different producers, one for each night!
It is tradition to eat food fried in oil – latkes (potato pancakes) and jelly donuts are two delicious foods associated with the holiday. This year, try baking your donuts from scratch and filling them with some of Foodzie’s amazing jams or jellies. Consider Terra Verde Farms’ selection, including seedless blackberry or Frog Hollow Farm’s organic apricot-cherry conserves. To garnish your latkes, improvise a twist on the old favorite of apple sauce by substituting chutney, Mango Apple Chutney from Sunchowder’s Emporia Jams is high on our list. More »
by Aryeh Cohen [➚] · Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
My good friend Sarah Newmanblogged over at TakePart about my daughter’s bat mitzvah at the Shtibl Minyan this past summer. As Sarah writes:
What also makes this bat mitzvah so special is that the sustainable practices they chose to incorporate into Shachar’s bat mitzvah can be used for any type of event. And, the greatest lesson that came of their planning is that it involved, engaged and helped to build an already thriving little community in the heart of the Los Angeles megalopolis. The family didn’t do this on their own; all members of their tiny synagogue (myself included) pitched in.
Indy minyan plus eco- and social-justice friendly bat mitzvah with amazing desserts.
(Why isn’t that a category on any of the surveys?!)
The whole story is here.
ylove passed on a link to a fascinating article about the future of in-vitro meat, that is, meat grown in a test-tube:
It starts with cells—it could be a stem cell or something called a myoblast, a precursor to muscle. You proliferate these cells in a kind of nutritious soup that’s filled with vitamins and amino acids and salts and sugar. This is the biochemical equivalent of blood. In order for the cells to grow into tissues, they need this medium. And, it turns out, the most promising approach to producing this medium is to use microalgae, which are photosynthetic organisms even more efficient than plants. We recently funded some research at Oxford University to examine how meat cultured with this medium compares to conventional meat in terms of energy impact, and the study showed that it uses 90 percent less land and water, all while producing 80 percent fewer greenhouse emissions.
Development is being spearheaded by a non-profit whose goal is reducing the resource footprint of the world’s appetite for meat.
Growing hamburgers in vats solves some halachic problems: No tzaar baalei hayim, cruelty to animals, as in endemic in contemporary factory farming. No need to hire rabbis to oversee the slaughter.
But it raises other questions.
Does meat cloned from a cow’s stem cell count as ever min hachai — meat (ultimately) from a live animal, which is prohibited to be eaten? Can a tissue culture be said to chew its cud if it has no cud, or to have cloven hoofs if it has no hooves? Could it conceivable be parve and permitted to be served with milk?
Ten years from now, McDonald’s may boast that its serves low-carbon, cruelty-free in vitro burgers. As Jews, should we eat them?
DailyKos posted this video today, poking fun at Arizona State Sen. Sylvia Allen (R), as she speaks at the Senate Retirement and Rural Development Committee meeting.
First of all, let’s give her the benefit of the doubt, and assume that she’s just a lazy Creationist, rounding up to 6,000. (We all know the earth is actually only 5,769-years old.)
But here’s the real concern:
This Earth’s been hear 6,000 years — and I know I’m going on and on and I’ll shut up — it’s been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with.
She’s falling back on a still-lazy belief common amongst a certain subset of neo-con Christians: that because G!d created the earth, everything has been, and will be, provided for us. If those same Christians believe in the end times, they feel no pressure to protect the environment now, because the world’s supposed to end soon anyway. I’m glad Jews don’t have that same mentality. (Nor do all Christians; remember when the Vatican added polluting the environment as a sin?)
But here’s the real shortcoming of her statement. Allen claims that there weren’t any environmental laws for the last 6,000 years. I call foul. It doesn’t take too close a reading of the Bible to find many references to our responsibility to the earth, nature, and animals; heck, the land even gets its own sabbath. Yeesh.
I admit it. The reason I haven’t posted up until now on the amazing new book by Rabbi Jill Jacobs is only partly because I’ve been reading it slowly. Really, a big part of it is that books this good just don’t come around all that often, and I’m feeling kind of 1st grade-ish about sharing. But we all have to grow up sometime. Or at least, if we don’t someone will come along and make us share our toys. Ahem.
So, Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote, There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice through Jewish Law and Tradition (Jewish Lights 2009) for all of us. Framed by a foreword from the utterly menschlikh gadol Rabbi Elliot Dorff, and prefaced by Simon Greer, Jacobs wrote the book during her tenure at Jewish Funds for Justice as rabbi-in-residence.
Grounded deeply in Jewish text, Rabbi Jacobs begins with her own journey to understanding how Jewish canonical texts are actually far more deeply invested with the everyday experience of poverty and need than most of us will (God willing) ever be, and how allowing the midrash, the talmud and other of our classical works to really enter us, not as something which we read for fun or education just because they’re important texts, but to really become doors to a perception of God and our fellow human, can cause us to be transformed through those texts, in the way that the rabbis meant us to be.
While she does this, Rabbi Jacobs also takes on the imprecise… well, let’s be honest, the complete meltdown of “Jewish” terms such as “Tikkun Olam,” “Tzedek” (as in the ubiquitous, and so therefore now nearly empty, verse “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof,” the favored phrase of Jewish organizations that don’t know – or at least can’t be bothered to find – any other text, no matter what the topic under discussion) and “Prophetic Judaism” into the utterly meaningless and restores them to a Jewish and more faithful context. (And can I say, thank you thank you thank you.)
This isn’t to say the book is completely without flaw. Like the tradition of leaving in tiny flaws to prove that a human creation cannot be perfect, there are some minor quibbles I have here and there. Primarily, I think that Rabbi Jacobs occasionally slides between “we can say that…” and the assumption of the supposition. Or that there doesn’t seem to be much room for the individual and national relationship/communion with the divine in any context other than social justice. But these are minor quibbles in a book so terrific, that I will be buying it for all my friends. How can I make any complaints about someone who at least implicitly supports my observance that, while everybody loves Hillel, it is Shammai who in his grumpy stringency, is actually the one who is more concerned for the disempowered and helpless (p. 32).
Rabbi Jacobs’ book also includes an excellent, concise introduction to the canonical texts, meaning that even the beginner can make sense of what she writes, and, I hope, that in reading her work will come to see that Judaism and social justice cannot be untangled from Judaism and Jewish law – that the system is a holistic one, and that Judaism does indeed give us a mission.
As Jacobs herself states in the conclusion, wrapping up her fine book with a brief codicil about Judaism in the public sphere,
“What is missing… is a real public discussion about how Jewish law and tradition might address contemporary policy questions… when Jews engage in the public discourse as Jews, we should bring Jewish law and principles into the conversation in such a way as to enrich… discourse…The commitment to living our Judaism publicly should then push us to take public action on these principles, both as individuals and as a community… We will witness the emergence of a Judaism that views ritual observance, study and engagement in the world as an integrated whole, rather than as separate and distinct practices.”
Now we’re talking. Just in time for your Shavuot Night Torah Study, the American Jewish World Service has launched On1Foot.org, a user-editable repository of social justice-oriented texts from Jewish tradition.
If you were wondering where in the Jerusalem Talmud is the original source for the dictum “one who saves a single life has saved the world entire”, a simple search yields Sanhedrin 4:22.
If you’re looking for a well-spoken prophet of antiquity who railed against the exploitation of the poor — Amos pops up with some choice words.
If you are curious what statement was made by some Jewish leaders arrested working for civil rights in Florida in 1964, you can read a passage from it here.
It’s a veritable wiki-concordance of “tikkun olam”! Here is how it is described in an announcement from AJWS:
On1Foot is an online, open source database of Jewish social justice texts. We invite you to visit On1Foot to explore this exciting new resource for Jewish social justice education.
Search and browse hundreds of biblical, rabbinic and contemporary Jewish texts about social justice
Upload new texts
Comment on existing texts
Create custom source sheets using the texts and suggested discussion questions
On1Foot is a project of American Jewish World Service and is co-sponsored by AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps, Hazon, Tzedek, Mechon Hadar and Uri L’Tzedek.
As we say down here in the District: Happy learning!
So many Jewschool friends in this video: Moishe House Silver Spring leads a birkat hachamah early in the morning on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, as videoed and photographed by the Washington Post:
As was noted here previously, the Jewish world is getting sun stroke as it prepares for Birkat Hachama (“Blessing of the Sun”) – observed only once every 28 years – on Wednesday, April 8. As predicted, right about now, reports of BH observances are virtually exploding throughout the Jewish community. (At my congregation in Evanston, IL, we’re going to observe BH with a sunrise meditation service, yoga sun salutations along with the traditional ceremony itself.)
An increasing number of BH related items have been crossing my desktop of late – my favorite is this article from the April 8, 1897 issue of the NY Times. Apparently when a group of venerable rabbis tried to observe the sun ritual in Tompkins Square, NY, they were almost shut down by the police. My favorite line from the (very detailed) piece:
No Permit Had Been Thought Necessary for the Gathering and Policeman Foley Could Not Understand What It Meant.
(Hey, get in line, Policeman Foley…)
Here is an extensive list of Birkat Hachama resources (including where to get your own commemorative t-shirt.)
(“Haolam Habah” = “The world to come,” a traditional euphemism for the afterlife)*
The Boston Globe today caught up with the green burial movement, a growing trend of individuals and funeral professionals moving towards more environmentally-friendly approaches to internment.
The section that caught my eye comes about half-way through the article:
[In Massachusetts] cemeteries set their own rules, and typically install concrete grave boxes to keep the landscape even, for easier maintenance, and prevent the ground from caving into a grave site. For Jewish burials, in which an unembalmed body is placed in the earth in a pine box, a cemetery will forgo the bottom of the concrete liner, allowing the casket to make contact with the dirt.
In 2006, when Rachael Stark of Arlington was trying to bury her husband in an environmentally friendly way at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, near the town’s center, she chose a Jewish burial, which is green by default.
“If I had said I want to do an eco-funeral,” said Stark, an environmentalist with Jewish roots, “I don’t know that the funeral home and cemetery would have respected that.”
So as the rest of the industry catches up to what Jewish tradition (and, I suspect, other traditions as well) already know, I wonder: will this be a new hook into Judaism for a different brand of seekers? Will (should?) the Jewish establishment exploit the environmental friendliness of Jewish burial as a way to entice more Jews towards (at least one slice of) Jewish observance? Or would that just feel icky?
* On a different note, I’m trying to be more conscious of the ways that my writing can limit the audience to an already-knowledgeable in-group. I’d like the content at Jewschool to be accessible to all who are interested, so I’m attempting to do my part by decoding Hebrew terms, Jewish jargon, etc. Thanks to Victor who has been asking for terms-definitions in the comments section for reminding me that not everyone speaks the Jewish Establishment Lingo.
This post is from memory, as the sessions I’m blogging on were during shabbos, so I wasn’t taking notes, so forgive me for being less than complete. click below for some insights from the sessions and from some personal conversations I had throughout the day. More »
Each week, over Shabbat dinner we engage in an experiment in mindfulness. Moving through the Shabbat table liturgy we are forced to think about two things: how does our wine and challah taste and where did then come from? 
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post from Yoni Stadlin, founding director of 
Tree-sitting has been effective in protecting huge groves and helping change many policies, but many of these ancient beauties have been logged nonetheless. Ninety-five percent of coastal redwoods in the northwest U.S. have been logged for making things like decks, playgrounds and tools. The practice of clear-cutting – leaving no trees standing – has turned huge, lush, vibrant and ancient redwood forests into eroded wastelands, destroying habitats, contaminating water, and massively increasing our species’ footprint on this planet.
Shabbat at the Hazon Food Conference is an exceptional experiment in pluralism. I wish I had the time to comment on it, but perhaps that will be saved for reflections tomorrow evening once I’m back home. For now, I will report on the sessions I sat in on today. The first involved a private meeting with current and future rabbis (and the occasional educator) and Nigel Savage, the director of Hazon and a true visionary. The second session, titled “The Vegetable Monologues,” after “The Vagina Monologues,” focused on the stories of three Jewish, female farmers. Before Havdallah, I attended a session of the status of Genetically Modified Organisms in Halakhah put on by 
So, Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote, 
Now we’re talking. Just in time for your Shavuot Night Torah Study, the 
So as the rest of the industry catches up to what Jewish tradition (and, I suspect, other traditions as well) already know, I wonder: will this be a new hook into Judaism for a different brand of seekers? Will (should?) the Jewish establishment exploit the environmental friendliness of Jewish burial as a way to entice more Jews towards (at least one slice of) Jewish observance? Or would that just feel icky?
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