There is a deep yearning within me and within so many souls to reconnect with the very fabric of creation. We hear the call and many of us are taking steps to move closer to her. We see this in the Jewish back-to-the-land movement, manifest in a growing number of Jewish farm education projects, in the New Jewish Food Movement fueled by Hazon, and in the blossoming of a Jewish consciousness seeking to rediscover the ancient earth-based roots of our tradition. With the world moving through a period of deep economic transformation and environmental uncertainty, now is the time for us to respond to this yearning.

The 14th of Nisan 5769 (Wednesday April 8th, 2009) is a profoundly auspicious moment to heed this call. Sunrise on the 14th of Nisan is Birkhat HaChama, the Blessing of the Sun, the once-in-a-generation opportunity to celebrate the birthday of the sun and the birthday of all of creation. As the Babylonian Talmud instructs, each person who witnesses the sun “in its season” – meaning when the sun arrives at the place where it was at the beginning of creation – shall bless Hashem, “Blessed is the Maker of Creation.” (Babylon Talmud, Berakhot 59b). Birkat HaChama is not simply a rare moment to celebrate creation, however. It is the deepest moment of renewal, rebirth, and new beginning for our generation.

Thanks so much to Yiska Obadia for her great Guest Post.  Yiska is a licensed acupuncturist currently practicing in NYC. She has a background in massage therapy and received her undergraduate degree in Holistic Health Studies.  A lifelong passion for nutrition and a 70 lb. personal weight-loss have inspired her work. In addition to working with individuals one on one, Yiska leads Transformative Nutrition Groups in NYC.  More information can be found on her website.

* Photo by Daniel Albanese

I hope you’re feeling that early spring feeling, where your energy starts to lighten and brighten, springing your creative life force into action. Many people begin to feel this enlivening occur as buds grow on the trees around us and the days get lighter, longer, and warmer. Some though may feel like they are still carrying around the weight and heaviness of winter, physically and/or emotionally. I know I was. Hence the notion of spring cleaning… I don’t think it’s an accident that both Lent and Passover occur during this time of year, both holidays encouraging the clearing out that makes space for the spirit of rebirth to spring forth.

Spring cleaning can happen on many levels. On the physical level alone, a simple elimination of processed and refined foods and chemicals from the diet can work miracles. As always, if you feel stuck, change something up and movement is bound to follow. You might consider giving up alcohol, sugar, and/or coffee for a month. Note: not forever! Try switching it up with an herbal detox tea instead. For allergy sufferers, this elimination can be profoundly beneficial. By diminishing unnecessary stressors, our bodies are more apt to handle the stress of pollen and other seasonal allergens with greater ease.

One of the times it sucks the most to be a convert like me (I’m doing this on my own, not for love) is during the holidays – Pesach in particular.  Like Christmas is for many (even secular) Christians, Pesach is one of the holidays that nearly all Jews, even many non-observant ones, celebrate in one way or another with their families.  Sure, over the years I’ve been fortunate to be brought into the homes of friends and strangers, but still it is not the same as having family traditions to look forward to, or even the casual security of knowing you have that unconditional place to go for the holiday.

So this year a friend of mine and I decided to host our own “orphans” Seder – for others like me who doesn’t have (a Jewish) family or just doesn’t like their family.  Although to be honest, I can count on one hand how many Pesach Seders I’ve attended, so maybe I don’t know what I’m getting myself into.  I mean, I know they are a lot of work, but I love a good dinner party and I have a friend to help out with the Jewish stuff.

But then I tell my friend (who had participated in Hazon’s Environmental bike ride last year) that I want to do an environmentally-themed Seder.  Sounds like fun, a little learning around the table, and hey, I write for the Jew & the Carrot, which is a project of Hazon, so they might be able to help me find an environmental Haggadah, right?

“No we don’t have one of those per se, but Nigel Savage is speaking at Uri L’Tzedek, so why don’t you go to that?”

The garden started as a joke. When asked what activities we both enjoyed, my fiance and I just looked at each other and laughed. Gardening? Eventually the joke became an aspiration. We both liked the idea of gardening: fresh air, a tactile activity, fresh veggies at the end. So one spring weekend, we got outside to tackle the years worth of weeds growing in our small backyard. After about five minutes, I decided it was too much work. So much for gardening. Instead, as I hunched over my master’s thesis on the computer, he got out into the backyard with some hired day laborers and started pulling up weeds. Once the weeds were cleared, they mixed sand into the clay-filled soil to amend it.  More bricks were brought it to complete the small brick patio dividing two sides of the yard. Finally, a trip to the garden store yielded flower bushes for the shady side and several varieties of veggie starts for the sunny side.

“They were to observe them as days of feasting and merrymaking (y’mei mishteh v’simha) and as an occasion for sending gifts to one another and presents to the poor.”
-Esther 9:22

Other than reading and/or hearing the Megillah, every mitzvah of Purim is mentioned in this one verse. Each of them is centered on food in some way, as it is a Jewish holiday, and the verse could arguably be the basis for the joke that every Jewish holiday can be summed up by the phrase, “they tried to kill us, God saved us, let’s eat.” What the Jews of Shushan did, however, was more than just eat.

Purim is a pretty strange holiday. The text we read, Megillat Esther, isn’t a typical biblical book; it makes no mention of the big guy upstairs. Its heroine, a nice Jewish girl bunking with her uncle, ends up in the arms of the non-Jewish king (oh gosh!), and exchanges certain things, namely her wedding vows, in order to save her people. The story ends with the Jews going out on a revenge spree, killing thousands. And how do we celebrate this event every year? By dressing up in costumes, making lots of noise, gorging on delicacies and getting drunk out of our minds ad d’lo yada. Pretty strange in comparison to, let’s say, Yom Kippur, where we don’t eat or drink, instead spending the day in deep and contemplative prayer. What’s even stranger is that we’re taught that Purim is an even “higher” holiday than Yom Kippur. In fact, the rabbis teach that during the Messianic Era, Purim will be the only festival that we observe.

My father’s all-purpose costume for Halloween and Purim turned him into a five-foot-eight sunflower, a three part transformation that made an American Jew into an American seed into a symbol of Jewish passing in ancient Persia.

Essentially, he would put on a green turtleneck and his green courduroy pants, dot his face with my mother’s eyebrow pencil and strap on the piece-de-resistance, a coronet of petals cut from yellow construction paper and tied with a ribbon. Thus attired, he and five to eight additional Budabin McQuowns (there were really a lot of kids in my family) would venture off to synagogue for the annual Purim party. I can’t remember everyone else’s costumes, but I was mostly Hamman, my brother Nick was mostly Vashti, and my brother Mike was mostly Esther, or sometimes King Ahasuerus (when given the opportunity to cross-dress, my family never demures). My mother came at least once as “Barefoot and Pregnant” which was both a quick costume and a clever nod to the swarm she had in tow.

Thanks to Hanniel Levenson for this guest post.  Hanniel is the Environmental Rabbinic Intern at The Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs. Hanniel majored in Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and was awarded a Master of Science degree in environmental policy at Bard College. A self-described post-denominational Jew, Hanniel sees a strong connection between the environment and Judaism and plans to pursue this avenue in his Rabbinical studies at The Academy for Jewish Religion. He is also a painter, a competitive gymnast, who has competed on the national level, as well as a recently Registered Yoga Teacher.

The Federation for Jewish Men’s Clubs (FJMC), one of the main pillars of Conservative Judaism, under the direction of its Executive Director, Rabbi Charles Simon, has taken the initiative to realize Conservative Judaism’s denominational- wide commitment to create a sustainable future.  And it begins in the synagogue.

Jewish tradition is filled with environmentally conscious laws, stories, and leaders. Couple this with strong social action and you have Shomrei Ha’aretz –  “Stewards of the Land.”

Tu Bish’vat is here, along with the delightful hunt in the market for new fruits, some exotic, some uneaten since Rosh Hashanah, and the chance to sit around the table and have a seder that is truly free-form and creative, without any rules about what we are supposed to do or say.

One element of the seder is this exuberance of fruit, all of its colors, smells, and textures. There’s even a special blessing to say for the sweet smell of fruit! Tu Bish’vat is not generally a “locavore’s” holiday, especially here in Western Massachussetts, where only a few of the fruits we can buy are local. (Back in Berkeley it was quite different, not only because you can get so many fruits grown locally in mid-winter, but also because you can go to the Berkeley Bowl and experience the most diverse, exuberant and orgasmic produce section that most human beings will every see.)

There is, however, an order to the seder (seder after all means “order”), something to structure this exuberance, moving from the hard shelled fruits (mostly nuts) to the ones with pits to the ones whose seeds and peels can be swallowed and eaten. This brings up some interesting botanical and culinary questions.

Check out the great new press in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on a new breed of Jewish farmers.  “Farming the land, Torah in Hand“  explains how our friends at Adamah, Jewish Farm School, Kayam and others are more than just farmers who happen to be Jewish, but are actually farming Jewishly. Click here to check it out.

One correction to the article: Kilayim is incorrectly translated as ‘holding back’ – a better translation would be ‘mixtures’ or ‘mixed species.’

When it comes to food, I’ve acted the part of intercessor more than once in my life. I’ve given propagandistic explanations of what CAFO’s are. I’ve pressured room mates and lovers, gently but manipulatively, to give up corn syrup and non-organic produce. I’ve been even more sneaky and covert. When my little sister, who will eat only four things, revealed that she was under the misapprehension that kosher meat was ethically raised, I didn’t disabuse her.

The kosher food industry has been playing its undeserved part as moral intercessor for a while now. An article like this one in Food Quality, shows that non-Jews invest our religious standards for food as a moral litmus that corresponds to their ethics. This revelation makes me feel proud, but also somewhat angry. The world thinks so highly of us that they’re willing to trust our standards, but Agriprocessors showed that the laws of kashrut have nothing to do with the laws of the rest of the world.

If you’ll be in New York City tonight, go and check out this panel at Yeshiva University‘s Weissberg Center, where Orthodox leaders will get together to discuss the movement’s response to ethics and kashrut. The panel is at 7 pm, and will include Shmuly Yanklowitz of Uri L’Tzedek. See The Jew and The Carrot’s interview with Ari Hart to get prepped.

If you can’t make it to the panel in person, check out the live webcast at Mogulus (thanks to Larry Lennhoff for his comment and to Ari Weiss for contacting us).

Rabbi Gordon Tucker is the Senior Rabbi at the Temple Israel Center in White Plains, New York. He served as the Dean of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTA) from 1984 until 1992, and on the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly from 1982 to 2007. His most recent published work, Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Generations is a translation with commentary of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s three volume work in Hebrew.

Right before Thanksgiving, I had the chance to speak with Rabbi Tucker about his thoughts on Hekhsher Tzedek, how food and social justice connect, and where change comes from in Conservative Judaism (hint, read the title of this post)

Read all about it below the jump (plus – a special, candid photo of Rabbi Tucker on Hazon’s New York Jewish Environmental Bike Ride!)…

I’ve always believed that keeping kosher was not just a way of creating Jewish identity, but also a way to create a society attuned to the earth. After years of wondering why some animals are kosher and others are not, I found an ecological explanation for these rules (see section VI). I’m sharing it with the hope of getting some feedback.

I. Why do we keep kosher? I want to open up this question by taking a look back to parshat Noach. Usually when we think of the Noah story, we think about how Noah’s family was given permission to eat animals (read more about this on neohasid.org and on jcarrot. ) But parshat Noach is also the first place where we (that is, all humanity) are given laws restricting how and what we eat.[1]

Even though the laws about keeping kosher, kashrut, may seem like the most specifically Jewish of practices, they have their origins in this “Noachide covenant”, where the first restrictions on eating are described. Those restrictions are to not eat a limb from a living animal and to not eat the blood of an animal. Both are the basis of many kashrut rules.

The Noah story is also the first time the distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘unclean’ animals is mentioned (Noah is told to bring seven of the pure (tahor) animals, which are the ones we call kosher.) So even the least universal aspect of kashrut, the “cloven hoof and cud-chewing mouth” requirement, has its roots in one of the Torah’s most universal stories.

That’s a good jumping off point for searching out the universal meaning of these culturally-specific, arguably parochial laws.