Leonard Felson, you’re our hero.  Thank you for writing such a beautiful, thorough article about Hazon’s food work for The Jerusalem Report. 

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The Jerusalem Report
October 15, 2007
By: Leonard Felson

Tuv Ha’Aretz brings together 3,000 years of kashrut, food tradition and the environment.

Winter squash, broccoli, fall lettuce, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and cabbage - all the fall crops are being harvested or about to be these days at Garden of Eve, an organic farm at the eastern end of Long Island. The farm is also part of a new movement that links synagogues and Jewish community centers with a growing number of organic farms across the country.

In what’s believed to be the first project of its kind, Hazon, a New York-based Jewish environmental group, has shepherded the creation of 10 such partnerships in the United States and Israel this year, with plans for up to 18 next year and more in the years ahead Community Supported Agriculture partnerships, or CSAs, have been around for decades to encourage consumers to support local farms. Members or “shareholders” pay a fee at the start of a growing season to meet a farm’s operating expenses; in return, members receive a portion of the farm’s produce each week, throughout the season.

Hazon sponsors annual bike rides from Jerusalem to Eilat each May in order to publicize its mission: to build and create a healthy, sustainable Jewish community by sponsoring cutting-edge educational initiatives, according to Hazon officials. Three years ago, it broached the idea of sponsoring a Jewish CSA as another way of achieving this.

Nigel Savage, Hazon’s executive director, thought the idea “had potential” given the role food plays in Jewish culture and religion, both historically and biblically. And he imagined that if individuals at synagogues and JCCs across the U.S. would put their purchasing power toward local, organic farms, Hazon could play a vital role in re-establishing a Jewish understanding and connection between what he says is “space, food and farming.”

A small group gathered at the home of Phyllis Bieri, a member of Congregation Anshe Chesed, a long-established Conservative synagogue on New York’s

Upper West Side. A neurologist by profession, Bieri had grown up eating fresh vegetables and fruit her mother planted and tended wherever they lived, never using pesticides or chemical fertilizers. So it became second nature for Bieri, after marriage and children, to feed her family as much as possible from fresh, local produce from a CSA they had belonged to for several years. In short order, a partnership was created between Anshe Chesed and the Long Island organic farm, Garden of Eve, a Jewish-owned farm run by Eve Kaplan-Walbrecht and her family since the late 1970s. Organic vegetables grow on 25 acres of the farm; straw takes up another 15 acres; there’s 20 acres in pastureland for the few cows on the farm and two acres of flowers.

So began Hazon’s “Tuv Ha’Aretz” (Hebrew for “Best of the Land”) project. A year later in 2005, a second Jewish CSA was established in northern New Jersey that included the JCC MetroWest and another organic farm. Last year, three more CSAs were created with synagogues or JCCs in Washington, D.C., Houston, and Long Island, N.Y. This spring, Tuv Ha’Aretz added five more in Berkeley, St. Paul, Atlanta and Philadelphia.

“Our vision for the next decade is for thousands of Jewish families at hundreds of synagogues and JCCs across the country to have the opportunity to support organic family farms,” says Savage.

Typically, CSA member families pay about $450 up front for about 24 weeks of produce, an average season. Often organic farms provide produce for other CSAs as well (not all Jewish ones), which helps guarantee farmers’ ability to sustain what remains a challenging business operation.

Members also commit to working one shift either on the farm that provides their vegetables or, more often, at their synagogue or JCC, setting up or cleaning up during the drop-off and pick-up times. Like any partnership, the arrangement comes with some risk, as members commit to bearing the problems that could result if weather, for example, damages a farmer’s crop. That’s not unheard of, as members of the Atlanta CSA can testify, following a long period of drought and severe heat across the southeast this summer.

Neither CSA members or Hazon supervise the practices or working conditions on the farms to certify the farms are run in a “kosher” or ethical way, but participants and Hazon officials say, unlike the relationship at most American supermarkets, members know the farmers, see them regularly and believe they have a transparent relationship. None of the particpating U.S. farms will observe the laws of shmita, or letting the land lay fallow;

Leah Koenig, a Hazon official, explains that the law is only relevant in Israel.
Despite the obvious involvement of synagogue and community center members, or Jews in general, what else makes the agricultural venture Jewish?

Says Savage: “Food is a very rich Jewish issue and a powerful entryway into lots of different issues. We have 3,000 years worth of kashrut and food tradition in which food is actually central to Jewish identity. At the same time, every time we eat, you actually have a series of consequences for the land that we don’t think about. The idea of Tuv Ha’Aretz is to bring those two separate conversations together.”

As a result, a growing number of Jews are beginning to see the connection.

Eric Schulmiller is among them. He’s the 35-year-old cantor of Long Island’s Reconstructionist Synagogue of the North Shore, as well as programming liaison to the synagogue’s social action committee. Last year, he helped persuade his synagogue to join Tuv Ha’Aretz. As the synagogue’s teen coordinator, he discovered the program by chance, after “googling” for organic farms as he planned a teen field trip. He found a core group of volunteers to spearhead the organizational and administrative effort and about 60 of the synagogue’s 360 member families to commit to the project.

Social justice has been a driving force within the congregation. As part of its social action agenda the synagogue has focused on what its members could do to combat global warming, participating in a national environmental campaign to purchase low-energy compact florescent light bulbs. It also is among the first U.S. synagogues to be “green energy driven,” or carbon neutral, by replacing old windows with more energy-efficient ones and incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs throughout its building. (Green energy is a term for those who buy their electricity from renewable sources such as solar, wind power or other alternative technologies.) The synagogue leadership also encourages its members to adopt more energy-conscious practices at their homes.

“If the overriding principle of kashrut is being aware of what you’re consuming and what’s fit to be consumed, the next logical step in our day and age would be to translate kashrut into not just ritual fitness, but ethical fitness,” says Schulmiller, explaining why a relationship with a local organic farm attracted synagogue members.

For Mark A. Kaplan, co-leader of a Tuv Ha’Aretz partnership at Congregation Kol Ami, a Reform synagogue in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park, the attraction was community building. “It will be a great way to bring our congregation together,” says Kaplan, who learned about the program while on a Hazon-sponsored Israel bike ride.

Some synagogue members are wondering what the project has to do with Jewish tradition, but with help from Hazon, Kaplan and co- leader Robin Rifkin, a nutritionist and chef, hope to show the connection with lectures or films about local sustainable agriculture and environmental issues, hunger and social justice issues, as well as cooking classes and community Shabbat potluck dinners.

In the U.S., the growing discussion around food - including bestsellers like Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” and Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” - has opened a gateway for Hazon to frame the discussion in a Jewish context. Last December over the first days of Hanukka, the organization sponsored a conference, “From Latkes to Lattes,” which brought together farmers, rabbis, Jewish educators, food writers, restaurant owners, chefs, nutritionists, college students and people just curious about the connection. In all, 180 participants attended the conference at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in northwestern Connecticut. Tuv Ha’Aretz coordinator Koenig said the gathering reflected an emerging national movement within the Jewish community “at the intersection of Jewish life and contemporary food issues.” Hazon’s second such conference will be held at the same location December 6- 9, over Shabbat and Hanukka.

“We’re touching a chord in the American Jewish community and inspiring families to think more deeply and broadly about the food they grow, purchase and eat,” says Koenig. At its core, she says, the conference allowed participants to think about food in different ways.

“We have a tradition about what’s fit for us to eat and we’re making it relevant in a contemporary world where factory farms and pesticides are so prevalent,” says Koenig.

Besides the ventures with organic farms, Hazon last May created a curriculum for Jewish day school students and their parents that looks at food through the double prism of Jewish tradition and contemporary life. The first day school to use it, Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan, began using the new curriculum this school year. And the Solomon Schechter Day School of Nassau County on Long Island, N.Y. plans to begin using the curriculum next spring.

Chapters of the curriculum, called “Food for Jewish Thought,” look at such issues as examples of where eating shows up in the Torah; traits of gratitude, mindfulness and blessing food; bread rituals; eating together, including the role food plays in mourning and comforting; agriculture and tzedaka; body image and eating disorders; and whether to eat meat.

Last year, Hazon held an 11-week beit midrash (study workshop) in New York that explored both traditional Jewish texts and the writings of contemporary food thinkers, and what the tradition could say about such issues as growing organic crops, sustaining local farms and how they might intersect with concepts of kashrut. That material is being turned into a 150-page curriculum, which will be printed and be available for Tuv Ha’Aretz participants this year.

Hazon [www.hazon.org] has even created a blog called “The Jew and the Carrot” that is meant as an on- line discussion spot for - what else? - Jews, food and contemporary issues. Hazon launched the blog right after last year’s December food conference, and its popularity has continued to grow, receiving about 2,000 hits per month, according to Hazon, and winning recognition as the “best new blog” and “best kosher food/recipe blog” at the 2007 Jewish & Israeli Blog Awards earlier this year.

Between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, Hazon coordinator Koenig wrote about “kitchen tshuva,” her attempt to return to what she calls her best self “through some serious reflection and reordering of my kitchen and all it symbolizes: family, overeating/under- eating, connection to the land, caring for others, care of myself, building community…” In another post, a twentysomething involved in Hazon’s Adamah program writes about being pleasantly surprised on his return home for Rosh Hashana to see organic produce on his mother’s kitchen counter. The point: What you do can have an influence on others.

Besides lively posts and discussions, a column of 20 book covers highlights the left side of the site below the headline, Books We Love, with links to each one. Another section tells visitors about upcoming events related to Jews, food and contemporary life.

Jonathan Sarna, a Brandeis University historian and observer of the Jewish-American world, says the work of Hazon and Tuv Ha’Aretz follows a tradition that grew out of the 1960s and early 70s, echoing a concept of eco-kashrut, first advanced by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a leading light in the Jewish Renewal movement, and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.

“For some years, we’ve seen efforts in different quarters to extend the meaning of kashrut beyond what halakha claims, towards a broader sense of making food not just kosher according to what halakha is, but also in a sense, morally and ethically kosher.”

The availability of organic kosher chicken in U.S. markets in recent years is but the latest example of that outlook, notes Sarna.

“It’s glatt kosher redefined,” he says, implying that the strictest standards of kashrut can be extended to another level both spiritually and agriculturally. “It’s the best of both worlds,” says Sarna. “You are in sync with liberal America by eating foods that are organic and at the same time observing the Jewish laws of kashrut.”

Although buying organic often costs more than conventional produce, poultry and meats, the increasing wealth of the Jewish community gives most Jews a choice, agree many proponents of a new paradigm for thinking about the Jewish role of food. “Most of us genuinely have choices in our lives,” says Savage. “And we exercise them in all sorts of ways. The notion of spending a little bit more in some cases for food which is actually healthier for you and for the world - that’s a choice that many of us can exercise.”

Indeed, says Sarna, that same tradition extends beyond the world of agriculture. Ma’aglei Tzedek (or Circles of Justice), a Jerusalem- based non-profit group has initiated a tav chevrati or social seal in an effort to realize its vision of a just and ethical Israeli society, conferring such certificates on businesses that adhere to basic standards of social justice or socially kosher policies. That includes recognizing businesses that make their premises accessible to disabled people or pay their employees fairly and on time.

As for Tuv Ha’Aretz, Savage is encouraged at the diversity it is attracting. “Participants range from people who are very Jewishly involved and keep kosher to those who never set foot in a synagogue. Ultimately, it’s about renewing Jewish life.”