That is – putting Jewish environmentalism within a fuller context

The purpose of this information sheet is to offer a perspective, a way of framing issues and thinking, seeing, and acting on environmental and other issues we are faced with one after another. The details in here are only to provide context, the relationship between different kinds of issues or levels of issues or linkages can be conceived differently than illustrated here.

We will start by examining an issue from different philosophical perspectives, and eventually lead into discussing how that affects the kinds of institutions we build and actions we take to address issues.

Consider global climate change/global warming as one issue and, say, use of chemical pesticides and farm animal antibiotics as another. Both of these cause environmental damage and both cause social strife through increasing spread of disease (global warming) and increasing resistance to treatment of disease (chemical and antibiotic use).

In our compartmentalized society, people think about various issues typically as each issue unto itself and in separate spheres of influence, which all may overlap each other slightly, as I have attempted to depict below on the left. COEJL has been placing a religious underpinning on this scene, as depicted on the right. For instance, the natural system can be seen as being rigged so the second paragraph of the Shema – the famine – and the Torah curses of what the land will do to us if we don’t follow God’s laws – result. We can relate contemporary issues to Torah in a way that resonates within us, compels us to action, and links us through generations to a wholistic web of connections which we will get to later. But we are still limited by this one issue at a time approach which looks at separate spheres of influence and solutions as being within the hands of individual action, such as driving less, using renewable resources and conserving energy, and eating organic.

Now think about underlying causes. What drives fossil fuel consumption and what drives the agrichemical business? At one level it is a collective result of economic decisions by millions of people for cheap fuel, ease of getting around, lower cost food. But what are the choices available and how are they constrained? What decisions do we make as a community or state or nation which

drive these economics? And what about the structures of society – capitalism, government subsidies, who has influence with government to create the subsidies and policies? If we want to actually tackle the issue, we need to get at these underlying roots. From an economic and political standpoint it means we have to alter our structural systems so that they favor transit, fuel-efficient vehicles, renewable energy, and stop externalizing the costs of environmentally damaging practice, so for instance organic agriculture becomes economically competitive for producers and consumers. Judaism makes these connections for us by not merely addressing our problems one by one, but by providing a structural system. This system has responsibilities, not rights, and there are many! But more importantly, there is an understanding that the earth and all that we have belongs to God, and while it is in our temporary custody we are to follow his instructions on what to do with it. So we have a system for transferring wealth (jubilee=yovel, cancellation of debt and restoration of land=means of production). We have a system for giving the environment a rest every 7^th year (sabbatical year=shmittah). And so on. Thus we can view issues in a broader context like what I call the stacked plates model. Each inner plate is sitting on top of the outer plates. Notice that in this depiction, social and environmental problems really are resting on economic issues which themselves are resting on other issues culminating in the power structure and organizational structure underlying the whole of society! Torah offers a different structural paradigm than the United States and when we change the bottom plate, we change all the plates that sit on top of it.

A great beauty of the Jewish structural paradigm is its integrated wholeness unifying all aspects of our biological and spiritual being, connecting us to God, connecting us to the earth (adam-adamah, where our roots are), to rhythms in time (Shabbat, holidays which are themselves tied to the agricultural cycle hence the earth and our food, and sabbatical and jubilee years), connecting us to each other through ethical commandments, and connecting us to our own self. I have tried to illustrate this web of connections here. We make these connections through carrying out our responsibilities. Because Torah creates a social fabric inextricably linking us to the environment (among many other things), and all these linkages cannot be cleanly disassembled, they are totally intertwined (so I should have drawn the tubes wrapping around each other and the box is really a helix), separating out any part to provide a Jewish view on an issue within our non-Toraic societal structure becomes self-limiting. It still can have great value, but the real and exciting challenge is in figuring out how to build some of this web (or helix) into the structure of our society today.

So the Torah model places responsibility on individuals and some also on communities, but it does not provide us with a direct means to address the systemic forces because it creates an ideal system. Maldistribution of wealth and a permanent underclass isn’t an issue because everything is reset every 50 years, and so on. Property rights aren’t an issue because the land belongs to God. Agriculture has to be organic so the poor can come in and glean without a wash bottle and scrubber to remove the toxic pesticides. Now I present another way of viewing our contemporary situation. The undergirding pillars or beams holding up the building are the societal structures, such as democracy, plutocracy, monarchy. The web of interconnectedness could also serve as such a framework. The framework results in a set of rules defining institutions which support society and limits, directly or often indirectly, the behaviors of those institutions. These institutions such as political parties and organizations of all kinds are our supporting structures but they are built upon the frame. These create public spaces for us to do our work, our tikkun olam, and people acting in these spaces are thereby constrained and their effect is only limited but they do together all shape the way we at a personal human level see the issues, environmental issues, social issues, and so on. Viewing the world this way, we see that being able to solve environmental problems involves changing these underlying structures so we are not continually constrained and limited in effect and so we can stem the tide of problems flying at us one after another. It means Jewish environmentalism necessarily thrusts us into the world of politics and forces us to deal with underlying systemic issues which may not even look like they have to do with the environment.

This is why I have brought to you information on the Green Party with its 10 key values – exercise for the reader - compare them to what you would come up with for 10 key Jewish values!, the New Party list of principles – make a similar comparison and see if you find interesting similarities and differences!, Democracy Unlimited, 1000 Friends of Maryland – a wholistic vision of community development which links environment and community and lifestyle into our economic and transportation systems, and Jews United for Justice. To achieve change in our present society is a power struggle. One can and should ask the question about how Judaism is connected to democracy, since in traditional Judaism, God declares the laws, we don’t vote on it. Some possible considerations are fairness of judging – in our case today also in creating the laws – the wealthy should have no more power than anyone else (nor should the poor by means of pity). Another consideration to perhaps draw from is the months and the jubilee in Torah are to be declared by people, in contrast to Shabbat and sabbatical year. But mainly, we have to recognize the struggle is to achieve a fair social structure out of a system which is driven by valueless forces of profits and amassing of global wealth. How to struggle Jewishly and try to bring about that beautiful web of connectedness is for us to wrestle with together now.