The role of the spiritual leader in the age of climate change: Re-imagining how to live on Earth in ways that honor the web of life, each other and future generations. This is the title of the seven day Winter Seminar for faculty and students I helped to plan over the past five months have been helping to facilitate this past week at Hebrew College. As we are half way through our programming I wanted to share with you some of what we have been studying and discussing and the questions that remain live and present.

Our goal for the Seminar was to provide rabbinical students with inspiration, knowledge and tools to be effective teachers and advocates for environmental change. The four frames that we determined our programming by were 1) Jewish texts that help us better understand and shift our relationship to the environment/ourselves 2) Scientific, historical and political information about the environment and climate change 3) Practical skills for the rabbi to shift personal and communal action towards a more sustainable lifestyle 4) Creativity, celebration and ritual.

We began this seminar by asking each student to bring in a meaningful photograph of nature and to connect it to a pasuk (verses of scripture) to adorn the walls of Hebrew College. This was a way for us to share information about ourselves and what connects us to this incredible planet. The images we brought helped elucidate and add new meaning to the verses we connected them to. For example, I took a line from Psalms about the vast waters and the creatures of the deep and put it with an image I took 50 feet underwater while SCUBA diving, looking up at divers ascending to the surface as the light shone down on them.

Founder and Rector of the rabbinical school, Rabbi Art Green gave us a big picture framing of where we are as a species and a theology of what Judaism has to say about our relationship to the Earth. (See more in his new book Radical Judaism.) We then had a workshop on repurposing where students showed us how to reimagine and reconfigure daily household items to serve new and potentially holy purposes. We learned from this about perspective – an old sock could just be an old sock, but from a different vantage point it could be the perfect raw material to create a pouch for our tallit (ritual shawl). A question we could take away from this exercise and which could apply to so many aspects of our lives: What else could this be – this object, this information, this garbage?

We had davenning (prayer) framed by Perek Shira, an ancient Jewish text which connects each part of creation to a different rabbinic or biblical verse of song and praise to Gd. Reading these praises out loud gave us new insight into the rabbi’s impression of the frog, the cat, the river. Bob Zimmerman from the Charles River Watershed Association illuminated our outdated system of water management in Boston which was originally designed for London in the 1850s. Our water comes from the Quabbin Reservoir in Central Massachusetts into our homes, then goes out through leaky pipes to Deer Island for treatment and finally into the Bay for dilution. Bob emphasized the need of a more localized and efficient approach where water is treated in the same geographic area in which it is pumped and used. During this session we got to hear members of our community who we usually explaining verses of Torah share with us their background in science and engineering to help us better grasp the new terminology Bob brought to us.

The local environmental justice non-profit Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE) came and encouraged us to think about environmental health and justice for all people. We discussed the ways in which climate change first and most dramatically impacts those who have fewer resources. ACE talked about how the real shift will come through advocating and organizing for systemic change. One of example of this would be not just cutting down on our own personal use of fossil fuels, but also organizing our communities to demand more rigorous emissions standards and more highly enforced laws about idling times for city buses, especially in areas with high rates of asthma. We discussed the merits of large-scale organizing versus making changes in our own personal lives. While most students in our program will likely work with communities of some privilege and largely not with people of color, many of us are now seeking opportunities to be involved in Environmental Justice work in a way that is both impactful and authentic.

The snow came down last Friday morning in big, crystalline flakes and while some smartly stayed off the slippery streets, others of us made our way to school and had an amazing session with Nili Simhai from the Teva Learning Center. We engaged in experiential environmental education thought activities like making 20 of us into all the parts of a tree and tromping through the knee-high snow to immerse ourselves in the beautiful winter wonderland surrounding us. We learned about perspective, about the difference between talking about nature and actually immersing ourselves in it, and about the way this can shift one’s mindset. Nili encouraged us to not be afraid to go outside and to use hands-on education.

And yesterday we learned from Carole Caplan, president of the board of Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, IL how it made its transition to becoming the greenest synagogue in the country (LEED Platinum). She started us off with the body-based practice of yoga as our morning prayer. From there we learned about the power of lay leaders and how we, as professionals, can empower and support these leaders in our communities. We saw images of one version of what green can look like as embodied in a synagogue. We learned that to carry out a vision like this, more than wealth or serious environmental knowledge, we need a willingness to bring our personal values (like Carole did with environmental health) into our work and into our communities.

In the afternoon Gabe Greenberg, a rabbinical student at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and Director of the Kayam Summer Kollel opened up the topic of Kilyam (Jewish prohibition against the cross-breading of seeds and animals) and GMOs. Together we probed the Jewish values that prohibit cross breeding through the lens of traditional sources and discussed how this both supports and comes into conflict with our modern values. Meanwhile, across the building, Lisa Gross, founder of Hybrid Vigor Projects and the Urban Homesteader’s League promoted cross-pollination of people and ideas. Lisa got us excited about her first project through Hybrid Vigor – the Boston Tree Party. The Tree Party is a collaborative campaign to plant one hundred pairs of heirloom apple trees in public spaces all across Boston. The project takes a stand for universal access to fresh, healthy food; for greening our cities; cleaning our air; creating habitat for urban wildlife; and for protecting the biodiversity and heritage of our food.

Some enduring questions that have been awakened through the seminar thus far:
– How to engage in systemic change and how impactful is changing our personal habits?
– If the questions we ask determine projects we create, how do we start asking more holistic questions?
– There are huge problems that often feel “out there.” How do we put a face on these issues so that we can better relate to, care about, and move towards addressing them?
– What would it look like for us to spend meaningful time outside every day – for ourselves, for our families, for those we work with?
– In what way is nature and science Torah?
– How do we wisely and skillfully move away from the way things have always been done that are no longer working?