As Emily Dickenson wrote, “some keep the Sabbath going to church, I keep it staying at home.” While many think of religious life as revolving around the rabbi and the synagogue, in many ways the home is at the center of Jewish religious life. Home is where we mark the beginning of Shabbat by lighting our candles and where we gather with friends and family to eat our Shabbat meals. We bring holiness into each room of our home by marking our doorposts with mezuzot containing the words of the Shema. Home is where the most observed and arguably the most central ritual of our tradition takes place, the Passover seder. We create intentionality around the food we cook and serve in our home through practices of kashrut.

Beyond ritual observance, home is where we are most consistently challenged to bring our values and ideals into reality on a daily basis. As part of our winter seminar on climate change and the rabbinate at the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College (see previous post) we sought to explore how our homes could be a space for more joy, more celebration, and a fuller expression of our values, both those that are particularly Jewish and those that are universal. Could practices of urban homesteading become a part of how we practice our Judaism at home? In the language of the Urban Homesteaders League (UHL), “Urban homesteaders are committed to re-imagining the good life as one that is meaningful, pleasurable, environmentally sustainable, and socially just. We place the home at the center of that pursuit and see it as a site for personal and societal transformation.” Working from the centrality of the home in Jewish life we sought to add to our communal toolbox skills for living out more of our values in our home.

As a community, together we came up with a list of some urban homesteading practices. Candle making, bee keeping, composting, meat curing, fishing, tincture making, sock darning, knitting—the list went on and on. For a group of urbanites that spend much of the day with our head in the books, this list was impressively expansive. Many of the ideas likely came from practices we remembered seeing or hearing about our grandparents doing that we no longer know how to do.

Continuing the process of communal brainstorming, this time we focused on why in as future rabbis it might be important for us to have a workshop on yogurt making or crocheting. As Rebecca Gould wrote of homesteading in her book At Home in Nature, “Historically, the movement of homesteading is a place for those who long to find a form of spiritual life outside formal religious institutions and to practice a way of living that is in step with the natural world rather than against it.” The ideas we came up with spoke to the ways in which these skills could help us create, as Gould writes later in the book, “a lived spirituality that has the potential both to imagine and to model versions of the future that may be more sustaining than our present is.”

At a time when many of the ways in which we are being told we can help curb climate change are “don’ts” these practices can be fun, celebratory, and can create community. Are we going to adequately address global climate change simply by making our own yogurt? No. But are we going to be able to generate a large-scale paradigm shift without shifting our own individual practices within our home? I don’t think so. In my own process of figuring out how I can best live in a way that respects present and future life on this planet I have found that practices of total self-denial and austerity are not-energy-generating and therefore are not enduring. Let’s take the example of driving. If one views it as his duty to humanity and to the planet to abstain from driving, he will likely feel resentful of those who do drive, and be frustrated by his lack of mobility. If, however, he begins to see biking as a way to be outdoors, stay healthy, and to avoid traffic, he is more likely to choose willingly to bike instead of drive, when possible.

Further, it is important to acknowledge that we are the beneficiaries of capitalism. Despite its many faults, because of this system we are at an incredible time in history when we can choose to engage in the practices of homesteading or not. We gain an immense amount not having to wake up at 4:00 every morning to milk our animals, churn our butter, and grind our grains. Instead, the practices of urban homesteading are a way, as the UHL puts it, of moving from “passive consumerism to active co-creative participation.” In the spiral of continual evolution, to make the choice to learn these skills is to choose to become partners in this co-creation.

The list of reasons we generated as to why a rabbi might want to learn these skills was expansive. We discussed how making something like socks or pickles ourselves personalizes and gives us more ownership over these processes. This is in turn cultivates within us a deeper care for the objects we wear and food we eat. By making something ourselves we can appreciate the process that goes into making it and can practice being in process rather than having immediate gratification of our desires. Food that we make ourselves often tastes better, saves money and resources, is healthier, fresher, and gives us more control over what we put into our body. Like the study of Talmud, homesteading practices are traditional skills that we can pass down from generation to generation. Practices like growing our own vegetables from seed and composting connect us to the cycle of life from germination to decomposition and back again.

We held yogurt making, pickling, bread baking, and crocheting workshops led by four different students held in the student’s home. We were excited to have these student-led workshops as part of the seminar not only to share hands-on skills, but also to empower members of our community to teach skills that we have to one another. It was also important to us to have people learning right in our homes. Our hope was to facilitate the taking down of the usual barriers of hectic schedules, separation by class levels, and anxiety about coursework that come up at school, and, ultimately, to help us build deeper relationships with one another. Being in such an all-consuming training program, we wanted to acknowledge that there is an abundance of knowledge, skills and experience in our community that often isn’t touched on during a typical school day. Our hope was for these hands-on workshops to be a starting point for us to begin to seek out in one another new learning outside the bounds of sermon writing and prayer leading.

Sitting around my kitchen table eating homemade yogurt with various toppings, or wiping flour off our faces in another classmate’s kitchen after bread making, these workshops really did feel like a step towards a more connected community. I’m already fielding calls and emails about yogurt starter and fermenting times from my fellow classmates, and can feel the budding of new friendships beginning. If resiliency is defined as something that is able to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching, or being compressed, our highest hope was for this afternoon of skills sharing, hands on learning, and experimentation gives us some tools to build resiliency, both for ourselves as individuals, and as a community.