Comments on: Restoring and Transforming the Ancient New Year for Animals https://beta.jewcology.com/2013/07/restoring-and-transforming-the-ancient-new-year-for-animals/ Home of the Jewish Environmental Movement Tue, 02 Jun 2015 16:55:51 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.40 By: Richard Schwartz https://beta.jewcology.com/2013/07/restoring-and-transforming-the-ancient-new-year-for-animals/comment-page-1/#comment-609 Thu, 25 Jul 2013 11:11:40 +0000 http://jewcology.org/2013/07/restoring-and-transforming-the-ancient-new-year-for-animals/#comment-609 Messages of support from rabbis and other Jewish leaders
We need to be aware of the realities of the global meat industry. It is our responsibility to apply Jewish teachings to how we obtain our food, use natural resources, and live alongside other animals.
 Suzanne Barnard, director of the International Jewish Vegetarian Society, London.
It is a great joy that we should reactivate a day to honor the holy relationship between the human and animal worlds, as per Genesis 1:29 and 1:30, where all of the animal and human species will be restored to a vegan way of life …. and with that a new level of peace will unfold on the planet. This is something to bring about and celebrate. Rabbi Gabriel Cousens, M.D. Director of Tree of Life Foundation and author of Torah as a Guide to Enlightenment.
Transforming this holiday, which was originally a time to tithe one’s flocks, into a day to focus on the treatment of animals on modern farms, would provide an excellent educational opportunity. Unlike our farmer/herder ancestors who had daily contact with animals, modern Jews are often completely out of touch with where their food comes from, or how it is produced.
 Rabbi Yonassan Gershom, writer and activist; his blog “Notes from a Jewish Thoreau” is at http://rooster613.blogspot.com/.
It is a beautiful idea to renew/revive a classic day – Rosh Hashanah for counting and giving ma’aser beheima – that lost its actual function with the Destruction of the Temple and the Exile. Your contemporary application of this attention in the form of addressing humanity’s relationship to animal life – and the widespread mistreatment of food animals and environmental abuse in today’s economy, marked by industrial farming and animal husbandry – is inspired. I wish you great success in this project because it would have a morally positive effect on our treatment of animals and the planet -as well as bring great benefits to human health in switching to a healthier diet and life enhancement eating. In this way, your project fulfills and advances the central mitzvah of the Torah: choose life.
 Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, former President of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership; author of The Jewish way: Living the Holidays.
Rosh Chodesh Elul, the Talmudic New Year for Animals, is a wonderful time to reclaim our connection to our brothers and sisters of all species, examine our ethics around treatment of animals, and celebrate the ways humans are and can be in partnership with all life. I, for one, look forward to blessing the animals in a Jewish context! 
Rabbi Jill Hammer, Director of Spiritual Education for the Academy of Jewish Religion (Riverdale, NY).

The Jewish tradition mandates that we are stewards of all God’s creation. In our day we are increasingly sensitized to suffering of those living creatures in our care; this initiative helps us to recognize our obligation to animals and so helps us be more fully human. 
Rabbi David Wolpe, Temple Sinai, Los Angeles.

Many more blurbs will be sought
—————–

]]>