Shulchan Aruch Yoreh Deah 248:1(Code of Jewish Law)

“Everyone is obligated to give Tzedakah. Even people supported by tzedakah must give from what they receive. Anyone who refuses to give tzedakah or gives less than what he should give, the court pressures him until he gives the amount he has been assessed. The court may confiscate his possessions and deduct from them the appropriate amount (for Tzedakah).”

How can a court force someone to give tzedakkah? Tzedakah is commonly translated as charity which is given in a non-coercive manner. However, charity and tzedakah are different. The root of the word tzedakah is tzedek, “righteousness”. A Tzadik is a righteous person. Yoseph [Joseph] (one of the twelve sons of Jacob), is the only one of the Jewish people’s ancestors who is specifically referred to as a Tzadik, i.e., Yosef HaTzadik. Why? In Proverbs it is written Tzadik Yesod Olam, a Tzadik is the foundation of the world. What does this mean? The Kabbalah explains that Yesod is the ability to serve as a conduit between multiple elements, directing and shaping the energy of those elements into a coherent whole, a whole which is greater than its separate parts. Consider the following imagery: in one of Yosef’s dreams, the wheat sheaves of Yosef’s brothers all gathered around Yosef’s sheaf and bowed down to it. Yosef (represented by the sheaf) is the connecting point, the facilitator of interrelationship between the various elements of the whole represented by his brothers. Admittedly, this was a quality that Yosef needed to learn how to actualize, which he did while in an Egyptian prison for twelve years! So great was this quality that he utlimately was responsible for the coordination of an international sustainability project…feeding the world! This quality of Yosef is rooted in his understanding of what it means to be created in the image of God, Tzelem Elokim, Who is the ultimate connector! This then is the heart of tzedek and of tzedakah, the ability to understand that we are not isolated and self-serving beings. We are here to help others and that to not help others is a violation of the dignity of oneself being Tzelem Elokim. Hence, if someone gives less tzedakah than is “required”, the court can mandate the person to give what is due, not only for the benefit of others, but for the very benefit of the person themselves, i.e., the maintenance of their own inherent dignity. In other words, a person should never feel so destitute as to not be in a position to give. This is the essence of social sustainability, the strength and health of the social fabric comes from the integrity of its components…us.

Israel has stated a goal to achieve oil independence by 2020 and Better Place is a large step in that direction. According to research, 57% of Israelis would purchase an electric car as their next car purchase and being that Israel’s major urban centers are less than 150 km apart from one another, and 90% of Israel’s drivers drive less than 70km per day, an electric car system may actually be viable. Current research shows that vehicles are the number one contribution to air pollutants in Israel and switching to a no emissions vehicle is a good idea to cut down on air pollution.

The center piece of the electric vehicle is the lithium battery. Which according to one news report is “Made from nontoxic materials, today’s lithium-ion batteries have unprecedented safety. A lithium-ion battery can also be recycled with minimal environmental impact. More than 95% of the battery materials can be recovered and reused.”

This application of technology is one, albeit potentially large, sector of sustainable development in Israel. If Israel were able to cut down on air pollution, especially in the major urban areas, perhaps this would lead to decreased pressures on the health services and economic resources could be diverted to other more vital areas rather than oil acquisition and refinement. However, what would this mean for increased reliance on the electricity sector to charge the batteries, where most of Israel’s electricity is produced by burning coal?

Thinking back to my experience at the ICLEI[1] World Congress in Capetown, South Africa in 2006, one thing in particular stands out in my mind’s eye. I was sitting in an explanatory session of the different topical themes that the congress was offering. A presenter rose to the podium and asked us to close our eyes, take in a deep breath, exhale, and do so again. In closing she informed us that we just had practiced resilience[2].

I learned an important lesson from that 15 second meditation…which is that resilience, the ability to restore, to heal, to make “Tikkun”[3], is in essence “being” in and of itself, expressed through breathing in time. Not surprisingly, the Jewish calendar provides us with wonderful time tools that can be understood as a kind of best-practices in resilience, i.e., breaths in time.

For example, the time measure of a week being seven days is the only one not based on any measurable natural phenomenon such as the cycle of the moon’s phases (a month) or the rising and setting of the sun (a “day”), it is simply the counting of seven days. The idea of a week as being seven days is a fundamental teaching of the Torah. In the Torah’s presentation, we are to perform our melacha[4] for six days and then rest on the seventh.[5] Thus “rest” is an integral part of the overall experience of a seven day week. This "rest", as we shall see, is the basis of resilience.

Let’s go a bit deeper. Melacha can be understood as the activities we engage in that are our creative re-creation of the world according to our level of awareness of how things fit together (or don’t). Thus to "rest" on Shabbat is that which is created through the refraining of such creative activity in the material world, in turn this allows for a potentially increased focus on inward “restful” creativity. This “rest” can consciously be enhanced each Shabbat through the experience of Oneg (as in Oneg Shabbat). Oneg is commonly translated as “pleasure”, but like many English translations of Hebrew words/concepts, pleasure just doesn’t quite capture the essence of what Oneg is.

The extent to which one can experience Oneg, is the extent to which one understands their actions/thoughts/experiences operating within a framework, guided by a vision, that in turn engenders connectivity to the very moment to moment moments of daily life.[6]

Resultantly, the Oneg that we have achieved, should we choose to utilize it, can guide us through the six days of “work”. In other words, the level of Oneg we have experienced can inform the moments of the coming week leading to hopefully increased levels of Oneg during the week as it relates to the preceding and forthcoming Shabbat and the cycle goes on and on.[7]

Thus, in sustainability terms, Shabbat is a resilience “tool” for the soul.[8]

Coming full circle, what the presenter at the ICLEI World Congress was trying to teach perhaps was that the highest level of resilience, of sustainability, is “being”. Only by being, in the fullest sense of what that means (personalized in time down to the very experience of my breathing), can we sustain our ability to be.

[1]ICLEI, Local Governments for Sustainability, http://www.iclei.org/

[2]Social resilience (there is also ecological resilience) “is the ability of human communities to withstand and recover from stresses, such as environmental change or social, economic or political upheaval. http://www.sou.gov.se/mvb/pdf/206497_Resilienc.pdf

[3]Literally “fixing” in Hebrew.

[4]Melacha, [m-lah-cha], commonly translated as “work”.

[5]For six days you may perform melachah, but the seventh day is a complete Sabbath, holy to the L-RD … it is an eternal sign that in six days, the L-RD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed. -Exodus 31:15-17

[6]Interestingly, the main mechanisms of Oneg Shabbat are food and study (corresponding to body and soul) [traditionally specal dishes/delicacies which were prepared before the onset of Shabbat and Torah study]. This opens up further discussions on food system sustainability and the Shabbat table, for a later time.

[8]The seven day week, one should remember, is nested within an overall matrix of time, that of the monthly and yearly cycles (with their corresponding festivals and events [both celebratory and mourning]). This larger matrix, with its time nodes [image forthcoming] connecting the day, week, month, year, years, is a tool for the “experiencer of time” to use in order conceptualize one’s growth towards ever larger and more inclusive levels of responsibility and awareness through the experience of those time nodes. Not to mention all of the various levels of expression at the communal, national, world, even universe scales of relationship.

]]> https://beta.jewcology.com/2011/03/honey-from-the-rock-resilient-shabbat-sustaining-the-ability-to-be/feed/ 0 https://beta.jewcology.com/2011/02/honey-from-the-rock-avoiding-history/ https://beta.jewcology.com/2011/02/honey-from-the-rock-avoiding-history/#comments Wed, 02 Feb 2011 16:10:18 +0000 http://jewcology.org/2011/02/honey-from-the-rock-avoiding-history/

Ten years ago I visited Cairo, Egypt with my parents. I’ll never forget the time when we went to the Egyptian Museum to see King Tut’s mask. Surprisingly, the most interesting thing about King Tut’s golden mask is not the mask itself, but watching people’s faces as they looked at it. Their eyes revealed a state of mind that can only be described as “captivated”. It was clear to me that after thousands of years, the ancient Egyptians were still masters of the external, material side of existence, but that is all that remains of their culture. Indeed Egyptian history is captivating, but it remains just that…history.

The over focus on externalities is very much a part of modern culture as well, but the issue has its deepest roots in the essence of the creation itself.

To understand this we have to consider a subtle but profound point of breakdown which occurred during the third day of creation. God calls upon the earth to produce “fruit trees that produce fruit”[1] [eitz pri oseh pri], but what happens…the earth produces “trees that produce fruit” [eitz oseh pri]. NOT fruit trees [eitz pri], but trees [eitz]. The Midrash[2] picks up on this discrepancy and Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook explains in Lights of Repentance:

"At the inception of creation it was intended that the tree have the same taste as the fruit….The trees that bear the fruit, with all their necessity for the growth of the fruit have, however, become coarse matter and have lost their taste….But every defect is destined to be mended. Thus we are assured that the day will come when creation will return to its original state, when the taste of the tree will be the same as the taste of the fruit.”

This principal breakdown is expressed yet again in the Torah’s account of Adam and Eve’s eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Adam and Chava were focusing on externals only, i.e., the fruit, that which is produced, rather than the relationship between the inner – process – and the outer expression – fruit. What generated these breakdowns is beyond the scope of this piece, but certainly the consequences are worth considering.

The modern environmental crisis can be interpreted as a manifestation of this breakdown. Modern man sees only production as the means of sustaining economic growth (Gross National Product for example). That which is produced, to the modern mind, is almost entirely disconnected from the processes which are producing the products which are the indicators of “economic health”. What such an imbalanced outlook really produces are products with grave hidden costs for the earth and for human beings.

What the world of production is slowly, maybe too slowly, waking up to is the need for systemic redesign. That is to say, we need to redesign the processes by which we produce and obtain that which we need (and do away with what we don’t need). This may be the beginning of the healing that Rav Kook is referring to, a time when the tree will taste like the fruit, a time when processes of production will be sustainably producing “fruits” and we will sustain the ability “to be” and just maybe we will avoid becoming “history”.

[1] Genesis Chapter 1:12,13

[2] Genesis Rabbah 5:9

This is the refrain that emerges from even a cursory glance at the media’s portrayal of such pressing issues as global climate change, world peace, and economics. In an ever rapidly changing world, in which it seems we have very little control and very little understanding of how we arrived here, disaster seems all but a foregone conclusion. It is unfortunate that the global narrative that is being woven, for the most part, lacks a comprehensive framework within which to take steps to avoid the doom and gloom scenarios. What saddens me most however, is that there seems to be a pervading sense that things do not, cannot, and will not change. Are we condemned to a self-fulfilling prophecy because we lack imagination and an appropriate framework within which we can build solutions to the challenges we face?

The answer is…absolutely not! Examples abound of sustainable frameworks within which we can begin taking active, systemic steps to changing the ways we meet our existential needs. Three such frameworks I have had experience with so far are permaculture design, the Natural Step, and Torah.

In future posts I will discuss permaculture and the Natural Step frameworks. Herein, however, I will begin to explore what the Torah teaches us about creation and our place in it, something I call the Torah’s Deep Ecology. The Torah’s Deep Ecology is a framework that empowers us to develop our awareness, relationship with, and understanding of the following: self (in relation to creation); system (as in provision of material needs); and time (through the moadim [Jewish festivals], literally, a rendezvous with the Creator in time). These are only three of the many branches of the Eitz Chaiim, the Tree of Life known as the Torah, but they are essential to transforming the narrative of doom to one of hope and restoration…to one of Tikkun olam, the fixing of this world.

For the purposes of this specific post, let’s begin with awareness at the individual level. I will be using Abraham as our principle lens. The Rambam in his Mishne Torah relates the following (emphasis mine):

When this giant (Abraham) was weaned, he began to roam around in his mind, while he was still small, and began to think by day and by night, and he would wonder, “How is it possible that this sphere moves constantly without there being a mover, or one to turn it, for it is impossible that it turns itself?” And he had no teacher or source of knowledge but he was sunk among senseless idol worshippers in Ur of the Chaldeans; his parents and the whole people worshipped idols and he worshipped with them. But his mind roamed in search of understanding till he achieved the true way and understood out of his own natural intelligence. He knew there is one God who moves the spheres, who created everything, there is none beside Him. He knew that the whole world was in error and that the cause of their error was that they worshipped idols and images, so that they had lost the truth. Abraham was forty years old when he recognized his Creator…Avodah Zara 1:3

And in a more practical manner:

And what is the way in which one can come to love Him and fear Him? When a person contemplates His great and wondrous actions and creations, and they will see from them His wisdom, and that there isn’t any length or end to it, immediately he will come to love, praise, and laud, and desire and great desire to know the great name, as David said: My soul thirsts for the living God. Yesodei HaTorah 2:2

What strikes me from these passages is that Abraham was not an aesthetic, he was not even a prophet when he first intuited that there is a Creator, and neither do we need to be such! Avraham was simply seeking the truth, he was “roaming”, he was questioning in his mind. But why? What motivated him to search, what was Abraham seeking? I think, in some ways, the following passage, from Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers expresses in a literary style what the Rambam expressed above. Please read the passage carefully as the nuances I think provide us with powerful insights into Avraham’s experience (emphasis mine):

God’s powerful attributes were, to be sure, a given reality outside of Abraham, but at the same time they were also in him and from him…. Here lay the origin of the covenant that the Lord made with Abraham and that was merely the explicit confirmation of an inner reality; this was also, however, the origin of the peculiar quality of Abraham’s fear of God. For since God’s greatness was indeed something terrible and real outside him and yet at the same time coincided in some sense with his own souland was indeed its product, Abraham’s fear of God was not fear alone in the true sense of the word-it was not only trembling and quaking but also attachment, intimacy, and friendship, all in one….He was called makom, space, because He was the space of the world, but the world was not His space. He was also in Abraham, who knew Him thanks to His power in him. But this very fact strengthened and fulfilled the first father’s sense of saying “I,” for in no way was this God-filled and courageous “I” inclined to vanish in to God, to be one with Him and no longer be Abraham. Instead he very alertly and clearly held himself erect opposite Him-at a vast distance, to be sure, for Abraham was only a man, a clod earth, but bound to Him by that knowledge and made holy by God’s sublime there-ness and Thou-ness. (p.346-349)

Avraham looked into the creation and saw beyond it to the One who created all. Yet, as part of that experience, of using his mind to peer through the veil of the world to its Creator, perhaps we can say, in some small (but grand) way that what he saw in the world, was also what he saw in himself. Who created me? Who created all that I see? The answer, the same one God.

How powerful, how beautiful, how humbling, we are not just nameless cogs in the great industrial machine, we are all expressions of the Creator, but in no way should this make us feel small and insignificant, in fact, just the opposite! What we learn here, is that the Torah’s Deep Ecology adjures us that awareness on the most primal level of self is by essence in a relationship with the entire universe, its Creator, and that relationship is awe-some.

To be continued…

Over the years, parts of the forest and surrounding farmlands were developed into ”McMansion” housing projects and looking back on it, I think this was part of what inspired me to join my school’s environmental organization in 7^th grade. Raising environmental awareness and the importance of working on behalf of environmental preservation seemed liked a logical thing to do. How could it be that so few were aware of the fact that our lives depend on the health and vitality of the natural world?

When I was 16, I spent five weeks working as a volunteer for the United States Forest Service in Clearwater National Forest, Idaho. It was there, in the wildflower fields of the Rocky Mountains, living in tune with the rhythms of creation, I became aware that it is possible for us to hear the living earth speak.

I maintained my commitment to environmental activism all through university. Inspired by profound questions of identity that emerged for me in a history class taught by Tony Judt, I came to Israel for the first time on Taglit birthright Israel in January of 2000. On the Livnot U’Lehibanot program land, people, spirit all came together for me at that critical juncture in my life and it was clear that I would need to return to Israel and explore Judaism more in-depth. I came back to Israel in 2001, where I worked as intern with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel under Naomi Tzur, now deputy mayor of Jerusalem, and learned part time in a Jewish studies program for “beginners” at Machon Meir. I wasn’t raised as a Torah observant Jew and I wanted my return to Judaism to be a balanced one, one that came from a place of love, comprehension, and genuine inquiry.

With those guiding principles, I returned to NY and found work with the Teva Learning Center, a Jewish environmental education program for Jewish Day Schools in the New England area. It was there, in the forests of Connecticut, studying its ecosystems and its wildlife, that I realized that I needed to learn Torah in a serious manner, for indeed I had looked into the earth and had found the Torah, now it was time try and understand what that meant.

I met my wife Carina at Teva we were married a year later and moved to Israel the day after our last sheva bracha to learn Torah for our first year of marriage. We made aliyah in 2003 and in 2004 I enrolled in the Masters program for Desert Studies at Ben Gurion University, Sde Boker.

At Sde Boker, I first learned about sustainable development, a complex balancing act of political, environmental, and social interests. I made trips to South Africa and Switzerland, as well as around Israel to learn more about what sustainable development is and is not.

During my Masters, it became clear to me that true sustainability emerges out of a deep and profound commitment to life and the development of self and global awareness. Sustainability has as much to do with building sustainable lifestyles, families, and communities, as it does with relating to the environment. From this angle, the Torah has a proven track record and hence I knew that I would need to return to my Judaic studies, and so we came to learn at Yeshivat Torat Yosef-Hamivtar’s Joseph and Gwendolyn Straus Rabbinical Seminary, with my ordination to come in 2011. During these years of smicha study, maintaining a commitment to environmental activism has come through gardening, my participation in ROI, a global community of young Jewish innovators, online courses sustainability courses, and by being part of the start-up team of Jewcology.com.

The social / communal component of sustainability and environmental activism is often taken for granted. With the launch of Jewcology, I am happy to be a part of this unique and growing community and I am looking forward to sharing more in the coming months on a diverse array of topics including: frameworks for sustainable development, tools for integrating the Torah's teachings about time / creation, and other topics that emerge as the journey continues.

Happy Chanukkah!