Jewish Education Getting Greener

Flower children: Environmental retreats are gaining popularity among Jewish day schools. TEVA learninG center

Flower children: Environmental retreats are gaining popularity among Jewish day schools. TEVA learninG center

by Carolyn Slutsky
Staff Writer

When the students at the Hannah Senesh Community Day School in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn returned to school earlier this month, they drank their water out of bottles that read, “mal’a ha’aretz kin’yanecha,” or “the earth is full of your creation.”

The school’s new building was designed last year with input from students for how to make it more environmentally friendly, and the school composts, serves lunch on washable plates and encourages students to go to local farmer’s markets to understand the process of how food gets from the farm to the kitchen table.

“As a Jewish school, we believe that taking care of the environment is a part of our responsibility,” said Head of School Nicole Nash, adding that in 2005 the school took top honors in the New York City Department of Sanitation’s Golden Apple Awards for their model recycling program and eco-curriculum that integrated Judaic and general studies.

“There’s definitely a lot of empowerment in not just talking about it in theory but putting it into practice as well,” Nash said.

Hannah Senesh is one of a growing number of Jewish schools throughout the country making a push for environmental education, the idea that the environment is an inherently Jewish issue and that day and supplemental school teachers, camp counselors and the entire Jewish community must convey that to their students.

In addition to schools and newly formed environmental organizations, the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education (CAJE) made eco-Judaism a centerpiece of its 33rd annual conference last month.

Jeffrey Lasday, executive director of CAJE, said the environment is an emerging issue in the Jewish and mainstream worlds, one he felt needed to be a focus of his organization’s annual meeting.

“Here is something that speaks to relevancy; it’s the burning issue of the day, so how could it not be a Jewish issue?” he said.

The setting for the CAJE conference was ideal for this theme: the environmentally friendly University of Vermont in Burlington, where verdant hills and azure skies frame the campus, which is green in both color and consciousness. Excited teachers walked between more than 60 sessions focused on the environment, along with hundreds of others on early childhood, special-needs students, adult education and much more, and many braved the steep hill into downtown Burlington, a quaint city on the banks of Lake Champlain.

For several years the environment has been poised to become the new Jewish “it” cause.

A combination of Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” Hurricane Katrina and recent broad changes in the weather have ignited the general public’s fascination with the environment and Jews are no different in rallying around this cause. It is one that supporters hope will hold the attention of older generations while also drawing new Jews focused more on social justice and other active displays of Jewish engagement than traditional, organized communal life.

Proponents worry that critics, those for whom the environment doesn’t resonate as an important cause or who would rather see Jewish money and efforts spent on more typical Jewish pursuits, may undermine a huge growth in the eco-Judaism movement. But organizations like the Jewish Farm School, Hazon and Canfei Nesharim continue to sprout each year with young people determined to place ecology and the environment on the Jewish map.

Twenty years ago, there was no Jewish environmental movement to speak of. Ellen Bernstein is widely acknowledged as having founded that movement when she began Shomrei Adamah, or “guardians of the earth,” an organization that united Jews and the environment in Philadelphia in 1988. The organization, now defunct, has given way to newer institutions and helped raise awareness that “an ecological understanding is consistent with Jewish life,” as Bernstein put it.

“There’s so much in the Bible about ecology and humanity’s relationship to nature,” she continued, and indeed a well-attended class she taught at CAJE, on reading Genesis through an environmental perspective, parallels a book she wrote on the same theme.

Amalia Haas, an educator from Cleveland, runs a program she calls Gan Amalia, a Jewish educational garden where she teaches important lessons about Jewish holidays and religion through the environment. Children from preschool up to teens engage with eco-Judaism in a number of ways: they make Jewish nature crafts like Rosh HaShanah pencil holders created from twigs and other materials collected in the garden and talk about the request to God to be inscribed into the book of life; they raise chicks and ducklings and learn about the life cycle through feeding them; they collect herbs and plants that are used to make Shabbat candles.

At the CAJE conference, Haas told a group assembled one night for an environmental dinner that Judaism is a land-based religion, and that all Jewish institutions — schools, synagogues, camps — if they have a door should have a garden.

It doesn’t matter, she said, whether the gardening is successful or not, everything is a learning experience deeply tied to Judaism. As for criticism that environmental education is hard to keep relevant and can easily get old, not so, said Haas.

“You’d never say, ‘I’m not going to do Pesach because I don’t have something new,’” she said. “This shouldn’t be optional.”

Haas and many other educators learn and teach through the Teva Learning Center, which is based in Manhattan and operates a number of environmental workshops and outdoor experiences for 45 day schools up and down the East Coast. School children can come for retreats at Teva’s sites and they also send educators to schools that want to do a particular environmental program with their students.

“[The environment] makes Jewish education relevant because it speaks to the issues of today,” said Alexandra Kuperman, assistant director of Teva, who was wearing a pin that read, “Oy Vey, I’m Schvitzing, Stop Global Warming” at her booth at the CAJE Expo where many vendors competed to distribute environmental information.

Toby Zelt, an educator in religious schools in Baltimore, will teach two courses this year that deal with environmental Judaism and Jewish ethics. With her high school students, Zelt will explore “wilderness spirituality” by taking them into nature and finding the intersections between Jewish identity and the wild.

With her sixth graders, Zelt plans to teach around a personal teshuvah, or repentence, where students will create experiential prayers that will take them out of the sanctuary and into nature to bless individual creations and gain a new appreciation for nature and for prayer.

“Teaching them something about nature and wilderness shows them they can create their own prayer and be spiritual in their own way,” said Zelt of her goals.

Another group well-represented at the CAJE conference and poised to bring a new twist to ecological Judaism was the Jewish Farm school. Co-director Simcha Schwartz and his colleagues, veterans of Teva, spoke about looking for an urban plot of land in Philadelphia, where the group is located, to farm. The group, founded in 2005, is also fundraising to develop a Jewish boarding school and gap-year program centered on the environment.

“We are unearthing Jewish agriculture, there’s culture in agra,” said Schwartz of the growing environmental movement. “We haven’t been able to play that out in exile, we couldn’t own land, but now Jews do and they cultivate it.”

Zvi Schoenburg, head of school at the Gesher Jewish Day School in Fairfax, Va., said teaching eco-Judaism has been a priority in his school since 2004. The school has a number of different habitats on its 57-acre property and classes tend to them, whether a wetlands, a meadow, a Havdalah garden (where herbs used in the Havdalah service are grown) or another kind of habitat. Classes also take responsibility for recycling paper, bottles or cans and for composting waste materials, and celebrate the environmental aspects of all Jewish holidays throughout the year.

“It’s very important that the kids recognize that Judaism is a religion in and of this world and we as Jews aren’t going to make it if planet earth doesn’t make it,” said Schoenburg, who anticipates that eco-Judaism will grow further in the coming school years. “People often say that in America we have a Bill of Rights. What Judaism is about is a bill of responsibilities, and being a good steward of the environment has been one of those responsibilities.”

Gesher is a community day school that accepts children from all stripes of Jewish observance, but an interest in the environment also extends to the most Orthodox pockets of the Jewish world.

“We don’t take standard-issue environmental issues and slap a yarmulke on them,” said Shmuel Simenowitz, a bearded man with a booming voice who runs Y’aleh V’Yavo, a Jewish environmental organization, at CAJE. Simenowitz, a Jew with chasidic roots originally from New York, also runs a shomer Shabbos, organic maple farm in Vermont, and brings Jewish students and adults to visit the farm and learn about the connections between themselves and the land.

He believes that Jews must train themselves to be conscious of the environment through Jewish rituals, using grass instead of flowers and recycled plates and cutlery at bar mitzvahs or weddings. His teenage son takes his message to heart, crafting chic pens made out of wood from trees grown on the family’s farm.

“Jews invariably reflect what’s going on in society at large,” said Simenowitz. “You can’t see that this is the story of the era and not react in one way.”

Whether through wilderness trips, praying outdoors, cultivating a garden or simply sitting on a rock deep in contemplation, the environment is a cause worth teaching and learning about at least from the perspective of teachers returning to their homes across the country for a new school year invigorated to teach their students about it.

As Ellen Bernstein said, “The environment can bring people from the periphery to the center of Jewish life.”

E-mail: carolyn@jewishweek.org

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