It’s Not Easy Being Green

Hazon’s Israel Bike Ride: Raising consciousness for environmental issues. Photos courtesy of Hazon

Hazon’s Israel Bike Ride: Raising consciousness for environmental issues. Photos courtesy of Hazon

by Doug Chandler
Special To The Jewish Week

In eight years, Hazon, a group devoted to building a healthier, more sustainable world, has grown from a venture with one unpaid staff member and no budget to an operation that employs 15 people on an annual budget of more than $2 million. In the process, the group has evolved into one of the Jewish community’s most prominent environmental organizations, as befits an agency whose name in Hebrew means vision.

Even newer than Hazon is Canfei Nesharim, an Orthodox group whose name, “Wings of Eagles,” reflects the Torah’s redemptive language for how the Jews were brought from Egypt to the Promised Land. Founded in 2003, the organization provides Torah-based resources on the environment to synagogues, yeshivas and Jewish day schools, said its founder, Evonne

Marzouk.

Although other groups, such as the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life and the Teva Learning Center, are older, all are reporting a surge of interest in the past few years. Much of it, they said, stems from rising concern over global climate change and, more specifically, Al Gore’s 2006 documentary on the subject, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Perhaps no activity illustrates that concern more than the “greening” of synagogues and other buildings — the design choices that have made those institutions environmentally friendly and have lessened their carbon footprints.

Indeed, the first of at least two synagogues to apply for certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit group that rates buildings for sustainability, received that status last month. The synagogue, Congregation Beth David of San Luis Obispo, Calif., is part of the Reform movement. The second synagogue, the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Ill., is expecting to be certified this summer, according to Rabbi Brant Rosen, its spiritual leader. Both congregations applied for the classification, known as LEED designations, following the construction of new, environmentally friendly buildings.

In this area, an Orthodox congregation in Englewood, N.J., Kehilat Kesher, is expecting to begin construction on a new home by the end of the year that it hopes will receive LEED certification. And the American Jewish Committee is “on its way to getting certification” for its national headquarters, a building in Midtown Manhattan that underwent extensive renovations, said a spokesman for the group.

“The bottom line is that we felt this was a religious act,” said Rabbi Rosen, referring to the greening of his congregation. Jewish values, he added, call for people “to create a sustainable world and to leave as small of a footprint as possible. The very foundation of our Torah” — language found in the first chapter of Genesis — “is that God created a sustainable world.”

Whether or not they seek LEED status, many synagogues in the process of greening their sanctuaries are receiving help from such organizations as COEJL; the similarly named but independent Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life of Southern California, or COEJLSC; and the Pacific Southwest Region of United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.

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But for all those efforts, some leaders suggested that turning green remains a challenge for the Jewish community, as it does for others, and that there’s still a long way to go.
“It’s a challenge to get people to change behavioral patterns,” said Rabbi Daniel Cohen of Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel, a Reform congregation in South Orange, N.J., that has begun moving in what he feels is the right direction. “We’re more sensitive and have taken some steps, but there’s more we have to do,” said the rabbi, who would like his congregation to place energy and environmental concerns “at the top of our communal priority list.” What he has discovered is that turning green “is a process — an individual, household and communal process.”

Employing similar language, Rabbi Jeffrey Fox of Kehilat Kesher said he and his congregation “started the process two years ago — very modestly — by changing the light bulbs and changing our cleaning materials,” which went from toxic to non-toxic. “So it’s been a slow, gradual, but steady process,” he said, adding that it’s “the only way you can go about it” because turning green “involves a cultural change for the entire community.”

A less patient view came from Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center, a Philadelphia-based organization founded in 1983 to oppose the nuclear-arms race. The rabbi recently took the Jewish community to task for failing to support New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s congestion-pricing proposal, which was shelved by state lawmakers in Albany.

The proposal would have established a special fee for automobiles to enter Midtown, using the money to improve mass transit, and would have helped reduce American dependence on foreign oil, Rabbi Waskow wrote in an op-ed piece. But “not a peep” in support of the proposal came from the organized Jewish community, the rabbi continued, and a coalition of citizens backing the plan “included half a dozen Protestant ministers but no rabbis.”

In an interview later, Rabbi Waskow, known for both his progre
ssive views and for his style of trying to prod others into action, said that while he realizes many Jewish organizations have taken strong positions on the environment, their lack of action in this case was “an important mistake.” The plan’s approval, he said, would have been “a flagship event” both for New York and other cities around the country.
Asked what grade he would give the Jewish community when it comes to the environment, Rabbi Waskow said he would have to assign a B-minus or a C-plus — “a whole lot better than five or 10 years ago,” but room for a lot more improvement. The community’s consciousness has been raised, he said, but it needs to be “a lot more vigorous.”

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Action on the environment has come from several quarters in the Jewish community, including the Shalom Center, which has prepared the “Green Menorah Covenant” for synagogues and other institutions to sign. Twelve synagogues around the country have signed the covenant, which invites them to adopt two of seven areas of possible action. Those areas include encouraging congregants to car-pool or bike to services, greening their buildings and advocating changes in government policy.

Mainstream organizations have also taken strong stands, with the American Jewish Committee issuing one of the earliest calls for energy independence. Ken Bandler, the group’s spokesman, said the group adopted that stance 30 years ago not so much because of the environment as because of national security. “We’re importing oil from countries that hate us,” including Saudi Arabia, he said.

Three decades later, AJC has changed all the light fixtures in its building, begun using green cleaning products and is close to changing its heating and cooling system — a process it hopes other organizations will emulate, Bandler said. In addition, the organization has offered employees a cash bonus of $2,500 if they buy a hybrid car — an offer taken up in the past two years by 10 employees across the country.

Hazon, begun eight years ago with an environmental bike ride, now focuses on two areas, said Barbara Lerman-Golomb, its director of community relations: outdoor adventure programs, like biking and hiking, and the intersection of food and Jewish values. “One piece of our work is to encourage environmental action among Jews,” said Cheryl Cook, Hazon’s chief operating officer, while the other piece “is to bring Jewish values to the environmental movement.”

To achieve those goals, one of the programs Hazon sponsors is Tuv Haaretz (“Good for the Land”), which operates in synagogues and Jewish community centers across this country and Canada. At each of those 19 sites, members of the Jewish community purchase shares in a nearby farm, which delivers produce to the site each week, said Judith Belasco, who oversees food programs for Hazon.

The program has become “a real community-building event,” said Belasco, drawing new members to the synagogues and JCCs while highlighting Jewish values like shmita, allowing the land to rest every seven years and thus replenish itself.

Other programs range from Hazon’s oldest effort, the annual New York Jewish Environmental Bike Ride, to its newest venture, Challah for Hunger, which takes place on six college campuses. Students involved in the program bake bread every Thursday, sell the bread on Friday and contribute the proceeds to various relief agencies, including the American Jewish World Service.

Two organizations are engaged mainly in education: the Teva Learning Center and Canfei Nesharim.

One of Teva’s programs, Shomrei Adamah (“Keepers of the Earth”), is for fifth- and sixth-grade day-school students who visit a retreat center for four days and make a “brit adamah,” or covenant with the earth, to engage in environmental activity. The Center also runs a program for junior-high students, Achdoot (“Togetherness”), in which the teens camp in the wilderness, usually a state campground, said Alexandra Kuperman, Teva’s assistant director. While taking part in the program, she added, the students learn that “our Torah was born in the wilderness.”

Canfei Nesharim, founded by Marzouk, 31, and four other Orthodox professionals, sponsors a program for synagogues that links the environment both to immediate concerns and to larger questions of Jewish values, said Marzouk, who works part time in Washington for the Environmental Protection Agency. The group also runs training seminars for educators and has published a book of teachings, each connecting the environment to a weekly Torah portion.

It’s the greening of synagogues, though, that has captured much of the public’s attention. Congregation Beth David in Northern California features automatic controls for natural heating and cooling, more than 200 windows and skylights, a motion detector in each room to switch lights on or off, and construction material designed to store heat in the winter and cool the building in the summer. Among the features at the Jewish Reconstructionist Synagogue are tinted glass windows, solar-powered lights in the parking lot, high-efficiency boilers and, in case congregants wish to bike to services, bike racks and showers.

Both congregations have also made extensive use of recycled materials, and the ner tamid, or eternal light, at the Illinois shul is powered by solar energy.

Such a move makes a statement to the community, said Joel Baker, executive director of the Pacific Southwest Region of United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism.

“Our concern — and the reason we got into this — is that if the synagogues aren’t green, then they’re presenting a message contrary to what rabbis are saying on the bima — that you have to be eco-friendly by virtue of the Torah,” Baker said. “So you have to walk the talk.”

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