Ellen Bernstein lays down the Torah on Jewish Environmentalism

Zeek | Creating a Sustainable Jewish Ecology | Ellen Bernstein

Read it. Now.

Judaism, I found, like many other indigenous traditions, is necessarily an ecological, sustainable tradition. All traditions that rise up out of the land, all indigenous traditions like Judaism, are interested in sustaining a people into the future.

And

And like ecology, whose concern first and foremost is the ecos, the house, Judaism is interested in preserving the home--our earthly home. And so in Judaism we have laws that forbid the cutting down of fruit trees and the polluting of waterways, and edicts that describe where to locate tanneries and how to plan towns and where to plant gardens and where to browse the sheep. Our whole system of social justice and tzedakah grew out of a landed consciousness. Without this kind of ecological appreciation, our culture would have dried up thousands of years ago.

I wish I had time to blog on this at length.

Chag Sameach

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