Nina's Blog

witnesses to our deeds

2009-06-29T10:14:00.003-04:00

I had reason recently to read again the first line of the stunning, soaring, disturbing poem that Moses dramatically proclaims to the people Israel as his farewell address. (Deuteronomy 32) In another day, he will walk to the mountaintop, see the land his people will enter without him, and die.

He opens his song to his people with the following words: "Give ear, you heavens, and I will speak. Listen well, land, to the words of my mouth." Rashi asks the obvious question: if Moses is speaking to the Jewish people, why does he begin by addressing the heavens and the earth?

The great teacher explains: Moses is reminding Israel, in fact warning Israel, that the heavens and earth will be witnesses to his exhortation, and to the Israelites behavior. Moses himself is flesh and blood and will die. He imagines that the people Israel might on occasion be tempted to think: after Moses dies, who will there be to hold us to the promises we re-commit ourselves to today? If we choose to say, 'We did not take upon ourselves the covenant,' who will there be to contradict us?

So Moses invokes before them "the heavens and earth as witnesses, for they endure forever." The heavens and the earth will be there when Moses is not, and they will dispense God's justice. That is, "If Israel merits it, the witnesses will come give Israel their reward, as it says, ' the grapevine will give of her fruit and the land will give its bounty, and the heavens will give its dew.' But if Israel should be guilty (faithless), the hand of the witnesses will be the first against them, and the heavens will be shut up, there will be no rain, and the land will not give of its produce, and thus you will be lost."

This time when I read it, it cut very close to home. Daily we make a compact with the earth: it gives us air to breath, produce to eat, stored and current waves of energy to ride on and nestle in. In return for all this goodness, we are bidden to tend well to the earth. In the words of Genesis 2, our task, our covenant, is l'ovdah and l'shomrah: to make good use of the earth, and to protect it in the process.

It seems we have forgotten the second half; as if we have neglected and violated the compact. Yet, who is able stand before us and say so? Who will we listen to even if they speak this truth?

But should we dare, in our hubris, to say: we did not make such a covenant, we are not off the hook. The earth is here to stand witness against us.

And it is. This is what is happening. Our bad behavior is causing the heavens to seize up or to explode in unpredictable ways and places. The earth is stripped of its nutrients and unable to produce its bounty. Even if we manage to live out our lives well-fed and comfortable, we will not be able to hide our misdeeds from the next generation. The heavens and the earth will testify against us. They are our witnesses, and they cannot be fooled, silenced or bought off.

What is the story we want them to tell our children and grandchildren, for generations to come? We must write the narrative of that story with our deeds today.

reconnecting with place

2009-06-24T09:23:00.004-04:00

My oldest son and daughter-in-law live literally one block away from me, over the river and through the woods. To see them emerging from the stippled wooded land behind our house onto the grassier "meadow" of our backyard is to imagine that I indeed live beside an enchanted forest. The only problem is that sometimes, when they come, the ground is wet, muddy in parts. So I have determined that my project for the summer is to build them a path.

First I had to determine who would do this. It quickly became apparent that to contract with a yard company would cost way too much. Besides, I had discovered two summers ago that while gardening was not exactly my cup of tea, heavier-duty yard work - moving stones, improving soil, composting, raking, working with wood, did have an appeal. So, in an effort to (1) provide a dry passage for my children, (2) create an even more enchanted backyardscape, (3) get a good summer's workout and (4) enjoy that satisfying sense of accomplishment at the end of summer, I determined to do the backyard "improvements" myself. What I didn't realize was how much it would (re) connect me with the particularities of this place. Through this work, I am seeing, sometimes for the first time, how radically the tracks of the sun change from month to month and season to season; how the land was used in lifetimes before me; the literal lay of the land and the subtle ways it swells and recedes; the bugs I like and the bugs I don't.

Second I had to figure out what to do. What kind of trail would I make? What track would it trace? What would it be made of? Again, cost made this decision easy. Bricks, pavers, slate, slab, tiles all would be too expensive. So I settled for a combination of packed dirt for the wooded area and crushed stone for the yard. I found a great vendor out in Timonium. They delivered the 10 tons they said I needed for my job (!) in three hours. Just what the impatient diy-er loves!

I laid out the path with my garden hoses (everything can multitask), used my excess stone left over from the renovation 9 years ago as edgers, and voila, the project was underway.

Some things to keep in mind: almost all the internet sites that tell you how to make a stone path tell you to put down a plastic liner. I didn't. It seems to me that we want to move away from impervious surfaces and allow the rain to seep into the ground wherever it can! So I dug my path, edged it with large stones and dropped in the stones (ah, the blessing of a wheelbarrow). Then comes the raking, perhaps the most physically and emotionally gratifying part of the enterprise. Raking the stones into place, spreading them around, pushing and pulling them here and there to even them out feels like giving the earth a back rub. You can almost feel the earth settling in, softening up, accepting this gift of tending. If the earth could purr, I imagine it would.

And while all the sites tell you to dig out 4 inches of dirt the length and breadth of the walk, they do not tell you what to do with it!! So, the good news is that we have bald patches of yard and awkward ridges and valleys left over from the heavy equipment used during the renovation years ago. I found that if I in-filled the gulleys with the dirt from the path, not only will the ground smooth itself out a bit, but the grasses from the "sod" will take root in the bald areas. So all in all, I get to have my path and seed the lawn too.

Next steps: continue to add to the fantasy. Home should always offer a bit of enchantment, even in the midst of the most familiar and mundane. We can be our own dream-weavers. So I will try to make gateways of fallen wood - twigs and tree limbs - that mark the threshold from yard to wood and from path to meadow; gateways that feed the imagination.

Homes should always be portals to enchanted worlds! Paradoxically, it is through reconnecting with the particularity of place that we are transported to the enchantment beyond.

displacing consumerism

2009-06-23T13:17:00.001-04:00

In a recent New Republic article on the ills of consumerism (June 17. 2009), communitarian leader Amitai Etzioni explains the problem: “A culture in which the urge to consume dominates the psychology of citizens is a culture in which people will do most anything to acquire the means to consume…” This unrestrained, indeed communally-driven impulse to buy is, he argues, a prime cause of our current financial malaise. We all want too much, and will fill our days, contort our lives, to be certain that we get it. (Even if we end up storing half of it in off-site storage units.)

Yet studies show that more stuff does not yield greater happiness. Since WWII, per capita income has tripled in the US, but overall satisfaction has plateaued. Indeed one of the greatest determinants of personal satisfaction is not a matter of fullness, but how we measure up against our neighbors. “Relative rather than absolute deprivation is what counts.”

The problem of consumerism, then, begins with us and our appetites, so it must be resolved through us and our appetites. Regulation can help stop the most egregious offenses, he continues. But it is changing the billions of consumer decisions we make every day that will truly heal our broken system.

His point is that our incessant, even desperate, pursuit of things is a surrogate for our incessant, even desperate, pursuit of happiness. The only way to dislodge consumerism, then, is to replace it with something more satisfying. “[I]t is not enough,” he writes, “to establish that which people ought not to do… Consumerism will not just magically disappear from its central place in our culture. It needs to be supplanted by something.”

What is that something? He offers two suggestions: communitarianism and transcendental pursuits. Etzioni is more compelling in his assessment of the problem than his presentation of a solution. But I believe he is on the right track. That is, if consumerism is at heart a spiritual pursuit, however misguided, then it can only be displaced by an authentic spiritual pursuit.

In his own way, Etzioni is arguing that religion is a prime arena for combating rampant consumerism, and therefore a prime source for motivating toward a life of “green.” After all, domestic consumption in the US drives 80% of our marketplace, and our marketplace is the premier source of environmental degradation. It is our behavior, then, our values and our appetites that can drive our economy toward sustainability.

This won’t happen overnight, but it can happen. The world was not always driven by consumption. We need to engage in what Etzioni calls a megalogue, that is, a national conversation conducted by millions of people over a million cups of coffee in a million conference rooms or dinner tables, or cafes. Perhaps that way we can make “less” become the new “more”; fill our hearts’ longings without filling our closets. Fodder for off-site storage facilities is not food for the soul.

Imagine that stuff would be more equitably created and distributed around the world; that instead of spending so much time shopping we spent it visiting and reading and playing music and re-building community. Imagine that the money we saved went to purchase services instead of unnecessary stuff so that more people would have more jobs that meant more to them and did more good; imagine that we could spend more of our creative energy on learning about the world and figuring out how to make things constantly better; imagine more time at home without the commutes that we endure to get to work to earn the money to buy the cars that get us to work…

This idea, seeded by Etzioni, seems like a chimera, a fantasy. But we were once driven by the lure of learning and justice, discovery and medicine, leisure and music. That is, a life filled with the pursuit of culture and meaning, and not the acquisition of stuff. No doubt we can be again.

bread from the earth

2009-06-19T13:58:00.005-04:00

Last week I spent four days studying Jewish texts about nature with 30 other rabbis. The gathering was organized by Oraita, a study program for rabbis sponsored by the [Boston] Hebrew College and its rabbinical school.

One of the texts we explored was the Zohar's commentary on Psalm 104, the soaring biblical paean to God's creation, and how nature and its wonders are witness, mediator and messenger of God's majesty. (Our teacher on this text was Melila Hellner-Eshed, a gifted scholar of the Zohar.) We could have spent the entire four days on this psalm alone, not just delving into it as a transporting biblical text but as a new way of looking at our spiritual relationship with the physical world.

This is something I hope to do over the course of the summer, and may be inclined to share some insights I glean with you.

For now, here is one I find captivating. Like most good insights, it takes some work to get there, so I am hoping you will stay with me til the end and find that it was worth the journey.

If you ever wondered where our bread blessing, hamotzi lehem min ha'aretz (Blessed are you God, who brings forth bread from the earth) comes from, it is from here, Psalm 104: 14. "God causes the grazings to grow for the cattle, and grasses in response to the labor of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth."

As we all know, bread does not spring forth ready-made from the earth. Rather, we classically explain the surreal imagery of this blessing as an acknowledgement of the exquisite God/human partnership that yields both the fruits for human survival and the majesty of civilization. That is, God's creation provides the raw material, and human ingenuity transforms it into the stuff of our lives.

But the kabbalists allow us to take this one step further. At least, they inspired in me the following thoughts:

In verse 29 we read: "When you hide your face, God, people are troubled: when you take away their breath, they die, and return to their dust." Or so the more literal reading would have it.

To the kabbalists, this verse reads more like this: "When you are displeased with us, God, when the world stands before you in judgment, You turn your face away and the supernal flow of life-giving forces is unable to reach us. We are troubled. Our breath is taken from us, and we are like someone who has died (in a state of impurity). What is the solution? What is the remedy? For us to reconnect with the dust, with the earth, the stuff and substance of your primordial creation and the possessor of its purifying powers."

Now that is quite a handful to unpack and quite a handful to grasp. But bottom line, the kabbalists seem to be saying that the most fundamental and essential products of God's physical creation - the earth and its soil - are also the most elemental conveyors of God's spiritual sustenance and healing.

So when we find ourselves distanced from God, or suffering from spiritual malaise, we should reconnect with things earthy, the essence of creation.

That, it seems to me, is a hidden message in the odd image of our blessing over bread: "who brings forth bread from the earth, ha-motzi lehem min ha'aretz". In kabbalistic imagery, motzi, "bring forth," is a word that indicates the unimpeded flow of supernal life-giving forces from the most distant of heavens to the most present of earthly realities . Bread, lehem, is more than baked dough, more than the physical staff of life. It represents all nourishment, material and spiritual, that comes from God and sustains humanity. And aretz, land, is the life-giving, renewing stuff of creation.

So when we recite the blessing over bread, we are both thanking God for the partnership that allows us to weave the grasses of the earth into the breadbasket of civilization. And we are thanking God for the constant reminder of spiritual renewal present in the most fundamental of earth's elements, the land.

reclaiming Jew as am ha'aretz

2009-06-07T07:56:00.005-04:00

For the past 2,000 years, the Jewish social elite have been the learned folk. First among them, occupying the inner circle, are the rabbis. They are the keepers of the tradition, the arbiters of our sacred texts. But since rabbinic Judaism has a democratizing tug, almost anyone who chooses to learn, whether in the company of others or by themselves, is also be considered part of the elite, even if only on the margins.

The opposite end of the social spectrum is occupied by the so-called am ha-aretz, the intellectual boor, unlearned and crude in habit. They were considered not only ignorant of Jewish learning and Jewish law, but indifferent or perhaps antagonistic to it as well. Or at the very best, sloppy about keeping it.

But here's the thing: Am ha-aretz literally means the people of the land.

While the rabbis epitomize the people of the book, the life of the mind, the timeless and placeless pursuit of religious imagination and learning, the amei ha-aretz are associated with land, the earth, the body located in time and place.

These two are complementary elements of life. They are the aleph (eretz) and taf (Torah), the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Life can exist only in the combination of the two, when lived nestled between the two. Yet somewhere along the way, they became severed from each other.

Even back in the talmudic period, when Jews still lived in Israel and were mostly comfortable in Babylonia, the rift between the rabbinic class (the haverim - the "brethren," the initiated) and the amei ha-aretz (the distrusted and sometimes reviled "lower class") was profound.

Internecine divisions are clearly nothing new for Jews. But my point for the moment is not how we must overcome class distinctions and name-calling, as important a subject as that is. My point on this blog is to call for a reclamation, a redemption, of the very idea of am ha-aretz.

First of all, we as a people have returned to our land. We are literally as much the people of the land - especially today - as we are the people of the book. We need to burnish both sides of this coin of identity: the mind and the body, the intellect and the labor.

Even more, we need to reconnect with the romance and appreciation of the land itself. All land. Nature. The Jewish people were nurtured on the land of Israel: its geography, its images, its trees, its watercourses, its climate, its produce, its agricultural laws. Our religious cradle, our spiritual expression was bound up in nature. The vocabulary with which we spoke to God was that of nature: the first of the harvest, the first of our flocks, the final harvest all were taken up to Jerusalem to celebrate with our people. We are bidden not to go to Jerusalem empty-handed, for the bounty of our land was a demonstrated of our bondedness with God.

Now more than ever, we need to remember that part of our heritage. Now, when humanity has the capacity not just to degrade one area, one region, one watershed, but the entire earth, Jews must reclaim the lofty and sacred name Am Ha-aretz, the people of the land. It will change the way we think of ourselves, what we teach in our seminaries, our day schools and synagogues. It will expand our legal categories and impact the questions we ask of our laws. It will inform our behavior, enhance our lives, help heal the earth and reconnect us to the sacred traditions of our landed past.

Interestingly, the phrase am ha-aretz was a laudable title in the biblical world. How appropriate for this generation, then, to renew it even as in doing so, it promises to renew us.

The Future

2009-06-01T09:41:00.000-04:00

Sarah Saxon is a senior at Roland Park Country School working as a BJEN intern this spring. She authored this guest entry.

When I was little I used to think that the only thing that could jeopardize the future of the planet, thus my future, was that the sun was going to explode…eventually. As I got older, in school I started to learn about the infamous green house gasses and the hole in the ozone layer. I learned that the polar ice caps are going to melt and the sea level will rise flooding the coastal states…some day. These things always seemed so far away to me and really not that bad; considering I would already be gone by the time the sun exploded, and if the coastal states flooded I would move inland.

But now I (and the entire world) am faced with an immediate problem that really will affect my future in a drastic way. The truth is I am terrified by what might be the future of this planet. I am terrified by the fact that a large percent of the general public, including corporate executives and officials, know and understand the dangers of their actions and just carry on in their merry way like nothing is happening.

We are using up the world’s resources, we are wasting half of the resources we use, we are polluting the air and water, and all the while becoming less and less humane. So the question is, how can we get word out about what to do to fix this problem? How can we convince people that they need to start changing the way they think about things?

The media is always a good way, but it is not necessarily as effective as we would like it to be. Take a movie, for example. How about “An Inconvenient Truth”. Yes it did have a huge effect on the public, and Al Gore even won the Nobel Peace Prize for his effort. But, how many people are still talking about it today?

I think it is more effective to start small. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Lead by example. I have a friend who never used to recycle. He saw me doing it a lot and he started to become more conscious of the things he was throwing away. Of course he did have a little extra encouragement from me. We were at a restaurant the other day and he saved a plastic bottle just so he could take it home and recycle it. I was a little dumbfounded actually. You never know how much your actions can affect other people. That’s why it is important to set a good example.

Sometimes when I write for this blog, my fear about the future of our society and the planet is somewhat assuaged. I know there are people out there, especially those of you reading this, who genuinely care, like me, about the future and the environment. I urge you to set the example for your friends and family. Maybe they will catch onto it too.

india's farmers go organic

2009-06-01T07:32:00.005-04:00

In case you missed this amazing story, it seems that 300,000 farmers in India are bucking the fossil fuel/artificial fertilizer trend of the past 40 years that both degraded the soil and put them into debt to companies such as Monsanto, and returning to the "old fashioned" way of organic farming. India's leaders are calling for scientists to do a rigorous study of the best practices for various regions so that soil, harvest yield and standard of living all continue to rise. A fascinating development we should all keep our eyes on. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104708731

on stamps and due dates

2009-05-31T04:54:00.002-04:00

Shavuot is a time to be awash in words. So, to oblige this tradition, and to be well tucked in for the holiday with a riotous companionship of words, I paid a visit to the Johns Hopkins University Eisenhower library.

One of the things I like most about the place, besides their enormous collection, is the way they check out books. They have a hand-held dispenser that adheres a tiny tag with the due date right on the back of the book. The most obvious advantage to this triviality is that you know when the book is due at a glance. Once upon a time, this piece of knowledge was available on any library book. You could look inside - or more recently outside - any borrowed book and know when it was due. It was stamped right there with the date. The convenience of this no doubt was unheralded but nonetheless welcome. I dare say it may also have aided the timely return of borrowed books. Unlike today, when even a thorough inspection of most public library books will not reveal the secrets to avoid overdue fines. Instead, the due date is most likely crumbled up somewhere on that little tasteless receipt that substitutes for the satisfying plunk of a stamp. At best the receipt is lost in a sea of papers at home or more likely lying wounded and discarded in the landfill with other tossed receipts for cold medicine and gum. How ignoble a fate for a badge of borrowed wisdom, a prod to keep one's promise, and a symbol of communal trust and belonging.

For that is what libraries and their stock in trade, books, represent. To borrow a book is to temporarily be entrusted with a piece of communal wealth, whose use we are granted, serially and individually, just for the moment. When we are done, we are return the book, no worse for the wear, indeed perhaps better infused as it is with our spiritual patina, so it may be sent on to the next member of society. Libraries are symbols of this bonding we have, one with the other, a shared ownership that reveals - or at least hints at - shared interests, with at least a few others in the neighborhood.

The record of due dates could tell us that. We could see how popular the book was, how often it was taken out and how frequently. We could imagine this book in other hands, on other laps, playing in the imagination of other minds. We would know that this book had a life before we handled it, that someone read and took care of it, and then passed it back so we could enjoy it too. And we would know that we too are not the last to lay claim to this book but that we must tend well to it and send it back so that others after us may take it home for a while. We would be reminded of this all because of the quiet cascade of dates on the cover.

Today, we check out a book with the same heartless routine with which we purchase a consumable: scan the UPC and get a receipt. A transaction solely between consumer and machine.

JHU library, on the other hand, still affords that bit of humanity in checking out their books. Past due dates are visible on the back of the boks. These bits of seemingly disembodied information place us not only in physical communion with our neighbors and their appetites, even if only in our imagination, but they also remind us of the value of communal structures. No one of us could readily possess all those bounded volumes of words and graphics. And even if they did, what good would it be to hoard them?

I learn five lessons of life and sustainability from this quaint tradition of stamping due dates on books.

(1) It reminds us that we are all in this together. That all property is in some sense common property, that it all comes from a common source and will return to the common source, no matter how long we ardently profess to exclusively possess it. We therefore have the obligation to treat it well, not to degrade the principal, so that others after us will find stocked shelves just as we did.

(2) We may not always know when the due date is, but there is always a due date. We must always ultimately relinquish our "books" back to the source.

(3) That just as the wisdom and generosity of others built the library, so we must continue to add and build for others.

(4) That hoarding - be it knowledge, wisdom, possessions, wealth of any nature - is not only unkind, it is wasteful. What good are all those books if they are locked on the shelves? What value has knowledge or wealth if it is not used for the benefit of others?

(5) There must be some commonly-agreed upon, artful mechanism for sharing, returning, borrowing and organizing, else all would be chaos, fighting ensue, and great potential would be squandered. Though not everyone can have everything all the time, neither do we all need everything all the time. Therefore, we would not feel compelled to personally possess, and hoard, so much if we knew there were good stewards, whom we supported and guided, who were taking care of these precious, shared resources. Both for our generation's use, and for those who come after us.

All this from a silent witness to our shared source of plenty, if we but keep its trust: a running list of dates of when this book is due.

William McDonough

2009-05-28T10:14:00.001-04:00

Sarah Saxon is a senior at Roland Park Country School working as a BJEN intern this spring. She authored this guest entry.

In 2006, a man named William McDonough came to speak at my school. I have to give some credit to him on this blog, because his speech introduced me to the world of environmentalism, and he had a very profound impact on my way of thinking.

There are two main things I remember about his speech (Besides the fact he is a very persuasive speaker):

1. “Waste is Food” – This is one point that William McDonough mentioned multiple times. He talked about the cycle of stuff. And by stuff, I literally mean stuff. McDonough talked about a circular pattern off stuff instead of the linear pattern that exists today. This is both in the technological world and the environmental world. McDonough’s idea is that we should eliminate the idea of waste all together (not just reduce it). For example, why shouldn’t we be able to use our TV until it is too old, go back to the TV supplier, turn it in, and say “I would like a new one please?” Then the supplier could use parts from the old TV for something else.

2. “All children of all species for all time” – The other thing that McDonough mentioned that really stuck with me, is that the point of making the world better isn’t just about helping humans, it’s about creating a safe place to live for “all children of all species of all time”. To me, this pretty much covers it. If we strive to make a place that is safe for all children of all species of all time, we haven’t let anyone out.

In the time since McDonough spoke at my school (3 years ago), I like the rest of the general public have become a lot more aware of the environmental issues that exist today (besides global warming and greenhouse gases). I have also become a lot more aware of the political side of “saving the environment”.

I have learned more about William McDonough and his effort to help the environment. He talks about “remaking the way we make things” (in his book Cradle to Cradle) and “the Second Industrial Revolution”. McDonough states that the first industrial revolution was what got us into this mess and second one will be about getting us out of it. Both, he claims, are simply about design.

If you don’t know or haven’t heard anything about William McDonough, I suggest looking him up. He is very insightful. You may not agree with everything he says; he is very strong willed. However, I think he has a lot of good things to say.

LEED Certification

2009-05-27T09:40:00.002-04:00

Sarah Saxon is a senior at Roland Park Country School working as a BJEN intern this spring. She authored this guest entry.

When I was brainstorming with Rabbi Cardin about some of the things I could talk about as a guest writer on the blog, we came up with the idea of the new athletic complex at my school. In particular, the new types of landscaping and water management systems that have been employed. When my school reconstructed the building and surrounding area, they made sure it was LEED certified by the U.S. Green Building Council. Some examples of LEED criteria involve storm water management, building orientation, irrigation and use of potable water, and resources involved in building construction.

The interesting thing about our athletic complex is how we went about dealing with some of the criteria. First of all, I have to say that the school did not just reconstruct our gym. They took the two grass fields next to the gym and turned them into turf fields. Also, they did a lot of new landscaping. And, second of all, the school had to do all of this keeping in mind that there is a natural habitat (which we call the back woods) that exists behind the building.

Here is the # 1 coolest fact about the new landscaping – it does not require any irrigation. What most people don’t realize is that if you plant flora that is native to the area in which it is being planted, it does not need to be watered. It is already acclimated the natural climate.

Here is the # 1 coolest fact about the new storm water management system - the two turf fields I mentioned above, both have cisterns underneath of them. When it rains, the storm water is absorbed by the fields, filtered, and then stored in the cisterns. The cisterns then release the storm water slowly out into the back woods over time.

Landscaping and storm water management are both very important when considering a building’s effect on the environment. Non-native landscaping uses a lot of unnecessary water that comes right from the municipal water supply. And, poor storm water management can lead to serious soil erosion and runoff.

Bittersweet Truth

2009-05-27T09:38:00.001-04:00

Sarah Saxon is a senior at Roland Park Country School working as a BJEN intern this spring. She authored this guest entry.

My parents recently cancelled the newspaper. Their decision to do so was mainly because the paper was becoming more expensive yet contained less material by the day. They also cancelled the newspaper because these days you can find everything about the news online.

From the environmentalist’s point of view this great! Today’s progressive society is constantly coming up with new and improved ways to reduce the use of natural resources; such as the trees that go into making a news paper. However, this triumph is bittersweet.

What about the traditions that we lose? What about being to wake up every morning, opening the newspaper (with coffee cup in hand), and reading the comics?

Sometimes I feel like because we are in the “age of technology”, we lose sight of the simple things in life that make it quirky and unique. Environmentalism doesn’t necessarily have to be such a serious business. These days it is so easy to get caught up in changing your everyday life for the greater good.

So my advice is: don’t lose sight of the simple things. It’s good to keep the environment in mind when buying something or wasting something, etc., but it is not good to lose sight of what makes you happy. If you like reading the newspaper, then read the newspaper. Just make sure you recycle it. Don’t change to an online paper because you think you need to, change because you want to.

Blackle

2009-05-27T09:36:00.002-04:00

Sarah Saxon is a senior at Roland Park Country School working as a BJEN intern this spring. She authored this guest entry.

Recently someone told me about a new website called Blackle. The site was created by Heap Media, and it is powered by Google. Basically, it is a more sustainable form of Google. Why? You might ask. Well, instead of having a screen that is all white with black writing, the screen is all black with white writing. This is more sustainable because it conserves energy. According to Roberson et al., “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen”. The amount of energy conserved can be seen on the site’s main page. It says that presently, 1,256,001.441 Watt hours have been saved. Although this is a small amount, it is one step in a larger action to reduce energy use.

What you can do to help:
Heap Media claims that Blackle was created in order “to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy”. Heap Media encourages users to set Blackle as their home page. “This way every time you load your internet browser you will save a little bit of energy”.

In order to learn more about Blackle, you can go to the website http://www.blackle.com/ and click the “About Blackle” button on the bottom of the page. You can also find out more about how to save energy and stay updated about the site.

my apple trees

2009-05-24T13:58:00.004-04:00

It is easy to feel noble, even righteous, when you plant a tree. Trees herald the beginning of things. The Garden of Eden began with trees; the Israelites were bidden to plant trees upon entering the promised land; we welcome a child with the planting of a tree.

Trees also call us to generosity. Unless you are young when you plant, most of the value of the tree will extend well beyond your lifetime. To plant a tree after 50 is to cast yourself gently into the lives of those yet-to-be. A sapling today is a message in a bottle drifting to those on a distant shore: I was here, and I was thinking of you.

One of the most famous stories of the talmud teaches us this. It is the tale of Honi the Circle-Drawer and the carob tree. Honi, renowned as someone whose insistent prayers for rain were heard by God, came across an old man planting a carob tree. "Old man," said Honi, "how long will it take for this tree to bear fruit?"

"About 70 years," replied the old man. Honi - a man all about "now" but weak on the future - scoffed a bit and asked if the old man wasn't a bit too old to benefit from the tree?

The man answered, "As my ancestors planted for me, so I will plant for others."

I remembered that story as I worked on my apple trees today. I planted three of them the day before Pesah, on Birkat Hahammah, the day we blessed the creation of the sun. I am hoping that through some miracle of fate and nature, these saplings, no more than 5 feet tall, will grow to be strapping young trees in 28 years when the next Birkat Hahammah comes around. I hope to have my picture taken beneath the spring blossoms of its spreading bowers. The caption will say: from 'Birkat Hahammah to Birkat Hahammah'. We will make something very special from the apple harvest that fall. And in the in-between years, my family and I will have enjoyed several seasons of yummy apples for welcoming Rosh Hashanah, for the apple pie for Thanksgiving, and applesauce for Hanukkah.

But today, I had to give up that hope for one of the trees. It is dead - who knows why. The other two trees are doing fine, thank goodness. But the fragility of an apple orchard, what with the deer, the rain (though this past month has been rather good), the transplanting, random disease, etc. is evident in this one loss. I also planted over 40 apple seeds erev Pesah - only 3 remain. Out of the early batch (apple seeds taken from the detritus of our haroset), only half sprouted and all of those collapsed after growing valiantly upwards three inches. Clearly I was doing something wrong. So I am now trying different planting techniques to see if I can coax new seeds to sprout and grow. (In case you are curious, about a gallon of applesauce yields a heaping tablespoon of seeds.)

Meanwhile, today I gingerly unwrapped the deer netting that I had draped directly on the branches of my three trees, and placed it instead on stakes encircling each tree. The hope is that this way, the netting will continue to keep nosy nozzles away from the blossoming and leafing little trees and still leave the trees sufficient room to grow.

Perhaps one day I will need to create a more substantial barrier around the entire perimeter. But that is an investment I cannot afford at the moment - for in my mind it will have to be a split-rail fence enclosing enough land to nurse nine mature apple trees, and room for a rustic bench tucked underneath where I will sit while my grandchildren play, or read, or draw in the orchard.

That's the way it is with trees. They bring out the dreamers in those who plant, and forge a hopeful, peaceful, verdant vision of our future. Perhaps that is why, when draping the netting over the trees, it felt like I was veiling a bride. Today stood for work and promises that will bring fruit at the end of a long path of tomorrows.

Hopefully, Honi - the petulant prophet of the power of "now" (as in, "God, make it rain now") - learned a similar lesson from that wise old man: when to press for the imperative of "now" and when to build up and celebrate the patience for "tomorrow".

Perhaps if Honi could learn it, it is not too late for Wall Street.

Fledglings

2009-05-22T08:37:00.005-04:00

Sarah Saxon is a senior at Roland Park Country School working as a BJEN intern this spring. She authored this guest entry.

This morning I was having a conversation with my friend, and we got to talking about college (We are both High School Seniors). That got me thinking about how humans are some of the only animals that live with their parents for an average of 18-20 years of their lives. Take birds for example: some birds are independent the moment they hatch from their eggs. Even birds with longer fledging periods only stay with their parents for up to 20 months.

So while I was thinking about college and birds and preparation for my future life, I began to also think about progress. I started to wonder: if humans are so well-educated and so well-prepared for our future, and we have the most brain capacity of all the animals on this planet; why do we use the least amount of brain power to do some of the most insignificant things? There are plenty of things that we have accomplished in the history of the human race that we should be proud of. However, there are also plenty of things we have done to be ashamed of.

When I brought this up with my friend, he agreed with me. He said, “Look what humans do. They argue, they hate, and yet, they also have the innate ability to love”. What a contradiction. We constantly argue and fight over this planet and yet we claim that we love it. We destroy the environment while, at the same time, we advocate for it. How can we do all these things at once?

The answer is, it’s easy to have beliefs, but it is so much harder to act on those beliefs. How many people do you know that say they care about energy conservation but won’t even buy just one LED light for their house? So what I think is: if you have a belief, stick to it. An action is less meaningful without a belief behind it. However, if you do care about something greatly, you should act on it.

Speaking of actions, I think I’m going to ask my parents to buy more LED lights for our house.

Pimlico Race Track - Park or Office Park?

2009-05-21T14:20:00.005-04:00

Sarah Saxon is a senior at Roland Park Country School working as a BJEN intern this spring. She authored this guest entry.

Last weekend was the Preakness. On the day of the race, I was in the car with some friends. While thinking about the fact that the people who owned the track were considering putting it up for auction, I absentmindedly said, “I think they should turn it into a park.” To which one of the passengers replied, “Oh yeah, that would be a good place for an office park”. I said, “No, like a real park”. In turn the passenger said, “Who do you expect to pay for it? The city already has enough parks. Why not just plant some trees?”

I’m not trying to make the passenger out to be a bad guy who is against environmentalism. On the contrary, he’s absolutely for it. However, I don’t think he understood the nature of my comment. Just like office buildings, parks are a part of industrialism, and they definitely require the use of natural resources. Unlike office buildings, however, parks sustain two types of life. Of course they sustain the environment (at least better than office buildings), but they also help sustain human life.

I think sometimes when people consider sustainability, they cut humans out of the picture and just look at the environment. But, sustainability isn’t just about the environment. It requires a balance between environmental issues, social issues, and economical issues. You cannot ignore people when you are trying to better the Earth. Advocating for the environment shouldn’t just be about scolding humans for progress and industrialization; and advocating isn’t just about spending all of your efforts on the environment because humans are such a huge part of the global environment.

So maybe one day, the owners will take Pimlico Race Track - a place where people gamble and get drunk - and turn it into a park (not an office park), where people can exist in equilibrium with the environment.

First National Jewish Sustainability gathering

2009-05-17T03:22:00.005-04:00

This past week was a turning point for the American Jewish community. Quietly, without much fanfare, representatives from 17 national Jewish organizations gathered at the Pearlstone Conference and Retreat Center to explore the compelling urgency of sustainability and what [more] they can do to move their organizations and membership to embrace it. The common element among these organizations is that their membership (JCCs, day schools, camps, Hillels, synagogues, and the like) own and/or operate millions of square feet of real estate across the country. Even more than being participants in this watershed moment, however, all the organizations were co-sponsors, underwriting not only their representatives' travel and lodging expenses, but also the expenses of the gathering as a whole. This is a remarkable statement of engagement, recognizing that the sustainability train is leaving the station, and we all need to get on it.

It was also a recognition that through their collective actions, these organizations can both significantly reduce the ecological footprint of the organized Jewish community, and affect the attitudes and behavior of the millions of Jews and fellow travellers who are affliated with or otherwise connected to them.

These organizations spent 26 hours together, learning and imagining what a green, sustainable society could look like. And at the end, they developed a dream scenario for their own organizations.

Such visions included: energy efficient buildings powered by renewable resources; green transportation; reduction of all waste including paper, disposables, and food; buying, recycling and composting materials in the same way that nature reuses waste as energy; transforming fossil fuel- and water-intensive lawns into regionally appropriate landscaping, orchards and gardens; using green cleaning supplies; and engaging in membership education and motivational campaigns.

Several individuals who were at the gathering have already scheduled meetings within their organizations to share what they learned and explore how to begin to implement these ideas.
This is a remarkable beginning, which we hope and expect will gather steam and move the American Jewish community as whole in a direction it has until now largely ignored.

For the record, and to acknowledge the commitment and vision of those who participated, here is a list of sponsoring organizations:

American Jewish Committee
Association of Jewish Aging Services
Federation of Jewish Men's Clubs
Foundation for Jewish Camp
Hillel: the foundation for Jewish Campus Life
JCC Association
JCPA (Jewish Council for Public Affairs)
Jewish Reconstructionist Federation
North American Association of Synagogue Executives
Orthodox Union
PEJE (Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education)
Rabbinical Assembly
Religious Action Center
Union for Reform Judaism
UJC (United Jewish Communities)
United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
Women’s League for Conservative Judaism

The gathering was organized by COEJL, with a little help from BJEN!

Thanks go to the wonderful folks at Pearlstone, who make it easy to put together a smooth, efficient and seamless gathering. And of course to all the participating organizations for their support. Kayn Yirbu - may this effort bring forth much fruit.

Isaiah 66

2009-04-28T14:09:00.003-04:00

The haftarah for this past Shabbat was taken from Isaiah, chapter 66. One need go no further than the very first line to be captivated by its poetry and, reading it somewhat midrashically, with its call to live in harmony with the physical world.

The opening verse reads: "Thus says God: The heavens are my Throne and all the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me? What kind of resting-place will you make for me?"

The setting is the end of the first Babylonian exile. The author is experiencing, or anticipating, the Jewish people's return to the land of Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple. This return good indeed, but not good enough. For, as the book of Isaiah tells us, the holiness of theTemple is not found in its stone. The holiness of the Temple resides in the faith and behavior of the people who fill it. After all, God does not need the Temple. God built the universe. The earth - expansive beyond measure to the people of antiquity - is but a footstool to God. The Temple is only valued in so far as it resembles, and calls forth, the goodness of the Jewish people.

God wants us to build a sacred home not for God's sake, but for ours. In the context of the present day, we should read the words "home" and "resting place" as synonyms for all of creation. The verse becomes then not a rhetorical question meaning: "How can you build a home for me when I am the Builder of the ultimate Home? How can a mere earthly home contain the infinite space of Me?"

Rather, the question becomes this: "I reside, as it were, with you here in this universe. We are partners in building this physical world. I have given you the tools and resources to build buildings that honor Me. What will they be like?"

Isaiah acknowledges that while God does not need real buildings, people and civilization do. The question for us is, what makes a building sacred? What makes a building, or more broadly, what makes the built environment and the earth that results from it worthy of being in partnership with God?

Surely it must be something that gives life, that comforts and heals and does not destroy the world or make us ill. Something that is, in today's jargon, sustainable. Isaiah challenges us in God's name to wonder, what kind of world will we make? Would God be proud of the "house" we built?

It is a good question indeed.

Our imagination

2009-04-27T20:52:00.004-04:00

3,000 years ago, an unknown artist, perhaps the world's first cartographer, created this extraordinary map of the city of Nippur, the cultural center of the Sumerian civilization.

There are several remarkable aspects of this map. For one, it is the first map known to have been drawn to scale - no mean intellectual and mathematical feat if it had never been done before. For another, it includes features such as the Euphrates river (the left-most double-lined "canal") and the Ur Gate. (Abraham's hometown was Ur - perhaps this very one, 100 miles southeast of Nippur.) But the most stunning element of this map may just be its perspective - from above. For the fact is, no human at that time could have seen the city from this perspective.

This view, as scientific and precise as it is, is a fabrication, a leap of the artist's imagination.

Yesterday I was in NY at a wonderful afternoon of learning co-sponsored by COEJL and the Finkelstein Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The subject was environmental ethics. Along with the engaging and little-known Jewish texts that we studied, we also heard from Dr Robert Pollack, Director of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion at Columbia University. In his power point presentation, Dr. Pollack had a slide which showed the universe, all of it, from what can only be considered a divine perspective. The viewer was outside the universe, which was drawn something like a short-bottomed ice cream cone lying on its side. For a moment, like for the viewer of the city of Nippur, we are taken outside of our limited reality, and asked to look back in at all of it at once.

The view of the universe reminded me of the map of Nippur, and I was struck by the juxtaposition of these two representations 3,000 years apart, so very different and yet so very much alike. For they both emanated from, and celebrated, the same human impulse: our expansive imagination.

This is what makes humanity unique: we can imagine what we have never seen and never known. We can project, plan, hope and dream. That, in part, is what enabled us to climb out of the caves and make the homes, the canals, the cities, the gates, the maps, the blueprints that gave us this blessed world we live in today.

Yet it is, paradoxically, the impoverishment of the human imagination that is stifling our acknowledgement and response to the dark side of all this wonder. We are not properly imagining the harm that the gift of our genius and progress is creating. We are not properly imagining the view of our world in the wake of its degradation by our actions. And we are not properly imagining what a renewed world, built on less instead of more, would look like.

Scientists tell us that if everyone on earth today, about 7 billion of us, were to live the way most Americans live, we would need 5 earths to satisfy the demand. If we fully used our imaginations to understand that, we would change our ways.

Needless to say, we do not have spare earths hanging around. But we do have endless imagination. Let's put that remarkable attribute to use to help us both heal the world, and enrich our lives. For in truth, these two can only happen together.

Passover Homespun

2009-04-06T10:38:00.000-04:00

There is something different about Passover this year, besides its confluence with Birkat Hahammah, that exciting once-in-28-years celebration. That is the way of holidays, after all. While they stay the same year after year, we don't. Therefore, we experience them differently each year. If we pay attention to how we see them, and feel about them, and react to them each year, we can learn a lot about ourselves, where we are in our evolution of values, choices and life.

So it is for me this Passover. These past three years of living deeply aware of the impression, the footprint, the impact my life leaves on our physical world has made me judge my lifestyle differently. This is not, and never has been, am "I'm okay, you're okay" world. We each live in each other's space whethere we like it and acknowledge it or not. My waste is your legacy.

Which has taught me two things:

1) I must have you in mind as I live my life. That is, I must live intentionally with the awareness of your presence and how what I do affects you.

2) To live so intentionally is to live more meaningfully, more fully, more profoundly.

In a way, I am never alone. The community, the purposeful intertwining of lives that we all crave, is consciously part of my everyday life.

As a committed Jew, this has always been that way for me: "All Jews are related and responsible one for the other," we say and teach our children. So too, the mezuzah is to me like a dot in the connect-the-dots puzzles we did as kids. Each mezuzah is a stopping point along that invisible line that connects us all, so that all Jews can seek home and refuge in a strange place simply by looking for the place with the mezuzah.

But this new heightened awareness is an extension of that, a filling out of that to include all people, all nature, all creation. So when I get up and turn on the shower, or rip the plastic off my dry-cleaned dress or microwave my breakfast, all of this is laden with an awareness of the ethic I am living. Every act I take, every act we each take, leaves a trail, and therefore is a witness to our values and our care for each other.

In the beginning, as we move into this realm of greater self-in-place/self-and-other awareness, we feel a bit overwhelmed. On the one hand, we don't want to be so self-conscious about our habits and our deeds. Or what they say or what they mean. We just want to do them.

On the other, we already construct our lives based on the audience and reception of the other. I do what I do in part, and make the choices I make in part, because I worry about what you will say and think about me. That awareness guides us in the clothes we buy, the coffee we drink, the cell phones we carry, the papers we read. What I think you will think of me by what I look like and what I consume affects so much of what I do, even in the privacy of my own home. Which is to say, we already live with the burden of the presence of the other in our lives. Why not just extend that awareness beyond what it does for me to what it also does for you?

Which brings me back to this Passover. Walking down the supermarket aisles, looking at the profusion of hametz look-alike products, seeing all the did-it-for-you prepared foods, never mind the extraordinary expense we are all burdened with in buying all that stuff, I cannot help but believe we have strayed from one of the premier lessons of Passover: simplicity. On Passover, hametz/leaven, is the symbol of too-muchness. It is the symbol of bloatedness, the things of our lives that are more than is necessary. It is a time when we are to simplify, take only what we need, only what we can carry.

On Passover, my kitchen reverts back to the essentials: fresh and frozen raw fruits and vegetables (I will be more aware this year about what is seasonal and what is not); eggs; oil; matzah meal; spices; cheese. I will do more cooking the week of this holiday than I do in over a month during the rest of the year. And despite the amount of eggs and oil I use, this week will probably produce some of the healthiest food to come out of my kitchen.

We make homemade almost everything – from soups to French fries to desserts. Our haggadot too are becoming more homespun. So too our matzah covers, seder pillows, games. My buying appetite, never large, is getting smaller. Not just this week but throughout the year. I can hardly imagine something I need that I do not already have, in some form or fashion. That is where I am this year in life. It is this simple message of our return to Passover each year, that we learn more about what each of us truly needs, what is truly our hametz. Changing over our kitchens and doing more with less - or different things - than we have during the year opens our eyes to who we are and what we really need.

I am learning that for me, this year, I don't need much. Rather, I cherish the homespun, the stuff that bears the earnest work of others, the stuff that leaves a smaller footprint, the stuff that conveys and inspires an interesting story, the stuff that brings people closer together, and the stuff that makes me worthier of sharing this world with my family, my community and you.

The next cycle of your life

2009-04-04T22:14:00.004-04:00

April 8 is almost here. The 206th celebration of Birkat Hahammah will soon be upon us. On the one hand, it is a rare and modest celebration. We mark this moment of welcoming the sun and praising God for its creation once every 28 years in the early morning hours with a one-line blessing: "Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who continually works the work of creation." On the other hand, this is a moment of grand celestial reset in an age crying out for radical, cultural Reset. Perhaps that is why it is likely to be celebrated more this year than in any year in history.

The occasion of Birkat Hahammah marks the return of the sun to the exact spot, at the exact time on the same day of the week that it occupied at its creation. The sun was created on the fourth day, and therefore this celebration is always on a Wednesday. But it is more than a birthday. This confluence of time and place (at least in the rabbinic imagination), when the dimensions of space and time mimic the moment of the sun's creation, makes this event a re-enactment, a rehearsing, a re-creation of the state of the cosmos when time and life began.

Birkat Hahammah, then, is not just a celebration of an anniversary. It is part of a return to that sterling, startling moment of newness. Every 28 years the heavens and the world reset. So too, it seems, can we.

We can use this under-stated, under-celebrated moment as a time to re-center our lives. Wherever we might have gone wrong, wherever we may have strayed from the path we once wanted to pursue, wherever we got distracted or lazy or sidetracked, we too can return there and reset our lives.

How grand of Judaism to give us so many chances of renewal: every day, every month, every year and every Birkat Hahammah. Interesting, isn't it, that all these renewals are pegged to the cycles of our celestial bodies (or, regarding the sun, our earthly cycle in relation to it). Daily, monthly, yearly and 28 year cycles. Birkat Hahammah is, perhaps, the biggest renewal of all. If the heavens reset, why can't we?

So, wake up early Wednesday, April 8. See the brightening and lightening of the sky, praise God for the majesty of creation, and your place in it, and begin the next cycle of your life anew.

What will drive tomorrow's economy?

2009-03-22T00:34:00.009-04:00

Here is my dilemma:

Today's economic engine is fired by stuff. It is the production, manufacturing, and distribution of stuff that keeps our marketplace humming. That is what this economic downturn is reminding us. When we stop buying, the economy starts tanking. But to buy more stuff degrades the environment. More stuff equals more mining, more manufacturing, more housing, more land development, more stores, more driving, more shopping, more throwing away, more waste.

To save the economy, then, we have to buy more stuff. To buy more stuff, though, is to harm our world.

Which forces the question: How do we break this cycle? If we wish to save the environment, ourselves, and our finances, what will drive tomorrow's economy?

There seem to be two possible solutions: (1) either we should make stuff more-efficiently, ie, more sustainably; or (2) we should build an economy not based on stuff. Or both.

Few of us want to envision a future built on "less." We live in a world that imagines that more is more, more is better. Almost everyone, from the most developed lands to the least 'emerging markets,' want more. And how can we say no to that? It would be both mean-spirited and fruitless for us Americans, who are but 5% of the world's population and yet consume 25% of the world's resources, to tell others they cannot aspire to the quality of life that we live here.

In this vision, then, if world consumption grew to match US consumption, we would need multiple earths to meet that demand. Since we don't carry around extra earths in our pockets, we will have to think of something else.

One suggestion is to make more stuff than we do now in better ways. Efficiency and recycling, cradle-to-cradle manufacturing, is one suggested solution. In this view, we dare to imagine that no matter how many of us there are, and no matter how big our appetites, if we can devise cyclical, sustainable, waste-free ways of manufacturing and consuming, all will be well. Done right, there will be enough money and resources for all.

I do not doubt that efficiency is a critical and necessary piece of the puzzle. Doing more with less is almost always advisable. And we know it is achievable to some extent. Years ago, California instituted energy efficiency procedures. In response, over the past 30 years, its energy consumption per capita has plateaued, remaining flat at just under 8,000 kwh per person, while the US average per capita usage has soared to 12,000 kwh. At the same time, California's average per capita GDP has surpassed the US average. (source: California Energy Commission; via Congressman Bartlett's power point).

And yet the question remains: is this sufficient?

First, there is the challenge by some that GDP is not an appropriate measure of a country's health, indeed that a country's quality of life can be sinking even as the economic indicators are rising . (For more information on this, and the alternative measure of GPI, check out Redefining Progress at www.rprogress.org. I will write more on this in another entry.) To be fair, the cradle-to-cradle view leans more to GPI than GDP. Still, is that enough?

Second, no matter how efficiently we live, no matter how creatively we stretch the natural laws of the earth's carrying capacity, we will eventually bump up against its limits, and be constrained by them.

And third, even if there were no natural limits to expansion and growth, are there not spiritual limits? Don't we need to ask at some point: Are we there yet? Isn't this enough? One quick example: over the last 30 years, America's average house doubled in size. Doubled. What was acceptable and sufficient, and perhaps even comfortable thirty years ago, is small and tight and unacceptable today. Yet today's households - the number of people living in these houses - are smaller. One report says: "As household size has decreased, the floor area per capita has increased by more than a factor of 3, from 286 square feet per capita in 1950 to 847 square feet per capita in 2000."

Of course, this trend may be temporarily reversing itself during this recession, as family and friends move in with family and friends. But that may be just the point: larger houses, representing our overall bloated consumer habits, didn't make us happier. In fact, one could argue that because we pursued more than we needed, we ended up with less than we had. And as the AIG bonus fiasco has shown us, those at the very top of the mess have developed a tin ear to the ethics of money. Do we really want people running our economy who only or mostly think of money and short-term profit, regardless of risk, rectitude, righteousness or social justice?

According to some happiness or satisfaction surveys, even before this recent economic downturn, Americans were no happier than we were decades ago (and perhaps a little less so). Nor are we the most satisfied nation on the planet.

Spiritually, then, even if we could have ever more, without cease, is that what we would want? Is that what would make us happy? Is that what our purpose in life is?

Once we pass a threshold of comfort, health and viability, how much do we need? At what point do we say, enough?

Which takes us back to our question: what will fire the enginen of our economy if not stuff?
Can we build another model?

Can it be driven by the services we provide one another: teaching, nursing, protecting, research, companionship, repairing, fixing, developing, curing, entertaining, transporting, etc. instead of making unnecessary stuff?

It is reported that Americans spend $2.6 billion on wrapping paper a year. What if we put our gifts in reusable bags (saving both the earth and our money) and instead, took the savings and with it, renovated our schools, and created community gardens, retrofitted old factories into green manufacturers, and increased and improved our social work, police and home aide work force?

Stuff will continue to be made to the extent that all these services, and our needs, require it. But wouldn't it be better if we didn't make stuff just so we can make a living but rather made a living with a minimum of unnecessary stuff. A quote in the Baltimore Sun business section on Tuesday, March 17, page 10, talking about the hard times an up-scale clothing store is going through, reads: "You have to try and encourage a 'wants'-based shopper in America and give people a reason to go out and make that purchase."

Is that really what we want to do? Waste our money on things we don't need so it can go to who-knows-where, instead of using that same money to do all the things we as a society say we need to do but can't afford? At what price is such a "want-based" society? What does it cost us in children who go to bed hungry, families without support systems and an environment that continues to degrade?

What would a healthy society, and a healthy economy, not based on wants and stuff really look like? I would love to know the answer.

We need to see this recession as a game-changer. It is not just something we need to get through so we can return to the good old days. We need to use this crisis to see the underlying ills that brought it on and build a new, renewable, economic model, to heal the earth, protect our bodies and enrich our souls.

Then, all the pain we are all going through will have been worth it.

Peak Oil

2009-03-16T04:28:00.006-04:00

I attended a gathering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health last week and walked away astonished. Not the good kind of astonished, but the awed, where-do-I-begin, how-could-we-let-it-get-so-bad kind of astonished. The gathering only tangentially had to do with climate change. But it had everything to do with the resources of this precious earth and how we handle them.

The gathering was on Peak Oil, a name that definitely calls for the overhaul of a media specialist. For the name is not only vague, but has a slight nuance of goodness. At best, even if the overwhelming darkness that is foreshadows is evident, it only tells us where we are when what it needs to do is alarm us for where we are inevitably and ineluctably heading. (Check out http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ and other google search sites for Peak Oil.)

Peak Oil - which most scientists agree is occurring now - is the state of maximum extraction of the world's oil reserves. Which means that after only 125 years, modernity has managed to raid and consume half of the earth's stored power from "ancient sunlight" that took 300 million years to create. The gathering explained some things we all know, but ignore, and some things most of us don't realize. We all know, and ignore this: that oil is limited resource. That someday, relatively soon, access to oil will begin to decline and the cost of oil will begin to soar. That will make our current standard of living almost impossible for most of us to afford.

We usually think of the cost of oil as it relates to filling up our gas tank. That is troubling enough. The shortage and cost of oil will force us to rethink where we live, reduce the value of our homes in our sprawling communities, affect how - and if - people get to work, where our children go to school. Our dependence on oil, and our sudden weaning from it, will create financial nad social upheaval as we struggle to re-orient and redesign our resources, land use and living spaces. There will be some winners, but most of us will be losers as society rearranges itself.

Personal travel is not the only issue. Almost all of our food and goods travel by truck. So if gas prices soar, so will the cost of food, and all our household and business commodities. In addition, much of our "stuff" is made with the energy from oil and made from oil products themselves! Increased production and transportation costs will lead to vastly increased purchase prices.

As if that isn't scary enough: Our food today is not only moved but is largely grown with the assistance of petroleum-based fertilizers, necessary due to the overuse, over-plowing and harsh land techniques of factory farms. Cheap food comes from cheap oil. When oil prices begin to rise, so will the cost of food, and the incidence of hunger.

Petroleum is also the source of cheap plastic, the magical product that makes safe, lighter containers, toys, auto parts, computers, bags, you-name-it. Try going through a day, or even an hour, without touching or benefitting from plastic. Of most concern, perhaps, is the role plastics plays in medicine, from instruments, to IV tubing and bags, to pill containers, orthopedics and other untold devices.

In short, we are running out of cheap oil, and the world is heading for a petroleum crash that will alter the foundations of our civilization. This liquid fuel is powerful. One barrel of oil does the work 12 able-bodied people can do in one year. One barrel = 12 people-years' worth of work. Which means that the cost of one barrel of oil, say $1.90 as it is today, buys you the work of 12 people for one year. Where else are we going to get that kind of dense, inexpensive power?

And even if some day we are able to extract that kind of power from the sun or some unknown remarkable physical property of the universe at such a reasonable expense, we are nowhere near doing that now. So, in the short run, we are heading for a global upheaval at best and catastrophe at worst. And the thing is, this would be a problem even if petroleum and fossils fuels weren't fouling the earth and driving it to destruction. No matter how you look at it, then, we need to move away from fossil fuels of all kinds as quickly as possible.

We need to do two things immediately:

1) support private and public funding for research and development of alternative ways of fueling our society. No matter what the economic climate, we cannot afford NOT to do this. Life will only get unimaginably worse if we don't get a handle on the cost and availability of energy that supports our daily lives.

2) conserve energy now. Estimates are that 30% of our current US oil consumption today is discretionary. Simply by altering our current habits and patterns, we can "produce" 30% more oil tomorrow. Nothing will be simpler, or cheaper, or buy us the necessary time to find solutions to this crisis that we are speeding towards.

BJEN's e-recycling

2009-03-11T08:49:00.004-04:00

On Sunday, March 8, at Oheb Shalom, BJEN ran its first (and hopefully not its last) electronic recycling program. Using the services of CDM recycling, we offered to take "anything with a plug" that you no longer wanted. The idea is to get that volume of trash out of the landfill, the toxins safely removed and tucked away, and save money for all of us (landfill management costs taxpayers money).

Thank you to all 150+ who participated in this remarkable day. We are still waiting for a final accounting from CDM about the volume we collected, but as you can see from the photo attached - which is just what we collected in the first hour or so - we were all overwhelmed by the turnout. It took two large (!) trucks to haul it all away. (The numbers just came in. We collected 20,301 pounds! Extraordinary!)

Thanks to everyone who helped to coordinate this, and to all our synagogue liaisons who got the word out!

Special thanks go to Audrey Rothschild, who spearheaded this project and whose organizational skills helped it run as smoothly as it did; and thanks to our volunteers who guided traffic and unloaded trunks and generall kept things in such good humor: Stuart Stainman, Donna Brown (and her gracious daughter), Larry Kloze and especially Sidney Rankin! And many thanks to Oheb Shalom (Rabbi Fink and Syn Exec Ken Davidson) for allowing us to use their outdoors during a most busy time of the year. Thanks to Joan Plisko for the suggestion to do this!

With the help of all you, we kept tons of dangerous and reusable waste out of our landfills.

One thing we learned for next time. Many of the items we collected still worked. Some were so outdated that very few people would find them useful. But other items, such as fans, clock radios, cassette players, etc. some folks might like to have. So, we had a few folks scavenge for goodies among the piles. And that was fine too! So next time, we are considering dividing our piles into two: the broken and the still-working, and invite you to come both to give and possibly to receive!

We will get back to you with information when we do this again.

Meanwhile, when does April 8th come only once every 28 years? This year! when it is also Birkat Hahammah. For information about this rare event, Blessing of the Sun - Birkat Hahammah, the every-28-year, thrice in a lifetime experience (if we are blessed with length of years), check out BJEN's website www.bjen.org and www.blessthesun.org.

And join us at sunrise at Pearlstone for a not-to-be-forgotten experience!

stuff and us

2009-03-09T07:00:00.009-04:00

Let me say at the outset that I believe in stuff. You know, the whatever we pull out of the ground, get from growing things and shear off live animals to make up the things we own and use. I believe we need houses to live in, chairs to sit on, clothes to cover us. I believe we need sinks and pots, pillows and pans, knives and pockets, shelves and shoes. I believe also that we need tchotchkes of some sort and to some degree, for it is our choice and display of unnecessary (discretionary) stuff that defines and expresses who we are even more than the styles and design of our necessary (essential) stuff.

So while I may be a minimalist when it comes to stuff (except books, and most recently their distant cousin, pocketbooks), I believe in stuff. Which is why watching now how we are learning to deal with our stuff, or more accurately, our loss of stuff and our limited ability to accumulate more stuff, offers a fascinating study of raw, radical human identity.

What happens when we can't define ourselves by or drape ourselves in new stuff? What happens when all we own is all we have to express our selves by? Who are we when we are stripped of the proclamation of self through stuff? The answer seems to be, "I" is increasingly found in "we". That is, "I" find myself less in my things and more in my people; less in my accumulated symbols and more in my collection of community. We seem to be turning to each other, our past and our present close circles of family and friends. They are enduring, and hopefully do not size us up and measure us by our stuff, but by our being.

So in hard times the old becomes golden, and the home becomes haven. Family become friends again and we find companionship and entertainment in the close, cheap and mundane. And that is good!

Video games, for example, have been selling like hotcakes. NPR reported in December 2008 that "overall video game sales are up 43 percent from this time in 2007". (Hotcakes, btw, were a hot commodity in America in the 1700s. Made of cornmeal and fried in animal fat, they were good home-cooked food sold at church functions and county fairs. They were a way to bring home-ness to the public domain.)

The movie business is booming, too. Despite netflix, movies on demand, downloads and the old-fashioned rent a flick, in these trying times, more people than ever are plunking down $10 or so to sit in a dark room with strangers and friends to share an experience that sometimes takes them far away, and sometimes powerfully hits home. Ticket sales are up sixteen percent over last year, according to the NYT. We may no longer be a nation united by broadcast tv or Sunday night's The Wonderful World of Disney, but we are still united by the movies.

I am far from the first to note that in tough economic times we turn toward each other and away from the ephemeral limitations of stuff. Our senses sharpen and we reject the veneer of modern sociability for the more durable, real pleasure of people and stories. Having little money, or worrying about whatever money we have, makes use realize that we are so much more than the numbers on our ledgers. We are not worth less, nor is our value diminished, because our accounts are lighter.

Rather, we realize, we are worth more. Our costly gifts become ourselves, our time, our attention and affection. So much more valuable than that expensive bag. For that gift, that jewel, that momentarily joy-making closet fodder will most likely cease to bring joy once the warmth of its transaction has fled.

So, it is here we learn that less-is-more, and enjoy the presence of each other.

spring 2009

2009-03-07T21:03:00.005-05:00

The peepers are here! Or at least one of them is. The spring peeper is a small chorus frog that lives near the water and emerges when the weather warms. Along with lengthening days and the newly-scheduled start of daylight saving time, it is one of the first harbingers of spring. Peepers populate my neighbor's three-tiered pond, sharing it with stocked fish and an occasional blue heron (or so my neighbor assures me).

This first one's song is clear and steady and strong, even if it is a solo. He is puffing away for the love of his life, beating out the competitors who are bound to follow. He is the lead in a chorus that is just now hatching. Such is the life of those who dare to be precocious. Ahead but lonely. Hopefully there is one silent female peeper equally present, precocious and aware, bashfully and eagerly listening to this suitor.

That is the way of March: a snow storm on Monday and a peeper by Shabbes.

Another sign was the small snatch of purple flowers (irises?), poking their heads out of the ground on the edge of wooded areas on the street near my home. (I have tried to upload a photo of them to accompany this blog, but given that this would be my inaugural effort at joining picture to words here, I am not sure if it will work. We shall see.)

Perhaps the spring will bring comfort and hope to those struggling through this downturn. Surely our energy bills will lighten, we can be outside more, and we can share in each other's company and return to the simple joys of being with each other. Perhaps we can even recall and recapture the art of conversation. We once knew how to do that.

Today, it seems to be a declining art. Despite our increasing modes of communication, we are woefully out of practice when it comes to conversation. There are website, books and articles that offer to help us regain what we once did as readily as eating.

Cafes and coffee shops hold out the promise of conversation. And in many cases they deliver. More and more we hear the word "salon", not referring to a beauty shop, but a gathering of diverse folk who come together for no other purpose than good talk. Perhaps our kitchen tables, front porches (where they still exist), patios, and dens can again be places of neighborly communion and satisfying conversation.

If there is any silver lining in this financial crisis, and despite the real needs that many of us will suffer through loss of jobs, income and investments I believe there are some, it may just be that it encourages us to turn to each other, to the joys of being together and listening to each other and sharing the stories and the moments that make up the tapestry that becomes our lives.

So this spring, perhaps more than others, invite a friend in, or out, for a cup of coffee or tea and sit and talk and tell stories that inspire. It will gird us for the hard work of recovery, and the re-making of our country that lies ahead.

May you have a Happy Purim!!