The intersection of halacha (Jewish religious law) and environmental consciousness, Lake Kinneret and its role in northern Israel, native plants, tree frogs, and conservation across cultures were just a few of the topics touched on during a wide-ranging panel discussion.
Held Oct. 30 at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, “Green Thinking, Values, Judaism, & Geo-politics,” explored the ways in which American and Israeli Jews have approached the issues of sustainability and politics.
The panel featured local environmental activists Rabbi Shlomo Levin of Lake Park Synagogue and Dr. Daniel Weber, a senior scientist with the Children’s Environmental Health Center at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
The Israelis were Adina Dolev, a sustainability educator from Moshav Arbel, and Yarden Tenenbaum, an environmental entrepreneur from Shaked. Jody Hirsh, JCC director of Judaic education, served as moderator.
Dolev and Tenenbaum were part of a group of four Israeli environmental professionals from the Sovev Kinneret Region — the part of Israel linked to Milwaukee, Tulsa, and St. Paul through the Partnership2Gether program — that visited Milwaukee in October. (See November Chronicle, page 11.) Partnership2Gether is a collaboration between Jewish federations, including the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, and the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Guly Ortal-Ivry, an ecological education project manager, and Gil Stav, a research scientist with a doctorate in ecology, provided insight into issues around the topic, but were not on the panel.
Early on, Weber raised a fundamental concern. “Life is made up of chemicals and every chemical is, at some point, potentially toxic,” he said. “So we have to use them, but how do we use them so that they have minimal impact on the environment?”
Borderless problems
Like Weber, Dolev is working to answer that question in a specific setting. She and a team of colleagues are conducting research to ensure the long-term health of the Kinneret. As well as being a source of drinking water and irrigation for area agriculture, it is also popular with fishermen and boaters.
“Marine activities cause a situation where many boats with gasoline enter the lake, and as you can imagine, a leak of fuel can be very dangerous in a lake where we use its water,” Dolev said. “Too much fishing of commercial species might change the diversity and quantity of fish, so fishing is regulated.”
In addition to their research on a specially outfitted laboratory boat, Dolev and her team have designed a series of floating educational workshops. To students living in the region, the scientists emphasize the importance of caring for the Kinneret’s ecosystem.
For tourists and other members of the public, the team offers “A Green Tour around a Blue Lake.” Observation is combined with presentations about the scientific research process and the results of prior research initiatives.
Tenenbaum is developing programs related to sustainability and the environment for Betar, a Zionist youth movement. He said it is a good fit for a guy whose favorite activity as a kid was to wander the sand dunes near his home in Holon looking for wild animals and whose wish for peace in the region has a deeply pragmatic connection.
“Environmental issues in Israel have been put aside because we focus on security or on social issues that have nothing to do with the environment,” he said. “Sometimes this frustrates me and I feel I have no way to change it. The problems we are facing have no borders, but people do. So the tension between the two is hard to solve.”
Levin cited the tension between a different but equally challenging boundary — Halachic Judaism and sustainability.
“Environmental values must be seen coming directly out of our observance of Halacha and the Torah and its rabbinical teachings,” he said.
In practice, however, the two are sometimes in conflict. That is something Levin would like to see change.
“Sometimes when we observe traditional Shabbat, we use extravagant amounts of electricity,” he said. “So one project that is important to me is exploring the responsibility of being environmentally and ecologically conscious in our observance of Shabbat.”
Another, he said, is kashrut. Halacha does not directly address environmental impact, the treatment of workers involved in the manufacture and preparation of kosher food, or the treatment of animals prior to slaughter.
“Those issues ought to be explored as well as the technical traditional kashrut of a product,” Levin said, “and that’s something I’d like to see developed in the future.”
Weber and Tenenbaum talked about sustainability in a personal setting — their homes. Weber has spent the last several years replacing the Kentucky bluegrass on his front lawn with native plants.
“It brings back a little bit of what Wisconsin used to look like,” he said. “I have only Sundays to work on it, but that’s where you’ll find me, working the land. There’s nothing better than to see those plants — sometimes yellow, sometimes purple — it’s one of the most healing things I can think of.”
Tenenbaum’s reclamation project is very much a work in progress. In Shaked, he said, there used to be a lot of tree frogs. But about four years ago, they disappeared.
“One of my dreams is to bring them back,” he said. “So I have a little pond and I bought and planted some vegetation that the frogs like and hopefully they will return.”
Planning Committee members for the event included Eric Crawford, Andy Stein, Pam Frydman-Roza, Steve Baruch, Dan Weber, Jody Hirsh, Pnina Goldfarb, and Ro’ee Peled.
Amy Waldman is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and coordinator of the ACCESS Program for Displaced Homemakers at Milwaukee Area Technical College.
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