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| Tuesday, July 03, 2007 |
Green Torah: Eco-Activist Beit Midrash
From our July/August 2007 issue. This article is part of our larger package, the AJL Green List.
At a tiny yeshiva, hidden away in a narrow, arched stone alleyway in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot, a quiet revolution is presently under way. Combining West Coast-style environmental activism with traditional Torah study, a small group of eco-activists cum Torah scholars are mobilizing a new generation of Jewishly-learned environmental activists, promising to alter the way that observant Jews everywhere relate to the environment.
Founded in 2004 by Shaul David Judelman, a Seattle native and recent graduate of the rabbinic program at Yeshivat Bat Ayin, the Eco-Activist Beit Midrash is a program of Yeshivat Simchat Shlomo, a small progressive Orthodox yeshiva that caters to Americans living abroad in Jerusalem. The month-long program, with multiple sessions yearly, includes a mixture of learning, volunteering, and farming, as well as “eco-tourism” within Israel. It draws roughly a dozen participants per session.
Shaul, who moved to Israel shortly after participating in the infamous 1999 World Trade Organization protest known as “the Battle of Seattle,” believes that the Torah offers enormous insight that can bring greater depth to one’s environmental activism. “I was really searching for a community in which I could embody my activism in a way that was more holistic than just attending protests,” Shaul tells AJL. “I came to Israel on that search, started learning Torah, and was taken by the depth of insight the Torah itself offered on environmental and sustainability issues.”
The program covers multiple angles, says Shaul, including establishing relationships between American and Israeli eco-activists, opening students up to a deep personal connection with the land of Israel, and offering a “next step” in Torah learning to environmentally aware Jews who have become interested in Judaism’s relationship to ecology and sustainability.
In addition to the program, Shaul volunteers as an environmental educator within Jerusalem’s traditional Orthodox religious communities. “The goal,” says Shaul, “is to teach religious Jews in Israel that environmentalism is a Torah value and not just a value of the secular left.” He is also working with a larger group of rabbis and educators to develop a Jewish legal treatise on environmentalism that will be made available as a course curriculum to Israeli yeshivas. “This project could have wide-reaching effects on Jewish religious communities, giving ‘eco-Torah’ far greater credence and integrity.”
This article is part of our larger package, the AJL Green List.
-- Text by Daniel Sieradski / Photo by Avraham Eliezer Tertes
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