Shamati trains and activates educators to support teens and college students leading climate work, and to build resilience in the face of climate emotions.
In September, Adamah launched Shamati, thanks to the tremendous support of the Covenant Foundation. Shamati, meaning “I have heard,” is a program designed to provide Jewish educators with tools to support young people grappling with climate change. We piloted the Shamati Educators Cohort, convening twenty-six Jewish educators (of middle, high school, and college students across North America) for six online sessions.
…
Although I joined Shamati because I wanted to explore how environmental protection appears in Jewish texts, I did not expect to see the Torah portion from my bat mitzvah, B’har, during one of our sessions. This portion (Leviticus 25:2-5) talks about the importance of giving a year of rest to a person’s land every six years. I’d never fully understood this portion’s relevance to our modern lives, but reexamining this text through Shamati made everything appear obvious: everything needs rest. When the earth, like us, does not rest, it is weakened, placed into a vulnerable state. It suddenly made much more sense to me that our emotions regarding the climate reflect the conditions of nature. I learned so much about recentering myself with the earth, and feeling both the pain of the earth and its constant need to recenter itself through small acts of self-care.
Yoshi Silverstein’s session particularly spoke to me. He introduced us to “Seven Dimension Cosmology for Embodied Jewish Resilience,” a practice from his Mitsui Collective. Examining the seasons, cardinal points, moon cycle, and time of day as representative of the emotions of a group was so fascinating. I couldn’t get his lesson out of my head after we concluded our Zoom. After considering the relationship between noon (tzahar), summer (kayitz), and south (darom), it feels impossible to ever disassociate the concepts. Although I am still working through the relationship between my emotions and the Seven Dimension Cosmology, I loved learning about a part of Judaism which was so new to me.
In addition to the connection between the earth and our bodies, I found the history of antisemitism and the fossil fuel industries relevant to our current political climate and the blaming of Jewish people for many of the world’s problems. Our sessions on eco-futurism and the psychology of crisis also stood out to me as essential for understanding the true extent of the harm we are facing as the climate degrades. From these sessions, and the rest of Shamati, I would highly recommend anyone with even the slightest feelings about climate change to take this course.
At Brown RISD Hillel, my students are incredibly focused on taking action. They are actively working on campaigns to encourage voting in the national election, and lean towards rallies and protests to address climate change. These are fantastic methods to raise awareness, but learning about the psychology of the climate crisis and its potentially devastating effects, especially on young people, inspired me to integrate personal resilience into my activities with students. During a coffee chat, a student involved in Adamah on Campus mentioned to me that he tries to avoid thinking about the crisis altogether, as it is too overwhelming. As the results of the presidential election are intrinsically linked to the future of America’s policies on climate change, I plan to host a “wellness day” at our Hillel to give students an outlet on Election Day.
We will have bagels, snacks, and art stations set up around Hillel to provide a source of self-care. I’m hopeful that creating forms of art as creative resistance to feelings of anxiety will become a practice I can further utilize at future Adamah events and at general activities on campus.
Adelaide Gordon
Springboard Fellow, Brown RISD Hillel