make your year-end gift to hazon

​December 30, 2021 | 26 Tevet 5782 | Jerusalem

Dear All,

For affording me this sabbatical, as I stepped down as CEO, I feel so blessed, so lucky, so grateful, to so many people at Hazon. Thank you to the staff, to the board, to stakeholders, to Marina Lewin (our amazing board chair), to Jakir – and to each and all of you.

It has been a very rich four months, despite the craziness of the Covid-era intervening in various ways. I offer three brief vignettes.

One was Yom Kippur. Normally I’m in shul all the way through. I love Yom Kippur, I’ve fasted every year since I was seven, I daven the whole thing. I kept Yom Kippur even in the five years when I kept hardly anything else.

But this year I had bumped into Michal Deutsch, a week before, as she started an 8-day hunger strike, outside Beit Hanassi (the President’s residence) to call on the government to declare a climate emergency. She’s a law student, 20-something, secular, tattooed. I happened to bump into her the first day – I was walking past – and chatted, and then hung out with her and her friends for a little bit, every subsequent day. Davened kabbalat shabbat with her and a few folks on the Friday night, out in the street. And then Yom Kippur morning I walked over at 7am, before shul started, planning just to say hello – and ended up spending six hours there. Just sitting in the street, chatting, davening, talking to folks as they walked past. Later I came back and broke fast with her.

It was just so interesting, so rich. Normally I would hate to miss any of the davening. But here in Jerusalem there was an extraordinary sense of shleimut, of wholeness. Jewish life has an added dimension in Israel, and in spending it with Michal and friends, I experienced that very palpably. (And one aspect of that extra dimension:  President Herzog not only came over, the first day, to say hello; he also walked over a second time, after Kol Nidrei, with his wife, wished Michal gmar chatima tova – a good fast – and said, “write me a letter when this is over, with what you want me to do – and I don’t promise I’ll do what you ask, but I’ll read it…” Very menschy. Then five weeks later, he announced the launch of the Israeli Climate Forum, led by (the widely loved and respected) Dov Khenin. I’m not suggesting that this was because of Michal; the planning for the new Climate Forum preceded her strike. But, yes, I think what she did had influence, and was significant. It is powerful to see Jewish life in public space. Thinking about the famous haftorah on Yom Kippur in a fresh light. Just breathing, integrating, being, in a slightly new way. Part of my own Jewish journey, my own human journey.

The second thing was COP 26, which I was at with Jakir. I had a real glimpse of the role and power of nonprofits and religions. We were a tiny part of COP 26. The center of gravity is the private sector, governments. Huge huge wheels turning. Vitally needed, and for real. Yes, should have been sooner; yes, should be more. But good things are starting to happen, on some considerable scale. What struck me, though, was that even though the third sector was so tiny at COP 26 itself, it is nevertheless that religions and nonprofits and the environmental movement are huge drivers underneath. Public education changes us, challenges us, provokes us. Hazon is and has been a small small part of this – but a significant part. I don’t know if I’m explaining this clearly enough – if I’m not, I apologize! – but I just had a sense of clarity about our role and our necessity. Every one of you reading this – you are part of this. Thank you.

And then the third thing was last week. I was briefly in Santa Katerina, in Sinai, hiking with friends in the mountains. It is beautiful, stark, silent. The rocks every shade of brown; the sky blue; and a few shrubs of green, dotted through. And silence. No light pollution, no road, no electricity.

I was there so briefly, but it felt like a still silent moment, a ground, an axis, at the very center of this whirling strange year – this 22-month Covid journey which continues to unsettle all of us.

And it was somehow profound to be there, and to go into Israel from there, as our weekly Torah portions recount the exodus from Egypt. Something about beginnings, journeys, connection, something about the physical world, something about how we are cleansed and reconnected by being in a stark natural environment.

So… thank you. Tomorrow is my last day in full-time employment at Hazon, since I began this thing in March 2000. It has been a long strange trip indeed. As of Jan 1^st I’ll be working for Jakir and for Hazon, part-time, as a Global Ambassador (Jakir’s choice of title, not mine!) I’m honored to do so. I love this organization. I love its people, I love what we do and try to do. I’m so grateful to each and all of you for your support over the years. I hope that you will continue to support us, every more strongly, this year and next year and in the years to come. Our work has never been more important. And, remarkably and happily, Hazon’s greatest years – and its most important work – lie ahead of it…

Shabbat shalom; and wishing you a happy and healthy new year.

Nigel

PS – as of Jan 1^st, my email is nigel.s.savage@gmail.com. Or you can WhatsApp me…

Please make a gift to Hazon today. Every dollar received by the end of the year will be directly invested into our growing programs and deepening our impact.

make your year-end gift to hazon​

The post A few words from Hazon’s new Global Ambassador, Nigel Savage appeared first on Adamah.

Dear All,

Here’s the statement that Hazon & Pearlstone have just released.
All the rest (of this email) is commentary…

I’m stepping down as CEO after 21 years. It is bittersweet. I love this organization, and I believe in it very deeply. I’m so grateful to everyone who has helped us, and helped me, reach this point.

And/but… it is good to make way for new leadership; and good to step down, to reflect, renew, to think about vision and the next phases of life.

For me the timing goes back partly to the last shmita year, in 2014-’15. I (somewhat randomly) decided not to buy books or liquor. Clearly neither of these things is religiously prescribed. But I wanted to do something that would remind me that the year was different from the other six in the cycle; and I wanted to change my behavior in a way that, like the biblical shmita, would reduce my normal consumption. To my surprise, I kept to these two decisions the whole year. They did indeed remind me not only that it was the shmita year, but also that in so many ways, I had enough.

And at the end of the year someone asked me what I wanted to do next time.
Without giving it much thought I said, next time, I want to spend the shmita year in Israel.

The next shmita year (which starts on Rosh Hashanah this year, i.e. September 6, 2021) was, of course, the far future, from 2015. But by the end of 2019 this was a looming fork in the road. I could be in Israel for a year, or CEO, but I didn’t think I could easily do both. Then Covid hit in February, and the next few months were a blur. But in July and August last year I started to tell board members, and in due course the full Hazon board, that I did indeed want to step down as CEO by this August.

A search process began. The choice of a new CEO is not mine but the board’s. But my stepping down as CEO is now leading, to my very great delight, to a merger between Hazon and Pearlstone, which I very strongly believe in. Jakir Manela will succeed me as CEO of Hazon on August 1st 2021, and will be CEO of the two organizations as the formal legal merger is completed. By next year he will be the CEO of the new, post-merger Hazon. Click here to learn more about the merger.

This is obviously significant news, both for the organization and for me.

Before I go any further, first, a huge – huge – HUGE – thank you.
A non-profit is a trust. No-one owns it.  As CEO I accept responsibility for the organization’s failures or weaknesses, and certainly for my own; but credit for Hazon’s successes rightly goes to an enormous number of people.  Literally: my thanks go to every single board member, since first we began. Every single staffer. Every funder, major or minor. Every volunteer, every intern, every organizational partner. Every synagogue, every rabbi, every activist, every farmer, every rider, everyone who strengthened this enterprise with ideas, with connections, with the sweat equity of meetings, (which are important, because that’s [part of] how groups of people get things done in the world).

I want to place the merger with Pearlstone in context. I founded Hazon at the very start of 2000. My first day at the office (which was inside the offices of the Nash Family Foundation; it was Jack Nash, z”l, who gave the first gift to enable Hazon to come into existence) was in March 2000.

So it’s now 21 years that I’ve been leading this organization.

We started with a Cross-USA Jewish Environmental Bike Ride.
Then the New York Ride and the Israel Ride.
Then we started our work on food – a beit midrash on food and Jewish tradition; a blog; Jewish CSAs; the Hazon Food Conference. Siach. The first Intentional Communities Conference. A wide range of publications, our work on shmita, the more than million dollars we’ve given in mini-grants, the organizations we’ve been fiscal sponsor to, more than 40 discrete rides or programs to Israel. The merger with Freedman and with Teva. Hakhel, the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, the Shmita Prizes.

I remember someone, about 2004, saying to me, Nige, I didn’t get that we needed a Jewish environmental organization – but now I do. So why are you doing this food work??  (A dozen years later, in almost identical terms, someone else said to me, I get Hazon’s work on food – but why are you doing stuff on intentional communities?).

And of course, I was somewhere between smiling and tearing my hair out. Because Hazon was never, in one sense, about food – or about bikes, or intentional communities, for that matter.

The organization has always been about hazon – about vision.

Despite – because of – huge challenges in the world, we’ve always wanted this organization to be about a positive vision. To connect, to support, to catalyze. To innovate, to try things, because we need fresh ideas and energy. It was true in 2000, and it is even more true today, that the challenge of environmental sustainability – of how several billion people live sustainably on this planet – is the greatest challenge that we face right now. 

How do we address this? How do we marshal the energies and assets of Jewish life towards creating a more sustainable world for all? 

So our programs have grown and evolved, these last 21 years.
But our core vision has remained remarkably consistent. 

To be grounded in the particularity of Jewish tradition and Jewish community, and yet quite explicitly working for a healthier, more sustainable and more equitable world for all.
Committed to inclusive community, to bringing people together across difference. 

Believing in the power and the necessity of immersive experiences (physically coming together in potentially transformative ways); of thought-leadership (the power of ideas);
and capacity-building (i.e. not just us, but striving to support great people and ideas.)

Pearlstone has been one of our closest organizational partners for many years.
I’ve been going there almost since it began, watching it build and grow. Jakir and I first met nearly twenty years ago. Since then he’s been part of six of our rides; four Food Conferences; seven years ago he was at our Shmita Summit in London; he’s been a leader of the work on intentional communities; he’s been at four JOFEE Network Gatherings; and he’s been a strong board member. Along the way, anyone who has met him knows that he is a mensch. He’s kind, thoughtful, he cares about people. He gets a heck of a lot done, and he does it with a gentle touch. It’s true that he’s a guy, and/but I hope that people won’t hold that against him. The merger makes enormous sense and he is uniquely qualified to lead Hazon. There is a genuine commitment on his part, and on that of the staff and the board, to see a wide range of people step into leadership across Hazon and across the JOFEE movement. I’m confident that under his leadership the tent will continue to be open on all four sides.

And for me, although I am sad to be stepping down, I’m genuinely thrilled about this merger, and delighted that he’ll be our next CEO. I’ll be off the grid from September to December, (apart from the Israel Ride – I look forward to seeing our Israel Riders in Jerusalem in October) and then supporting Jakir and the new Hazon, part-time, from Israel, as of January ‘22.  I shall serve at the pleasure of the new CEO, and I’ve said to him and to both boards that if at any point I’m not able to be useful, I shall certainly step out entirely.

I’ll end by noting that this shabbat is also Rosh Chodesh Av. It inaugurates the Nine Days, the saddest period in the Jewish calendar. And it’s significant for three reasons.

First: the Nine Days in general, and Tisha B’Av in particular, is about facing destruction. The Jewish calendar – Jewish tradition – is fundamentally hopeful. But this is the time of year when we’re encouraged to face destruction, square on. In a month in which temperatures hit 116 degrees in Canada, the Jewish community needs to confront the potential destruction embodied by the climate crisis as strongly as we possibly can. I hope and believe the new Hazon will be well-positioned to do that.

Secondly: the destruction (according to Jewish tradition) arose because of a dispute between two guys called Kamtza and Bar Kamtza. A foolish and needless dispute. This is a time of year that comes to teach us to love each other, to support each other, to strive to do good. The opposite of sinat chinam, baseless hatred, is ahavat chinam – what we might call, “random kindness.”  This too is a wise encouragement, for all of us, and for the new organization.

And finally: we have the tradition that mashiach, the messiah, is born on the afternoon of Tisha B’Av. And six days later we have Tu B’Av, the full moon of Av, a festival of love, of being in the fields, of wearing borrowed dresses, so that no-one should be embarrassed by what they have or don’t have.  And I do indeed hope and pray that, amidst fires and Covid and so many things wrong in the world, that together Hazon and Pearlstone, and all of our staff and boards, and all of us – everyone reading this email – can together work to create a healthier, a more sustainable and a more equitable world for all. That’s the messianic goal that we aim for – and that I do truly believe is possible.

So: thank you. I’ll write again in the next few weeks, but effective August 1st, the future leadership of this organization is with Jakir, and with our staff and board. I hope you’ll join me in supporting him and them as strongly as you possibly can.

Shabbat shalom, chodesh tov,

Nigel

The post Stepping down as CEO; Hazon merger appeared first on Adamah.

We were thinking we might try and send out some videos as well as just written words, and this week’s parsha seemed like a great time to begin.

(Leviticus 25:1) “Vayedaber adonai el moshe behar sinai leymor,” “And God speaks to Moses on Mount Sinai saying” “Daber el bnai yisrael”, “Speak to the children of Israel,” “V’amarta elehem,” “and say to them,” “Ki tavo el haaretz asher ani noten lachem,” “When you come to the land which I give to you,” “Veshavta haaretz shabbat laadonai,” “The land should be at rest, a shabbat for God,”

“Shesh shanim tizra sadecha,” “six years sow your field,” “V’shesh shanim tizmor carmecha,” “Six years gather from your vineyard,” “V’asafta el tvuata,” “And harvest your produce,” “U’v’shana hashviit,” “And in the seventh year,” “Shabbat shabbaton,” “It should be a full shabbat,” “Shabbat shabbaton yihiyeh la’aretz,” “for the land,” “Shabbat ladonai,” “And a Shabbat for God,”

“Sadcha lo tizra,” “Don’t plant your fields,” “V’charmcha lo tizmor,” “Don’t prune your vineyard.”

Later on, by the way, in the same parsha, famously, we’ve got (Lev. 25:10) “V’kidashtam at shnat ha’chamishim shana” “You should sanctify the fiftieth year,” “U’kratem dror ba’aretz l’chol yoshveha,” which are the words that are on the Liberty Bell: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

So this is one of the places in Jewish tradition that’s introducing the notion of shmita, the sabbatical year, and yovel, the jubilee, and I wanted to just try and explain why this is so exciting to me, and why I and we believe that you should be excited by it, given that on the face of it it’s fairly obscure. Let me say straightforwardly, if you’re here, the questions that underpin all of Hazon’s work is: what does it mean to be a human being in the 21st century? And what does it mean to be Jewish in the 21st century? And does Jewish tradition have any wisdom for the real challenges of living today?

And the more that I’ve engaged with shmita as a concept and the more that I’ve thought about it, the more that I think it holds within it extraordinary truths, extraordinary wisdom for the world that we live in, and frankly, extraordinary teaching about the nature of Jewishness itself.

And there are a few different reasons for this. One of them is that everything that’s within shmita is a frame for the key issues we face in the world today and especially coming out of Covid. It’s about our relationship to time, it’s about work and rest, it’s about equality and inequality and how you balance those things out. It’s about debt and the proper use of debt and relief of debt. So there is all of that.

Secondly, it’s really unclear. I hate those places in Jewish tradition that you can say X means Y or just do this – it’s not interesting. The texts of shmita as a civilian, as a human being, as a rabbi, as a teacher, if you start to look at these with friends and learn them and say, just read them, ‘what does this mean?’ If this was the only record we had of what it meant to be Jewish, how would we understand jewish values? It opens up amazing conversations.

I also think that shmita is just an amazing frame in time. Every other piece of the Jewish calendar we observe, Tuesday is different from shabbat, Chanukah is different from Pesach. Well, this year on September the 6th on Rosh Hashanah is the start of the shmita year. How is the shmita year going to be different for you, for your family, for your Jewish institution?

Just one thing: this behind me is that – seven years ago in the lead up to the last shmita year, I somewhat randomly was trying to think about how I was going to remember that this was the shmita year, and although there was nothing that I had to do here in New York, I randomly decided that I wasn’t going to buy any book for the whole year.

This was so stressful to me that from about five months before the shmita year, I started going around the apartment, picking out books that I either hadn’t read or had read but I wanted to read again, and wrapping them in newspaper so that if I couldn’t survive a year without buying books, I could take one of these things, which are unmarked, rip it open, and go oh my gosh I’ve always wanted to read this book.

Well, it was a great thing to do, first of all, I actually didn’t buy a single book during the whole of the shmita year. You may think that’s not a big deal, but I buy lots of books and I love books, it’s not a terrible thing, but the act of not buying books reminded me every day that it was the shmita year, and what’s more amazing is I didn’t open one of these books, they’re all still here six years later. I don’t know what’s in there. It’s one of the lessons of shmita: that we have enough. It comes to teach us that we have enough.

Shabbat shalom. I want to bless you and me and all of us that we engage with the tradition, that we learn from it, and particularly in the lead up to the shmita year, that you start to think about it, we all start to think about it, figure out how, personally, you want to make this year different for you, and institutionally, how to register it within your Jewish community.

Shabbat shalom,

Nigel

The post Shmita & Parshat Behar Bechukotai 5781 appeared first on Adamah.

Dear All,

It’s Earth Day two weeks from today. This prompts me to think about Earth Day as the secular equivalent of one of the festivals of Jewish life. Doing so helps us to better understand both Earth Day and the Jewish calendar.

In a theological sense I’m not a believer. If emunah is translated as faithfulness, then I strive to be a faithful Jew; but if it signifies actual faith, then I am a doubter, to put it mildly.

(If I had to describe my theological orientation it would be in a phrase that Rabbi Art Green used many years ago – a spiritual humanist. This was a riff on the notion of a secular humanist – which I’m not, despite my absence of emunah. Art himself, a few years after he introduced this phrase, published Radical Judaism. In a marvelous moment, I was chairing a session, I think at Limmud, where he was speaking. In the Q&A I said to him, “Art, you wrote this great essay on spiritual humanism a few years ago, which had a big impact on me. But now you don’t sound like a spiritual humanist, you sound like a panentheist.”

“Yes,” he said, in his beautiful and distinctive voice, “I have moved on….”)

But emunah in the sense of faithfulness – to the tradition, to core Jewish ideas – remains central to Hazon’s long-term work. Extreme weather events, extinctions, falling sperm counts (likely caused by endocrine disrupters): these need science, public policy, philanthropy, governmental interventions; this will be the aggregate work of our lifetime, and it is well underway at this moment in human history. But underneath all of this is both a spiritual malaise and, more deeply, something just fundamentally wrong – morally and ethically, not just practically – in how we relate to the natural world that sustains us.

This is the place of both humility and necessity for the world’s religions including, in a sense, the overarching postmodern secular religion whose implicit presumptions influence so much of how we live. It’s a place of humility because, frankly, whatever claims we may make for the wisdom of Jewish tradition (or Catholicism, or anything else), we have been found wanting. Whatever we have done, thus far, is somewhere between “nowhere near enough” and “not even vaguely enough.”

But it’s a place of necessity because values underpin policy. What is the motive force underneath any of the mass social movements we have seen over the past few years, or frankly anything, large or small, that is larger than me and my tribe, however defined? The answer to this is a steadily enlarging sense of the sanctity of human life and the unique value of each person. (And vegans would add: and why stop at the boundaries of human life; should we not expand our concerns to all sentient beings?)

There is no traditionally secular frame that, by itself, encompasses all of this. Utilitarianism will not quite do it. And, in any case, secular culture – as we continue to see – is thin, and we desperately need the thick culture which is provided by religions at their best. Having concern for the whole world doesn’t quite do it. Marxists had a concern for the whole world in the 20th century, and the French revolutionaries in the early 19th century. Revolutionaries sure of the rightness of their cause are invariably intolerant of those with whom they disagree. At their best, religious traditions build ongoing bridges, backwards and forwards, between noble and idealistic visions on one side, and the daily challenges and choices of human behavior, on the other.

It may seem a stretch to loop this back to Earth Day, and in some ways I accept it is. But Earth Day has at its kernel a post-religious love of the world. Last year was the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day, and I think the first fifty was, in a way, just the beginning. We need Earth Day to impinge on our consciousness. Businesses should close. Schools should close. Governments at every level should devote the day to the long-term future of our communities. We should go outdoors and clean-up. We should go outdoors and learn. We should go outdoors and plant.

At Hazon, we’re proud to have founded #SoundTheCall last year. The idea was to rally the Jewish community to really speak up during Earth Day. We were aiming for a few hundred people, and in the end more than 1,500 participated. This year we’re expanding the frame and explicitly labelling it not as “Jewish” but as multi-faith (which indeed builds on the contributions of folks such as Bill McKibben and David Gergen last year.) We’re partnering with EarthX, who are co-producing it with us this year.

Please join us for Earth Day. #SoundTheCall is focused on the three commitments of our Brit Hazon:

1. Make some further change in your behavior
2. Give money and time to organizations working on these issues year round
3. Raise your voice for substantive change – in any institution you are part of, and in public space.

Most of all: go to your calendar , and block out Earth Day – April 22nd – every year going forward. Challenge your institution to devote this one day of the year to fleshing out a vision for living more lightly on this planet – and figuring out how you’ll advance that vision in the coming year.

And, no: I didn’t forget that it is Yom Hashoah today. For anyone who has been in Israel on this day, it is a solemn and moving and intense day. Places of entertainment are closed. The siren goes off at 10am, and people stand to attention, in silence. We lack a sufficient frame, and we require it. But Yom Hashoah in its own way is a reminder that liturgical creativity – that calendrical innovation – is possible and necessary. I want us to be on guard against fascism and antisemitism and intolerance. But I want us – and every community in the world – to dedicate ourselves to striving to ensure the conditions that enable peace and prosperity in the future. If Yom Hashoah helps us towards that vision, too, then we will really learn from the past.

Shabbat shalom,

Nigel

The post Earth Day as a secular chag appeared first on Adamah.

Dear Friends,

Since the summer, we have had the incredible fortune of having six wonderful interns supporting and enriching our work. Much gratitude to Repair the World Serve the Moment, the Applebaum Internship Program, JOIN, and the Hornstein Program For Jewish Professional Leadership at Brandeis University. One of these interns, Rebecca Levy, has written the piece below and we are thrilled to be able to share her words with you.

In loving community,

Wren, Rabbi Nate, Marla, and Hannah

When sitting in shul, my favorite part of most sermons is the speaker’s call to action, which typically comes towards the end. Yes, it is important to learn and the lessons that we draw from the Torah and from life are beneficial, but as one of my English-teachers always said, “so what – who cares?” – English-teacher code for “why is this important and what can we take away from it?” Especially in days like these, when the feeling of loss and uncertainty can be overwhelming, I like to know what I can do moving forward. Do not get me wrong, I love to learn and learning is necessary if you want to act meaningfully, but I find it discouraging to spend so much time learning about all of the problems that we face only to leave the shul feeling like I just need to learn to live with it. There is no hope in that – there is only tragedy.

Unfortunately, I cannot provide you a handbook on how to accomplish your goals. I cannot tell you what to do for the simple reason that I do not know you yet. I do not know what your aspirations are, what causes are important to you, or what you want your mark on this world to be. Whatever situation you are in right now guides your priorities in this moment and those priorities probably differ from mine. So instead of telling you what to do, I want to equip you with some tools on how you can, at the very least, begin your work.

In the news and even casual conversations between friends, I find that we sometimes get stuck. We read horrifying facts and gloomy statistics, and we absolutely should be talking about them. When tragedy strikes, those who suffered or are still suffering deserve respect in our acknowledgment of their loss and hardship. At the same time, we should not merely be accepting that this is how it is always going to be. Instead, we should admit that we are in an awful situation and that people are hurting, and then use it as motivation to create change. It is with this in mind that Panu Pihkala, a Finnish expert on eco-anxiety, discusses the concept of “tragic hope” in his work titled, “Eco-Anxiety, Tragedy, and Hope: Psychological and Spiritual Dimensions of Climate Change”. Eco-anxiety is a term used to describe the various difficult emotions and mental states that arise from the environmental conditions and knowledge about them. We can cope with this form of anxiety, according to Pihkala, using tragic hope. That is, we can cope through admission that a situation is tragic but still have hope for a better future.

Just recently we read Parashat Toldot, in which Esau gives away his birthright to his brother, Jacob, for a bowl of stew. We read, “וַיֹּאמֶר עֵשָׂו, הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי הוֹלֵךְ לָמוּת; וְלָמָּה-זֶּה לִי, בְּכֹרָה” – “And Esau said: ‘Behold, I am at the point to die; and what profit shall the birthright do to me?’” (Genesis 25:32). Esau trades something so spiritually and monetarily precious for a bowl of stew and his justification for it is that he is going to die eventually anyway. Instinctually, having read this story many times, I assume that Esau is thoughtless. However, when I really think about it, his choice is not dissimilar from how many of us behave in similar situations.

Despite urgent warnings from environmental scientists about the collapse of the world as we know it, many people choose to do nothing. A lot of people justify this reaction by saying that they will die before this affects them, so they pass off the burden of change to the next generation. The truth of the matter, though, is that these effects are already devastating populations of people, and it probably has already affected you. People are dying from natural disasters that have only become more intense due to climate change: wildfires are rampant, heat waves are worsening, and water access is becoming unreliable as droughts and floods become more severe. Sadly, the list goes on. In Parashat Toldot, Esau takes the path of instant gratification and his mistake serves as a reminder to think about others and about our collective future.

Even more often, though, I think that people do nothing because they feel paralyzed. Whether you are sad because a local forest was decimated in your area or, more commonly, because you are afraid that climate change is taking away your future, eco-anxiety can be debilitating. We often mistake this paralysis for apathy when it is not a lack of concern at all, but rather caring so much and not knowing what to do about it that you end up doing nothing instead. When it comes to the enormity of the environmental crisis, people do not feel as though they, individually, can make a difference. Unfortunately, this socially constructed silence is not saving us, or our planet and it will not help us cope with the looming fear that many people have for themselves and their future generations.

What I just described is a lack of action in the face of tragedy but let us look at how this narrative can change if you mix hope with tragedy. It is no secret that the Jewish people have had to overcome many tragedies throughout our long history. We escaped slavery in Egypt, suffered exile and persecution, survived the Holocaust, and continue to battle anti-semitism globally. Yet, we are still a people full of hope and how fitting that “Hope” is the literal title of Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah”.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (z”l) claims that hope is “one of the very greatest Jewish contributions to Western civilization.” He continues saying that, “to be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair. Every ritual, every mitzvah, every syllable of the Jewish story, every element of Jewish law, is a protest against escapism, resignation or the blind acceptance of fate. Judaism is a sustained struggle, the greatest ever known, against the world that is, in the name of the world that could be, should be, but is not yet.”

I would argue that Rabbi Sacks is describing how Jewish law and history teaches us that “tragic hope” as a coping mechanism gives rise to action and meaningful change. In the face of overwhelming tragedy, the Jewish people always held hope and look how we have thrived in spite of the tragedies we have suffered. This is exactly what “tragic hope” hope means – to admit loss without surrender, to persevere despite devastation. Yet, having seen and lived the successes of tragic hope, we never teach the practice of tragic hope as a means to a greater end nor do we provide instructions on how to achieve tragic hope.

So here it is everyone, the moment you have been waiting for, my call to action: no matter what issue you decide to tackle, I urge you to put tragic hope into practice to do it. In order for tragic hope to take effect, though, we need to create an atmosphere that does not only champion community, but also collaboration. To create the atmosphere that tragic hope requires, we need to form a space where people feel comfortable sharing that which afflicts them without fear of rejection. Until recently eco-anxiety has not been taken seriously as a source of genuine anxiety. Particularly with younger generations, people have suppressed their fear of their futures because it was not considered legitimate; however, we cannot fix a problem if we cannot admit that it exists. To create the atmosphere that tragic hope requires, we need to form a space where failure is merely a steppingstone to success. Think of how many beneficial innovations could exist right now if people were not afraid to try something different. To create the atmosphere that tragic hope requires, we need to form a space where diverse backgrounds and opinions are welcomed because having a variety of experts will no doubt create more comprehensive solutions, especially when we are against complex problems. This collaboration cannot happen in a silo and yet, it is not lost upon me that we are in a period of isolation. It is essential that we use this time reaching out and listening to one another.

We are beginning the process of bringing tragic hope into action starting now. I encourage you to confront your difficulties and start having difficult conversations without being overly optimistic or overly pessimistic because either one alone is counterproductive. We need to acknowledge people’s pain while also creating conditions in which people envision positive changes occurring because it is only when you combine both that meaningful action can occur. Even when tragedy seems unavoidable, we can band together to hope and to act – to protect our environment, beat this pandemic, and face whatever future challenges lie ahead.

Rebecca Levy is an intern with Hazon Detroit.

The post Hazon Detroit: Tragic Hope & Meaningful Action appeared first on Adamah.

Dear All,

We weren’t going to send an email this week. We figured there’d be enough in your inbox in the days before Rosh Hashanah.

But I am prompted by the fires out West to write something I have been thinking about for some while. This isn’t an appeal email, it’s not really a “shana tova” email, but I hope you’ll take a few moments to read it.

The fires out west go to the heart of so many of the challenges we presently face, and Covid has provoked its own further re-assessment for us as an organization. We intend that Hazon will come out of this stronger and more focused. But part of that focus is striving to be as truthful as we can about what is possible, what is necessary, and the relationship between the two – for the Jewish community institutionally and for each of us as individuals.

What is possible: every single thing we do to help create a more sustainable world is arithmetically close to meaningless. One change in behavior. One fewer plane trip. One donation to NRDC, one vote for the more sustainable candidate. Individually our actions are so negligible, in their aggregate impact, that I do believe we have to face this sense of futility, of overwhelmedness. I feel it myself, very strongly. I imagine that Bill Gates feels it, and Greta Thunberg, and Michael Bloomberg. Even those who have punched a thousand-fold above their weight, a million-fold, nevertheless go to bed at night knowing that the world is, as yet, headed in the wrong direction, and that not one of us has sufficient of anything to fix it. The wildfires – the worst in history – are yet one more example of this, if further example were needed, which of course it is not.

So the fires this time amplify this clarity. This is no longer some future climate crisis. This is what happens when you have a hundred years of uncontrolled output of oil and gas and coal, and then another forty years when we knew as a society that we needed to hammer on the brakes, but did not. The changes to come in the next ten or fifteen or twenty years – the hurricanes, the droughts, the fires, the die-offs – these are en route. At best (and this is not minor; it is huge), in relation to direct impacts during that period, we must do much more in the way of adaptation to make our cities and our communities more resilient. This alone is why we need a new president and a new congress to invest trillions of dollars into a green new deal, because there is critical work to be done on infrastructure, health care, public health and planning, to name just four, if we are to better cope with known-but-unknown crises yet to come.

But this of course, all of it, is only half the story.

Because the line about “all our behaviors are arithmetically close to meaningless” is true also of voting. Yet we vote – hundreds of millions of us. And when we do so it is not because we believe our own vote will make a difference. We know that, statistically, it will not.  Has your one vote ever been the difference between a winning and a losing candidate? And yet we vote not merely because it is a civic duty but, more than that, it reflects our implicit understanding of the commons. To vote – and, by extension, to take any action which is individually insignificant, but which in aggregate, as part of the wider whole, is vitally vitally necessary – is to attest, almost theologically, to our ultimate significance, and to the moral force of choosing to be part of that larger whole.

What Covid has made so very clear is the extent to which so many of the things we really need are public goods in the first place.  The goods we need we cannot individually buy. You may send your kids to private school, but you don’t drive on private roads. Public health is a public good, and its absence endangers us all. Roads, police, hospitals, health insurance… Just a year ago I sat shmira for a 27-year old woman killed on her bicycle by a truck. None of us individually can pay for protected bike lanes, yet we all of us – car drivers, cyclists, pedestrians – in our busy urban eco-systems rely on research, planning, implementation, civic involvement to hold leaders accountable, and good public leadership in the first place, to create the public goods that keep us safe.

The fires out west are a visceral microcosm of this. My heart goes out to the families of the people who have died; to the many many more made homeless.  These individual deaths – as with deaths from Covid – may seem more or less random. We none of us know when our turn will come. And this is the very point of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur – to remind us of our mortality, despite the defenses, psychological and actual, we strive to place around us.

But here are the punchlines from all this:

1.       It is worth taking a moment, quite calmly – as calmly as we can –  to acknowledge our insignificance, because this is honest, and I think we have to sit with it for a moment. You don’t dive back to work after someone dies, or someone had a heart attack. Sit with it. Just allow some time – including over the chagim – to allow ourselves to feel how scary this all is; this sense of the world hurtling in the wrong direction and nothing I, I by myself can do about it….

2.       and then move past it.  This is the key Jewish move, the key civic move. To be mired in our insignificance is to give in to despair or a kind of theological disempowerment. This is unwarranted, and also unhelpful. Fackenheim’s “614^th commandment” has fallen out of popularity in recent years, but it ends, Jews ‘are forbidden to despair of man and his world, and to escape into either cynicism or otherworldliness, lest they cooperate in delivering the world over to the forces of Auschwitz…’ The language is gendered and old-fashioned, but the point is spot on. We can feel despair, or be cynical, or retreat into otherworldliness, and each of these is its own pull. But – in the modern parlance – leaning in is the very opposite. We lean in. We vote. We act. We do change our behaviors. We do call upon others to do likewise. We do commit our institutions to change. We do see honest language and straight science as bedrock from which we build.

In the near-term we must support our rabbis and cantors and everyone leading Jewish institutions, and just send love and elbow hugs, and show up as and how and as safely as we can.

Then we need to vote and encourage others to vote – including our own friends and family members in swing states; if you personally know someone who’s on the fence, your voice will count.

Then we have to get through the weird period from the election to the inauguration – January 20^th – and hope that the US democracy holds solid.

And then it’s the rest of our lives – and on to Tu B’Shvat and Earth Day, the start of the shmita year (September 2021) and COP 26 (the UN climate conference, in Glasgow, in November 2021) and then in September 2022 a new seven-year cycle in Jewish life starts.

Strangely enough, that’s where I think we need to be pointed. Day-to-day we must do what we can, each one of us. But between now and September 2022, every single Jewish institution, every school, every synagogue, every federation and foundation, every JCC – every single one needs to develop a 7-year plan, to weave a deep commitment to environmental sustainability into the fabric of Jewish life. The food we serve. The power we use. The education we deliver. The voices we raise. The relationships we build. That is actually how we respond to the fires this time. By striving, very determinedly and very systematically, to rally all of the resources of the Jewish community – and, of course, of every single faith community, every ethnic community, every local community, every intermediate institution of which we are part – in order to work for a more sustainable world for all. There is, quite literally, no greater task that we can engage in the coming decade.

And that’s why I and we wanted to send this email now. As we are buffeted by the news, by personal and familial challenges, by an unfamiliar and unsettling set of Jewish holidays, let us have some real sense of why we feel insignificant; why it’s ok to feel that; why and how we must move beyond it; and some of what we must do on the other side.

And that’s what I’m working for, and in different ways, Hazon’s staff and programs, our volunteers, our interns, our board members and stakeholders.

Shana tova – a healthy and sustainable and sweet year. May it be so.

Nigel

The post The fires this time: public goods, the Jewish community, different time horizons appeared first on Adamah.

Dear All,

Isabella Freedman is closed as a retreat center, but the state of CT has reduced the minimum period for bookings, which now enables us – next week –  to launch Isabella Freedman Getaways. If you’re interested in coming up and spending 5 or 12 days at Isabella Freedman – with three meals a day of (local, ethical) kosher food, in beautiful surroundings – look out for our email next week.

We similarly had to take the very difficult decision to suspend the Adamah Fellowship for this summer – the first time since the program began, in 2003, when that has been so.
But – but! – we’re now happy and excited to launch a new program: Adamah At Home. The program runs from July 6th to July 26th, and you can send in applications on a rolling basis from now through July 1st. It’s an exceptionally strong program encompassing practical skills, daily conversation and what we hope and intend will be a strong group. We’ll cover Jews ecological learning, garden mentorship, food systems and policy; also food choices, cheesemaking and regenerative farming.

And we’ll also talk about structural racism in this country – because the longer that Hazon has done work on food, and what it means to eat Jewishly in the 21st century, the longer we have looked at food deserts, the impact of federal policy, the weird distortions of the Farm Bill (and the competing values that underpins its different measures) and so on.

And so as well as sharing with you the launch of Adamah At Home, I wanted also to reflect further on events in America in the last few weeks. I wrote last week to say that, properly understood, Black Lives Matter is capable of making this a better country for all its inhabitants. This week I was one of nearly a thousand environmental leaders on a historic call with leaders from the Movement For Black Lives. It included Hop Hopkins, who’s head of strategic partnerships for the Sierra Club, and who wrote a very strong essay a week ago, titled Racism Is Killing The Planet. He’s not just talking about “environmental justice” in the abstract, but giving a sense of how and why the two issues are so closely related. So I commend that to you. And I share with you, below, not just information on Adamah At Home, but also some of the work that Adamahniks have been doing in relation to this topic and some of the things that the leadership of our Adamah team want to share with everyone.

I’d add that, in this fractured and difficult time, not everyone agrees on every topic, and nor should they. Many of you will be provoked and inspired by some of this. Some of you may be disturbed or confused or disagree. That’s ok. Jewish tradition is a journey, life is a journey, and this country is on a journey. So we learn and grow, and what’s been happening this summer is all part of it.

Finally: you know how much I love the calendar and the significance of the calendar. But it’s not just the Jewish calendar. Juneteenth has arisen in recent years to become a significant day in the calendar of this country. I think it almost certain that this year will see the largest celebrations of Juneteenth yet. The protests I’ve attended in the last week or two in New York have been a kaleidoscope of this city – young and old, every color, every background – coming together to try to hold this country to its high rhetoric, to its best aspirations. So I wish you not only shabbat shalom but also happy Juneteenth. This too is a step towards building a healthier and a more sustainable Jewish community and a more sustainable and equitable world for all.

Nigel

PS: This week’s After The Plague is me in conversation with four of the teens from Hazon’s Jewish Youth Climate Leadership board – please join us at noon ET on Sunday.

The post The launch of Adamah At Home, and thoughts about M4BL appeared first on Adamah.

Dear All,

I don’t feel like I have a lot of wisdom right now. This is hard.

The lessons of Jewish history favor moderation, and striving to keep one’s balance. It is relatively easy for societies to become destabilized, and much harder to calm them down again.

And yet, of course, we must also ask: what does “calm them down again” mean? In the sense that the protests are more than justified. Racism – personal, institutional, structural – has been wired into the fabric of this country since its very beginnings, an original sin for which there has been no systematic teshuvah. So this is a year’s rage, a decade’s rage, a century’s rage, and longer still, all boiling over. It is in the nature of being Jewish that we know what it is like to be an outsider, to be scared, to be an immigrant, a refugee, discriminated against. Many of us, most of us, grew up with that in our bones. And so it is unbearable to see persistent racism in this country, unbearable – after slavery, the civil war, a century of lynchings; after Goodman, Schwerner & Chaney… and Eric Garner… and case after case of police killings of unarmed black men… and then George Floyd.

I feel angry and upset – and yet I have a job, a home, savings.
If I were younger – or less white – or less employed – or had less money in the bank – I might not only feel rage or despair, I might also say, what have I got to lose? And things can spiral out of control, very easily, from that point.

There are many times in the last few weeks and months that have been hard. The father of an old friend died, and I just burst into tears. Another friend’s father is still fighting for his life in the ICU – he has been there now for six weeks. For Hazon (on a different plane) we fought to open Isabella Freedman in March, scrubbed and cleaned and planned – lost that fight – aimed to open for Pesach – lost that fight – closed for two months, and hoped to open for Shavuot – lost that fight. We continue to swivel. We continue to strive to do our best. Each day brings new challenges. Staff members, board members, funders, participants, counterparties – everyone is doing their best. I am grateful. But it is hard.

And now all of this. The Hebrew phrase is yesh gvul – there is a limit. There is a border, a boundary, a moment when you say, enough already.

I am a very weird kind of first generation immigrant to this country. I’m not an economic refugee, I’m not a political refugee. I am privileged in many ways. And for some reason I have not one but two degrees in American history. I used to be teased by my friends in England for being so pro-American.

And yet I didn’t really come to America; in a very weird way it turns out that I made aliyah to the American Jewish community. I’m a part of the Jewish people, and I felt clear that when the history of this era is written, two centuries hence, it will be what happens now in Israel, and what happens now in the USA, that will most determine not only the future of the Jewish people, but also what influence the Jewish people has on the trajectory of the world. Will we add new chapters of which to be proud? I don’t know; but the American Jewish community has wealth and power and influence, and we must strive to use it for good. Consciously or not, that’s why I’m here.

I don’t have US citizenship, and for a long while couldn’t figure out why I didn’t – given that, as a Green Card holder, I’m now entitled to it, and have been for some while. And I knew – I could feel – that there was something in me resistant to doing so.

And maybe I will take citizenship or maybe not, and maybe indeed I will live the whole of the rest of my life here. Or maybe not. Many people don’t have that choice, either. (And maybe, of course, I will die tomorrow; we, none of us, know when our time will be up.)

In other news: Isabella Freedman is closed, but we’re going to do a virtual Isabella Freedman retreat this Sunday. We invite you to give a donation if you wish, but there is no charge, and no obligation to do so. Speakers and teachers include Diane Bloomfield (teaching Torah Yoga); rabbis Matti Brown, Yaffa Epstein, Jill Hammer, and Ezra Weinberg; Yoshi Silverstein and Dr. Shamu Sadeh; and many others. This week’s After The Plague will be at noon, as part of our virtual retreat, and my guests will be Rabbi Jill Jacobs, from T’ruah, and our own rabbi-in-residence, Isaiah Rothstein, offering perspective, advice, and perhaps tochecha (rebuke) in relation to the state of this country right now. Do please join us. Click here for registration and more info.

Finally, and in a somewhat weird and disjunctive way, Hazon’s Hakhel project won the Jerusalem Unity Prize this week. If you click here you can see (in Hebrew) the ceremony in which Reuven Rivlin, President of the State of Israel, awards the prize to Hazon staffers Aharon Ariel Lavi and Leah Palmer. I remember the murder of Eric Garner and we saw last week the murder of George Floyd; and many of us also remember the kidnapping and murder of Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naphtali Fraenkel in 2014. It felt like the whole of Israel searched for them and prayed for them, and it was in the aftermath of the discovery of their bodies that their families, together with Nir Barkat, then mayor of Jerusalem, established this prize. The idea behind it was, in a sense, let us take this tragedy and find a way to play forwards that which was good, within it – that sense of unity.

And so I end with that thought, with that inspiration. The prize didn’t come out of thin air. We have the fast of Esther (commemorating incitement and the risk of genocidal murder) and then Purim, a celebration which also summons us towards clarity and the journey to Pesach. We have the fast of the first-born (another near-death experience) and then seder night – in which, famously, although we made it through, we commemorate the deaths of our enemies, who did not. Coming up next month we have the three weeks, commemorating the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem – and then we come back to life, and the messiah is born, and six days later a festival of love.

So…. it is a little hard to imagine a festival of love, in this country, anytime soon. The messiah is nowhere to be seen. We don’t have clarity, redemption feels far off, and too many first-born sons have died in this country.

And yet…. ani ma’amin; which is to say, ”I believe….” 

And my “belief,” whatever it is, is not theological. I don’t believe in divine deliverance. I don’t believe in American exceptionalism. But I do, somehow, believe that every Western democracy sooner or later can and should and will find its way back to solid ground. I am blessed not to have been born a Tibetan, abused now for 61 years by the (truly evil) Chinese regime. I am blessed not to live in North Korea, with its forced labor camps and its grotesque totalitarianism. I am lucky, perhaps, not to live in Hong Kong, and thus to fear what the future might hold there, as the Chinese strive to stamp out all forms of democracy. Many tragic things have happened in my lifetime, but we have avoided (thus far) the nuclear war that people feared in the fifties and protested against in the eighties and nineties. The memory of two world wars helped inoculate two or three generations of world leaders from stepping too far into the brink. Black Lives Matter is a slogan which, taken seriously, will help this country be a better country, for all its inhabitants. What is happening now is not just a civil rights issue, it’s a human rights issue. So we must lean in to the justifiable anger, and use it to drive systemic change, in whatever ways we can, just as the knowledge of impending climate crisis can and should cause us to change our ways. And so I believe – I do believe, I choose to believe – that things will be better, and that together we can make them better. That is what Jewish tradition stands for. That is why Hazon exists. Let us, each and all of us, make our own stand for good, this week, this summer, and this year.

Shabbat shalom – and I hope to see you on Sunday,

Nigel

The post Perspectives appeared first on Adamah.

Dear All,

Normally at this time of year we share updates on our plans for a vibrant summer at Isabella Freedman. As we all know, this year is a different kind of year, and this announcement is a different kind of announcement.

Covid-19 has changed how we will be able to gather for the foreseeable future.

It has become increasingly clear that retreats are unlikely to be able to run with the same participation numbers and pricing that they have in the past, even as Covid cases have begun to fall. As a result, we will be cancelling all retreats through the end of 2020. But even as we cancel retreats, we are hard at work trying to ensure that other programs can still take place at Isabella Freedman.

Our campus is beautifully located. We exist to serve our clients, to offer rest and renewal outside the city, and to do so in a way that nourishes and inspires people. We can’t do that, this year, with our traditional retreats. It may not be possible to do anything at all. But we are exploring whether we can enable at least some people safely to come up to Freedman. If we can do so it will be good for those who are able to come to Freedman, and good also for the institution and for our staff in this time of transition.

So with the understanding that there are many factors that may make it impossible or inadvisable to have guests at Isabella Freedman, we are sending this email to gauge your interest in a socially-distanced option that we are exploring. Please read below and then reply to me or email simone.stallman@hazon.org to let us know if you’d be interested.

First: public health is a primary concern. Currently, CT state guidelines require a minimum stay of 32 days; and they also require the maintenance of social distancing, including no gatherings of more than 5 people for non-essential activities unless those 5+ people constitute one household. Within those parameters, we have begun to explore the concept of Isabella Freedman Getaways – stays in our guest rooms for 32 days or more, which would include meals eaten open-air in our dining tent.

Each family / group would get a suite of two rooms that would include a living and sleeping space and would sleep 4 comfortably. There will be no official programming, and no access to the main building. We expect to offer an optional outdoor “Avodat Lev” service in the morning, and yoga in the late afternoon, in both cases done outdoors and at appropriate distance. Other than that, and some Shabbat programming, this is simply an opportunity to ‘Getaway’ and enjoy the grounds, trails, and lake at Isabella Freedman (we are not currently allowed to open the pool until at least June 20, if at all), as well as the local area – while eating our farm-to-table kosher cuisine. Weekly linen service and light housekeeping will be included, as well as three meals per day, seven days per week, in an open-air tent, with take-away options for lunch. If you are interested, please let us know by June 1st, as we need to gauge the amount of serious interest in this potential offering. On the one hand, capacity will be capped at 18 couples or families; and on the other, this will only be viable if at least 12 couples or families sign up. We have no idea what the demand is and we need to establish that in order to know whether we can proceed.

If you have questions, please email simone.stallman@hazon.org.

We are asking people who would like to come to put down an $1,800 deposit. If for any reason we decide not to proceed, we will return 100% of this to you (and we want to make absolutely clear that we will return that money immediately; there is and will be no request that any part of it be donated.) If we receive at least 12 deposits then we plan to proceed, and housing will be allocated on a first-come first-served basis, up to a maximum of 18 bookings.

Please don’t hesitate to be in touch with questions.

With all best wishes,

Nigel

The post Isabella Freedman Update and Summer Getaways appeared first on Adamah.

Dear All,

Things are fragmenting, and our old fragmentations are now fragmenting further.
Different countries have different policies. Different states are opening up in different ways. Different sub-cultures have their own distinct rhythms and norms. And different political tribes turn out, once more, to have not just different views but even different facts.

Underneath all this are different understandings of the nature of risk. As a society we lack functional numeracy, and it is not a surprise that we are not good at weighing different probabilities in relation to risk. (Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project, about the work of Kahneman and Tversky is a fine thing to read, for starters.)

When the coronavirus was a cloud on what seemed like a distant horizon, in general most of us underreacted to the actual risk. (On Feb 25th I suggested to someone that Hazon needed to prepare for the coronavirus, and got back the reply I am disinclined to put time into such a remote possibility. Exactly one week later the first Hazon staffers were in quarantine – and so it began…)

Now, three months’ later, I fear that we are over-reacting, in various ways, partly because we are conflating three different sorts of risk: there is one reason I should not be concerned about getting the virus, and two reasons that I should be concerned, and each of these is evolving in different ways and has different implications.

The reason for me not to be too concerned is that I’m not over the age of 80 and I don’t have multiple chronic illnesses. The death rate for people who are over the age of 80 and/or who have multiple chronic illnesses is high; for those of us who are not in those categories it is low. In my case I have asthma – this winter I had quite bad asthma – and so there are grounds to believe that if I were to contract the virus it might hit me harder than others, but the likelihood that it would kill me is still very low.

(Note that, as with all probabilities, saying that the likelihood is low or very low doesn’t make it zero. When on any particular day I ride my bike in the city there is a very low, but non-zero, chance that I’ll be injured, and a still lower, but again non-zero, chance that I will be killed. If I ride my bike not once but 200 or 300 times in a year, then the chances are 200 or 300 times higher. Which is to say: still low… but 200 or 300 times less low.)

But although I may personally be “low-risk”, a reason for me to be concerned is that although contracting the virus may not kill me, I may inadvertently kill someone else. Every person who died got the virus from someone else. Most of the people who transmitted the virus (again, statistically, by definition) haven’t died from it. So although I don’t necessarily have to be hugely concerned about whether I get the virus in relation to my own health, I do have to be very concerned about the possibility that I might contract it and pass it on to someone who could die from it. (And, again, think about “hugely concerned” in that sentence. I don’t want to get a horrible flu, which could make me feel awful for days or weeks, and which could kill me. The question, though, is not whether I want it – I do not – but how concerned about it I ought to be. And the answer is, concerned… but not hugely concerned.)

The second reason for me to be concerned is that if I contract the virus and require hospitalization, or I contract the virus and cause others to need hospitalization, I may cause the hospitals to overload, with immensely tragic consequences. This is the issue of “flattening the curve,” which we learned about a couple months ago.

I want to disentangle these three points because each of them is not static over time.

For the first one – the chance that contracting the virus will be fatal to me – the likelihood changes slightly over time (as better treatments and treatment protocols come on stream), and the likelihood that I will be exposed to the virus also changes over time (this chance rose through February and March, as more and more people around me – unbeknownst to them – were contagious, and it is declining, now, as fewer people become contagious.)

For the second one, the chance that I could kill a high-risk person by transmitting the virus from me to them, the chances are now declining if my and/or their behavior changes. This is why, on the one hand, 80-somethings and other people at high risk are being especially cautious, and it is also why, for the sake of others as much as for ourselves, those of us who are not high-risk are also being cautious. But note that, in February, I could easily have gotten the virus (I was in contact with people who were in contact with people who, in retrospect, did have the virus) and, right now, it’s statistically harder for me to get the virus (I’m interacting with far fewer people; I’m wearing a mask outside; I’m washing my hands scrupulously when I come into the apartment.) So, again: these behaviors do reduce the risk of my contracting or transmitting the virus; they do not reduce it to zero; but they do reduce it very significantly.

For the third one, again, the risk will vary over time. Right now, in New York, the lockdown has mostly worked and so hospitals coped, just about. If we loosen preventative measures, and there is a subsequent spike in numbers, we can expect that public health measures will immediately be taken to slow that spike.

I write all of this because, right now, every region of government, every company, every non-profit, every family and every person is weighing these different risk factors. I have had too many recent conversations in which people have been certain that we should do X, or Y, or it would be crazy to do A, or B, or not do C.

That is why it is so critical to engage with a probabilistic reality; to realize that these are the weighings of different kinds of risk. Each involves known facts, estimates, the opinion of experts, people’s personal circumstances, and the different relationships to risk that different people have. It is vital that as a society – and as a Jewish community – we continue to review and revise our conclusions over time; that we remember that no option is ever risk-free; and that different people and institutions can legitimately come to different conclusions or policies.

In the most recent period we have seen this particularly in relation to overnight Jewish summer camps, and day camps, and whether or when or how they decided to open or (in most cases, so far, not open); but soon enough it will also be each business, each restaurant, each synagogue, each school. There are health risks in opening, but also health risks in staying home. We have lost lives to the coronavirus, but we none of us know if we are one of the people who, statistically, had this not happened, would have died in a car crash these last eight weeks – but in fact we’re alive today because we weren’t in our car, or we weren’t the pedestrian hit by the car. And so on, in endless chains of causation.

All of this is true at the largest planetary levels also. This Sunday on After The Plague, one of my guests will be Professor Shaul Bassi, the founder of Beit Venezia and Hazon’s partner on the Living Under Water project. We’ll talk about the extent to which the challenges and choices facing Venice are heightened versions of those facing the entire world. We have reduced our carbon output, these last two months, and the world is the better for it; but literally hundreds of millions of people have lost their livelihoods, even apart from the loss of life. In that time Venice has been reclaimed for the Venetians, who for the first time in decades have had quiet in their beautiful and unique city; and yet their economy is hugely dependent on the tourists who clog their streets. How do they reach some new balance? This is their question, and ours, and the world’s.

And this, by the way, is what a “Green New Deal” is all about. If governments are able to print money in response to this Covid emergency, ought not the future of the entire planet to be equivalently compelling? I learned from Anna Hanau the idea that “you know you’re on the right track, when your solution to one problem solves a bunch of others.” That is what it would be, now and in this next decade, to invest money in healthcare for all; in improving alternative transportation systems; in providing free high-quality broadband in rural areas; in housing the homeless; in fixing our schools and hospitals; and in providing a version of the GI Bill for education and student loan debt relief for the twenty-first century. Finding low-carbon ways to invest in our future made sense before the virus, and doing so makes even more sense now.

And, coming down to land, Hazon too faces complex choices. Right now we’re making plans to relaunch our bike rides and to develop a new version of Adamah; watch this space for announcements on both in the near future. Isabella Freedman remains closed, but the small number of self-catering units that we have will shortly be available for rent, and we’re assessing the risks of whether some sort of opening of the campus will be possible in the future. 

The superb Great Big Jewish Food Fest is underway (and some of our events are listed on hazon.org/calendar, and below). Next Friday, May 29th, is the first day of Shavuot. Normally at Freedman we have our amazing goat parade. This year instead we’re hosting an online event with some of our partners: Earth-Based Shavuot: A Day of Learning with Hazon, Pearlstone, Wilderness Torah, and Urban Adamah.

Finally: in this week’s Torah portion we enter the desert and begin by conducting a census. I love that this is in the Torah, because the Torah is fundamentally not about “religion” in the Western/Christian sense; it is rather about jurisprudence; it’s about the good society, and how one constructs it, and that begins with full participation. This week Liz and I gave money to a very important 501c3, The Voter Participation Center, which is doing critical work now to make sure that every vote, and every voter, gets counted in the elections this fall. If you want to honor the Torah’s census, then an investment in voter participation, this fall, would be – in my judgment – a risk worth taking.

Shabbat shalom,

Nigel

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Dear All,

Lots of people aren’t on Zoom. Subway workers, farmers and food distributors, the police and the armed forces and the fire brigade, everyone in a hospital, people cleaning the streets – all these people are not on Zoom, and many more.

But some of us are on Zoom a lot these days. The benefits are significant. Being able to see and talk with friends and family in different places. Zoom seders. At a different scale, our #SoundTheCall event had 32 presenters in 28 different locations, not to mention more than 1,500 people watching it. We couldn’t have done these things without Zoom. As a society, we had no idea how relatively easily our offices could migrate online. The consequences of this on where people live and how they work will have enormous ramifications in the next decade.

For Hazon, just one small but significant example. We did a consequential Shmita Summit in London in April 2014, and were planning something similar this winter. Now, instead, we’re doing a Shmita Summit next month, online, likely the first of several. The cost of doing it online will be way lower both in dollars and in carbon. It is much less likely we will do one again in person. There is genuine loss in not meeting in person, and that is sad in all sorts of ways. But the cost/reward trade-off is significant.

So the Jewish community is galloping online. All sorts of events, major and minor, are moving online. Our post-Covid world will not simply default to pre-Covid forms of gathering.

But this is only half the story. Because I, like many of us, am Zoomed out.
Exhausted by these meetings. Their weird rhythms and evolving customs. The chat box on the side. Whether people are on video or not. Whether they’re really present or not. Whether I am really present or not. And that particular moment in a day when one is just exhausted; and Zoom is part of that.

And that’s just adults. What about kids, especially younger ones? I have enormous compassion for parents at home, especially single parents, or parents who have several kids, or any number of configurations in which the only realistic option is screen time, to engage the kids and allow some respite for the adults. I don’t have an ounce of criticism for anyone. On the contrary. All of this is hard enough. Go gently on yourself. Don’t stress. It will be ok.

But as a society, this screen time is bad for us. It fries our brains. It hypes us, distracts us, tires us and crashes us. It messes with our neurons and wires our brains in unfortunate ways. Many of you will have read Richard Louv’s Last Child In The Woods, which introduced the phrase “nature deficit disorder.” Well: whatever nature deficit disorder we had in 2008 just zoomed itself to a whole new level in 2020.

So we need an après-Zoom strategy. 
Just as we are galloping online: we must give equivalent thought and attention to how we get ourselves outdoors. 

There has been an intense conversation in the Jewish community about summer camps, but this should not be the only focus of our attention. We must devote time, thought, and money towards year-round outdoor education. It is not less important after all this, it is more important. 

Of the few dedicated Jewish retreat centers we have, Isabella Freedman is presently closed, Pearlstone Center is presently closed, and the ability to celebrate the chagim (holidays) outdoors, to integrate natural rhythms and Jewish rhythms, to come together multi-generationally and not just uni-generationally; as a community we need this, and we do not sufficiently value it.

The need to prioritize being outdoors runs counter to much energy that is now underway. Shuls worry about membership renewals if high holiday services go online. Foundations will look at market returns in ’20 and additional emergency payments and will conclude that in ’21 or ’22 they need to rein back their payout ratios. Dayschools care about Teva, and many of them truly love Teva, but in a year when they’re worried about losing kids and losing tuition – is Teva a necessity or a luxury? Jewish outdoor education, Jewish environmental education, Jewish food education, Jewish farm education – we need these things, and yet, relative to strong legacy organizations like ADL or AIPAC or JNF, the enterprises that deliver and produce these programs are highly fragile.

In previous crises we have tended to define as core, that which we are used to doing; and to define as an added luxury, and one we can’t now afford, recent innovations in Jewish life. It was a mistake in the past and it will be a mistake now.

This is why institutions – now! – even as they (as you) make plans to go online, need also to create equal and opposite plans to get outdoors, and to do so, wherever possible, in community, in relationship, and in an explicitly Jewish context. Any funder who is thinking about – and investing in – program migrations online, should also be thinking about equivalent investments in how we come together, away from screens, in the future.

And I note in closing that tomorrow morning’s sidra is where counting the omer comes from. We learn about the chagim and about grain offerings. We started life as an agrarian people. The small mixed use farmers, growing local food – those are our people, that’s where we came from.

Today, the 29th day of the omer, is the beginning of the week of hod, of simplicity and beauty. Hod is the world of waterfalls and crags, the sun rising on a cold day, vegetables growing in a field, wild berries, the Galil in springtime, hiking to the overlook at Isabella Freedman, and so so so much more.

And counting the omer is the journey from “freedom from” to “freedom to.” Freedom from, in this context, includes freedom from the fear of death from this plague; the fear of hospitals overburdened, frontline staff without PPE, people dying in nursing homes, and on and on. We must strive, indeed, to become free from all this. As Shuli Karkowsky, Hazon’s EVP, pointed out to me, this is the base of the Maslovian pyramid, and without this we can’t aspire to the higher freedoms.

But those, nevertheless, are the ones we journey towards, the ones we count upwards to. We want to be free to make healthy choices. We want to be free to choose the physical and not just the virtual, a touch and a hug, dancing together, rejoicing at a wedding; not just reading about Shavuot as the festival of the first fruits, but seeing those fruits and their gathering ourselves. Shavuot is zman matan torateinu, the time of the giving of the Torah. The rabbis understood that the significance of that phrase is that the Torah is given, but it is up to us to choose what it is we want to receive. This involves thought, preparation, active involvement, hierarchies of decision, money, conversation – all the things that make freedom so hard.

So as you go towards Shavuot, personally and professionally, as you plan for the summer and fall and beyond – go outdoors. Walk in Central Park and Prospect Park, walk in Tilden, walk in the Galil and in the Machtesh and in the Arava,  go out to the country, go the beach. Do so both joyously and planfully. Go outside by yourself, and with family and friends, and as a community. Do so for the sheer heck of it, and do so also to learn, to daven (pray), and to transmit knowledge and love to the next generation. This is – this should be – a core commitment of human life, not an optional extra.

Shabbat shalom,

Nigel

PS  please feel free to send this to your rabbi, or the board or leadership of your synagogue or school. We must engender this conversation now – even amidst crisis, even with limited budgets, even with an unclear future.

PPS: and in other news, and despite all of the above – virtually! – please join me for After The Plague, this Sunday, May 10th at noon, ET with Rabbi Phyllis Berman and Rabbi Dr. Arthur Waskow, and next Sunday, May 17th,  at noon with the former SEIU head, Andy Stern.

PPPS: And speaking of being outdoors: as of now, we’re still planning to proceed with this autumn’s Arava Institute Hazon Israel Ride. Go to the website to check it out and email sara.pilavin@hazon.org if you have any questions.

The post After Zoom? appeared first on Adamah.

Read through to the end, because there is an amazing treat in store when you get there….!

Dear All,

First, just a brief Hazon news update.

The Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center is closed and, like lots of organizations, we don’t know when or how or in what way we will re-open. We’re using this time to figure out not only how to maximize impact in the near term, but also how to use this crisis to clarify and strengthen our work in the longer-term.

And, meanwhile, Hazon staffers are working hard and well in this challenging moment.

Teva’s Arielle Aronoff is helping day schools with online teaching. We’re planting and preparing at Adamah. Mike Davino and his crew are starting to make some needed repairs at Isabella Freedman.

In Detroit, Wren Hack and Rabbi Nate DeGroot and our team have been helping on the ground, providing food, and help in growing food, for people and communities in need.

And last week’s #SoundTheCall clearly hit a chord. The feedback was amongst the strongest from anything we have done. Hazon has a strong record of bringing new ideas and programs to life. We and Earth Day Network intend that this will become an important annual multi-faith platform, focusing ultimately on the three things that the world needs everyone to do: First, make some further change in your own behavior, to reduce your own footprint; secondly, give money and time to organizations that are working for a more sustainable and equitable world; and thirdly, amplify your voice, both as a citizen and within any organization of which you are a part.

So – April 22nd 2021; 10am to noon, ET – #SoundTheCall. Put it in your calendars now…

And now, five thing that will make you feel better:

1. Give a gift, right now – however small – to provide life-saving supplies, for life-saving workers.
This comes first in the list because, truthfully, we feel – and we are able to take legitimate steps to make our own lives better – when we first try to help others.

The backdrop to this is that one of many lessons of this crisis is the need for  (1) strong central institutions, and (2) ethical and tactically flexible leadership within those institutions.

Not all of this country’s central institutions have both characteristics, but one that has risen powerfully to the challenge is the Jewish Federations of North America. They have played an absolutely critical role in helping a huge number of Jewish institutions (Hazon included) get SBA-backed loans, not least because they were intimately involved in both helping to craft the legislation, and then disseminating critical information on how to access it.

Behind the scenes, separately from that, they have been finding, buying and distributing PPE – personal protective equipment – to staff in nursing homes. The people who look after our parents and grandparents are cleaning and feeding old people who can’t care for themselves, they work hard day in and day out, for low pay – and then this crisis hit and far too many of them have lost their lives because of the absence of proper kit. JFNA leapt into action. Many people are alive today because of what they have been doing.

Their campaign to support this work is launching today. Liz and I, and many of Hazon’s staffers and board members have already made donations. Please click here, right now, to join us in giving a gift to this campaign. I promise you: you will not feel in some sense “poorer,” if you give a gift (what you’d have spent at Starbucks in a week, or going out for a meal with a friend, or whatever), you will genuinely feel better about yourself to know that, even in some tiny way, you have striven to be part of the solution.

2. Read Botany In A Day, by Thomas Elpel. 
To the extent you can, being amidst sunlight and living things, in all their glorious shapes and sizes, is deeply nourishing. And learning about the world enriches the experience. I am in awe of – and jealous of – my friends who seem to be fluent in the natural world. It drives me crazy that I can identify more car brands than I can trees, after all these years. Names in and of themselves don’t necessarily matter, but being able to frame trees and plants is important and helpful. A dear friend recommended Botany In A Day, and I am loving it, and commend it. (And here’s a 45-minute video of Thomas Elpel teaching from the book.)

(Also – separately – we are all, it seems, spending more on Amazon. If you are not yet part of their program which gives 0.5% of your spend to a designated charity, please join it today, and use it, and designate Hazon as your beneficiary. The amounts are tiny, really tiny, but if you and your family and your friends all support us in this way, these little amounts will indeed mount up. Click here, right now, to set this up!)

3. Listen to my conversation with the great Alon Tal, last weekend.
This was the third installment in our Sunday series, After The Plague: Nigel Savage in conversation with… Yesterday was Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s memorial day, and today is Yom Ha’atsma’ut, Israel’s independence day, and if you want to understand some of what’s happening in Israel at the moment, with an added dollop of inspiration and provocation, then listening to Alon will help you do that. Alon has already accomplished more in half a life than most people manage after several reincarnations – and there’s a better than 50/50 chance he’ll end up as an MK (a Member of the Knesset) in the next few weeks. Listening to him is quite literally both fascinating and inspiring.

(And click here to learn more about my upcoming conversation this Sunday with the Passows.)

4. Quit coffee!!
OK.

I realize that in saying such a thing I am testing blasphemy and heresy to their limit, even in this tolerant and inclusive world.

But bear with me.

The data is fairly clear that coffee is good for us in a number of ways.

But I often do a pre-Pesach cleanse, and thank G!d, I did one this year. I’m still off coffee, seven weeks later. (And I don’t drink “soda” – Coke, or anything like that, and haven’t for many years. Coffee was the only caffeine I ingested.)  I am calmer, I’m more focused, and I’m sleeping better. Caffeine does spike your energy – but then it crashes it. The absence of spike-crash-spike-crash-spike-crash turns out to be very helpful.  So, if you don’t feel the need to quit coffee, then of course carry on. Of our many addictions it’s not one of the worst. But if you drink coffee thinking that it somehow helps you, and in any way have zooms and crashes of energy, or are struggling to sleep, then my postcard back to you from this particular trip is – just quit coffee and caffeine, and in due course you’ll feel better.

(PS: please don’t tell Ruth Messinger I wrote this. I don’t know if she drinks coffee, but she does drink caffeinated soda, and if I tried to take one away from her she’d likely punch me. And, as you know, she still packs a fabulous wallop.)

I’d add: as well as quitting caffeine, I’m also only having sugar and booze on Shabbat (which is, after all, two days out of seven, in practice.) But if I’d come into this whole crazy period on caffeine and sugar and booze I fear that my daily routine would have become six cups of coffee for breakfast, a tub of Ben & Jerry’s for afternoon tea, and then a large scotch to unwind in the evening.

Overall: many people right now are coping with extraordinarily challenging circumstances, and if you can handle caffeine or booze or sugar in moderation, then keep at it. But if you can find a way to cut one or more out, you’ll handle the other challenges better.

5. Rabbi Pesach Stadlin, blowing a flofar? A shlute??
OK: you made it this far. A final big big treat. We had more guests for #SoundTheCall then we were able to showcase, and one of them was Eden Village’s remarkable Rabbi Pesach Stadlin. If you made a list of the ten most inspiring people in the world, it would start with Greta Thunberg, Pesach and Yoni Stadlin, and then we could argue about the other seven. This was a video that Pesach made, in Israel, for #SoundTheCall. It is great and amazing and inspiring all the way through…. And then the coup de gras is him playing Nomi Shemer’s beautiful da lecha on a completely unique new musical instrument!!!!!

Click here to listen to Pesach…

So – huge thanks to everyone.
And I know, of course, and feel, that this is very hard. A friend’s sister died yesterday, at a young age, almost certainly from the virus. Another friend’s father is fighting for his life in the ICU. People have lost family members, or their jobs, or are coping with illness. It is scary and hard.

But this is why we have to have vision. It is why we have to give, as we can, and support those around us. It is why we have to work for a better world. And it is why we should celebrate both Shabbat, and the natural world.

Shabbat shalom,

Nigel

PS  And pencil in your calendar, three future dates that will educate, nourish, provoke and inspire…

This Sunday, May 3rd, 10:30am ET, my guests on After The Plague will be The Fabulous Passow Trio [which is what they’d be called if they were classical musicians] – Rabbi Dani Passow, Nati Passow, and Rabbi Shuli Passow.

Sunday, May 10th [back at our normal time of noon] my guests will be Rabbis Phyllis Berman and Arthur Waskow. 

Each of these five guests has their own unique take on the world and their own distinctive journeys, but they have in common (1) a strong and grounded sense of Jewishness and (2) a commitment to – and a track record of – taking that commitment out into the world in real and serious and important ways.

Finally, Friday, May 29th is chag hakatzir (the festival of reaping), aka yom habikkurim (the day of the first fruits) aka… the first day of Shavuot. From 1pm to 4pm PST – there’s going to be a very special celebration created together by Hazon, Pearlstone, Wilderness Torah, Urban Adamah, and friends, combining planet earth, Jewish teaching, wisdom to make the world better, and music. Mark your calendars now!

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