With all due respect to Kermit, but sometimes, it's fairly easy to be green especially if you're a magazine looking to tackle issues. Back in April, PresenTense (for which I am senior editor) published an unintentional green issue, focusing
on efforts to re-green Israel in the aftermath of the second Lebanon war. In July/August,
American Jewish Life had their Green Issue, noting that "in the age of global warming, melting ice caps and gluttonous over-consumption, we present the AJL list of people, places and ideas that are saving Planet Earth."
Moment's green moment came in August/September, with "Why a Green World is Safer for Jews and Everyone Else."
While a magazine can declare itself eco-friendly, certain other Jewish institutions have a harder time. The Forward (and several other publications) reported that PETA (whose acronym sounds like it would be good with hummus but is really the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is in a tizzy over the treatment of chickens used during the kapparot ritual, a seemingly wacky holdover from the days when people didn't think twice about metzitzah (a circumcision ritual that many modern Jews and non-Jews find repugnant) or even before. Kapparot involves identifying a poor unassuming chicken as the bearer of our sins=97we symbolically remove those sins from our lives by swinging it around our heads three times, saying an incantation and then lopping off its head, presumably, along with our sins... (What, us? Pagan? Nah.) But if the animal is mistreated during the process and what self-respecting chicken wouldn't suffer during this experiment with centrifugal force isn't that a sin? And is there some inconsistency in committing a sin while performing a ritual designed to remove that sin?
While we're removing sin and talking ethical eco-Judaism, we should really discuss a recent announcement by Hazon's Nigel Savage (yes, that's really his surname), who's going to have a goat ritually slaughtered at the next Hazon food conference.
According to the Jewish Week report:
The Torah and Talmud reflect people who lived on and cared for the land. As modernists, "we've been cut off from that," says Savage. We think meat's natural state is plastic-wrapped in a grocer's freezer. We don't think about the animals who give their lives for our meals. That's why Savage likes to talk about the azazel, the biblical scapegoat that is the theme of the Yom Kippur Torah reading. The reference should make us aware, he says. And that's why Savage will have a goat slaughtered at Hazon's second food conference at the upstate Isabella Freeedman Jewish Retreat Center in December. The shechting will force the conference participants to confront an animal's reality, he says.
These kinds of callbacks to the repentance ceremonies of our ancestors are very rich symbolically even graphic, one could say. But are they necessary for us to teach a connection between ourselves, our actions, and our environment? Maybe we should all just do penance through tashlich; assigning our sins to a piece of bread and chucking them into a river, watching as they float down the river and out of our lives seems much more resonant, and doesn't hurt anyone. I think this ritual is one we can all embrace. At least until someone founds the People for the Ethical Treatment of Carbohydrates.
