Focus on Issues: Jewish Environmental Activism Grows with Coejl’s Inspiration

In the middle of the March 1992 Consultation on the Environment and Jewish Life, then-Sen. Al Gore had to leave the conference to vote on the Senate floor.

The next time Paul Gorman saw the legislator, he was running down the hall, returning to the conference.

“Is it over, is he still speaking?” Gore asked Gorman about Rabbi Saul Berman, a professor at Stern College in New York.

“It was pretty interesting to see a Southern Baptist running down the hall to hear what an Orthodox Jewish professor had to say,” said Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, the interfaith group that was born out of the consultation.

But “people are either running down the halls or at least sitting up straighter in their chairs” when it comes to the alliance between religion and the environment, Gorman added.

As proof, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, created in 1993 under the mandate of the 1992 consultation, recently received a new grant to continue operation for a second three-year term. COEJL is the Jewish partner in the larger umbrella Gorman heads.

“The continued funding of COEJL is good evidence that major funders appreciate the progress that we have registered,” said Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary and a member of COEJL’s board of advisors.

“COEJL is the gem of the Jewish community right now,” said Matt Biers-Ariel, director of high school programs for the Agency for Jewish Education in Oakland, Calif.

“It’s the clearinghouse for all Jewish environmental programming,” he added.

COEJL, which intertwines religious values, spirituality, science, public policy and community-building, was established as a member of the interfaith umbrella group.

“The partnership as a whole has become an important player in the national environmental movement, bringing a distinctive message about environmental issues and about the relationship between environmental sustainability and social justice,” said Mark Jacobs, project coordinator for COEJL.

Over the next three years COEJL aims “to create a group of leaders who can carry the vision and agenda of Jewish environmentalism forward into the next century and to establish in the institutions of American Jewish life a permanent commitment to environmental education and action,” he said.

“It’s a little ambitious, but that’s what we’re about.”

COEJL itself is an umbrella group for 23 national Jewish organizations, including the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

Through outreach, education, leadership and policy development and scholarship, COEJL has established a permanent foundation for Jewish involvement in environmental awareness and has chipped away at the image of Jews as strictly an urban people.

“People would always say to me `Jews are urban people, they’re not connected to the wilderness, they don’t leave the city,” said Gorman. “I’m glad Moses didn’t say that.”

Rabbi Steve Shaw, director of the Department of Community Education at JTS, said while Jews, exiled from their land, have become an urban people, their traditions are founded on God’s creation.

“Our holidays are rooted in the agricultural cycle,” he said. “They’ve taken on a kind of symbolic meaning for us and it’s important to recover what they originally represented.”

To this end, COEJL has distributed to 2,500 synagogues, schools, Jewish community centers and other Jewish organizations a 122-page program manual, “To Till and To Tend: A Guide to Jewish Environmental Study and Action.”

The coalition has also organized leadership retreats for Jewish environmental educators and activists and, through the Religious Action Center, has testified before congressional committees.

COEJL maintains a legislative advocacy network, which sends action alerts and legislative updates to more than 1,000 registered organizations and individuals. Jacobs said that he hopes to have some 2,500 names on the mailing list by the end of COEJL’s sixth year.

“They have a lot of good resources and a sounding board relating to what I was looking to do,” said Sue Spector, a free-lance Jewish educator and former director of the Jewish Community High School in Akron, Ohio.

Spector will be creating and coordinating programming in the area of Jewish environmentalism and ethics for schools that do not have the resources or the staff.

“I think the problem is always how to get the community at large, that these concerns should be a part of their lives,” she said. “COEJL are good instigators.”

Over the next three years, COEJL plans to establish an online communications system, advance Jewish academic environmental writing and launch an annual campaign linked to a specific area of Jewish life, such as a holiday or ethical principal, said Michal Smart, COEJL’s director of education.

COEJL is also developing pilot programs such as Yitziah: Jewish Wilderness Journeys, co-sponsored by North Carolina Outward Bound. The program, which targets young adults, combines outdoor experiences such as hiking and backpacking with Jewish education. Such programs “build more of a personal relationship with the natural world, with God’s creation,” Smart said.

Spector and Biers-Ariel have also planned their own wilderness trips for their students.

“For many students, their connection with something bigger than themselves does not take place in a traditional setting, like synagogue, but it does happen in the outdoors,” said Biers-Ariel, who received a COEJL grant to hold a day-long conference on spirituality, ecology and social justice.

“We made a mid-course change of direction that I think both Mark and Michal embody, which was to work with younger people who had a generational connection to these issues,” said Gorman.

“I really see this being carried by younger people and I am beginning to hear more excitement from some of the senior people in the institutions.”

In fact, the UJA-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies in New York has given COEJL a $40,000 continuity grant to launch the Yitziah program.

“That’s mainstream funding recognizing that this is a new area of programmatic initiative,” said Gorman.

The alliance between religion and the environment is “on its way to being an extremely surprising source of renewal for Jewish life.”