Holiday Feature After 25 Years of Effort, Green Synagogues Blossom

When Rabbi Leah Lewis conducts the Tu B’Shevat seder at Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles this year, congregants will learn about the special qualities of figs, olives and walnuts. They will also learn about the Jewish mandate to be stewards of the earth and, in a departure from previous seders, stewards of their own synagogue. “People are ready for it,” said Lewis, explaining that in only four months the Reform temple, with 710 family units, has created a 10-member Green Team and scheduled an environmental audit to evaluate energy-saving opportunities.

Tu B’Shevat, literally the 15th day of the month of Shevat, which begins at sundown on Feb. 12, is known as the New Year of the Trees. A minor holiday with no prescribed mitzvot, it is often celebrated by planting trees locally or in Israel or by participating in a seder. But more recently it has become a Jewish Earth Day, concentrating on the physical benefits of installing energy-efficient light bulbs, planting native, sustainable landscaping and setting up recycling bins.

Making synagogues eco-friendly, or green, can be traced back to November 1978 when Rabbi Everett Gendler, the father of Jewish environmentalism, climbed on the icy roof of Temple Emanuel in Lowell, Mass., to install solar panels to fuel the ner tamid, or eternal light, in the temple’s sanctuary.

“We plugged it almost directly into the sun,” said Gendler, now the temple’s rabbi emeritus.

After that, a few individual synagogues worked to make their buildings ecologically responsible. Temple Emanuel, a Reform synagogue in Kensington, Md., has been at the environmental forefront since 1989. But in general, Jewish ecological efforts were sparse until after the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also known as Earth Summit.

The following year, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life was created to carry out a Jewish response to the environmental crisis. Recently, the coalition embarked on a Greening Synagogues program in conjunction with GreenFaith, New Jersey’s interfaith environmental coalition.

It launched its pilot program in 2004 with four New Jersey synagogues representing the demoninational spectrum — Congregation Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange, Bnai Keshet in Montclair, Kesher Community Synagogue of Tenafly and Englewood, and Congregation Agudath Israel in Caldwell — offering a menu of options in the areas of facilities management, education and worship, and environmental justice and advocacy.

At Agudath Israel, there are now 45 committed Green Team members, according to the program’s director, Randi Brokman. The synagogue is planning to rebuild, breaking ground next June and incorporating many energy-saving plans. In the meantime, the membership has managed to reduce disposable waste by 30 percent to 50 percent.

“We have put environmental issues more in the consciousness of congregants. That’s the goal,” Brokman said.

And that’s the coalition’s initial goal also. “But ultimately we want this to filter down into homes,” Barbara Lerman-Golomb, the coalition’s associate executive director, said. “We want this to become second nature to anyone involved in the project, to feel that it’s the ethical, moral and Jewish thing to do.”

That’s also the goal for CoejlSC, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life of Southern California, an independent affiliate of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life. Founded in 1999, the California coalition began its own Green Sanctuaries program around 2001, in conjunction with the Interfaith Environmental Council and 16 pilot congregations, more than half of them Jewish.

Many Jewish texts advocate stewardship of the environment, stemming from the concept of bal taschit, which cautions against waste. This first appears in Deuteronomy 20:19, which prohibits the destruction of fruit trees in wartime.

For many synagogues, greening is not just about fulfilling a spiritual mandate: It is also about savings. Lee Wallach, cofounder of the California coalition, said that, depending on size and building usage, a synagogue can save up to $40,000.

At Congregation Ahavath Beth Israel in Boise, Idaho, it is Rabbi Dan Fink who “nags” his congregants into ecological awareness.

Under the leadership of Fink, who is also the co-author of “Let the Earth Teach You Torah,” Ahavath Beth Israel took recycling to an extreme when it relocated its entire building. Needing a larger facility and grounds for its 190-family Reform congregation but not wanting to relinquish its 108-year-old Moorish-style landmark synagogue, it had the 60-ton building hoisted on a flatbed truck in 2003 and moved three miles to the new site. In addition to preserving the building and its materials, Fink said, they redid the “entire infrastructure of the old building so we now have much more energy-efficient heating, cooling and lighting.”

For Orthodox synagogues, environmental activism is still new. Canfei Nesharim (the wings of eagles), the first and so far only Orthodox environmental organization, was launched on Tu B’Shevat 2003.

While still at the concept stage, according to the organization’s executive director, Evonne Marzouk, the volunteer organization is dedicated to educating the Orthodox community about protecting the environment from a halachic perspective. The organization recently published “Compendium of Sources in Halacha and the Environment,” and is discovering what Marzouk calls “a great response.”

But perhaps the most compelling argument for preserving the environment, quoted by Marzouk and others, is a Midrash in Ecclesiastes Rabbah (7:13). When God first created human beings, He showed them around the Garden of Eden and then warned, “Take care not to corrupt and destroy my world, for if you do, there will be no one to repair it after you.”