Jewish Groups Join Other Faiths in Partnership for Environment

Religious leaders are going green.” Together, they are working across denominational and ecumenical lines to give environmental concerns new priority.

Jewish groups, in concert with Catholic, Protestant and Evangelical organizations, are kicking off a three-year, $4 million effort designed to push ecology toward the top of their communities’ agendas.

The new interreligious coalition is being called the National Religious Partnership for the Environment and its goals are ambitious.

The partnership aims to educate and improve the behavior of congregations and congregants toward the ecology; to train clergy and laity in ways of mobilizing resources around environmental efforts; to generate theological study of the relevant issues; and to support public policy initiatives.

The Jewish partner in the group is an unusually broad interdenominational caucus called the Consultation on the Environment and Jewish Life.

Its members are the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council and the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center.

The partnership’s other members are the National Council of Churches, the U.S. Catholic Conference and the Evangelical Environmental Network.

Together, they will reach some 70,000 congregations and potentially hundreds of millions of congregants.

The Jewish perspective on the environment, which in some ways differs markedly from Christianity’s, will help inform the orientation and projects of the partnership.

Each of the three Jewish organizations participating in the group is using its particular niche in the Jewish world to promulgate the partnership’s agenda.

JTS will be exploring the theological and philosophical aspects of the religious community’s approach to environmentalism through a series of conferences now being organized, according to Steven Shaw, director of the seminary’s department of community education.

A conference involving theologians, scholars, philosophers and scientists, tentatively slated for 1994, will work to develop a philosophy on Judaism and the natural world, said Shaw, who is a naturalist by avocation and is the Conservative movement’s official liaison with the partnership.

Shaw, on behalf of the partnership, is also developing a regular seies of seminars for the benefit of the seminary faculties of each of the mainstream Jewish movements.

The seminars will likely be held six times a year, for two years, to develop curriculum materials about the environment based on Jewish sources.

It will be an “attempt to introduce the seminary deans and faculty to a field that most people in the Jewish world know nothing about,” said Shaw.

He is also planning a weeklong retreat on the environment for rabbis of all denominations for some time in 1994 or 1995.

And finally, regular in-service training seminars and retreats for Conservative rabbis and rabbinical students will now more intensively focus on environmental issues.

NJCRAC’s contribution to the partnership will be its ability to serve as a liaison between the religious and communal institutions of the Jewish world, particularly the community relations councils, in sensitizing them to the relevant issues.

NJCRAC may convene a series of regional consultations around the environmental agenda, according to Jerome Chanes, NJCRAC’s co-director for domestic concerns.

“The fact is that within the Jewish community to date, the environment has not been a priority issue,” said Chanes.

The environment is an issue perfectly suited to community relations work because it “is truly a universal issue, one which transcends public policy and religion,” he added.

The Reform movement’s Religious Action Center will be utilizing one of its greatest strengths — legislative advocacy — on behalf of the partnership.

“We want to take a more assertive position on environmental legislative issues,” said its director, Rabbi David Saperstein.

RAC will closely follow pertinent Congressional and administration efforts, and when legislation is coming up for a vote, will disseminate relevant material to Jewish and other partnership member agencies through NJCRAC.

RAC will also produce a manual instructing synagogues on how to program around environmental issues, said Saperstein.

This is an issue for activism through religious bodies because the environment “is a profoundly religious issue, and on such moral issues the religious community is looked to for guidance,” he said. “The voice of conscience of the interreligious community can have a profound effect on the debate.”

The partnership has been more than three years in the making. In 1989, as religious thinkers and leaders began discussing how they could uniquely contribute to the environmental cause, Carl Sagan and 34 other prominent scientists sent a letter to hundreds of religious leaders of all faiths asking them to rally around the issue.

Late in 1990, Sen. Al Gore, now the vice president-elect, helped organize a meeting of religious leaders, scientists and senators in Washington, a gathering that gave birth to a new group, the Joint Appeal By Religion and Science for the Environment.

The following June, Jewish religious leaders, from Orthodox to Reconstructionist, gathered with Christian representatives to be briefed by leading scientists on the state of the environment.

Together, they founded a series of initiatives by religious organizations, which led to a consultation of Jewish religious, communal and political leaders in Washington in March 1992.

And in May, an invitation from Gore and a bipartisan committee brought 75 religious leaders and 50 scientists to Washington to testify before Congress and brief politicians.

There, the participants decided to form the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, which still has the enthusiastic support of vice president- elect Gore, according to Paul Gorman, director of the partnership.

Gorman is working out of New York’s Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine to raise the $4 million budget required by the three-year initial plan.

The only financial commitment that has been secured so far has come from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, a leader in Jewish causes, which has already supplied $215,000 to the effort to date, and recently granted the partnership an award of $300,000 over the next three years.