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August 15, 2003/Av 17 5763, Vol. 55, No. 51
Remain bound to the earth
FLORENCE ECKSTEIN
Publisher
Genesis relates that at the time of creation, God appointed human beings as guardians of the earth. Jewish religious texts are replete with teachings about protecting and preserving, tilling and tending the natural world. The Israelites' primal ties were to the land that sustained them.
We have moved far, far away from the commitment of our ancient ancestors - morphing from the people of the earth, to the people of the book, to the people of the SUV. For centuries we have used, abused and neglected our world, tearing down forests, paving deserts, dumping waste in oceans, depleting soils, polluting the air we breathe.
"The quality of urban air compared to the air in the deserts and forests," wrote Moses Maimonides in the 12th century, "is like thick and turbulent water compared to pure and light water."
A decade ago, the American Jewish community began responding to the escalating ecological crisis. The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL), founded by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (then NJCRAC), the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and endorsed by 26 other national organizations, has worked since 1993 to engage organizations and individuals to "integrate Jewish values of environmental stewardship into Jewish life."
This spring, COEJL adopted an Environmental Policy Platform. Core principles address stewardship of ecological systems, responsibility to future generations, U.S. energy independence, governmental compliance, moral leadership and other essential concepts.
Thirteen COEJL chapters and numerous affiliates, in 28 states and Canada, work with synagogues, community centers, organizations and individuals in environmental efforts. Our neighboring city of Tucson boasts a COEJL chapter, but Phoenix - touted as the Southwest's leading Jewish community - is conspicuously absent from the list. Meanwhile, we blade the desert to build homes, bury life-sustaining soil under heat-radiating concrete, squander precious water to green golf courses and fill swimming pools, defile the air with auto exhaust, and obscure views of the heavenly stars with light pollution.
Surely it's time to deal with how our individual and communal behavior damages the earth entrusted to our care, and to identify Jewishly what we can do - within our homes, our institutions and our community - to supplant ignorance with knowledge and misuse with responsible behavior.
Annual Mitzvah Day trail cleanups and Tu B'Shevat tree plantings are not enough. They're hardly a beginning. Environmental responsibility demands daily diligence.
If the leading Jewish community in the Southwest needs impetus for garnering political will and leadership to begin this life-sustaining work, it need look no further than the creation story in Genesis.
Contact the writer at flo_eckstein@jewishaz.com. Information on COEJL is available at www.coejl.org.
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