A Tree Evangelist Who Connects Heaven and Earth

By Beth Schwartzapfel for The Jewish Daily Forward

During a Sabbath evening service one Friday in February, Seth Goldstein and his 9-year-old son, Ozi, sat with their eyes closed in the synagogue in Olympia, Wash., where Goldstein is the rabbi. From the bimah, Nalini Nadkarni asked congregants to imagine a tree that was important to them. She described the maple trees that had lined the driveway of her childhood home. Amid the confusion of growing up, they had been a refuge. She would climb their limbs with a book and a snack, and spend entire afternoons up in the air.

Getting Rooted: Nalini Nadkarni, a forest ecologist and professor, speaks at synagogues, church- es and Buddhist temples about science, spirituality and a special love of trees.

Getting Rooted: Nalini Nadkarni, a forest ecologist and professor, speaks at synagogues, church- es and Buddhist temples about science, spirituality and a special love of trees.

Nadkarni isn’t a rabbi. She isn’t a member of this congregation, Temple Beth Hatfiloh. She doesn’t practice any religion at all, actually. She is a forest ecologist and professor at the nearby Evergreen State College.

But Nadkarni loves trees with an almost religious zeal, and after more than three decades of meticulous scientific research, she told the congregation, she has come to realize that science is not enough to safeguard trees.

“I care deeply about trees with my heart,” she said. “More and more, I am interested in protecting them, perhaps because I remember their protection of me as a child. So I initiate discussions about trees whenever and wherever I can. I find places of worship help me learn and teach about [them].”

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This Week in Jewish Farming: Season of abundance

By Ben Harris for Telegraph

Apparently, I jumped the gun.

Last week, I was waxing poetic about how safe and sound I feel with the winter squash tucked away in the greenhouse. That was then the greenhouse looked like this:




Now, it looks like this:


Tis the season of abundance. The fall crops are in – in our case thousands of pounds of winter squash, hundreds of pounds of potatoes and a modest haul of onions. The fading summer crops briefly overlap with fall ones, producing a goldmine of culinary possibility. Most Americans don’t regard the availability of butternut squash and juicy tomatoes at the same time as much of an achievement. But for the seasonal eater, this is really a special moment.

Like all good things, this one won’t last. Before the month is out, the last of those summer crops will be spent and we’ll be in full-on fall mode, with cold hardy plants and storage crops all that we have to draw on. Of course, this fills me with all kinds of anxiety, a condition exacerbated last week when I went to water in some seeds only to find the well had run dry.

I’m told this has been an unusually dry summer in Connecticut. I wouldn’t know, because before this season I never paid much attention to such things. But I do know our beds are so parched right now it’s impossible even to till them without watering them first – let alone seed radish or arugula that need to be kept consistently wet for days until germination. Problem is, there just isn’t any water.

Our well is shallow, just 17 feet deep, and as predicted by the well specialist I consulted in the spring, it has run out. So we’re left with the house well — a much larger reservoir but one we are allowed to use only about an hour a day. We now have hoses run across 400 feet of pasture and use a spray nozzle to water. It’s not a very sophisticated operation, and it hardly feels abundant, but right now it’s all that stands between me and multiple crop failures.


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A shmita year: Why we need to ‘give it a rest’ in 5775

by dan pine, j. staff


Adam Berman is about to give his Berkeley farmland a break.

Rye and other cover crops that have been planted at Urban Adamah, the nonprofit Jewish educational farm he directs, will draw nitrogen out of the atmosphere over the winter and return it to the soil, rejuvenating it.

The timing is not coincidental. Shmita — a Torah commandment that requires croplands in Israel to lie fallow every seventh year (shmita means “release” in Hebrew) — begins on Rosh Hashanah, at sundown on Wednesday, Sept. 24.

coverSept19_2014Besides resting the land, Jews may not eat anything sown or grown in Israel during the shmita year. They may eat only from perennial plants or wild edibles — though anyone may take crops growing untended on private lands. Also, personal debts must be forgiven if the debtor so requests.

This is how shmita has been observed for centuries by observant Jews in the Holy Land. When it comes to agriculture, property and social inequality, shmita provides the ultimate clean slate.

“Shmita is the most economically, environmentally and socially radical idea in the Torah, hands down,” Berman said.

This year, there is a concerted effort in some circles to extend the principles of shmita beyond the letter of the law. Metaphorically, Jews are finding new ways to embrace the idea of lying fallow.

“Shmita is a comment on what society should look like,” Berman said. “If we took it literally and applied it in a meaningful way to the nonagrarian society we now inhabit, it would have profound impact.”

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In the California Desert, Wilderness Torah Takes Judaism Back to Nature

Founder Zelig Golden, an environmental lawyer turned rabbi-in-training, tries ‘to reconnect the Jewish people’ to the earth

By Merissa Nathan Gerson for Tablet Magazine

Shortly after he finished law school in 2007, Zelig Golden went on a “vision quest” in California’s White Mountains with Rites of Passage. Although it was “a religiously universal program,” Golden said, he had “what turned out to be a very powerful Jewish experience.”

It began as a 10-day group trip in the wilderness, at an altitude of 10,000 feet in the high desert, but the focus was on preparing for three days and nights Golden would spend alone afterward. “I was guided to go spend three days and three nights fasting and praying,” he recalled. He intended to reevaluate his “work in the world” because he’d decided that being an environmental lawyer wasn’t satisfying enough. “I came back with a very simple vision,” he said. “I wanted to connect my people to the earth.”

By “my people,” Golden meant the Jews. Two and a half months later, he turned his vision into reality, organizing the first “Sukkot on the Farm” in Dixon, Calif. “It was a little festival,” he said, “not so organized but well-intentioned.” A small, informal group of Bay Area Jews camped out at the edge of a vegetable field, where they prayed, built a sukkah, learned Torah, and toured the farm. Out of this festival, Wilderness Torah was eventually born—a Berkeley-based group Golden calls “a manifestation of this vision to reconnect the Jewish people to this thing we were once deeply connected to.”

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