By Rabbi Yedidya Sinclair

Last week’s conference on world religions and climate change sponsored by the UN and ARC was an extraordinary event. You can read about it here, here and here. The gathering together of religious leaders and environmental heroes was unprecedented. So was the strong acknowledgement of the world’s religions’ critical role in confronting climate change, from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon.

(And so, for that matter, was my sitting next to his wife at dinner last Monday night and giving her a virtual tour of Israel on the cover of a box of Elite chocolates from the Ben Gurion airport gift shop. But that’s a story for another blog.)

One of my favorite moments came when I was nearly stoned by the organizers (in a very polite and English way) for reckless and irresponsible davening.  They had asked me in advance to give a short prayer at the end of one of the sessions. I had thought hard about what to offer. I don’t believe in making up new-fangled prayers, but wanted to do something that would resonate across the plethora of spiritual traditions present.

Eventually I remembered the talk that R. Dov Berkowitz gave at the Vayehi Or conference in Jerusalem back in April. R. Dov argued that for 3000 years and more, the Land of Israel has stood poised between the desert and the availability of water. With no great river running through the land we have no choice but to turn to Divine Providence for rainfall, fertility and blessing. In 2009, with encroaching drought and desertification, many other countries are in this position (One of the African delegates at Windsor pointed out that 10 month old babies in his country have never seen rain.) Today the whole world is the Holy Land. Except perhaps for England…

So I got up at the Windsor conference, quoted R. Berkowitz’s idea in his name and announced my intention therefore to read the traditional Jewish prayer for rain said on Shemini Atzeret, with kavvanah not just for the Land of Israel but for the whole Earth. The Conference chair clutched his head in alarm. For this was moments before we were due to process through the streets of Windsor to the Castle, in our ceremonial religious gladrags behind banners and a marching band. It had poured with rain all night but now the sun was peeping through heavy grey clouds. And here was I, literally asking God to rain on the parade.

Undeterred, I read the simple but powerful words: “

For you are God who makes the wind to blow and the rain to fall.
For a blessing, not for a curse.
For life and not for death.
For plenty and not for scarcity.

Then I sang the Vorker niggun that accompanies the prayer in many Israeli shuls and the other Jews present joined in. Delegates from drought-wracked Asian and African countries said they joined in silently with the prayer.  Before concluding, I added “and let’s hope it stays fine here for another half an hour.”

We trooped out into the street, resplendent in our sky blue caftans and saris, saffron and orange turbans, austere black canonicals and burgundy tunics. The Jewish Renewal crew did us proud, draped in their rainbow-colored  tallitot. The press snapped happily, tourists gawped with delight and killjoy clouds gathered menacingly overhead.  Over the moat and drawbridge, through the hulking Norman portcullis of Windsor Castle beneath the Disneyesque towers and turrets (no fairy tale, I’m sure, for would-be invaders 900 years ago) and in through the massive oak doors of the State Apartments.

Scarcely was the last robe and mitre safely inside when it began to rain. This ensured me a certain Honi Ha’ma’agel-like fame for the rest of the conference. The UK head of the World Wildlife Fund admonished me that I really should have asked for 45 minutes leeway, just to be on the safe side.

Of course, it doesn’t take a miracle for rain to fall on England in November. But it does seem like a miracle that such a group came together to pray, act and speak out for wise and responsible steps to avert climate change and ecological crisis. It seems like a miracle that a thoroughly secular outfit like the UN recognized their indispensable role. It seems like a miracle that just now, when the world’s need is greatest, religions are waking up as one to their ancient teachings on conserving the Earth and their this-moment imperative to act on them. Let us join in the miracle and pray and act together.

Sign the Pledge: www,JewishClimateCampaign.org

Shalom Climate of Change Readers,

In honor of this past week’s Blog Action Day, dedicated to the fight against climate change, we’d like to report to you on the Seven Year Jewish Climate Campaign.

We first mentioned the campaign following JCI’s Vayehi Or event in April. Since then and with help and ideas from many of you and fellow Jewish environmentalists and leaders from Israel and abroad, we have developed The Plan and are now gearing up to bring the campaign to the global Jewish community. The official launch date is this coming Monday, the 18th of October, in honor of Climate Healing Shabbat, November’s gathering at Windsor Castle, and the upcoming Copenhagen Conference in December.

The aim of the Jewish Climate Change Campaign is to engage the entire Jewish community towards taking action on climate change. In doing so we will be joining a global movement of 12 world faiths, each launching plans of their own. We invite you to head to http://JewishClimateCampaign.org/, to sign the pledge and join the campaign, and to offer any further suggestions as to the content of the plan and its recommendations.

The core of the campaign is as follows:

• Making it clear that Jewish people care strongly about these issues. We will be presenting the campaign and the number of signatories at Windsor Castle, to the Secretary General of the United Nations, the British royal family and religious and environmental leaders from around the world;
• Making changes in our own lives – and inviting our friends to do likewise.  The pledge commits you to learn, to speak-up, and to change at least one of your actions for good. It could be to eat more local food, or to use your bike or public transportation more, or insulate your home, or get a more fuel efficient car – but we hope you’ll make your own changes now and in 2010;
• Creating a long-term process for serious change in Jewish institutions. We’re calling on every Jewish institution – school, synagogue, JCC, camp – to set up a Green Team, and start working on a multi-year plan to green itself. It’s good for the world, good for the institution and good for the Jews. If you’re the head of a Jewish institution, we invite you formally to have your organization become an organizational partner -  http://jewishclimatecampaign.org/joinUs.php – and if you know someone who heads a Jewish institution, please send this to them and invite them to sign as an individual, and have their institution become a Partner.
• Introducing the Jewish world to a wide range of resources on the interface between Judaism, Climate Change and Sustainability. The website contains lots of information – and links to other Jewish environmental organizations that have further resources.

We look forward to continuing to work together in rising, as a People, to the challenge of climate change.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Sinclair, Yannai and the JCI/Climate of Change Team

To sign the pledge and pass it on to your friends: http://jewishclimatecampaign.org/pledge.php
If you have any questions, email climate@hazon.org.
If you’re the head of a Jewish organization – or know someone who is – please ask them to become an Organizational Partner. Info at http://jewishclimatecampaign.org/joinUs.php

Sign the Pledge: www.JewishClimateCampaign.org

By Yannai Kranzler

How would you respond to sitting on an airplane, digging into the seat pocket in front of you, to discover that your complementary in-flight magazine was dedicated to caring for the environment?

Would you be thankful? Hopeful? Would you laugh? Would you sigh and say, “Well, I’m the one paying them to emit Carbon Dioxide- it’s very courteous of them to make an effort?” Or would you say, “This is, like, over-the-top obnoxious- is it possible to get more cynical than an airliner claiming to be a part of “The Eco-Movement?”

I ask because I found myself in this situation a few weeks ago, on my Continental flight from Pittsburgh to New York. Continental, it seems, has gone green, titling the September issue of Continental Magazine “True Green,” dedicating it to “People, Places and Products Driving the Eco-Movement,” including in it many references to Continental’s environmental accomplishments. I didn’t quite know how to react to this.

Now I didn’t say that I don’t believe Larry Kellner, Chairman and CEO of Continental Airlines when he lists the company’s “Commitment to environmental responsibility” as a reason to fly Continental, but… well would you believe him?

Here’s the fun thing: Even if we don’t believe him, even if we think the whole thing completely outrageous, there’s something subtle, but important going on:

If I learned one thing in Community Based Social Marketing class, it’s that the most assured way for people to change their attitudes is for them to change their behavior, even just a little bit, and to publicly commit to sustaining those changes. Whether Continental is wholeheartedly pursuing green measures for the betterment of the world or playing lip service to the trendiness of being green, the fact that they’ve publicly committed themselves to the cause will likely impact their decisions in the future.

In Jewish tradition, we believe that Acharei Hapeulot, Nimshechot Halevavot, that “Our hearts follow our actions.” If I’m not feeling close to my community, my tradition tells me to go out and do something for the community. If I don’t care for the poor, I’m to give to the poor. We’re even commanded to help our enemies with the heavy loads they carry on their backs.

Our whole religious system, in fact, is based on action, or Halakhot. I’m not asked to fervently believe until I taste being immersed in action. As CBSM contends, I’m likely to feel connected to my community, compassionate on the poor, and to favor reconciliation with foes, when I pursue actions that connect me with them. Could there be a better way to make peace than to help my enemy carry his load?

Ultimately, it won’t make a difference if Mr. Kellner is an environmentalist stuck in the wrong business or a good businessman in a world of environmentalists. Save actually going green, which in Mr. Kellner’s business might mean finding another job, publicly committing to the environment is probably the greenest thing he could have done.

All we need to do is to hold him to his commitment.

In all fairness to Continental, it seems they have made real efforts to maximize their fleets’ fuel economy, and now run planes that are 35% more fuel efficient than the ones they used in 1997. For more on Continental’s environmental policy, see http://www.continental.com/web/en-US/content/company/globalcitizenship/environment.aspx

Sign the Pledge: www.JewishClimateCampaign.org

By Rabbi Julian Sinclair

Sukkot has a special connection to rain. The Talmud (Rosh Hoshanah 16a) says that on Sukkot, we are judged for the rainfall we will receive in the coming year. On Shemini Atzeret, the final day of the holiday, we begin to say Mashiv Ha’Ruach u’morid Hagashem, in the Amidah prayer, invoking God as the One who brings rainfall, at the start of the wet season in the Land of Israel.

It can seem strange to be saying these words outside Israel, in climates where we are not so aware of the shift into a rainy season. In many regions it rains year round. Why do we connect ourselves to the climate rhythms of the Land of Israel thousands of miles away?

There are many places in the world today that do not have the luxury of being able to debate whether climate change is a mere theory or a proven fact. For Inuit Eskimos, subsistence farmers in Mali, or peasants in the Himalayas, climate change is not a scientific hypothesis but their everyday lived experience. They see their habitats disappearing, experience longer and more severe droughts and see with their own eyes how much the glaciers have receded.

To these groups we should now add inhabitants of the Land of Israel. In Israel people have always been acutely aware of rainfall. It is a necessity of life. Over each of the past five years rainfall in Israel has been significantly below average. In the past two years it was 30-35% below average, resulting in a severe and worsening water crisis. It is becoming clear that this is not a blip but a trend. It is a trend in line with climate change scientific predictions for the Middle East.

Sukkot is a holiday of trust in the seasons. We live outside in booths, in celebration of the fall harvest and in touch with the beauty of the natural world. The sukkah is a temporary dwelling, exposed to the elements. It is fragile—at any moment the natural world could turn on us and knock our it down. But this is also a source of joy. The very fragility of the Sukkah causes us to turn to God in gratitude for the embracing protection of the regular, natural order of things.

It is on Sukkot, as we leave our homes and put our trust the weather, that we are likely to see the effects of climate change around us. Are there plants growing in your neighborhood that you have never seen before? Did you get more rain than you expected, or none at all?  When you compliment the unseasonably warm weather, does it click in the back of your mind that perhaps it should have started to turn to fall now?

For most of our lives we are not sufficiently tuned in to our surroundings to notice these subtle changes.  Our solid suburban homes shield us from much awareness of the nuances of nature.  But on Sukkot, we may be able to notice the signs that are pointing to a changing planet and arouse ourselves to play our role in addressing the problem. ((with thanks to Rachel Kahn Troster for her formulation of this thought.)

In America the most of the urban and suburban Jewish community are not yet feeling the effects of climate change. Our brothers and sisters in Israel probably are. When we say Mashiv Haruach, we align our existence with their’s. We acknowledge the critical importance of rain for life there. We sensitize ourselves to the life-threatening consequences of upsetting the planet’s delicate climate balance. And we may be aroused to joy, love and action to help protect this fragile miracle.

Hag Sameakh!

Sign the Pledge: The Jewish Climate Campaign

By Rabbi Julian Sinclair

The Power of One

On Yom Kippur we examine our actions.  The scrupulous review of our deeds that the day calls for teaches us that everything we do, however small it may seem matters a great deal, often far more than we can even imagine.

Maimonides writes in The Laws of Teshuvah:

Therefore a person should see himself throughout the year as if his life is half good and half bad and likewise see the whole world equally poised in the same way.  One bad deed can tip himself and the whole world towards destruction. One good deed can tip himself and the whole world towards salvation….therefore all Jews have the custom of doing as much Tzdakah and as many Mitzvot as possible between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.”
Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 3:4.

Global climate change is caused by billions of everyday actions of hundred of millions of people. It is so tempting to say, “what difference will it make if I change my lightbulbs/drive a Prius/….I’m only an infinitesimal part of the problem.  My actions won’t make a difference.”

Billions of people telling themselves this are tipping the world towards destruction.  The power of Teshuvah is the power of one; the knowledge that each of our lives and our deeds matter and can have incalculable significance.

Sir John Houghton, one of the world’s leading climate scientists put it very beautifully when I asked him why individuals should feel that their puny actions can  make a difference to the climate:

First Sir John quoted Edmund Burke, the British Enlightenment thinker who declared: “No man ever made a greater error than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.” Then after a moment’s reflection he added,

“But I think there’s a deeper answer than Burke’s. You know, I live overlooking the estuary of the river Dovey. Once a year, the sky above my house becomes a staging post for migrating starling. They create the most spectacular formations, tens of thousands of them, banking ,wheeling, whirling, swirling around a vortex , and separating and regathering while replicating the same order; I don’t think anyone really understands how they do it; certainly not the starlings themselves, yet out of the actions of all of those many individual birds come coherent and beautiful patterns of organization. We’re like that too, though mostly we don’t realize it; we view our acts and choice as individuals as if we lived in a vacuum, we don’t understand how we are participating in much larger social organisms.”

Yom Kippur is the time to make a commitment to small but real changes. When each of us decides that we are going to make changes and walk more gently on the planet –  we start to tip the world in the direction of salvation.

Jonah and Loving a Tree

At Minchah on Yom Kippur we read the book of Jonah. It marks a shift in the day from a mood of solemnity towards mercy and also from Jewish particularism towards universalism.

God tells Jonah that He will bring destruction on the city of Nineveh and commands Jonah to prophesy to Nineveh to change its ways. Jonah refuses to accept the task and flees from God.  God catches up with him, Jonah prophesies to Nineveh and the city repents and is saved. At the end of the book Jonah is still resentful. God sends him a Kikayon tree and Jonah gratefully enjoys its shade. The tree dies and Jonah is very aggrieved.  To which God says:

You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow; and should not I care about Nineveh, that great city…” Jonah 4: 10-11.

Many of us switch off and close down when we hear prophecies of impending climate change destruction. They may be scientifically well-grounded, but apocalypticism can be paralyzing. Like Jonah, we turn away and try not to listen.  It is often a tree that we love, a landscape, a beautiful butterfly which is endangered that awaken in us an inkling of how much God loves creation and arouse us too to have compassion for the world.  The inspiration we need to make the changes we must, need not come not from fear but can well up from love and gratitude.

gmar hatimah tovah.
Sign the pledge: www.JewishClimateCampaign.org

By Rabbi Julian Sinclair

A couple of years after former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach founded  ActNow, a sustainable business consultancy, he signed up Walmart as a client. This brought Werbach considerable notoriety in eco-activist circles. Walmart’s record of

Adam Werbach, Global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S

environmental responsibility had previously been spotty, to put it mildly. Werbach retorted to his critics that Walmart, with almost two million employees and 127 million customer visits per week, had the potential to do far more to save the world than the Sierra Club ever had.

I had the opportunity to visit Werbach’s company (now named Saatchi S) in San Francisco, and attend a staff meeting. The participants sat on the floor and passed around a plate of organic banana bread. Yet despite the trappings of informality, the conversation had a focus, drive and ingenuity about it that I had rarely experienced in the non-profit world.  The Saatchi staff certainly looked like the young, idealistic types whom I knew from environmental NGOs. But dropping a profit incentive into the motivational mix seemed to release a different level of creative zing.

Subsequent encounters with other leaders of cutting edge green companies strengthened this sense of the potency in marrying idealism with the scale and dynamism of the business world. Jonathan Rose, CEO of a large US sustainable urban development consultancy, Arnold Goldman founder of Brightsource Energy and Yosef Abramowitz of the Arava Power Company all combine strong ethical vision with a rigorous ambition to build successful businesses that will help solve large, real-world challenges.

Two valuable recent books have helped expand and sharpen my understanding of the potential for green business to do good while doing well – and also its limitations.

First the ‘Harvard Business Review on Green Business Strategy’ brings together the best articles on the subject from HBR’s archives over the past decade. They cover areas from “What Every Executive Needs to Know About Global Warming” through analyses of developments in green building and international sustainable business strategy to “How to Maintain Competitive Advantage on a Warming Planet.”

The essays concisely survey the main areas of impact and opportunity with which climate change confronts business, including dealing with regulatory policies frameworks (e.g. cap and trade), developing climate friendly products and technologies, reputational factors, impacts on the company’s supply chain and liability to litigation or to direct physical damage.

Several of the authors confront the issue of greenwashing versus real change, coming down unanimously in favor of the business benefits of moving towards genuine, long term sustainability.

The book includes Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken’s seminal 1999 essay “A Roadmap for Natural Capitalism,” and is worth buying for that article alone.

The authors lay out four guiding principles for transforming our modes of economic production that are both visionary and practical: dramatically improve the productivity of natural resources; shift to biologically inspired modes of production; move to a solutions based business model (as opposed to an product ownership based model, e.g. provide floor-covering services rather than sell carpets) and reinvest in natural capital.

They persuasively show the huge energy and resource saving potential in innovative design across large areas of today’s economy (”Only 1% of the energy consumed by today’s cars in actually used to move the driver: only 15-20% of the power generated by burning gasoline reaches the wheels and 95% of the resulting propulsion moves the car, not the driver.” Good morning Detroit.) The article is a powerful argument on grounds of ethics, aesthetics, efficiency and profitability for embedding industrial production into the naturally sustainable systems of the physical world.

The book “International Business and Global Climate Change” has a narrower focus.

Pinkse and Kolk, both professors at Amsterdam Business School give an impressively detailed account of the dilemmas and opportunities that climate change poses for large companies.

They focus on two areas: compliance with national and international regulatory frameworks and developing innovative technologies and capabilities. On the way Pinkse and Kolk cover the economics of carbon mitigation, a comprehensive history of carbon emission regulation and an unsparing analysis of the strengths and failures of the frameworks currently in place.

They show, for example, how the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme over-allocated emissions permits which utilities then sold for huge profits, and how the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism’s credits ended up going overwhelmingly to projects reducing emissions from an obscure, but highly potent greenhouse gas called HFC-23 that could be mitigated using a cheap, readily available end-of-pipe technology. The scheme therefore did almost nothing to stimulate clean technology innovation as its creators had envisioned it would.

Pinske and Kokse’s book, though scholarly and comprehensive is written in the impeccable but lifeless English prose at which Northern European academics seem to excel.

If you are either a policy maker designing a Greenhouse Gas regulatory framework, or a senior business executive figuring out how to comply with (or exploit) such a system, the book is a must-read. If you are anyone else, you’ll probably find the style and density off-putting.

The Harvard Business Review work, though less detailed, is a much racier read, employing HBS’s trademark case-study approach to illustrate the messy real-world complexity of transitioning toward sustainable business methods.

A common message that emerges from both works is that business needs a coherent, credible, predictable and global framework for carbon emissions mitigation if it is going to go green on a large scale.

The current chaotic patchwork of voluntary and mandatory, short and medium term, local and international schemes inhibits many companies from making major long-range investments in clean technologies.

Business cannot create this framework; it is a task for governments and intergovernmental bodies, chivied along by civil society – NGO’s, the media, religious groups and businesses themselves. December’s climate summit in Copenhagen is expected to take a crucial step down this road.

As Arnold Goldman of Brightsource has written, green business is not a new invention. He points out that according to the

Arnold Goldman, Founder of Brightsource Energy

Talmud, the first question each of us will each be asked on judgment day (before any enquiries about our “religious” life) is “did you do business b’emunah” – faithfully or honestly (Shabbat, 31a.) Business b’emunah surely requires not raping the planet, not profiting from fleeting and destructive wants, but creating products that add real value to people’s life and to the life of the biosphere.

By Yannai Kranzler

Breaking news, from Dayton, Ohio: Attitudes don’t predict behavior. Economic incentives don’t usually work. And sweet corn tastes best the day it’s picked.

I’ll explain:

I’ve spent the last week in Dayton, with my wife, Chana’s grandparents and cousins. I expected a quiet week- great times with Chan’s family and a nice break from the intensities of Jerusalem.

But it turns out that tucked between miles of corn and soybeans lies a lively and very special town. One night, I went with Uncle Danny to a minor league baseball game, getting in for free when the ticket attendant gave us the tickets of two people who couldn’t make it themselves. Another night, I played ice hockey for the first time in ten years with Chan’s cousin Mitch (Boy does my lower back hurt!). And in the nearby town of Hamilton, I attended environmental psychologist Doug Mckenzie-Mohr’s daylong seminar, “Fostering Sustainable Behavior: Community Based Social Marketing (CBSM),” organized by the local Butler County Storm Water District. And that’s where I learned about attitudes and behavior, and the futility of financial incentives. (I learned about the sweet corn that night for dinner).

Founder of Community Based Social Marketing, Dr. Doug Mckenzie-Mohr

Dr. Mckenzie-Mohr’s formula, “Community-Based Social Marketing” (CBSM), utilizes research methods like surveys and focus groups to understand behaviors in their social contexts. CBSM strategies leverage friends, mentors and neighbors to encourage changes on a communal level. Programs focus more on social norms than on numbers, more on getting communities of people to commit to doing small things, than on telling them how badly they need to do big ones. A CBSM slogan might read, “Help us improve the air quality for the children at this school: Turn your car off whenever idling for more than ten seconds,” with a campaign handing drivers a free sticker that says, “We care about our kids’ air: This car will not idle for more than ten seconds,” making sure it gets placed on the front window, so that not only passers-by, but the driver inside the car will see it too. That’s instead of producing and handing out informative materials explaining how “Turning off your car when idling for more than ten seconds will save you X amount of gas, Y dollars per minute, and reduce your CO2 emissions by Z tons.”

Given that most attempts I know of at changing people’s behavior try either to change attitudes or offer financial incentives, I found Dr. Mckenzie-Mohr’s assertions striking. But throughout the seminar, he presented study after study debunking these and more basic assumptions about how to convince people to act differently. He compared these with the results of CBSM programs, and the results were unequivocal. Turns out that knowing that my neighbors, who I trust (and by whom I want to be respected) perform a particular action, let’s say composting, it will have more of an impact on me than knowing the reasons behind composting. At the very least, it will get me to ask if I too should be composting, certainly a more likely way to get me composting, than being given a brochure.

Through CBSM, Dr. Mckenzie-Mohr has implemented successful campaigns on water-management, electricity-usage, transportation, conservation and composting, throughout Canada, Australia and the US. Green auditors who have learned CBSM have been three to four times more successful than those that haven’t in getting clients to implement the changes they recommend. Dr. Mckenzie-Mohr has sat on some of Canada’s leading panels on climate change and the environment, and was recently awarded the Canadian Psychological Association’s  “Psychologists for Social Responsibility Research and Social Action Award.”

I’ll share some practicals from the day in future posts, but for now, I’ll suffice to say that I was incredibly impressed by what I found in Dayton. An old Midrashic statement comments on the Psalms 29 passage, Kol Hashem BaKocoach, “The voice of God is in strength,” by adding, B’Kocho shel Kol Echad v’Echad, “In the strength of every individual.” Divinity is in everyone, the Midrash explains (Tanchuma, Parshat Yitro). In Dayton, I experienced a place that might not have the eco-chic of New York or the eco-fervor of Berkeley, but that certainly did have Godly spirit enough to fill up a huge auditorium with local environmental employees dedicating their lives to improving the quality of life in Ohio and doing their part in creating a sustainable future for everyone. And along with family, a game of hockey and the perfect cob of sweet corn, it’s hard to get more divine than that.

For more on CBSM, and for some great resources on fostering sustainable behavior, visit http://www.cbsm.com.

By Yannai Kranzler

I was a bit late to Beit Knesset, synagogue, last Thursday morning, on the Ninth of Av.  By the time I arrived, it was already full of men and women praying quietly.  A Jerusalem community known for singing and loud, lively davening, on this day, everyone was solemn, contemplative.  Some sat glumly on the floor. Some stood. Some broke the silence by sniffling in tears.

On the ninth, or Tisha of the month of Av, we mourn the destruction of Jerusalem, the exile of Divine Presence, tragedies that befell the Jewish People, hatred between brothers, and the fact that we haven’t yet figured out how to make things good in the world.

I realized almost immediately what was so weird about what I was seeing: Modern people aren’t supposed to be sad. We hide sadness, or try to make it go away. Even at funerals, we wear sunglasses and hide from others seeing our being sad.

In private, too, sadness is not really allowed. If a friend of mine is sad, my upbringing says, “Fix it.” Convince them to “live life with a smile,” and to “look on the bright side.”

But nobody was wearing sunglasses at shul on Tisha B’Av, and nobody was trying to fix anything. Observing the customs of Tisha B’Av, we did not even say hello to one another. Nobody showered, brushed their teeth, or wore deodorant. Like we were disobeying, one by one, the most basic rules of social etiquette. Keeping tradition, we sat the morning on the floor reading Kinot, poems of mourning.

And then, we reached afternoon. Something magical happens when Tisha B’Av reaches the afternoon. We get up off the floor. Stretch. Put on Tefillin. We go home. Eventually, we begin to cook for the end of the fast.

And literally from that point on, the Jewish People enters a nonstop whirlwind adventure of repentance and celebration and the Highest, most intimate and joyous Holidays of the year.

It begins with Tu B’Av, kind of a national matchmaking day- there’s room for relationship when people are not ashamed of having sadness, and are open to holding others’ sadness, too. Two weeks later begins a month of hard work to improve ourselves in Elul, then comes crowning God King on Rosh Hashanah, saying an integrity-filled sorry on Yom Kippur, and leaving the stability of concrete, to live in comfy little houses of straw on Sukkot, in order to celebrate our vulnerability, and to appreciate That which sustains us.

I think about our collective trek towards confronting, and hopefully reversing the effects of climate change, and I wonder what it would be like were we to make space for mourning the destruction we’ve caused the world.

Could we enter our own whirlwind adventure of fixing and celebration? Could we have a Tu B’Av, where our honesty allows us to recognize the potential for Peoples to complement, and not compete with one another? An Elul, where we wake up at the crack of dawn every morning to search our every action and vow to change those that aren’t okay? A Rosh Hashanah, where we acknowledge our awe of the forces in the world that are more powerful than we are, a Yom Kippur where we look to those forces and to one other and sincerely apologize for thinking we were so above it all? Could we culminate with a Sukkot, where we dance and sing to modest living spaces and interdependence with Nature, where it is so obvious that there’s plenty of room for everybody when nobody feels the need to control everything?

I wonder, because in all of the discourse surrounding climate change, we are not allowed to be negative. What began with doom-laden predictions, has now evolved, in order to avoid being paralyzing, into a discussion on the opportunities embedded in responding to climate change. Along the way, we skipped feeling sad for those suffering because of climate change, and for the fact that we were the ones who caused it. If the president is now going to talk about climate change, he best focus on green jobs; how climate change is the economic opportunity of our lifetimes. I find myself routinely looking at scathing environmentalist documents and shaking my head saying, “Don’t you know? Being critical never works with the environment. It offends people, and people don’t like to be offended.”

Now, I pray for green jobs, and believe us entitled to a healthy economy. And I think it’s obnoxious to offend people. But like the Rabbis say, if we don’t mourn destruction, we won’t really live rebuilding. If we don’t acknowledge our mistakes, understand them, accept our own culpability in the greed which broke our economy’s back and our ecosystem’s balance, if we don’t look plainly at the faces across the world that suffer because of our unwillingness to make changes in our daily lives, will we chase green jobs with the same passion as if we did? Will we rush to work at those green jobs with the same energy, dedication and pride? Will we be willing to say that if our economy is abusive of other Peoples or generations, then we don’t want that economy? On the most basic level, will we be as willing to share?

Tisha B’Av challenges us to be real. If there’s more than just a bright side, we can’t just look for the bright side. If we do, we won’t know it when it hits us.

I hope we can accept the challenge to be sad over our actions. I hope we have the strength to admit we were wrong. I hope that we mourn the weakness of denying vulnerability, and then dance to the integrity in embracing it. I hope that we drink to interdependence. That we are entirely overcome and enchanted with the weight, the pain, and the perfect, seamless joy of life when we lift our glass, take a deep breath, and quietly say, “L’Chaim.”

Based on the teachings of Rabbi Aaron Leibowitz, from Tisha B’Av in Nachlaot, Jerusalem. Read more from Rav Aaron at www.ravaaron.wordpress.com.

By Rabbi Julian Sinclair

Recently I was asked an interesting question by an Israel environmental leader.

“I was a bit surprised and somewhat dismayed,” he began, ”to find out that the date chosen for the Copenhagen Planning Seminar was also Tisha B’Av.”

A bit of background for the uninitiated:

1.    The Copenhagen Summit in December is a gathering of world leaders that aims to bash out a successor agreement to the Kyoto protocol that will limit CO2 emissions going forward. It is widely seen as a critical moment in the global effort to address climate change.

2.    The particular Seminar spoken about here is a gathering of Israeli environmental NGO’s that will propose an Israeli position

Gilad Erdan, Israel's Minister of Environmental Protection

for the Copenhagen Summit. Israel has not so far taken an official line on global warming. That is probably about to change. The new environment minister, Gilad Erdan, is one of the very few in recent years not to see the appointment as a consolation prize for not receiving a “real” ministerial job.” Erdan gets it. He understands that the environment really matters. The Tisha B’Av seminar includes a meeting with him.

3.    Tisha B’Av is the saddest date of the Jewish year. It is a fast day marked by deep mourning for the destruction of both Temples, the massacres and dispersions that followed and the ensuing 1800 years of exile from our country.
My environmental leader friend (who is himself Jewishly observant) was troubled by the choice of date for this meeting. While he knew that the decision was made in good faith, with good will, and certainly without any intention to inconvenience observant Jews, he wondered whether it might not be “singularly inappropriate to have the meeting on that day?” Or possibly, he continued, there was a “meaningful connection that could be made between Tisha B’Av and climate change?”

“It’s an interesting one”, I wrote back to him.

“On the one hand, holding the event on Tisha B’av certainly makes it hard for anyone who is halakhically observant to come, at least in the morning. It’s prohibited to do work until noon on Tisha B’Av and even to greet anyone as a sign of our utter desolation on that day (which would pose problems for how to behave in a meeting). There’s a strong custom of spending the whole morning in synagogue. That’s before you even start thinking about the effects of not eating and drinking all day in the middle of summer in Tel Aviv. So, on grounds of inclusiveness it’s not exactly an ideal choice of date.”

“On the other hand”, I mused, “maybe there was something singularly appropriate about the choice of date…” Talking with people about this since, I realize that it might in fact be true in more ways than I thought.

Firstly, some have drawn an analogy between the burning of the Temple and the ecological threats of today. As Rabbi Arthur Waskow writes,

“This memory of the burning of the Temple comes when scorching winds blow across the Middle East, when forest fires blaze, when grassy savannahs shrivel in the drought brought on — in our generation —  by global heating.  It is as if the burning of the Temple is a miniature version of the scorching of our planet.”

Waskow calls for people to fast on Tisha B’Av this year, or at least to fast from consuming gasoline and beef, (two of the biggest causes of greenhouse gas emissions)– a call we strongly endorse.

Secondly, as Dr. Michael Kagan of Jewish Climate Initiative pointed out, Tisha B’Av is the day on which it was decreed that the Jews would wander in the desert for 40 years of exile as a punishment for the sin of the spies, who shunned the goodness of the Land of Israel. In the terrible words of the Talmud:

“Rabbi Yochanan said that day (when the decree was made) was the eve of Tisha B’Av. The Holy One said, “you have wept for no reason. I will fix on this day weeping throughout the generations.” (Talmud 29a).

According to Rabbi Yochanan, the people’s acceptance of the spies’ slanders and their groundless weeping about the problems they anticipated in the Land of Israel was a kind of original sin. Because that generation refused the challenge of entering the land and implicitly preferred exile, Tisha B’Av was marked out forever as a day of weeping for exile from our land.

Only now are we starting to repair the effects of our longest exile. We in Israel are painstakingly learning how to live here once again. We have made many mistakes, in water use, forestry and city planning, but through the remarkable efforts of Israel’s environmental movement we are relearning how to bear responsibility for our natural environment.  How uncannily appropriate that a meeting at which the reborn State of Israel’s Minister of the Environment will be asked to rise and take some responsibility for the earth’s greatest environmental challenge should be inadvertently scheduled for Tisha B’Av.

And there is another level to this too. To appreciate it, let’s first note that Tisha B’av is one of several fast days in the Jewish calendar. In their purpose, these days fall on a spectrum between Teshuva repentance, and mourning. These purposes are not the same. Teshuva is about examining our lives individually and communally asking ourselves what needs to change and resolving to be better from now on.

Mourning is about experiencing and grieving for a loss. These purposes may overlap but they are not the same. Yom Kippur is a fast of Teshuvah but not a day of mourning. On the other hand if someone close to us dies, our main response is one of mourning, not of Teshuva.

As Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik points out, Tisha B’Av itself is a fast of mourning and not of repentance. We don’t try to fix anything on Tisha Bav, but to experience the magnitude of the catastrophe that befell us. We sit on the floor and read tragic elergies for Jewish suffering. We weep, cry out and come face to face with the horrors of the destruction and everything that followed from it; the blood running knee deep in the streets of Jerusalem, the massacres of the exiles, the expulsions, the inquisitions, the pogroms and the gas chambers. We remember that we are a people that has seen the worst; we have been in the deepest pits of hell and on Tisha B’av we revisit those places.

And we’ve also come out of the deepest pits of hell, with a fierce commitment to love and to cherish life. On Tisha B’Av, the Midrash says, the Messiah will be born.

This Tisha B’Av, it is to be hoped, the State of Israel will be take a significant step towards loving and cherishing all of life on earth.

By Yannai Kranzler

How do you effectively photograph the earth getting a few degrees warmer? Or sea levels rising? Or animals migrating from native habitats?

Marketing Climate Change has always been a challenge. And even more complicated has been marketing solutions: the intricacies of sustainable economics are just not that thrilling for most people, not to mention photogenic.

But that doesn’t stop The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart from trying to explain the recent Markey-Waxman Cap and Trade bill in the following video. A valiant, if not incredibly successful attempt…

(If you can’t see the video player, click here).

Providing the needed help (and granting Stewart membership in the “Nerds of America Society,”) was Steven Chu,  America’s new Secretary of Energy:

(If you can’t see the video player, click here)