Lifestyles

What We Have: Jewish Lifestyles

The lifestyle area provides the opportunity to implement insights into Jewish tradition and values in everyday ways that reconnect the practical and the educational. Ecologically helpful lifestyle changes are not merely good for the planet, but flow from core Jewish values, and offer people a range of meaningful practices that connect deeply held values with Jewish identity.

Through partnerships between environmental organizations and synagogues, the Jewish community will educate its members to lighten their environmental footprint and to restore a traditional Jewish ethic of modesty in consumption. This changing ethic will be related to canonical Jewish texts and sources.

We identify four main areas of focus in the mainstream lifestyle: Food, Consumption, Travel, Homes.
  

Where We Are with Lifestyle: What is Going on in The Jewish Community Now

Go to jewishclimatecampaign.org to submit information on what is going on today in the Jewish community with respect to Food, Consumption, Travel, Homes, or other categories of lifestyle.

Vision for the Next Generation: Jewish Environmental Lifestyles

• Eating practices evolve in ways that are both ecologically beneficial and consonant with Jewish food teachings.
• Shabbat is recognized as an ecological value.
• Responsible consumption is the norm.
• Ecological consequences of Jewish community-sponsored air travel is accounted for.
• Jewish communities are ahead of the average community in reduced dependence on the automobile.
• Jewish homes are the standard of green home design.

Jewish Lifestyle Goals for Generational Change: September 2015

Food
Goals:

• Cutting communal meat intake by half by 2015.
• Supporting whole food, local, organic start-ups
• A greater proportion of Jews saying berakhot and reflecting on the source of the food they eat and the process by which that food reaches their dinner plates.

• Focusing on food. Strengthening food education and changing eating practices represents a big opportunity. Interest in food issues is widespread, both in the general culture and in the Jewish community. Following the Agriprocessors scandal American Jews are far more aware of the real costs and consequences of their food choices.
   
  In Judaism, food is a basic area in which we strive to attain kedusha, holiness. It is fully congruent with this idea to explore how the way we eat today in the West generates ethical costs and environmental damage that compromise the ideal of holiness.
  
  We would argue that reducing meat consumption as a communal norm is fully in the spirit of the Kosher Dietary laws. The Laws of Kashrut, are, at least in part, about minimizing the pain and suffering to the animal in the slaughtering process. We now know that it is only possible to eat large quantities of affordable cheap, kosher meat if the animals that are consumed are industrially raised in ways that cause them suffering throughout their lives and at their deaths.
  
  Reducing meat consumption would also have tangible environmental and ethical benefits. According to the UN, 18% of global greenhouse gases are produced by livestock. At a time of global food shortages, 50% of grain grown in the US is fed to animals.
  
  We will therefore propose a goal of cutting communal meat intake by half by 2015.
  
  Further, that when meat is eaten it should be humanely and locally raised where possible. Initiatives such as Mitzvah Meat and Kol Foods are making kosher, pasture-fed, local meat available in the United States. Supporting these startups will help make humanely produced kosher meat much more widely available.
  
  The fair treatment of workers in the meat processing industry is an essential element of kashrut.

• Eating locally grown food in Jewish institutions should also be goals. Hazon's Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, Tuv Ha’Aretz, fosters partnerships between synagogues and JCCs and local sustainable farms. It has 30 affiliated communities across the US today and aims to increase this to 180 by 2015.

• We propose reframing berakhot as mindfulness meditations so as to make them accessible for non-Orthodox Jews. By 2015 the goal should be that a greater proportion of Jews will say berakhot, mean them, and reflect on the sources of the food that they eat and the process by which that food reaches their supermarket shelves and dinner plates.

See the draft 7-Year Goals of the New Jewish Food Movement.

Consumption
Goals:

• Reducing consumption of material goods by 10%
• Generally accepted and supported practices of re-using material goods within the community, sometimes referred to as the G’mach.

• Consumer choices are one of the main drivers of environmental degradation, through the incentives they provide for the manufacturing and disposal of wasteful, superfluous and short-lived items.
  
  It is, of course, impossible and intrusive to attempt to legislate peoples' private consumption decisions. We will influence communal norms by adopting consensus standards limiting conspicuous consumption, for example at public celebrations such as weddings and Bnei Mitzvah, as well as modeling more sustainable practices at various institutions.
  
  This would be in line with the sumptuary laws limiting public displays of wealth that operated in many medieval and early modern Jewish communities. It will also be fully consonant with the ethics of a period of prolonged economic recession during which many more Jewish families will be unable to keep up with previous communal expectations to display affluence.  

• A campaign to encourage observance of the Sabbath, as an ecological value as well as a religious one.
  
  Shabbat is a precious spiritual and ecological resource. It contains wisdom that is profoundly needed today about how to place limits on the untrammeled pursuit of wealth that is one of the drivers of ecological destruction
  

Travel
Travel Goals:

• Jewish Organizations should seek to eliminate air travel when it isn't necessary.
• Organizations should install video conferencing facilities that can substitute for intercontinental travel. (This will also save money and makes sense in the current economic climate.)
  
  Organizations should, as a matter of course, offset the carbon emissions produced by their activities, e.g. through projects such as the Heschel Center's Good Energy Initiative.

• Air Travel Getting on an airplane is the most ecologically damaging thing that most of us can do in our daily lives. At the same time, we need to recognize that Jews, as a globally dispersed people, fly more than the average. Moreover the educational model of many Jewish schools, youth movements and organizations involves deepening connections to Israel, and entails flying large numbers of people between Israel and the Jewish centers of the Diaspora.
  
  This situation is unlikely to change dramatically soon. Jews will remain dispersed and Israel will continue to be of central importance to the Jewish people. Given these facts, the organized Jewish community needs to take responsibility for the ecological consequences that follow from it.

Specifically,

• Jewish Organizations should seek to eliminate air travel when it isn't necessary.
• Organizations should install video conferencing facilities that can substitute for travel.
• Organizations should, as a matter of course, offset the carbon emissions produced by their activities, e.g. through projects such as the Heschel Center's Good Energy Initiative.

• Auto Travel – The large Jewish communities are at an advantage when it comes to auto travel, because of the prohibitions on travel, many communities, especially the Orthodox and Modern Orthodox, are built within walking distance to the synagogue or community center.  It follows then that many Jewish communities are  ripe models of New Urbanism. 

• Jewish Homes