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Sukkot, Science and Religion

My extended D'var Torah on this topic at Sinai and Synapses!

Affordable Housing: A Sukkot Reflection and Charge

This is my D'var Torah for the first day of Sukkot 5784 and Shabbat, September 30, 2023.

 

Sukkot is actually the third part of the High Holy Days. It’s not just Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Sukkot is the zany but nuanced third festival of our kickoff month of Tishrei.

And Sukkot is specifically a continuation of Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur we go hyperspiritual, in the sense that we put away most of our material existence – eating, physical pleasures and adornments, even our homes as we spend more time in the synagogue than any other day. Then on Sukkot it seems like the opposite – we get hypermaterial, very earthy. Outdoors, building the hut, waving the Four Species, and in contrast to Yom Kippur the essential mitzvah in the Sukkah is to eat.

What we are actually doing is bringing our spiritually-realigned selves from Yom Kippur into a stylized version of our material life. A simple house, a week of meals, getting hands-on with four types of plants that represent four basic ways we interact with the physical world of things that grow and the water cycle. It’s like moving into a prototype of the materialist world, getting the basics straight before we step out into a more complex actual world of commerce and tangible things. On Sukkot we try to align our material selves on the basis of our reoriented spiritual selves.

So in the Talmud the Sukkah is connected to the Holy of Holies, which the High Priest used to enter on Yom Kippur. That’s where the ark was with the tablets, which means the Sukkah itself is a covenantal place. It’s a design statement meant to guide our relationship to material things and to people with whom we share meals, and to people in our neighborhood. And all through Sukkot we’re reminded that our relationships with people and food are connected directly to nature. We’re always eating in the shade of the s’chach on top of the Sukkah, the shadows that remind us of the divine protection that covers us even when we’re not paying attention, a spiritual mist made up of very earthy material.

So I want to talk about one way we can prototype our material world in the coming year, so it becomes more aligned spiritually and covenantally. I am part of a group of about ten clergy in the area who call ourselves the Greater Nashua Interfaith Housing Justice Group. We have been together for about six years but we’ve been working very publicly on issues of housing for more than four years. I want to tell you some of the what and more of the why, and invite you to engage in that work with us as members of the Jewish community and the faith community more broadly. Many of us are speaking in our congregations this week on this topic. Some of you were here four years ago when we did the same.

A Sukkah is defined in the Talmud as dirat ara’i, temporary dwelling. On a Torah level this is about bringing us back to the desert, where the Jewish people lived in a series of temporary places while we got our Torah and our training. In Egypt, even as slaves we lived in houses, as we know from the night of the Exodus with the blood on our doorposts. In the promised land we would again have homes, to live in and buy and sell. Sukkot is about the experience in between. In the desert every one of us knew a vulnerability about food and shelter survival, and it was the same whether you were Moshe or Miryam or a tribal elder, or anyone else. 

In our community, dirat ara’i for some people means not having any place to call home from day to day. All of our local shelters are full all the time. Thanks to the vision of many local leaders and the generosity of many including members of our shul, a new shelter on Spring Street in Nashua was opened recently by the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter. Having a stable place to come back to each day, to rest and eat a meal and do homework, is a basic prerequisite for physical health, and mental health, and doing your job well or staying consistent in school. Too many kids have to couch-surf, which means moving also from school to school, and you can imagine the impact on educational progress and social development.

Because so many of our local nonprofits work so well on homelessness, our clergy group has picked up the next level from that, which has never had enough public advocates. So we work on affordable housing, which in practice turns out be primarily for renters – another kind of dirat ara’i, temporary dwelling.

In the city of Nashua, an increasing number of people rent as opposed to owning the place where they live. As a result, rents in the city are skyrocketing, outpacing inflation by about double in the past decade. In our part of the state, even beyond the city, about half of renters pay more than they can afford on housing, meaning more than 30% of income. If you work in health care, education, or retail, it’s almost impossible to find a place to rent in Nashua that’s affordable on your salary, and certainly that’s the case for people in lower paying jobs.

As a result, just the City of Nashua needs to add around 4,500 more units of housing by 2030 to stabilize our overall housing market, and of that at least another 1,800 units that would have to be affordable to people making far less than the area median income. Even this wouldn’t quite meet the needs of all the families emerging from transitional housing programs or everyone working as a nurse, a police officer, or a public school teacher who wants to live in the community where they work. It would still be a dramatic bite in the shortage.

Our municipal leaders and our state leaders have been paying more attention to this over the past five years. In Nashua, there have been some welcome achievements and our interfaith housing justice group has been part of a couple of them, as has the Granite State Organizing Project in these and others. Nashua created an affordable housing trust fund with $10 million from the American Rescue Plan, one of the Covid-19 relief programs passed by Congress. This money will increase the incentives for private builders to create affordable housing. Rentals are financed on the expectation of an income stream down the road, and when the apartment is going to be rented for less than the market rate, there’s a shortfall there that makes the project unprofitable – or in the non-theological lingo we’ve learned, “it doesn’t pencil.” To make it sensible for a developer to rent at a rate that someone could afford who is a teacher or a nurse or getting back on their feet with a new job, each unit requires an extra $25-80,000 of upfront financing. That’s what this fund will provide. This $10 million can help us bite off some 10-20% of the need we have. We’ll need more in the fund to hit our goal by 2030. As an example, a real-estate transaction surcharge on the order of a penny on every $1,000 of a sale could fund our need in Nashua in perpetuity. 

We have a new inclusionary zoning ordinance that passed our Board of Aldermen with not a single dissent, which requires new buildings of certain sizes to have a certain number of units of affordable housing within them, or else the developer has to pay per unit built into the housing trust fund.

Many of you have seen the redevelopment and expansion of public housing downtown on Central Street off the south end of the new parkway, formerly the Bronstein Apartments and now Monahan Manor.

All of these are an acceleration of the pace of creating new affordable housing, but we are still behind where we need to be for 2030. So we need to advocate for more funding from the state and other sources, as the Covid-related stimulus funding comes to an end.

If it were just about numbers, I don’t know that we would be involved specifically as people of faith. How we create housing matters. 

The Sukkah is about covenantal design. It’s about how housing links us together or divides us. When the Talmud discusses the construction requirements for the Sukkah, it connects the Sukkah to a chuppah, the marriage canopy, and to a mavoy, a neighborhood allyway where people often decide to collaborate in carry things around or share food on Shabbat. I’ve been thinking about the most bizarre design teaching about Sukkah, which is the booth has to be big enough for your entire head, a table, and most of your body but not all of it. Obviously this wouldn’t be a comfortable Sukkah, nor is it ideal to have a Sukkah where you can’t eat with other people. I think what it means is that you have to experience a full Sukkah mind yourself, but your eating has to keep you connected to what’s outside.

How we create housing is as important as the raw number of apartments. American public housing programs created clusters of high-rise buildings that concentrated poverty and had the effect of segregating many cities by race. The newest thinking even about publicly financed construction is that it makes a difference when attention is paid to how a building helps people connect with their neighbors, with local business and public space. Open space and common space matter, incentives to connect with other people in the building as opposed to fearing them. It makes a difference when people of different socioeconomic backgrounds and cultures live in the same building – so much informal networking happens, so much social trust can be built across difference, the outcomes are proven better for children. 

It makes a difference when the people who live in a building or a neighborhood that will be rebuilt to increase its capacity for housing have a voice, in the design and in what happens to them while they are displaced.

Our interfaith housing groups call this covenantal thinking. It’s what we hope for and are already lobbying to happen around the next big projects in Nashua: redeveloping the Elm Street Middle School when the new school opens, recreating the public housing on Major Drive, what will happen next now where the asphalt plant was proposed down the hill from here, and how to repurpose Daniel Webster College as proposed in the new city master plan.

Covenant thinking might lead any one project to have fewer units, which on its own seems like a missed opportunity. But as the lens widens, new people might see themselves as partners for affordable housing, and new projects can emerge that the existing stakeholders might never have thought of.

The Spring Street Shelter has some of this covenantal thinking in it. There are community rooms, rooms for education, and former director Michael Reinke’s vision was for community groups beyond NSKS to share a life in the building. Not just to see residents are people who need things from “the rest of us” like clothing, or even skills training. But a place where community groups could offer interesting cultural and educational programming for anyone, resident or not, in a location central in our city right downtown.

The last time a group of us preached on housing we were leading into a public event, which generated momentum and new relationships with city officials and led to some of the progress to date. We’ve been able to collaborate and to critique. So too this coming Monday the community is invited to a forum with candidates for mayor and the Board of Aldermen in Nashua. We will hear stories about the housing crisis from community members, and then ask the candidates for their policy priorities around equitable, affordable housing. The forum is at the Unitarian Universalist Church near here at 7:30, and you’ll have plenty of time to make it after our Sukkah dinner and event here that night. 

Whether or not you live in Nashua, you can advance the goals of more affordable housing created in a covenantal fashion in many ways. Attend the event on Monday. Sign up for our e-mail list, so we can keep you posted on public meetings of local planning boards and other bodies debating policies and budgets. We need people who are not the usual faces to come and be YIMBYs, Yes in My Backyard advocates, because almost every project is opposed by an organized group. Ask any candidate for office if they will accept a pledge toward 2,000 new units of affordable housing this decade if you live in Nashua. But things are happening all the time in the other towns too, and next year, the gubernatorial and legislative elections will have a big impact, because Gov. Sununu and the legislature the past few years have added tens of millions of new dollars statewide into affordable housing finance. The new governor and legislators should continue in that path and add even more.

And if you or someone you know has expertise in any area related to real estate or finance or construction, or philanthropy, help us connect. One of the things about our congregations is that we have so many different talents and resources among us, and it’s not just the same players as are around other tables who discuss and decide these matters.

Sukkot is a good time to reflect on the physical structures we live in and how they are connected as neighborhoods and as towns. On Sukkot we move out of our settled homes into dirat ara’i, temporary structures, which help us get our bearings as we relaunch into a year of commerce and consumption, neighborliness, political debate about how we marshall and share our collective resources. On this Sukkot, let’s complete the High Holy Day season by restoring our material lives to their spiritual roots, their covenantal roots, for the new year.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach!

Sukkot, Water, and Oneness

From Yom Kippur, when we put aside our material existence by fasting and spending so many hours in prayer, we move within days to Sukkot. Sukkot is by contrast a very earthy, material holiday. There is the Sukkah booth itself and the plant material that makes up its roof. There are the Arba'ah Minim, the Four Species, as well -- the lulav (palm), the etrog (citron), the hadasim (myrtles), and the aravot (willows). Sukkot helps us take the spiritual awakening we experience with the new year and bring it toward our material lives.

According to the Mishnah, Sukkot is one of the four Jewish New Year occasions, when "we are judged concerning water."  So many of the rituals of Sukkot involve water or praying for the winter rains. If you shake the Four Species together, it sounds like a rain shower!

Here is an explanation that builds on work done by Nogah Hareuveni, who founded Neot Kedumim, a nature preserve in Israel dedicated to biblical landscape and agriculture.  (I think the interpretation is his, but since I can't find it written exactly this way I'll take responsibility if it differs.)

Dr. Hareuveni notes that the four species represent the only four different ways that plants can be watered. The palm is a tree of the desert oasis; it draws from deepest groundwater. The willows grow by a river, water constantly flowing on the ground. The myrtles require rain -- dew or the periodic floods that go through a dry stream-bed (known as nachal in Hebrew or wadi in Arabic).  The citron is a cultivated fruit, requiring irrigation -- humans gathering and bringing water.

To the pagans living around our ancestors, each source of water came from a different source and could be traced to a different god. The Canaanites actually used the same word, baal, to refer to the "master" of their pantheon of gods, and to the condensation of rainwater on plants. In some texts, the waters of the deep are referred to as Mot, the god of death. These are the deep waters in our Genesis stories that originally covered everything and had to be held back to allow the ground to emerge, or that God released for Noach's flood.

But the Israelites came to understand that the four waters were one, and had only one Source. So they bound the four disparate species together into one bundle, to symbolize the oneness of our God. The Four Species are waved in all directions, indicating an understanding that the one Source of waters and life is present everywhere.

Water remains a basic need, even in our technological society. It makes up most of our body and the surface of our planet. Our life from day to day, and our future as a species, depend on water, and many conflicts in the world or within societies are about access to water. For all those reasons, water is a common metaphor in our tradition for God and for Torah. And when everything is in alignment, the prophets describe perfection as perfect waves or an ever-flowing stream.

Being an American Zionist

This is the text of a column i wrote in the New Hampshire Jewish Reporter for December 2021. I am posting this today on Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel's Independence Day.

I have been a Zionist since I was a kid. I didn’t become an American Zionist, though, until I was 22. That was when I decided not to make aliyah and make my life in the State of Israel.

I was just back from a year in Israel as a college student. In Jerusalem, I was seeing myself a few years in the future as a Hebrew speaker, a soldier, a Masorti (Conservative) rabbi, a member of Oz V’shalom, the religious peace movement. I came home and couldn’t wait to go back.

Within a few weeks back on campus, immersed more than ever in my Hillel community, I realized how American I was feeling. I had the sudden realization that the only way I would fulfill my life was an American – an American Jew and probably an American rabbi. My great-grandparents came to America as a choice, and in flight from the czar’s tyranny. I was born American – but at the age of 22 I made my choice to be an American.

And my Zionism changed, from future Israeli to American Zionist.

I want to argue that an American Jewish Zionist is a Jew rooted in America. A first-class Zionist; not a consolation prize for not having the courage to make aliyah. A full partner in the project of Zionism. A partner with a specific and essential role that is obviously different from the role of Israelis.

My American Jewish Zionism is also a religious Jewish Zionism, and I realize that’s not the case for everyone reading. But I hope my concepts are useful regardless of whether that specific profile fits.

These are some of my fundamental tenets as an American Jewish Zionist. This thinking is hardly my own, and I owe more than anyone Rabbi Donniel Hartman, leader of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

Israel is the original and ongoing land of the Jewish people. The claim is religious and historical. It may be complicated in terms of Palestinians and their claim, but the claim still stands without compromise.

It’s a fascinating dimension of Jewish life for the past 2500 years that even during the times of a center in Eretz Yisrael, or a longing for it, there have been strong centers of Judaism outside the land. The fact that Jews like me affirmatively choose to live in America as members of Am Yisrael does not undermine Israel at all. One of our roles as American Zionists is to explain this to people around us – the uniqueness of Jewish peoplehood in Israel and America.

Zionism is a movement of moral and spiritual excellence. Rabbi Hartman put it this way in an address to the 2007 Reform movement biennial: “The birth of the State of Israel provided Judaism with an unprecedented opportunity of permeating and actively shaping all aspects of society. Whether in areas of political theory or economic policy, religious practice or ethical conduct, human rights or environmental care, hospitals or army bases, classrooms or courthouses - Israel is where Jewish values meet the road.”

American Jewish Zionists should see ourselves as partners in Zionist excellence. Rabbi Hartman made two points about this in his 2007 talk. First, American Jews have unique intellectual and cultural contributions to make to Israel. If Israel is a unique lab for Jewish values, the American Jewish experience has been a longer and better-established lab around issues of religious freedom, minority-majority relationships, and ideological pluralism.

It is because we are in America that Jewish thinkers and leaders have had to formulate a Torah of concern for human beings and not just for Jews. A Torah of responsibility for the whole earth and not just the Jewish community. It is because of America that totalitarianism and technology forced Jewish thinking to ask questions about the ethics of power and the limits on human innovation. In the past few decades, Israeli and American Jewish thinkers have indeed become thought partners and innovators around all of these issues.

Hence Rabbi Hartman’s second point about the role of American Jewish Zionists as partners. He charged each of us to find that aspect of Israel and the Israeli striving for moral excellence that inspires us. It could be climate, or bioethics, or human rights, or aging… chances are the answer is a moral passion you already have here. Learn about its unique Israeli shape. Connect to the people who drive it and work on it there. Join those projects and institutions in any way that’s available – by taking a role, by contributing or investing money, by advocacy.

It is as partners that we move from vicarious spectators, and from our own inferiority complex about not being Israeli, to an affirmative Jewish identity as American Zionists. Israel needs this kind of American Zionists. It’s a responsibility, and it’s work.

The responsibility and the work do not come without trouble. Indeed, Rabbi Hartman says what Israel and the Jewish people need from American Zionists often is for us to be “the troubled committed.” We need to feel issues that trouble Israelis as our own issues. Sometimes we need to be more troubled than many Israelis are, and bring that to them.

But commitment first, as American Zionists. The troubled-ness of the noncommitted, the non-Zionist, is not likely to make a difference on any contentious issue. Not in Israel and not here among the many people around us who purport to care about what happens in Israel but have no commitment to it.

Every year especially around Chanukkah and around the Fourth of July, I reflect on my decision to embrace America and American Zionism. And I resolve to do both of those better, with more follow-through and more clarity to myself and as a teacher. For those of us in New Hampshire who will always be American, consider becoming a truly American Zionist.

Engaging With the Election -- Take 1

Kudos to the Southern New Hampshire Jewish Mens' Club for this morning's forum with candidates for New Hampshire's open Senate seat, 2nd District Congressional seat, and governorship.  Great turnout, great questions, nicely run all around.  It's a tribute to the Jewish community to be able to host such an event.

It was good to see the candidates up close, to hear their voices and read their body language.

I'm going to start having something to say about the election in the coming days -- not who to vote for, but how to approach an election "spiritually."  I have two first reactions to what I heard -- and I only got to hear Kelly Ayotte, Paul Hodes, and Charlie Bass, so that's a caveat.  First, it was a lot of canned speeches in response to thoughtful questions, and I was disappointed about that.  Nuanced questions from insightful citizens deserve better -- this goes for D's and R's alike.

Second, there seems to be such a consensus at least in New Hampshire about the importance of renewable energy for jobs and the economic future.  It's a shame and a shonda that this Congress couldn't get a bill to the president.

More to come about how Jews and Torah might frame the issues and approach the vote, beyond "liberal" and "conservative."

Behar/B'chuoktai: That You May Live on the Land

At first reading, the two parashiyot that are combined this week seem like a divine split personality.  Behar ("At the mountain [of Sinai]") is the most utopian parasha in all of Torah after Genesis 1, in which "God saw and, look, it was very good" -- all of Creation!  Behar imagines a land in which every seven years, people lose the basic privilege of land ownership.  They are forbidden from working the land to cultivate produce and sell what they grow.  Instead, everyone eats from whatever grows.  And every fifty years, people and families return to the property that belonged to them when the Israelites first came into the land.  All transactions are, to use the language of today's papers, "unwound."  If your family became wealthy by accumulating land, when the jubilee year arrives everything goes back where it started.

Imagine how highly God must think of us, to imagine that we could realize this vision.

 

B'chukotai ("by my laws"), in contrast, is mostly taken up with divine reward and punishment.  If the Israelite community obeys the covenant in Eretz Yisrael, God will prosper them.  If they don't, and continue to slide away, God will make the land infertile, bring hunger, and eventually banish the people from the land.

 

This is a more graphic version of the second paragraph of the Shma, the so-called "standard theology" of the Bible.  Utopian it isn't!  It is almost as if in these sections, God views the Israelites as always children, presumed to respond primarily to incentives and punishments.

 

For a long time I found it very difficult to pray my way through the second paragraph of the Shma.  Or to find any divine inspiration in the theology of reward and punishment.  Behar, in contrast, spoke to me and prodded my dreamiest dreams.

 

About fifteen years ago, I was given an article by Rabbi Arthur Waskow that changed my outlook about these passages in the Torah.  And I began to understand that Behar and B'chukotai are not two poles, but two sides of the same coin.

 

Rabbi Waskow reads sections like B'chukotai with an ecological lens.  When our way of life becomes unmoored from Torah, we cause the land we live on to become unforgiving, inhospitable to our life.  When we don't live by the laws that restrain the power that one person might exert over another, we spin ever faster in a materialistic frenzy.  When we ignore the Sabbath and draw out of the earth unrelentingly each week and each year, we abuse the Life that is God's presence in the soil, the waters, and the sky.  We cause God to leave our land, our earth.  And as a result, we well know from environmental scientists, human beings are having to leave lands that are becoming progressively less habitable.

So in the end, Behar and B'chukotai flow from the same divine vision.  The laws of the covenant are, among other things, limits on our use of the earth.  Respecting those limits from day to day creates the habits that might one day lead us to the mountaintop, where we might contemplate Shabbat on the wider scale.  The scale of pausing our economic machine, or sharing its rewards more equitably, or making sure each family has a chance each generation to start fresh if they need to.

The utopia of Behar is far beyond us.  There are first steps and next steps.  This Shabbat and next week we call attention at Temple Beth Abraham to the New England Carbon Challenge.  It is a simple and fast on-line tool that enables a household to model different changes in the way we use energy.  You sit down with your bills, and explore different options.  The website tells you how much that choice will reduce your bills and your carbon emissions into the atmosphere.  On Monday at 8:00, we are welcoming Arden Cala, outreach director for the mayor of Nashua's citywide Green Team to talk about it.

It takes maybe 15 minutes, and the average participant comes up with ideas that could save more than $700 each year.  Most of the ideas are far short of installing solar panels on your roof or wind generators in the yard.  Try it!  I hope for 50 households to log in this month and see what's possible.  You can do it at home, or come in during religious school next week on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday and someone with a laptop can walk you through it.

These changes are a win all the way around -- for the bank account, the atmosphere, and the swaths of our planet that we are ruining in our quest for more fuel.  And they are very much in the spirit of the teachings at the end of Leviticus and the second paragraph of the Shma.  Try some, that we may continue to live well on the good land that God has given us.

Jewish Deli Meets Slow Food

Here's a great new article I came across in the Forward:

Can the Jewish Deli Survive the Sustainable Food Movement? Pass The Homemade Pickles  By Sue Fishkoff

Sukkot, Water, and One-ness

From Yom Kippur, when we put aside our material existence by fasting and spending so many hours in prayer, we move to Sukkot.  Sukkot is by contrast a very earthy, material holiday.  The Sukkah booth itself, obviously, and the plant material that makes up its roof.  The Arba'ah Minim, Four Species as well -- the lulav (palm), the etrog (citron), the hadasim (myrtles), and the aravot (willows).

According to the Mishnah, Sukkot is one of the four Jewish New Year occasions, when "we are judged concerning water."  So many of the rituals of Sukkot involve water or praying for the winter rains (think about what it sounds like when you shake the Four Species together).  Here is an explanation that builds on work done by Nogah Hareuveni, who founded Neot Kedumim, a nature preserve in Israel dedicated to biblical landscape and agriculture.  (I think the interpretation is hers, but since I can't find it written exactly this way I'll take responsibility if it differs.)

Dr. Hareuveni notes that the four species represent the four different ways that plants can be watered.  The palm is a tree of the desert oasis; it draws from deepest groundwater.  The willows grow by a river, water constantly flowing on the ground.  The myrtles require rain -- dew or the periodic floods that go through a dry stream-bed (known as nachal in Hebrew or wadi in Arabic).  The citron is a cultivated fruit, requiring irrigation -- humans gathering and bringing water.

To the pagans living around our ancestors, each source of water came from a different source and could be traced to a different god.  The Canaanites actually used the same word, baal, to refer to the "master" of their pantheon of gods, and to the condensation of rainwater on plants.  In some texts, the waters of the deep are referred to as Mot, the god of death.  These are the deep waters in our Genesis stories that originally covered everything and had to be held back to allow the ground to be emerged, or that God released for Noah's flood.

But the Israelites came to understand that the four waters were one, and had only one Source.  So they bound the four disparate species together into one bundle, to symbolize the oneness of our God.  The Four Species are waved in all directions, indicating an understanding that the one Source of waters and life is present everywhere.

Water remains a basic need, even in our technological society.  It has been a persistent metaphor in our tradition for God and for Torah.  Water continues to be one of the most important matters of environmental scarcity on our planet today, and it continues to be in the center of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

If you are around Nashua, I'll be teaching more about Sukkot and water this Shabbat/Yom Tov morning in shul at Temple Beth Abraham.  Hag Sameach!

A Milestone in Kosher for New England

I got this in my inbox today from my friends at KOL -- Kosher, Organic, Local:

KOL Foods is pleased to announce the launch of our Online Store!
 
We are so pleased to be able to offer our products just in time for Rosh Hashanah.  Glatt kosher, grass-fed beef and lamb as well as pastured poultry are now available for online order and home delivery.

Click here to SHOP KOL FOODS!

KOL Foods puts kosher meat and ethics on the same plate so you can feel good about the meat you eat.  Everyday we work to create a new food system that supports sustainable animal production, treats farmers and workers fairly, and improves the health of families and communities.  KOL Foods is dedicated to changing the face of industrial animal farming by making grass-fed, non-industrial kosher meat widely available.

Shanah Tovah,
The KOL Foods Team

August is Eat Local Month in New Hampshire

Did you know...

• The average item in the supermarket was transported 1500 miles.
  
• As much fossil fuel is consumed producing and transporting our food in the United States as driving our cars.
• Somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of all the food calories human beings on earth consume comes from four crops:  corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice.  These are for the most part farmed on an industrial scale, using pesticides and herbicides that are made from fossil fuel and whose runoff poisons water in many parts of our country and the world.

It's as if each time we wanted to eat in Nashua, New Hampshire, we had to call and order out from Sioux City, Iowa!  When we talk about climate change and global warming, the way we eat is a key factor the same way our driving is.

(The author Michael Pollan wittily suggests that "there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us", not the other way around!  Corn has gotten us to take responsibility for its expansion, by giving us all kinds of ways to use its chemical derivatives.  Corn has gotten us to feed it to our grass-loving animals, and Pollan says that now that we eat as much corn as is humanly possible we've begun to feed it to our cars!)

In New Hampshire, August is Eat Local Month.  Eating food that comes from the immediate area has all kinds of obvious benefits.  It reduces pollution of all kinds.  It slows the use of fossil fuels.  It weaves the local community together.  It steers us toward fresher, healthier, tastier food. Spiritually, it reminds us to be humble, to remember that God gave the first humans a patch of land "to work and to protect" (Genesis 2:15).

So let's find a way to the local farm or farmers' market this month.  We can even each start by picking one product to substitute all month, to remove from the supermarket basket and buy instead locally.  Then see what happens to our consciousness, and our habits.  As Ben Azzai said (Pirket Avot 4:2), "One mitzvah drags along another mitzvah"!

If you read this during August and do go out and eat local, I invite you to let us know -- post a comment to the blog, say where you shopped and what you bought.

On this site, explore more links, articles, organizations, and podcasts about food, energy, and sustainability