In This Moment: Post Shabbat Special - The Survival of the UnFittest and Extinction of the Fittest. A Most Unusual Simhat Torah

In This Moment Cantor Kaplan, Hazzan Rabinowitz and Judy Schneiderman share the special honor of Hatan / Kallat Torah at our Zoom Simhat Torah service on Wednesday. See more below. Shavua Tov (A good week!) I'm sending out this week's O-Gram after Shabbat in order to share important messages that I discussed over the weekend. On Friday night, in speaking of the Creation story, I spoke about the alarming, increasing rate of extinction, a reverse evolution being accelerated by climate change. Then, on Shabbat morning, I discussed why even traditional commentators like Rashi would have assented to Darwin's ideas (and science in general), even as they would have balked at the twisted philosophical distortions of those ideas as they evolved into what was called "social darwinism" which really was an alias for fascism. So see those commentaries below. Meanwhile, I invite you to join me, beginning Tuesday at 7, for a year-long discussion of the great ideas of Judaism of the past half century, "The New Jewish Canon." We'll be dividing the book into small, manageable nuggets. If possible, please read the introduction for the book before the first session. Each session will be independent of the others, so join us even if you can't make it each time. For now, we'll be meeting on Zoom only. Click here to read the introduction to the book (assignment for the first week) Click here to see the syllabus for the first 5-session mini course, plus links to some of the readings for those five weeks. Click here to register. Click here to order the book (or order from Amazon). It's highly recommended that you order the book, as not all readings will be available via pdf link. The Zoom link for the class is here Meeting ID: 851 5161 5155 Passcode: 655683 Scenes from Simhat Torah We had high hopes for our two-part Simhat Torah celebration. But the planned Covid-safe dancing in the parking lot part was weathered out, so we were left with the Zoom service on Simhat Torah morning. In its own way it was very special. We honored some wonderful people with the special aliyahs marking the ending and beginning of the Torah (that's Naomi Marks above, who was our Kallat Bereisheet - Bride of Genesis). I also showed everyone the very end of Deuteronomy, so that participants at home could see the final words of the Torah as it was being chanted in real time (see photo above). The awkward part was when I - the designated Torah celebrant - danced alone up and down the aisle of the chapel. It was strange, but, knowing that I was dancing on behalf of everyone watching, and hearing everyone singing along, it was also strangely meaningful. We Jews have always evolved to take on the challenges of the moment, and that certainly happened here over the course of this year's holidays, from beginning to end. You can watch the video of Simhat Torah and see for yourself; or go back to the very beginning, to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (watch the videos here, and share the link!) Dancing with the Torah on a most unusual Simhat Torah I) Extinction of the Fittest In the midst of all the climate craziness going on around us, the wildfires and storms, the droughts and the floods, this headline in the NYT from a couple of days ago might have been missed: U.S. Officials Report More Than 20 Extinctions Here’s how the story begins: The ivory-billed woodpecker, which birders have been seeking in the bayous of Arkansas, is gone forever, according to federal officials. So is the Bachman’s warbler, a yellow-breasted songbird that once migrated between the Southeastern United States and Cuba. The song of the Kauai O’o, a Hawaiian forest bird, exists only on recordings. And there is no longer any hope for several types of freshwater mussels that once filtered streams and rivers from Georgia to Illinois. In all, 22 animals and one plant should be declared extinct and removed from the endangered species list, federal wildlife officials announced on Wednesday. As we’ve seen with the just-concluded festival of Sukkot, The Jewish calendar sensitizes us to the eternal rhythms of nature.  The sukkah is supposed to inspire in us a sense of smallness in the face of nature’s grandeur. Everything plays its note in this remarkable chorus, everything and everyone. Species come and species go. Even viruses are wiped out – to so we hope – in herd immunity. But we are much sadder when we see a woodpecker go extinct than when smallpox does. And we feel somewhat responsible when so many species are no more.  According to National Geographic, more than 99 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. 99 percent of 4 billion species that have evolved. More than 35,000 species have been evaluated to be threatened with extinction today. At least 900 species have gone extinct in the last five centuries. About a third of about 6,300 species of amphibians face extinction due to their sensitivity to climate change, a rate that is 25,000 to more than 45,000 times greater than what would normally be expected. It is estimated that about half of all mammal species-along with humans, they include gorillas, monkeys, and lemurs-are at risk of extinction from loss of habitat and climate change. A World Wildlife Fund report, as analyzed by the Zoological Society of London, of more than 5,800 fish populations in the world's oceans concluded that the number of fish in the world's oceans has declined by nearly 50 percent since 1970, due to overfishing but also to rising ocean water temperatures due to global warming. In North America, the American Fisheries Society estimates that 700 species of fish are in danger of extinction, representing nearly 40 percent of all fish. Trees are not exempt from climate change and the increasing extremes in weather. During the current four-year drought in California, about twelve million trees have died, largely from pests taking advantage of trees weakened from lack of water. Incredibly, even the massive, seemingly invulnerable Sequoia trees, some of which have lived for several millennia, are showing unprecedented stress, including shedding leaves much earlier than usual. We have a young congregant, Chase Brownstein, who is a budding (and brilliant) paleontologist. Some recent research he is doing at Yale was just written up by Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. The findings were published Aug. 25 in the journal Royal Society Open Science. You might recall that it was just six years ago that Chase spoke about his hobby at his bar mitzvah. As we prepared for that speech, we were discussing Sukkot and he reminded me that not all transitions in nature are cyclical. Yes, leaves fall and then the trees re-bud, but they are still ever evolving. Each new season brings a new ring around the bark of the tree and a lighter shade of gray to my day-old stubble. So rather than focusing on the 40-year march through the wilderness, Sukkot can also point to far more dramatic transitions, some of them being traced over many millions of years. So many years and billions of species, coming in and leaving the scene. Just down the road, mammoth bones have been discovered on Cove Island. Connecticut, in fact, is a paleontological paradise. Dinosaur footprints, bones and teeth have been discovered throughout the Connecticut Valley. Where we are right now, right where our sukkah now stands, might have been part of the original Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs roamed these parts 195 million years ago, literally fueling our own existence. We drive both on and powered by their pulverized remains. The transitions we celebrate are not simply seasonal and cyclical, they are evolutionary and epochal, from Jurassic to Jerusalem to us. It’s all so wondrous; it makes me feel pity for those who force themselves to believe that this spectacular evolutionary journey was somehow compressed into six days. Which is the story we read in the Torah this week.  And each layer of life, each remarkable creature in God’s vast menagerie, each wandering resident of this earth, has built a home and ultimately seen that home dissolve into the dust, only to see another rise in its place. Another home, and another species to live in it. Species come and species go, but if we don’t do more to prevent this hemorrhaging of life, the next endangered species may be our own.   Rabbi Shmuley Yankelovitz writes, "As Jews, it is a sacred duty to reverse these terrifying trends." Indeed, there is a unique mitzvah addressing this situation of human-caused animal extinction. The Torah teaches that one must shoo away a mother bird before approaching her young. Rabbeinu Bachya (commentary on Deuteronomy 22:7) explains that the reason for this mitzvah is to prevent actions or even the perception of actions that might lead to the extinction of a species. The mother bird is to be left alone so she can reproduce offspring. To destroy both the mother bird and her kin is to wipe out a section of creation and that is deemed too destructive. While Jewish law allowed for the killing of animals in prescribed situations, it also mandated the humility and the compassion to protect all creatures and honor all in living existence that we encounter.    This week’s holidays and tomorrow’s Torah reading affirm our connection to all creatures that have wandered this earth, some of them quite old and extremely enormous. In Genesis 1 and 2, human beings are assigned the responsibility to tend to our planet and nurture these creatures –and maybe prevent some of the four billion species from becoming fossils so soon.   It’s already too late for the ivory-billed woodpecker. Let’s just hope it’s not too late for us. Postscript: I finished this sermon on Friday at about noon and then took my dogs out for some exercise, when I noticed that Cassidy was sniffing around something on our front steps. It was a dead bird - not in the bushes somewhere, but right on our front steps. Not a usual occurrence (we have dogs, not cats). What does it mean? Whatever, whether it's just a coincidence, someone sending a message - sort of a take-off on "The Godfather," without horses, the importance of this message was driven home by the chorus of birds that accompanied us during our outdoor service. See the service below - sermon is a half hour in. II) Survival of the Un-Fittest (This Shabbat morning d'var Torah is based on a sermon by the great Rabbi Harold Schulweis, a champion of the marriage of science and religion) The great Scopes Trial in the 1920s, 100 years ago, highlighted what is a faulty argument for Judaism – that somehow Darwin’s theories and the Creation account in Genesis are in conflict. And yet here we are, a century later, still hearing those arguments. Darwin argued that you and I were descended from a "hairy tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in nature." Darwin claimed that each and every one of us as individuals recapitulates the process of world evolution in our own person. You and I are microcosms of the evolution of life. So we read, in Darwin's works, that the fetus of a dog after a week looks virtually the same as the fetus of a human being. Several hours after conception, you and I had gills and a tail just like tadpoles and fish, the gills representing an ancient fish, the tail an ancestral reptile. The Origin of the Species is not Bereshit. These were different ways of understanding, of describing and thinking of the world.  The Church had to choose between the truth of Darwin or the truth of God's testament – either/or. For the synagogue this is a false choice. Why? Because there cannot be a conflict between scientific truth or biblical truth. Truth is one and God is one and the name of God is Truth. So we read in the Talmud (Sabbath 55a), "the seal of God is truth.”   The term "emet,” the rabbis in the Talmud point out, is formed by the aleph, mem, teth  – first, middle and last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Judaism is in love with God whose signature is truth. In Judaism truth has no race, no ethnicity, no religion, no geography. In Judaism there is no secular truth as opposed to religious truth. There is no Jewish astronomy or pagan astronomy, or Jewish biology or Gentile biology.  What about non-Jewish alien sources of knowledge? A fascinating discussion in Talmud Peshachim (94b) includes a rabbinic debate on some matter referring to the calendar and the movement of the moon and stars. Some of the rabbis cite "chochmay Israel"  – "Jewish sages." But some Rabbis cite "chochmay umoth ha-olam"  – "Gentile sages." The conclusion in the Talmud is "Nirim divreyhem midrabanam" – we follow the pagan sages because in matters of astronomy they are superior to us. Truth is truth whatever its origin. Does a believing Jew assert that the world is 5,782 years old? Listen to Rashi, the 11th century great interpreter of the Bible who lived quite before the 19th century Darwinians. Asked about the date and the age of the world Rashi answers, "The Torah doesn't tell you the order of the ages." And he cites the rabbinic commentary that God had created many, many worlds before this one. Torah is not archeology or astronomy. If you look for science in the Bible or for religion in science, you will end up confused and dispirited.  In his brilliant sermon, Rabbi Schulweis goes on to discuss why social darwinism, which took the "survival of the fittest" among human population groups, runs entirely counter to Jewish values, which stress that we care most of all to the "unfittest," those in need of a social safety net. He writes: It is precisely in such a case that Judaism dissents. Here Jewish faith clashes, not with science but with scientism; not with empirical facts, but the illicit of conversion of facts into value; not with the natural description of the survival of the fittest, but with the claim that only those who are physically fit deserve to survive.  Shavua Tov! Rabbi Joshua Hammerman Temple Beth El 350 Roxbury Road Stamford, Connecticut 06902 203-322-6901 | www.tbe.org    A Conservative, Inclusive, Spiritual Community

Shabbat-O-Gram for October 4

Shabbat-O-Gram

 

Over 400 came to hear Bret Stephens last week at the Hoffman Lecture. 

See the album - photos by Aviva Maller

New Hammer-pups Cassidy and Casey were introduced to the world at our Sukkah Hop

Click here for more photos from the Hop and all our summer and fall events 

Click for Yom Kippur sermons     Click for Rosh Hashanah sermons

Yanks and Sox: They’re Baack!

With the holidays behind us, we can now move on to important matters - like the looming Red Sox - Yankees series, their first meeting in the playoffs since the Curse-busting 2004 ALCS. Yes, the Rivalry is back. I’ve written in the past about that classic series as well as why the Red Sox are God’s chosen team. But for today, with tribalism having left the baseball stands and infected our body politic in a much more insidious manner, I’d rather lower the temperature by recalling the lesson I learned from the Voice of the Yankees and TBE member Mel Allen. You can read my eulogy for him here. At his funeral I recalled this anecdote:

Two years ago (in 1994), just hours prior to Yom Kippur, baseball officially cancelled the World Series for the first time in Mel's lifetime. Everywhere, people were in deep mourning. How could it be the fall without the Fall Classic? Where would our heroes come from? What would become of our nation without our national pastime? The baseball world, the country and the calendar were entering an autumnal abyss.

I wasn't sure what to say to Mel that evening. I wanted to comfort him in the hope that he could comfort me. So I said to him, "Such a sad day." And Mel, in his matter of fact way, which could often mask deep wisdom as plain common sense, replied: "This is not a tragedy. War, now that's tragic. Poverty and hunger, that's a tragedy. This is not a tragedy."

And I ascended this pulpit that night a whole lot wiser. Mr. Baseball, the one I had thought lived and breathed only for the game, made me understand that it was just a game, a game which lived and breathed through him, but only inasmuch as it expressed the drama, beauty and poetry of life. It wasn't the game that mattered: it was the living and breathing. It was on that night that the Voice of the Yankees enabled this Red Sox fan to understand that ultimately, we are all on the same team.

It’s something for all of us to recall.

Now, play ball!

TBE Teen in USA Today

I was so proud to see TBE Teen Menanie Roloff’s op-ed about anti-Semitism this week in the USA Today. See it here.

She writes movingly of her response to the anti-Semitic bullying she faced as a child:

Many times I ask, what if I had never met an ADL representative? What if my mother had told me not to worry? What if I stayed silent, hoping the harassment would go away and they would stop hurting me? 

Instead, I was taught to stand up for myself and others. I got help, and a door was opened for me I never knew existed. My message to children all over the world is this: Have hope. Be strong, fight for what you believe, and always tell your mom and dad everything. Being bullied is not OK. It is never OK, and you don’t need to accept it or stand for it.

As bleak as your circumstances seem, it will not be dark forever if you find a community and support and make change for yourself, as I did.

Mazal tov, Melanie!

 

Creation and Evolution: Perfect Together?

Just in time for the portion of Bereisheet, which includes the two creation accounts, Wired magazine gives us the story, ”America’s Clergy are Teaming up with Scientists.” As you’ll recall, my Kol Nidre sermon dealt with the compatibility of science and religion, and we will be having a guest speaker here in early December who has founded a website dedicated to that premise, called Sinai and Synapses. The story of the creation of the universe puts that idea to its greatest test.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has been wrestling on how to bridge this country’s religion-science divide. The Wired story states that AAAS says that seminaries are most fascinated by cosmology and neuroscience. But some schools have branched into other areas under the guidance of science advisers. For instance, divinity students at Wake Forest University in North Carolina dissected a sheep brain (thankfully that never happened at my rabbinical school). Catholic University in America seminarians discussed what finding aliens might mean for the future of their religion, while other schools hosted screenings of Ender’s Game and The Martian.

I'm a fan of the website Religious Tolerance.org.  I found there the following chart, which points out the apparent conflicts between Genesis and evolutionary theory.

Comparison of 1st creation story with the theory of evolution:

There are many discrepancies between the first creation story (derived from the Bible) and evolutionary theory (derived from astronomical observations, the fossil records, radiometric dating of rocks, etc.):

Item	According to Genesis	According to Evolution Theory
Source	Genesis 1:1 to 2:3	Paleontologists, Biologists, Astronomers, Geologists, etc.
Sun	Created after the world	Present before world coalesces
Grass, land plants, trees	Created before the sun	Evolved after the sun
First forms of life	Land plants	Marine organisms
Birds	Created before land animals	Evolved from land animals
Fruit Trees	Created before fish	Evolved after fish
Initial diet of animals	Restricted to plants	Animals evolved as meat, plant eaters, and omnivores.
Age of the universe	Less than 10,000 years	About 14 billion years
Age of the Earth	Less than 10,000 years	About 4.5 billion years
Age of earliest life forms	Less than 10,000 years	About 3.5 billion years
Where humans came from	From Adam who was created by God(s). Genesis 1:27 does not explain the method. Genesis 2:7 explains that Adam was made from dust, the ground, or soil (translations differ).	Evolved; higher apes and Homo Sapiens share a common ancestor. Actually, any two species of life have a common ancestor, even humans and cabbages, or dogs and sharks.

The differences, while substantial, do nothing to shake my belief that the two narratives are complementary.  Note that I said complementary, not compatible.  Yes, we can go as far as to say that days in Genesis might well have been measured in eons rather than hours.  And yes, there is a stunning symmetry in the fact that humans are the last beings created in both accounts.  And yes, the Big Bang can be said to echo the starting point of Genesis.  But the Torah account never was and never will be intended to describe scientific fact.

It's a shame that both in this country and Israel literalist forces have made this such a controversy, when, as I see it, Genesis and evolution can easily co-exist as complementary rather than conflicting stories.

Given the newest discoveries in DNA research, Darwin's theories on evolution have now been nearly universally accepted by the scientific community. Even Pope Benedict gave it his "hechsher." The evidence of our evolutionary ancestry is written all over the human genome. Intelligent Design has been discredited - notably in trials in Pennsylvania and Ohio. But that doesn't mean God is out of the picture.

There are those who are very concerned that accepting Darwin's notion that humanity is an accident of nature would be a bad thing for morality. They claim that if you teach kids that they are evolved from apes they are going to behave like murderous animals.

I guess if Darwin hadn't come around, there wouldn't have been over 250 mass shootings in the US thus far this year.

Prof Kenneth Miller, a biologist at Brown and bestselling author, disagrees with the Creationists on evolution's role on morality. The core of the Creationists' argument is that evolution is driven by mistakes. And it's true that evolution is driven by mutation. "But imagine an organism that never made these mistakes," Miller says. "We think of mistakes as being bad, but if you have no mistakes, you have no mutation, you have no evolution. What's going to happen to an organism that replicates its DNA perfectly every time? It's not going to survive. So by what standard are we calling these mistakes?"

in evolution, perfection is the road to extinction. The path to survival is the path of growth, of change, of shattered patterns.

Maybe evolution is not a mistake of nature, Miller suggests. Maybe it is, in effect, the "design" of nature, the way nature is supposed to work. Somehow, and we don't know how, something happened that drove that first amphibian to take a big gulp of air and climb ashore. Somehow, at some point, something drove that first bird to flap its wings and soar.  Somehow, at some point, a pair of chromosomes melded together - we know which ones they are - marking the evolution from ape to human. Maybe it was random, maybe it wasn't, but either way, one can easily fit a model of God into this scenario, not a God who micromanages every detail of the universe, but who created a process of flow and change that we call evolution, which reflects the will of the Creator.

One could easily make the claim that evolution is simply teshuvah writ large. Just as we make mistakes and grow from them, so does DNA. So does the universe. So does God.

I think Einstein would agree. The universe, like Judaism, has a bias for change.

Even God has evolved, at least our conception of God; it's shifted dramatically from the warrior sky God of the Bible to the Rabbis' concept of ha-Rachaman - the womb-like embodiment of love (which is also, by the way a Muslim name for God). Maimonides looked to reasoned Aristotelian thought for his God, while the Kabbalists added a sense of balance, of yin and yang, to their mystical eroticism. Arthur Green writes, "The Oneness of God, for the Kabbalists, is dynamic and flowing rather than static and unmoved." God is flowing, emanating, unfolding, and so is Creation.

God is, in fact, breath itself - the life force embodied in breath. We actually have a prayer that says just that. Nishmat Kol Chai tevarech et shimcha Adonai Eloheynu. All who breathe praise You.  To breathe is to testify to the march of life, the gift of constantly becoming, constantly growing. Even God's very name mimics the act of breathing. Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey. Pronounce it and you get the sound of breath. It's no accident. God is found in that flow of life, in the process of change, and we are created in God's image. Kol Haneshama t'halelya halleluyah says Psalm 150. The mere act of breathing is a prayer.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer (of blessed memory) wrote the following after a trial where the Kansas Board of Education tried to impose anti-evolution curricula on classrooms - and lost.

"How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too."

The God I believe in is a God of change. Our lives are governed not by stagnancy but by flow. The only constant is change, and we need to adapt, constantly adapt to it. We need to Grow with the Flow. Like nature itself, we are not perfect. We make mistakes. But perfection is the road to extinction. When we become perfect someday, we'll all have become robots. Perfection is not a goal to aim for; it is an illusion to dispel.

Evolution, therefore, is completely compatible with Jewish sensibilities and belief.  And Genesis provides us with crucial lessons on growth, change and...how we have all evolved from day one.

Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

Finding the Calm Within the Storm: Spiritual Storm Resources

Given the dire forecasts and our recent local history of power outages, I'm sending this out to our community before the worst of the storm hits.

If, once it is safe to travel, we have power at the temple, I will send out another email notifying congregants that the building will be open and available to you.  We'll heat up some coffee and crank up the wi-fi, and feel free to stay as long as you wish.  If we lose power, alas, we have no emergency generator, so there will be no email from me to let you know that.

Meanwhile, my prayer for all of you is that everyone remains safe and cautious. 

I am looking out my window now and the trees are swaying relentlessly, bending to the wind's increasing power, but not yet breaking.  As the gusts increase through the afternoon, it only seems a matter of time.

I know that for many in our community, there is an even greater threat, as the sea itself prepares to make landfall in a manner that, they tell us, we've never seen before. 

In the primeval narrative of Genesis, the wind brought about a separation of waters, and then a separation of water from dry land.  We're seeing before our eyes an undoing of this primal act of order.  Sandy is a return to primordial chaos. Instinctively we recognize it - or at least my dogs do.  We only need to pull ourselves from our electronic devices and look out the window.

The Hebrew word for wind is ruach, which also means "spirit."  In Judaism. the meteorological and spiritual are deeply intertwined.  The experience of a storm is a profoundly spiritual one, even in our day.  Perhaps especially in our day, since, even when we can pinpoint well in advance what will happen, we are completely powerless to stop it.  The weather is one of the few things left that reduces us to mush in the face of its power.  It makes us realize how insignificant we really are.

Insignificant - and interdependent.

All we have is one another right now.  And our hope in the God whom the ancients envisioned riding on this spirit-wind, and whom we imagine giving us the strength to overcome its impact.

I've collected some inspirational readings to help give you the strength that we all seek at a time like this, so that you can find your own place of calm within the storm.

See this collection of Jewish prayers of healing and hope during a time of natural disaster, collected by the URJ.  

Also see this prayer for safety during a hurricane.  And Naomi Levy's Psalm for victims of a hurricane or flood.

No one should be traveling now, but for those who are, there is the traditional Tefillat Haderech, the Wayfarer's Prayer.

My own poem, "The Storm Before the Calm" is a commentary on Psalm 29, the storm psalm, in light of modern Jerusalem and the peace process (it was written a few years ago, when there was one).

With my fervent hope that everyone finds a safe place - and that we can all come together to give thanks when the worst is over

A Creation Theology for a Post-Darwinian Age

Are you, like me, someone who has difficulty imagining God as the "Old Man in the Sky?" Do the prayers of the siddur not connect with your view of the universe? Do you have trouble reconciling the Creation story with what we know about fossils and Carbon 14 dating?

Click here for a lecture by Rabbi Arthur Green, also available for downloading on iTunes or here.

This talk summarizes the themes of Green's important new book, "Radical Judaism," explaining why religion remains relevant at a time when evolution and Biblical criticism havae been accepted as fact. Religion and modern science need not be seen as enemies. While there are still a few holdouts who believe that the world was actually created 5771 years ago (e.g. the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who said "If you are still troubled by the theory of evolution, I can tell you without fear of contradiction that it has not a shred of evidence to support it"), Green posits a dynamic, new way of looking at Creation and God, enabling us to interpret the narrative of Genesis in a whole new light, taking 20th century theologians like Heschel and Kaplan into our 21st century world of multicultural fusion and universal connectivity. If you are looking for an authentically Jewish vision for the religious skeptic, this one is it.

In December about a dozen of us discussed the first chapter of Green's book, and I quoted from it several times over the High Holidays. At some point over the next several weeks, I hope to continue the conversation.

A Once in 28 Year Celebration

Here, courtesy of Hazon, are some explanatory materials regarding a Jewish ceremony done only once every 28 years! Join me at Cove Island on Wed. April 8 at sunrise, 5:15 AM, to welcome the sun's return to the exact spot where it was at the time of its creation (according to tradition). We'll meet by the totem pole (why not) to share some readings and prayers about the significance of the sun. Here is Hazon's take:

We hope you’ll find meaningful ways to celebrate and to learn about the positive role the sun plays in our lives (all life depends upon it!) and about its power as a healthy, renewable energy source. For many, the notion of solving an entire global crisis can be overwhelming. That’s why the second-century sage Rabbi Tarfon teaches in Pirke Avot, “It is not your obligation to complete the task (of perfecting the world); neither are you free to desist from it.”

On their resources page Hazon offers suggested materials for education, ideas for action, tools for advocacy, competitions - as well as ways you can bring a celebration of Birkat HaChamah to your family. Here are some Study and Learn Resources and Articles and Dvar Torah Resources.

Here are some other ideas from Hazon (aside from joining me at 5:15):

1. Greet the new day with yoga Sun Salute postures.


2. Symbolically burn chametz using the concentrated light of the sun.
   Construct a solar cooker and enjoy a recipe made prior to April 8 or host a solar cooker cook-off. Click here for do-it-yourself solar cooker instructions; more about solar cooking and healthy solar recipes.


3. Bake matzoh in your solar cooker prior to April 8 to serve at your seder.


4. Send in a solar cooker recipe to The Jew & The Carrot Solar Cooker Recipe Raffle and be entered into our raffle. You could win the recently released The Jew & The Carrot - Recipes cookbook with recipes from our blog or Hazon’s Food for Thought. Send your recipe along with your name and contact information to herecomesthesun@hazon.org.
   Register for the 2009 Hazon Food Conference with the discount code “sunny” and receive $50 off.


5. Take a sunrise bike ride. Learn more about Hazon’s Jewish Environmental Bike Rides in New York and Israel to support innovative environmental projects including our work in the new Jewish Food Movement. Use the discount code “sunny” and receive $50 off our Rides. Decorate your bike with sun decorations, take a picture and we’ll post it on our site!


6. Plant sunflowers in your garden!

Here Comes the Sun!