Environment, Climate, and Animal Rights

Let Sukkot be our call to action this year. May it give us the spiritual resolve to live in the midst of great uncertainty and challenge, and to take action to pursue climate justice in this vast interconnected world of ours.

It is not enough to mourn. Mourning must be accompanied by actions that end the harm being done. 

That the Torah addresses the concerns that civilization inevitably brings, along with awareness of the need for individuals to experience God in wilderness, seems to me a profound grappling with the needs both of human beings and of God’s non-human world.

We have enough warning signs, enough extreme climate names. Let us not be Pharaohs on the way to deaths in every household.

Our Torah depicts what can happen to us in a world without water... Moses striking the rock to yield water is a vivid metaphor for the water-related violence that is breaking out all over our world — particularly in the Middle East, as well as in South Asia and Africa.

For the sake of the food insecure in these difficult days, and for the future health of our country, I hope that Ki Tavo’s powerful linking of sacred space and religiosity to the obligation to give to those in need can be strengthened. As Americans increasingly seek spirituality and community outside of organized religion, community builders, religious and non-religious alike, must work to cultivate cultures of giving.

Even during a war, a moment of life and death, the Torah implores us: Do not destroy. All the more so in our own lives when the choice is far less drastic, we must always search and seek out ways to avoid unnecessary destructive action. 

This work is essential, now more than ever. But this work is also exhausting. Just like the holiday of Sukkot, our world is also one of contradictions. There is good within all the chaos, although right now it might be hard to see.

The fast of Shiva Asar B’Tammuz (the 17th of Tammuz) begins an annual period of mourning in the Jewish calendar culminating with Tisha B’Av (the 9th of Av), which marks the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem, as well as other tragedies of Jewish history. Rabbinical Student Frankie Sandmel created this 17th of Tammuz...

Commentary for Shabbat HaChodesh and Shabbat HaGadol This coming Shabbat is Rosh Chodesh Nissan, which means the clock is ticking for Pesach’s arrival. The following Shabbat, we will read as Haftarah the very last passage of the last of the classical Hebrew Prophets: Chapter 3 of “Malachi.” We name the day “Shabbat Hagadol” – referring...