Living Our Beliefs: Exploring Faith & Religion in Daily Life

The Interfaith Green Sabbath Project – Jonathan Schorsch

• Meli Solomon • Season 3 • Episode 59

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Episode 59.
The Green Sabbath Project, founded by Jonathan Schorsch in 2019, promotes the concept and ritual of a weekly earth day. Taking a day of rest for yourself and the environment is eminently reflective of the sabbath. Although Jonathan draws from his Jewish heritage, the Green Sabbath Project intentionally avoids promoting any particular religious beliefs or language. Jonathan sees potential learning between religious and non-religious people in connecting the values of a weekly day of rest and reducing the impact on the environment. Taking on this practice is both a simple action and a very flexible practice with deep benefits.


Highlights:
·       The Green Sabbath Project aims to promote sustainable living through practices inspired by the principles of Shabbat.
·       The project avoids religious language to appeal to a wider audience and promote ecological consciousness.
·       People need guidance, incentives to act sustainably and step off the hamster wheel.
·       The project has three parts: education, gatherings, and encouraging people to observe Green Sabbaths.
·       Promoting sustainable living and ecological thinking as complementary to religious and spiritual approaches.
·       We need to re-think how we eat, shop, work, and relate to the environment. 


Social Media links for Jonathan:
Website – https://www.greensabbathproject.net
Website – https://www.jassberlin.org
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-schorsch-a27630276
University of Potsdam – https://www.juedischetheologie-unipotsdam.de/en/chairs/jewish-religious-and-intellectual-history/prof-dr-jonathan-schorsch


Social Media links for Méli:
Talking with God Project – https://www.talkingwithgodproject.org
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/melisolomon/
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100066435622271


Transcript:  https://www.buzzsprout.com/1851013/episodes/14372271


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Comments?  Questions? Email  Méli at – info@talkingwithgodproject.org

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Jonathan Schorsch transcript

The Green Sabbath Project

 

Meli  [00:00:05]:

Hello, and welcome to Living Our Beliefs, a home for open conversations with fellow Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Through personal stories and reflection, we will explore how our religious traditions show up in daily life. I am your host, Meli Solomon. So glad you could join us. This podcast is part of my Talking with God Project. To learn more about that research and invite me to give a talk or workshop, go to my website, www.talking withgodproject.org. This is episode 59, and my guest today is Jonathan Schorsch. Jonathan holds the chair in Jewish, religious, and intellectual history at the University of Potsdam, which is near Berlin, Germany. He is the author of numerous books and essays on the early modern Sephardic world, late modern Jewish history and culture, and Jewish ecological perspectives. In 2017, he founded and still directs the Jewish Activism Summer School in Berlin. In 2019, he founded the Green Sabbath Project, which seeks to adapt and adopt the ancient practice of Shabbat as an ecological ritual for our era of ecological catastrophes. Jonathan lives in Berlin, Germany with his family. His social media links are listed in the show notes. Hello, Jonathan. Welcome to my Living Our Beliefs podcast. I'm really pleased to have you on today.

 

Jonathan [00:01:50]:

Thank you. What a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

 

Meli  [00:01:54]:

I'd like to start with my usual first question. What is your religious and cultural identity?

 

Jonathan [00:02:01]:

Start with an easy one. Wow. I am an American Jew. I grew up in the Bronx. I grew up in a conservative Jewish household in the denominational sense, not the political sense. At this point in my life, I am, avowedly heterodox in certain ways.

 

Meli  [00:02:26]:

You've done a lot of things in your life, and you now live in Germany. The key thing that we're going to focus on today is your Green Sabbath Project. When was it founded?

 

Jonathan [00:02:41]:

I started it in 2019. Our website was designed and finished literally, I think, as COVID was sweeping the world and people were starting to realize how serious it was.

 

Meli  [00:02:57]:

And what inspired you to start the Green Sabbath Project?

 

Jonathan [00:03:00]:

I have always been environmentally oriented and engaged, and my worries have grown as I have learned more about the various crises we face. I had moved from, the States to Germany, from Columbia University, to Potsdam University, where I now teach, outside of Berlin, and that was 8 years ago. So that gave me an opportunity to attempt to, integrate my personal environmental activities and concerns much more, intentionally into my scholarship, which I have done. As I started thinking and writing more and more about Judaism and ecology. The idea of the practice of Shabbat of of a Sabbath, of a weekly rest day just kept coming to mind for very obvious reasons. I wrote about it, in a number of pieces. And then I thought to myself, well, what a typical scholar. It's all, theoretical in intellectual. You know? You're writing about things, and I thought, well, what about trying to take this into the so called real world? What if someone started a movement, a mass movement to get people to keep Shabbat in some way, you know, as an environmental practice? So that's what I attempted to do. And I wasn't the first one as I discovered, but it's been super interesting, super rewarding.

 

Meli  [00:04:40]:

You started it right before COVID hit. It sounds like the intention was to have events to do things in person and to what? Teach people how they might observe Shabbat in some way or how Shabbat can be environmental. Can you say a little more about that?

 

Jonathan [00:05:04]:

Yes. Exactly. Both and then more. The idea the practice is is relatively straightforward. We are aiming to get people to do some kind of weekly day of rest, to take one day a week, Shabbat, if you're Jewish, on Saturdays, Friday night sundown to Saturday night sundown, Sunday if you're Christian, perhaps Friday if you're Muslim, and to really make that a weekly Earth Day. And, yes, we're aiming both at religious individuals and communities, those who are already doing, observing, celebrating some kind of Sabbath practice, but may not necessarily be doing it as an environmental practice. They might not be doing it intentionally in connection with ecology, or as we might say today, being green. And then at the same time, we're really very much targeting people who don't consider themselves religious, people who might consider themselves spiritual or agnostic, atheist, Gaius, Pantheist, whatever, essentially suggesting to them that this kind of a practice, whether one believes in god or not, whether one's doing it, for religious reasons or not makes a lot of sense ecologically in terms of mental health, well-being, lifestyle from a political perspective and so on. So we really see and promote Green Sabbaths, as a vehicle for ecological consciousness raising, and it's really that simple. It's not the only solution. It's not the ultimate solution. It's It's one of many things that people can and should be doing, but I feel we feel that if we are truly to become a sustainable society or a set of sustainable societies, then we are going to have to internalize green values, ecological values, deeply and truly. And therefore, coming from a religious background myself, having been very involved with religious spiritual communities, I feel that ritual is incredibly powerful as a tool. And these kinds of practices, these kinds of self aware, rituals and practices are particularly good at instilling values, in individuals and in collectives, especially long term. Yes. We have to recycle. We have to compost. We have to reduce. We have to not waste food, etcetera, etcetera. And we also have to understand what we're doing and why. And that's where I think these kinds of rituals come in. So a weekly earth day, a weekly day of rest becomes a vehicle for meditating on our environmental footprint, on what we are doing or what we are not doing what we could be doing, what we should be doing, again, through God, without God, and hopefully, that consciousness spills out to the other 6 days of the week.

 

Meli  [00:07:54]:

Practically speaking, what are the various elements of the project, especially considering you launched just as COVID hit.

 

Jonathan [00:08:05]:

Right. Good question. So we do, I'd say, 3 things. One is education, trying to teach people, show people, give people examples, model what this might mean. 2, we do online events. We do gatherings usually once a month and we have had a wonderful array of, speakers, presenters, guests. And then 3, we ourselves do and we encourage people to do themselves as individuals or families or communities some form of Green Sabbath.

 

Meli  [00:08:39]:

So education, events, and encouragement of others to celebrate Shabbat, to do nothing as as your website said. I like that.

 

Jonathan [00:08:52]:

Exactly. To do nothing in one form or another. Now, again, we don't use the word Shabbat because we are not promoting a specific religious approach to it, and we're certainly not promoting an orthodox, you know, traditionalist approach to it. We're rather, ecumenical, very o open minded about how people do this. We want people to do what feels comfortable for them. But yes. So for instance, for 2 years in a row, we have done a kind of green Sabbath weekend in October. It coincides with Shabbat Beresheet, the, Sabbath on which Jews around the world read the portion of the Torah about the creation story at the very at the very beginning of Genesis. There, we have had a a wide, array of groups joining us and people, as it were, do nothing together, which is not entirely true, but, you know, they might do a kind of slow dance performance. They might get together for a organic vegan local potluck, lunch. They might do a walking meditation in the woods, etcetera, etcetera. The the possibilities, about as endless as one's imagination. In some sense, what we are trying to encourage people to do and what we are modeling and then hoping that people will continue to do to emulate is some form of Green Sabbath. Now For Jews, that will sound a lot like Shabbat, and that's not coincidental. The point is to have this be a self-conscious practice or ritual, which is really focused on the ecological aspects, the ecological motivations. Ultimately, we are going to have to be sustainable as individuals and as societies, and so this is yet another opportunity to think about that. What does it mean to live sustainably? How might I live more sustainably? How are we not living up to, truly sustainable ideals, etcetera, etcetera.

 

Meli  [00:10:47]:

Yeah. Interesting, this business of being inspired for you as the founder from Jewish practice, and yet you are specifically not using religious or not using Jewish languaging. Is that correct?

 

Jonathan [00:11:06]:

Yes. I do happen to believe that the, biblical and rabbinic framework that was developed around Shabbat is profound, is inspirational, is wise, is still absolutely relevant and timely. I believe it's it's radical. It's almost revolutionary in some senses. But I also feel and understand that that's not where everyone is at. I understand that that organized religion is complex and and often can be problematic. I understand that in our modern world, religion is complicated for people and is even a turnoff for some people. The urgency of our ecological crises is such that we need to make use of all of the tools at our disposal. Given how secular the world is, we still have a lot to learn from these modalities, from these ancient or often ancient traditions and tools. So I am a little bit smuggling in something, trying to do that in a way that will not alienate people. There's a lot to learn from, let's say, Shabbat, from these approaches. And and by the way, people who are orthodox or religious or traditionalist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim also have a lot to learn from our environmental crises and from the environmental sciences and environmental humanities. Religion is always adapting. Religion is always evolving, and so that learning process is too directional and should be. I think that's a good thing. It's so rich, and I kind of love that.

 

Meli  [00:12:48]:

It's kind of humorous, this business of kind of sneaking in religion. You know what it makes me think of is having a kid eat a piece of carrot cake to get them to eat some carrots.

 

Jonathan [00:12:58]:

I don't wanna say that I'm sneaking religion in, but I do think religion has been brilliant at figuring out how to organize communities and individuals around goals, especially long term, especially intergenerationally. And that is exactly what is needed to address to confront our environmental crises. Ritual is a big part of that. Practice is a big part of it. Human beings, I think, are not merely rational or analytical. The data will not convince everyone. We don't always do what we know to be best or right. We operate often unconsciously. We are emotional beings. All of the things of ritual are are very powerful and speak to us. What I understand us to be doing is smuggling in age old spiritual strategies, one might even say spiritual technologies, that I don't think are any less urgent or powerful or effective. But I do think that in some sense, removing them from the trappings of organized religion that many people rightfully have problems with is important too. If people get closer to God, if people find religion as a framework that's meaningful because of this, wonderful. That's great too. You know, our contemporary problems are not necessarily solvable or addressable purely through the age old religious approach. The rabbinic laws of Shabbat, the 39 forms of labor that one is not permitted to do on Shabbat. And as Abraham Joshua Heschel and other thinkers have pointed out, the ultimate underlying purpose of these laws could be understood as refraining from impacting on nature for Shabbat. For those 25 hours from sundown to sundown, we do not transform nature. We do not manipulate. We don't do. We don't act. We just are. We we be as it were, because the world is perfect. We we are back in Eden for that one day a week. We are living under the divine or in the divine abundance. There's no need to make change. There's no need to do anything. You could argue that that is inherently ecological, and in some ways, it is. But if that is not connected to ecological consciousness, then it is very possible, maybe it's even likely that on the other 6 days of the week, those same very religious individuals who are keeping Shabbat punctiliously may be doing all kinds of things that are not ecological at all because it does not fall into the specific concrete parameters of the law. You know, the Green Sabbath Project, we're not imposing a particular set of beliefs or practices and saying, if you do this, the world will be saved as much as suggesting possibilities, suggesting solutions, suggesting things that will hopefully, both benefit the the planet and, all the other species that live with us and you and me as individuals as well.

 

Meli  [00:16:25]:

So one of the things that comes to mind when I hear you describe this, Jonathan, is the question of contents and the vessel. In terms of the Green Sabbath Project, the desire to be not just not an organized religious expression, but to rid yourself of the vessel, the the trappings, one might say, of organized religion and focus and promote the core conceptual elements and the practice without the the do's and don'ts of Shabbat. Is is that a reasonable way to say it?

 

Jonathan [00:17:10]:

Yes. Absolutely. But I would put it a little differently. If someone is practicing an ecological life, there's no reason whatsoever that that could not overlap with a devout Jewish life or devout Christian life or devout Muslim life, but it is not necessarily the case, and, of course, vice versa, obviously. What the Green Sabbath Project is doing is a little bit shamelessly, heterodox. It is playful, creative with the understanding that religions, spirituality, these kinds of practices, these kinds of communities are essentially what we make of them, whether we believe in a divine mandate or not. And, therefore, the question is, what do we want them to be? The environmental crises are absolutely urgent, existential, dire, possibly threaten the well-being of humanity, clearly threaten the well-being of many ecosystems and other species. I desperately want to see that changed. Yes. My goals are much more limited in some sense than a wide ranging religious cultural system such as Judaism or Christianity or Islam, which obviously has many, many other goals and values as well. I don't want to see, let's say, you know, green values or sustainable living as mutually exclusive with a traditional or traditionalist religious life, but, again, they're not necessarily overlapping or identical.

 

Meli  [00:18:45]:

I do appreciate that religions have their agendas and are not necessarily aligned. They're often not aligned, so I can see the benefits of setting those elements aside, which brings me to the question of your audience, and are you engaging or how are you engaging people who are not actively Jewish?

 

Jonathan [00:19:13]:

Excellent question. Precisely because I don't see the majority of our world's population suddenly or even gradually becoming religious Jews or religious Christians, by not using particularist language, we really do want to appeal to a wide range of individuals and communities. Now many of our audience, many people who participate in Greek Sabbath activities happen to come from religious backgrounds. It makes sense to them. It's something familiar to them. They've grown up with it. It resonates. Many of them are not, and they may get it from a different perspective. When you talk about a weekly day of rest, a kind of weekly Earth Day, when you talk about doing nothing as a practice, when you talk about withdrawal and rest, focusing on on the family, on on friends, on your children, focusing on not impacting nature or or uses the rabbinic lens of the laws of Shabbat and commands us to, live hyper locally for one day a week. All of these things add up to an eminently ecological approach. So a lot of that, I think, resonates with people who are not Jewish or who are not religious Jews, who don't want to be told they're commanded to do x, y z, but may feel it as an inner imperative, or may feel it as a wisdom tradition that makes a lot of sense, or they may feel it as something that has been missing in their lives, and they love the idea of bringing it in. That's what speaks to people often very powerfully. We as individuals don't always come up with the wisest or best approaches to things. But collectively, over time, over many generations, through our cultural practices such as religions, we we have in fact come up with incredibly wise approaches. So we offer this as an example, as a model, something that you might take up if you wish to. I think as we all know in modernity, people do not wanna be told you must do this. In some sense, to a certain degree, people need to be shown what to do, and and incentives, positive and negative, are are are often super useful. People need to internalize these values. They need to make them their own. So that's our goal. How do you live sustainably? Because you want to, because it's meaningful to you, because you understand the consequences of your action, and you don't like that those consequences may be harmful in in various ways. Now this is where environmentalism in some sense really does overlap quite strongly noticeably with, Jewish law and the whole idea of the structures of a religious law. Judaism is a religion that focuses particularly on deeds, on actions, not on beliefs and not on a vague heart orientation. There too. You know? It's interesting, I think, environmentally. We understand now that it's not just enough to love trees and to hug them, to think naturally, or to live with a love for nature. It's a question of what one does or what one does not do. These consequences, especially the negative ones, are again, they're concrete. They're specific. They're real. And so, therefore, it makes a big difference. I don't see sustainable living and thinking ecologically as at all mutually exclusive from religious, spiritual, approaches and the other way around too. There's a really a beautiful dialogue between the two. There or there there can be. There should be.

 

Meli  [00:23:08]:

Has the vision changed since you founded this project?

 

Jonathan [00:23:12]:

That is an excellent question. I wouldn't say it's changed. I would say that It has become more self aware and perhaps more capable of focusing on the important messages and the you know, what sells as it were, you know, what sells and what works. You know, it's ironic because in many ways, the Green Sabbath Project is promoting something invisible, intangible, so easy to do. You don't have to spend any money to do it. You don't need any material resources to do it or or minimal resources to do it. It's a bizarre kind of endeavor to be selling nothing, and yet It's been kind of intriguing and very rewarding to watch people get it, to watch people's eyes open and say, oh, yeah. Yeah. Of course. That makes so much sense. But, of course, it's one thing to get that conceptually. It's one thing to understand it intellectually. It's another thing to live it and to do it, and that is hard. That is really hard in our day and age in particular, to disconnect for 25 hours, to close all your screens, to not get in the car, to not get on the computer, to not want to, do things. Right? It is truly a Zen exercise. It's very hard to overcome. So in a way, I would argue that that Zen exercise is at the core of the entire ecological cluster of crises, ultimately. If we think about consumerism, we think about the idea of endless growth that capitalism, particularly American style capitalism, promotes. The idea of self limitation. Whether you think it comes from the divine or not, that is gonna make us or break us.

 

Meli  [00:25:18]:

But I think it's key that you noted, Jonathan, that it's hard to sell, do nothing. This is our challenge. And Part of the challenge is not just the particular change that you are promoting. It's also true that change is hard. Change of behavior, change of attitude is hard for us. We get into habits or we have desires that are very attractive even if maybe they're not good for us, and it's very hard to change that.

 

Jonathan [00:25:53]:

Right.

 

Meli  [00:25:53]:

I do find myself wondering about a possible other way to think about what you're offering, which is more towards change what you do rather than stop doing because it is so difficult to not do something that you repeatedly want to do. The suggestion is often choose a different something to do. I'm not hearing that as an approach.

 

Jonathan [00:26:27]:

Right. Well, that, I I really appreciate what you're saying. I agree with you and I have not really spoken about that so far in our conversation, but that is where the education, the pedagogy comes in. And that is absolutely central to what we do. And in fact, that is much of what we do. So let me give you just 2 examples. And and the the the idea here when I speak about pedagogy or education is exactly trying to help people understand exactly what you were just highlighting. That is to understand that they are not being asked to avoid doing something or to do nothing but to seeing doing nothing as an action, as doing something that is in fact probably one of the healthiest beneficial things they could be doing. So, again, let me give you 2 examples. There are many organizations nowadays that are actually working with some kind of day of rest or Sabbath. Tiffany Schlain, the filmmaker who made a a little movie about Barbie before the big movie about Barbie came out, who is a wonderful, activist and artist and and thinker and feminist. She and her family came up with something she calls Technology Shabbats, and that was a way that they as a family could detox, get off their screens. They happen to be Jewish, so they do it on Shabbat, Friday night to Saturday night, and that has become something she has been trying to spread as a potential tool for well-being, for family connectivity, for mental health. Tricia Hersey is an African American theologian, and she has founded a wonderful organization called The Nap Ministry. Her approach is to say African Americans have historically been used as what Aristotle called living tools. They were forced, into slavery in order to do the manual physical labor that the enslavers did not one to do, so their bodies became something that they lost control of. And so she uses rest, napping, literally napping, being able to take a nap and sleep and rest as an African American, as a radical, if not revolutionary, step of taking back control of one's own body. Why are we constantly being told we have to be productive and working? For whom are we working? Why can't we simply relax and rest? Something that is a supreme instance of self possession, of controlling oneself. So those are just 2 examples. And both of those, in their different ways, both of them go back to the inherently radical revolutionary nature of Shabbat as a biblical rabbinic practice, which was essentially to say, one day a week, you don't belong to your employers. You do not belong to the economic system. You do not belong to Pharaoh and the slave system in Egypt. You belong to me. You belong to yourself. And that act of taking one day a week and saying, sorry. I just live. I'm not gonna go to work. I'm not going to do things for others. I am not motivated by external commandments of other human beings. So that's the first example. Right? Shabbat as a kind of radical political, economic, spiritual act or or practice. The second way I think we try to, again, help people understand what doing nothing as it were is about is to go back in some sense to the Zen perspective and language, which is definitely there all over the place in Judaism also. The modern west is quite petrified of death. Death as a focus of fear motivates so much of our society on on an unconscious level that is deeply central to what the environmental crises and all the other crises to which they're connected is about you could argue that a practice like Shabbat of doing nothing, allowing oneself to do nothing one day a week is a form of getting used to a little death. It is a form of accepting nothingness. To be able to do nothing for one day, to be able to sit back, have a beautiful meal where you're talking, you're singing, you're not worried about the future. You're not worried about all of these external things that you think make you valuable and valid. You exist as part of, an abundance that is, that truly is, that is a kind of training, I believe, that has profound psychological, emotional impact and benefits. So that's the second example. Right? Learning how to not need, not have desires, not have cravings. Those values are all over religions and spiritual systems, Native American systems, indigenous systems around the world. They are so hard to internalize precisely because of the challenge to our desires to be great, our desires to be big, our desires to be powerful, our desire is to be secure and safe. And, ultimately, in a way, you could argue that Shabbat, that a weekly Earth Day, that the green values behind it all, that the spiritual, religious values behind it all all point to the same thing. Get used to being vulnerable. Get used to being part of a whole that is far larger than you that we don't fully comprehend. Get used to your impermanence and accept it. It is part of the whole. It is an unavoidable part of life and to pretend that it can be suppressed is at the root of a lot of these ecological and and civilizational crises. So those are two examples of how some, you know, seemingly simple weekly ritual, in fact, opens up to the deepest, most profound global existential, philosophical, spiritual questions. Those lead to, ideally, positive understandings that this kind of a ritual practice of doing nothing or doing less is in fact ultimately positive.

 

Meli  [00:33:09]:

Where do you see this in 5 years?

 

Jonathan [00:33:13]:

In 5 years, I would love to see communities, neighborhoods, maybe towns, families and organizations actually doing some kind of green Sabbath. It may take very different forms in very different communities, and that's fine by me. They can choose what to do. So I would love to see this as a kind of real time experiment that is increasingly taken up in the real world, on different levels. And that's what we I've been trying to do this year as COVID has dwindled a little bit, diminished as a as a threat. We've tried to move towards more in person events and tried to move towards encouraging our members, our audience to to do to host in in person events. In 5 years, I would love to see this as a much more of a mass movement in in religious traditional religious communities, in in secular communities, in in Atheist communities, etcetera, etcetera.

 

Meli  [00:34:17]:

I hear your thinking kind of sliding around because it's a large and complicated idea, and you are specifically trying not to propose a particular agenda or approach. So that just makes it more complicated.

 

Jonathan [00:34:36]:

Right. Yeah. It's a weird it's a weird thing. It's both very complicated, as you said, wide and, challenging, and yet it's also on some level the simplest thing in the world. And it's it's strange to to think of it in both both of those ways. But I do think, ultimately, what's important is that people are doing it self-consciously as an ecological ritual. I think that ultimately is key. Because if you're doing it without understanding why you're doing it or you're doing it without knowing what you're doing, then it loses it's flavor, and it loses its meaning, and it loses its impact. Ultimately, I I think that's what is key, and I I believe, hopefully, that is what would be also appealing to people, if they understand, if they really get it, right, then they can say to themselves, oh, yeah. This is training. This is practice. We're both modeling having no or having less of an environmental impact, and we're also teaching ourselves how to do it the other 6 days of the week.

 

Meli  [00:35:43]:

Right. And, conceptually, what I'm hearing in this ecological ritual you speak of. One of the things that comes to mind is Simon Sinek in his Start With Why, which is a very, very powerful idea. It's conceptually clear, but it can be a real challenge to put that into practice.

 

Jonathan [00:36:08]:

To say the least. Absolutely. The Kotzker Rebbe, radical Hasidic teacher famously said, “if you pray today because you prayed yesterday, you're a sinner”, meaning if you're doing things just because that's your habit or if you're doing things just because that's what your grandfather taught you, that's problematic because exactly as you said, you're not getting the why. And that holds for religious practices, and it also holds for, of course, all kinds of secular things that we do. So much of what we do is unthinking. And the whole intention of Shabbat, obviously, and the intention of so much of religious practice and rituals such as Passover, as as you, Meli, keep emphasizing, is to do things differently. Because by doing things differently, you are jarring your cognition, you are jarring your thinking and saying, wait. Wait. Why am I doing what I'm doing? Why do I do it that way? Why not another way? Etcetera. So, ultimately, in terms of the environmental impact of so much of what we do as human beings today, we absolutely need to rethink it. Why do we have a food system that looks the way it does? Why do we subsidize certain kinds of products and and not others? Clearly, as a society, as a set of societies, we need to fundamentally change how we think and how we do things, and I hope that, something like the Green Sabbath will be part of that process.

 

Meli  [00:37:37]:

Yeah. I hope so too. Part of this challenge is what I see as as a tension between asking why and the benefit of establishing a healthy habit.

 

Jonathan [00:37:54]:

Right. What I would like to add to that is kind of an an answer to your new question, which is one of the things I find so powerful about these kind of practices like Shabbat and other kinds of religious practices, spiritual practices, and rituals is that Shabbat brings together the individual level and the collective level. When we think about politics, when we think about the environmental crises, We we really are a little bit schizophrenic. There's a part of us that believes that it's all in the collective. We need better laws. We need better policies. If we change governmental approaches, then the solution is there. Right? And then there's the other side which says, no. No. No. No. It's all individual. The revolution has to be an internal revolution first and foremost because if we don't do that, then nothing will change. We all have to change our behavior. Right? We have to stop driving. We have to stop flying. We have to compost. It's all individual behavior. Right? Now I am a almost in everything I think and do, I am a believer in both/and and not either/or, and I always think and say that it's both. It's always both. Of course, it you need the revolution on the external level and on the internal level. It must be individual, and it must be collective. How could it be otherwise? Any any revolution that is only external is doomed to failure as we've seen historically. And if you're simply meditating all the time and worrying about your internal revolution, that's also not really helping very much. So something like Shabbat to me is inherently both individual and collective, therefore Green Sabbaths, Also, inherently individual and collective, and I love that. And that, to me, cuts across this debate about well, how are we going to solve the problem? We need laws. No. No. We need to internalize green values. No. No. We need laws. Right? No. It's both. And so to me, by its very design as it were, something like Shabbat or Green Sabbath gives us both. It it feeds both sides of the debate, and it also, in some sense, argues that both sides are only getting it half right. It's just a wonderfully promising, rich practice that is, at one and the same time, utterly simple and layered and profound and almost endlessly interpretable the way good rituals and practices should be.

 

Meli  [00:40:27]:

As a closing question, I'm wondering about how this engagement, how this Green Sabbath project has changed your personal Jewish beliefs and practice.

 

Jonathan [00:40:42]:

Wow. You ask great questions. First of all, The Green Sabbath Project has connected me with a remarkable array of individuals, inspiring, active, thought provoking people who have taught me a lot. I have benefited as much as I have imparted things to others, and I love that about it. Jewishly, I think it has reinforced my inclination, which was already present, to look on a personal level for a spiritual practice for a way of life, for an orientation intellectually to my own heritage and my own religion and my own practice that is holistic, that I am trying to bring into dialogue with each other, a whole variety of different perspectives, ancient and modern, metaphysical, and and materialist, a collective and individual that work for me, that, are meaningful, that move me, that induce me to continue. I have discovered through the Green Sabbath Project and and all of that I've been doing with it and all that I've learned from others involved with it, new layers, new depths, new horizons in the texts that I read and know, in the new texts that I come across. I feel very privileged, really deeply blessed by what I have, you know, managed to put together and and how it has really gifted so much to me. I have, I think, come to understand that there are so many faces to this thing that I would call my way of life, my practice. You know, traditionally, Jews talk about 70 faces of the Torah, shivim panimah Torah, and I have really come to feel that, not just understand it intellectually, to really feel that reading some of these profound environmental thinkers is Torah, and then the other way around too, reading straight Torah as it were. I I see all kinds of new ecological depths to it. And and, you know, I I have to say, when I say ecological and environmental, as I think I've hinted, I really mean it. It's not something about, like, biology or or ecosystem science. In thinking, talking environmentally, ecologically, I I ultimately think of what, 1 anthropologist calls super nature culture. Right? We talk about nature. We talk about culture. There are various people who talk about nature culture because you can't divide nature from culture. And she, Mayanti, Hernandez is, I believe, her name if I'm getting it correct, this anthropologist, and she puts it all together, super nature culture. I cannot help but seeing everything that way. I don't know if I believe in God in the traditionalist sense, you know, the way the Talmud says, the 5 things you have to believe, But I believe in super nature culture. I believe ultimately that everything is interconnected. Everything is interwoven. It may not be clear always. It may not be easy to understand. It may not be easy to put the pieces together. But in some sense, I do feel that I have, at least for now, reached a kind of place of some quasi- or post-Kabbalistic ecological sense of of the whole, of the all, of everything. You know, I see glimpses. It comes and goes. I I lose that sense when I managed to attain that you know, the the Kabbalists and the Hasidim speak of the difference between constricted consciousness and expanded consciousness, you know, small mind as it were and and a great expansive and expanded mind. And when I can attain it, I am profoundly moved, And I feel like I've caught a bit of the corner of the garment that covers the whole mystery, and that, has been one of the many, blessings and rewards that I feel I've gotten from all of this.

 

Meli  [00:44:58]:

Well, those are fine words to end on, Jonathan. I will put links in the show notes so people can reach out and learn more about the Green Sabbath Project along with the many other things you do. And I just want to thank you for coming on my Living Our Beliefs show and telling us what it's about, how it might benefit us and the environment.

 

Jonathan [00:45:26]:

Thank you, Meli. I I really, am honored and delighted to be here with you. I thank you again for the invitation and and commend you for this platform, for people to share a bit of, you know, yeah, what they've learned and what they do, with others. And keep it up, and I bless you. It should, grow in strength and success, and maybe we'll do it again sometime. I would I would love that.

 

Meli  [00:45:53]:

Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to get notified when new episodes are released, hit the subscribe button. Questions and comments are welcome and can be sent directly to info@talkingwithgodproject.org. A link is in the show notes. Transcripts are available a few weeks after airing. This podcast is an outgrowth of my Talking with God Project. For more information about that research, including workshop and presentation options, go to my website, www.talkingwithgodproject.org. Thank you so much. Till next time. Bye