This Is Happening But It Can't Be Happening 
Shmita: The Purpose Of Sinai 
Beltane 2013: The Great Poetry Of Flesh 
3 Jewish Values For Earth Day 
Earth Day, God And The Apocalypse
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Is there some subterranean -- even subversive -- connection between spring celebration of the Earth and spring celebration of work and time for rest?
The environment is sustained by trees, which cleanse the air and stabilize the earth, and the references in Jewish sources to the importance of protecting them are meant to be guidelines for caring for the planet in general.
God is a personification, not a person -- an undeniable interpretation, not an otherworldly tyrant. If we fail to grasp this, we cannot possibly understand religion or religious differences.
We lamented the threat posed to indigenous people and lands in the path of the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, a project that would carry oil from the Canadian oil sands to the Pacific Coast for shipment to Asia. We lamented our own entanglement in the complicated reality of oil.
We are all parts of the globalized organism that is our food economy. We are pieces of a greater whole. In the service economy we play different roles, some of us are hands and some are mouths, but we are all interconnected in a living househol, that feeds and sustains every living thing.
If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will shriek and frantically try to escape. Drop that same frog into a pot of warm water, however, and gradually turn up the heat, and it will drift off to sleep and die. Some version of that second scenario is happening to us right now.
Let us learn together, celebrate together, act together to rescue and heal our Earth from the Crushers in our own society.
The movement from the old aeon to the new aeon in the Mayan calendar that the doomsdayers are picking up on speaks to the idea that we all need a new archetypal energy to enter our lives.
The powerful links between a mature love of nature, the capacity for spiritual transcendence and our moral sense have an emotional resonance that can leave us lost for words. Today, however, those links are threatened in an unprecedented way.
We pagan Angelenos have quite a task to create sacred space in the midst of traffic and Hollywood and everything else for which this city is notorious. Nevertheless, the community is alive and well.
Since I "woke up" to the perils of climate change, I've been preaching about climate chaos and our responsibility to future generations in guest sermons in churches in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. I truly do believe that we baby boomers are in grave danger.
We can rededicate the universal Temple of Planet Earth, as the Talmud describes the rededication of the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. We can hold back the devastation that global scorching is already wreaking on our lives.
Not all religious groups are as active in responding to climate change; indeed, some are actively denying it exists. But some organizations have realized that religious groups have an obligation to reinvigorate our society's conversation about climate change and hold policymakers' feet to the fire.
Suppose we were applying biblical theology to the Frankenstorm of this past week: We might say that God listened to the two major candidates for president of the most powerful nation in the world refusing to say the words "climate change" or "global warming" in speeches and debates.
I don't know if Sandy's devastating strength is a direct result of human choices; but to imagine that changing our world as we do doesn't, well, change our world is just plain silly.
During the presidential debates, we did not hear a single question on climate change, arguably the defining issue of the 21st century. A common biblical justification lurks in the background of skirting this issue.
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