The Green Rabbinical Student

Dirty downtown LA, originally uploaded by swimfast.

This is normally a clear view of major buildings of LA, which are barely seen through the smoke and soot.

Like a bad dream, as the plane approached LA I looked out of my window to see a thick cloud of pollution hovering over the city.  Out my window I could barely see the groud, the mountains, the cars, the buildings.  Normally, this is OK.  The plane will descend below the clouds, everything will clear up, and life will go on.  But this was not normal.

The multitudes of fires have encased the city in a thick blanket of smoke.  As I disembarked from the plane I could taste the particulate matter entering my lungs, I could smell the fire in the air, and I could see that the sunlight was restricted.

As I drove home, through the oil fields pumping so we can continue quenching our thirst for oil, it just made me sad.  Our world is in peril and we are only making it worse, let alone taking steps to help it.

A friend writes:

“I am a gay Californian whose sacred and loving marriage to the woman I have been committed to for the last 13 years of my life was recently voted upon and 52% of my fellow Californians saw it fit to take away my rights and write discrimination against me, my wife and so many others into the State Constitution”

I saw this discrimination happen in Ohio, and now again in California.  Only it’s “surprising” in California and four years later.  It’s awful, truly awful.  It’s hate, it’s fear, and it’s blatant discrimination in a country that is supposed to have moved on.  As a man of religion, an American, a man of the earth, and a Human Being, I cannot believe that this is occurring.  It is truly a civil rights movement of this generation.  Keith Olbermann says it better than I can, so take the 7 minutes out of your life to watch, and then spread the word.

Too far apart

To the left is exhibit A - Suburban Sprawl.  This presents a major challenge for the modern Jew who is faced with the task of interpreting the halacha.  What to do when your community forces you to drive to your Shabbat engagements?  I quote my friend and collegue David Singer:

“The real issue isn’t weather it’s OK to drive on Shabbat but, rather, that driving in general turns the fabric of communities upside down.  Rather than worrying about whether driving on Shabbat is OK or not, the real issue is worrying about building communities and cities where people don’t need to drive in the first place.”

He’s right, and it made me wonder.  Before cars, certainly, communities were arranged so that everything was walking accessible.  But was it OK to take a horse?  was that prohibited?

I for one, try not to drive my car at all, but to make biking BAU (Business as Usual).  I try especailly to not drive on Shabbat, however I find that this is not always possible as I try to find new places to pray and celebrate Shabbat with a geographically diverse group of people.  We must change the way we think about how we use our space, so that it works for us and our environment with an exploding human race.

Here is a graphic to demonstrate how much space we are giving to our polluting, noisy, dangerous cars: