By Eli Weinbach

Rest requires work. Without putting in the prep time, we may find that a day off is spent thinking about what has yet to be done. Without planning, vacation may not be much more exciting than staying home. Extended conversation with friends about where to go for dinner cuts into dinner time if plans aren’t made ahead of time. When hosting a guest, we make sure their stay is easy, but that ease is the result of extra work. 

Vayakhel and Pekudei are accounts of work done by the Israelites to ensure that God would have a resting place in their midst. Moses gives many instructions, and Betzalel the architect orchestrates production with his assistant Ohaliab. The population is galvanized to contribute either their materials or time. 

In the final chapter of Exodus, the monumental work is finished. The nation watches with baited breath, and their hard work is rewarded. The Shechina descends upon the newly built Mishkan (Exodus 40:35), and divine respite in the physical realm is achieved. All that planning and work seems like so little when the payoff arrives. An immanent God! The Most Holy, right in the middle of the camp! And all that had to be done was laboring for the sake of rest. 

This work-rest dynamic is always available to us, on various scales. We work for six days and revel in the holiness of Shabbat. We toil for six years and leave the seventh Shmita year for rest. We voyage for 49 years and return home in the Jubilee. God created us with the abilities to plan and build, to till and tend. Yet we are commanded to rest. We do not work for work’s sake. It is through that creative exertion that we open the space for rest and true connection with the Godly.  

​Work is hard. Hopefully, we can remember the lesson of Shmita and the Mishkan: the purpose of work is the rest which follows, for it is in that rest that one can find true connection with the divine.  

Rest well!

Eli Weinbach is an experiential education for the Jewish people, and strives to manifest his love of the environment and Jewish tradition in a deeply connected world. He has worked for Hazon since 2017. 

By: Melissa Hoffman (with thanks from Hazon)
Many of us anticipated this Purim as the approximate year-marker since our lives changed unimaginably. There’s something apt about the holiday that highlights the topsy-turvy nature of life bookending the beginning — and hopefully the beginning of the end — of the coronavirus in the United States.  

Purim represents a time of finding happiness and hopefulness amidst great existential uncertainty. It’s also about hidden truths being revealed to us. In the early months of the pandemic, many of us found joy, paradoxically, in hearing tales and seeing images of rejuvenation and rebirth occurring in nature due to the sharp drop in our own activity. With humans in temporary retreat, wildlife proliferated in formerly abandoned habitats and even occupied urban spaces. As motorway traffic plummeted, a dramatic decline in carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide emissions allowed all life to breathe more easily again. We got a glimpse of what it would look like to give the land a long-deserved Shabbat, a respite from our anthropocenic reign. Maybe we caught a glimpse of the truth that’s been drowned out by the busy-ness of our typical, frenetic day-to-day: that slowing down is a good look for the world.  

A key lesson we can draw from COVID-19 is that we need intentional, punctuated rest periods to avoid future burnout, especially for our food system. The regulatory concept of Shmita has enormous relevance and potential for us today — what would it look like to establish a regular cycle of leaving the land fallow for one year every seven years (Lev. 25:4), to release loan recipients from all their debts (Deut. 15:2) and to include animals both domesticated and wild in the Sabbatical practice (Lev. 25:6)? Would such a system naturally curb humans’ exploitative tendencies? Could it instill in us a sensitivity to our own power in relation to land, animals, and others in society? Might we come to a more holistic understanding of who and what comprises community, and how to sustain it?  

The Sifra (Behar 1) poses a famous question about the verses describing Shmita in Vayikra/Leviticus: “מה ענין שמיטה אצל הר סיני? Mah inyan shmitah etzel Har Sinai? — what does Shmita have to do [specifically] with Har Sinai?” Weren’t all commandments disseminated at Sinai? The midrash answers simply (maybe even circumventing an answer altogether) that “just as general and specific ordinances of Shmita were enunciated at Sinai, so too with all the mitzvot.” This doesn’t explicitly address why Shmita is directly linked to Sinai, but we can ponder the significance and relevance of a geographically specific set of agricultural laws received outside and prior to entering the land of Israel. Could the particular laws be not an exclusive set of guidelines for Israel, but instead, a playbook from which we’re meant to extrapolate a general rule of cessation from work, wherever we are? Could our particular love and care for the land and community within Israel teach us an ethic of communal care and justice that apply to anyone, anywhere?  

As the quintessential Diasporic Jewish holiday, Purim reminds us that thriving Jewish community and traditions matter outside of specific geographic boundaries. Wherever we are, Shmita is a metaphor for allowing people and the more-than-human world to recalibrate and revive. Pandemics like COVID-19, abetted by humans pushing natural ecosystems and industrial food systems to their limits, highlight how necessary this reprieve is.  

Although conceptually Shmita applies only to those who own and steward land, expanding and implementing a Shmita-like practice today doesn’t necessitate owning it. In a time when we have done our best to divorce ourselves from our food system, perhaps the most direct way we can participate in a Shmita-like practice is by supporting agricultural production that accommodates and centers these limitations: by eschewing factory-farmed products, by buying from farmers that employ regenerative practices, and by sourcing food that destroys the least wild habitat. We can be agents of Shmita by making choices that put the least amount of strain on people, animals, and the land. 

One year later, the chaotic side of Purim’s topsy-turviness still hasn’t left us. But one truth that will be continuously revealed to us, even as we emerge from this pandemic with hope and healing, is our interdependence with — and responsibility to care for — all land and those who dwell upon it.  

​Chag sameach and Shabbat shalom. 

By Helen Smith, NRPE Program Associate
Christmas is upon us. This season is unlike the others of years past though. We are kept in our houses, away from those we love.  There are long hours on the road ahead for some who will embark on driving to loved ones instead of flying. These long hauls remind me of the wise men, traversing for long periods of time to be able to give treasures and experience togetherness as they celebrate God’s gift of healing for the world.

Christmas means many things to many people, but I see it as a time for healing.  Humanity was hurting and confused and needed guidance, so God sent help. The pandemic and its domino effect has been hard on so many people and their families. It’s not easy to be apart from people you love during this season, or for months on end.  In this time, we need healing. Healing from sickness, tragedy and loneliness.

Through this time, healing of the earth has been happening. When the human world halted this spring, we saw the earth begin to heal. Streams became clearer. Smog began to clear. We saw firsthand that if given a chance, the natural world can help in the healing--both physically and spiritually.

During the pandemic we saw ways that God's creation can heal itself and help heal us. ​Since the pandemic began, people are spending more time on public lands than ever before. Spending time in God's creation provides an ideal safe/socially distanced activity. And, activities outdoors can provide much needed physical activity and can feed us spiritually. 

The healing of the earth has begun, and we get to be an integral part it helping to accomplish a clean earth for many more to come. And just as we begin to celebrate, the Bethlehem star can be seen this week around the world.  A reminder of God and the care for us and creation that continues.
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Tonight is the first night of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights. The holiday commemorates the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem after the Maccabees defeated the Syrian armies in 165 B.C.E.

A great miracle happened there – when the Jews re-entered the desecrated sanctuary, most of the oil had been deliberately defiled. But despite this, they continued searching through the rubble until they found one single sealed cruse of consecrated oil. It's important to note that it wasn't just sitting there on the floor to be found, it had to be searched for, which required faith, action, and perseverance – a perfect metaphor for 2020.

At the heart of Hanukkah is the lighting of the menorah. Each night candles are lit by the Shamash: a single flame on the first evening, two on the second, and so on until the last night of Hanukkah, when all the lights are kindled. The eight candles represent the eight miraculous nights the Temple flame burned from that single vial, which was the length of time it took to press and consecrate fresh oil.

For Jews everywhere, lighting the menorah is a reminder of God's presence in our lives:

"Why has light been such a favorite symbol of God? Perhaps because light itself cannot be seen. We become aware of its presence when it enables us to see other things. Similarly, we cannot see God, but we become aware of God's presence when we see the beauty of the world, when we experience love and the goodness of our fellow human beings." (Etz Hayim Torah commentary published by the Conservative Judaism movement, p. 503).

Seeing God’s presence in creation and community resonates across nearly every religious tradition and is central to our shared work through Earth Ministry/Washington Interfaith Power & Light. Even in the darkest hours of night – even in the most difficult days of a pandemic-filled year – there is always light. Remember that we all carry within us the spark of creation and that together we form a strong and resilient community.

LeeAnne Beres, Executive Director, Earth Ministry

Rev. Dr. Steven C. Bland, Jr. is the Senior Pastor at Detroit’s Liberty Temple Baptist Church and the President of the Michigan Progressive Baptist State Convention.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a glaring and harsh spotlight on the irrefutable fact that unhealthy air and water can become devastating disasters for communities of color. We have always known that clean air and water is necessary for human health. But the COVID-19 pandemic revealed, yet again, the harsh and tragic reality of what decades of pollution does to communities of color. While as a nation we are rightfully focused on addressing the immediate health needs of infected individuals, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the health and well-being of Black and Brown folks must be addressed through pollution reduction. 

Under the current deregulatory agenda, water protections are drying up, coal is worth more than human life, and new tailpipe emissions standards may actually cause more deaths. Even the nation’s bedrock environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), is under siege. These rollbacks will increase human exposure to pollution that is linked to higher coronavirus death rates. As a pastor concerned with both protecting human life and God’s creation, this is untenable. 

Cumulative impacts—a phrase to mean systematic and ongoing poisoning of neighborhoods and communities—need to be addressed if we are ever to truly recover from this pandemic. These cumulative impacts cannot be addressed by rolling back regulations in the name of economic progress. Yet, that is exactly what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is doing -- including the recent executive order to use a national emergency declaration to waive NEPA’s crucial environmental protections.

The rollback of NEPA is of particular concern since it is credited with protecting communities from the devastating impacts of an unwanted and unneeded freeway expansion in the northeastern part of the state and saving Michigan taxpayers $1.5 billion. Yet, even given its effectiveness in minimizing impacts to the environment and to communities during infrastructure development, the EPA is currently planning to revise and undermine this law. Despite public outcry, the EPA is close to finalizing changes to the entire NEPA process that favor polluting industries. 

In a bid to escape the burden of environmental stewardship, the EPA proposed rollbacks aim to change the NEPA review process and pave the way for further degradation of vulnerable communities. We know that these communities—low-wealth neighborhoods and communities of color—often bear the brunt of problems caused by poorly planned infrastructure projects. By rolling back NEPA, the EPA is planning to eliminate one of few environmental protections that these communities have. The changes to NEPA threatens the health of our communities and puts our air and water at risk 

My Christian faith calls on me to care for the earth and most importantly to care for my neighbor. This healthy future that my faith envisions and my community deserves demands more than rollbacks designed to pave the way for unsustainable and irresponsible development. Protecting the environment through regulations like NEPA aligns with a vision of vibrant, healthy communities. NEPA has helped us escape some of the more environmentally tragic infrastructure missteps for more than half a century, and it should be regarded as helping us build a pathway to a healthier future.

The impacts of COVID-19 may have uncovered for many the environmental injustice lived daily by communities of color, but it also unearthed a solidarity among us all to care for our neighbor in their time of need.  We know more acutely now that pollution left unchecked will severely undermine our ability to respond to pandemics. We must, therefore, ensure that protections such as NEPA that protect human health remain intact, because we depend upon these safeguards to build vibrant and just communities.
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Around this time of year – the High Holidays – Judaism calls us to take an annual look in the moral mirror. This year more than ever, we may be afraid of what we might see. Yet that pessimism does not serve us, and it may not even be accurate. By the time these High Holidays arrive, the pandemic will have consumed over half a year of our lives and collective history. The virus has killed more than 800,000 people and counting, and has altered the lives of everyone on the planet to some extent. The High Holidays are a season for taking moral inventory for the sake of Teshuvah — turning and returning — and a global crisis must also be a time for self-examination for the sake of learning and changing course. The confluence of the High Holiday season with a global pandemic that has touched us all therefore makes this perhaps the ripest time in our lifetimes for a collective accounting of our moral state and our future direction. Though we often assume that such a reckoning should be focused on searching out our faults and making amends for them, true reflection finds whatever the mirror reveals, be it bad, good, or complicated, discouraging or hopeful. So if we take this time leading up to and including the High Holidays to look back and consider what has happened, how we have responded, and how we can prevent it from recurring, what do we see? What have we done, who have we been, and what can we learn from this debacle for the future?


Believe it or not, here’s what I see from where I sit: we are actually rising to the occasion in the most important and holy way – we are preserving life. Crisis has shown us who we really are, and this is what it has revealed – we are champions of pikuach nefesh, the Jewish principle that saving a life is of paramount importance, superseding even our most precious institutions like Shabbat. We have acted – or refrained from acting – in order to preserve life at the expense of not only conferences and family visits, large weddings and prayer services, school and sports, but that most untouchable of American idols: constant economic growth. This is how we are showing up in this moment of crisis.


Though there has been much sound and fury in the news media and on social media about resistance to the shutdowns, when viewed from high up, these exceptions only prove the rule. Without some dissenters, we might mistake our restraint for something that was truly out of our control, a constraint that no one could resist. But that’s not the case — we don’t absolutely have to follow the public health rules, we are choosing to. In fact, a recent poll showed that 86% of us are wearing masks outside the home and 75% of us support requiring everyone to do so. Most importantly, almost three quarters of us say that virus-prevention restrictions trump concerns about economic damage. And the relative few who aren’t following the rules aren’t primarily responsible for the virus spiraling out of control in the U.S. – other countries also have people who won’t follow rules, but those countries’ coordinated responses are keeping the virus in check anyways. Don’t get distracted by the drama; the reality is that we the people are doing this right. For the first time I can remember, the world is engaged in one giant exercise in Jewish, religious, and humanist values: we are putting life above all else. We are responding in the affirmative to the Torah’s great challenge to us — issued near the end, in the portions we read right before the High Holidays — to “choose life, that you may live.” (Deut. 30:19)


I hate to say it, but in a certain respect this comes as a surprise. To the extent that we have tried to dedicate some of our time, efforts, and resources to the wellbeing of humanity beyond our immediate circle of family and friends, we may even experience this as nothing short of a shock. The list of phenomena that kill or threaten to kill massive numbers of people, and yet are tolerated by most people — at least insofar as we do little or nothing to stop them — is far too long to enumerate here, though climate change and our addiction to the often lethal personal automobile can stand in for the full set, representing the much-reported and the normalized-to-the-point-of-invisibility ends of the spectrum, respectively. It is the constant underlying angst of organizers and would-be change-makers: human beings’ seeming inability to break out of the routines of our daily lives and the structures in which we live to prioritize life over the pursuit of everything that capitalism tells — or compels — us to focus on. Again — though now in reverse — the fact that some resist this trend only proves the rule: there is nothing forcing most of us to ignore these causes of death, we just do. It is just as hard — harder, even — to shut down major portions of our lives to preserve life in the face of COVID-19 as it would be to change our ways to prevent the looming climate catastrophe, but we are willing to sacrifice for one and not the other. The question of how to relay our willingness to “choose life” against this threat into a willingness to do the same with respect to many others is not merely an exercise in speculation about human nature, it is the most fundamental question of our time.


So our seasonal reflection on how we have performed in this moment of great consequence — the pandemic — must turn to the question of how we will perform in the face of a crisis with eternal consequences — climate change. Remember, the point of our looking back over the past year at High Holiday time is ultimately for the sake of the future. So how will we turn our willingness to “choose life, so that you may live” into one that also fulfills the next few words of the verse: “you and your descendants”?
Again, there is good, and surprising, news. Just as the pandemic has shown that we are capable of prioritizing life, the pandemic has also given us an unexpected boost in the daunting task of extending that will to preserve human life by averting climate catastrophe. According to the United Nations, the world’s carbon emissions must fall almost 8 percent each year from now until 2030 in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. It’s a goal that seemed incredibly daunting, at best, just a year ago, given the inertia of the global economy. But the pandemic has resulted in an 8 percent drop in coal use in the first quarter of 2020, and an increase in the use of renewable energy.  In other words, because of the pandemic, we have taken the first necessary step towards saving the future of life. The task is now a little simpler — to continue that trajectory. The problem with how we have taken this first step, of course, is that it was linked to an enormously painful economic shutdown. If the price of preserving life is destroying our economy, robbing our children of their education, and not seeing our loved ones — among other terrible consequences — it seems less likely that we’ll be willing to do the same in the face of future threats to life, like climate change.


Fortunately for us, it doesn’t need to be this hard. Much of the hardship involved in slowing the pandemic was avoidable — failing to heed many warnings about the likelihood of pandemics and the government’s gutting of our public health infrastructure are just two of many choices that were made that ultimately led to the need for the dire sacrifices we are now all making to mitigate its consequences. As Barrett Swanson wrote in his indictment of American disaster culture in Harper’s Magazine, the pandemic and its consequences are not “acts of God,” though government officials, news media, and corporations have all rushed to categorize them as such.  Even more so than the pandemic, we have ample warning about the likelihood and dangers of climate change, giving us even more opportunity to make choices ahead of time that will avert not only the last-resort response of upending our lives to slow its progress, but the catastrophe itself. Instead, we can make measured, conscious, strategic, and ultimately far less painful choices now to prevent crisis and death later. Whatever limited sacrifices might be necessary now — and in truth, it is more likely that only certain corporations’ carbon-based business models would ultimately have to be sacrificed — the suffering and death that would result from not addressing the problem in advance would be many orders of magnitude more painful. A move towards preserving life now would in fact be joyful and meaning-making affirmation of our collective will to live, which is no sacrifice at all.


So finally, if we have discovered that we are willing to sacrifice even our precious economic growth to save lives, and if proactive measures to preserve life from climate disaster would not be nearly as painful as ignoring the threat, if at all, why then is the United States being ravaged by the pandemic and why does it seem so difficult to change our collision course with climate change? Again, it is not the fault of those individuals who aren’t being careful enough, or who are outright flouting the rules — at least not primarily — because most of us are in fact acting to preserve life. Rather, the answer to both is that we the people have not yet claimed enough of our power to let our goodness determine the outcome. We are not failing; our national government and certain overly-powerful corporations are failing us. In fact, when I said earlier that I was surprised that we rose to the occasion and sacrificed to save lives during the pandemic, I should not have been, because we the people were never the primary cause of societal failures to effectively address the other major threats to life in the first place. Responding to overwhelming threats to life that respect no borders and feed on our interconnectedness — as both the pandemic and climate change surely do — requires massive coordination and direction, and a certain unity of purpose. In other words, they require leadership. We would not have had to give up so much — or endure so much death — if our leadership had risen to the occasion during the pandemic as we have, and we will not have to sacrifice to stave off mass death from climate change if our leaders meet the climate challenge as we now know we are able to. We need leadership that is willing to rise to the call of history, to match our commitment to life, to stitch our individual goodness together into a coordinated response, and to help us preserve life for the ages. We cannot wait for leaders to lead the way, we must become our own collective leadership, leading our leaders to choose life as we have. Our reflection in this High Holiday season has revealed that we have what it takes to preserve life; now let us find the power within us to lead ourselves to a future that chooses life.

(This article appeared first on Tikkun magazine’s website, you can read it and other thought provoking articles here.)

by Alexander Sankey
Alexander is proud of his heritage and background from the Kiowa and Northern Arapaho tribes. He is a Junior at the University of Oklahoma and an intern for the EYA Summer 2020 Program.

As a native person and a Christian, I am deeply passionate about understanding the struggles of Native Americans and responding to their needs from the perspective of my faith. The history of Mt. Rushmore, located in the Black Hills of South Dakota, is a prime example of this struggle. Prior to being called “Rushmore,” the mountain was named “The Six Grandfathers” by the Lakota Sioux, after the four directions, the Earth, and the Sky. Many Lakota people still travel there to gather medicines for prayer and to connect with creator at a spot that has been sacred for them for generations. 

The Black Hills and the Six Grandfathers were originally listed as “unceded Indian territory” in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, but colonizers changed the treaty boundaries after discovering a small amount of gold in the Black Hills. In 1927, the sacred mountain was further desecrated when Gutzon Borglum was commissioned by the State of South Dakota to carve what is now known as Mt. Rushmore. Furthering the insult of desecrating a sacred site by carving into the mountain, Borglum had social and financial ties to white supremacist groups, and the Mt. Rushmore project was funded in part by the Ku Klux Klan, with which Borglum had sympathies.

Each of four men memorialized at Mt. Rushmore deserves credit in building this country, but each man has a blemished past when it comes to people of color. Untangling the history of Mt. Rushmore helps us to understand why many native people view the memorial as a symbol of white supremacy. What most non-indigenous people do not know is that every time this carving is celebrated, the oppression of indigenous people is ignored and the pain of the native peoples that call this area home is increased. 

Jesus taught us that we must love our neighbor as ourselves (Mt 22:39). As people of faith, in order to manifest Jesus’ teachings, we must work towards reconciliation and justice and endeavor to heal these wounds. Only then, by being in right relationship with our “neighbor,” can we then be in right relationship with God.