NEWS: PRESS RELEASE ARCHIVE

Rabbis and the Environment

Editorial

The Forward, August 3, 2001

A group of some 500 rabbis from across the country, including the heads of every Jewish denomination, joined forces this week to send Congress a letter urging a moral, environmentally sound policy on energy. Coming on the eve of a crucial House debate on President Bush's energy initiative, which represents everything the rabbis warn against, the letter stands as a deserved rebuke to administration wrong-headedness. The signers and the group that mobilized them, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life — an offshoot of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs — are to be saluted.

President Bush's initiative calls for massive new power plant construction, lowering pollution standards and opening
protected wilderness areas to new drilling. The rabbis demur. "We have a moral obligation to choose the safest, cleanest and most sustainable sources of energy to protect and preserve God's creation," they write. And they want America to take the lead internationally, first of all by joining the Kyoto Protocol. "Preventing climate change," they write, "is a preeminent expression of faithfulness to our Creator."

It's been a while since we've heard voices of the Jewish community speaking out in a serious way on broad societal
issues, and the change is a welcome one. The last few weeks have also seen a turnaround on stem-cell research, with all the major Jewish denominations speaking out in favor. Both issues, energy policy and stem-cell research, serve to remind us that Judaism actually does have a set of core values that are common to the denominations. For all our differences, there's more that unites us than divides us.

It's no small achievement to bring together a group comprising as much as one-fifth of America's congregational rabbinate in a joint statement on the environment. It isn't often that 500 rabbis manage to agree on any issue these days. It's all the more impressive when the issue is one that doesn't fit into the standard communal agenda of Israel, Holocaust remembrance and Jewish identity. The achievement only serves to highlight the urgency of energy conservation in the face of growing environmental threats to "God's creation," as the rabbis put it in their letter. If that's not a Jewish issue, it's hard to imagine what is.

Read related Forward news story 

Read the letter, 'Let There Be Light': Energy Conservation and God's Creation

Check to see if your Rabbi signed the letter