Make climate change a moral issue for Jewish leaders

As the Biden administration gears up to combat climate change, I’d like to see leaders of my religious community at the forefront of those rallying to the cause.

It’s not as if the Jewish rank and file are unconcerned. Back in 2014, a PRRI survey found 78 percent of us consider climate change “a crisis” or “a major problem” — the highest proportion of any religious group in America. And there’s no shortage of Jews involved in large secular environmental organizations, to say nothing of small Jewish ones.

But the leadership of the communal umbrella organizations has pretty much been missing in action. How come?

The question was posed at the opening panel of the Big Bold Jewish Climate Fest, an online agglomeration of discussions, performances, presentations, rituals and workshops that took place at the end of January around Tu B’shvat, the festival known as the “New Year of the Trees” that has become the annual focus of Jewish environmentalism.

“Why isn’t climate change high on the communal agenda?” asked organizer Lisa Colton.

Because it hasn’t been perceived as central to the health and safety of the Jewish community, said Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America.

Because there are no obvious bad and good guys, and no clearly achievable solutions, suggested Nigel Savage, founder, president and CEO of the Jewish sustainability organization Hazon.

“I think it’s taken awhile for folks to realize that, yes, this is about trees and plants and animals and ecosystems, and it’s also about people,” said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, founder and CEO of the new Jewish climate advocacy organization Dayenu. “This is actually about the future of humanity.”

In fact, environmentalism was put on the Jewish communal agenda three decades ago, thanks to Rabbi David Saperstein, thendirector of Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center in Washington, and Jerome Chanes, thennational affairs director of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council.

Now renamed the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, NJCRAC is the national agency that, at least, nominally coordinates the policy agenda of the Jewish community at large, including the 125 community relations councils associated with local Jewish federations.

In 1993, Saperstein and Chanes played key roles in establishing the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, as well as the interfaith National Religious Partnership for the Environment.

In those days, the Jewish community was less narrowly focused on Israel and its own demographic continuity, and less riven by partisan political disagreements. No one objected to joining the environmentalist bandwagon.

But there was a problem. Recalled Chanes: “The environment didn’t really fit naturally in the model.”

In other words, Jewish policy engagement is, in environmentalist lingo, anthropocentric: Protecting the natural world doesn’t fit the model.

But as Rosenn made clear, engaging with the poor and marginalized communities who are most victimized by environmental degradation and climate change does fit the model.

It is instructive that, in his powerful encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis makes concern for human suffering from climate change of a piece with his concern for the natural world. Mainline Protestant denominations also make environmental justice central to environmental advocacy.

So how does climate change become, as the Climate Fest panel put it, “a central moral issue of the Jewish community”?

“Don’t write off the organized, establishment Jewish community,” Fingerhut said. “Rather, view it as an opportunity.”