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Jewish Environmental Ethics around Food Production and Consumption
Please join us with Daniel B. Fink as we discuss how Jewish texts, traditions, and values can help us learn to produce and consume food in ways that would significantly slow, and eventually even reverse, catastrophic climate change. We will look at the significance of eating a plant-rich diet through the lens of the Creation story; human beings are not given permission to consume animals until after the Flood.
We will examine how Jewish laws around the sabbatical and Jubilee years can be reflected in land management and food production techniques including farmland restoration, silvopasture, conservation and regenerative agriculture, nutrient management, efficient irrigation, managed grazing and more. Finally, we will apply the Jewish imperative of bal tashchit - derived from the biblical ban on using fruit trees for siege works - to questions of food waste, which Drawdown names as the #3 cause of climate change, with over one third of the food raised or prepared failing to make it from farm or factory to fork.
In short, we will look at the convergence of Jewish wisdom and contemporary best practices around food production and consumption. Daniel B. Fink is in his twenty-seventh year of serving as rabbi of Congregation Ahavath
Beth Israel in Boise, Idaho. He received his bachelor’s degree in history and philosophyfrom the University of Virginia, and a Masters of Arts in Hebrew Letters from the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. He is a banjo and harmonica player as well as an ardent environmentalist who enjoys hiking, canoeing, biking and kayaking. He is the co-author of Let the Earth Teach You Torah and Judaism and Ecology as well as numerous articles on Judaism and environmental policy. He has served on numerous local non-profit boards, including Planned Parenthood of Idaho, the Idaho Food Bank, Family Medical Residency of Idaho and Interfaith Sanctuary homeless shelter. He is married to
Dr. Janet Kaufman, and is the very proud father of Tanya and Rosa Fink and Rachel and Jonah Kaufman.