hello!

welcome! I started this blog because I have been trying to think through a series of related questions. namely:

what is the relationship between jewish ethics and climate justice?

can we add to the jewish left's ethical vocabulary a new set of terms that move beyond our habitual anthropocentrism?

given that indigenous peoples are 10% of the world's people and steward 80% of the world's biodiversity, and that the exhaustion of the earth's natural systems is a product of colonial extraction, what is the relationship between a commitment to diasporism for our own people and a commitment to land justice & sovereignty for indigenous people? (no easy answers!)

can jewish thought about land justice not only transform judaism but also be intellectually and spiritually helpful to our fellow non-indigenous 90%?

how can we as jews form spiritual and ethical connections to land without falling into the trap of settler romanticism? (whether in historic palestine, north america, or elsewhere?)

can thinking about land & climate justice help us to fill in the positive content of a jewish left that is currently defined negatively (that is, by its opposition to zionism)?

what is the relationship between the recent jewish left turn toward piety/observance/halakha and the broader left turn away from settler humanism? is it possible to connect these without turning decolonization into a metaphor?

in the spirit of climate politics when it's too late: how can the wisdom of our ancestors, who kept each other alive through bad times, help us to get through the very bad times ahead? how do we practice emergent strategy as jews? and what does collective responsibility look like? (and if not now, when, etc)

I'm not a formally trained academic nor an expert on any of these issues—neither jewish text, nor climate justice, nor decolonization, nor degrowth. (I picked the word "degrowth" because it seems a more precise and politically active word than "ecology" or "environmentalism." what we need is not just study of the world's delicate particle logic, but a dismantling of the systems that destroy it.)

nevertheless, I feel spiritually called to try to think through these issues with the help of heaven and the ancestors. I've been trying to work on this project on my own, but I think writing for/with others will make it feel more possible to forge ahead through the terrible weight of these questions and my looming sense of powerlessness to address them.

I also want to set the intention that, like, I’m not just jerking off here. these questions come from several years of engaged antizionist organizing (although all opinions are my own and don‘t reflect the stances of any organization). my original goal was to find spiritual-rhetorical tools that we in the jewish left can use, which have the weight of “pikuach nefesh” and “b’tzelem elohim” but don’t rely on those concepts’ anthropocentrism. or, in other words: you’ve heard of the inherent dignity and sacredness of all human life, but what about more-than-human life?? even though the project has gotten more conceptually broad from there, it‘s still my intention to make/find tools we can use to make change.

jewish knowledge is supposed to come out of dialogue, both with our chevrusas (study partners) and with our texts. I'm going to try to write in response to texts rather than just starting from my own ideas. I'm also trying to follow a principle of "write as you read"– I don't need to have read all the books to have something to say about any of them. and if you’re reading this, please let me know your thoughts about what I’m overlooking, what texts I might find useful, etc.

thanks, and zey gezunt!