Posts in category "Recommended Reading"
A Guide to Jewish Practice: Everyday Living
Rabbi David Teutsch is Director of the Levin-Lieber Program in Jewish Ethics and the Louis & Myra Wiener Professor of Contemporary Jewish Civilization at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where he previously served as President for a decade. An avid bicyclist, he participated in the 2007 Hazon Israel ride, did a 2300 mile solo ride across the United States in summer 2008, and has done the New York Hazon ride for the last several years. He is also a well-known lecturer, consultant and trainer, and is a past president of the Society of Jewish Ethics and of the Academic Coalition for Jewish Bioethics. A past member of the Conference of Presidents, he has served on the boards of over a dozen other organizations, including schools, synagogues, and magazines. An honors graduate of Harvard University ordained by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, he earned his Ph.D. at the Wharton School, where his dissertation dealt with organizational ethics. Hazon is honored to include Rabbi Dr. Teutsch among it’s board of directors.
In 2011 he published the first volume (devoted to everyday living) of A Guide to Jewish Practice, which takes a values-based approach to both ethical and ritual matters. In January 2012, it was honored with a prestigious award from the Jewish Book Council. It is the most comprehensive work of its kind ever published outside the Orthodox world; it collects and explores seven decades of outstanding scholarship in Reconstructionist Judaism. As Rabbi David Teutsch describes it himself, “We all hit that moment when we wonder, ‘How do I move forward in a way that reflects who I am and what I care about? ‘I hope the Guide can help contemporary Jews to keep creating new solutions.” (more…)
What’s Happening on Shabbat at the New York Ride
Labor Day Weekend, August 31-September 3, 2012
We’re excited to announce a small taste of opportunities at this year’s Hazon New York Ride Shabbat retreat. Options include:
- Making your own energy bars
- Goat milking demonstrations and farm tours
- Challah baking
- Book club discussions on White Bread
- Hiking beautiful trails, swimming in the lake or pool, or simply enjoying the gorgeous scenery
- Eating the best farm-to-table food
Shabbat-only registration is just $299 for adults and $165 for kids. Prices increase on August 8th. Register today!
It’s not too late to join us for a relaxing Labor Day weekend and close out your summer with a bang! We still have room for folks over Shabbat, room for riders, and spots for crew.
Matt Biers-Ariel Tours Bay Area REIs
Hazon California Ride Keynote Speaker Shares His Cycling Story
Join Matt Biers-Ariel, author of The Bar Mitzvah and The Beast: One Family’s Cross-Country Ride of Passage by Bike, as he tours Bay Area REIs to give a humorous and poignant talk and slide show about the book.The book’s genesis came from his son’s refusal to have a Bar Mitzvah. Instead, the 13-year-old rode a bike across America to deliver a petition to Congress on global warming. Mountaineers Press recently published the book which has garnered excellent reviews from both mainstream and Jewish press. (more…)
Introducing: the 2012 New York Ride Book Club
Participants this year’s Hazon New York Ride may join in our second annual book club. This year we’re reading the following:
White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf by Aaron Bobrow-Strain
Here’s a little about the book: How did white bread, once an icon of American progress, become “white trash?” In this lively history of bakers, dietary crusaders, and social reformers, Aaron Bobrow-Strain shows us that what we think about the humble, puffy loaf says a lot about who we are and what we want our society to look like.
Fair Food’s Oran Hesterman Visits Elkin’s Park [Philadelphia]
Join Congregation Kol Ami in Elkins Park, PA for a book talk with Oran Hesterman, author of Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainble Food System For all.
Click image for larger view.
Event sponsored by Hazon CSA Elkins Park, Creekside Coop, Transition Cheltenham Food Action Group and Congregation Kol Ami
New York Ride & Retreat Shabbat Schedule Announced
The educational theme of the New York Ride‘s Shabbat Retreat is “Food Choices: Why What We Eat Matters,” and we are promising participants a fun, relaxing, engaging, and informative weekend at the beautiful Camp Kinder Ring. The schedule for the weekend has now been finalized, so check it out to learn about all the exciting activities, workshops, services and meals – all keeping with the theme of food choices – offered throughout the retreat weekend.
Join us for the Shabbat retreat, and here’s what your weekend might look like:
After you arrive on Friday afternoon and settle into your cabin, you might choose to learn a bit of Yiddish in an introductory class: Yiddish on One Foot. If you’re more excited by food, you can learn some DIY kitchen skills by attending workshops on pickling, challah baking, and making homemade salad dressings. Or maybe you’ve really been looking forward to the Ride, and will want to learn a bit of bike maintenance in the flat changing workshop. You can choose how you would most like to welcome in Shabbat as there will be several different service options, and we will all join together to light the candles, and to share Shabbat dinner.
Agriculture Is the Leading Source of Pollution
Oran Hesterman’s book, Fair Food, teaches us that agriculture is the leading source of pollution in 48% of river miles and 41% of lake acres that are water-quality impaired. While this is a daunting statistic, there are concrete ways you can help reverse this trend. Learn more about Fair Food.
This Book Might Change Your Life
By Judith Belasco, Director of Food Programs, Hazon
My first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) pick up of fresh, local, organic veggies is a few days away. In mid-winter, I plunked down $550, signed up for my volunteer slots, and felt good that I was voting with my fork for a healthier, more sustainable food system. During the 2011 growing season, I’m joined by a network of 56 Hazon CSAs and thousands more CSAs in communities across the country. While I am excited for the East Coast season to begin, I’m aware of the many people who are unable to access CSA shares and those who are unable to access healthy food at all. Our food system is broken. Joining a CSA is a great first step, and there is more we can do in order to fix it.
Enter Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All, a practical guide to changing not only what we eat, but how our food is grown, packaged, delivered, marketed and sold. Author and founder of the Fair Food Network, Oran B. Hesterman, shows how our food system’s dysfunctions are the unintended consequences of our emphasis on efficiency, centralization, higher yields, profit, and convenience. Fair Food describes four key principles a redesigned food system should embody – equity, diversity, ecological integrity, and economic viability. In addition, it offers examples of how various individuals and organizations have started to integrate these principles into their enterprises. Fair Food closes as practical guide for how individual and collective action can create big changes in our food system. This book might change your life. Fair Food was released for publication on June 1.
As Hesterman says, now is the time for each of us “to shift from conscious consumers to engaged citizens.” We need to think about the food policies that affect our lives. From our Jewish institutions to the USDA Farm Bill, food policies, overt or implicit, affect how food is produced, processed, distributed, purchased, or protected.
Three (Jewish) Communal Actions with Impact!
Fair Food Network is excited to be partnering with Hazon on the following three calls to action. You can learn more about all of these issues by reading Oran Hesterman’s Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All. Together, we can move from being conscious consumers to engaged citizens and transform our food system!
- The first call to action is in your kitchen. Make a commitment to spend an additional $10 per week on food the source of which you can trace and trust. It may be $10 at the farmers’ market where you’ve just had a discussion with the grower; it may be $10 toward a buying club or a CSA. This $10 is not just for you and your satiation. It is a transformative $10 spent with intention, or kavannah, toward a fair food system.
- The second call takes place in YOUR Jewish community, whether it be a synagogue, havura, Hebrew school or even where you volunteer. Make a commitment to engage the leadership of that institution (maybe it’s you!) to view food as a critical issue in the development of your community (because it is). Find one way you can make a change in the way things are done. This may mean exclusively seeking out caterers who source locally for your celebrations, partnering with a farm to provide produce for school lunches, setting up a Sunday Farmers’ Market, or laying out an expanded set of kosher guidelines for the types of foods you will serve at your institution’s events.
- The third call takes place at the policy level. With discussions around the 2012 Farm Bill beginning soon, it is important to let your elected representatives know that as their constituent, you want THEM to engage with food policy issues. Start by familiarizing yourself with the issues that will be up for discussion. It is too early to make hyper-specific political demands, but it isn’t too early to tell your representatives that you want them to be involved.Contact your Senators and Representatives and ask the following:
My name is ____ and I want Senator/Representative _____ to know that as a voting constituent, it is important to me that he/she is engaged with issues of access to healthy food and the 2012 Farm Bill. I want him/her to hear my concerns that the Farm Bill safety netinclude small and mid-size family farmers and that it pay attention to reestablishing a regional food systems infrastructure.
Thank You – a Great End to the Year
This is a personal note, amidst the blizzard of year-end emails, to thank you for supporting Hazon in 2010. This was our 10th year, and it’s been a fairly remarkable one. Our new tagline says “Jewish inspiration. Sustainable communities.” That’s as succinct as we can get it – that’s what we’re about.
In practice, we effect change in three ways: through transformational experiences; thought-leadership and capacity-building. This has been quite a year for all three. (more…)
