Many Heavens, One Earth Conference, Windsor Castle, November 2009.

By Rabbi Yedidya Sinclair
Last week’s conference on world religions and climate change sponsored by the UN and ARC was an extraordinary event. You can read about it here, here and here. The gathering together of religious leaders and environmental heroes was unprecedented. So was the strong acknowledgement of the world’s religions’ critical role in confronting climate change, [...]

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Praying for Rain: Who Affects the Weather, God or Us?

By Rabbi Julian Sinclair
Sukkot has a special connection to rain. The Talmud (Rosh Hoshanah 16a) says that on Sukkot, we are judged for the rainfall we will receive in the coming year. On Shemini Atzeret, the final day of the holiday, we begin to say Mashiv Ha’Ruach u’morid Hagashem, in the Amidah prayer, invoking God [...]

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A Couple of Thoughts for Yom Kippur

By Rabbi Julian Sinclair
The Power of One
On Yom Kippur we examine our actions.  The scrupulous review of our deeds that the day calls for teaches us that everything we do, however small it may seem matters a great deal, often far more than we can even imagine.
Maimonides writes in The Laws of Teshuvah:
Therefore a person [...]

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Julian Gets to Grips with Green Business with a Double Book Review

By Rabbi Julian Sinclair
A couple of years after former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach founded  ActNow, a sustainable business consultancy, he signed up Walmart as a client. This brought Werbach considerable notoriety in eco-activist circles. Walmart’s record of
environmental responsibility had previously been spotty, to put it mildly. Werbach retorted to his critics that Walmart, with [...]

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The Ninth of Av, Copenhagen and Climate Change

By Rabbi Julian Sinclair
Recently I was asked an interesting question by an Israel environmental leader.
“I was a bit surprised and somewhat dismayed,” he began, ”to find out that the date chosen for the Copenhagen Planning Seminar was also Tisha B’Av.”

A bit of background for the uninitiated:
1.    The Copenhagen Summit in December is a gathering of world [...]

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Climate Change, Copenhagen and the Three Weeks

By Rabbi Julian Sinclair
The Copenhagen Summit in December is a gathering of world leaders that aims to bash out a successor agreement to the Kyoto protocol that will limit CO2 emissions going forward. It is widely seen as a critical moment in the global effort to address the threat of climate change.
There is a remarkable [...]

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The Happy Planet Index: Putting the Eco back into Economics

By Rabbi Julian Sinclair
How are we doing?
Not as well as you might think, according to the Happy Planet Index (HPI) which released it’s third annual ranking of nearly all the world’s countries last week.
The HPI is an alternative to GDP as a measure of national well-being. A country’s HPI score is calculated by multiplying together its life expectancy and [...]

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Roundup: June on Climate of Change

As we enter July (hot hot times here in Israel!), we wanted to bring you a roundup of our posts from the last month, just in case you missed one or two. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on any of our posts, and on the blog in general. And feel free to [...]

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Sally Bingham’s “Love God, Heal Earth”: A Review, by Rabbi Julian Sinclair

By Rabbi Julian Sinclair, as published on www.GreenProphet.com
Twenty years, ago, Sally Bingham went to her local bishop and announced that she wanted to be ordained so that she could become the world’s first priest for the environment.
She was received with some skepticism. Undeterred, she embarked on almost a decade of study and became an Episcopalian [...]

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Envy-Based Economics and a Forgotten Tenth Commandment

By Rabbi Julian Sinclair
On Shavuot morning next Friday, in synagogues around the world, we will read the Ten Commandments. It’s remarkable, when you think about it, what a success they’ve been. Over the past 3000 years the Jewish people has done an extraordinary marketing job on conveying these basic ethical and spiritual laws. Across the [...]

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