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GENESIS — 2:15 tend

GEN268 When the Holy Blessed One created the first human, God took Adam and led him around all the trees of the Garden of Eden. And God said to Adam, “See My works how good and praiseworthy they are! And all I have created, I made for you. [But,] be mindful then that you do not spoil and destroy My world. For if you spoil it, there is no one after you to repair it.  Kohelet Rabbah 7:13. Modern Jewish environmental teachings use the term shomrei adamah, “guardians of the earth,” to emphasize our responsibility as the earth’s caretakers.  This phrase comes from the Hebrew in [this verse] in which God commands human beings to “work [l’ovdah]” the earth and “keep [ul’shomrah]” the earth. (By Kevin M. Kleinman, "Curb Your Consumerism: Developing a Bal Tashchit Food Ethic for Today")  SACTAB 171 (ft. 1).

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GENESIS — 2:15 tend

GEN270 Let Your Table Be to You a Temple. …. Bananas—those ordinary staples of the American breakfast table---don’t come cheap.  [They are] a natural wonder, scarcely found in the wild.  To get those sugary, golden-hued fruit to our supermarkets, the U.S.-based companies that control banana cultivation the world over employ a cocktail of toxic fertilizers and pesticides known to harm human beings and animals.  They clear acres of virgin forest and replace vibrant tropical ecosystems with banana monocultures.  They burn remarkable amounts of fossil fuel to transport their product over vast distances—far more than producers of other crops.  They drive down wages by snuffing out competition; they deny their workers health care and education, and they prohibit unionization.  [Organic bananas are certainly an all-around better choice than conventional bananas.  Grown without pesticides, they are safer for the agricultural laborers and for surrounding ecosystems.  However growing them in quantity is difficult and requires the deforestation of virgin forests at high altitudes (where banana-living diseases are scarce).  Moreover, they do little to increase the quality of life of the laborers who grow and harvest them or to decrease quantities of fossil fuel burned in transportation to our markets.] The bottom line: transforming this wondrous and rare plant into an everyday breakfast item takes a tremendous ethical and ecological toll. I love bananas as much as anyone, but the ubiquity of this fruit is an example of a larger trend in American life-the desecration of the nourishing plants and animals God commanded us to “protect and nurture” in the Book of Genesis [this verse]. Banana producers have transformed a rare and fragile fruit into an utterly ordinary breakfast staple.  They have accomplished this feat through various nefarious technological, political, and economic practices—along the way damaging the earth and the lives of its inhabitants.  By contrast, we Jews have an ancient system of mitzvot regulating agriculture, diet, and food preparation.  A striking passage in the Babylonian Talmud encapsulates this system in a single sentence; “Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Eliezer taught: As long as the Temple stood, its altar atoned for Israel’s sins, but now a person’s table atones for him” B’rachot 55a.  For the Rabbis of the Talmud, food—the proper foods cultivated and prepared in the proper manner—could be as holy as the sacrifices offered on the altar of the Temple long ago. After my experience in Costa Rica, it was difficult to imagine how bananas could continue to appear on my home’s modern stand-in for the ancient Temple’s altar, the kitchen table.  The ecological and social harm wrought by banana production has besmirched this fruit’s golden reputation; as a consequence, I decided to replace bananas in my diet with other, locally grown, organic fruits.  In other words, there may be no better place to start redressing the errors of agribusiness than with those bananas on the breakfast table. (By Joseph Aaron Skloot, "Real Life / RealFood: Let Your Table Be to You a Temple")  SACTAB 207-9

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GENESIS — 2:15 tend

GEN272 Partnership with God.  Few things have the ability to bring us closer to God than planting and growing food in a garden.  It is the ultimate example of our partnership with God and a manifestation of living Judaism.  But in actuality, it is a three-way relationship between humans, the earth, and God.  “The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to till it and tend it” [this verse]. Let us not underestimate the importance of [this] deceptively simple [this verse] … God needed human help so that the entire life/growth process might move forward.  The early rabbinic commentators jumped on this thought: “The edible fruits of the earth required not only God’s gift of rain but also man’s cultivation.  Man must be a co-worker with God in making this earth a garden” (J.H. Hertz, ed., Pentateuch Haforahs). In other words, paradise was perfect—almost.  It was complete—almost. For all its beauty, for all its wonderful design, something was missing.  Us! God needed a partner: us.  [citing Balfour Brickner, Finding God in the Garden (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 15. (By Barbara Lerman-Golomb, "Getting Back to the Garden")  SACTAB 199-200

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GENESIS — 2:15 tend

GEN275 The realities of aquaculture [the industrial farm equivalent for raising sea animals in confinement] must make us cringe as Jews, we who are commanded not to cause undue suffering to animals.  Farm-raised fish live in water that is so fouled and crowded that it makes it hard for them to breathe, and they cannibalize one another at a high rate.  They have nutritional deficiencies that weaken their immune systems, and they are slaughtered in horrible, inhumane ways.  Fish raised through aquaculture live in terrible suffering and die the same way. To combat the illnesses—parasitic bacteria, rickettsia, lesion—that farm-raised fish contract, producers introduce chemicals and medications  Millions of other fish destined for sale in the United States are raised with chemicals and drugs not approved for use in this country. Yet, as we have seen with Chilean fish producers, devastating viruses still spread, killing millions of fish each year.  When we purchase most farm-raised fish, we are violating the values of both bal tashchit and tzaar baalei chaim by supporting an industry in which large-scale death rates and animal suffering are inherent in nearly all methods of aquaculture.  The first value is drawn from a commandment given to us in Deuteronomy 20 not to wantonly destroy God’s creation, and the second value is rooted in the environment from Exodus 23 to prevent suffering to animals. Sadly, wild-caught fish are hardly a more humane alternative. While they live freely before they are caught, unfettered by cramped and filthy conditions, the methods of catching the sea animals we crave-trawling, longline fishing, purse seines—also kill millions of sharks, marlines, sea turtles, albatross, dolphins, and whales each year.  This kind of ‘scorched-earth style of ‘harvesting’ sea animals,” where 80 to 90 percent of what fisheries catch –so-called by-catch—are thrown back, dead, into the ocean, goes against the value of bal tachchit in a way that we can no longer ignore as people of faith.  This knowing wastefulness is akin to Maimonides’s teaching with regard to cutting down fruit trees: “We do not cut down fruit trees outside the [besieged] city, nor do we take away from them the water channel so that they may dry up, as it says, “Do not destroy its trees” [Deuteronomy 20:19], and anyone who cuts down [such a tree] gets lashes.  And [this rule is] not only during a siege, but at all places; anyone who cuts down a fruit tree in a manner of destruction is lashed.” Mishneh Torah, Hilchot M’lachim 6:8  We cannot ignore the parallel between the cutting down of fruit trees in pursuit of a city and the cutting down of innumerable species in pursuit of the one or two most desirable ones. Maimonides makes this extrapolation explicit when he teaches further, “And it is not only trees, but anyone who breaks vessels, tears clothing, tears down a building, plugs a spring, or wastes food in a manner of destruction, transgresses ‘Do not destroy.’” (ibid.)  When we consume wild-caught salmon or tuna, we are, at the same time, participants in a system that is wantonly destroying the diversity and vibrancy of God’s creation. Furthermore, nearly one-third of wild-caught fish in the world are reduced to fish meal and fed to farmed fish, cattle, and pigs.  Using fish meal to feed farm-raised fish is, as Mark Bittman writes, “astonishingly inefficient. Approximately three kilograms of forage fish go to produce one kilogram of farmed salmon; the ratio for cod is five to one; and tuna … [the] ratio is 20 to 1.” Surely we as Jews, who are commanded not to seethe a calf its [sic] mother’s milk Exodus 23:19, we are commanded to shoo away the mother bird when we take her eggs Deuteronomy 22:6-7, must learn from these values that to feed a fish with fish meal should violate any holistic sense of kashrut.  These fishing systems are not only ecologically troublesome; they are also cruel in the various methods by which hundreds of different species are crushed together to die slowly over hours.  If kosher slaughter of farm animals is meant to help them die quickly and painlessly, the methods of fish slaughter in wild-caught fisheries result in the opposite effect—slow, painful, brutal deaths.  Even if Jewish tradition says little or nothing about how fish should be slaughtered, surely we should extrapolate from what it does say about slaughtering land animals to know that fish should not be made to suffer in any of these ways.  So what is a Jew to do? Foer and others advocate that we eat no fish at all, which is certainly a legitimate option, and perhaps the best one. God made Adam and Eve vegetarians, and perhaps this is the Jewish ideal. (By Joel Mosbacher, "FISH: A Complex Issue") SACTAB 190-2

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GENESIS — 9:3 eat

GEN666 ... only after Noah’s sacrificial offerings did God say, “Any small animal that is alive shall be food for you, like green grasses.” [this verse] The sanction to eat meat is given the moment after God realizes “the human mind inclines to evil from youth onward.” Genesis 8:21.  Perhaps that was the violence God saw Noah’s generation commit.  The carnivorous drive of both man and beast so horrified heaven that the ducts of the deep were opened and the land welled over with torrential tears. We have both turned over the verse “You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk” (Exodus 23: 19, 34:26; Deuteronomy 14: 21). In exodus 21, this verse follows verses on sacrifice, festival offerings, and choice first fruits. Biblical scholars understand it to be referring to ancient Egyptian sacrifices, not necessarily how we prepare our food. But we've also drunk from the Talmud and been fed by the commentators, who understand it as a prohibition against cooking milk and meat together. (By Zoe Klein, "Real Life / Real Food: A Letter to My Vegetarian Husband")  SACTAB 273-4

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