So the Green post elicited some good discussion and that’s a great start. I just want to be clear that I am not talking about only recycling but everything from solar panels on the roof to greening the windows to any new work that is done on the building in the coming years to the astringents that are used on the floors each day that are breathed in by hundreds of children on a daily basis. And I’m suggesting framing all of these issues in a larger Jewish context and linking up to an increasingly strong ethic that’s out there which understands clearly the implications of how we live our lives and the wars we fight for oil.

It’s a little “culty” but check out the Solaire site. It’s NYC’s first environmentally friendly residential tower. I’m suggesting that it’s a matter of course that Jewish communities, moving well into this century knowing everything we know about the state of energy in the world, may have an ethical obligation to create sacred structures on these principles.

To give you a sense of how a younger generation of men and women have used their connections and know-how to configure a business based on consulting for companies on this very issue, one good example in New York City is GreenOrder, run by Andrew Shapiro. This company is among the examples of a whole new frontier available for attacking this issue from a variety of innovative perspectives.

Shawn Landres at Synagogue 3000 jumps on board with this question as well. Out in LA, our friends at IKAR and the Progressive Jewish Alliance are moving in to a building that is being constructed by a family foundation interested in supporting initiatives like theirs, making this conversation bi-coastal. Let’s see what comes of it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 7:04 pm and is filed under Big Issues in Jewish Life, Brooklyn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.