This Kitchen is Based on Jewish Values
In my last post, I shared about our Sustainable Kitchen project, and how we came to decide to use environmental local businesses (ecobeco and Amicus Green Building Center) to design and build our kosher kitchen.
We are now one week into our project — one week of our refrigerator in the dining room, our pots and pans spread out across the living room, our water being filtered from the bathroom, and our dishes being washed in the laundry room. We are cooking on borrowed electric burners (also in the dining room) and, very gratefully, in our neighbor’s oven. So far, I’d say it’s going pretty well.
We chose this more sustainable path based on Jewish wisdom. The most central environmental ethic in Jewish tradition is the commandment prohibiting needless destruction or waste. (For an extensive treatment of this topic and additional sources, see “Summoning the Will Not to Waste.”)
In Jewish tradition, the prohibition (Deuteronomy 20:19–20) against cutting down fruit trees in wartime is understood as a much larger general prohibition against needless destruction, called “bal tashchit” in Hebrew. The Talmud (B.T. Shabbat 67b) teaches that the prohibition applies to wasting energy, and the great Jewish commentator Maimonides (Hilchot Malachim, Chapter 6, halachot 8–10) understands the prohibition to include smashing household goods, eliminating a water resource, tearing clothing, destroying a building, and destroying food. In short, this Jewish commandment instructs us to care for the lived-in world, and not to destroy — directly or indirectly — anything that may be of use to people.
Other Jewish sources urge us to care for our possessions responsibly, and to reuse holy objects for other holy purposes, rather than letting them go to waste. (For an extensive treatment of this subject, see “Holy Use: Relating to Resources Sustainably.”) One interesting story about the patriarch Jacob (B.T., Tractate Chulin 91:1) shows the care that he took in returning to recover a few small vessels that had been left behind. The Pri Tzadik commentary explains Jacob went back because for the righteous, “property that is assigned to and created for them is very precious to them.”
Few or none of us could consider ourselves “righteous” on Jacob’s level, but I thought of this teaching today as I went back (twice) to recover small forgotten items (a metal water bottle and a shirt). In both cases, I was tempted to forget them as not worth the time to retrieve, but thinking of Jacob’s lesson, I reconsidered. If I left them, they’d become trash for someone else to clean up, and I’d need to spend my own time and money to replace them, in addition to the environmental cost of creating new items. So I went back, and when I saw the items returned to their owners, I was glad I had.
These Jewish values informed our choice to design and build our kitchen in a sustainable way, incorporating both the reduction of waste and some holy re-use. I’ll begin to share more about these details next week.
*Disclosure Note: I requested and received small discounts from ecobeco and Amicus Green Building Center to promote local businesses I believe in.
