Thanks to nonprofits like Zalul Association for Environmental Protection, Israel\’s environmental awareness has awakened, and, during the first week of March, a delegation of about a dozen academics, environmentalists and politicians will spend five days in Los Angeles working with their local counterparts.\n
Last summer, Bonnie and Marc Gottlieb calculated their carbon footprint, measuring the impact on the earth\’s environment of such activities as driving their car, turning on their furnace and tossing out their trash. They discovered that they emitted about 56,000 pounds of carbon dioxide annually into the atmosphere.
On a ferociously cold evening in November 1978, Rabbi Everett Gendler climbed atop the icy roof of Temple Emanuel in Lowell, Mass., and installed solar panels to fuel the synagogue\’s ner tamid (eternal light).
\”We plugged it almost directly into the sun,\” said Gendler, who rejoiced that the ner tamid was no longer dependent on the finite and politically questionable energy resources of the Middle East.
Morah Malka will understand.
She\’ll get that I am focusing on Alan Rosen because he was my teacher and not because she and the other recipients of the 18th annual Milken Family Foundation Jewish Educator Awards are any less worthy of notice than Alan, who also received the award last month.
In less than 48 hours, I visited Mount Everest, on the border between Nepal and Tibet, and Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon. The unlikely juxtaposition was the result of attending screenings of quite different films: the flashy Hollywood premiere of \”The Bucket List,\” followed by an understated private screening of indie Israeli film, \”Beaufort.\”
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