Full Interview

Jerry: Could you tell us a little bit about your upbringing and where you grew up?

Linda: I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles, California. I am one of six kids, and that is relevant to the theme of environmentalism because my parents could never afford taking us on a vacation that involves a city or staying in a hotel. So, all of our family vacations when I was growing up were going to state national parks with tents and camping. So I grew up going to Yosemite and Sequoia National Park and Lassen and California state parks and doing a lot of camping and hiking and backpacking. And I think- you know I was thinking about this question Can literature save the environment?- because I actually think- you know, PEOPLE who care about the environment are what will save the environment. And what arouses concern for the environment? literature certainly can because it impacts people. I think that fundamentally having the experience of being out in nature is really what, at least for me, is the most compelling. If you haven't spent any time outdoors, it's hard to have an appreciation of the grandeur of outdoors or a sense of the ways in which the human footprint has so radically transformed the natural world. And if you spend all your time in cities or with human technology, you can actually wind up, not only not having an appreciation of the outdoors, but even a dislike for it- a sense of thats just sort of bugs and sand and, you know, cold or heat and it's not comfortable. And why would you want to save something that you don't care about or even that you dislike?

Rachel: That reminds me a lot of what John Muir talks about: how he thinks that a problem with civilization is that "man" gets TOO civilized, and sometimes you just have to go out into the wilderness and just forget about everything.

L: So I grew up in cities and coming to Saratoga Springs, a small town in upstate New York- I initially came here on a two-year contract 26 years ago, I wasn't expecting to make my life up here. But, I actually discovered that I really like having access to the Adirondacks and to the outdoors and natural beauty a lot more than i like having access to smog and freeway traffic. When I first moving here, somebody asked me if I lived in town and I said No I live in Wilton. And they said Oh you commute? And I started laughing, and I said you know it's a 4.6 mile drive from my house to Temple Sinai. I had a job in LA that was 15 miles from my home that it took me an hour to get to because you crawl on the LA freeway at 15 mph and it takes you an hour to get there! THAT was a commute!

L: What sort of outdoors experience did the two of you have? Or what- I guess this is a second question- but I'm also curious what motivated you to take this class.

J: Well I've always been interested in literature, like reading-wise, I've always been an avid reader. So I wanted to take something that had a good list of novels and literature because I remember reading the course description, and these were all books that I hadn't read and that were classics, so I felt like there was a need to kind of be motivated to read them. And outdoors-wise, I mean my parents own and run a boy's summer camp up in Maine so I've always been in the outdoors. My dad, on the side, is a Maine wilderness guide, so I've always been canoeing since a young age out west. I've been to San Juan River in Utah and the Rio Grande, so I've done a lot of hiking and canoeing all throughout the northeast on the Appalachian Trail and things like that. So, that's my environmental background.

L: We vacation in Maine. I mean like, way down east, all the way down right on the Canadian border- Lubek. 

R: I'd say my area, I'm not as lucky to have as good access to nature. There are some forest preserves, but I don't know if you're familiar about how Illinois was covered with prairies and they destroyed them all. My town is trying to come up with some preserves, but it's a slow process. But I think a lot of what got me interested in nature is my grandma. She lives in Tappan, New York, so almost in New Jersey. And she always would have these berries growing. She has this huge backyard that's basically a forest. And this area she lives in, it's very secluded, it's sort of like around here where there are these hilly forests. It's just so different from what I'm used to, where Illinois is flat as a pancake. Also, I've always been sort of intrigued by the ocean. A lot of my interest in the environment started with animals. I wanted to be a marine biologist for quite a long time until I got stung by jellyfish and I sort of let go of that dream. But I always sort of wanted to maintain some sort of involvement with the environment because I have always just thought it is important. I took an environmental science class last year and just learned a lot. And I think this class is perfect for me because I love English, I love books, I love reading and writing, and I really like the subject of focus for this class. So, that's me.

R: Do you think you background of going to all these national parks brought you to where you are now, with sort of an environmental focus?

L: Oh, absolutely. Like I said before, it's hard to have a sense of loving and caring for wild places or natural places if you're afraid of them or if you think they're uncomfortable or unpleasant or full of mosquitoes or lacking the creature comforts that you want at home, when you're missing your TVs and all the rest. I think it was really important, and as a parent, it is also important to me to take my kids on hikes in the Adirondacks, canoe trips in Minnesota in the boundary waters. We did a lot of outdoor stuff. Two of my kids are now or have done their own kind of environmental work inspired by, I think, in part the way they were raised. 

L: Have either of you heard of the book Last Child in the Woods? 

J: I haven't.

R: No.

L: Actually it's interesting that that's not mentioned in any way on your syllabus. It was published sometime between the last decade, I can't remember exactly when. But it's basically a book about how, as a culture, America has gotten very far away from the outdoors and that you have kids growing up that have to connection to the natural world and what the consequences of that are. And, again, this whole point that it's hard to care about preserving something if you have no connection with it, if you don't even know what it is that you want preserved.

J: I know, of course, my upbringing: being raised Jewish and having a Bar Mitzvah. But I think always my parents personally found more of a spiritual essence of nature. My parents always told me that they connected more religiously and found more of a religious essence and passion while being in nature and kind of feeling that spirituality. Do you have any similar feelings about that, about the kind of fusion of religion and nature?

L: I think that experience you're describing is not in any way unique to your parents or to you. I think it's pretty universal. There's a sense of awe at the wonder and grandeur of all of creation that one gets outdoors that you just don't get inside an office building. Under fluorescent lighting. The feeling of being out camping somewhere and looking up and seeing a star-filled sky and the milky way and a sense of how much is so greater and vaster and beyond you. Human technology kind of gives us the opposite sense, that we're the center of the universe.

R: So, I saw the article hanging down there about your studies as a soferet and the title of the article had to do with living spiritually with the environment. So, how has that come into play with that process?

L: I'm in the process right now of writing a torah scroll. And that is being done in a way unlike any other scroll that I'm aware of because it's a community project and volunteers are helping with making all of the parchment from deer skin that are donated from local hunters. In fact, the reason I have to leave right at 6:15 is that my husband and I are doing a Bread and Torah program up on campus tonight. And I'm meeting the media services guy at 6:30 to get stuff set up. But what I'm bringing to campus this evening is a deer skin and hide-stretching frame and we're going to stretch a hide in the test kitchen in the dining hall. It's a visual most people who grew up in the cities don't get to see. And ya I think it's related to just this idea of, you know, I like to have a sense of where things come from and how things fit together. And you know my motivations for this community project project complex and multi-faceted, but certainly a piece of it is the idea of inviting in a whole community to have hands-on participation in the making of the most sacred ritual object in the Jewish faith. To see where it comes from, to see the materials that go into it, and to have a sense of the whole process, and not just have it be "here's this object sitting in the synangogue in the sanctuary in the ark," but every single torah scroll is the result of a lengthy process that involves the skins of 60 to 70 living, breathing creatures. You know, their hides are what parchment's made from, and the ink used in writing comes from natural ingredients: gall nuts and gum arabic. You know, the writing is done with feathers cut from turkeys. I get turkey feathers from local farmers. All of this is...So much in our world disconnects us from the environment. You go to the supermarket and you think food comes in boxes and meat comes shrink-wrapped in plastic, and, you know, you forget this is an animal. And vegetables don't grow in plastic wrap, they grow in farms, and some of these farms are sprayed with pesticides and are part of huge agro-businesses and some of these farms are carefully tended and nurtured by organic local farmers. You know, YOU make a choice and it's a statement of values with how you consume or what you choose to buy and what you choose to eat and what you choose to feed yourself and your family. So, kind of connecting the dots and living with an awareness of how things are connected is important to me.

R: So what do you think, from your experience or how it applies to your life, are the biggest issues in the environment? Obviously the human disconnect, but sort of when you read the news, what bothers you the most?

L: Right now, what bothers me the most is that global warming has not been mentioned by either presidential candidate, that we could actually have in 2012, a presidential election where both candidates are just acting as if this doesn't exist. That human beings are in the process of radically transforming our planet in ways that has not been seen, or certainly not been seen in the last 10,000 years, and we may be making the planet inhospitable to human life and that nobody's talking about it and and everybody's acting as if it isn't happening. That's what I find the most profoundly disturbing right now. I have a son that's working for Environment Connecticut and running a canvasing office in Connecticut, and they're trying to get elected folks who aren't committed to trashing the environment. And it's so mind-boggling to me that there should even be a political divide around this. You know, like, that that isn't sort of a basic human self-interest that everybody could unite around. But, special interests and human greed that trump saving the planet in which we live.

R: We're coming up on a sort of staged debate on fracking and that really one of the main issues of that, yes its very convenient, we need oil, but is it worth the loss of nature's integrity? I mean, I don't think it is, but it's kind of hard, especially now, when there's such a gas shortage to say "Hey we need to stop drilling!"

L: Ya, and the economy's bad and this will provide jobs and we want to be less dependent on Middle East oil and natural gas is a cleaner fuel than oil and coal and, you know, ya ya ya I get it. But if we could focus on investing in alternative forms of energy with the same vigor that is being focused on extracting every single last drop of carbon-based fuel from this earth, regardless of the carbon dioxide levels in our environment, if even a fraction of the energy that's being devoted to that can be devoted to solar fuel and wind power and alternate energy, all of us would be so much better off.

J: How long is the entire process of scribing a torah?

L:Well, most torahs are written by a professional scribe in 12 to 18 months, and that scribe is getting all his materials purchase ready-made at a scribal supply shop in some religious community in the New York metropolitan area or in Jerusalem or another religious area in Israel. The torah I'm writing will be about a 15 year project at the pace I'm going, I've been holding pretty steadily to the same pace, just sort of extrapolated from how much time I've put in and how far I've gotten this is how long it's going to take. I've been working a little over 5 years and I'm a little over a third of the way through. It's a totally separate skill set to make parchment than to write a torah. The skills you need to be a master calligrapher have nothing to do with the skills you need to process hides and make quality parchment, it's two completely different skill sets. I don't know of any other scribe that's involved in parchment-making because it's not something you need to do as a scribe, you can just go buy your materials. It's something I got involved in, in part, because of this idea of involving the whole community in the process of amking a torah. And, in part, because I'm a woman, that gets into whole other areas. Women traditionally aren't scribes, so I can't go walking into a scribal shop in Jerusalem or Monsey and say I want to buy parchment for a torah I'm writing because I'm not supposed to, as a female, be writing the torah in the eyes of the people in those communities. So, for me I got involved in this partly because of the whole community aspect, partly because I like the interconnections between things, partly because I like to know where things come from, and partly because I didn't want to have a deceptive way of getting my materials. I have friends who are male who have said "give me a shopping list and I'll walk into a scribal shop for you and buy you whatever parchment and ink supplies you need." But I kind of though, whatever it is that makes a torah scroll sacred has got to include integrity of the process, and if the torah is born out of deceiving a seller, I don't see how that could be sacred. I don't see how that could be a holy ritual object if I got all my materials from somebody who would not have wanted to sell to me if he's known they were going to a woman writing a torah. That was just not the way I was going to get this material.

J: Do you think that outlook will ever change in any way for a woman being a scribe?

L: Things evolve and change over time. The first woman rabbi in the United States was ordained in the early 1970s. At that time the thought of a female orthodox rabbi when there were no conservative woman rabbis- now there are. Now there's one woman who's been ordained as an orthodox rabbi. The door's been cracked open, and maybe a hundred years from now it won't be so weird. I'm certainly not the only female scribe, although there aren't any orthodox female scribes, but outside the orthodox world the main barrier to women becoming scribes has been finding somebody who will teach them because it's like a medieval guild, the way you learn is by apprenticing yourself to a master who will teach you his craft. The biggest obstacle is access to teachers. To my knowledge there are only two or three, just a handful of male scribes in the world who were willing to train females. At least two of them have to do it in secret, and the third who is my teacher, who did it openly is dead...Eventually, it will change, but it will be a while.

R: You sort of alluded to it in the beginning, but what do you think the power of the written word is? Of literature, either fiction or nonfiction.

L: It can inform. And move. And I think both of those are key. People need information. If you don't know the consequences of dumping carbon dioxide into the environment, then you're not going to care. So, some of the environmental writers that have profoundly impacted my life are folks like Bill McKibben, who's getting information out there. With regards to my personal dietary practices, Barbara Kingsolver's [Animal, Vegetable, Miracle] book was very significant for me in altering my shopping practices and getting a CSA share in planting a vegetable patch on my front lawn, in ceasing to buy packaged goods. So, literature can provide information that you don't otherwise have. And in the absence of information you're not going to know that there's anything at stake. But I think even more importantly is that literature can move us, can kind of touch us, not only provide information and kind og reach us intellectually, cognitively, but also touch us in some sort of emotional or spiritual place, you know: this matters. I care. It can make us care. So, there's definitely a role for literature. I think Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, I mean there's a role for media, which came out sometime in the mid 2000s. That, I think, sort of transformed the conversation because, up to that point,  a huge segment of our community, of our American society, didn't even believe global warming was an issue. Now, global warming in on everybody's radar, now most people sort of understand that the environment it really changing, especially after things like Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Irene.The questions are more What can we do? And what's prolifically feasible? And how do we motivate, how do we inspire change? But that particular film did a lot to let people know because they could see. That film had visuals, this is what this mountain looked like in 1920 and this is what it looks like with the glaciers retreating today. That kind of seeing stuff.

L: I would say, as a rabbi who's concerned about this, I don't work in the environmental world, no I'm a rabbi., but I've tried within the sphere I which I operate to have the impact I can. We convened several years back what we called the "Green Team" of Temple Sinai to look at our own space and how we can make our building more green, which is an ongoing process with old buildings that were built in a pre-green era and are expensive to maintain and upkeep. But even looking at the habits of the congregation, we've tried to eliminate using paper goods. Every single service, following the service you have an oneg shabbat, you have refreshments, you have coffee, and cake, and desserts. We used to always have paper plates and napkins and plastic forks, and after every single service there would be a huge garbage bag full of all this stuff going to a landfill. So one of the things the Green Team did was to eliminate these paper products. We now have these little glass kiddush cups that get put in the new energy-efficient dishwasher and get washed rather than having all these plastic things that get thrown into the garbage. We have in front of Temple Sinai a bike rack that we got through a grant program and the help of the city to get it. But encouraging people to use alternative forms of transportation. When the weather permits, I bike-ride to work every day that I can. I'm not doing that this season of the year, but in the spring and the summer I am every day that I'm not needing to drive other people other places as passengers in my car or it's not a thunderstorm where I don't have things I need to schlep that I can't carry on my back, which knocks out a couple days every week, but I try to bike-ride as much as I can and I like have that bike rack right next door to the temple, right on our property here. It's a statement, too. Within our community we try to do things that will get people outdoors and connected. We have Adirondack Shabbat services where we do outdoor services in natural settings, as opposed to sitting in our building for that spiritual experience that one gets outdoors that you don't get in your own space. We have this bakery that my husband operated out of the kitchen, the ingredients are, as much as possible, locally sourced and organic and that's something we talk about, the importance of sustainable agriculture. It's sort of a matter of trying to connect the dots for people, that there is a relationship between how we live. I drive a Prius, that was a decision on what car to get and an energy efficient car is important to me. There's all these pieces, and the environmental situation that we find ourselves in is composed of hundreds of millions of individual decisions that individuals make as well as certain global things.