“Let My People Grow.” The Jewish Farming Movement: A Bottom-Up Approach to Ecological and Social Sustainability

Abstract

Sustainability is a complex concept, encompassing both ecological and social systems. Religious groups have long been concerned with the social sustainability of their member base and are more recently addressing the ecological sustainability of the natural environment. The Jewish religion is embracing social and ecological sustainability through the Jewish farming movement. It addresses social sustainability by uniting Jews based on individual interests rather than hierarchical boundaries through the provision of a grassroots, pluralistic forum for Jewish identity and community to accommodate a changing twenty-first century Jewish population. It also addresses ecological sustainability by addressing internal and external boundaries to adopting a sustainable lifestyle through the reinterpretation of environmental concepts and land-use practices from a Jewish lens and the physical application of these concepts in Jewish farms and gardens. We introduce the Jewish farming movement and review the literature on Jewish cultural and pro-environmental transitions leading up to the movement. We then present a case study on the Jewish farming movement in Baltimore County, Maryland, using a grounded theory approach to uncover how a grassroots, religious movement impacts the social and ecological systems surrounding it. The authors conclude that Jewish farming (1) serves as an interest-based, non-hierarchical form of Jewish participation and identification which impacts participants’ Jewish identities, and (2) creates a community field for its participants, which eases several barriers to pro-environmental living and impacts participants’ sustainable lifestyles.