GrowTorah

“Baruch HaShem for this cucumber,” an Orthodox girl shared with her parents. Until recently, most Orthodox Jewish communities in urban and suburban environments were not growing their own food, and very few Orthodox Day Schools offered environmental classes or sustainability plans. GrowTorah was founded to provide nature-based experiential programs, rooted in Torah values within Orthodox communities, to cultivate a more passionate, compassionate, and sustainable future. To date, GrowTorah has worked primarily in Orthodox communities in New York City and Bergen County, New Jersey. In the absence of having a Jewish framework for minimizing their impact on the environment, many of GrowTorah’s constituents struggle to balance traditional Jewish living with their commitment to the broader world. That’s why the organization develops its work on three levels that are rooted in traditional Jewish pedagogy: personal practices, such as home gardening or composting; familial and communal action, such as reducing trash production and CO2 emissions associated with trash collection; and institutional change by training teams of people at schools to implement school-wide environmental education initiatives.