Local News

Director of Northwest Jewish Environmental Project renews her passions in Alaska

By Deborah Seldner, other

She’s already made her mark on the nation’s Jewish environmental landscape, but after a week kayaking in Alaska with eight other leading Jewish environmentalists, Portlander Sandi Scheinberg said she has a renewed passion to continue the arduous task of environmental conservation.
“It was moving, going to one of the last wild places and seeing it just like what you read in Lewis and Clark’s journals,” said Scheinberg. “I’d never been somewhere where every second salmon were jumping. I thought, “˜This is how it used to be.’ We saw 20 to 30 bald eagles and sea otters everywhere. There is so much life around you that you’re not really conscious of in urban life.”
“The average global temperature keeps rising, species are going extinct…it can be depressing,” said Scheinberg, executive director of the Northwest Jewish Environmental Project. “The sense of renewal and spirit that I find in mindfulness practice can help me continue with passion and patience.”
The Nathan Cummings Foundation sponsored the Aug. 7—15 Inside Passages wilderness journey for Jewish environmentalists. Participants were recommended by the board of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life. Much of the journey focused on mindfulness — the practice of concentrating on being in the present, of calming the mind, of inhabiting the present experience.
COJEL Vice Chair Arden Shenker of Portland said, “The executives of COJEL deliberated over a list of those likely to be shakers and movers in the Jewish environmental field over the next decade.”
The project was funded by the Cummings Foundation, which makes grants for both Jewish life and environmental programs. Rabbi Rachel Cowan, head of the foundation’s program on Jewish life, organized the trip after participating in two earlier trips through the Inside Passages Project.
The fact that it was a group of Jewish environmentalists, including five rabbis, made the trip especially significant, said Scheinberg.
“We were not just environmentalists,” she said. “We were Jews out there who care about the environment from a Jewish perspective — and that was the basis of all our activities.”
While the group did engage in some Jewish text study each day, Scheinberg said that the focus of the trip was really a withdrawal from the intellectualization of Judaism in an effort to “engage in Judaism from a more silent, contemplative place.”
Intellectually, she said, you can look at the scientific interdependence of species, and you can study Jewish texts that emphasize humans as caretakers of God’s creation, but on this trip, participants sought to experience the “oneness — the echad” that is at the core of Judaism.
Meditation practices from both Jewish and Buddhist traditions and extended periods of conscious silence contributed to that sense.
Speaking about mindfulness, Cowan said, “Alaska was a place to practice it, as it was such an overwhelmingly beautiful space to be present. By paddling in silence, by sitting in silence, one hears more, feels more, senses more and is more aware of all these senses, as well as of the way the mind and body work. One is not distracted by conversations or business discussions. One is in Alaska, in the moment. Out of this calmer mind, on learns more from the experience itself, rather than imposing preconceptions on it — or one at least sees one’s preconceptions more clearly.”
“The (Cummings) foundation’s goals in sponsoring the trip were to strengthen a leadership core of COEJL, to introduce the practice of mindfulness to a group of environmental leaders and activists with the hope it would be integrated into their Jewish spiritual lives as a tool for cultivating patience, wisdom, and countering burnout, and to see whether the experience of contemplative retreat was something that COEJL would deem useful to its organizational life,” said Cowan.
Scheinberg praised the Cummings Foundation for funding the trip.
“Many aspects of this experience were more subtle than what I think foundations would typically fund,” she said.
Scheinberg said that participants all said the experience would have a positive effect on their personal and work lives. But she said they also all agreed that “It’s intangible enough that we won’t be able to report to the Cummings Foundation that “˜these specific accomplishments stem from the new sense of presence and calm and centeredness.’ But we know people with those qualities tend to be more effective in the work we do.”
The Inside Passages Project was founded in 1994 by Kurt Hoelting to create a blend of wilderness journey and contemplative practice. Hoelting, who lead the COEJL group, is a commercial fisherman, graduate of Harvard Divinity School and 20-year student of Zen meditation.
In addition to Cowan and Hoelting, Rabbi Alan Lew helped lead the trip. A Conservative rabbi from California, Lew is the author of The Sound of One God Clapping, which explores his personal path through years of intensive Zen Buddhist training and his eventual return to Jewish faith.