Even though Hazon's efforts are aimed at Jews, the marriage of sustainability and religion reaches beyond the Jewish world.
The Presbyterian Church (USA), for example, has designed a curriculum for high school students and young adults titled "Just Eating? Practicing Our Faith at the Table."
The General Assembly of Unitarian Universalists Assn., meanwhile, last year selected "Ethical Eating: Food and Environmental Justice" as a four-year topic of study and action by its 1,000 congregations.
Such efforts are part of a larger food movement whose advocates wrestle with ethical questions raised by the food they buy and eat. They have been inspired in part by Michael Pollan, author of the best-selling "The Omnivore's Dilemma," and others who argue that fast food and an industrial food system have divorced many people from the source of their food.
Rabbis and other Jewish leaders began picking up on the theme about five years ago. Sinai Temple in Westwood is among several dozen synagogues nationwide that have embraced community-supported agriculture projects -- in which people buy shares in a farm's operation in return for a portion of the harvest.
In explaining the project to two dozen congregants who came out one recent night to meet farmer Phil McGrath and taste some of his English peas and black Russian kale, Rabbi Ahud Sela said that God told Adam not only to till the land but to protect it. By purchasing a share -- $1,500 for 40 weekly boxes of produce -- congregants would get food grown 60 miles away, not shipped from South America, he said.
"I know where my produce comes from. It's a guy named Phil McGrath," Sela said. "He farms 300 acres in Oxnard. I'm proud of the person who produces the food for my family."
Another rabbi, Dov Gartenberg of Temple Beth Shalom in Long Beach, is taking a different approach to "reestablish the centrality of the table" in Jewish life. Gartenberg and Emily Moore, a chef, are writing a book of holiday ritual meals -- which he will talk about at this year's Hazon Food Conference in December, to be held again at the Asilomar conference center near Monterey.
One such meal marks the holiday of Shavuot, which occurs in May or June each year and commemorates the Jews receiving the Torah from God at Mt. Sinai.
Gartenberg's congregation will share a Seder at their synagogue with foods tied to the Torah, including a honey-tasting related to teachings in Proverbs that wisdom should be as sweet to the soul as honey is to taste.
