These include, the Biblical protection for fruit trees, rules in the Mishnah against harming the public domain, Talmudic debate over noise and smoke damages, and contemporary responsa on agricultural pollution.
[13] In contemporary Jewish liturgy, ecological concerns have especially been promoted by adapting the kabbalistic ritual of conducting a seder for the New Year of the trees Tu Bishvat.
One primary Jewish environmental event is the Tu BiSh'vat seder, often labeled as 'Jewish Earth Day' and sometimes humorously called 'Tree B'Earthday.
'[15] Falling in early spring, two full moons before Passover, Tu BiSh'vat ("the 15th of the month of Sh'vat") generally coincides with the first sap rising in the fruit trees in Israel.
The Jewish National Fund (JNF) applied these motifs in the 1950s to champion Tu BiSh'vat as a day for planting trees in Israel.
By the late 1970s, Jewish groups were innovating rituals for Tu BiSh'vat that connected Biblical and rabbinic teachings with material from the Kibbutz movement or JNF and with current environmental concerns.
[16] In the 1980s, dozens of homemade Tu BiSh'vat liturgical books or haggadot, modeled after the Passover seder, were being used around the country to celebrate trees and to talk about local and national environmental issues, the earth, and ecology.
[17] In North America, the movement was in many ways motivated by the revival of back-to-the-land values in the 1960s and 70s, together with the influence of Zionist idealism, which also emphasized returning to the land.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow is also one of the leaders in this area of exploration, starting with his 1982 work, The Seasons of Our Joy: A Modern Guide to the Jewish Holidays,[20] which follows the liturgical calendar through the changes in the earth.
Founded by Ellen Bernstein in Philadelphia, the group produced guides to Judaism and the environment, such as Let the Earth Teach You Torah (1992), which was one of the works that initiated the field of Jewish environmental education.
Shomrei Adamah captured the imaginations of environmentally concerned Jews around North America and quickly supplanted groups such as L'OLAM in New York City on the national level.
COEJL filled the vacuum left by Shomrei Adamah, working with other religion-based groups, under the umbrella of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE).
Jewish environmentalists are drawn from all branches of religious life, ranging from Rabbi Waskow's organization and The Shalom Center to the Orthodox educational group Canfei Nesharim.
The Adamah Farming Fellowship was also founded in 2003 at IF (now called the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center) by Shamu Sadeh, an alumnus educator of the Teva program.
[21] In Israel the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership, and the Reform movement's Kibbutz Lotan, both founded in 1983, have had a long and lasting impact.