Beth Haverim - Mahwah

2007 was our first year delivering to the community supported farm group at Beth Haverim. Conveniently located just off of Route 287 on Ramapo Valley Road, we were very pleased with a growth of the membership during the harvest season and look forward to their continued support.

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From: January 2007 Issue of Beth Haverim Temple Topics Vol 23 No. 5

From the Rabbi’s Study

“If not now, when?”

It's the heart of winter, although as I write it feels more like a warm spring day!

Apropos of that unseasonable warmth, I’d like to bring you back for a moment to a High Holiday sermon I gave this past fall about food and the role of thoughtful, intentional eating in our lives as a Jewish value.

For those of you who have gardens, you know that if you want to have fresh garlic in your pasta sauce in July or August, you have to plant the bulbs in the ground in October already! For the first time, we planted garlic in our

backyard this autumn. We know we won't have any vampires, which is a good thing. Now, if we can only keep the deer and our resident woodchuck away, we’ve already seen the sprouts symbolizing the promise of a great garlic harvest in the summer of 2007. Hard to believe that you have to wait that long for some homegrown stuff, but it's true!

Gardening even in the winter has got me thinking about the harvest to come, and that’s where I want to gauge your interest. Over the High Holidays, I spoke to you about the farm share our family purchased in the spring of this year. Each week, from June through August, we picked up bags of the freshest veggies, greens, herbs and fruit that had been grown and picked at Farmer Rich’s farm in Wantage, New

Jersey. We also received a newsletter with recipes and farm updates each week. We got an incredible variety and quantity of organic produce in what we were told was a lean year. And now we’re looking at the coming year, when we’ll be purchasing another share. In addition to planting the garlic in our own backyard, we also were able to go the farm this fall to help the farmer plant rows and rows of that pungent crop, which was great fun.

I know that there may be more than one Community Supported Farm like the Catalpa Ridge Farm, from whom we purchased our share. If you’re already regular participants in a CSF, that's terrific. I hope you'll tell me about it and buy in again this spring.

If you're not already connected to a farm, I’d like to invite you to consider joining my family in purchasing a farm share from Catalpa Ridge Farm. Farmer Rich says that if we can get 10 families to each purchase a share, which last year ran about $440 for almost 20 weeks of fresh produce, then we can have the deliveries made directly to the synagogue each week.

Check out Catalpa Ridge’s website at www.jerseygrown.com, or feel free to contact me with questions or thoughts you might have about this idea. Buying locally grown, organically grown produce is a significant way that you and your family can follow the commandment of ba’al tashchit, of taking personal responsibility for protecting our environment. So, too, it’s a good way of taking care of our own bodies—one of God’s great gifts to us.

—Rabbi Joel Mosbacher