Zelig Golden

Zelig Golden is co-founder and co-director of Wilderness Torah.

Zelig Golden, Co-Founder/Director

Zelig’s greatest passion is connecting people to their highest purpose through facilitating their connections to Nature and Spirit. A community Maggid, vision quest guide, environmental educator and attorney, Zelig brings ten years of visionary leadership to the Jewish environmental community. He brings earth-based Jewish spirituality to the Bay Area by developing and guiding programs such as the Jewish Vision Quest, the B’nai Mitzvah Nature-Mentoring program, and Wilderness Torah’s annual cycle of land-based pilgrimage festivals. To help build the national Jewish Food Movement, Zelig is a member of the Hazon Board of Directors and co-chaired Hazon’s 2008 Food Conference. He is also active in the Jewish farm movement as an adviser and educator for the Jewish Farm School. Zelig derives much inspiration from his 2006 season farming, teaching and pickling at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center’s Adamah program; as well as his years as a Colorado Outward Bound instructor, an Alaskan backcountry park ranger and a life-long explorer of wild places. Zelig got his start in the Jewish environmental movement in 1998 as the first program director of the COEJL-affiliated Northwest Jewish Environmental Project. Until recently, he worked as an environmental attorney for the Center for Food Safety to protect our food and farms. Zelig received a J.D. with a certificate in environmental law from University of California Berkeley School of Law, and a bachelor of science in ecology, with an emphasis in sustainable development, from the University of Washington.

Wilderness Torah

Religion

Earth Based Judaism – Reclaiming Our Roots, Reconnecting to Nature

By Zelig Golden

The Jewish tradition provides us with a built-in operating system that connects us to the earth by connecting us to the cycles of nature.