To Till and to Tend

How many of us have ever given thought to what our Shabbat candles are sourced from?  I’ve been working at increasingly my lifestyle sustainability for years and never thought to ask.  I work for an organization, GreenMicrofinance, which brings green energy to those at the Bottom of the Pyramid; without access to grid electricity, people rely on kerosene lamps and parraffin candles.  And yes, parraffin candles – examples of which are the old familiar Shabbat candles – are sourced from fossil fuel.  I just reasearched this and came up with a wonderful post at Canfei Nesharim’s site – they provide an Orthodox perspective on environmental responsibilty and have a very comprehensive post on just this question which you should definitely check out.
So what to do?  One simple, but expensive, solution is to switch to naturally sourced candles, soy or bees wax.  That way we can all keep on using our beautiful Shabbat candlesticks.
Another route would be to return to our ancient, pre-candles ritual of burning olive oil in shabbat lamps.  Pictured above is a modern version, which is quite lovely, designed by Israeli artist Nathanel Putnam.  Then there is the arts and crafts project approach.  My own personal experiment failed, so I put it out to all of you out there to share your more successful attempts.  I did find a totally neat web site which demonstrates how to recycle paper into oil wicks.  This would be a great project for educators to work on.  We really need to figure this out! Can you imagine how much fossil fuel is consumed by all the shabbat candles each Friday night?  Contributing to global warming is definitely at odds with welcoming Shabbat.
To all you problem solvers out there: the best solution would be a shabbat lamp shaped to fit INTO a shabbat candlestick, since those are the ceremonial objects we all own.  That way we don’t need to all go out and buy even more stuff.  Let us share our wisdom about this.  ASAP!