ABOUT THE EVENT

Rewilding the Tree of Life: Jewish Law and Theology in the Time of Climate Change.
This lecture will explore how deep engagement with Jewish law and theology may help us respond to the rapidly mounting threats of global climate change and ecological degradation. Grappling with the full range of Jewish religious literature, from Bible and Talmud to mysticism, poetry, and philosophy, we shall consider how these sources can help us address such problems through developing a capacious approach to environmental ethics, education, and activism. At the same time, we will engage deeply with Pope Francis’s remarkable environmental legacy, most visible in his landmark Laudato Si, and will put his writing into dialogue with Jewish legal and theological traditions. In doing so, I will make an argument for the need to
“rewild” both religious and secular education in our day. Rather than examining environmental problems from within highly curated fields of knowledge or parochial lenses, we ought to approach scholarship and teaching as taking place within an ecotone—the fertile transitional realm between different ecosystems or communities that is a marshy site of complexity, interdisciplinarity, and collaboration across boundaries and differences.

This lecture is taking place on Tu B’Shvat, the Jewish New Year for the trees and so is a perfect opportunity to think about how as humans we live in relationship with nature and the environment

Program Time Line
7:50pm – Zoom room opens
8pm – Introduction
8:05pm – Lecture begins
9pm – Q7A
9:30pm – done

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ariel Evan Mayse is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, the rabbi-in-residence at Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute, and senior scholar-in-residence at the Institute of Jewish Spirituality and Society. Previously he served as the Director of Jewish Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, and a research fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Michigan. Mayse holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Harvard University and rabbinic ordination from Beit Midrash Har’el in Israel. He is the author of Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism (2024), and Speaking Infinities: God and Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritsh (2020), and his current book project As a Deep River Rises: Judaism, Ecology and Environmental Ethics, is under contract with Brandeis University Press.