Feral Thinking: Religion, Environmental Education, and Rewilding the Humanities

Abstract

The contemporary American university largely operates as an agent of domestication, tasked more with enforcing the social and economic order than with expanding the horizons of possibility. The dawn of the Anthropocene, however, demands that we reconceive of the humanities not as self-sufficient, hierarchical, or divided away from other modes of seeking knowledge but as core to what human being and responsibility ought to mean in the more-than-human world. The present essay makes a case for reworking—and rethinking—the American university along the lines of Mark C. Taylor’s prompt to reconceive of the academy as a multidisciplinary forum for the “comparative analysis of common problems”. I suggest that religious teachings—and religious traditions themselves—can offer models for the intertwining of the humanities (literature, poetry, philosophy, the expressive and applied arts), the social sciences (the study of governance, political thought, the study and formulation of law), and the natural sciences as well as mathematics and engineering. Further, I argue that when faced with radical and unprecedented changes in technological, social, economic, and environmental structures, we must, I believe, engage with these traditional texts in order to enrich and critique the liberal mindset that has neither the values nor the vocabulary to deal with the climate crisis. We must begin to sow new and expansive ways of thinking, and I am calling this work the “rewilding” of our universities. Parallel to the three Cs of rewilding as a conservation paradigm, I suggest the following three core principles for the rewilding of higher education: creativity, curriculum, and collaboration. Though I focus on the interface of religion, ecology, and the study of the environmental, social, and moral challenges of climate change, I suggest that these categories of activity should impact all domains of inquiry to which a university is home.

1. Introduction

The contemporary American university now operates as an agent of domestication, if it was ever anything else, tasked more with enforcing the social and economic order than with expanding the horizons of intellectual or spiritual possibility (Freire 1972; hooks 1994; Kant 1996, p. 247; Vossoughi 2021). Educational theorists and critics, like Sylvia Wynter, have shown us that a wide variety of seemingly objective academic structures, from departments and administration to curricula and pedagogy, are shaped by colonialist mindsets and subject to significant intellectual and procedural blinders. Even well-intentioned values, like cultural diversity, intersectionality, and “disruptive education”, serve as fig leaves to conceal inconvenient truths about the rampant economic divergence and poverty—what Bruno Latour has called the vertiginous explosion of inequality that defines our age (Michaels 2006). The myopia caused by systemic biases within the academy is compounded by an endless push toward specialization, which forces faculties to fracture into increasingly isolated disciplinary silos.

These forces have widened the growing gulf between what C. P. Snow once called the “two cultures”, a gnawing chasm between scientists and literary types that burrows down to the very bedrock of academic and public life. Since the consolidation of power in the research universities of early modern Europe, continuing with the expansion of higher education in postwar America, academic life and instruction are increasingly defined by the rigid boundaries of those “nonoverlapping magisterial” (Gould 1999). This situation, a fracking of intellectual life that has exacerbated old fissures and created new ones, has contributed significantly to our collective inability to respond to the climate crisis (Jencks and Riesman 1968).

As economic machines, modern research universities communicate to their faculties that they must also function as entrepreneurs. Professors are taught, both implicitly and explicitly, to be eternally on the make, looking always to raise oneself to the top of the market (Clark 2006). During recent rounds of graduate admissions, I have been struck by the fact that many young applicants hoping to enter the halls of the academy already have websites dedicated to their teaching and writings before starting a PhD program. That this is now increasingly true of my undergraduate students is, well, alarming. Academic culture mimics the landscape of techno-capitalism; we are supposed to move quickly, to produce as much content—that is, writing—as possible. Our gross domestic project is measured in terms of the expansion of our own curriculum vitae, and our contribution to what is sometimes called “the knowledge economy” or the expansive market of “research capitalism” (Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Pocklington and Tupper 2002; Berg and Seeber 2016; Collini 2012, 2017). Undergraduate students, understandingly bewildered, are pressured majors that will give equal or greater monetary and social capital in return for the significant financial outlay of tuition and expenses, not to mention many years of valuable time. While not all academic centers of higher learning fall prey to these issues—the magnificent but short-lived Black Mountain College (1933–1957) in North Carolina and Quest University in British Columbia (2007–2023) come to mind as counter examples—the problems are indeed metastatic (Molesworth and Erickson 2015; Delbanco 2014).

The crisis of higher education in our day, which has struck the humanities in particular, is not just about numbers (Reitter and Wellmon 2023). As Martha Nussbaum has argued, “we seem to be forgetting about the soul, about what it is for thought to open out of the soul and connect person to world in a rich, subtle, and complicated manner; about what it is to approach another person as a soul, rather than as a mere useful instrument or an obstacle to one’s own plans; about what it is to talk as someone who has a soul to someone else whom one sees as similarly deep and complex” (Nussbaum 2016). This situation bespeaks a measure of intellectual fragmentation with dramatic consequences, especially in our age of embattled polarization and the progressive breakdown of civic discourse into warring extremes (Conant 1945). Balkanization within the academy is not a new story. In a lecture delivered in 1917, the eminent sociologist, historian, and theorist Max Weber remarked as follows: “…scholarship has entered an apparently permanent phase of specialization unlike any that has gone before. This specialization is not only the institutional reality—it shapes the scholar’s own experience… Strict specialization is the only way someone in scholarship can possibly achieve—perhaps only once in his life and never again—the feeling of having accomplished something that will truly last” (Weber 2020). As with the production of all other commodities, it has become a truism that the fertile generation of knowledge demands expert efficiency, comparative advantage, and a near-complete division of labor.

The fragmentation visible in the academy also holds dramatic consequences for our impact upon the natural world; we should, of course, acknowledge the enormous geopolitical and carbon footprint attached to academic life at a major research university, one that often come at a large and significant cost to others (see Ghosh 2021). Describing the splintered study of food systems in his day, and the environmental small-mindedness that follows suit, Aldo Leopold commented as follows:

These are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university.

(Leopold 1987)

Modern institutions of higher learning generally do not encourage researchers to think holistically or to grapple with systemic problems from multiple perspectives or disciplinary angles.

This fragmentation means that we are not preparing our undergraduate and graduate students to encounter the wicked problems like that of climate change, a crisis that is a multifactorial, cumulative constellation of issues that reflect social, economic, and scientific problems. Concerned faculty often tackle environmental issues in piecemeal ways, from within the ambit of their own specialized training, and humanities scholars in particular are often excluded and marginalized from the core discussions around environmental issues. A recent announcement from my own university’s website is a case in point: “New Environmental Social Sciences department formed”—followed by a telling subheadline, “The new department within the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability incorporates the human element into interdisciplinary efforts to tackle humanity’s greatest sustainability challenges” (Tranchell 2023). Twice forms of the word “human” are invoked, yet individuals engaged in studia humanitas are excluded. The humanistic arts, it seems, are condemned to irrelevance in the face of humankind’s most pressing existential problem. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Though sometimes described as hackneyed and well-trodden, this criticism of the fractures of higher education and the sidelining of the humanities appears more judicious with each passing year. Let me be clear, the humanities are often marginalized from contemporary environmental education, and from the broader study and practice of sustainability, in part because they have ceded so much ground to the physical and social sciences (Sideris 2017). We need a new type of humanist revolution to address this fact (Rodriguez 2018). Living within the Anthropocene, however one might date and define this term, demands that we reconceive of the humanities not as self-sufficient, hierarchical, or divided away from other modes of seeking knowledge but as core to what human beings and responsibility ought to mean in the more-than-human world (Iovino 2016). In what follows, I will make the case for reworking—and rethinking—the American university along the lines of Mark C. Taylor’s goad to reconceive of the academy as a multidisciplinary forum for the “comparative analysis of common problems” (Taylor 2009, 2010; Boyer 1990, 1994). I argue that religious teachings—and religious traditions themselves—can offer models for the intertwining of the humanities (literature, poetry, philosophy, the expressive and applied arts), the social sciences (the study of governance, political thought, the study and formulation of law), and the natural sciences as well as mathematics and engineering.

In developing a response to the ecological crisis, scientific information and method are absolutely critical for understanding the mechanisms and implications of climate change and for helping us find ways to cope with a changing and increasingly inhospitable planet. At the same time, the mindset in which all relevant questions or problems ought to be tackled by science alone neither provides us with a robust ethical framework nor helps dismantle the economic, philosophical, and social structures that dominate our world. Science should be able to critique religious sources, but religious modes of moral reasoning, evaluation, and narrative or myth—and the academic study of religion along with them—ought to be able to return the favor. They ought to be considered seriously, as we struggle with our day’s weightiest and most important questions (Francis 2015; Cf. Wiebe 1998).

Such branches of human knowledge ought to be reconstrued as mutually constructive rather than nonoverlapping kingdoms. The joints and intersections between them are broad and marshy, and purposefully so. Here, I am thinking about academic life, about scholarship, teaching, and collaboration, as an ecotone—the transitional realm between different ecosystems or communities. These zones, both naturally occurring and artificial (human-made), serve as the midpoint of a real-world Venn diagram of fertility and creative conflict. These zones allow for the interaction of multiple species, giving rise to possibilities unavailable and perhaps unimaginable in either extreme. On a conceptual level, I argue that the convergence of different fields can enable fruitful conversation and cross-pollination along with creative and generative tension. The climate crisis should spur the engagement of science with many contested issues surrounding social ecology—namely, race, gender, indigeneity, and so forth—matters of profound consequence that rest at the intersection of mind, body, self, and world. This encounter is meant to be mutually enriching and bilaterally elevating.

Frameworks and curricula for higher learning that are both intensive and more holistic appear in the history and literatures of religious traditions as well as in classical and premodern academies or universities (Kalligas et al. 2020; Adler 2010). In the four-part taxonomy offered by the philosopher and ethicist Ian Barbour (conflict, independence, dialogue, integration), the latter two are, perhaps surprisingly, in many respects the most common approaches to bridging forms of knowledge that are found in historical religious traditions. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity have a long experience with drawing together what we would call the humanities (literature, poetry, philosophy), the social sciences (the study of governance, political thought, the study and formulation of law), and the natural sciences as well as mathematics and engineering (Jenkins 2013). The exchange between science and religion rarely favored one extreme to the exclusion of the other, and many forms of synthesis have been advanced over the centuries (Hardin et al. 2018; Barbour 2000).

Many have argued that the intellectual worlds of classical Islamic civilization may readily be held up as a gold standard for this integrative model (Gade 2019; Nasr 1968; Zaman 2014; Faruque 2021). In traditions across the world, the humanities were once considered to be a central part of a religious education that included mathematics and the sciences. It should also be noted that classical liberal education in the United States included religious sources and modes of thinking as an essential part of its core curricula (Jacobsen and Jacobsen 2008). Going even farther, in a 1781 proposal that twinned philosemitic Hebraism with antisemitic patronization, Ezra Stiles described Jewish learning as “worthy to be sought after and transplanted into the Colleges of America” (Ogren 2021). In other words, Stiles was interested in opening the door to new and different modes of vital thinking at Yale College by emulating the exchange of ideas, the give-and-take or critical inquiry, modeled in classical Jewish sources (Shulman 2008).

Perhaps the most famous attempt to rethink modern education along spiritual lines was that of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the Bengali poet and philosopher, who correctly diagnosed the British colonial education system as a “factory” that emphasized moralism, conformity, and intellectual fragmentation rather than deep inquiry and exploration of the world on its own terms. “Education is, in a real sense, the breaking of the shackles of individual narrowness” argued Tagore in 1919, “…The highest aim of education should be to help the realization of the unity, but not the uniformity. Uniformity is unnatural… A sound educational system should provide for the development of variety without losing the hold on the basic or spiritual unity” (Tagore 2007). Holding classes out of doors was key to Tagore’s broadening of the aesthetic, spiritual, and conceptual work of education: “Nature’s help is indispensable when we are still growing up, and still learning, and before we are drawn neck and crop into the whirlpool of affairs. Trees and rivers, and blue skies and beautiful views are just as necessary as benches and blackboards, books and examinations” (Tagore 1961; O’Connell 2003, 2007; Sharma 2021).

The content, interdisciplinarity, and scope of religious sources—and the traditions and cultures that have shaped and been shaped by them—have much to offer contemporary educational frameworks. This is not to elide the fact that religious and spiritual traditions have, in some respects, made a historical contribution to our current ecological and educational crises. Religious and spiritual traditions are complex and can be, to varying degrees, implicated in the violences I am criticizing, and the impulse to romanticize their environmental histories must be resisted (Taylor 2016; Taylor et al. 2016; Sideris 2007; 2017, pp. 1–7).These complex past dynamics have been much discussed in the wake of Lynn White, Jr.’s infamous indictment of religion as a cause of climate emergency, a case set forward in a 1967 article that set religious thinkers back on their heels (White 1967). While some have attempted to undercut the science that explains climate change, many have tried to “green” ancient traditions through heavy-handed reinterpretation meant to show that the keywords of contemporary environmental thought have long been central to their religion. These attempts to find analogies between religion and contemporary ecology, however, do little more than establish paradigms without offering alternative worldviews or ethical frameworks. Religious literatures cannot provide a wholesale transferrable solution to environmental problems, but, as thought partners and as ethical prompts, they can cultivate the deeper work of exploring traditional sources with an eye to new modes of theorization and values that unseat regnant assumptions about humanity and our relationship to the nonhuman world (Gade 2019 and Miller 2017). These teachings, paradigms, and pathways of study—including the reflective scholarly consideration of theology as a mode of reasoning—are further enriched by conversation with Indigenous traditions, hence expanding what counts as both “religion” and as “Religious Studies” within the academy (Tafjord 2013; Kelley 2015; Whyte 2017, 2018; Cotter and Robertson 2016; Johnson and Kraft 2017; Higton 2012; Ogden 1972; Plaskow 2014).

I should also note that I am not making a point about “religion” in the abstract. As a scholar of Jewish Studies, an ordained rabbi, and a member of the Jewish community, I write and teach from those intersecting social and intellectual positions (Jacobsen and Jacobsen 2012). Documents like Pope Francis’s bold encyclicals Laudato Si’, On Care for Our Common Home (2015) and Laudate Deum (2023), demonstrate that, in their textured specificity, religious vocabularies often predate the carbon economy and, therefore, fall prey neither to its assumptions nor its limitations. When faced with radical and unprecedented changes in technological, social, economic, and environmental structures, we must, I believe, engage with these traditional texts in order to enrich and critique the liberal mindset that has neither the values nor the vocabulary to deal with the climate crisis.

Responses grounded in starting points of liberal and market individualism have failed to generate the collective action we need. “In that global warming poses a powerful challenge to the idea that the free pursuit of individual interests always leads to the general good” Amitav Ghosh writes, “it also challenges a set of beliefs that underlies a deeply rooted cultural identity, one that has enjoyed unparalleled success over the last two centuries” (Ghosh 2016). The struggle to develop a language or mindset for comprehending and addressing the dangers of the Anthropocene stems, in part, from a combination of the trans-jurisdictional nature of the global challenge and the legal and social default toward market individualism where collective action on a grand scale is required. However, the problem is also rooted in what Vandana Shiva has felicitously called “the monoculture of the mind”, a general malaise that has taken hold institutions of higher education. We must begin to sow new and expansive ways of thinking.

2. Rewilding the Academic Landscape

I am calling this work the “rewilding” of our universities. Rewilding is a progressive conservation technique grounded in a belief that dynamic resilience and ecological flexibility comes from reduced human interference, emphasizing that environmental stability is grounded in biological and territorial diversity (Hinton 2022; Foreman 2004; Bekoff 2014; Halberstam 2020; Cf. Whyte 2024; Tsing et al. 2020, https://feralatlas.supdigital.org (accessed on 13 November 2024)). Evolving from its origins in the 1980s, the contemporary rewilding paradigm is sometimes said to have three Cs: cores, connectivity, and coexistence. That is, healthy landscapes must be protected, interconnected, and home to a variety of flora and fauna (including macro-predators), but they must also be places of connection between people and nature. Parallel to this, I suggest the following three Cs for the rewilding of higher education: creativity, curriculum, and collaboration. These categories and values should impact all domains of inquiry to which a university is home; though in the present essay, I focus on the interface of religion, ecology, and the study of the environmental, social, and moral challenges of climate change. (Though we share an emphasis on coordination and interdisciplinarity, this work of “rewilding” the academy is intentionally quite distinct from the weaponized metaphor of (Michaelson 1998)).

Perhaps most importantly, we need to rewild our ways of thinking and teaching—this is the creativity of our three Cs. If monoculture is about making complicated situations into simple ones and human control of the landscape, rewilding education demands an embrace of both complexity and humility (Monbiot 2013, pp. 162–63). “The drive towards monoculture causes a dewilding, of both places and people. It strips the Earth of the diversity of life and natural structure to which human beings are drawn” (Monbiot 2013, p. 154). The biological consequences of deforestation and “defaunation” are shocking and terrible, and their impacts extend to our own bodies and minds as we, too, are members of those impoverished or damaged ecological systems (Dirzo et al. 2014). Similar types of fragmentation happen as our modes of reading and thinking are shunted into those artificial granaries of knowledge that we call departments and disciplines. No subject is off limits, though of course not all methods can or should take root in every text.

Rewilding fosters flexibility and multidisciplinary thinking, bringing a variety of sources and methods to the table and listening to each of them. Ceding a concretized hierarchy of disciplines, this principle reminds us that many species of text or knowledge must be brought to bear on difficult problems. We should remember that Indigenous creatures were once invasive, and although the enormous diversity of humanistic thinking might seem irrelevant to searching for practical environmental solutions, these traditions and ideas hold enormous potential for positive transformation. Queering, disrupting, and brushing things against the grain, we look to expand the horizons of our imagination, moral and emotional, as well as regulatory and scientific beyond what the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci called “cultural hegemony”—a term as appropriate for science, technology, and engineering as the liberal arts. While “wilderness” is about the exclusion of human beings, rewilding emphasizes the importance of human existence within nature—the knowledge that we are part of something tangled, complex, and interwoven.

We also need to rewild our university curriculum, including the courses of study that guide environmental studies. In addition to the science of earth systems, biology, geology, statistics, and so forth, a basic course of study should include the significant integration of fields like law, economics, government, philosophy (including philosophy of science), history, literature, and art (Johnston 2013; Jacobs 1989). No subject is irrelevant to environmental education, no discipline out of bounds, because the climate crisis demands a new way of thinking about human beings in the world. These modes of thinking could be presented as units embedded into science and engineering classes, but many could be offered as stand-alone courses intentionally tooled for nonmajors or nonspecialist graduate students. Many bolder proposals might take us even farther as well. Rather than organizing our university curriculum around insular majors housed in specific department, we could follow Taylor’s prompt and rearrange our core curriculum so that it offers the opportunity to grapple with a set of critical problems. Or, more specifically in regard to the climate crisis, what if all undergraduates were brought into the academy via a two-year course of study structured around the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire? That frame is capacious enough to hold nearly all elements of human culture and knowledge yet could also take us to specific applied questions of regulation, policy, and natural science, considered in tandem with literature, philosophy, ethics, and history.

The way that we, as faculty, assemble ourselves is equally important, and we need to be prompted to find points of connection that stretch across disciplines. “Education is a moral practice” claims Herb Kohl, “manifested by the specific content and nature of instruction across subject areas, within the context of a caring learning community” (Kohl 2009). Rewilding our educational structures—and the paradigms that guide them—might push us and our institutions closer to being “schools” in the sense that the term applies to marine mammals. “Dolphin schools” writes Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “are organizational structures for learning, nurturance, and survival, both intergenerationally and within generations… What if the word school, as we use it on a daily basis, signaled not the name of a process or institution through which we could be indoctrinated, not a structure through which social capital was grasped and policed, but something more organic, like a scale of care” (Gumbs 2020). This type of educational change is both close at hand and far afield, requiring a concerted shift in our approach to all dimensions of academic life.

Wildlife and ecosystem conservation often draws upon the principle of complementarity. Rather than viewing potential locations or populations solely in isolation (called scoring), this broadminded approach seeks to understand how such places and their inhabitants function together as part of a network, and how new preservation sites can add unrepresented features or species to those already being protected (Justus and Sarkar 2002). A mindset of complementarity also pushes one to strive for preserving the maximum richness of species and privilege zones that include the highest degree of biodiversity (Lindenmayer et al. 2007; Margules and Pressey 2000; Kukkala and Atte 2013). Such areas are, quite literally, homes to fertility and abundance, but they are also not viewed solely or in isolation; they exist within a broader network of conservation zones that are part of a bigger project. Taylor called for the development of “emerging zones”, spaces of inquiry “organized around problems and themes that lend themselves to interdisciplinary investigation. They should be designed to maximize the openness and flexibility necessary to adjust to the constantly expanding and evolving intellectual landscape.

Whenever possible, these “emerging zones” of inquiry should focus on questions and problems that have practical relevance and prepare students to become responsible citizens who are capable of pursuing creative and productive careers” (Taylor 2010, p. 145). Imagine, if you will, a requirement that every student to graduate from our universities take at least, say, six classes offered in an emerging zone. These could—and should—be co-taught, another way of cultivating the fertile contact points between disciplines; alongside collaborative research and writing, teaching in teams both widens the possible scope of inquiry, while deepening the students’ multiple competencies. Rather than trading off instructional hours, faculty should work together to create courses of study that do not simply join departmental commitment but maximize the biodiversity of intellectual richness. We could strive for synthesis and hybrid vigor, reaching for complementarity rather than capitalist exclusion and neo-liberal specialization.

Why look to humanistic sources in this work of rewilding? In part, because such texts can offer us modes of reading and interpretation beyond extraction, paradigms, or hermeneutics that can stretch the imagination and allow us to look for what has been called the “adjacent possible” (inter alia, Kauffman 2007; Landy 2012; Rosenblatt 2019; Josselson 2004). Charles Altieri has described a practice that he calls “reading through”, an affective and philosophically attentive form of ethical reading by which “we can gain a rich grammar for interpreting particular experiences or projecting self-images that have significant resonance in how we make decisions in the present” (Altieri 1990). These potential ideas, images, and values become a part of our “mental furniture”, a realm of potential reconfiguration allowing us to make different choices. Here, too, I follow the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel:

Creative dissent comes out of love and faith, offering positive alternatives, a vision. The scarcity of creative dissent today may be explained by the absence of assets that make creative dissent possible: deep caring, concern, untrammeled radical thinking informed by rich learning, a degree of audacity and courage, and the power of the word. The dearth of people who are rooted in Jewish learning and who think clearly and care deeply, who are endowed with both courage and power of the word, may account for the spiritual vacuum, for the state of religious existence today.

(Green and Mayse 2019)

The power to spark transformation, to levy critique, and to build alternatives is rooted in a sense of commitment to the past: when we are stuck, when our present is defined by stagnation, fear, and small-mindedness, we need to think in complex and uncomfortable ways.

The rewilding approach also entails significant changes in our ways of looking at texts. In many respects, religious traditions have also become domesticated; being yoked to values and logic of our industrialized carbon economy has shifted the manner in which core ideas and teachings are being read and interpreted. However, our time demands that we lift up radical voices, elements of religious thinking that challenge our social and economic systems, while also threatening the hegemony of mind that restricts our vision. We must, in short, allow them to rewild us and open our eyes to the vast array of alternative possibilities found in the texts rooted in the past. Jewish mystical sources offer us a paradigm for such hermeneutical work. They describe Scripture as a verdant textual garden overflowing with secrets, filled with an untold number of new interpretations. This divine light has been lovingly sown into the very fabric of being.

This light was sown by the blessed Holy One in the garden of His delight (ginta de-idnoi), and He arranged it in rows by the hand of the Righteous One, who is the gardener of the Garden. He took this light and sowed it as a seed of truth, (Jeremiah 2:21) arranging it row by row in the Garden, and it sprouted and grew and yielded fruit, by which the world is nourished, as is written: “Light is sown for the righteous”… (Psalms 97:11).

It is written: “as a garden makes its sowings spring up” (Isaiah 61:11). What are “its sowings”? The sowings of primordial light, which is constantly sown. Now it bears and yields fruit, and now it is sown as in the beginning. Before the world can eat this fruit, this sowing bears and gives fruit, not subsiding. So the worlds are nourished by the supply of that gardener called Righteous One, and He never subsides or ceases, except in time of exile.

(Zohar 2:166b-167a, based on Matt 2004, vol. 5, pp. 465–66)

This teaching offers a powerful vision of a self-sustaining world, a cosmos whose interior and exterior flourishing is driven forward by the vitality of these divine seeds. Rather than being hidden away only in the World to Come, the Zohar claims that this primordial light is constantly re-emerging and being reborn within the material realm.

Much like annual wildflowers that automatically self-seed and regrow each year, this world—called the garden of God’s delight—is defined by a kind of sustainable ecology of sacred energy that was set into motion through the processes of creation. This garden is also Shekhinah, the source of God’s pleasure and a realm that constantly gives birth and recreates (Zohar 2:35a). The fertility of this garden is, to be sure, threatened by the parching fractures of exile:

Now, you might say, “Of the time of exile is written: ‘Waters vanish from the sea, and a river becomes parched and dry’ (Job 14:11). How can it generate offspring?” Well, it is written “sown”—continually “sown”. From the day that the river ceased, that gardener has not entered the Garden; yet that light that is continually sown yields fruit, and is sown of itself as in the beginning, never subsiding—like a garden generating offspring, some of that sowing falling on its own, right in its place, generating offspring as before.

Now, you might say that such offspring and fruit are the same as when the gardener was there. Not so! But this sowing is never withheld.

Similarly, “and Torah is light” (Proverbs 6:23)—Torah too is constantly sown in the world, generating offspring and fruit, never subsiding, and by its fruit the world is nourished.

(Zohar 166b-167a, based on Matt 2004, vol. 5, pp. 465–66)

The primordial light constantly renews its illumination in the form of saplings and plants that grow, wither, and then, regrow in an endless cycle that continues even without the active intervention of the gardener. We might expect the flow of emanation to cease, but the World to Come is, thus, continuously arriving, manifest in the ceaseless fertility of the divine garden. Similarly, the Torah reveals its endless inner illumination, as it tirelessly yields new “fruits” of meaning. The fertile text cannot yield the fullness of its interior dimensions without human sowing, without the struggle and toil of our exegesis and interpretation; yet, the automatic regeneration of illumination and the production of new ideas continue unabated even in periods of rift and exile. Drawn forth from the ancient textual garden through human interpretation, the vitality of Torah is effervescent and unceasing. This paradigm for what it means to encounter a text as a font of possibility and reflection can, in my estimation, guide our engagement with all the humanities, provided that we do not till them under.

3. The Yields of Rewilding

The humanities, the study of religion, and Jewish Studies can help expand environmental education in an enormous number of ways but allow me to mention a few domains in which we could do with some rewilding: technology, animal studies, contemplative studies, and applied research. First, Jewish sources generally reject technological determinism—not everything that can be done, ought to be done. Moreover, they threaten the optimism that drives so much innovation, for technology is not the only answer. Carbon sequestering, terra-forming, plastic vacuums, geo-engineering are not the solution. At best, these technologies treat the symptoms, and more often, they actually reflect the deeper malaise. Rabbinic sources highlight the allure of technology as a kind of graven or false god; this ancient teaching maps the yearning to stave off ecological calamity with geological mastery onto the story of the tower of Babel (Gen. 11), long identified as a tale warning against the corruptive effects of hubris:

“They [i.e., the generation of the flood] said, ‘Once every 1656 years the firmament collapses. Let us make pillars to support it, one in the north, one in the south, one in the west and this one [i.e., the tower of Babel] will stand in the east.

(Bereshit Rabbah 38:1)

Build higher, continue to grow—we can hold up the heavens if they collapse! If we create carbon sequestering systems or plastic vacuums, no compromise or changes are needed. Geo-engineering means that, if we simply perfect the technology, we can somehow have an ever-expanding GDP within a world of limited resources. Yet technology cannot change the fact that we and some 90–95% of the species that have co-evolved with us across the past millennia cannot live on the planet we are creating. We need to slow down, to ask questions about the implications of such building projects. Whose land do we need to take, whose lifeways and cultures must be displaced or destroyed in order for the construction to proceed and for our own modes of living to be preserved? What are the implications for the landscape, for the local ecosystem, and for the whole biosphere? Without curbing innovation, since we need technology to address the effects of climate change, we ought to remember that such solutions ignore the fundamental economic, social, and spiritual problems that have led us to this point. We must also acknowledge that, in many respects, it is already too late, and we need to learn how to make equitable decisions in a world of scarce resources without resorting to constant war.

A second tradition deals with one of the best-known Jewish legends: the golem. This text, rather than emphasizing the power of the supernatural, highlights the allure of the technology-reflexive hazards of the things that we create:

Here I shall recall what my father told me about what happened to his grandfather [Rabbi Eliezer Baal Shem]. Once he saw it [i.e., the golem] growing and getting bigger, he grew afraid that it might destroy the world. Therefore, he erased the name [of God] that was still connected to its forehead; thus it was destroyed, returning to its dust. But it injured him, wounding his forehead as he was in the process of erasing God’s name from upon it.

(Emden 1884, no. 2:82)

The solutions mindset, endemic to contemporary thinking, though hardly a modern invention, can actually be part of the problem, especially if it includes a fetishization of technology. Lynn White noted that, “I personally doubt that disastrous ecological backlash can be avoided simply by applying to our problems more science and more technology” (White 1967). Here, I often recall the work of Kyle Whyte, an Indigenous philosopher and scholar of environmental studies who has demonstrated the inadequacy of “epistemologies of crisis” (Whyte 2021) for confronting climate change. When faced with seismic environmental shifts that threaten our way of life, societies and their laws all too often fall back on the very tools and structures that brought them to that point. Whyte presents an alternative in what he describes as “epistemologies of coordination”—namely, “ways of knowing the world that emphasize the importance of moral bonds—or kinship relationships—for generating the (responsible) capacity to respond to constant change in the world” (Whyte 2021). Coordination, in other words, enables us to search for answers and response rather than seek to abate or sequester the symptoms.

Now we come to a second domain of rewilding, which concerns animal studies and conceptions of human biology and placement within the kingdoms of life. Neither science nor the humanities have escaped the terrible truth that who counts as a human is frequently contested—dehumanization often comes along with the renaissances both scientific and humanist—and critical thought must be given to how to overcome this frightening truth (Scott 2000). Furthermore, part of the work of rethinking the place of the human being means moving beyond the false dichotomy of human versus nature and seeing ourselves as part of the “house”, the oikos of ecology, and the network of connection, reciprocity, and obligation that this connection demands. Taxonomy, animal biology, and the careful analysis of trophic webs and cascades, however, must be combined with the study of cultural human/animal entanglements and the moral and narrative elements of this lore. We need to find a paradigm of kinship with the nonhuman world, and the humanities remind us, perhaps ironically, that that nonhuman animals have their own inner worlds and their own ways of sensing and experiencing the world. Scholars of the ancients have also shown that, although both Aristotle and the Stoics robbed creatures of many of these traits, many Greek philosophers approached the minds and hearts of animals as exceedingly complex phenomena (Sorabji 1993; Gross 2014). This sophistication has, of course, long been recognized in Indigenous cultures (Weatherdon 2022).

The concept of human stewardship over other forms of life is often overused and frequently deployed as a kind of noblesse oblige rooted in hierarchy. On the other hand, an ethic of care, obligation, and responsibility is core to many religious traditions and need not justify a rigid human/nature or human/animal binary, not to mention feckless extraction or instrumental reason. We live in community with the land, in conversation with its inhabitants, and the web of reciprocity and mutual obligation is key to the divine charge. The anthropocentric focus of religious traditions can be a feature, not a bug, in the Anthropocene–whether we start it at 1492, the rise of colonialism, the first or second industrial revolution, or the post-War atomic age–human beings are now shaping the world. We are not the only world-building creatures, of course. Beavers build dams, moles farm and stockpile worms, and termites construct magnificent skyscrapers. However, we do it at a scale and with a potential for destruction that is unique among the forms of life on this planet. One daring Hasidic source from the mid-nineteenth century, written as Poland was first beginning to industrialize, describes our sense of imbricated community with the animals as nurturing an ethos of responsibility. This obligation was generated before we were created. All beings, all life, are asked if they consent to our creation. The mysterious “us” in the divine declaration of “let Us make human beings in Our image” is neither the royal we nor, as one rabbinic tradition has it, an addressed to the angels, but a moral question posed to the sum totality of the symphony of creation, in all of the polyphonic and vast richness of its biodiversity. This acknowledgment of our own type of dependent origination triggers obligation and also commands attention to our place in the more-than-human world around us (Leiner 2006, no. 39, pp. 58–59, Mayse forthcoming).

Martha Nussbaum has outlined a programmatic new take on animal rights owed to animals not because they are like us, or because they feel pleasure or pain, but because they ought to be allowed to flourish in species-specific ways (Nussbaum 2022). Applying her capabilities approach to this new realm, Nussbaum claims that animals must be allowed to engage in their own modes of life and meaningful types of activity both social and individual. Cultivating our own moral emotions can be helpful, but animals need rights, and they need people who will speak for them, prosecute on their behalf, and ensure that these obligations are respected. Preserving animal rights through obligations demands that they be recognized as actors and subjects rather than passive objects.

The noted botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer argued for the importance of learning the songs of plants around us, not just scientific names. Indigenous knowledge, she writes, reflects an awareness of the “shimmering” musicality of the world around us. Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav had a similar idea–the shepherd learns the song of their life from the animals and land across which they wander.

Each shepherd has a unique melody (niggun), reflecting the grasses and the place where they pasture. Every animal has some unique vegetation that it must eat, and the shepherd does not always remain in the same place… Each grass has a song… and the shepherd’s melody is made from their songs….

This is connected to, “From the ends of the earth, song shall be heard” (Isa. 24:16). Melody and song erupt from “the ends of the earth”, for the vegetation that grows upon the hearth produce song. The shepherd knows the melody through which strength is given to the grasses, and thus food is produced for the animals.

(Nahman ben Simhah 1985, 2:63. See also Seidenberg 2015, 2019; Harrod 2000.)

The world is filled with the unique songs of each and every animal species, claims Nahman of Bratslav, but all forms of inanimate being have their melodies as well. These songs are learned and threaded together by creatures, as they interact with the various kinds of vegetative life and physical phenomena in their environments. A shepherd must hear these intertwined songs, taking them to heart and weaving them into a melody that reflects her or his own experience of the places through which they have traveled and the forms of sentient life they have encountered (Haskell 2022). Rather than instrumentalist attempts to extract from the earth and to domesticate animals solely for human benefit, this reciprocal process requires sustained attention and attunement; the song emerges only from deep connection, sensitivity, and engagement. In order to summon up the food for his animals, the shepherd must first learn to listen to the surrounding world and, from its melodies, to braid a song of her or his very own.

Third, rewilding can help us with the seeds of contemplative approaches to education, a new way of thinking about the cultivation of attention and sensitivity. Contemplative practices, and the academic study of contemplation, can sensitize us to ecological travesty and offer us patterns of mind and action that lead to thoughtful responses. Contemplative studies is, in some respects, a new scholarly term for a set ancient practices and theories that look beyond the bifurcation of mind and body—or self and world—they are what Anna Tsing has called “the arts of noticing”, methods for expanding mind and heart, identifying portals through which we can perceive the world around us. Such thinking and practices have the capacity to train our eyes, and all our senses, to perceive that which lies beyond an array of binaries (mind/body, human/animal, nature/culture, self/world, activism/reflection), cultivating within us the reflective awareness, longing, and sensitivity needed for climate and cultural healing. Examining the contemplative techniques described in early Christian sources, Douglas Christie has described their aspirations for such spiritual expansiveness:

The primary work of contemplative practice is to become more aware of this web of relationships, to learn to live within it fully and responsibly and to give expression to it in one’s life… To retrieve a vision of the world as whole–through sustained attention to the underlying unity that connects all beings to one another and to the root causes in our thought and practice that contribute to the deepening fragmentation of self, community, and world–is necessary to the work of healing that is at the heart of any sustained ecological renewal.

(Christie 2013; Allison 2023; and, more broadly, Scharmer 2016)

The craft and practice of contemplation can sensitize us to vast fields of connection, helping us rethink the place of the human being by moving beyond the false dichotomies, anchoring us in that oikos of interrelationship, reciprocity, and obligation. These practices and techniques help us find a paradigm of kinship with the nonhuman world, an approach that demands responsibility for but also with the animals that surround us.

Contemplative ecology also reminds us that, sometimes, the answer to complex difficulties and even dire situations is found not in doing more but doing less. Rather than rushing to immediate solutions, pausing for reflection engenders our much-needed capacity to sit with the brokenness of our world and its systems. Contemplative ecology also calls our attention to the specific formations of particular landscapes and the actual communities of life sustained by them. These rituals and practices are, in my estimation, a crucial part of the process that Bruno Latour has described as “coming down to earth”, remembering that we are terrestrial beings linked to distinct places even as we exist within a broader planetary ecosystem (Latour 2018). Contemplative ecology invites the sensitivity we need, in the words of Barry Lopez, to become “apprenticed” to our immediate surroundings (Lopez 2022, pp. 61, 77, 83, 86). Within the academy, contemplation is often seen as a competing alternative to action—a tension visible in the writings of Aristotle, Augustine, and Arendt, to name a few—but Jewish mystical and philosophical sources both medieval and modern show them to be interwoven, interlinked. Changes in behavior begin with shifts in attention, but action and movement in the world are also modes of learning. This capacity to slow down is, in part, what prevents us from slipping into crisis, when we should be working toward coordinated traction.

Jewish contemplative practices are meant to cultivate our awareness of a world that shimmers with divinity, including a strong sense of place and a vision of the animals around us as teachers, mentors, and friends. These rituals involve serious, reflective consideration of our spiritual, physical, and moral entanglements with the physical world. The Zohar describes King Solomon as plucking a walnut off of the tree, and after contemplating the fruit and its many layers of shell and nutmeat, coming to see that all forms of life are infinitely interrelated as bodies and souls:

When King Solomon descended to the depth of the nut, as is written: “I descended to the nut garden” (Song of Songs 6:11), he took the shell of a nut, contemplated all those shells and knew … [that] the blessed Holy One had to create everything in the world, arraying the world. All consists of a kernel within, with several shells covering the kernel. The entire world is like this, above and below, from the head of the mystery of the primordial point to the end of all rungs: all is this within that, that within this, so that one is the shell of another, which itself is the shell of another … This, the kernel; this, the shell. Although a garment, it becomes the kernel of another layer.

Everything is fashioned the same way below, so that a human in this world manifests this image: kernel and shell, spirit and body. All for the arrayal of the world, and so the world is.

(Zohar 1:20a; based on Matt 2004, vol. 1, p. 151)

Wandering into the garden and paying close attention to the intricacies of its vegetative life, Solomon achieved a new way of seeing the world. The legendary king of Israel noticed the majestic simplicity and interactivity of the fruits and nuts that surrounded him in this garden by gazing intently upon their physical forms, coming to understand that the world is filled with an inexhaustible number of intertwined dimensions. Much as an edible kernel of nutmeat is bound to its shell, the many levels of cosmos and reality are inherently connected with one another. Likewise, the human soul—or spirit—and the body are part of a single indivisible entity rather than two distinct or discrete forms. Contemplating this endless progression of interconnected forms, Solomon discovered that things appearing to be an exterior shell of materiality at first blush are actually filled with sweet divinity.

The Zohar’s rich portrait of Solomon’s imaginative efforts to conceive of the “inescapable network of mutuality” (King 1963) could serve, I believe, as the “kernel” of the reader’s own contemplative practice (Christie 2013). This depiction of the garden as the place in which the knowledge of God and of the world grows, expanding upon both vertical and horizontal axes, also provides an interesting premodern correlate to the “rhizomatic” theory of knowledge described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 2003). Rather than linear advancement, Deleuze and Guattari write, the development of ideas and our patterns of thought mirror or “imitate” the nonbinary aspects of nature; new growth erupts in expansive multiplicity and multi-dimensionality from originary roots. This same Zoharic teaching continues with a description of how the entire cosmos unfolds from a single fleck of divinity: “The expansion of that point became a palace, in which the point was clothed—a radiance unknowable, so intense its lucency. This palace, a garment for that concealed point, is a radiance beyond measure, yet not as gossamer or translucent as the primordial point, hidden and treasured”. (Zohar 1:20a; based on Matt 2004, vol. 1, p. 151). This inestimably bright point spins itself into gossamer of ever-inclusive garments that together form material and spiritual existence—what Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio has called “the nets of intimacy” that guide and stabilize our lives while filling our days with delight, closeness, and kinship (Osorio 2021).

The Zohar asks its readers to conceive of the universe as an infinite array of kernels, of garments layered upon some garments and concealed within others. In mythic terms, this expresses a conviction that the interconnected universe and its biodiversity are the very ground of our own intellectual and religious awakening. “Besides that which I directly see of a particular oak tree or building” Abram writes, “I know or intuit that there are also those facets of the oak or building that are visible to the other perceivers that I see” (Abram 1996, p. 39). This demands that we train our eyes upon the “world that we count on without necessarily paying it much attention … [which] is always there when we begin to reflect or philosophize” (Abram 1996, p. 40). We ought to do this with a heightened sensitivity to the claims of connection and obligation made upon us by those to whom we are fundamentally linked (Fishbane 2021). “The universe” Thomas Berry wrote, “is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. The devastation of the planet can be seen as a direct consequence of the loss of this capacity for human presence to and reciprocity with the nonhuman world” (Berry 2006).

There is one final zone in which the principles of creativity, curriculum, and collaboration, placed into dialogue with religious sources, can contribute toward a new vision of environmental education and the place of the humanistic disciplines therein. The concept of rewilding reminds us of the need to look for education outside of the arcades, beyond the ivory tower and even the boundaries of the classroom itself. The physical world, the landscape and its inhabitants, ought to be taken seriously as a prompt for moral, spiritual, and philosophical reflection. Applied and engaged scholarship entails becoming an “apprentice” to the phenomena that surround us, encountering creatures, trees, rivers, and stones as teachers and partners in the work of making sense of the world. Time spent indoors cramps and constrains our vision (Monbiot 2013, pp. 169–170l; Louv 2006, Last Child in the Woods), and new vistas are opened by considering riparian corridors, prairies, old growth forests, gardens, and ponds. In the words of one Talmudic story:

Rav came to a certain place. He decreed a fast but rain did not come. The prayer leader descended before him and recited: “He Who makes the wind blow”, and the wind blew. He said: “Who makes the rain fall”, and the rain came.

Rav said to him: What are your deeds?

He said to him: I am a teacher of children, and I teach the Bible to the children of the poor as to the children of the rich. If someone cannot pay, I do not take anything. And for any child who is struggling, I have a pond with a school of fish. I win the student over with my fish. I calm him and soothe him, until he learns to read”.

(Babylonian Talmud Ta’anit 24a. See also Calderon 2014; and, on this image, Smith 2023)

Children—and adults—who are unable to find their educational path inside the classroom remind us of the necessity of looking beyond its confining walls. Calmed by the presence of water and the flittering movements of the fish, perhaps what this young voyager learns is not how to intone the alphabet but to “read” and interpret the world around him. Indeed, such encounters with natural phenomena can construct, and reconstruct, our minds and patterns of thought. “The living world” scholar and activist David Abram writes, ” … is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons” (Abram 1996, p. 34). Rather than diminishing the importance of this-worldly experience in developing knowledge, a common tactic in post-Cartesian science and philosophy, religious sources anticipate the importance attributed to intersubjectivity in the works of latter phenomenologists (Kapstein 2004).

The world is a site of reflection and awakening, one in which the real trees of the physical landscape reverberate with wisdom. The late anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has described the Aboriginal word bir’yun, or “brilliance”, as a luminous quality that “allows you, or brings you, into the experience of being part of a vibrant and vibrating world” (Rose 2017, p. 53). This aesthetic dimension, she explains, also refers to “one’s actual capacity to see and experience ancestral power” (Rose 2017, pp. 53–54). Roses’ description of this dynamic force coursing through the physical world—one that both beckons to us from the past and invites us into the fullness of the present—is helpful for understanding the countless Jewish stories in which spiritual teachers are inspired to wisdom precisely through their interaction with the world around them, “When you study” taught Rav Mesharshaya, “study adjacent to a river of water; just as the water flows, your studies will flow” (Babylonian Talmud, Horayot 12a). Additionally, in the words of the medieval Zohar, “Rabbi Shim’on, Rabbi El’azar, Rabbi Abba, and Rabbi Yose were sitting one day beneath some trees on the plain by the Sea of Ginnosar. Rabbi Shim’on said, ‘How nice is the shade of these trees covering us! We must adorn this place with words of Torah” (Zohar 2:127a). The trees awaken us to creativity precisely because they demand attention, connection, and the gift of heartfelt interpretation.

One additional element of this educational world immersion is visible in the particular forms of learning that comes through applied knowledge, community partnership, and tackling real-world problems—modes of education that are no less relevant to the humanities. Forms of thinking that Aristotle once called phronesis, theoria, and praxis actually come together in service learning and education, rooted in the quest for social action (Devine et al. 2002; Dolgon et al. 2017). The questions that drive our research, the issues that animate our writing and teaching, can emerge from engaged consideration of the world around us and participation in its systems. While single-minded activism should not be confused with scholarship, in many cases, our understanding of humanistic sources is only deepened—and challenged—by, for example, what is learned in through applied work and social campaigns, as we develop a more critical and thoughtful understanding of public issues and community change through intertwining reflection, learning, and action.

This is what I, and others, have called the applied humanities (Dekel-Chen 2020; Steinberg 1974; Brom 2019; Shulman 2008). The model of “engaged scholarship” has gained increasing traction in the past few years, and academic work that has direct implications for, and applications to, the lives of others is no longer seen as diluted or denatured. Yet, many researchers in humanities chafe at the notion of making scholarship relevant to specific contemporary cases or problems. Recognizing that many of our graduate students will not find traditional jobs within the academy, and that many will actively seek employment in professions that engage directly with real-world problems, I believe that it is necessary to rethink the process of graduate education. Along with this practical consideration, I argue that humanities scholars have expertise that can be—and ought to be—shared with activists, regulatory advisors, community organizers, and governmental players of all levels. More than a justification for the continued existence of the humanities, the applied humanities paradigm suggests that scholarship in these fields can and must contribute solutions by applying theory to practice and engaging with the most pressing problems of our day. The university classroom is neither a silo nor a cloister but a laboratory—a threshing room in which we are tasked with loosening ideas from the chaff of the past and bringing them into the present.

4. Coda

I should say, by way of a conclusion, that my journey into academia began out of doors. It began in the practice of martial arts in my youth and the transformative experience of standing on the summit of a mountain deep in the heart of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. There, pausing quietly at the end of my black belt test, I felt as if the life force of the world was being breathed through me. As the porous boundary between the nonhuman and human realm temporarily receded, I was gifted with a sense of the necessary imbrication of human flourishing with that of the world in which we live. Both of my parents were involved with sustainability, and yet, growing up on a small plot of land in California’s fertile yet parched Central Valley, I was witness to a legion of severe environmental problems rooted in industrialized agriculture, pollution, extractive mining, and ever-increasing alienation from traditional foodways. This firsthand experience of slow but unmistakable ecological collapse, along with the concomitant racial disparities and pressing economic inequalities, sparked an ongoing dedication to environmental and social justice that has led me to institutions of higher learning in Davis, Boston, Jerusalem, Ann Arbor, and finally, back to Northern California.

In academia, we often talk about “building bridges”. In his essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, Martin Heidegger describes the constructive power of the bridge in defining the experience of space and landscape:

The bridge swings over the stream with “ease and power”. It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge.

(Heidegger 1971, p. 152)

According to Heidegger, the bridge defines the spaces around it, turning distinctive features of a single landscape into opposing banks. Bridges come in many different forms. Some connect through exclusion. Some are one-way. Some are hulking, steel-cabled monuments to industrialism that negatively impact the environments around them. It requires care to build bridges that, well, connect rather than divide. Religions do not just help in this bridge work; they can offer a different kind of nonbisecting vision, a way of looking at the many and various disciplines that must be brought to bear in the study of “sustainability”, so that they do not remain on opposite banks but integrate within a single, delightfully marshy landscape of possibilities.

My choice to enter the professoriate as a researcher in the humanities reflects a conviction that alternative futures are shaped through deep hermeneutical engagement with the religious, literary, and philosophical resources of the past. While technological and scientific advancement is essential, such developments cannot address many of the base problems at the core of climate change and environment crisis. The foci of my scholarship—Jewish theology and mysticism, the philosophy and development of Jewish law, and comparative religious ethics—reflects this brooding sense of responsibility and obligation. My choice to seek ordination as an Orthodox rabbi, however, reflects a simultaneous desire to teach and write as an active agent from within the tradition as well as an academic scholar. These vocations are distinct, each with their own set of tools and commitments, but they converge in my yearning to address the devastation of climate emergency through creative and courageous engagement with traditions of the past.