Learning about Judaism and Ecology from Professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

Dr. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is Regents Professor of History, Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism, and Director of Jewish Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. As a Jewish intellectual historian, she writes on Jewish philosophy and mysticism; religion, science, and technology; Judaism and ecology; and Jewish philosophy and feminism. In addition to over 70 essays and book chapters, she is the author of the numerous books, including being co-author of Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed Word. This volume contributes to the nascent discourse on Judaism and ecology by clarifying diverse conceptions of nature in Jewish thought and by using the insights of Judaism to formulate a constructive Jewish theology of nature.

I had the opportunity to ask Dr. Tirosh-Samuelson about her thinking, experiences and work. I hope you enjoy the interview below!

Dr. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson. Headshot courtesy of Jewish Studies at Arizona State University

How did you get interested in working on climate change?
I was born in Kibbutz Afikim, Israel, and the love of nature was inculcated in me from a young age. In the 1970s, I studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Department of Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah that later changed its name to Department of Jewish Thought. My Ph.D. dissertation (1978) focused on an Italian Jewish thinker, Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (d. 1526), who was a philosopher and a kabbalist, and my goal was to explain how philosophy and Kabbalah intersect in his thought. When one studies premodern Jewish thought, one cannot avoid thinking about the natural world. The medieval rationalist philosophers had much to say about it because they sought to reconcile the Judaic belief that the world was created by God with the theories of ancient Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle, that the physical world was eternal, that is, uncreated. Medieval Jewish philosophers, most famously Moses Maimonides (d. 1204), developed a way to interpret the Bible in the light of Aristotelian philosophy and science to reconcile the apparent tension. Unlike the philosophers, the kabbalists approached the Bible as a symbolic text that mirrors the inner life of God, about which Aristotelian philosophy and science had little knowledge. For the kabbalists, the natural world is a linguistic construct, a poetic text that was brought into existence by Creator God, the most perfect artist. Kabbalah articulated symbolic interpretations of nature using its unique hermeneutics.

As an intellectual historian I was interested in understanding conceptions of nature in premodern Jewish thought and since 1977, my academic career developed in the United States. In 1997, while I was teaching at Indiana University, I was invited to participate in the conference “Judaism and the Natural World” at Harvard University as part of the ten conferences Ecology and World Religions that Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim organized (1996-1998). I was invited to respond to papers on nature in the Jewish mystical tradition, and this was my first encounter with the academic discourse on religion and ecology, with religious environmentalism as a social movement, and with Jewish environmental activism in the United States. Three years later, I was asked to edit the proceedings of the conference, even though I was not one of the organizers. I agreed to do it, and the result was the book Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed Word (2002) that featured Judaica scholars, rabbis, educators, and environmental activists. For the past twenty-five years, I have been writing about Judaism and nature, Jewish environmentalism, and Judaism and ecology, culminating in the book, Religion and Environment: The Case of Judaism (2020), which was based on public lectures I delivered in 2016.

How is this connected to your Jewish involvement and identity?
My academic work cannot be separated from my Jewish identity. I write as a Jew, as a scholar of Judaism, and as a scholar of religious studies who specializes in Judaism. While my worldview, values, and lifestyle express my rootedness in Jewish history, religion and culture, I always see Judaism in the broader cultural context. Therefore, my work on Judaism and environment is part of the larger academic discourse on religion and ecology, and my analysis of Jewish texts, ideas, movements, and trends is part of my understanding of Western history and culture. Jewish culture always evolved through conversation with surrounding societies, cultures, and civilizations.

What is your “lane” and how did you pick it?
I engage in climate change issues as a scholar, interpreter of texts, and educator. My scholarship is interdisciplinary, integrating history, philosophy, religious studies, and Jewish studies. To use your metaphor, I “swim,” so to speak, in more than one “lane.” As a Jewish intellectual historian, I seek to understand philosophical and religious ideas in their historical context that changed over time through interaction between Jews and non-Jews. As a scholar of religious studies, I engage Judaism from the perspective of the field of religion and ecology that highlights religious responses to our ecological crisis. And as a scholar of Jewish studies, I analyze Jewish environmentalism in the context of contemporary Judaism explaining why, when, and how environmentalism became a Jewish issue and what is the distinctive message of Judaism in the age of climate change.

What are the “big issues” for the near future in which other people can be of help?
Climate change is an expression of a massive ecological crisis. The eco-crisis consists not only of global warming, extreme weather events, and devasting floods or prolonged draughts, but also of total collapse of ecological systems throughout the world. If left unattended, the collapse will eventually render large swaths of the Earth uninhabitable and will threaten the future of many life forms including human life. Since human action has brought about the current ecological crisis, humans, and that means all of us, have the responsibility to address that devastation by changing our lifestyles and our attitudes toward the natural world. Climate change is not just a scientific issue to which there will be a techno-scientific solution, but a moral issue that concerns ethical values, social ethos, and religious beliefs. The “big issue” that faces humanity is how to conceptualize the physical world in a way that protects its integrity and fecundity so that future generations will be able to exist and hopefully to flourish on Earth.

What do you consider to be “success” in your work?
As an educator, I define “success” in terms of consciousness raising, that is, making people become aware of our ecological challenges, become attentive to local environmental issues, and learn to care about the natural world for its own sake rather as mere resource for human benefit.
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What is your advice for people who are just getting their start on climate issues? Where should people begin?
My advice can be summarized as follows:
• do not disengage climate change from the broader ecological crisis
• start by reading about climate change, knowing that you will not master scientific information
• approach climate change as a cultural issue that has moral, religious, and spiritual dimensions
• become familiar with scholarship about Judaism and the environment
• become involved in environmental organizations
• remain hopeful and do not succumb to despair

What is exciting about what you are doing and where and how others can help?
Educational work is exciting! I remain excited about what I do because my goal is to get my students, my readers, or my listeners engaged and excited about the tasks ahead. Our task today is to protect the possibility of life on Earth for generations to come. To make that task doable, I impart ethics of care, namely, I want people to care about the natural world, care about specific places and regions, care about diverse forms of life, and care about human life in different societies and cultures. To address climate change we need to learn to care, and this can only be done through education, which is a social endeavor. If we learn to care about the world and about each other, we will save the world and ourselves from destruction.

This post has been updated to correct a spelling mistake.