May 28, 2025 Receiving Torah for Our Times: Scientific and Religious Thinking for Climate Action

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Can faith-based understandings truly contribute to healing our planet? How might spiritual values reshape our environmental ethics? How can scientific and religious ways of understanding work together to address the urgent climate crisis? What are the potential benefits and challenges of such collaboration?

Join us for a compelling virtual panel discussion with esteemed panelists David Abram, Frances Flannery, and Natan Margalit. Guided by moderator Or Rose, the discussion will illuminate how the deep insights of ancient wisdom can work in tandem with the rigor of contemporary science. Together, they can inspire the fundamental changes in worldview and action required for a sustainable future, looking beyond solely technical, political, and economic remedies.

Presented by ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal and the Miller Center for Interreligious Learning and Leadership of Hebrew College. Generously supported by the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion

Panelists

David Abram, PhD is a cultural ecologist and geo-philosopher. He is the author of  The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Described as “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David’s work engages the ecological depths of experience, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and imagination inform the relation between the human animal and the animate earth. The recipient of numerous awards, including Rockefeller and Watson fellowships and the Lannan Literary Award, David held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and Environment in Oslo, and recently was Visiting Professor in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University.

Frances Flannery, PhD is a biblical scholar, community and environmental activist, and well-published researcher, with six authored or co-edited books and numerous peer-reviewed publications. Her work often bridges biblical studies and Jewish studies with contemporary challenges, including the environmental crisis, violent extremism, and war. Since 2019, she has been Co-Founder and Co-President of BioEarth, a registered 501c3 and home of the One Billion for Peace Pledge. She is currently writing a trilogy that is an ecological theology of the Hebrew Bible.

Rabbi Natan Margalit, PhD was raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. As a young adult he lived for twelve years in Israel and received rabbinic ordination at The Jerusalem Seminary in 1990. He earned a Ph.D. in Talmud from UC Berkeley in 2001. Natan has taught at Bard College, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College. He is currently the Interim Dean of Faculty and a member of the Va’ad (steering committee and core faculty) of the Aleph Ordination Program, and serves as chair of their Rabbinic Texts department. Natan is the author of The Pearl and the Flame: A Journey into Jewish Wisdom and Ecological Thinking. He is the founder of Organic Torah, fostering holistic thinking about Judaism, environment and society, which is a program of Aleph: Alliance for Renewal.

Rabbi Or Rose is the founding Director of the Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership of Hebrew College and a senior consultant to Interfaith America. He previously served as the Associate Dean for Informal Education at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College and as co-founder and co-director of CIRCLE, a center for interreligious education co-sponsored by Andover Newton Theological School and Hebrew College. Rabbi Rose is publisher of The Journal of Interreligious Studies and the co-editor of the award-winning anthologies, My Neighbor’s Faith: Stories of Interreligious Encounter, Growth, and Transformation (Orbis, 2012) and With the Best of Intentions: Interreligious Missteps & Mistakes (Orbis, 2023), and author of My Legs Were Praying: A Biography of Abraham Joshua Heschel (Monkfish 2025)