"Global climate change, manifest in extreme weather events and staggering loss of biodiversity, is the greatest moral and existential crisis of our day."
Ariel Evan Mayse joined the faculty of Stanford University in 2017 as an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies and serves as the rabbi-in-residence at Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute (atiqmakers.org). Previously he was the Director of Jewish Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts. 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 Speaking Infinities: God and Language in the Teachings of the Maggid of Mezritsh (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), and co-editor the two-volume A New Hasidism: Roots and Branches (Jewish Publication Society, 2019) with his teacher and colleague Arthur Green. Mayse is working on a forthcoming monograph examining the relationship between spirituality and law from the dawn of Hasidism to the eve of the twentieth century.
Through a deep-dive into the teachings of Jewish mysticism, this ten-week fellowship for high-school students offers participants a vocabulary for thinking beyond the values of carbon capitalism, the insular epistemologies of scientism, technological determinism, and the extractive approach to the non-human world that dominate our economic and social systems. "The ecological crisis,” writes Mary Evelyn Tucker, “is also a crisis of culture and of the human spirit. It is a moment of reconceptualizing the role of the human in nature.” The aim of this fellowship is to work towards such renewal of the human spirit through constructive, creative, and courageous engagement with the vast sources of Jewish mysticism. Apply here!
The core of our fellowship, sponsored by the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and Society, will be weekly text-study sessions (on Zoom), each highlighting a range of Jewish mystical sources and spiritual practices on a particular theme. Participants will be expected to read these sources, supplied in both Hebrew and in English, and to prepare them in advance of our meetings. To that end, each student will participate in weekly paired (hevruta) study with another fellow.
Students will also be expected to take part in a public-facing conference on ecology and Jewish spirituality in the Spring, serving as hosts, respondents, and organizers (date yet to-be-determined).
Participants will also be given the resources to start a social action campaign in their community tackling a problem addressed by our sources.
The fellowship will launch in January 2023, and applications submitted by December 15th will receive priority. The weekly study-sessions are slated to take place on Wednesday at 5:00pm PT = 8:00pm ET.
Space is limited, so please apply here!
Ariel Evan Mayse
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Stanford University
Rabbi-in-residence, Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute
Series Editor, Stanford Studies in Jewish Mysticism
