Nature and Scripture: Finding Our Place in the World

Rabbi Ellen Bernstein will be discussing the significance of nature and place in our lives: how we have lost our place, the consequences of losing our place, and how scripture can help us recover a right relationship with place. Bernstein founded Shomrei Adamah, Keepers of the Earth, the first national Jewish environmental organization, in 1988. She has been dubbed the "birthmother of the Jewish environmental movement" and "a pioneering thinker who helped define modern Jewish environmentalism." She is author/editor of: Let the Earth Teach You Torah (1992), Ecology & the Jewish Spirit (1998) and The Splendor of Creation (2006). She created the first ecological haggadah for Tu B’Sh’vat, A New Year for the Trees, and has popularized Tu B'Sh'vat as an ecological festival through large-scale interspiritual Tu B'Sh'vat arts seders. She was a featured speaker at the Religions for the Earth conference and the final ceremony of the 2014 Peoples' Climate March. Her most recent work, The Promise of the Land Haggadah, will be published by Behrman House in 2019.