Before joining the faculty of Mount Holyoke College in 2017, Dr. Benjamin spent nine years on the faculty of the Religion Department at St. Olaf College, in Northfield, MN. She held the Hazel D. Cole Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Washington and the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Post-doctoral Fellow in Judaic Studies at Yale University. She received her B.A. from Hampshire College and a Diploma in Jewish Studies from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Judaic Studies. D. Benjamin completed her doctorate in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University with a specialization in Modern Jewish Thought. She is a 2024 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has also been awarded a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Award, and a Wexner Graduate Fellowship. She has been a member of the American Academy for Jewish Research since 2024. She was raised in Seattle, Washington, on the unceded traditional land of the Coast Salish Peoples.
Join us for Kabbalat Shabbat and Dinner, followed by Rabbi Kanarek’s first lecture, A Rabbinic Ethics of Obligation for Today. The classical Jewish sages understood human relationships through the lens of obligation, and they elaborated on what we owe one another in great detail. These obligations ultimately derived from divine command. In this text study, we’ll consider this rabbinic framework in light of relationships that largely escaped the sages’ attention. We’ll reflect on our own daily experiences of obligation, asking how those experiences raise questions for our rabbinic inheritance and offer critical evidence as we make that inheritance our own.
No need to register for the lecture; if you would like to come to dinner register HERE
Dr. Mara Benjamin will give a guest D’var Torah during services, then sit down to have a conversation about various topics she is knowledgable on. She could cover topics from her book The Obligated Self, feminist theology, or her still to be published, newest work, Earthbound: Jewish Thought and Ecological Disruption.
Don’t miss Rabbi Kanarek’s final lecture, Dominion, stewardship, and other ways of being earthling. Jewish tradition offers multiple, even contradictory, models of what it means to be a human being in relationship to the rest of the world. In this session, we’ll analyze how these different models position us humans in relationship to other creatures and the world as a whole. Then we’ll consider how these models affect our ability to understand and respond to ecological crisis.
*Join us for bagels at 9:30 with the talk starting at 10.
