Finding God in Nature and Torah: Exploring Psalm 19 with Rabbi Shai Held

In this session, Rabbi Shai Held discusses the connection between God, liturgical texts, and nature. Do we find God in the beauty and majesty of the natural world or in the power and delight of Torah? Do we discover a different kind of God in each place? What is the Book of Psalms’ attitude towards nature worship? Rabbi Held guides us through an extremely close literary and theological reading of Psalm 19 (“The heavens declare the glory of God”), part of Pesukei DeZimra for Shabbat and Yom Tov, and asks how the psalm both supports and subverts ideas about God from the ancient Near East. Rabbi Shai Held–theologian, scholar, and educator–is President and Dean at Hadar. He has taught both theology and Halakhah at the Jewish Theological Seminary and also served as Director of Education at Harvard Hillel. A 2011 recipient of the prestigious Covenant Award for excellence in Jewish education, Rabbi Held has been named multiple times to Newsweek’s list of the 50 most influential rabbis in America. He holds a doctorate in religion from Harvard; his main academic interests are modern Jewish and Christian thought, biblical theology, and the history of Zionism. Rabbi Held's first book, Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence, was published by Indiana University Press in 2013; The Heart of Torah, a collection of essays on the Torah in two volumes, was published by JPS in 2017.