Rabbi Hilly Haber

"Mattie stood in the doorway, and an involuntary shudder went through her when she saw Ciel's eyes. Dear God, she thought, she's dying, and right in front of our faces. 'Merciful Father, no!' she bellowed.

In Parshat Ki Tisa, we learn that even though the Israelites have left Egypt, they carry with them the shape of a dictator long gone. While Moses speaks with God on Mount Sinai, recording the laws by which this new nation will live, the Israelites ask Aaron to make them a new deity, who according to midrash, was "like those of the Egyptians" (Pirke de-rabbi Eliezer, 45).

Brazilian nun and ecofeminist Ivone Gebara writes from the frontlines of climate and economic disaster. Attuned to the plurality of pains crying out locally and echoing across the globe, Gebara weaves together a theology of ecosystem and interconnection, one that recognizes the vast webs of relationship binding all life in shared fate. Gebara offers a vision for human and ecological flourishing that starts with an honest account of communal and environmental degradation.

In a path-breaking1993 work entitled Sisters in the Wilderness: the Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, Delores Williams sets forth a theology of the wilderness centered in the experiences of African American women. Building from the particular and speaking with universal resonance, Williams identifies a wilderness ethic grounded in the values of: survival, relationship and resilience. For Williams, the wilderness is a place of both struggle and possibility - a place in which Hagar, a slave cast out of her home, is rescued by God so that she can ultimately mother her own nation into being.