Midrash Nyc

These days when people think about their relationships with land, it's often under the context of landownership: buying it, selling it, farming it, exploiting it. According to Dr. Mari Joerstad, the Israelites of the Old Testament would be horrified by our attitudes towards and interactions with the Earth. For Old Testament societies, owning and selling private land was just not a concept or practice like it is today. Dr. Joerstad talks to us about what the language in the Hebrew Bible says to us about the relationship that Israel had to the land and, in turn, to God and how that extended to the concept of being accountable to the land. We also get into a discussion about how contemporary concepts of landownership are so tied into identity of societies that it leads to armed conflict.  Joining this conversation is Amanda Clevinger, the leader of Forefront's Faith & Climate Change small group. ABOUT MARI Dr. Joerstad is a biblical scholar, whose research focuses on ecology, land, migration and belonging in