Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

June 8, 2026

The Divine Book of Nature in a Rabbinic Key

For Yerucham Levovitz, the whole world was a house of study.

In Christian theology, there is a longstanding image of nature being a divine book to be studied alongside the Bible. A similar idea finds expression, in a distinctly Jewish form, in the writings of Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz (1875–1936), who served as mashgiah—something like a dean of students—in the prestigious yeshiva of Mir (then Poland, now Belarus). In this capacity, Levovitz was responsible for the students’ moral and spiritual development, and used this theme in his discourses. Dovid Campbell explains

SaveGift