Associate Professor Ariel Evan Mayse

Ariel Evan Mayse joined the faculty of Stanford University in 2017 as an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies. He is the rabbi-in-residence at Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute, a lead fellow at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and Society, and a senior fellow at the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley. Previously he served as the Director of Jewish Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, and was a research fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Michigan.

Mayse holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Harvard University and rabbinic ordination from Beit Midrash Har’el in Israel. His current research examines the role of language in Hasidism, manuscript theory and the formation of early Hasidic literature, the renaissance of Jewish mysticism in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the relationship between spirituality and law in Jewish legal writings, and the resources of Jewish thought and theology for constructing contemporary environmental ethics.

He is the author of Speaking Infinities: God and Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritsh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020; Hebrew translation, 2022); Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism (Stanford University Press, 2024; Hebrew translation, in progress); and Hasidism: Writings on Devotion, Community, and LIfe in the Modern World, with Sam Berrin Shonkoff (Brandeis University Press, 2020). His next project, As a Deep River Rises: Judaism, Ecology and Environmental Ethics, is under contract with Brandeis University Press, and he is currently working on a biography of the Baal Shem Tov for the Jewish Lives Series (Yale University Press).