Samuel Chayen

chayens[at]netvision.net.il

Samuel Chayen is at present a full-time doctoral candidate in the Science, Technology and Society Program at Bar-Ilan University. In 2006, he received a President’s grant awarded to outstanding doctoral candidates, and has since devoted all his time to studies and research.

Samuel is a prominent activist in the environmental movement in Israel. Before taking time off to work for his doctorate, he served in a variety of roles in different organizations within the environmental movement in Israel. Among others, he served as a lobbyist for “Life and the Environment” – the roof organization of the environmental organizations in Israel. Within this framework, he advanced the activities of the Israeli environmental movement in the Knesset and government ministries and promoted environmental legislation. He was also the director of the “Israel Economic Forum for the Environment”, an organization whose aim was to incorporate standards of environmental management into Israeli industry. Previous to this, he served as a lobbyist for “Adam, Teva Ve’Din” – the Israel Union for Environmental Defense and as a scientist on their scientific staff dealing with problems of pesticides.

His political experience extends also to the international field. He represented the Israeli environmental organizations twice in on the Montreal Protocol negotiations (the treaty that deals with reducing the use of substances that deplete the ozone layer), in 1995 in Vienna and in 1999 in Beijing. In both of these conferences, the world environmental movement gained great achievements. Samuel dealt mainly with the phase-out of the pesticide methyl bromide by the developed nations.

His expertise in environmental politics resulted, on the formation of the 17th Knesset, in his helping the Members of Knesset, Dr. Dov Khenin and Rabbi Michael Melchior, to inaugurate the Environmental-Social Lobby of the Knesset, and to direct its activities for half a year until his complete withdrawal from public work in order to write his doctoral thesis.

In his doctoral work, Samuel is concentrating on researching the subject “Environment, Society and Economy in the Philosophy of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and Dr. Isaac Breuer”. These two philosophers, who were influenced greatly by the German enlightenment, developed a special Jewish notion, “Torah with Derech Eretz”, that attempts to apply the Torah to all aspects of civil life. The doctoral work forms a reconstruction of their methods in the fields of the environment, society and economy. By means of this reconstruction, Samuel wants to suggest a method that Jewish orthodoxy, which today is alienated from the environment, could adopt. On the other hand, the secular movements in the State of Israel could also adopt the methods of Hirsch and Breuer, since their principles are in accordance with the universal humanism which they took from the German enlightenment.

Samuel has been awarded various academic and public prizes. In 2005, he was awarded the Shield of the Minister of the Environment for his activities in promoting communal environmental communication and raising awareness of the special connection that exists between Judaism and the environment. In 2004, he received the Pratt Prize for environmental communication, for his establishment of a forum for the environment on Ynet, and his management of this forum for four and a half years.
Samuel Chayen is a well known environmental publicist, and was previously the editor of the environmental journal “Yarok, Kachol Lavan” (“Green, Blue and White”). Many of his articles may be found on the internet. In parallel with writing his doctoral thesis, he continues to write op-ed articles as well as articles of literary criticism and philosophy in newspapers and various journals.