This paper examines ethical responsibility toward nature and animals as it emerges across Jewish textual, rabbinic, and modern philosophical traditions. Beginning with the Genesis creation narrative, it explores the tension between human dominion over nature and rabbinic interpretations that place limits on such mastery, notably the Talmudic claim that the first human was prohibited from consuming animal life. This hermeneutical move opens space for a Jewish ethics that resists anthropocentric domination. The paper then turns to Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, whose messianic vision reinterprets dominion as moral stewardship and anticipates a future return to vegetarianism as an ethical ideal grounded in compassion for all living beings. Finally, it analyzes Hans Jonas's ethics of responsibility, situating his philosophy of life and organism within his own post-Holocaust theological framework. Jonas's reconceptualization of God as self-limiting shift ethical responsibility decisively onto humanity, thus extending moral concern beyond the human to the biosphere as a whole. Read together, the paper argues, these traditions demonstrate that Jewish thought offers robust resources for addressing contemporary ecological and animal ethics, foregrounding responsibility, ethics, and the preservation of life in an age of environmental crisis.