I sometimes think we forget to ask why the organization many of us work for is called Hillel. And so some of my favorite texts to teach emerging adults–not only those formally involved in Hillel–are the stories of Hazal, our sages, about Hillel HaZaken, Hillel the Elder.

You will recall that in many of the midrashic and Talmuduic descriptions of his teaching, Hillel is celebrated as humble and patient. There is the story of the man who bet that he could make Hillel become angry and thus pestered him with seemingly inane questions: “Why do the Babylonians have round heads?” and the like. The punch line of the story comes when the man admits defeat in his cause: “Better that you should lose 400 zuzim than that Hillel should lose his temper.”

In a similar vein, there is the most famous of the stories of Hillel, when the convert who Shammai shooed away is welcomed by Hillel and told, “That which is hateful to you do not do unto your neighbor. The rest is commentary. Go and learn.”

In both of these stories, as in many others throughout Rabbinic literature, Hillel is presented as wise and implacable, a Gandalf or a Buddha, a Yoda or a Dumbledore, as much as a rabbinic sage. Yet he is not elusive; he reveals something of himself. Recall that the first story happens when Hillel has just come out of the bath, and must first put on a robe. Or think of the midrash of Hillel on his way to the bathhouse, when his students ask why he is seemingly wasting time by not studying Torah: “The soul is a guest in the body,” he replies, and therefore we must keep our bodies clean. In both of these stories, Hillel’s physical vulnerability evokes a feeling of intimacy (within halakhic boundaries).

The word that I therefore associate with Hillel’s Torah, both in substance and in presentation, is mentoring. Hillel is, perhaps, the originator of the foundational catchphrase of engagement today: Be interested, not interesting. He listens, he allows himself to be interrupted, he makes the learning enterprise not about him but the learner. He teaches in whatever setting he finds himself–not only the formal study house, but wherever and whenever an opportunity for Talmud Torah arises.

While we frequently invoke Hillel’s famous questions of Pirkei Avot, we sometimes look past the teaching that comes slightly before that one: “Be like the sons of Aaron,” he said. “Love peace and pursue peace, love people and draw them near to Torah.” Whereas Moses is an ideas person, motivated by the pure thoughts that exist beyond language, Aaron is a people person–someone who loves, listens to, and is interested in people. The power of Hillel’s statement here is in reminding us that true engagement comes neither through the weight of formal instruction nor the lightness of ice cream socials. It comes through loving people–caring about them, listening to them, meeting them where they are–and drawing them near to Torah.

Hillel doesn’t give up on Torah, not one bit. He teaches Torah by listening to people, by helping them find their place in it. That is the work I try to do every day, over coffee, over lunch, during a walk, and in the two minute conversation that can happen when I least expect it. I do not have the humility or the self-effacement of Hillel. But I aspire to be a teacher in his mold.

June 16, 2010

Judaism has often portrayed the life of the rebbe/teacher as the embodiment of holy ideals; the sage has studied so much that his (or her, we might now say) every action exudes Torah on a level that demands attention and offers important lessons in how to live a holy life.  One thinks, for example, of the famous Talmudic story in which an eager student hides under his teacher’s bed while the master and his wife make love. When discovered and rebuked, the student delivers a stinger: “this is Torah, and I must learn.”

As powerful as it is to regard a whole life as Torah, it troubles me to think that only the most learned members of our communities could be designated as such.  Rather, I’d rather embrace a model in which we regard our students’ lives and experiences as already Torah, already meriting investigation, celebration and study, even if those lives (as all our lives) are still in the process of unfolding.

This way of thinking can have a strong impact when considering what and how to teach.  Simply put, I don’t think it’s enough to instruct and/or to inspire—that is, to offer external input.  These things can be crucial, of course, in helping a person grow personally and Jewishly, but I’d like to venture that we’ve failed if that’s all we’ve done (even as that, already, is quite a bit.)

Rather, in our decisions about what texts to teach and how to teach them, I think that we need to look for ways to refract and articulate that which is already going on inside our students.  We need to show them that, in a thousand different ways, Judaism sees their hopes, questions, struggles and secret fears.  They need to see that the best of who they already are is something that can be named—since one key aspect of emerging adulthood is about finding language for unarticulated aspects of the self—and that it is affirmed by their tradition’s sacred writings.

Needless to say, this doesn’t mean that our classes should be fluffy New Age experiences in which everyone’s told how great they are all the time, or that anything goes in Torah.  Rather, we should push our students to talk about what’s scary, what’s hard, what makes them angry and what feels like it’s at stake. We need to help them to understand what their highest, holiest ideals are, and to push them to live them out. We need to show them their already-latent potential to access the sacred. We need to call them out on the ways that they ignore their deepest-held beliefs and intuitions in favor of what’s easier, more popular or what they think they should believe. (This can be crucial, given that learning how to hear and trust oneself is critical work of these years.)  Students become their own best teachers of their own Torah, and they learn that Jewish texts, traditions and rituals are tools to help them do this work.

Of course, this pastoral approach to text isn’t exactly novel, Jewishly, but I think it’s an effective and powerful one in general, and certainly when working with this particular age group.  These conversations can take place in very informal settings using minimal text as a starting point, or in a campus setting with a more traditional source sheet approach; I’ve even used it in the university classroom, though obviously there’s quite a need to tread carefully there and not overstep any boundaries.  (It can be done; it’s just trickier.)  There are a myriad of settings in which one could execute these ideas and a myriad of ways to do so; the final product will vary wildly depending on each educator’s  style and predilections.  What matters most is that, at the end of an encounter with our texts and traditions, our students walk away knowing that they, too, are Torah.

June 16, 2010

In order for Jews and Jewish communities to be able to fruitfully and meaningfully transform conflicts between and among us; in order for Jews to be able to significantly and caringly reach across difference and distance between Jews and various other communities and peoples; in order for Jews to honestly address divisions and dissonances; each of us, within our selves, it is not enough for us to turn to the wisdom of our texts.  Jewish tradition is rich with texts that call on us to love, to attend to, to learn with and from the other.  Yet, so often the courage, compassion and justice of our texts are not reflected in the ethos and orientation of our actions—individually and communally.  These texts often become lost in the translation from word to act, from idea to embodiment, or these imperatives become interpreted in such narrow terms that I need not extend myself beyond the four amot in which I live and invest most of my life, physically, psychologically, emotionally and socially.  What results is violence–sweeping or subtle, deliberate or unthinking, we do violence to each other, to ourselves, to Judaism, and to the very image of God.

A significant number of Jews in their twenties and early thirties describe experiences of the Jewish community and/or of Judaism as insular, unwelcoming, defensive, alienating and intolerant of difference and diversity.  These experiences frequently result in a rejection of Judaism and relationship to the Jewish community altogether.  I envision a flourishing Jewish life, and therefore an approach to engagement with Torah, in which attentive and receptive relationship is of ultimate concern, sacred import and is ethically basic–not only with those I might like or agree with, but with the diverse, colourful, complicated spectrum of those with whom I share breath and time on this planet.  Thinkers such as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas offer theologies of relationship.  I am interested in approaches to learning that offer practice in cultivating relationship, with curiosity, flexibility, courage, loving (entailing compassion and care, generosity and responsibility) and creativity as constitutive of relationship.

I want to briefly point to three key dimensions I seek to consciously engage in teaching as we gather around the shared narratives, images and questions of Torah: a) the practice of listening, b) personal narratives and c) embodiment.

a) The practice of listening is rooted in the humility that my own understandings are contingent and partial, aware that listening only to those with whom I agree renders the world very small and renders my own being, understanding and imagination very narrow.  The skill and commitment of listening require practice in resilience, learning to remaining present and curious when I hear opinions or interpretations I disagree with or even feel threatened by.  Teaching the skills and practice of deep and open listening as integral to Jewish learning seeks to awaken voracious curiosity, a desire to not only know diverse opinions or ideas, but to reach toward and understand diverse human beings, listening for the complex and rich personal experiences, and the historical/cultural experiences that have shaped and animate our beliefs, ideas and assumptions.  Thus knowledge becomes shared, dialogically construed and requires dwelling with, abiding by what it is we are trying to know.  Listening also entails deeply listening to that which is authentic and true for oneself, calling for us to speak with integrity and to honestly and generously make room for our own inconsistencies and conflicting truths, our passions and uncertainties.

b) We are ignorant of the lives of most of the people we interact with on a daily basis.  Sharing personal narratives in conversation with Torah enables us to experience the lived humanity of another person, in all its intellectual, emotional and spiritual dimensions.  As we read our lives into the texts and map the texts onto our lives, the abstract and ancient become concrete and alive.  I gather in the specifics of another person’s life, in its commonalities with and differences from my own–your gifts, vulnerabilities, joys, struggles, beauty, and fire.  This is where I discover, in my concrete differences from you, that the things I had assumed to be normative or universal are not.  This is where the beliefs or actions that were invisible to me because they were shared by everyone around me are illuminated.  From this place, from the stories of our families and childhoods and neighbourhoods, from the stories of our particular griefs and longings, we can develop a grounded and genuinely caring discourse for engaging our differences and delighting in our commonalities.

c) Embodied exploration of Torah, through movement exercises, voice, play, etc. seeks to engage the whole, sensuous, thinking, feeling, embodied self, not limited only to cognitive or discursive modes.  Rather than talking about, we experience and explore in real time—experiences that can lift and fill the spirit with amazement and delight, that can cultivate awareness and heighten sensitivity, experiences that can unsettle and throw open habitual ways of being, perceiving and interacting.  Learners are invited to practice qualities of playfulness, improvisation, spontaneity, imagination, risk-taking, partnership and experimentation with one another.  Because these modalities are often non-verbal and associative, they are able to give expression to feelings, images and relations that are more full and rich than discursive articulation can contain and, in a creative mode, differences and contradictions can fruitfully sit alongside each other.  Embodiment offers opportunities to become practiced and proficient at interacting with one another, in both connection and conflict, creatively experimenting with and inhabiting courageous and generative possibilities that we can then carry with us out into the wider world.

June 15, 2010

Emerging adults are perhaps the age group most acutely concerned with the central questions of human life: Who am I? Who do I want to be? and How do I become that which I wish to be? A pedagogy is therefore required which directly addresses these questions as its core concern. Rather than focusing exclusively on the common formal and informal Jewish educational goals of information, knowledge, skill acquisition, Jewish literacy, positive Jewish experiences, and even ‘meaning’, the pragmatic (in the sense of Dewey and James) transformative pedagogy I wish to present takes these core questions as its foundation. It aims to give students, through study, practice, sharing and experience, the ability to answer those questions themselves, not simply theoretically, but in actuality, helping them become the people they wish to be.

This transformative education is pragmatic in two senses. First, it incorporates not just texts but practices, using each to inform and enrich the other and both to transform the student. Second, it advocates a pragmatic reading of the texts themselves, a reading which centers on the texts performative, descriptive and instructive dimensions. Rather than focusing on what the text ‘means’, this reading asks what the text, and the practice contained therein, ‘does’, its meaning being one aspect of its performative effect. Students are trained to interrogate the texts with such question as: How does this text affect the reader-practitioner? What are the goals of the text or practice? What kind of person does it want the reader-practitioner to become? How does this text or practice help the reader-practitioner to become that kind of person? What are the strategies and techniques the text or practice uses to affect that transformation?

Answering these questions requires an imaginative leap on the part of the reader. Imaginative identification with the intended reader of the text is therefore taught as an interpretive technique. Interlaced with the discussion of the text, students are encouraged to imagine themselves into the ‘ideal reader’ of the text with the appropriate religious, psychological and spiritual convictions and understand the texts performative effect on such a reader. Such imaginative identification might take the form, for instance, of setting aside modern ontological-theological skepticism, post-Maimonidean queasiness about an embodied God, and our own sense of impropriety at the mixture of religion and sexuality in order to envision the ontologically true (non-metaphorical) erotic union of the masculine and feminine aspects of the divine. From this imaginative leap, students then have a much richer understanding of why medieval kabbalistic texts might use such language for the divine and the divine-human encounter and how such language might impact and transform a kabbalistic practitioner reading it. Students might be asked, for instance, to imagine what the experience would be of making love to the Shekhinah, or of wrapping tefillin as embracing the divine masculine and feminine. Similarly, in an exploration of Rambam’s negative theology, or more properly, his path of negation, students are asked to imagine themselves into the mindset of the Maimonidean practitioner who constantly strives to negate every aspect of existence she encounters as ‘not God.’ What would it feel like to walk in the world with such an approach to one’s experience?

Parallel questions are asked in the study of rabbinic texts, whether aggadic or halakhic. For instance, in a discussion of tort law, students might be asked to imagine themselves into an agrarian based society in which the worth, function and centrality of land is radically different than in our own society and from that basis to understand rabbinic rulings concerning compensation and damages and the kind of society, selves, and relationships such rulings are meant to construct. Such an approach therefore requires a keen historical sense and so is actively engaged in utilizing academic insights from a spiritual perspective.

This personal imaginative exploration is then concretized further by the introduction of an actual practice from the tradition, most often discussed or described in the very texts that were read, but sometimes a practical addition to the theoretical claims of the text. The practices offer the students an opportunity to personally explore different states of mind, heart and body and to cultivate alternative qualities and ways of being in the world. Through altered states, experimentation with alternate dispositions, new ways of seeing the world, new experiences, and the questions and answers all these experiences give rise to, these practices confront the students with direct challenges to how they think about themselves, their lives, and their religious practice and so stimulate personal transformation and growth.

The practice also deepens the understanding of the text, sometimes allowing students to directly encounter the experience described in the text and so to grasp the text more thoroughly and profoundly. Indeed, I would argue that certain texts simply cannot be understood (versus having their language parroted back to them) without a direct encounter with the experience the text is concerned with. In my own experience, for instance, practices of ego-softening have helped me understand Hasidic claims about the nature of the self and its annihilation that were obscure to me before. Similarly, these practices have helped me comprehend the centrality of humility in rabbinic and medieval thought and the ways this disposition is conceptualized.

At the same time, the text is crucial to feeling one’s way into the practice. The text helps frame the goals of the practice and its mechanism and, perhaps most importantly, the correct intention (kavvanah) with which to approach the practice for it to have its desired result. The text also provides, at times, the insights which are meant to be the fruits of the practice, the insight itself arising through a dialogue between the practice and the analytical investigation of the theoretical claims in the text. Finally, text grounds the practice in the tradition and in broader claims about the nature of God, reality, Israel, Torah, community and the self.

The modalities of investigation which this approach utilizes are then multiple. Analytic investigation is used both of the text and in reflection about one’s experience in the practice. Emotional exploration is similarly used in both text and practice in order to ‘feel one’s way into’ or imaginatively identify with the text and also to open to and explore the emotional components of the practice. The body also plays a crucial role, particular as many of the practices are explicitly embodied, such as conscious eating or dance. Both interpersonal and intrapersonal modes of investigation are central, with students exploring their own inner reaction to the texts and practices, but also sharing their reactions formally in class discussion of the texts and in processing sessions following the practice with their classmates in order to spark new insights, a sense of acceptance of their own process and deeper understanding.  Artistic–imaginative modes of investigation are used as well whether in song and dance, in visualization practices, or simply the common practice of imaginative identification. Finally, this approach particularly stands out for its use of ‘spiritual’ or ‘contemplative’ modes of investigation such as silent meditation and observation. It also important to note, that the use of alternative modes of investigation in no way excludes the extremely important analytic investigation with which we began. But it does claim that that all-too-dominant mode is not sufficient for a full understanding of the texts or practices of our tradition and that there are times to set that mode aside to allow other modes to do their work.

The goal of this approach is then to help students, through the tradition, address the core issue of emerging adulthood (and indeed of human life): Who am I? Who do I want to be? and How do I become that person I want to be? These questions are addressed in radically open and exploratory but non-neutral way. Students are free to disagree with the perspective of the texts, but the texts do have a perspective and students are expected to do their best to understand that perspective and its benefits. Moreover, there are certain habits of mind of heart such as compassion, ego-softening, awareness, mindfulness and others, which this method aims to instill in the student. However, the goal is not for students to explore different ‘ideas’ or ‘answers’ to these questions in a theoretical way, nor for them to ‘receive’ certain ways of being from the teacher or texts,  but to be challenged, through texts, practices, the teacher and each other, to genuinely discover the answers to these questions within themselves. Though there are dispositions at which this pedagogy aims, these dispositions can only, on this understanding, be found by the students within themselves and so are always open to being challenged or rejected. For that reason, texts and practices are brought which are meant to challenge students’ sense of who they are and who they should be and, in that destabilization, create a space of open inner inquiry where answers can be found in a more free, independent and authentic way.

Such a goal means that this pedagogical approach aims at the students acquiring insight or understanding rather than knowledge. In distinguishing these two categories, I take knowledge to be knowing that something is the case in an external analytic, but not fully internalized, sense. For instance, one might know that some action is wrong but still do it, driven by desire or anger. Or, one might know how to plug in the numbers to solve a chemical equation without understanding the actual chemical processes involved. With genuine insight, however, which is fully internalized, there can be no gap between action and understanding or between the formula and comprehension of the chemical process. Indeed, in insight, which is internalized, felt and integrated knowing, the action or use of the formula grows out of the deep understanding.

There are of course many levels and layers of both types of knowing, but for this pedagogy, students who leave the class with only knowledge, however extensive, of the Jewish spiritual tradition have not succeeded in achieving the goal of the class. Rather, the goal is for genuine questioning and exploration to give rise to insight and understanding about the nature of their selves and what they want to be in life. Such as goal, however, cannot in fact be taught, but only facilitated. While knowledge, to some extent, can be imparted, insight can only be acquired through one’s own exploration. The imparting of insight can be an important part of that facilitation, but while repeating learned words maybe constitute knowledge (of a poem, formula, historical fact, etc.), it has no relationship to insight. The words must be integrated, made personal, and shake our very selves for insight to occur. The class therefore attempts to set up the structures, texts, practices, challenges, discussions and processing which make that insight possible. It is this insight and thus transformation which is then at the center of this pedagogical approach rather than the text, knowledge, literacy, text-skills, or positive experiences which are often the focus of Jewish education.

In order to allow the students to do this work an environment must be created in the class which fosters such exploration. In part, this is created by formal structures which create ‘safe space’, but moreover it is created by creating contexts for student intimacy and sharing, by the teacher’s modeling of the vulnerability required for such discussion and practice (for instance, by sharing his own failings and struggles), by being explicit about the demand for personal sharing and creating regular contexts to make that a reality and by making it abundantly clear that there is no ‘right’ reaction to any practice. Students are free to love or hate the practice or to have had wonderful or terrible experiences. Absolute acceptance and lack of judgment towards their experience must be made evident by the teacher for this approach to work. For instance, in our processing groups, I thank every student for their response no matter what it is, for indeed every response is valuable.

This does not mean the teacher abandons her role as an educator and expert. While there are no wrong or right responses to the practices or the texts, there are better and worse readings of the text and more and less skillful ways to do the practice. The teacher’s job is to correct improper understandings of the text and its language and help guide the students towards more skillful performance of the practices, demonstrating the discipline and openness which engaging in these practices requires. The development of trust and open exploration also takes time. There are certain practices which cannot be done at the beginning of the course or in a one-off session but must be explored after the trust of the group has grown and developed.

As might be evident, this approach requires discipline and commitment. Contrary to the sometimes popular understanding of spirituality as ‘airy-fairy’, an important lesson of this approach is the hard work and discipline that spiritual practice and transformation require. Class structures must always then be able to hold together the openness of acceptance with the demandingness of discipline.

The role of the teacher in this pedagogy is multiple. The teacher is perhaps most importantly a facilitator who, through his knowledge, insight, and experience helps guide the student through self-exploration and revelation. Whether occupying the role of a facilitator standing back, or more that of a guide showing the way, the teacher can only help the students to do their own work. Yet the teacher is also a source of knowledge, helping students understand terms and texts and historical contexts. The teacher must also be a questioner and critic, asking students to examine their claims and experience a bit more carefully and to investigate if they truly believe what they have said. Modeling her own inner work and investigation is also a crucial role for the teacher. Indeed, I believe teaching this material cannot be done effectively without such vulnerability The roles of facilitator-guide and model are possibly the two most critical roles for the teacher to embody for this pedagogy to succeed. Both of them require the willingness of the teacher to make and admit his mistakes. Teachers who think they have all the answers or who are too uncomfortable or frightened to admit their failings cannot adequately fulfill either of these role and so their task as teachers.

Yet to teach this way, like the goal of this approach, requires not just knowledge, but insight. Such insight is not available through traditional modes of study but rather is acquired through life experience, meditation, spiritual practices, therapy and other such modalities. But it is acquired. That is, one can learn it. It is not simply some miracle, an act of grace, which drops out of heaven as people sometimes seem to relate to spiritual insight. Indeed, in my understanding, this insight is our basic divine nature and something every educator and human has, it only needs to be uncovered. Thankfully, practical systematic techniques for uncovering our own basic insight, such as meditation, are available.  Yet what this makes clear is that to do this kind of education, to do emerging adult education ‘where personal meaning plays a significant role’, we must rethink the kind of training that is called for. Textual knowledge, while essential, is not sufficient. Rather educators must be trained in exploring their own personal meaning, in confronting their own self, in opening to their own vulnerability and in revealing their own insight. Only with a sense of their, always incomplete, answers to these questions, can educators educate effectively in this sphere.

The potential students towards which such a pedagogy can be directed are extraordinarily broad. In my class at Pardes, for instance, level aleph students and kollel students participate successfully in the same class together. In part it is because these texts and approaches are so little known that it is new to most students, no matter their background. Moreover, because the fundamental goal of the class is insight and not knowledge, it overturns the normal hierarchies formed by textual knowledge and Jewish background in Jewish education. Neither background nor knowledge speak in any way to a student’s ability to open to, integrate, and grow from the texts and practices we explore. Finally, because this approach places at the center the core issues of emerging adulthood it is potentially relevant to any kind of Jew from any kind of background. Engagement with the texts and practices does not require any particular relationship to Judaism or ideological approach. What it does require, however, is openness and the willingness to experiment and this is probably the most important limiting factor in this educational approach.

The contexts called for for this approach are potentially multiple. At its most effective, it operates in some kind of extended setting such as a yeshivah, weekly meetings on a college campus, or a committed adult study group, or in a short term intensive setting such as a seminar, retreat, or summer camp. It is most challenging to do in short term non-intensive settings, most importantly because of the central importance of the development of trust and safety in the group. However, even in such settings it can be done by simply encouraging people to take the first faltering steps of trust and exploration.

Fundamentally this approach, though not applicable in every detail in every setting, calls for a rethinking of the goals and modes of Jewish education more broadly and for us to focus more explicitly and fundamentally on education as a practice of transformation which helps both student and teacher become the Jews and human beings they wish to be.

June 15, 2010

Immersive education. Immersion is one of the most effective ways to transform people. In a culture that demands multitasking, this presents a counter-model of deep and focused engagement. We know this is effective from sleep-away summer camp: it allows children and teenagers to form community and social bonds from the moment they wake up to the moment they fall asleep. Service learning alternative breaks have opened this mode up for college students. What would it look like to expand alternative breaks to include immersion Torah study?

Face-to-face encounter as the “new” technology. Much has been made about the power of online social networking to transform Jewish community. But I have found the premium of face-to-face interactions even higher in this wired world. Luckily, Torah study is a natural mode for this kind of interaction. The mode of one-on-one learning – havruta – can offer a corrective to the plugged in mode of contact.

Multiple skill levels. Communities of study are most robust when people of multiple skill levels interact over Torah. This is a tricky goal – on the one hand, there is value to segmenting people by skill level so that everyone can make progress at the appropriate pace. On the other hand, too much of Torah study has been walled off between “kiruv” and “advanced” learners. What kind of study community could integrate both modes? How could we ensure that the momentum behind Torah study is not limited to beginners, but recognizes that Torah study is a critical goal for people of all levels?

Empowerment education. We all know that content is slippery – people remember very little of what they learn, even from the best of teachers. So how could we shift the dialogue from learning facts (only) to learning how to learn. This demographic is used to being handed the keys to content – not just taking other people’s word for it. At least some of the Torah study must focus on teaching people the skills so that they can delve into Torah study on their own after the teacher has gone home. This does not mean there is a dichotomy between teaching meaning and teaching skills. But being satisfied with a focus only on meaning-delivery, wrapped up in a neat bow, will handicap ultimate empowered engagement with the unending power of Jewish tradition.

Finally, some thoughts on the orientation to the content of Torah study, inspired in part by my teacher, Dr. Devora Steinmetz.

• Torah study opens us up to the possibility of meaningful mystery in the world. It is a literature that is mysterious by nature, and thus meant to be interpreted, and to reflect and build upon the interpretations of others. This is in stark contrast to an American culture where everything is exposed and nothing is left to the imagination. Studying Torah is not like reading Facebook updates. Torah study allows us to connect to an otherworldliness, a sense of divinity that is represented by mystery.

• Torah study is also about encounters with concepts that are foreign and sometimes disturbing. A surface-level connection to Torah is fully affirming (“Look how nicely Torah correlates with my Western values of justice!”). But a real engagement with Torah is much more complex. It involves confronting the difficult and alienating passages rather than writing them off as artifacts of a culture long gone. In a world with no clear answers, what better way to reflect on the assumptions by which we live our lives than to encounter the sometimes foreign and unfamiliar values inherent in our tradition and let ourselves be surprised, shocked, and challenged by them? If a reflective life is meant to be more than just affirming our existing beliefs, then Torah provides the opportunity to engage with life more fully.

• Torah study offers a way to approach the other. The fundamental method of Talmud study is to examine each sage’s opinion, open it to challenge, and then try to defend it. Taken as a value, this is a form of engagement with the other in which he is not automatically wrong or automatically right. His is a valid opinion that must be grappled with. Ideas are weighed on their merits, not because of the status of the rabbi behind them. Although everything is in some ways up for debate, everything is also given the opportunity to be relevant and meaningful, even opinions that at face value seem absurd. This is a true spiritual practice. It enables us to inhabit a world in which the opinions of others are evaluated based on their merits, where people feel comfortable enough to both challenge and protect the ideas in the marketplace that are not their own or do not speak to their values. Because Torah study is often done with a partner, this exercise of “approaching the other” is not limited to the characters in the text, but also played out with the people learning Torah together.

June 15, 2010

“All of a sudden things just began to click,” Rachel recalled, “and things began for me to personally make sense.”  She was sitting with a colleague of mine, around the time of her graduation from college, describing her experience in my course eighteen months earlier.  “Everything became more meaningful for me.”

In the course that Rachel (a pseudonym) had taken with me, titled “Studying Sacred Texts,” we had spent a lot of time examining the variety of approaches to the study of sacred texts in Judaism and other faith traditions as well.  In particular, we had confronted the difficulty of studying sacred texts in the modern world, in the light of historical criticism.  What does it mean for a text to be sacred?  What do we believe, and how can we defend those beliefs?  Why should a text have normative weight for us – and what might be the limits of that normativity?

For some students, the encounter with this material is a challenge to their traditionalist upbringing (a constructive challenge, I hope).  But Rachel came to college without an extensive religious education; she had a strong Jewish identity but not a lot of conviction.  The class wasn’t a challenge so much as an opportunity.  “Rather than taking apart anything,” she reported, “it was really filling in gaps for me.”  Rachel seized the opportunity to develop her own understanding of the nature of sacred texts in her own tradition, and what they might mean to her.  As her instructor, hearing (or reading the transcript of) her strong memory of the course is inspiring, and humbling.

In a recent article in Liberal Education (Winter 2009), Anne Colby and William Sullivan argue for a renewed focus, within higher education, on the development of personal and social responsibility.  They articulate three dimensions of this focus: formation of identity, cultivation of purpose, and development of practical reasoning (learning to put knowledge to use).  Some of this renewed focus can be achieved through experiential learning, they claim, as well as through attention to the overall campus community and culture.  But we should not neglect the potential of the traditional classroom.  “Pay attention to questions of meaning, purpose, and personal identity in the classroom,” they counsel.  “It is important that faculty model and provide experience with the interplay between analytical detachment and sensitivity to moral purpose and meaning.”

I do not presume to claim that I regularly achieve these goals with my students.  I am well aware of how often I miss the mark in my teaching, of how often what seems compelling to me comes across as stultifying to my students, of how my attempts to promote rigorous thinking about matters of substance fall flat.  I want and need to respect students’ autonomy and the norms of critical academic discourse.  I want to cultivate the capacity to establish “analytical detachment” even about matters that are near to one’s heart and soul, even as I recognize and honor the personal significance of the issues and ideas that we are discussing.  It’s a tricky business.

But sometimes it works.  Sometimes I find a way – or it finds me – to integrate questions of meaning and purpose into my classroom.  What should we do in the world?  What constitutes a life well lived?  To what are we committed? Sometimes students feel safe enough to consider the risky questions of identity.  Who am I?  Who do I want to be? Sometimes, within the familiar contours of a college seminar, we create together what we might call, for the present purposes, a Third Space.

In that Third Space, we do not abandon critical rigor, and we do not embrace “advocacy” (which, in the academy, is code for the uncritical promotion of particular points of view, especially on matters of personal and political significance).  We avoid the therapeutic mode like the plague; my students are not my patients and I am not their therapist.  We are always alert to faddish self-help clichés and political sloganeering.  We recognize the dangers of indoctrination and of charismatic teaching, and we use humor to deflate any burgeoning sense of our own self-importance.  In fact, the pedagogic practices are not even visibly distinct from more traditional, more detached, more “academic” seminars.  But we do not shy away from the questions of meaning and purpose and identity that are often just beneath the surface of our intellectual inquiries.

For Rachel, the course succeeded beyond my deepest aspirations. “[Levisohn said that] I’m not really here to be your spiritual guide, but I do care about your growth, and so I think he tried to facilitate the flow of the classroom in a way that allowed us to learn from each other.”  Even more gratifying is her perspective on the continuing significance of the course in her life.  “I was at a Hillel leaders’ thing at Brandeis, and they asked us to circle on a map the place where we had our most meaningful Jewish experience at Brandeis, and I circled the Mandel Center [where the class had met]…  And it’s because it was really such a wonderful positive Jewish experience for me, and it was strange, because it was a classroom, and you wouldn’t expect it, but everyone was really there to put their whole minds and hearts into what they were doing.”  We do not expect classrooms to be a Third Space, Rachel notes – but perhaps we should.

June 15, 2010

AJWS’s service-learning programs to the developing world, particularly our college trips, are geared primarily toward emerging adults. We engage our participants in a sophisticated exploration of both the socioeconomic injustices that they encounter on these trips and a range of authentic Jewish responses to those injustices.

When we began to develop service-learning curriculum, we found that Jewish social justice education had traditionally approached these questions from one of two perspectives. In the “aphoristic model,” the educator combs through the Jewish canon, finds a pithy text that speaks to an attractive ethical value (e.g. Rambam’s ladder of tzedakah) and then builds a lesson around that text. By contrast, in the “cherry-picking model,” the educator identifies a cause that she would like to advance (e.g. LGBTI rights) and does a directed search of the Jewish canon to find texts that speak to that value (pointedly avoiding much of Leviticus in the case of LGBTI rights).

Neither of these models holds up particularly well as a methodology for confronting the great social justice and public policy challenges of our day. Beyond a bit of rhetorical inspiration, Tzedek, tzedek tirdof! doesn’t shed a great deal of light on how we should respond to the genocide in Darfur or the plight of indigenous Peruvians displaced by a hydroelectric dam.

Beyond that, these approaches undermine the salience of Torah study as a tool for social change. By asking ancient texts to resolve complex contemporary social issues, as if they were Randy Cohen’s ethicist column in The New York Times, we make them seem simplistic. This phenomenon is perhaps most evident in the ever-more-generic and meaningless overuse of the term Tikkun Olam (despite Rabbi Jill Jacob’s thoughtful efforts to resuscitate it).

Rather than looking to text study as a guide to moral public policy decisions, we approach it—in concert with the literature of contemporary moral philosophy—as an exercise in “productive discomfort,” our term for a kind of psychic dissonance that encourages them to critically examine and, ideally, recalibrate their beliefs and perspectives in order to motivate attitudinal and behavioral change.

For example, as part of a session entitled “Beyond Good Intentions,” we engage our participants in a discussion about their motivations for participating in a volunteer service program. Their responses run the gamut from the noble to the self-interested to the patronizing. Using these as a backdrop, we then confront a text from Bava Batra 10a:

The evil Turnus Rufus posed this question to Rabbi Akiva: If your God loves the poor, why does God not support them? Rabbi Akiva said to him: In order that through [helping] them we achieve salvation.

In suggesting that the suffering of the poor is instrumental our spiritual edification (the “we” here is deliciously, maybe even intentionally, ambiguous), this text provokes a profound period of cheshbon hanefesh for our volunteers. They begin to critically explore the roots of their activism and volunteerism: To what extent does our service flow from a moral imperative and to what extent is it the product of a desire for a “do-gooder feel-good fix,” and how much does this distinction matter (if at all)?

We’re extremely attuned to the fact that pushing these buttons is a fraught proposition. In challenging participants to transcend complacency—often by confronting them with the ways in which their behavioral choices, consumption patterns and political decisions implicate them in the injustices they encounter on these trips—we risk debilitating them with guilt. The goal is always to find the zone of productive discomfort between apathy (which in the case of our participants sometimes manifests as self-congratulatory self-righteousness—“I am so virtuous for having given up my spring break to sleep in a hammock and build latrines”) and the overwhelmed paralysis that can result from confronting the consequences of that apathy.

The teaching setting in this case is critical—the physical discomfort of manual labor and the cultural discomfort of living in a poor community in the developing world both set the stage for the productive discomfort we hope to create through study. To ensure that this productive discomfort moves beyond the inchoate and impotent realm of frustration/outrage/self-loathing, we weave the ethically provocative conversations together with  socioeconomic and political information about the real issues of poverty, international development, globalization and public health. The ethical discussions, largely grounded in dialogue between and among Jewish text and the literature of moral philosophy, move participants along a continuum of affective engagement with an issue, while the socioeconomic content grounds that affective engagement in high-stakes, real-world outcomes.

Finally, we demand that any learning experience that confronts participants with injustice also provide them with tools and structure to implement concrete changes in their day-to-day lives in order to fight such injustice. In other words, if we teach participants about the impact of U.S. agriculture policy on peasant farmers (a problem admittedly far-removed from the lived experience of most Jewish American college students), we need to provide a mechanism for them to take action in response. This focus on concrete, practical action is based on the belief that the failure to act in the face of injustice fosters apathy, cynicism and fatalism, while commitment and action empower and build hope.

June 15, 2010