Journal of Ecumenical Studies

Zev Garber’s reflections on “Teaching Torah in the Academy,” as what he defines as a “learning exchange,” have struck a proverbial chord in me. His approach to teaching is fundamentally Jewish, since, while affirming the principle of Torah mi-Sinai, it builds on the same dialectic methodology employed by Jewish Sages over the course of millennia and exemplified in talmudic discourse. I am mindful of the classic Barbra Streisand film, Yentl, in which her character, a girl masquerading as a boy in order to attend a rabbinical yeshiva, is engaging in conversation of a personal nature with a study hall partner (and secret romantic interest). The headmaster immediately notices this and approaches them both, asking pointedly, “Are you agreeing or disagreeing?” to which the two students respond in unison, “Disagreeing!”

That scene has perpetually remained with me, as a teacher of undergraduate college students, given that young people in contemporary Western culture are reared from early childhood to approach school as a series of [End Page 127] obstacles that may be overcome only by providing programmed responses to whatever material they are confronted with. The educational system itself is to blame, training them like sea lions to leap through a series of hoops, never questioning why the hoops are there or what they represent. When texts are assigned for reading, students are instructed merely to reflect on them without recognizing that every author, like every pedagogue, has an angle to elucidate, an argument to make, a point to drive home. In almost every case, in advancing one argument, the author and/or classroom lecturer is disagreeing with someone else. Perhaps the most significant challenge in today’s university classroom is to frame the material presented not as an encyclopedic compendium of “information” to which students give sheep-like assent but to facilitate, in Garber‘s words, “comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.”

Unlike the physical sciences, wherein the goal is to arrive at the “correct” answer, the objective of a liberal arts/humanities education ought to involve the identification of multifarious issues (“revelation”) while learning to form and to address cogent opinions (“reason”) that hold academic water. In Garber’s words, the teacher should be not so much a “knowledge-dispenser” as a “knowledge-facilitator.” Unfortunately, being “passively taught” is the rule rather than the exception in a system whoser major, if not only, goal is to promote acceptable scores on standardized tests. The “seeds of midrashic activity” of which Garber writes are not easily evaluated or measured as “learning outcomes,” and perhaps for this reason little value is placed on them in the academy. Nonetheless, the “way of Midrash” is perhaps the most valuable discipline to be appropriated in an academic setting. Moreover, the “twist” to which Garber refers represents a unique contribution in fusing traditional Jewish learning with the approaches of modern scholarship. Such an approach may, in fact, be seen as an echo of the rabbinic innovations with regard to the Oral Torah, which preserved the tradition of that which was communicated in writing to Moses, while adapting it (by what amounted to a “mutation” of sorts) to succeeding generations.

There is no clearer example of the “way of Midrash” than the one provided by Garber regarding contemporary discussions of the historical Jesus. For many generations, the very idea of constructive, academic dialogue between Jews and “believers” in Jesus, whether identified as Christians, [End Page 128] Judeo-Christians, or Messianic Jews, has been all but unthinkable. As result, it would hardly be an exaggeration to observe that interfaith relations have been and remain hampered by a sea of ignorance. To this, I would add the observation that, when it comes to the academy, ignorance is compounded by an inability to grasp how to engage those of another faith perspective.1

Unfortunately, the tendency among many undergraduate students is again to search for “right” answers, resorting to the traditional creeds and doctrines in which they have been reared. When it comes to religious-oriented discussions, the student must in many cases be “retrained” to ask “academic” questions, while understanding the debatable scholarly issues involved. Such issues of course have...