Orality, Textuality and the Living Experience of the Oral Torah
Allen Selis      Email This Article

אמר רבי יהודה בר שלום כשאמר הקב"ה למשה כתב לך , בקש משה שתהא המשנה בכתב. ולפי שצפה הקב"ה שאומות העולם עתידין לתרגם את התורה ולהיות קוראין בה יונית והם אומרים אנו ישראל, ועד עכשיו מאזנים מעויין. אמר להם הקב"ה לעכו"ם אתם אומרים שאתם בני? איני יודע אלא מי שמיסטורין שלי אצלו, הם בני. ואיזה הוא? זו משנה שנתנה על פה והכל ממך לדרוש.

(מדרש תנחומא, כי תשא ל"ד)

Given this tradition, we ought well ask, "How effectively do we teach Mishnah, indeed, how well do we teach all Torah Sheb’al Peh, in our day schools?" In this article, I offer a critique of our practice in teaching Mishnah, then a response, which draws from cutting edge scholarship in modern curriculum theory. I will conclude with an example of this theory turned into classroom practice, and a closing reflection on this work itself.

Our students are likely to begin their study of the Oral Law with Mishnah. Often we wait until later in the elementary school curriculum to introduce Mishnah, so that students have gained some degree of skill in Humash and exegesis. We expect them to be able to read Hebrew, to navigate a core text with commentaries and to be comfortable with "Rashi" script.[2] Then we present them with a new milestone in their learning. A page of Mishnah in square script at the center of the page, framed by columns of the commentaries of R. Ovadia Bartenura and Tosefot Yom Tov. At that moment, we telegraph to our students that Mishnah is merely another book, eviscerating the possibility of teaching Torah Sheb’al Peh in the unique fashion that the Midrash describes. This approach turns Mishnah into mimesis, at the expense of mistorin.

What have we lost? The quality of spoken interaction with a living tradition. Well through the middle ages, the experience of learning Torah Sheb’al Peh emerged from a student’s encounter with a teacher, not a book. In this setting, the act of learning was imbued with discovery, frustration, conflict, joy and love. In short, the learning was alive. It replicated the most important interaction of all, between the Jewish people and God. Once that learning lost its voice, we became accustomed to teach Mishnah from the text, not Torah from Sinai. As educational leaders in Torah Sheb’al Peh, we need not retreat into the text for lack of better options. Our pedagogy should be attuned to the struggle between oral transmission and textual knowledge that is inherent in Torah Sheb’al Peh. When we misuse or overuse the vehicle of text, the innocence of orality is violated and the experience of Mount Sinai grows distant. But when we embrace creative possibilities for instruction, we offer our students the potential of a powerful educational experience.

Curriculum Theory:The Phenomenon of the Text

Max van Manen, a leader in the field of educational phenomenology, [3]offers critical input from the cutting edge of curriculum theory.

First, van Manen (1989, 2000) suggests that the process of learning begins with pure experience which we later abstract into conceptual knowledge. Experience constitutes “that world which precedes knowledge.” These experiences are rich, powerful and unformed. Later, at the level of abstraction we sharpen our thinking and impose discipline on our intuitions. At this step, conceptual knowledge becomes fully crafted, resonant and precise. From the perspective of the learner, van Manen (2002) notes that it is always possible to assimilate conceptual knowledge. But students only achieve a deep understanding when they internalize the pathos that precedes conceptual knowledge.

Van Manen’s (1985) second crucial observation is directed towards the very nature of text itself. Before we fit language into the straight columns of text, we lived in the “innocence of orality.” At this level of “reading,” language has the capacity to create transformative experience. Such language can “teach and change us;” by drawing us towards an intimate connection with the author of the text.

Implications for the Jewish Educator

Van Manen was writing about novels. For us the stakes are considerably higher. The notion of creating a transformative experience by bringing students towards an intimate connection with the author of their “text” takes on explosive meaning when the text is Mishnah and the author is the ultimate divine Author. While each educator must make his or her own commitment to the values that motivate their practice, I can comfortably state the following: The pinnacle of my own teaching is the moment in which students realize that their studies are a vehicle for personal transformation, for growing closer to God. Were I forced to choose between knowledge of God and knowledge of text as the goal of my teaching, I would choose knowledge of God. In van Manen’s language, I place the experience of learning Torah Sheb’al Peh prior to the textual format that the Mishnah has come to occupy due to historical accident.

My translation of van Manen’s approach into Jewish pedagogy involves the following argument. We learn first by experience, and out of experience gain conceptual understanding. In the same fashion, Mishnah represents a powerful experience, the unfolding of Torah from Sinai in the world of daily action, prior to its existence as a book. As a text, the Mishnah becomes a physical object distinct from the God who gave the Torah and the Sages who lived and taught it across centuries. If we are only teaching our students to decode words on a page, then we risk teaching them about books. When we focus our attention towards that which came before the book, then we are teaching them about how to live in relationship to God. And that is our job.

For this reason, I argue that we must rescue the orality of the Mishnah in our pedagogy. Doing so returns us to the land of formative religious experience in which individuals discover who they are in relationship to God. Orality returns us to the experiential side of learning, the side that must necessarily precede textual, conceptual work. How might we make this happen? One experimental proposal follows.

From Theory to Practice

The exercise is designed to be part of an introduction to Mishnah that will be age appropriate for students around grade 5, depending on the school curriculum and the students’ abilities and needs.

1.Give students a brief introduction to Mishnah as Torah Sheb’al Peh, customized to match the religious philosophy of the school. The introduction should stress the way in which we understand that the Rabbis learned Mishnah, each student from the mouth of his teacher, traced back to the days of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi.

2.Tell the students that you want them to understand Mishnah the way it was taught 2,000 years ago. Teach them Mishnah Pesahim, 1:2, which discusses the need to search for hametz in preparation for the Passover holiday. Have them learn it orally in class. If a parent can review this with them, then ask that parents do so. If necessary, give students a tape recording or send them a digitized voice recording by email.[4] Do not give them a text.

3.The next school day, review the oral learning of this text. If the students are not fluent in Hebrew, explain the text in their native language. Key words that all students must understand are “huldah” (=rodent), “ger’rah” (=dragging) and “ein ladavar sof” (=there's no end). Congratulate the students on mastering one small bit of Torah Sheb’al Peh.

4.Next have the class look at the first half of Shemot, Chapter 12. Ask them what the text tells us about hametz and what we should do about it. Ask them to describe explicitly what happens if we leave any hametz in our homes over the Pesah holiday. What if we just overlook a small amount? Review the Mishnah that the students learned several more times. As students begin to ask questions about the Humash text and its relationship to the Mishnah, note the questions by writing them on a blackboard, but do not answer them yet.

5.Now comes the magical part of the exercise. You will need four shoe boxes, numbered one through four, and four crackers. Put one shoebox in each corner of the classroom, and put a cracker in each shoebox. Ask for seven volunteers to play the roles of four householders and three huldot (=rodents). Have the owner of house number one dispose of his or her hametz. Then send the volunteer householders out of the room. Call upon the first huldah,—who must take hametz out of any one box and put it into any other box. Bring the householders back in, and have the whole class ask the first householder, “Pesah is coming! You have an important mitzvah to do! Don’t you want to check your box again?” The householder should refuse, then repeat the Mishnah ein hosheshin…(=we do not suspect …)The second householder now checks his or her box. After the next rotation of householders in and out of the room, start with householder number one and work up to the last person who has not checked their “house.” Householders one and two respond as before, while number three checks his or her box. Continue once more to complete the cycle. Then open the boxes, one by one. Someone is in for a surprise.

6.Once the laughter dies down, ask students what happened. What made this funny? Would it have been so funny if Pesah were soon to start and you still had hametz in the house? Underscore the serious implications of this. Most importantly, ask each householder what it felt like as they refused to “double check” their house, and what they felt as they opened the box at the end of the exercise.

7.Finally, draw out some shared understandings from what happened. This is a critical point in the entire exercise. Note that some of these understandings are cognitive, others experiential. Work on experiential understandings first and follow up with cognitive knowledge later.

i.Sample of experiential understanding. Did anyone express anxiety, discomfort or frustration during the exercise? What about happiness or outright relief? These responses reveal why ein laDavar sof is so important. The text of the Torah, like God, is infinite—but our lives are finite. How can we, mere human beings, ever live up to God’s expectations of us? In a world of ein laDavar sof, we might never be able to fulfill even a single mitzvah. Our relationship to God would become painful, stressful and burdensome, and that is obviously not what God wanted for us. Torah Sheb’al Peh preserves our intimate connection with God by making Torah livable in real life.

ii.Sample of cognitive understanding. You might point out that there is no textual basis in the Written Torah for the practice of searching for hametz. Some students might be shocked to confront the fact that one of their most important associations with the start of Pesah never existed in any book until the late second Century C.E.[5] One lesson is that we don’t ever rely on the Written Torah alone. A more basic concept is that we must now adapt our idea of “Torah” to include everything that God taught us, in any form, that we have transmitted across generations.

8. Ask your students what Torah Sheb’al Peh is, and why there would be no Judaism without it. Work tactfully with your students’ replies as you add your answers to this question. My own stance is that all Torah Sheb’al Peh represents a return to Sinai, the place where God answers all questions.

Reflections on Practice

I would not be a good student of van Manen if I failed to pause and reflect on the process of writing this article, and what it taught me.[6] I learned two things.

First, I confess that I found it difficult to write this small piece of sample curriculum. No one ever taught me to teach Mishnah this way, and I find myself in the awkward position of having to show others how to use a model of learning that I myself am struggling to master. So be it. Perhaps this merely reminds us that we all need to dedicate part of our educational practice to the pursuit of innovation.

Second, I discovered how fixed I actually am on text. After drafting a possible illustration exercise for this article, I was dissatisfied with my first attempt. Starting anew, I went back to the bookshelf in my office and opened a Mishnah. I was surprised to find that even as I wrote about recovering the orality of the Oral Law, I could not do my work without a printed text in hand.

The text is inescapable. It is an essential technology for preserving and transmitting real knowledge, and indeed I returned to my books time and again in the writing of this article. That response might seem odd, given my commitment to the restoration of oral teaching. In truth, I have no desire to weaken the importance of text in Jewish learning. Rather, I wish to strengthen our commitment to that which comes before the text—an exchange with God about how to live in God’s world….

Van Manen (1985) quotes literary theorist Karl Barthes as saying that when he reads a powerful work of fiction, “I desire the author.” Would that our students read a Mishnah with such passion. To get there, we must help our students discover what came before the text.

Bibliography

van Manen, M.  (1985) Phenomenology of the Novel, or How Do Novels Teach? Phenomenology and Pedagogy. 3 (3).

van Manen, M.(1989) By Light of Anecdote. Phenomenology and Pedagogy, Volume 7.

van Manen, M.(1990) Beyond Assumptions: Shifting the Limits of Action Research. Theory Into Practice. 29 (3).

van Manen, M.(1991) The Tact of Teaching. The Althouse Press: Ontario.

van Manen, M.(2000)Moral Language and Pedagogical Experience. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 32 (2), pp. 315-327.

van Manen M. and Li, S. (2002) The Pathic Principle of Pedagogical Language. Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 18.

Pinar W. , Reynolds, W., Slattery, P. and Taubman, P., (Eds.) (1995) Understanding Curriculum.Peter Lang: New York.

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Allen Selis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum Theory and Development at the University of Maryland’s program in Education and Policy Leadership.