This article is neither a record of success nor of unmitigated failure. It is a reflective description and evaluation of my experience, which I see as part of my own professional growth and which I share in the hope that it will be of help to other teachers. I should add the caveat that this reflection is happening much too soon for reliability. My standard line to students is that I judge my teaching by the condition of their souls ten years afterward (and I love it when they call to let me do that).

Nearly three decades ago, I taught the book of Jeremiah in a Modern Orthodox high school. I identified ways that the text might challenge my students and planned my teaching around them. It was the only time I taught Nakh in my thirteen-year stint there. I then left the school for seventeen years before returning this year to teach Jeremiah as a last-minute replacement. The result was not a second dip in the same river. The students and I had changed in ways that significantly affected my teaching of Jeremiah and made it a differently “difficult” text.

I’ll begin with some general observations and claims, provide an example, and then move to the case study.

About Difficult Texts

Texts are not intrinsically or objectively troubling. They become troubling when they challenge expectations in ways that readers cannot easily dismiss. Which texts are troubling to whom depends on prior beliefs and prior relationships to the text.

People naturally defend their beliefs and relationships against textual challenges. Given the decision to teach a text to students who may find it difficult, pedagogic decisions can reinforce or weaken those defenses. There is no such thing as “just teaching the text and letting the students make up their own minds.” There is, however, such a thing as “teaching the text with the goal of enabling students to make authentic choices.”

Enabling authentic choices doesn’t require neutrality about outcomes. It is legitimate and possible to teach texts with the goal of enabling students to authentically choose some options over others. Doing so requires knowing your students well. It also requires acknowledging the possibility of “successful failure,” meaning that students will diligently learn everything you teach them and then authentically make choices that break your heart.

Consider what is often presented as THE troubling text, the narrative in Genesis of the Binding of Isaac. The story on one level demands the prioritization of relationship with God over all human relationships. That level relates to the command that Abraham sacrifice his son Yitzhak. On a second level, the story demands the prioritization of obedience to God over all other values. That level relates to the command that Abraham sacrifice a human being.

Depending on their prior commitments, students defend themselves differently against the text. In my experience, comfortably Orthodox students resist interpretations that suggest that Abraham would have been justified in challenging a Divine command on ethical grounds. This allows them to quietly follow halakhic choices made by their communities even when those choices trouble them ethically. By contrast, students who are comfortably non-halakhic resist interpretations in which Abraham has ethical expectations of God. This distance insulates them against seeing him as a role model and therefore against feeling any obligation to follow traditions that they see as unethical. Uncomfortable students of all kinds are much more open to interpretations that generate uncertainty about what we should learn from the story.

Different teachers as well come to the text with differing and possibly opposed goals. Some may seek to reinforce religious submission, while others seek to encourage activism; some prioritize autonomy, whereas others prioritize observance. I generally see my task as comforting the troubled and troubling the comfortable. In other words, I try to connect alienated or disinterested students to texts while leaving all students open to being challenged and even chastised by them. This is a delicate dance within a single class.

Teaching Jeremiah in the 1990s

In what ways might Jeremiah be a “difficult” text that challenges or chastens?

In the late 90s, I didn’t see difficulties arising from the content or reception of Jeremiah’s prophecies. I did however consider that the book offered three potential challenges to conventional Orthodox belief. First, the eponymous prophet can be read at certain points as doubting his own experience of prophecy. Second, the text’s apparent lack of order can be a problem for beliefs about the editing process. Third, the large number of keri uketivs (words that are written one way but read differently) can challenge beliefs about transmission.

My late 90s sophomores were not all comfortably Orthodox or conventional Orthodox believers, so for many of them, raising these issues was more liberating than challenging. We began by reading through Radak’s introduction to his commentary on the Prophets, which understands keri uketiv as reflecting manuscript variants. We then read Abravanel’s introduction to his commentary on Jeremiah, which explains the prevalence of keri uketiv in the book as the result of an older Jeremiah correcting the grammatical errors of his youth. We then read Malbim’s introduction, which expresses horror at Abravanel’s depiction of Jeremiah as a prophet-in-progress. Students could thus find confirmation in the tradition for a wide variety of attitudes. My hope, which I think was largely borne out, was that this would enable all of them to find a point of connection and yet recognize the existence of legitimate options that didn’t work for them personally.

The final assignment in the course was to reedit the book into some kind of order—chronological, thematic, or whatever (not alphabetical)—and defend five choices made while doing that. Two (or maybe three) students protested that the assignment was heretical on the grounds that it had them critically evaluating the editorial work of the Anshei Knesset HaGedolah (the Men of the Great Assembly, traditionally credited with “authorizing” the finalized text). They were allowed to instead write essays explaining five cases of apparent disorder in the book as we have it.

Teaching Jeremiah in the 2020s

By contrast, almost all of this year’s students were comfortably Orthodox. They were frustrated rather than challenged or liberated by the suggestion that the text’s structure was indecipherable, and uninterested in the cause of keri uketiv, because their acceptance of the text as holy and perfect did not require being able to understand it.

Raising these issues increased the pain of studying Nakh with no commensurate gain.

This was also true with regard to content. For example, Jeremiah 7:31, 19:5, and 32:35 each denies that God ever considered commanding child sacrifice, and Taanit 4a applies this to Akeidat Yitzhak—but my students had not been bothered ethically by the Binding of Isaac, so this Talmudic assertion was neither challenging nor liberating for them. A session I had counted on to create persistent tension was flat on arrival. In essence, I did not know my students well enough to know what they would find difficult and why.

This applied as well to the major “new thing” I had planned to add to my old curriculum.

Much of Jeremiah is about his failure to get the population of a Jewish nation-state to recognize that God might allow their state to be destroyed because of the flaws in their society. Moreover, the destruction the prophet predicts does not occur linearly—there are military and political successes along the way. Similarly, but not in sync with politico-military success and failure, the society’s corruption is not linear, and it’s not even clear that the destruction happens at its ethical nadir.

I thought that recognizing this would disturb or comfort students based on which ideological version of Religious Zionism they subscribed to (or if they were unsure about Religious Zionism). But my sense is that the parallel left them unmoved. I’m still not sure why. My present best guess is that they assume that God would have to send a prophet to warn us before allowing such a destruction, even though he didn’t before destroying the Second Temple.

That guess emerges from one way that Yirmiyahu did become “difficult” for them. We explored Rabbi Jonathan Ziring’s observation that Jeremiah, unlike, for example, Elijah, does not seek to prove the truth of his words via miracles. Instead, he appeals to historical evidence and reason, specifically the destruction of past sites of the Mishkan and of the Kingdom of Israel. Many students were deeply disturbed at the idea that Jeremiah’s audience had no irrefutable proof that he was the true prophet and those countering his message were false. Some were disturbed because it threatened their construction of their own present belief as demonstrable; others because it made the prophetic past seem too much like the present, and they were attached to the idea that our lack of clarity reflects a kind of fallenness.

That prophets stand for a lack of ambiguity emerged from another issue as well. We studied R. Isaac Arama’s Akeidat Yitzhak on Genesis (Gate 35), who suggests that Jeremiah 32:8, “And I knew that it was the word of God,” means that the prophet himself was unsure until later whether his experience had been prophecy or an ordinary, uninspired dream. Many of them chose the option on the final assignment that allowed them to work through whether that was possible, and quite a few wrote or later spoke to me about having changed their minds in the course of writing.

In Rav Aharon Lichtenstein’s terms, this year’s class came in preferring reverence to relevance. That choice may generally be an indicator of ideological comfort.

Reflections

There are good reasons to make challenging such comfort a pedagogic goal:

1. Sustaining comfort may require freezing students at a level of understanding that is developmentally inappropriate. The goal should instead be to productively manage disequilibrium so their understanding of Torah grows with them.
2. For many students, a fugitive and cloistered comfort will not survive into adulthood anyway. They will face these challenges when they leave home for college, or in a Reddit group, or simply as the result of life experience. Better to face them first in a supportive environment.
3. Sustaining comfort may require tolerating or even encouraging intolerance of other people expressing discomfort.

It’s tempting for teachers and schools to focus on sustaining comfort and then blame subsequent environments if their students’ commitments later collapse as soon as they become uncomfortable. This feels safer—no one can blame you directly for the long-term outcome. This temptation, however, often leads teachers and schools to radically underestimate how much discomfort already exists and makes students less comfortable expressing their discomfort to faculty. Pedagogic valor is sometimes the better part of pedagogic discretion.

It’s nonetheless vital to recognize that the risks and costs of initiating discomfort are real. Some students will openly express disillusionment earlier than they would have, and who can know for sure that they even would have? Students may tune out passively out of disinterest, or actively as self-protection or protest. Not every issue needs to be raised with every student, and certainly not all at once.

Effective and responsible teaching to discomfort depends on knowing the students well. It is wise to build in opportunities to listen to student reactions and recalibrate as needed. As in the examples above from my own practice, I believe in giving students options to avoid having academic success depend on confronting a specific discomfort, as well as emphasizing that rigorous defenses of positions they find more comfortable are welcome.

Troubling texts provide an opportunity to teach students how to reevaluate specific assumptions without threatening their entire structure of belief, and how to deal with internal dissonance and external diversity. Studying these texts can spur students’ personal, intellectual, and spiritual growth and maturity. Schools should embrace these opportunities responsibly, which ideally means taking care that teachers have the knowledge, skills, support, and relationships with students to carefully calibrate the material for the class and to individualize as needed.