Keren Romm (keren.romm@gmail.com) currently teaches at New Community Jewish High School in Los Angeles, and specializes in Bible and Medical Ethics.
How do I teach all of Bible in one semester? How do I make it meaningful for my students? And how can I help them build a sense of Jewish identity in the process? Keren Romm tackled this challenge.
Background
The Jewish Studies program at New Community Jewish High School (Los Angeles) – the 3rd largest Jewish community high school in the United States, – consists of a Hebrew plus two model (each year, every student takes Hebrew, one Jewish text, and one Jewish Civilizations class). The school’s reputation for focusing on individual needs in order to educate – “one mind at a time” – has contributed, fundamentally, to the course discussed below.
I developed the Biblical Survey course to meet needs not at all atypical in the realm of high school Jewish education in schools of this type. All too often, education focuses on esoteric chapters and verses of the Bible, and usually merely in reference as an example of larger – more seemingly relevant – themes. Due to the limitation of time, we cannot teach everything we want to. With only one ‘text’ class, Tanakh is not offered as a separate class for each of the four years. This means that Bible texts are often selected based on their relevance to other material – verses that discuss laws are the basis for Talmudic discussions, sources of famous commentaries, etc. This leaves gaps in the student’s general knowledge and, and lends to a haphazard knowledge base. How are students to use the oldest tool in Judaism without a pre-existing comprehension of its basic lessons and storyline?
A decision was reached that our students needed a foundation in Tanakh. We reworked and condensed some of the material in the existing curriculum in order to create a semester-long block, which would be used for me to create a 9th grade Tanakh course. Yet this presented me great challenge – how to adequately encapsulate the Bible in a single semester.
As I approached this challenge I reflected that students nowadays have instant access to near-infinite information, replete with rebuttals – however loosely worded – to any assertion their teachers make, and a “smart” answer to any query they may pose. As teachers we are faced with the additional challenge of making the material both interesting and relevant. The Bible does not necessarily hold an innate authority for this audience; combined with a present-day apathy towards all things biblically inspired, students tune out once they hear that they’re about to “bible-dive”. Teachers understand the difference between an enviable ‘elective’ course, in which the students are volunteer sophists ready to learn, and the dreaded ‘compulsory’ credit courses saturated with a bemused student body. ; This second challenge helped to energize me to shape this course as oppose to act as a hurdle.
My design for this course needed to take into account that students address the Bible with an animus towards its authoritarian tonality. Like my students, I too was taught the Bible at school as an authoritative text, while at home I was encouraged to question everything. Though it may not be the only model, what I try to pass on to my students is a similar approach to how I was raised – reverence for the text and its content, with an eye to its personal relevance. I would like the students to know the stories that are considered basic Jewish knowledge, but also to question, with an emphasis on how the Bible pertains to being a Jew and a better person in today’s society. These stories should not be learned merely by rote; the Bible is our source for values and traditions, and, as such, needs to be studied not only as a literary text, but also as a personal ethics guide book.
Content and approach
The charge I was given in designing this course was to cover a great breadth of material, from creation through receiving the Torah, with exposure to Midrash, and excerpts from the Prophets and Writings. My personal mission was to do all that, and to make the learning meaningful, and this would have to happen in both the Torah sections as well as those from Prophets and Writings.
Within the Torah section, the focus on the early narratives that record the beginning of human history provides an opportunity to learn about the beginning of us. We can glimpse what people do with the freedoms and powers given to them, are exposed to potential models of family relationships, and can see the early leaders God chose for us and analyze their behavior.
Yet it is not the just the content which would make the learning meaningful, it was the way we learned and processed the text. Students are encouraged to learn the stories, analyze the characters’ behaviors, tease out the values modeled and lessons learned, and decide what, if anything, they want to internalize and emulate. We take the time to read the texts in hevrutah, discuss the peshat in great detail in class, look at some classical interpretations of the text, look at select midrashim on these narratives, and finally, discuss the personal application of these stories – as a modern day American, do I believe any of this happened? Do I care? What does either answer mean? How does this book affect my life and me as a person?!
Within the Prophets and Writings sections, the material is studied in two ways. The first is in lecture-style; the students read selections in preparation, and then take notes during class. This approach results in a more complete grasp of the morals and lessons in these sections of the Bible, as opposed to the minutia, or biblical trivia. In the second mode, individual students prepare the material and make presentations to their classmates. The presentation carries a requisite for going beyond the mere summarizing of a story, and places the onus on the student to provide an investigation as to why their assigned/chosen piece is included in the biblical canon. When forced to provide an argument as to why a story belongs in the Bible, the student comes one step closer to internalizing biblical legitimacy. In the process of doing their presentations, students learn to identify with characters, situations and struggles.
My introduction to the course syllabus is presented to the students as follows:
This course is designed to orient students to the Tanach, the book after which we are named (as the “people of the book”). We will spend time tracking themes through the narrative, which include: Jewish peoplehood, as expressed through the themes of covenant, commandedness, chosenness; leadership qualities; and the settling of the land of Israel. The goal is to ground Jewish identity in Jewish literacy, as an attempt at developing a relationship with the Biblical narrative and finding meaning may shape personal identities, as knowledge leads to good character and values development…
We will become part of the interpretive tradition, delve deeper into the central narrative of the Jewish people, and develop a love for the study of Torah!
By actively studying the narratives and questioning their relevance, the students are enabled to ponder the most important query of all (the reason for teaching these courses altogether): on what level do I want to be a part of this people? How am I going to take the lessons I’ve learned from this text I’m engaging and apply them to my civil responsibilities, my interactions with others, my life goals?
Bible study as a vehicle for identity building
The course is catered to students without strong backgrounds; though they may be beginners regarding their knowledge, they are invited into an age-appropriate world in which they are allowed to question the existence of and their personal relationship with God. Most importantly, while studying Biblical stories and becoming familiar with this primary Jewish text, they are also invited to critique, and commend, the behaviors of the Bible’s central characters.
From the very beginning, in class discussions review the facts of the story but always push the students further. Students also keep a journal as a way to process both intellectual and emotional responses to the stories and the questions they raise for us. What do we learn from different characters’ behaviors. Why does God ask early Biblical characters what they’ve done? Were the punishments in the Garden justified? Does Cain learn his lesson? Was Noah truly sin-free? What template does the first monotheist, Abraham, set for us in our relationship with God? Was Isaac a leader? And more. The Bible, as our collective narrative, is a great source for values and models of human interaction with their fellow man and God.
The characters are three dimensional and therefore relatable. In both their presentations and their final project, students need to interact on a deeper level with a Biblical character. For their presentations they must study the character in terms of his/her life, purpose, actions, etc. with the express purpose of teaching their classmates. For their final project, they spend seven weeks studying and summarizing the character’s life. They are also responsible for discussing the character in relation to the people around them, how they treat their environment, their interaction with God, the choices they make, etc. Lastly, they must explain why they chose this particular patriarch or matriarch to write about; what can I learn from this character? How can studying this character influence my life and how I’d like to interact with the people around me, my environment, God, etc.?
Flat, iconic models, such as comic book heroes, are surreal and – their role model status is – unattainable. Biblical characters are made human upon analyzing each character’s behavior, and critiquing his or her action(s). Heroes, of any kind, have long-required relatable traits in order to lend some use (i.e. a lesson learned, a moral understood) to readers. As much as I would like to help people in this world, I cannot leap over tall buildings and run faster than a speeding bullet. However, I can welcome people into my home, as Abraham did, or accept the consequences of my actions with some grace, as Moses did, and/ or stand up for what I believe in, as Yael did.
The book of Genesis can be seen not only as the beginning of human history, but also as a study of the family unit. These early-recorded families, admittedly, are dysfunctional by contemporary standards. However, by looking at how they interact and the decisions they make, we can try and evaluate their viability as role models. Critiquing what these characters do in particular instances does not preclude learning invaluable lessons from the lives they led.
The nature of our time requires that any Biblical Survey course go beyond the mere debate of divine writ versus manmade inspiration. The assertion should be that its cast of characters – heroine and outcast alike – can become guides for who we want to be. It is our job to study these inherited texts and eke out the potential secrets of coexistence and humanity. Without the knowledge of these basic Biblical stories – origins shared by the monotheistic religions and referenced throughout pop culture – students have no way of accessing this potential fountain of moral guidance. The culmination of a process that allows students to constantly analyze, reflect, and internalize the narratives and characters they are studying, is an effective way for students to create their identity based on literacy.