Hanan Alexander is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Haifa. He has been Visiting Professor and Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and the University of California (Berkeley, CA), and his book Reclaiming Goodness: Education and the Spiritual Quest won the National Jewish Book Award in 2001. He is a member of the editorial board of Jewish Educational Leadership.

Hanan Alexander recently released his new book, Reimagining Liberal Education: Affiliation and Inquiry in Democratic Schooling (Bloomsbury, 2014). Jewish Educational Leadership is pleased to present an interview with him.

JEL: In brief, what is your book about?

It’s about what it means to be educated from the perspective of an ancient tradition – like ours, for example – and at the same time to believe in an open, liberal and democratic society.

JEL: What’s the problem you are trying to solve?

In classical, liberal political theory (based on the thinking of Immanuel Kant), the idea is that there are values that, like mathematics, are universal – independent of culture, personal experience, or tradition. They emanate from our capacity to reason, and education is about cultivating that capacity to reason. That creates a set of beliefs about democratic society, the most important of which is that to be a democratic citizen means to be an autonomous, rational person. Every person is able to make their own decisions based on their innate rational structures. The difficulty for a person of tradition is that according to Kant, everyone has the same rational structures, and the rules – like mathematical rules – are the same, so that even though each of us is autonomous we should all be making the same decisions. People of tradition, however, believe that there are sources of values other than ourselves – God, halakhah, tradition – to which we have some kind of obligation, and these are not dependent on reason. In the classical, Kantian, liberal view, you have to leave your tradition at the door. Many of us have experienced that in very practical ways – Christmas trees, other kinds of public ceremonies which are ostensibly neutral, banning of religious garb in French schools, taking tests on holidays in university – all of which are ways in which that kind of liberalism is a lot less pluralistic than it purports to be. That’s not really pluralism – it is pluralism only if everyone makes the same choices!

I am looking to explore a different model of liberalism, called diversity liberalism, which is more open to people who come from a world of tradition. The father of this kind of thinking is a famous Oxford philosopher by the name of Isaiah Berlin, who happened to be Jewish, who believed that the world is made up of a bunch of different incommensurate cultures – cultures which don’t have the same language and values, and which don’t necessarily agree with one another. The task of liberal society is to allow all these cultures to coexist even in their disagreement. Even further, I am looking to develop an educational model that will help educate toward diversity liberalism.

That, however, makes certain kinds of demands on tradition, for in order to be able to live in a society like that one has to be willing to engage in dialogue with those whose views are very different from your own if you want to figure out how to live together. In order to be able to talk to people who are different, and who may have views which are different from mine, I have to be able to listen. So my real question is how to conceive tradition so that it can be in conversation with others who are different from me.

So it’s a two-sided problem: imagining a liberalism which is open to tradition and a tradition which is open to liberalism. And then to think about what kind of pedagogy can help foster both of those. This kind of pedagogy I call pedagogy of difference, and the basic premise is that in order to be able to accept someone who is very different from me I need to know myself. I need to accept myself, my heritage, my tradition, where I come from. I cannot accept someone else if I am afraid because I don’t know who I am. But in order to really know myself deeply I have to really know the other person and how we are different.

To accomplish this, every educational process has to expose our students to at least two traditions of thought. Like many day schools – one, a tradition deeply steeped in our faith, and second, exposure to a secular, modern, so-called “enlightened” tradition of academic thought. Sometimes those traditions agree and sometimes they are in tension with each other, and learning to be open to that tension is a great example of what I call “pedagogy of difference.”

JEL: Do you sense that this is happening already or is this something you are trying to foster?

Like John Dewey said, there is nothing so practical as a good theory. I don’t believe that we have a good theory. For example, in contemporary American liberalism, most Jews believe that they have to check their tradition at the door. The rampant assimilation we experience is an expression of that. Jews tend to vote liberal, and the reason they do so is that they believe that liberal America will accept them. What they haven’t woken up to is the fact that that liberalism doesn’t accept them unless they cease becoming themselves in some very important ways. For American Jews it is important that we develop an alternate theory of liberalism. It’s important for Israelis too, because the universal liberalism of Kant is not as tolerant as one might expect of the idea of a Jewish state, or any other state devoted to a particular people or national culture, because on that theory of liberalism the state is not allowed to have a special relationship with one group or tradition!

So a different liberalism is critical for the health of democracy as well as for Judaism. This gives us two very important things. First, this treats what we sometimes call “general” or “common” education as an equal to or Jewish education. They are parallel traditions, each with its strengths and weaknesses and both are needed in order to have a democratic society. It opens the question of why is it necessary to be educated in faith in order to be a democratic citizen.

JEL: So your concept can be applied equally regardless of the school’s denomination, each one defining tradition differently?

My position works for anyone who positions himself or herself somewhere in the center of the spectrum. It would not work for those on the extreme, intolerant side of the religious spectrum, as they reject dialogue with the other as they believe that they have an exclusive on truth. It would also not work for those on the other extreme, the religious left or the ultra-secular. Both of them are totalistic and closed. Classical Reform Judaism, which adopted this ultra-liberal position, would probably not be conducive to what I am proposing. Today’s Reform, however, is much more open to dialogue and debate, and has moved toward the center. So, too, with Orthodoxy. Most forms of modern and centrist Orthodoxy would all fit within this broad swath of what I am talking about, and even some ultra-Orthodox positions (many Habad institutions, for example). Conservative Judaism surely tries to position in the center and would also be open to this.

JEL: Imagine a school built on these principles. What would the pedagogy look like?

I think that there are already schools which do this. Let’s take, for example, a Bible lesson. The lesson would look at a text from a number of different perspectives, including from the framework of traditional Rabbinic commentary, but would not be restricted to the idea that there is only one meaning to the text (e.g., Rashi). Even the approach of Nehama Leibowitz, where you would compare a variety of different approaches, is already beginning to move in the direction of pedagogy of difference, because you are engaging in the possibility of a number of different ways to interpret the text. That begins to crystalize the student’s critical capacity. To the extent that you can imagine looking outside of the Jewish tradition (which Nehama also did on occasion) – looking at critical historical sources or how other religious traditions look at this text, that would enhance the ability to look at things from alternative points of view. There is obviously a developmental side to all of this, which I am setting aside for now.

Or take, for example, the study of Jewish law. In principle, a comparison of Jewish to American law, or a comparison of halakhah to British law or Ottoman law, are all ways of introducing an alternative point of view to recognize that there is more than one way to understand things.

JEL: For many, Jewish education is about bringing people to some kind of commitment. Do you think that presenting the Jewish position as one viable alternative amongst many will bring about greater commitment, or do we run the risk of diminishing commitment as a result?

First, a clarification. I don’t believe that the Jewish tradition is just another alternative; if I did believe that then I wouldn’t be doing what I am doing. I wouldn’t teach my kids to be Jewish, I wouldn’t devote my career and life to the education of young Jews if I didn’t believe that it wasn’t the most valuable thing to do. It’s not that I think that this is one alternative among many; I think that it’s the best alternative. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t very smart people out there who are committed to traditions that they also think are the best, and I want to be able to live with those people, to make them my neighbors and friends. In order to do so I need to cultivate my own deep commitment to my faith, and to be open to conversations with others. If we think that people aren’t otherwise already doing the kinds of engagement that I am describing, then we are simply fooling ourselves. It presents itself to them every day. If we present a rigid, closed system incapable of engaging in that conversation, it is not clear to me that that position encourages commitment at all; I believe that it has a strong capacity to diminish commitment – at least the kind of intelligent commitment that is the most valuable and interesting for an educated person. Is there a potential for a tragic side? Yes. It is possible that I can teach with all the love and passion that I can muster and that my children and students will choose to do something else, but they might choose something else anyway, even without that exposure. On the other hand, if I teach them how to engage the other and incorporate his or her best ideas into my way of life, while maintaining loyalty to my own heritage, I lessen the chance that my students and children will feel the need to seek another way of life outside of Judaism to live in the wider world.

JEL: What would the graduate of such a school look like?

The graduate is someone who is deeply committed to our tradition, as he or she has come to understand it in the context of the interpretation within this framework, but at the same time has a deep respect and commitment to engaging other people in the society and learning from them. So at the same time the person is profoundly committed and profoundly open. The term I use for this is openness with roots. In order to be open you have to be grounded, otherwise openness is meaningless.

And I think that openness with roots changes the roots – it changes the view that you have about your own tradition and being grounded in tradition changes the way in which you engage with others. I would like to see more faith schools in democratic society, not fewer, but more faith schools which are engaged in conversation with the other.

JEL: One of the critiques of the Rambam’s approach to philosophy and the demands that he places on the individual is that very few people have the intellectual capacity of the Rambam. What you describe works for you, or for other really smart people like yourself, to enhance and deepen their commitment, but what about for those students who don’t have the capacity to engage on this sophisticated level?

When Rambam says that every Jew should come to a rational appreciation of the tradition, the Rambam is measuring the tradition against the standard of Aristotelian philosophy. On this, I don’t think that Rambam is correct, and I am much more in line with R. Yehudah Halevi than with the Rambam. I actually believe in a view of ancient tradition, the authority of which is equally – if not even more powerful – than our rational capacities. We have a text, and we have a lot of evidence that that text goes back a long time, and it says more or less the same thing today when we read it on Shabbat morning that it said a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, three thousand years ago, and we even have evidence that it said it four and five thousand years ago. It’s a really old text, and we have a mechanism in our tradition that has been extraordinarily effective at communicating that text and passing it down. From one generation to the next. Remarkable, almost unbelievable.

It is hubris of modern rationalism that my current thinking, on the basis of what Kant thinks sits in my head, is a more reliable source than my very ancient tradition. When my children ask me why I believe in God, my answer is that I have a Torah that tells me so, and I know that because I received that Torah from my parents. And they received that Torah from their parents. That is a powerful source of knowledge, and I don’t believe that that kind of tradition needs to be measured against the kind of rationalism that the Rambam brought to the table. So the criticism of Rambam doesn’t apply to what I’m suggesting. But I do think that you are right, because there is complexity here that many young people will find difficulty with because it doesn’t present our tradition in simplistic terms. It presents our tradition in complex conversation with other traditions.

My argument is that every single young person does this anyway. The only question is whether they do it well or badly. A lot of young people do it badly, in part because we don’t teach them how to do it well. I am arguing that if we think carefully and thoughtfully about how to construct that conversation, with a firm belief in the moral, ethical, and religious significance of our tradition, we give them reasons to think that the tradition is valuable. We engage in the conversation about the significance of this and how it sits in conversation with others. I believe that the other trajectory, the one of total rejection – I don’t think that’s what God expects of us. Closing ourselves off to others dehumanizes them and debases the Torah.