The year was 1982. I was studying in Jerusalem for the year and my roommate invited me to join him on one of his visits to an elderly recent immigrant from the Soviet Union now living in an absorption center. When we arrived, I was introduced to the elderly gentleman, who told me that his name was Mr. Morehdin (although I suspected that the name was not his original one). While he had a difficult life in the Soviet Union, having spent time in Siberia, he chose to share with us that day how he survived a Nazi concentration camp. One day a Nazi guard summoned him, having heard that he was Talmud scholar. The guard had been told that there were disparaging statements in the Talmud about gentiles, and even laws discriminating between gentiles and Jews in civil matters.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan were two giant Buddha statues, each well over 100 feet tall, that survived nearly 1500 years until they were obliterated by the Taliban in 2001. The explicit motive of the destruction was extreme Islamic iconoclasm. Almost as soon as the explosions were broadcast worldwide, I raised the obvious connections to Deuteronomy 12:You are to demolish, yes, demolish, all the [sacred] places where the nations that you are dispossessing served their gods, on the high hills and on the mountains and beneath every luxuriant tree; you are to wreck their altars, you are to smash their standing-pillars, their Asherot you are to burn with fire, and the carved-images of their gods, you are to cut-to-shreds—so that you cause their name to perish from that place!

In the instruction of Biblical or Rabbinic texts, it is quite common for teachers to experience apparent conflicts between the values arising from the texts and the prevailing values of their students. Teachers may feel torn between their loyalty to Jewish tradition that they are expected to impart and their personal and/or cultural identification with the students entrusted to their care. It is my contention and experience that the sharper or more painful the apparent conflict between the values of a text and the values of students, the greater the educational potential. However, teachers need to carefully consider how their own value-orientational ambivalence is playing a role in the educational dissonance—are we really dealing with “troubling texts,” or are we dealing with troubling troubles with texts?

I’ve been teaching for forty years, mostly to day school graduates. And I’ve noticed something surprising: very few of them have had real educational experiences exploring who God is—or what kind of relationship we’re meant to have with Him. They’re taught about Judaism, Torah, Halakha—but not God.

I won’t explore why that’s the case here, but I do want to talk about the consequences.

We live in a world shaped by beliefs. Beliefs build our reality. They can uplift and energize us—or drain and depress us.