While in school settings we regularly evaluate educational experiences and the instructors who provide them, in this area of synagogue adult education there is a rarely any formal assessment. Every year, I travel for such weekends, and the educator in me asks three central, evaluative questions:   

• What is the educational worth of the lecture circuit?  
• What do visiting scholars see as the educational benefits of these programs?
• What can we do to improve these programs and to integrate this weekend learning into the lifeblood of the synagogue while boosting attendance at ongoing classes?

Reflecting on these questions and the issue of assessment, we turn to the words of Isa Aron, in Becoming a Congregation of Learners:   

Visitors to congregations renowned for their learning are often impressed by the profusion of programs and activities. As a result, they focus on the number of participants, how the staff is recruited, and how funds for these initiatives were raised. Rarely, however, do they ask the more important questions: What motivates members to participate? How did these learning activities come to be seen as defining features of the congregation? Concentrating on the programs themselves, rather than on how they originated, evolved, and became established, has led many to the erroneous conclusion that synagogues can be changed by the replication of successful programs. It is true that creative and effective learning opportunities are necessary, but they are hardly sufficient.[1]   

How do scholars-in-residence (SIR) contribute to a culture of learning within a congregation? If they are necessary but not sufficient in creating such a culture, then what else can be done to augment such programs so that congregational learning becomes transformational in the lives of those who participate? In order to answer these questions, we will examine the nature of these programs through the eyes of scholars themselves, through those who host scholars, and through educational literature that helps us understand why and how adults learn.   

The Benefits   

            Scholars-in-residence bring out the crowds. They are often master teachers, as well as specialists, who have important research and insights to share with us in their respective fields, in contrast to many synagogue rabbis who are generalists. We gain broader vistas than might be offered locally when hearing rabbis and educators who have traveled the Jewish world, both literally and in book form. Many inspire us to challenge ourselves or our current notions about particular subjects. Scholars in Jewish law help us grow our understanding and observance of halakha, while historians transplant us into the past. Middle East experts and sociologists can offer us perspectives on current events, Jewish sociological trends and demographics that seem murky because we may not be sufficiently informed or up-to-date. On a gender front within the Orthodox movement, some synagogues have little exposure to women who are learned and taking leadership roles in the community at large. Female SIRs can offer a future aspirational glimpse for the girls in our pews.   

            Like a good book, scholars can take us to worlds we have never visited, be they in the realm of human experience, Biblical or legal exegesis, or pages from our history books. I distinctly remember a speaker with special needs who spoke in my local synagogue about navigating her difficult world as a committed Jew. Her words, indeed her very presence, had an immense impact on her listeners. No doubt, the exposure to a universe outside our limited experience impacts our inner universe.   

What Visiting Scholars Think   

            In exploring the educational benefits of SIR weekends with some well-known scholars from a range of fields and denominations, it seems clear that exposure to big ideas, different perspectives and new methods of presentation serve as important educational benefits that such scholars provide. One scholar cautioned, however, that, “The label ‘scholar’ is abused and cheapened when it is used for, say, a layperson describing the workings of his organization….”   

            Those on the lecture circuit easily identified important benefits of being an educator who enters a congregation with a different perspective. One female historian who teaches in this capacity regularly observed that the voice of an outsider can challenge local assumptions: “Ayn navi b’ero” (No one is a prophet in his own city). In other words, being a scholar allows you to be a prophet in someone else’s city. It gives you a voice to say what you may not be able to say as directly in your own place of residence. “But it’s not just the “new” voice.  It can be a valuable experience.” In other words, there is inherent value in the promotion and engagement of a subject outside of the novelty factor. New and deeper learning is taking place.   

Another expert asserts, “People walk away stimulated, engaged, and more knowledgeable.” He bases this not on immediate reactions to his presentations alone but through the correspondence he has afterwards with participants and the level of conversation that his talks stimulate. Within synagogue life, the rabbi is not expected to be an expert in all realms of Jewish knowledge. The SIR offers an opportunity to go beyond homiletics and classical text learning and explore less traditional subjects like the Dead Sea Scrolls, Holocaust denial, parenting, Middle East policy, synagogue transformation or Jewish identity, as just a few examples.   

Many SIRS believe that weekend learning programs offer a good bridge between the scholarly and lay communities because academics come out of the ivory tower and often focus on more practical or applied wisdom. In the words of a visiting scholar:   

My weekends tend to be focused on how synagogues can transform themselves. My first talk puts synagogue life into a historical and sociological perspective. But my second and third presentations get more practical, showing how services can be more interactive and then doing some text study to show that the new modalities are not out of synch with Jewish teaching. My final session is a hands-on board workshop to put the leadership onto a path of transformation.   

With this trajectory of study and integration into the life of the synagogue, this rabbi feels that his presentations are designed to challenge those in synagogue life to behave differently, and thus are a lot more than educational entertainment. They have the power to change synagogue life.   

In this sense, the program has important benefits for the speaker as well as the listener since it enables those from the world of ideas to see what is happening within “live” Jewish communities, forcing scholars out of their comfort zone. A number of scholars interviewed said that their visits to communities help them try out topics and get to know the landscape of American Jewry “from the trenches.” Consequently, most of the educators interviewed felt that such weekends were a learning experience for them as well.   

When asked if they perceive their role as an educator or an entertainer, most felt that a combination of the two was critical. Dry, academic learning did not make for engaging talks. One academic said that as he began his speaking career, he was taken aside by a well-known rabbi and told that he should learn a lot of jokes, and then (“when the audience isn’t looking”) throw in a little Torah. Even with the humor, he shared that he is very much an educator and not an entertainer.    

While as a teacher I understand…that an audience that laughs may learn better, all of my lectures have solid intellectual and academic content.  Most American Jews today are college educated and expect to be talked up to, not talked down to.   

He finds that in teaching his subject, one of the educational benefits is clarifying wrong assumptions or information in his field.  He believes that as a result of his teaching, he has “stimulated listeners to read more, learn more and to appreciate that the past carries lessons for the present and future.”   

SIRs who do not take their audience seriously or condescend to them have little chance of making a positive impression or an educational impact.  While most synagogue members may not be experts in the scholar’s subject matter, they are, nevertheless, usually highly-educated and thoughtful and resent when a speaker “dumbs down” his or her talks. They look forward to and expect sophisticated presentations. Another lecturer said that he repeatedly hears participants say that they are “starved” or ” thirst” for learning since they are not getting this particular style of study in their synagogue. “If they’re hungry for more after an SIR comes,” that is sufficient justification for the educational worth of such programming.   

Stimulating Thought or Challenging the Rabbi?   

One scholar believes that as an SIR, he is there to challenge the norm but also aware that when he leaves, people have to live with that norm. “I’m there to shake things up.” In that sense, he understands that his presence may present a challenge to the rabbi. On the one hand, he is there to strengthen Jewish feeling and commitment that will potentially assist the rabbi in his own long-term goals for his congregation; on the other hand, he believes that the biggest challenge of such programs is their potential to undermine the current professional leadership in a synagogue. “When a person says to me, in front of the rabbi, ‘It’s such a breath of fresh air to have you here,’ I understand the criticism he is also offering of the rabbi.” To overcome this challenge, this SIR makes a concerted effort to praise the rabbi in specific detail before he begins his presentations in order that the congregation value their leadership. “The trick is not to make the rabbi look bad.”   

Visiting scholars warned of situations where the SIR is brought in to rock the boat and intentionally undermine the rabbi or the board on an issue. To illustrate, one SIR shared a weekend he labeled a “disaster” since he was brought in to offer his guidance on women’s issues in a synagogue whose rabbi was ultra-conservative when it came to gender-based policies. The synagogue clearly wanted and expected him to present the more liberal position he generally takes with his own congregation. To add to the tension, the rabbi of the congregation was not present for that Shabbat, and this SIR clearly felt that he was being used to create dissension between the rabbi and his constituents. He advises SIRs to keep away from such situations by exploring the expectations beforehand and any unarticulated assumptions of those bringing in scholars to speak. A scholar can inadvertently step into a quagmire of complication where the voice of an outsider is being used as leverage or ammunition, an unenviable position.  The scholar should make sure that there is no agenda behind the invitation.   

Unwanted Expectations   

A number of SIRS were also uncomfortable offering homiletics in the Shabbat sermon as is often requested of visiting scholars. Understandably, the timing of the sermon offers the maximum opportunity for exposure to the entire congregation with the hopes that the initial talk will inspire people to come back to later sessions. A number of speakers commented, however, that they were not interested in offering sound-bytes but in giving proper lectures in their expertise not constrained by the 20 minute time limit or by the mandate to give a sermon on the Torah portion when they are really specialists in an unrelated field. “Let the rabbi do what he does best, and let me do what I do best.”   

In the words of another academic,   

…I think shuls sometimes misuse scholars by asking them to give the derasha (sermon). Their own rabbis are trained and skilled in that; an academician often is not particularly good at it. Why not have him/her teach…? Isn’t it a waste of an opportunity to hear what they couldn’t get otherwise?   

The time limits of a sermon or the request to speak on the weekly Torah portion can go beyond the scholar’s comfort level and may not be a good use of his or her talents and background. One SIR resolved this by insisting that he speak after Kiddush and give a full hour presentation without the distraction of food and fidgeting before services are over.   

            At issue are two separate challenges: timing and duration are one issue and should be made absolutely clear beforehand. Some scholars are only told how long to speak for in any given slot on the day they are actually speaking. They may have been asked to address a complex subject and prepared accordingly only to find that they were given a mere fifteen minutes for the subject’s explication. Some scholars are also not sufficiently sensitive about timing and delay the service’s end by half an hour, which can throw off the schedule of other activities taking place in the synagogue like day-care, youth services and catering.  The other challenge lies in style and content; those who determine the SIRs for the year often have strong intellectual interests that may or may not be shared by other members of the congregation or sometimes have scholarly friends or relatives and arrange for them to visit and speak but who do not have wide appeal.  Such speakers may be too academic, too insular or too political for a particular congregation. It can be very hard to “get it right” in terms of the proper level and topic, as will be mentioned later.   

Financial Issues   

Every scholar I spoke to was financially motivated to join the ranks of SIRs since the lecture circuit provides an important supplemental income. Most (but not all) found, to their surprise, that even though they were driven by financial concerns, they really enjoyed the experience:   

I went into this because my university doesn’t pay well, and it’s expensive to live. I had a wife and three kids. When I started 30 years ago I was making $11,000 at a time when synagogues wanted to know about liturgy, identity, synagogue transformation and leadership. I could do that and I needed the money. But eventually I really began to love meeting people. Wherever I went I asked people about Jewish life and their communities. I walked away having learned a lot about Jewish life in the country. I felt that it was part of my research. It was like having a focus group wherever I went. On Saturday nights I would have focus groups on spirituality because people don’t like to talk about spirituality.  But they started.   

The financial dimension of SIR weekends,however, has its own challenges. Few SIR programs involve formal contracts. As a result, some speakers expressed frustration when congregations haggle over speaker fees or want a discount as a non-profit. “I only work for non-profits,” said one female lecturer.   

I find the way that some people try to get something on the cheap is personally demeaning. Honestly, I’m less willing to do the traveling and put in the energy if a rabbi or synagogue member argues about the honorarium beforehand. After all, I am giving up my whole Shabbat at home with my family. I happen to know that most of my male colleagues are making the same thing or more than I’ve asked for and have spoken in the same synagogues. Why should I teach for less when other synagogues are happy to accommodate my fee? If the fee is too expensive then find an alternative.  And please don’t bad mouth me since the Jewish community is small. If you don’t tell people how expensive I am, I won’t tell them how cheap you are.   

Another scholar added, “I discovered that it takes the same energy to give a $3000 lecture as a $500 lecture.” He is eager to investigate whether this is also true of $30,000 lectures but has not yet been invited to try. One scholar pointed out that he feels it should be standard practice to pay the scholar immediately after the weekend – in keeping with the Torah mandate to pay a worker upon completion of a job – and in private.   

The only thing worse than being handed a check in front of other people on a Saturday night or Sunday is not being handed a check at all and having to call weeks later (sometimes more than once) to find out where the payment is. Sometimes when we use the term ‘honorarium’ it sounds like it’s optional rather than a fee for services rendered.   

One scholar was more blunt about the financial aspect, “Scholars want to earn money – that is their motivation – so where is the educational animus?” He believes that despite the financial motivation that drives many to the lecture circuit, the top speakers really do care about doing an excellent job and penetrating the minds of their respective audiences. Despite this, he believes that the “money is also an issue now” because he is getting fewer and fewer requests given the economic downturn.   

How are fees for such weekends determined? Some synagogues have a flat rate, which is generally the most equitable approach. Even then, negotiations take place for speakers who generally charge more than the flat rate and are sought after around the country. Most speakers have flat rates as well, but there is often little communication in the synagogue world about what SIR fees should generally be. There is no assumed “going-rate,” which can lead to disappointment, discomfort and disrespect in extreme cases. One scholar recommends that synagogues ask for individual rates up-front rather than review all of the logistics and then dangle the honorarium at the end. Any mismatch of expectations can then be clarified from the outset. 
   

In addition to the financial issues from the scholars’ viewpoint, certain physical conditions enable visiting scholars to feel comfortable when traveling but are not always directly articulated or automatically provided. Scholars appreciate a warm welcome and interesting conversation. One scholar shared that once his host was unable, for medical reasons, to hear him speak. Upon the scholar’s return to the house, the host asked for a summation. The scholar began to share his presentation but was quickly stopped: “Ah, just tell me your opening joke.” Not everyone is interested in scintillating conversation.   

More than one scholar expressed that some basic physical requirements are not always accommodated or obvious to the hosting congregation:  a private bedroom, a private, attached bathroom, comfortable flying arrangements (particularly if the flights are at difficult times or significant distances from home), thoughtfulness to dietary restrictions and travel times. Many speakers would appreciate being able to bring a spouse when airline tickets are necessary since they spend so many Shabbatot on the road.   

Scholars are generally expected to speak a number of times and are approached continuously over the course of a weekend on a private basis. While informal contact is important in making connections to the community, it can get overwhelming. One young scholar told me that he left the circuit for this particular reason. It was physically and psychically too draining to have no Shabbat of his own. Consequently, it is important that someone ‘protects’ private space and time to make sure that SIRs have a chance to rest. Late night meals followed by private consultations can be very demanding. It can be challenging to be “on” even when not speaking and maintain the requisite energy to do a good job lecturing, which is the primary reason for the visit. Some SIRs complained that because they were brought in to a community at considerable expense, they are expected to be “on call” for the entire Shabbat or weekend with hardly a break. A person who recently hosted a speaker in his community confided to me that this scholar visiting from Israel had not a minute to herself the whole weekend. Before he went to synagogue, he complained that there were a few people he didn’t even know speaking with her in his dining room early Shabbat morning before services. Visiting scholars often lose their Shabbat rest in an attempt to create a meaningful Shabbat experience for others. They may agree to that but also find themselves drained of the energy to do a good job for their primary speaking responsibilities.   

In terms of unarticulated expectations, I was witness years ago to a remarkable conversation at my kitchen table when a well known SIR stayed with our family for the weekend. After Shabbat, he received a phone call to our home number from a resident of the community who was not a member of the synagogue in which this scholar spoke. The caller was clearly sharing personal details of his marital situation with the SIR on the assumption that wisdom in one area spilled over to others. The visiting scholar, obviously trying to balance a genuine display of compassion while maintaining his own professional authenticity, told the caller that he was very sorry about his difficult personal situation but that he did not know him at all and was not trained in psychology, and thus unable to give him the advice he sought. The caller persisted. The scholar maintained his position, and the call ended rather abruptly after reaching an impasse.   

Another unarticulated expectation of the SIR may lie with the congregational rabbi hosting the weekend. The congregational rabbi often views the scholar’s visit as a good time to talk shop or sometimes vent steam to a colleague. The rabbinate can be a lonely business and the counsel or simple company of another professional is a welcome opportunity for camaraderie. These conversations are obviously not part of the formal understanding of the SIR role but can consume a lot of the scholar’s time. Most scholars welcome this aspect of the weekend, but felt it may best be accommodated by a call before the weekend to establish an official time to speak, rather than the midnight hour on Friday night.   

Despite some of the challenges , most scholars felt that these weekends are wonderful ways to see former students, colleagues and friends around the country  or the world and rekindle connections, in addition to getting to know new communities. 

Hosting a Scholar   

Of those I interviewed who host SIR weekends, it seems common for many congregations to host scholars between 4-8 times annually, usually every 6-8 weeks. Because scholars may be traveling from Israel or are only available at certain times of the year, some synagogues go from feast to famine in terms of their SIR programs. Adult education committees often ask scholars a year in advance.  Yet they then become tangled in date requests because of synagogue events like bar and bat mitzvot or are subject to the academic calendar and conference schedules of academics and rabbis. While congregations often wonder why a glut of scholars appear in a synagogue and then for months the pulpit is occupied only by the rabbi, this has more to do with managing difficult travel schedules than intentional design.    

Many synagogues budget about $10,000-$20,000 per year to facilitate SIR programs, but most claim that they have to do special fund-raising on top of their current budget to accommodate specific scholars or specific programs, such as a world-famous figure or having a SIR for Shavuot, a longer holiday that brings up the cost of the scholar to the community. With the economic downturn, a synagogue in a large metropolitan area that used to host about 8 scholars a year had just 2 in the past year because of financial factors. Many scholars who are well sought after are simply out of the budget range for many congregations. It will be interesting to see if, over time, congregations pull back and host fewer per year because of the cost. Some scholars claim that they, too, have lost what was once a healthy supplemental income because they have had either cancellations, postponements or fewer requests to speak because of financial constraints. One popular circuit lecturer lowered his speaking fee significantly this past year after receiving fewer requests. Many, however, feel that they cannot afford to lower their honoraria because they are speaking less than they once did. One rabbi believes that these programs are in decline:   

I observed that already in the 90s the number of programs has gone down. People don’t want to come out, even if you’re good. People are over-booked. Synagogues should not be in the business of keeping busy people busier. What we should be doing is quality programs. I only get the 50-and-up crowd because these are people who grew up doing these, but by Sunday morning, it’s a small crowd. It used to be hundreds. Now lots of stuff is on the Internet, and we are less important in their lives.   

 One hosting rabbi commented that these programs are important because they stimulate and ferment ideas. He believes, as did other hosts, that a major challenge is finding a scholar who appeals across the entire congregation and identifying scholars with innovative and challenging ideas that help shape communal thinking on important issues. In the words of this rabbi,   

When a community has various constituencies and age cohorts, it is not always possible to find SIR’s that will be equally attractive to all. I believe that there is a value in annually having at least one woman, someone who relates well to youth, someone who is more scholarly, someone who can speak authoritatively but not with bias about Israeli issues, someone who is active in general society and brings a religious perspective to bear, etc.   

When asked if such programming has an impact on adult education programs during the week, most felt that it did not because their mid-week classes generally did not have significant attendance.   

…it’s hard to get a lot of people out on a weeknight, for either a class or a special lecture. Doing it over Shabbat gives us the opportunity to provide excellent educational programming to the community, achieve economies of scale, so to speak, by taking advantage of the fact that people like to be in shul, around friends, etc., on any given Shabbat, and we can maximize face time– not just with the scholar, but with the shul. It also provides us with the opportunity to introduce the scholar to our community. Having a communal meal with the scholar provides the scholar and the community intimate time with each other, not just lecture time, which can be impersonal at times.     

Did the roster of scholars diminish in any way from attendance at regularly scheduled classes? Have scholar-in-residence programs challenged some of the fundamental notions we have about what continuing education should look like? Have sporadic Shabbat lectures by “big names” replaced a more solid, ongoing commitment to Torah study? With the financial cost and the potential cost to ongoing learning, it is fair to ask some difficult questions about the lasting educational worth of scholar-in-residence programs, if only so that synagogue rabbis and adult education committees can be more realistic in educational goal setting. Virtually all scholars and hosting rabbis I spoke to for this article said that, if anything, having outside scholars spurred people to more learning rather than less learning. And yet, given what we know about how and why adults continue learning, we may need to shape these programs in such a way that their impact is more extensive and enduring.   

Why Adults Learn   

            Adults view Jewish study as having multiple benefits. In an informal poll of a group of my own adult learners, they identified both intrinsic and extrinsic goals that brought them back to the classroom. They attend classes to:   

• Create community
• To fulfill an obligation to study (the mitzva of Talmud Torah)
• Cement friendships
• Encounter spirituality
• Develop resources – tools for future knowledge
• Strengthen Jewish identity
• Use hard-earned time well
• Build Jewish confidence
• Be better parents
• Exercise the mind
• Stimulate intellectual needs
• Answer questions
• Forge meaning
• Manage transitional times

While many of these goals can be accomplished through SIR programs, the majority of them require intensive, interactive and on-going commitment.   

             The goal of most sustained, regular learning is to feel inspired by classical Jewish literature and its messages, to gain mastery of textual intricacies, or to be equipped with the requisite information to observe laws and rituals properly. Being able to read and to relate to texts creates a touch-point with ultimate questions and offers a nexus of language; it connects us to a living past, offers us a way to connect with those around us and offers a language of connection to those not yet born.   

Text is our language of meaning, continuity and depth. It is platform and lodestar, moral compass and anchor.  Barry Holtz, in his introduction to Back to the Sources, contends that Jewish text study leads to self-understanding:   

These are not only the books that one reads and rereads and sets on the shelf. They live, too, in the context of hours of human repartee, of struggle and illumination in community. Part of the great allure of study for Jews over the centuries must have some connection to this interpersonal domain. [2]   

In addition, the process of learning is about community building and nesting ideas within the context of relationships that will have enduring meaning over time. It is hard to achieve this over a weekend, but it can be stimulated though a weekend of study.   

On a personal rather than communal level, Roberta Louis Goodman and Betsy Dolgin Katz write in The Adult Jewish Education Handbook that:   

Learning is a way of strengthening one’s Jewish identity and connection to our tradition. Additionally, since much of Jewish learning is done with others, it augments community building. Through studying together, people get to know one another in a personal, often deep and meaningful way. These study experiences can lead to friendships as well as the formation of havurot that gather for celebrations, holiday observances, and the doing of ma’asim tovim – righteous deeds.[3]   

Professor of education Michael Rosenak, in his article on the educated Jew in Visions of Jewish Education, argues convincingly that although it seems quite fragile, “there is still a common cultural language, a kind of ‘plausibility structure’ among Jews.”[4] Part of the common language of Jews is, according to Rosenak, the “communal approach to the study of the sacred literature of Judaism.” We do this by exposing people to our “culture and spirit in a primary and foundational way.”[5] In other words, Jewish adult education is not only, or perhaps primarily, about self-discovery, as it is about creating a language of meaning with other people, those beside us, before us and those yet to be.   

The creation of community and identity require more than episodic inspiration. One and two year programs of adult study notably forge the kind of interactions and knowledge that many adults crave. Yet fewer and fewer people make the time for these classes, even those committed to the mitzva of Talmud Torah, on-going, regular Torah study.   

Dolgin-Katz and Goodman also sensitize us to the value that adults place in feeling both competent and confident in their Jewish lives and how adult education can help in that process.   

Learning can provide the skills and knowledge that augment an adult’s feelings of confidence as a Jew. Adults used to feeling competent in their work, relationships, special interests, volunteer roles, and family life want likewise to be confident in performing rituals in the home or synagogue, in prayer, in answering questions of non-Jewish friends or colleagues, and in grappling with difficult questions about life and death, good and evil, and purpose and direction. They want to be able to find resources and to use the tools that can help them access answers. Unfamiliar often with the vocabulary of Jewish life, and even less adept at understanding Hebrew or translating Hebrew texts, they still want to know enough to feel included in the Jewish venture.[6]   

Jews of all denominational streams want to know more on the path to doing more, or want to understand what they are currently doing within a historical or spiritual framework. They often lack the tools or resources to go it alone and benefit profoundly from the presence of a Jewish teacher/mentor in their lives. Adults beset by the illusion that growing up means knowing everything are relived to have people in their lives in multiple disciplines with whom they can confide and with whom they can seek guidance.   

Diane Tickton Schuster, author of Jewish Lives, Jewish Learning, believes that what prompts adult learning outside of the legal mandate to study is that something challenges previously held assumptions.   

When Jewish adults have disruptive or “disorienting” experiences that challenge previously held worldviews, they sometimes wonder if Judaism can help them to “understand” their situation in new ways. When these adults embark on new meaning-making, new learning can transform their view of themselves as Jews…As Jewish adults mature and grapple with pressing questions and ambiguities, they discover paradoxes in their thinking about Judaism and their lives as Jews…When Jewish adults are grappling with questions of meaning, they find it beneficial to engage in learning and discourse with other learners…[7]    

She divides adult students into what she calls five positions of knowledge:   

Silent knowers – Don’t know they have the right to know, or are not sure how to acquire knowledge, or shy away from learning.   

Received knowers – See knowledge as something they get from outside resources and depend on others to form opinions.   

Subjective knowers- Rely on personal experience as a basis for knowledge.    

Procedural knowers –  Trying to gain expertise and want to develop tools for knowing.   

Constructed knowers – Want to have ownership of the material through analysis and sharing knowledge with others.[8]   

Scholar-in-residence programs are excellent for silent and received knowers but fall short in most of the other categories. Those wanting to have first-hand experience, gain tools and mastery or feel ownership will not necessarily receive that from a visiting scholar’s presentation, although that scholar may stimulate them to make a longer-term commitment to learning and help them adjust their thinking on a particular Jewish idea. And perhaps this factor is something that scholars should take into account as they enter a community and regard one of their goals as encouraging future study.   

Few synagogues have repeat performances of the same scholar over multiple years but this may also help strengthen and deepen the learning process within a synagogue culture. The “variety show” approach of exposure to many thinkers may have less educational impact than deepening a congregation’s relationship to a few scholars. I personally know of no synagogue that employs this thinking.   

If the outside scholar has the ear of the congregation in a way that others may not, it may be incumbent upon the scholar to give congregants a charge: zil u’gmor, go out and learn. If adult education is there to make us competent, confident, spiritually open and better-practicing Jews then scholars may want to give more thought to shaping their presentations to accommodate these needs in more active ways. Make recommendations for further reading. Make sessions more interactive. Provide bibliographies. Encourage book groups and study sessions as a follow-up. Rabbis should leverage these learning opportunities with theme-based classes that continue the conversation and help transition people into more ongoing study. Use the scholar to speak to different age cohorts or special interest groups.  Few synagogues use visiting scholars to speak to teens and yet this population would greatly benefit from hearing exciting developments in the larger Jewish world. The worst outcome for such a weekend is for a listener to arrive at the conclusion: “So what?” instead of “Now what?” or feel inspired to grow and learn but have no ready address in which to do that.   

The popularity of the scholars-in-residence should not mask the need to ask and answer the difficult educational questions that such programs surface. The economic constraints may have a beneficial outcome in that synagogues may use fewer scholars but use them in more intensive and thoughtful ways as part of an ongoing investment in a theme or topic.  For example, a congregation may be asked to read a book that the SIR has written, have small book groups around the community to discuss the book. The scholar can then come into the community and share his or her thoughts on the topic and the weekend can be followed by classes on a related topic. One rabbi now comes into synagogues, gives talks but also spends a whole day with a board talking about synagogue transformation. When coupled with a charge, with preparation from the congregational rabbi before and follow-up, the scholar-in-residence program can help adults achieve their articulated and unarticulated learning goals and create a shared language of study across a community.   

One of the great benefits of visiting scholars is that they infuse a congregation with intellectual sophistication. One scholar worries that now that there are fewer of these programs, synagogues may drive themselves into intellectual irrelevance. He adds, “Synagogues shouldn’t be in the ‘want’ business, trying to figure out what people want. People don’t always know their own spiritual needs.  A skilled speaker can raise the level of what Judaism can provide them without them ever having asked for it.” The SIR weekend as a stand alone experience, risks turning scholarship into edutainment. But when congregations use the SIR platform to saturate people with new ideas, challenges, and future study and conversations opportunities, the synagogue becomes not only a place of prayer but a place where critical dialogue about Jewish life begins.   

Dr. Erica Brown is the scholar-in-residence for the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington. Her latest book is Confronting Scandal. She can be reached through her website: leadingwithmeaning.com. 

[1] Isa Aron, Becoming a Congregation of Learners (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2002), p..79-80.   

[2] Barry Holtz, Back to the Sources (New York: Touchstone, 1992), p. 19.   

[3] Roberta Louis Goodman and Betsy Dolgin Katz, The Adult Jewish Education Handbook (Springfield, NJ: A.R.E. Publishing, 1990).   

[4] Michael Rosenak, “Educated Jews: Common Element s,” Visions of Jewish Education, eds. Seymour Fox, Israel Scheffler, Daniel Marom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 192.    

[5] Ibid.   

[6] Goodman, Katz, The Adult Jewish Education Handbook   

[7] Diane Tickton Schuster, Jewish Lives, Jewish Learning (New York: UAHC Press, 2003), p.115.   

[8] Created by Diane Tickton Schuster as seen in Becoming a Congregation of Learners, pp. 180-181.

What If You Eliminate the Truth?

First, we can sometimes dismiss as impossible that which is actually true. As we then deal with “whatever is left,” we will already have lost that which we sought most.  The problem in giving examples of this is that readers may still reject them as “impossible,” and would dispute my assessment that we are struggling to find our way when we have already dismissed the truth.

Perhaps the following example is theoretical enough to allow me to make the point without raising any hackles: In my book, Murderer in the Mikdash, I portrayed a post-Messianic society in which not all problems had yet been solved, not all Jews were fully observant (or fully virtuous) and yet which was much closer to an ideal Jewish society than we have today.

Many, many readers were intensely uncomfortable—even distressed—by the portrayal; some even characterized it as a dystopia, as a sardonic suggestion that we would never find the perfect society.  Even as readers agreed it would be better to have a Beit haMikdash, a Temple, than not, better to have a State of Israel that runs to some extent according to Jewish law than not, they still held that a not-fully-perfect Messianic society was “impossible.”

When they spoke to me, I would push them on the point, asking whether they would prefer a society that was imperfect but getting slowly better, or wait an extra two hundred years for a miraculous, immediately perfect Messiah.  Almost all chose the latter.  I was particularly struck by the realization that that was exactly the choice Orthodox Jews made in the early days of Zionism, rejecting the imperfection of working with those who had a vastly different view of Judaism in favor of waiting for a more perfect advent of renewed Jewish life in the Land of Israel.  Hearkening back further, it was also what happened at the beginning of the Second Temple, when so few Jews returned to Eretz Yisrael at Cyrus’ call.

The Lost Opportunity of Such Thinking

I would have thought we would have learned the lesson, since our hesitance back then led to a State significantly less attuned to religiosity than it might have been.  Imagine how different Israel would look today if hordes of Orthodox Jews had joined early, draining the swamps, risking malaria, and the other hardships the early settlers went through: what kind of State would have come into being in 1948?

One danger of eliminating the impossible, then, is rejecting as “impossible,” options and opportunities that are merely difficult or unlikely.  But I want to spend my time here on those ideas or phenomena we make impossible, not because they are inherently so. 

For a small example, I recall a conversation in which I once suggested to a Jewish Day School principal that all graduating 8^th graders should have read all of Chumash with Rashi.  It was the response I found so memorable, “It can’t be done.”

What the principal meant, I assume, is that, given the various commitments and concerns we have for our students, accomplishing that task has become impossible.  The fact that Jewish students throughout history have easily achieved such textual proficiency by that age suggests that were “we,” whether as schools or communities, to develop other commitments or views of how to educate children, that particular impossibility—and others—could be conquered.

Impossibilities We Create

Our decisions in life can also create more intractable impossibilities; we think about them as an exercise in self-understanding, not seeking practical change.  For the example I most want to take up here, it is, I agree and admit, impossible to have Jewish students attend public schools and get their Jewish education in supplemental programs.  If I thought otherwise, I would not raise it here, because Text and Texture is not a policy forum; I raise the idea not to advocate it, but because examining that impossibility will teach us a great deal about what we lose in allowing certain ideas to become impossible.

In this case, one of the prime and obvious losses in rejecting public schooling is money and all it can bring.  At least since the recent economic downturn, but even before that, the crushing cost of Jewish education was obviously unsustainable.  The cost affects family size, creates pressures to earn a level of livelihood that creates conflict with other significant Torah values (the easiest example being how much Torah an adult Jew needs to learn daily), and eats into the funds available for other worthy Jewish causes.  There are certainly other aspects of the problem, but most pressingly, were we only able to take advantage of public resources, we could save nearly half the cost of Jewish education.

I will come to the reasons we cannot do so—good, strong, solid reasons— but let me stay with the cost of that fact for a bit more.  We already pay for public schooling; that fact leads some of us to lobby for some kind of voucher program, so that our failing to partake of public institutions leaves money on the table and puts us at policy odds with those striving to protect the public schools. 

Along the same lines, Orthodox participation in public schools would deepen and improve our relationship with the community around us.  Since many of these students come from homes that care about and value education, with parents who readily involve themselves in helping out their children’s schools, they would likely be a boon for those schools as well, which we would hope would generate increased goodwill for the Jewish community.  That is not a reason to do it, but another advantage to note. 

Yet It Is, Clearly, Impossible

What, then, are the downsides that make such an idea impossible?  One which I suspect looms large for many Orthodox parents is the fear of the influences in such an environment.  While the social problems we see in the society at large certainly exist within our own community as well, I suspect that many parents feel that the self-selection of those who send their children not only to private school but to an Orthodox Jewish one offers some insulation.  Perhaps to a lesser extent but still relevant, we might worry about the values of the broader society to which our students would be exposed, many in opposition to those set by the Torah.

Both worries are valid, and yet appear odd in the following sense: at least in the Modern Orthodox community, but even to some extent in the Centrist one, these concerns intrude elsewhere only relatively minimally.  These same parents will have no problem with their children participating in extracurricular activities with the same kinds of children they would meet in public school—Little League, dance, drama, whatever—and will censor their children’s exposure to the outside culture’s music, TV, movies, and books only minimally.  Most of these same parents will expect and want their children to attend secular colleges, and then make their professional way in that society and culture as well. 

I am not criticizing those choices, but rather am pointing out how they seem to run counter to this aspect of the concern that leads us to insist on separate Jewish schools even for the General Studies side of the educational day.  I recognize and am sympathetic to the response that at younger ages we need to insulate our students from the full exposure they will get later in life; I am only noting here that the cost of that insulation runs into the millions of dollars and comes at the expense of other worthy causes, such as helping the poor or advancing medical research, conditions that have no other options than struggling forward at great cost.

And Your Torah, What Will Be Of It?

I suspect, though, that the worries about mixing with those around us are not the central ones keeping Orthodox Jews from utilizing society’s resources for a General Studies education.  The experience of the Jewish community of the mid-40s and 50s, where Talmud Torah education proved wholly inadequate to transmit even the basic grounding in Torah, mitsvot, and Jewish thought seemed to highlight the necessity of a Jewish education that covered the whole school day, in which the environment of the school was one of Jewish values and ideals throughout the day.

Again, I do not write to disagree with that assessment, I write to note the cost of that reality.  First, what was true back then would not necessarily have to be true today.  Talmud Torahs may have failed for many reasons no longer relevant to our discussion. Most importantly, it seems to me, Talmud Torahs were not given nearly enough time to be successful.

The issue of time sits at the center of why any public school use plan could not work.  If Jewish students were going to be in public schools for seven hours a day five days a week, it would leave too little time for meaningful Torah education.  But much of that is because we are not willing or able to insist that our students use the tracts of free time left to them for their Torah education.

Students who finish school at 3pm—as the public schools do—could, at least at older ages, take up to an hour break, and still have three full hours for Torah study.  This would mean their day ended at 7pm, I understand, which may be too rigorous a schedule for us to contemplate.  It would certainly cut into the amount of time these students had for piano, art, ballet, and sports.  Of course, in more “right-wing” Jewish communities, the school day ends at 7 and is focused even more fully on Torah studies. 

And, to offer a fully meaningful Jewish education, that would not be the end of the story.  We would need to insist that our students also spend at least two hours on Shabbatot and another 3-4 on Sundays.  Such a schedule, I note, would still only give them 17-20 hours a week of Torah study, as compared to the thirty or more they would be getting on the General Studies side.  Over the course of a 38-week school year, that is a deficit of some 380 hours just to reach parity.

Here, the structure of public education offers us another untapped opportunity.  Whereas many Modern and Centrist parents accept the necessity of a ten-week summer vacation, we might alter that expectation, and sandwich a summer school (for Torah studies only) around two two-week vacations. The middle six weeks could have a full four to five hours of Torah studies a day, six days a week, with camp-like activities for the rest of those days, at the very least cutting into the deficit that our school year created.

I don’t offer these numbers or ideas with any sense that they could be seen as practical; I offer them to show an example of what we reject as impossible and the consequences thereof.  The system I outlined, impractical as it is, would cost the Jewish community significantly less than Jewish education does now, and would, if we tallied it all up, likely give our students close to the amount of Torah studies they get now, and perhaps more (in many schools, students get a maximum of three hours a day for the 180 official school days of the year).

I imagine other benefits of such a system, but there is little point in elaborating on them, since there is no way it would be implemented.  Let me close, then, by considering out loud why there is no way.  Well, first and foremost, parents and students would bristle at the rigors of the program—so much learning? Kids having to be in school until 7 every night? Having to spend their summers with a full half-day of Torah learning? Having to spend significant parts of Sunday morning studying Torah rather than playing ball, taking dance, or learning an instrument?  Rushing off on Shabbat to learn rather than hang out with friends and family?

The impossible is impossible, I agree; but using it as a mirror lets us see ourselves as we otherwise might not, lets us recognize our most basic commitments, the goals most important to us, and those that we will let slip by the wayside if circumstances dictate.  Whatever is left, then, is not necessarily the truth, it’s the percentage of the truth we are able to tolerate.

1. a quality I personally seek, as in my Mission of Orthodoxy posts, at blog.webyeshiva.org

But that’s a mirage, because it wouldn’t happen so obviously; it would happen more something like this:

It wouldn’t be Moshe Rabbenu who came to announce our need to leave behind not only our residences but our whole way of approaching the world (as my father a”h used to say each year at the Seder—we were freed not only physically and spiritually from Egypt, but culturally, leaving behind their worldview along with everything else).  As my teacher, R. Dr. Haym Soloveitchik used to point out, the Raavad (or other great rabbis) were never born; Avremel (or Moishele) were born, and later became the Raavad, Rambam, Ramban, or whoever.

So this prophet wouldn’t be someone instantly recognizable as the greatest leader of our history.  It would, instead, be a member of a prominent Jewish family, perhaps with a sibling who was a leader of the Jewish community, but who had spent years out of the country because he had run afoul of the law.  And, by the way, we should assume that while some people would recognize he had been right in whatever supposed crime he had committed, others would be equally confident that he was a criminal, that the government had been right to prosecute him.

So after years of hiding, with little or no contact with the US Jewish community, he’d come back one day, with the news that God was going to free us of all our attachments to the United States.  Here, the analogy breaks down somewhat, because the US is a benevolent country, completely unlike Egypt; if we focus instead on how the US and the West in general has enslaved much of the Jewish community to its worldview—and this not by coercion, but by how attractive and sensible that worldview seems—we can get back to the hypothetical.

To be a little clearer on what I mean, this Moses might come to free us of our mistaken attachment to Western sexual ethics, to the Western view of the sanctity of life (in which abortion and euthanasia are both reasonable possibilities), and to the extreme Western version of devotion to science, in which scientific principles regularly deny God’s power or ability to intervene or abrogate what are deemed laws of Nature (an attitude, incidentally, that carries over into other disciplines—historians, for example, will not only deny the role of Providence as a practical matter of making it impossible to prove anything; they will, many of them, deny it axiomatically).

So Moses and his brother—whose judgment will rapidly become questionable, as it becomes clear just how much he is being influenced by the returned prodigal—would manage to get in to see the President, without authorization.  Their success in that, of course, would be the result of an unexplained breakdown in security, not because of any higher Power supporting them.

Once in the Oval Office, this Moses type would convey his message to the President, with the warning that God would visit terrible punishments should that message be ignored. To prove his point, his brother would throw his walking stick on the floor, to have it turn into a snake.

But in the twenty-first century, one of the President’s science advisors would just have discovered that a certain species of snake, when handled by a threatening predator, becomes stiff as a staff until the danger passes.  Racing back to his office, he, too, would produce a stick that turns into a snake on release.

So Moses would threaten the water supply (and, miraculously, the President would not jail him for making the threat); when, soon after, e coli or other dangerous materials turned up in the water, making it undrinkable, the President’s security analysts would deny the miracle, demonstrating numerous holes in our water security, so that any madman could do that.

Then, perhaps, nothing would happen for a few weeks (or months), but one day, this Moses would return, announcing that frogs are going to start dying all over the world.  When that prediction started coming true (as, incidentally, is happening today), scientists would be puzzled, but would offer numerous hypotheses—none of which could yet be established conclusively, but they would be completely confident that more study would certainly eventually offer a fully natural explanation.

If you’ve read with me to this point, I suspect you reject the hypothetical as simple-minded, for one of two main reasons.  Either you think that it’s silly to think such a thing could happen today (as if to say that God only had the power back then to produce such changes of nature), or because you feel confident we’d get it this time.

Aside from the fact that we’ve had numerous problems with drinking water in the last little while—not to mention more than one major natural disaster, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, with no little loss of life—I was struck by Bergdorf Goodman’s recent announcement that they were going to start patrolling their stores with specially trained dogs, who would sniff out any bedbug infestations that might occur. This happened, I believe, because another chain store had had to close down a store to try to deal with their own bedbug problem, as have some high-end hotels.

Now, bedbugs are not lice—the customary translation of כנים—so maybe this is totally different.  And perhaps readers will point out that we didn’t have a prophet announce these plagues ahead of time.  Perhaps those are, in fact, crucial differences, and none of the recent events (even just in the US—9/11, Hurricane Katrina, raging wildfires, mudslides, flooding of several rivers, contamination of various water supplies, wildlife disasters, economic dislocation of a once in a generation variety, and, now bedbug infestations—not to mention tsunamis, earthquakes, and mudslides in other parts of the world) have any connection to God.  Although I cannot resist noting that bedbugs would be a particularly poetic way for God to react the US’ leading role in rejecting God’s morality around an activity that mostly takes place in bed.

But I am no prophet, nor the son of a prophet, so I cannot say any of this with any confidence.  Rather, I am here to ask a question one step more theoretical: If God decided to communicate with us in a time when prophecy had not yet been restored, and God’s message was that we needed to question fundamental assumptions we make about the culture we inhabit, how would God communicate that? Good times wouldn’t do it, because it is in the nature of good times to feed on themselves, for people to assume that things are going largely well, that God is largely happy with us (otherwise, why give us good times?).

Denying the possibility that God is communicating with us by sending more difficult times, we close off, it seems to me, all God’s options for getting that message across.  In only the last decade, many Orthodox Jews, including leading rabbis, have rejected the possibility that cataclysms (let alone personal struggles, whether economic or medical) are God’s call to radically change our ways.

Is that really only because no prophet said so ahead of time? After all, plenty of thinkers, Jewish or otherwise, have tried to encourage us to think in such ways; they have not predicted the events, but have offered interpretations after the fact, only to be ridiculed.  And ridiculed, I note, not just because such people give often offer overly unidimensional, unsophisticated, unnuanced, or otherwise flawed readings of events.  Repeatedly, I encounter seemingly Orthodox Jews who reject the possibility that major natural problems—including bedbug infestations—come from God, for whatever reason.

And if you reject that out of hand, is it really true that having a prophet named Moses—who only later would become Moshe Rabbenu– say ahead of time that this is why it is happening would be enough to change your mind?

And, incidentally, I do not mean complex or debated truths, I mean ones that should be seen as simple and obvious.  I have reviewed some of what I see as those simple truths in my posts on the Mission of Orthodoxy project, but here’s another one: I recently suggested that part of Orthodoxy is the belief in miracles as a possibility.  As an illustration, I argued that a person who was ill, even to the point that doctors despaired of doing anything more, nonetheless should believe in the possibility (not likelihood, and certainly not guarantee) of a miraculous recovery, and should pray to God with that possibility in mind.  A listener, highly educated Jewishly, was surprised at my claim, and appeared not to believe it.  I note that my view is, as far as I can tell, universal in traditional Jewish thought; while some thinkers see miracles as exceptions embedded by God within Nature (although usually hidden from our view) and others see it as God actively intervening in Nature, the idea that miracles can occur at any time is, I believe, well-accepted in traditional thought. And yet, even highly educated Jews have trouble recognizing this truth.

Two Scriptural Examples of the Challenge

Here is how I became aware of the conundrum: In one case, I was reviewing the haftarah for the second of the Three Weeks, the second chapter of Yirmiyahu.  In verse 8, Yirmiyahu complains on God’s behalf over the failures of that generation’s leadership. As Radak understands it, the priests of the time, serving properly and appropriately in the Beit haMikdash, nonetheless failed to protest the idol worship all around them.  The Torah scholars of the era studied as an academic endeavor and intellectual exercise, not as a guide to behavior.  The monarchs, whose role and expertise is shepherding the masses to better service of God, instead neglected God.

Yirmiyahu, I noted, is letting us know that the average Jew of the time would have had a hard time finding the truth. While Yirmiyahu and a few others were loudly declaring it, there was plenty of competition as well.  As I made this point, a young woman in the group raised her hand and asked, “So how are we supposed to know the truth?”

5/9, The Aftermath: The Second Example of the Failure to See Truth

I will offer some suggestions towards an answer, but let me tell the second story.  This past Tish’a B’Av night, Lincoln Square Synagogue hosted me after the evening Kinnot, to share some thoughts relevant to the day.  The hour being late and energy in short supply, I spoke briefly about chapters 42-44 of Yirmiyahu.

Following the Destruction, we are told, the people come to him and ask him for God’s Word on what they should do (Malbim, I should note, thinks they were insincere from the start; I presented it more in accord with the most apparent meaning of the text). The prophet commits to telling them what God says, and they, unbidden, add a promise to obey whatever command comes.

In what seems to me the weak link in their commitment, it takes ten days for Hashem to reply (I tried to imagine what those ten days would have been like in my short story 5/9, The Aftermath, in my book Cassandra Misreads the Book of Samuel).  Crucially, though, the reply would seem to be exactly what they wanted to hear— Hashem urges them to stay in the Land, promises that they have reached the end of their needed punishment, assures them this would be the beginning of a rebuilding process.

It may have been the wait that did it (and it may be that Hashem delayed precisely to test their faith), but they respond by calling Yirmiyahu a liar. Each time I think of that, I shudder—Yirmiyahu has spent forty years remonstrating with them, trying to convince them to change their ways, has predicted the tragedies they have already seen even as he was reviled, arrested, and tortured; now that it has all come true, they are still able to call him a liar?  In their telling, it is Baruch ben Neriah (who, we find out in Chapter 45, suffered in his own way by virtue of the people’s sinfulness) who has convinced Yirmiyahu to tell them to stay.

Incidentally, a comment of Ramban’s at the end of his commentary on Haazinu (Devarim 32;26) is relevant here.  He points out that even if Haazinu were only the words of an ordinary astrologer (or, in our days, a scientist), we would follow whatever he said, since the predictions have come true so fully. Here, too, we might have thought Yirmiyahu’s being right time and again would have made inroads in the people’s faith. Apparently not.

So they go to Egypt, and Yirmiyahu goes with them.  There, God tells him to remonstrate with them for their sun-worship.  Instead of regret, they answer him in kind, insisting not only on their intention to worship the sun, but claiming that it was their failures in proper sun-worship that had led to their troubles.  As I reviewed all this that night, I lamented the Jews’ ability to convince themselves the story of the Destruction should lead to a greater rejection of the prophet’s words, not a lesser one, grieved over the people’s stubborn blindness to the truth, so great that even calamity would not alert them to it.

Would We Notice Truth If It Stared Us in the Face?

To give it a contemporary element, I added that the Mishnah in Sanhedrin 97b says that if the Jewish people fail to repent as necessary to merit the Redemption, R. Yehoshua is of the view that God will bring a king whose decrees are as harsh as Haman’s, and the Jews will repent.  That comment, incidentally, is recorded by Rambam in Hilchot Teshuvah 7;5, although Rambam just says “and the Jewish people will in the future repent.”  If the Churban and exile did not do it—and, in our own times, if the Holocaust and its horrors did not do it—what kind of king was R. Yehoshua envisioning?

After I finished, an elderly couple was leaving, and I heard the wife ask the husband, “But the question is, how can we know the truth?”  A remarkable challenge: After thousands of years in possession of the Torah, with the additional comments of Hazal, of rishonim and acharonim, many of us are still honestly unsure as to where to find the truth of what God wants from us.  This is not the challenge of accepting the truth, which is what stops pagans, for example, from finding God—they deny that what we have is the truth.  Nor is it the challenge of living up to the truths we know, which is what we articulate in our ‘al het’s on Yom Kippur.  Here, I am grappling with the challenge of knowing the truth when we are looking for it.

I also don’t mean to suggest that if we look the right way, we will find a single truth.  Even with the right strategies, we have to expect to find differences of nuance, of emphasis, and of detail—the Judaism of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel differed sharply, sometimes radically, as does that, in many important ways, of Jews from different parts of the world.  But those differences are all within the bounds of Elu va-elu, these and these are the words of the living God.  What we often lose sight of is how to differentiate those truths that fall within elu va-elu and those that lie without.  Herewith, therefore, four suggestions that are not the whole solution, but are a useful start:

1) Start with Tanach (Scripture).  As the word of God, Tanach makes a claim to truth that no other texts can or do.  The truths declared by Tanach, properly understood, are the truths that God has shared with us precisely so that we can know what truth is.  And, crucially, whatever we find in other authoritative sources, cannot, by definition, contradict what we find in Tanach; it may explain Tanach in ways we would not have realized on our own, but the proper understanding of Tanach must always be central to an accurate Jewish life.

2) In line with the realization that we can only understand Tanach correctly based on how tradition interpreted it, look to follow our leaders.  In our times, some communities of Jewry resist the idea of following leaders, but the assumption of Tanach and Hazal is that most of us are ill-equipped to find the truth for ourselves.  I have numerous times heard people of remarkably minimal education (at least compared to what full knowledge of Torah involves) expatiate at length on topics which I happened to know they were ill-equipped to address– halachic, hashkafic, and practical terms of how to best apply ideas of the Torah to this world.

Leadership is a talent, but also an occupation.  Someone who has spent his life in study and consideration of Torah is more likely to have insight and understanding into its nature and interests than someone who has spent that same time in some other profession, however noble.  That is not to say that study itself guarantees finding the wisdom to lead; we need to insure we follow leaders well-suited to the task, in Torah and its related fields.

Once we find those leaders, though, we need to approach them with the humility of knowing that which we do not know.  This, too, can be taken too far; some would insist on going to a leader (or rebbe) on every life matter, even those where the individual is fully competent to weigh in. But we can go to the other extreme as well, ignoring our Torah leaders completely, and not seeking their perspective on how to handle central questions of our time.

Part of the reason we do this, I think, has to do with a third rule of finding the truth:

3) If it’s too comfortable, it’s probably not the truth.  One of the reasons we have trouble following our leaders is that we often do not like what they have to say (and, in response, those leaders often learn to refrain from saying all that they think).  But with the possible exception of the most perfected among us, the truth will show us areas we need to change, areas of failure, and areas where we have not even begun to realize that which we are supposed to be doing.

Finding the truth must mean making room for the possibility that we have been blind, until now, to deeply significant aspects of what God wants from the world.  That kind of openness, of readiness to hear such distressing news, is not so easy to cultivate, but necessary to finding truth.

4) The truth has to be taken whole, not in pieces. As neviim complain, one flaw in the Jews of the first Beit haMikdash was their insistence on emphasizing sacrifices, to the detriment of other important parts of what God asked of them.  It is deceptively easy, and tempting, to focus on one or other part of what the Torah wants, and turn that into the whole.

But the truth, to be the truth, must be taken in all its complexity and all its parts.  To focus on one part of the truth of Tanach and/or Hazal, no matter how accurate that one part is, is to lose sight of other equally or more important pieces of that truth, and therefore to warp not only the neglected parts, but even those the person is engaging.

Following all of these ideas will not guarantee that we will find all of the truth; the Jews of Yirmiyahu’s time were not necessarily less intelligent, less committed, or less astute than we are.  But learning from their mistakes, recognizing the challenge, seeing that our task is eased by the voluminous Jewish literature that has developed since then, should help us at least come to understand the endeavor in which we are engaged and bring us closer to finding the truths Hashem has been broadcasting these past thousands of years.

After that, we can only move forward with the confidence and hope that Hashem helps those who seek Him, that if we return to the search with a whole heart, Hashem will insure that the truth will meet us more than halfway.

יוסי בן יועזר אומר: יהי ביתך בית ועד לחכמים, והוי מתאבק בעפר רגליהם, והוי שותה בצמא את דבריהם:

 רוח חיים לאבות א:ד

1. יהי ביתך בית ועד כו’ -
2. יתכן לפרש כי במ”ח דברים שהתורה ניקנית בהם, כמבואר לקמן, א’ מהם הוא המחכים את רבותיו ע”י שאלותיו החריפים וממילא רווחא שמעתתא
3. והנה הלימוד נקרא מלחמה,כמ”ש “מלחמתה של תורה”;
4. א”כ גם התלמידים לוחמים יקראו
5. וכמו שאמרו חז”ל “לא יבשו וגו’ כי ידברו את אויבים בשער
6. אפילו אב ובנו הרב ותלמידו נעשו אויבים זא”ז ואינם זזים משם כו’
7. ואסור לו לתלמיד לקבל דברי רבו כשיש לו קושיות עליהם
8. ולפעמים יהיה האמת אם התלמיד, וכמו שעץ קטן המדליק את הגדול
9. וז”ש יהי ביתך בית ועד לחכמים.
10. והוי מתאבק מלשון “ויאבק איש עמו”, שהוא ענין התאבקות מלחמה
11. כי מלחמת מצוה היא
12. וכן אנו נגד רבותינו, הקדושים אשר בארץ ונשמתם בשמי מרום המחברים המפורסמים וספריהם אתנו -
13. הנה ע”י הספרים אשר בבתנו בתינו הוא בית ועד לחכמים אלה, הוזהרנו ג”כ וניתן לנו רשות להתאבק וללחום בדברי’ ולתרץ קושיתם ולא לישא פנים לאיש רק לאהוב האמת,
14. אבל עכ”ז יזהר בנפשו מלדבר בגאוה וגודל לבב באשר מצא מקום לחלוק, וידמה כי גדול הוא כרבו או כמחבר הספר אשר הוא משיג עליו, וידע בלבבו כי כמה פעמים לא יבין דבריו וכוונתו.  ולכן יהיה אך בענוה יתירה
15. באמרו “אם איני כדאי אך תורה היא וכו’”
16. וז”ש הוי מתאבק כנ”ל אך בתנאי “בעפר רגליהם”, ר”ל בענוה והכנעה ולדון לפניהם בקרקע.
17. “והוי שותה בצמא את דבריהם” . . .  ר”ל שותה ועדיין צמא.
18. או יאמר יהי ביתך בית ועד כו’ – ואף אם אינך מבין בעצמך
19. ומשל ליכנס לחנותו של בושם שקולט את הריח
20. ואף אם אינך מבין והנך מתאבק אך בעפר רגליהם, עכ”ז תהיה שותה בצמא את דבריהם

 Mishnah Avot 1:4

Yose ben Yoezer said: Your house ought to be a meetinghouse for the sages, and wrestle in the dust at their feet, and drink their words with thirst. 

Ruach Chayyim (R. Chaim Volozhiner) to Avot 1:4

1. “Your house ought to be a meetinghouse for the sages” –

2. It is possible to explain (this by saying) that among the 48 things by which Torah is acquired, as is made clear later (in Avot Chapter 6), one of them is by adding wisdom to one’s teachers through his sharp questions, so that the content of Torah inevitably expands.

3. Now the study (of Torah) is called combat, as in the expression “the combat of Torah”;

4. Therefore the students too must be called combatants,

5. as the Sages said: “They will not be shamed etc. when they speak with enemies in the gate –

6. even a father and his son, a rav and his student, become enemies one to the other, but do

not move from there (until they love one another),

7. and it is forbidden for a student to accept the words of his teacher when he finds difficulties

with them –

8. and sometimes the truth is with the student, as when a small branch that kindles the larger –

9. and this is what is meant by “Your house ought to be a meetinghouse for the sages”.

10. “Mit’abek” is from the same root as “And a man was mit’abek with him”, which refers to

11. the hit’avkut of combat, for this is a combat of mitzvah.

12. We are situated similarly with reference to our teachers,

13. the holy ones whose bodies are in the ground but whose souls are in the exalted heavens, the famous authors, whose books are with us –

14. Now via the books which are in our houses, our house becomes a meetinghouse for those

sages, we are also commanded and given permission to wrestle and engage in combat with their words and to resolve their difficulties and not to show favoritism to any man, rather to just love the truth,

15. but with all this one must be cautious for the sake of one’s soul lest he speak with arrogance

and expansiveness because one has found a basis for dispute, and imagine that he is as great as his teacher or as the author of the book which he is challenging, rather he must know in his heart that sometimes he has not fully understood the author’s words and intent. Therefore he should take an attitude of great humility, saying “Although I am not worthy, nonetheless it is Torah etc.”

16. This is the meaning of “wrestle”, just on the condition that it is with “the dust of their feet”,

meaning with humility and submissiveness, arguing in their presence while sitting on the

ground at their feet.

17. “And drink their words with thirst” – . . . this means drink but always remain thirsty.

18. Or perhaps the meaning of “Your house ought to be a meetinghouse for the sages” (is that

that you should do this) even if you yourself do not understand (their conversation).

19. A parable: To enter the store of a perfumer, because you absorb the aroma.

20. Even if you don’t understand, and you are only engaged/even encrusted with the dust of their feet, despite all this you must drink their words thirstily.

R. Chaim Volozhiner’s translation of “mit’abek” as “wrestling” (lines 10-11), and subsequent unpacking of the wrestling metaphor, is justly famous, and generally accurately so.  My goal is largely to put this reading in the context of his full comment here, and to cast some light on a few of its lesser-known elements.

One issue that should leap out is that R. Chayyim, despite being the disciple of the Vilna Gaon, does not sharply distinguish between actual and literary teachers.  That is, he does not see it as essential for teachers to have the right of reply to their students. What is necessary is the attitude of humility, not the formal expression of it, and students are entitled – even obligated – to hold their opinions against those of their teachers even when the teachers are not present to defend themselves. It seems clear to me that the context here is practical halakhah. R. Chaim would presumably set standards of minimum competence here, and of relative competence, and I doubt that he genuinely means to forbid accepting the psak of one’s rebbe when one has relatively minor (albeit outstanding) intellectual difficulties with it, but nonetheless the rhetoric is striking.

On the other hand, R. Chaim begins by speaking of students’ contributions as valuable because they enhance the learning of the teacher, rather than independently worthwhile. They are the small twig that kindles the larger – the students’ flame, in and of itself, would just go out. Here he comes from Rav Yochanan’s description of Resh Lakish’s role on Bava Metzia 84a – “He would ask 24 challenges, and I would give him 24 resolutions, and the content of Torah would inevitably expand” – and it’s not clear that this framing applies well to dialogues with books.

One way of pushing this question is to focus not on the wrestling metaphor, but rather on Yose ben Yoezer’s first charge, to make one’s home the meetingplace of sages. R. Chaim understands this, in contemporary terms, as encouraging one to assemble a library. If one reads this only as the precondition for wrestling, very well, but it seems to me that the form of the Mishnah requires it to be independently worthwhile. But is there a point in assembling a library of books with which one does not engage?

This issue is perhaps highlighted by R. Chaim’s less famous alternate reading, that one should make one’s house a meetingplace for sages even if one will understand nothing of what they say, and merely be covered with their footdust, and drink their words thirstily even if uncomprehendingly.  Here he introduces the metaphor of the perfumery, but while one might argue that simply experiencing the sages in their home territory is of great value, it’s hard to say that of books.

At the same time, the mere presence of books does have an impact on the children of the house, and there is value – a value always in tension with our horror of idolatry – in having visible and tangible symbols of our values. Furthermore, books are less likely to let us down badly, especially once we have come to know them well. Upon witnessing any case of rabbinic corruption, there is a real temptation to retreat into dialogue with books.

Here is one way of expressing the tension I’m trying to convey. R. Chaim imposes a serious charge on students – they must challenge their teachers. This is what Rav Yochanan valued unto death in Resh Lakish, and when students fail this responsibility, they share the blame for their teachers’ failures.

But R. Chaim does not, at least not here, create a similarly dynamic responsibility for teachers toward students. Teachers can wait for students to challenge, and then simply react.

Students who never challenge will simply never grow. This may not be problematic when the relationship is human – it is in the nature of students, perhaps part of the definition of authentic disciplehood, to seek correction from their teachers, and everyone has the obligation to find a teacher, “aseh lekha Rav.”  But what happens when teachers prefer to see themselves as students? When rather

than opening themselves to challenges, they feel accountable only to deceased authors, and thus spend their time in one-way dialogue with ancient books? Here humility can become an impenetrable screen for arrogance, and books cannot call them to account.

by Daniel Reifman

Teachers of Halakhah are often torn between conflicting agendas: on the one hand, to ensure that students have mastered all the laws relevant to contemporary observance, on the other hand, to familiarize them with a sense of the background—both the history and reasoning—that informs what we practice.  Throw in the fact that most day schools accord less time for Halakhah than for other Judaic studies subjects, and it’s no wonder that the one of the central purposes of education—to engage our students’ critical faculties—is often overlooked. 

I admit that encouraging students to think critically about the halakhic process presents certain challenges, not the least of which is the risk of undermining students’ respect for that process.  Yet I would suggest that such concerns reflect our fears as educators more than our students’ actual experiences.  Taught with appropriate restraint, such an approach to Halakhah can engender a sense of respect for the halakhic process by allowing students to engage with the material on their own terms. 

The following is an example of this approach as applied to the topic of shehiyah—leaving food on the fire from Friday afternoon into Shabbat, an activity the Sages restrict in certain circumstances.  My primary goal is simply to get my students thinking about the reasons behind rabbinic prohibitions, but ultimately I also want to question the assumption that we can always know exactly why such prohibitions were enacted.

 The debate between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel

I introduce the topic of sheyihah by placing it within a broader framework of melakhot (prohibited actions) that are set into motion late on Friday afternoon.  This issue is the subject of a prominent debate between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, as recorded in Mishnah Shabbat 1:5-9: 

בית שמאי אומרים: אין שורין דיו וסממנים וכרשינים אלא כדי שישורו מבעוד יום; ובית הלל מתירין.  בית שמאי אומרים: אין נותנין אונין של פשתן לתוך התנור אלא כדי שיהבילו מבעוד יום, ולא את הצמר ליורה אלא כדי שיקלוט העין; ובית הלל מתירין.  בית שמאי אומרים: אין פורשין מצודות חיה ועופות ודגים אלא כדי שיצודו מבעוד יום; ובית הלל מתירין.

…ושוין אלו ואלו שטוענים קורות בית הבד ועגולי הגת.

Beit Shammai rule: ink, dyes and vetches may not be steeped unless they can be dissolved while it is yet day; but Beit Hillel permit it.  Beit Shammai rule: bundles of wet flax may not be placed in an oven unless they can begin to steam while it is yet day, nor wool in the dyer’s kettle unless it can assume the color [of the dye]; but Beit Hillel permit it.  Beit Shammai rule: traps for wild beasts, fowls, and fish, may not be laid unless they can be caught while it is yet day; but Beit Hillel permit it.

…and both [schools] agree that the beam of the [oil] press and the rollers of the wine press may be loaded [right before Shabbat].

Before proceeding to the Talmud’s explanations of the machloket (halakhic debate), I ask my students to consider whose opinion seems more intuitive.  Typically students are quick to realize the logic behind Beit Hillel’s position: an action completed before the onset of Shabbat cannot constitute a violation of Shabbat, even if its effects extend well past sundown.  The difficulty then, lies in explaining Beit Shammai’s position.  I further ask my students to consider why Beit Shammai concedes in the cases of the oil and wine presses, and why the following mishnah (1:10) records no objection from Beit Hillel:

אין צולין בשר בצל וביצה אלא כדי שיצולו מבעוד יום…

Meat, onion[s], and egg[s] may not be roasted [right before Shabbat] unless they will get roasted while it is yet day…

Here, too, is a melakhah that is set in motion before the onset of Shabbat, yet the ruling is presented anonymously—presumably placing it outside the scope of the machloket.

The Talmud Bavli, we should note, doesn’t directly address any of these questions.  Only in the process of explaining a parallel beraitha (in which Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel debate a further series of cases in which an action done before Shabbat has effects that continue into Shabbat) does the Bavli (18a) raise the issue of shevitat keilim—the notion that one’s utensils must also not “participate in” melakhah on Shabbat—and then suggest that this is the underlying basis of the machloket.  But this explanation doesn’t fit neatly with most of the mishnah’s cases (as students are quick to point out), nor does it account for the cases in which Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel do agree: loading the weights of an oil or wine press—which all agree is permissible—and placing food on the fire to roast—which all agree is prohibited.¹ Indeed, the Yerushalmi—which parallels part of the sugya in the Bavli—makes no mention of shevitat keilim in this context.

The Tosefta’s version of the debate 

Instead of focusing on the Bavli’s explanation of the machloket, I follow up our discussion of the Mishnah by showing my students the Tosefta (Shabbat 1:9), which presents the machloket between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel in dialogue form:

אמרו בית שמאי לבית הלל: אין אתם מודין שאין צולין בשר בצל וביצה בערב שבת עם חשיכה אלא כדי שיצולו?  אף דיו סמנין וכרשנין כיוצא בהן.

אמרו להן בית הלל: אי אתם מודין שטוענין קורות בית הבד ותולין עגולי הגת ערב שבת עם חשיכה?  אף דיו סמנין וכרשנין כיוצא בהן.

 אלו עמדו בתשובתן ואלו עמדו בתשובתן, אלא שבית שמאי אומרים: “ששת ימים תעבד ועשית כל מלאכתך” [שמות כ:ט] – שתהא כל מלאכתך גמורה; ובית הלל אומרים: “ששת ימים תעשה [מעשיך]” [שם כג:יב] – מלאכה עושה אתה כל ששה.

Beit Shammai said to Beit Hillel: Don’t you admit that one may not roast meat, an onion, or an egg on Friday afternoon immediately before nightfall unless they will get roasted [before Shabbat]?  Likewise ink, dyes or vetches [may not be steeped immediately before nightfall].

Beit Hillel said to them: Don’t you admit that one may load the beams of the oil press or suspend the rollers of the winepress on Friday afternoon immediately before nightfall?  Likewise ink, dyes or vetches [may be steeped immediately before nightfall].

These stood by their answer, and these stood by their answer; but Beit Shammai said: “Six days you shall labor and do all your work” [Ex. 20:9] — that all your work should be complete; and Beit Hillel said: “Six days you shall do [your work]” [Ex. 23:12] — you may do work all six [days].

Unlike in the Mishnah, where the cases in which Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel agree appear almost as an afterthought, in the Tosefta they form the crux of the debate.  Each side makes its case by citing an accepted precedent, and the machloket revolves around the issue of which precedent is more relevant to the case of steeping dye plants right before Shabbat.  What does seem like an afterthought in the Tosefta is the derashot (textual inferences) that Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel cite as the basis for their positions.  Rather than presenting the derashot as part of the dialogue, the Tosefta cites them only after noting that neither side yielded its stance.  What the Tosefta implies, then, is that neither side could fully articulate why the other’s side precedent isn’t relevant.

A basic model of legal reasoning:   Rav Moshe and the Chazon Ish

I find the Tosefta’s version of the machloket an interesting teaching tool on two levels.  First, I use it to illustrate to my students one of the most fundamental forms of legal reasoning.  Given a question about any halakhic issue, we can construct a test case on either side of that issue by finding two known precedents, one of which is prohibited and the other permitted.  Having set up such a framework, we can formulate any halakhic conclusion about the case in question simply as a choice to use one of the precedents over the other.  Particularly for students not trained in abstract Talmudic reasoning, this model can be a simple and effective way to frame complex halakhic issues.

For example, consider the debate between two 20^th-century poskim (rabbinic decisors), the Chazon Ish (R. Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz) and R. Moshe Feinstein, regarding the use of a blech to leave food on the stovetop into Shabbat.  R. Moshe Feinstein (Iggerot Moshe O.H. 1:93) rules that covering the burners with a blech (metal sheet) permits one to leave food that is not fully cooked (such as a cholent) on a stovetop into Shabbat, a point disputed by the Chazon Ish (O.H. 37:11).  Their debate centers around the Mishnah’s ruling (Shabbat 3:1) that one may leave a stew on a kirah (a type of ancient oven) into Shabbat if the coals in the oven have been banked (i.e., covered) with ash.  What about a case in which the coals (or the equivalent heat source) have been covered with something else, such as a sheet of metal?  Here we find conflicting implications from the medieval commentators.  On the one hand, Mordechai (Hagahot Mordechai Shabbat ch. 3) states that covering the opening of the oven with an empty pot is the equivalent of baking the coals.  On the other hand, Rashi (Shabbat 37a, s.v. גבה) implies that one is required to bank the coals even if one places the stew atop the cover (כיסוי) of the oven.  The practical difference between an empty pot and the oven’s normal cover would seem to be negligible, and it’s tempting simply to chalk up this apparent conflict to a simple difference of opinion between Rashi and Mordechai.  However, since both of their rulings are accepted by later authorities, we are forced to say that the two scenarios—placing a stew atop an empty pot vs. placing the stew atop the oven’s normal cover—are halakhically distinct.  Here, then, are the conflicting precedents that inform the use of a blech.  The debate between the Chazon Ish and R. Feinstein can be framed as a question whether a blech is more comparable to an empty pot or to an oven cover.

But in order for this model of legal reasoning to be effective, we need first to be able to articulate the difference between the two precedents in conceptual terms: Given two such similar cases, why is it that one is permitted and the other prohibited?  It’s this conceptual formulation that allows us to categorize the case in question as being more similar to one precedent or the other.  In the case of the blech, both the Chazon Ish and R. Feinstein agree that the difference between Rashi’s ruling and the Mordechai’s ruling stems from the need for a shinui (irregular procedure) in order to leave food on the fire.  Placing food on top of an empty pot is considered a shinui because one would not normally cook this way, unlike placing the food on top of the oven’s normal cover which might be done even during the week (at least in the context of the type of oven referred to in the Mishnah).  The Chazon Ish and R. Feinstein disagree about whether placing the pot atop a blech is or is not considered normative cooking practice.

Precedents with no clear rationale

The problem we face in the case debated by Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel—preparing a dye solution right before Shabbat—is that neither side can explain the difference between the two precedents.  Why should loading the weights of an oil or wine press right before Shabbat be permitted when the equivalent case of cooking—placing meat on the fire right before Shabbat—is prohibited?  This is not to say that there is no way of explaining the difference between these cases, only that in the Tosefta’s version of the machloket, neither side is able to articulate a cogent distinction.  Faced with an irresolvable conflict between two precedents, their machloket over a third case ends in a stalemate: אלו עמדו בתשובתן ואלו עמדו בתשובתן. 

Of course this analysis only begs the question: If no one can explain the reasoning behind these precedents, why are they valid arguments?  Here, then, is the second point I impart to my students: as much as we like to assume that Halakhah flows in smooth and coherent fashion from a fixed set of principles, we must acknowledge that often practice takes on a life of its own.  This is true not only with regard to practices that we categorize as minhagim (customs), but even—as in this case—with regard to practices that have the force of gezeirot (rabbinic edicts).  The Tosefta’s language suggests that by the time of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel’s debate, these rulings—to load the weights of oil and wine presses right up until Shabbat but not to begin roasting food right before Shabbat—were sufficiently ancient for the original reasoning behind them to have been forgotten.  Moreover, it would seem that the two practices weren’t perceived as being in conflict until Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel considered a set of similar cases, such as preparing a dye solution right before Shabbat; only then did the underlying conceptual issue come to the fore, and with it an irresolvable contradiction.

Conclusion

Although this sugya provides particularly clear examples of rabbinic prohibitions which lack clear rationales, I would suggest that this phenomenon is far more widespread than generally acknowledged.  Following the approach I have outlined here, I recommend that in cases like these we trust our students’ intellectual curiosity, giving them the freedom to question accepted interpretations, then empowering them with the tools to seek out alternatives.

1. The Bavli (18b) also suggests a reason that Beit Hillel would concede to Beit Shammai with regard to leaving foodstuffs in the oven from Friday afternoon: שמא יחתה בגחלים — “lest one come to stoke the coals”.  But like the idea of shevitat keilim, the concern that one might come to stoke the coals emerges only in the Bavli’s analysis of a beraitha.  Only in the medieval commentaries do we find this explanation used to account for Beit Hillel’s concession to Beit Shammai in mishnah 1:10.