Jewish Lives, Jewish Learning (Part 2)
Once again I want to talk about the book Jewish Lives, Jewish Learning: Adult Jewish Learning in Theory and Practice, by Diane Tickton Schuster. I am not less appreciative of it this week than last. Every Jewish teacher outside of the Orthodox world should read it. One surprise to me is that despite the depth and detail that are presented on the subject of getting to know one’s students and allowing yourself to be known to them, no mention is made of the work of either Martin Buber or Emmanuel Levinas.
Buber is best known for his book Ich und Du, translated into English as I and Thou. The essence of this work is the insistence that we should treat the other, as much as possible, as a full person. An end unto themselves and not just a means for us to accomplish some end of our own. A simplified, but well known, understanding of Levinas’ best known idea is that we need to know each other by looking into the eyes of the other – to see while being seen. These ideas are radically non-hierarchical.
Education (but not learning) has hierarchical frame: teacher and student. The teacher is positioned as an expert possessing some specialized knowledge or skill that the learner lacks. For children, who are obliged to go to school and to study with teachers who they have not chosen, this hierarchical frame can be oppressive. For adults, when they choose their own teachers, the hierarchical aspect of the experience is often precisely what they seek. The relationship in the example of the child can be an I/teacher-it/student relationship. In the example of the adult, the reverse can predominate. Nevertheless, when a teacher is caring and the students are open and appreciative the classroom can come much closer to the ideals of Buber and Levinas. The Brazilian educator, Paolo Friere, (not without some reference to Buber), believed that the classroom was best when the hierarchical relationship was overthrown.
Friere’s radicalism arises from his experiences far from the Jewish classroom. In the early rabbinic academies in Eretz Yisrael and in Babylonia, the hierarchy of the priesthood had been overthrown already by the Romans. It had been replaced by a meritocratic hierarchy based on the acuity and the breadth of one's learning. Those at the top of this pile often stood apart from the Jewish masses and looked down upon them.
We can look at the Baal Shem Tov as a leader in the path away from that sort of elitism. For the Baal Shem Tov, the Tsadik’s job in life was to ascend to the highest possible level of holiness and communion with God. However, as a Tsadik, he understood that one’s job was also to help raise up others, and to do so one had to meet them at their levels. This required the Tsadik to, themselves, go down in their own level of holiness and then raise the other up as one raised oneself back upwards.
In the chapter of Jewish Lives, Jewish Learners, “Tzimtzum in Practice: Rethinking the Teaching-Learning Partnership,” Schuster adopts a concept from Lurianic Kabbalah to introduce the idea of the teacher who steps back from their position atop the educational hierarchy. She quotes Gershom Scholem as an introduction:
“The doctrine of tzimtzum, of god’s self-limitation, states that the act of primeval creation by God was not one in which the Infinite left its mysterious depths, an act of emanation from with to without, as in early Kabbalah, but that this primal step was in fact ‘the contraction of the Infinite from Himself to Himself,’ an act of self-gathering and contraction within Himself in order to create the possibility of the processes of the world... Only after this act of contraction does the Infinite turn outwards, sending a thread of the light of His essence into the primeval void created by tzimtzum from which there emanates the sefirot.”
The expertise of the teacher can use up all of the space in the room. The teacher role is set the plan for the learning, but once the class has begun, particularly with adults, the teacher should be just one more learner with an asterisk and a “buck stops here” responsibility to make the experience work for everybody. This is a very Jewish way of thinking about education. Jewish learning is not the memorization of a catechism. Getting the right answer is less important in Jewish learning than developing an understanding for oneself of the question and an answer.
When sitting at a Beit Din for a convert, a question that one often asks or hears asked by one of the other Dayanim is, “what do you like best about Judaism?” or, “what drew you to Judaism?” More often than not the answer is the grappling with ideas and the value that is placed on thinking for oneself. Whether one’s childhood education came from Yeshiva of Flatbush or Our Lady of Lourdes, that is what Jewish adult learners need. When they get the space within the class and their contributions are encouraged and validated they can grow into the role of teacher for themselves and others. (Which is not to say that there aren’t practical skills, like Hebrew language acquisition and trope learning that need to be taught primarily as skills-based classes). As much as anything, that is my own Jewish story.
Most adults come to Jewish education either through a habit of lifelong learning or because they have come to some crux in their lives that they are trying to work through. In either case, the desire is for growth. For those in times of transition, the Jewish style of learning (in well-run classes) is both nurturing and challenging. One has to face the challenges before one can accept the nurturing. Keep that in mind if you are intimidated or have had experiences of Jewish education that missed the mark for you. The things that we work for are the sweetest.
A last note out of my own experiences: I am no less intimidated by being the one who doesn’t “know the answer” as anyone else. That anxiety kept me back for years. Going to Rabbinic school forced me to reveal every weakness in my learning and over time that changed me a bit. There was one class towards the end of Rabbinic school where the teacher would ask questions and no one would answer (probably because many of my classmates didn’t bother to do the reading) and time would just lag. After a while I gave up on any pride and started answering the questions myself, without regard for whether or not I was right or wrong or really wrong. I was happy to open up some space and in doing so I was able to rouse my fellow students and get them engaged so that we could all learn (being wrong might have been my best move in that case). And once I’d had my say I let it go. They might have thought I was a jerk, or an idiot or a know-it-all, but we all did learn a lot in the end.
