Worth Knowing: Talmud Study and the Intellectual Values of High School Students at Liberal Jewish Day Schools

ABSTRACT

What do Jewish day school students believe constitutes good understanding and worthwhile learning in the context of their encounter with rabbinic texts in the classroom? This article shares findings from an interview study of Jewish day school students in grades 9 through 12 regarding their attitudes toward the study of Talmud. I argue that high school students’ estimations of the value of Talmud study are shaped, not only by individually held tastes, talents, and commitments, but also by a set of shared intellectual values. These values, related to their beliefs about the purposes of learning and what good learning should accomplish for the learner, develop in the context of their schools and communities and frame how students set goals for and assess their own understanding of Talmud.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic beliefs
• high school students
• Jewish education
• Talmud

Acknowledgments

The Students Understandings of Rabbinics research project is a partnership between the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University and the Davidson School for Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary and was funded, in part, by a grant from CASJE, the Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education, at George Washington University. In addition to developing a knowledge base for the field of rabbinics education in general, the project was designed to support the ongoing development of standards and benchmarks in rabbinics as part of the Jewish Day School Standards and Benchmarks Project. The Students Understandings of Rabbinices Project is headed up by Professor Jon Levisohn of Brandeis University and Professor Jeffrey Kress of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Rabbi Elliot Goldberg, Dr. Ziva Reimer Hassenfeld, and Rabbi Sheryl Katzman have offered crucial feedback on study design, school selection, and the interview protocol. Additionally, Rabbi Elliot Goldberg and Rabbi Joshua Ladon offered valuable assistance in conducting some interviews with teachers and students and provided a sounding board for many of the ideas in this paper. Elisheva Gould, Jacob Zieper, and Avigayil Schneiman checked transcripts for accuracy. Amina Levites-Cohen provided research assistance. Dr. Moshe Krakowski and Dr. Katie Light Soloway provided valuable feedback on the project report. Some material in this paper appears in the full report (Levites, in press).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Initially this study sought to uncover student understandings of rabbinics, however this paper specifically addresses student understandings of Talmud. This underscores the difference between rabbinics as a body of text and how this literature is presented as a subject matter in Jewish day schools. Over the course of the data-collection process it emerged that both educators and students in Jewish day schools almost always addressed questions about the presentation of rabbinics in day schools as related to the formal study of Talmud in the classroom. Most did not consider where rabbinics might appear outside of the classroom subject (e.g., tefillah, the Jewish calendar, etc.) While the interview protocol opened using the word rabbinics most students preferred to conduct their interview using the word Talmud instead. Some used Gemara or Torah she be’al peh. Further, when educators and students spoke about what Talmud was and what kind of material it contained they almost always referenced halakhic material. Midrash and aggadah were rarely mentioned. (For more on the presentation of rabbinic text in Jewish day school classrooms, see Levites’s (2018) The Scope of the Web: Day School Educators’ Perceptions of Expertise in Rabbinics or Levites’s (in press) The Teaching and Learning of Rabbinics in Jewish Community Day Schools.)

² In most of these instances the question of why a student should study Talmud or why Talmud warrants study in contemporary educational settings is unexamined. Notable exceptions include chapters by Gregg Gardner and Elizabeth Shanks Alexander (both in Kanarek and Lehman’s (2016) Learning to Read Talmud: What it Looks Like and How it Happens). In both chapters the authors reflect on experiences teaching rabbinic text in nonsectarian university settings and offer a case for why the study of rabbinic text is a worthwhile pursuit.

³ Here I follow Tali Hyman, in which Jewish liberal day schools which can be seen as “part of the modernist project to adapt and update classical rabbinic Judaism to life in an open society with Western ideals.” (Hyman, 2008, p. 31). A key belief central to the foundation of these schools is the possibility of a synthesis of Jewish and Western ideals. As Hyman notes, Jewish communal norms and needs do not always harmonize with Western Enlightenment values and instead can produce a sense of “dissonance” for students. This is not to say that Orthodox day schools do not engage with or promote Western liberal values. For more on Talmud study in Orthodox Jewish day schools see Krakowski (2017).

⁴ Generally speaking, the advanced track (sometimes called Honors, accelerated, or Beit midrash) presents text in the original language and seeks to build skills so students can independently access these texts. This class is often seen as geared toward students who have been in Jewish day school since elementary school and have appropriate Hebrew language skills to take on the translation tasks in the classroom. In the standard Jewish Studies class (which was rarely referred to by schools or students with any distinctive name), texts are often presented in translation. One administrator argued that his school does not have an advanced track and that the program was rigorous across the board; however, students in this school were generally aware and noted in their interviews that one track had more intensive requirements and more advanced language skills.

⁵ When I shared this finding with a scholar of Talmud she was quite surprised. From her expert perspective (and personal schooling experiences) the study of Talmud would be the most like the study of math.

⁶ All names are pseudonyms. Students were offered the opportunity to select their own pseudonyms. If a student did not select a pseudonym one was assigned by the research team.

⁷ Batya did not note, for example, the role of the Talmud in the development of the liturgy and Shabbat practices of her synagogue community.

⁸ As noted earlier, student consultants were invited to select their own pseudonyms.

⁹ Importantly activities for learning are different from orientations. Still activities for learning can make visible preferred teacher orientations. As described by the students, these levels of understanding roughly map onto Holtz's (Bible) and Levisohn’s (Rabbinics) orientations to sacred Jewish text. Level I aligns with the Decoding and Translation Orientation (Bib) and Skills Orientation (Rab); Level II aligns with Halakhic Orientation (Rab); and Level III aligns with Personalization Orientation (Bib), Ideational Orientation (Bib), and Torah/Instruction Orientation (Rab). While not designed as an alignment study there was agreement between the activities students reported happening in class and activities we might associate with the orientations that the teachers interviewed ireported foregrounding in their own teaching of Talmud.

¹⁰ As such it bears some resemblance to Bloom’s taxonomy, which students may or may not be explicitly aware of.

¹¹ Students in the “regular” Jewish Studies track, while they sometimes did translation work, did not focus on the need to translate and decode syntax in order to understand rabbinic text in their interviews. They also did not focus on the second tier of understanding, following the logic of the argument.

¹² Teachers may introduce different activities for learning Talmud and Tanakh. Or students may enter their classrooms with a different framework for Tanakh as important and meaningful that they learn from their home and communities (and even American society in general, which considers the Bible a foundational text).

¹³ This quote is particularly interesting because the students often referred to animals in their interviews as examples of how (ridiculously) obscure and disconnected from their reality Talmud could be. They offered sheep, oxen, and donkeys as examples to epitomize the distance between their own realities and life depicted in the Talmud. Here Barry chooses a text that features a donkey to highlight how Talmud can generate “deeper meanings.”

¹⁴ In contemporary South Korea some have drawn an association between Jewish achievement in the secular sphere and the study of Talmud. Tokayer’s 5,000 Years of Jewish Wisdom: Secrets of the Talmud Scriptures (originally published in Japanese in 1971) is a bestseller in South Korea. For more on this subject see Gribetz and Kim (2018).

¹⁵ Hyman writes largely about “Jewish studies” in general. Students in the interviews did contrast between the study of Tanakh and the study of Talmud.

¹⁶ In the report I also note implications for teacher development. One finding in the report is that teachers of Talmud in Jewish day schools are often trained in the same handful of institutions—namely, seminaries and yeshivas—and tend to present Talmud the way they themselves were taught.