What Can Jewish Scholarship Contribute to Jewish Teaching?: The Case of the Rabbinic Tale

ABSTRACT

What does it mean for teachers to “know their subject matter” and what are—or might be—the sources of teachers’ knowledge? The article contends that there is an underutilized potential resource for Jewish teachers that Judaica scholarship about classic texts may offer to pedagogy. The article examines, as a model, the Rabbinic tale—stories found in Rabbinic literature about the Rabbis themselves—homing in on the ways that this literature is viewed by scholars today. It then explores the pedagogic implications of this scholarship and suggests both the advantages and complexities in using Judaica scholarship in this fashion.

KEYWORDS:

• Judaica scholarship
• professional growth of teachers
• teachers’ subject matter knowledge
• teaching Rabbinic texts

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This was more or the less the concept presented by Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, in an op-ed in the New York Times, July 26, 1999.

2 See also (Shulman, 1986).

3 “Published” is surrounded by quotation marks since it is not intended to assume that the these texts were published in the way we today mean the term. Rather it suggests that a text was by and large organized and known, mostly through oral transmission.

4 Earlier scholarship often used the term haggadah to refer to this literature. Nowadays aggadah (plural aggadot) has replaced the earlier usage. Generally haggadah is used specically to refer to the Passover Haggadah.

5 Halakhah and aggadah are not recently invented terms: The Rabbis themselves were aware of these categories, as we see in a number of places in this corpus. See, for one example, the Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Bava Batra 8a). The most well-known reflection on the terms in a literary fashion is an essay from 1916 called “Halakhah and Aggadah,” by the great Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik.

6 One sees the variety of possibilities in books dealing with these stories about the rabbis: Jeffrey Rubenstein, the leading scholar of this literature, has books entitled Talmudic Stories (1999), Rabbinic Stories (2002), and Stories of the Babylonian Talmud (2010); Burton Visotzky uses the term “sage tales” (2011); the English translation of Ruth Calderone’s book A Bride for One Night uses Talmud Tales (2014) as its subtitle. (The Hebrew was aggadot, not surprisingly.)

7 On the apodictic nature of Mishnah see Weiss Halivni (1986) and Simon-Shoshan (2012).

8 For example, Rose G. Lurie, The Great March, Book I (New York, NY: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1931), Mordecai H. Lewittes Highlights of Jewish History, Volume 3 (New York, NY: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1955), Ellen Frankel, The Classic Tales (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Publishing, 1989).

9 I first encountered Neusner’s approach in the distribution by mail of a lecture he delivered at Bowdoin College in 1980; it was later incorporated as a chapter in his influential book, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah. I had the good fortune to take a course with Fraenkel at the Hebrew University in 1977 and watched his genius at work in class interpreting tales in insightful and imaginative ways.

10 My own book, Rabbi Akiva: Sage of the Talmud (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017) has been profoundly influenced by these new literary approaches to the Rabbinic tale.

11 The story of Rabban Yohanan appears in a few different versions; perhaps the most well-known one is in the Babylonian Talmud Tractate Gittin 56a–b. The fact is that Vespasian was back in Rome at the time of the siege and that it is extremely unlikely that a Jewish teacher would manage to talk with the future Emperor of Rome. Akiva’s supposed marriage to Turnus Rufus’s widow is told in the Babylonian Talmud Tractate Nedarim 50a–b.

12 Yet even in this case, insights about the cultural differences can help make sense of specific texts and be of great use for teachers. The stories in Rabbinic literature about the tension between a Rabbi’s domestic life and his life in the Beit Midrash have been illuminated by Boyarin’s (1993, pp. 136–151) insights about the different decisions about the age at which Rabbis married in the two communities of the Land of Israel and Babylonia.

13 See, for example, Friedman (2004).