What Work Do the Concepts of “Language” and “Literature” Do for Michael Rosenak?

Abstract

Michael Rosenak uses the twin metaphors of “language” and “literature,” borrowed from Oakeshott and Peters, to argue that the goal of education is initiation into a language. This goal transcends the study of literature in that language. It includes, as well, the development of the capacity both to critique literature and to produce literature of one’s own. This article compares his use of the language-literature distinction to that of Oakeshott and Peters, revealing some inconsistencies that are driven by his desire to emphasize both autonomy and pluralism, on the one hand, and to maintain a residual essentialism on the other.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author expresses his appreciation for their critical and constructive insights to Isa Aron, Barry Holtz, and others in the audience when this argument was first presented at the Network for Research in Jewish Education in 2010; to Dan Smokler, via his unpublished 2011 paper, “Michael Rosenak’s Metaphor of Language and Literature” and subsequent discussion of that paper; to Orah Minder and Beth Lesch; and to the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

¹ The terms do not appear in two early programmatic essays, “Education for Jewish Identification: Theoretical Guidelines” (Rosenak, 1978a) and “The Tasks of Jewish Religious Educational Philosophy” (Rosenak, 1978b). At this stage, Rosenak is enamored of various kinds of “facts” to which students may be “linked” and of Max Kadushin’s notion of “value concepts.” In Teaching Jewish Values: A Conceptual Guide, Rosenak (1986) refers to the idea of presenting Judaism as a language (pp. 35, 59–60, and Chapter 4, passim), but he does not yet employ the twin concepts of language and literature. A bit later on, in his Commandments and Concerns (Rosenak, 1987), the paired concepts do appear in two locations (pp. 34, 260), including a footnote in the former acknowledging both R. S. Peters and Michael Oakeshott. But they do not play a central role in his argument. (One may wonder, as one reviewer of this article has done, about the relationship between the twin concepts and other pairings that are central to Commandments and Concerns, such as “explicit” versus “implicit” and “normative-ideational” and “deliberative-inductive.” To be sure, one could pursue a fruitful investigation of the relationships among these various sets of concepts, and more broadly, of the ways in which the commitments that are captured in the language/literature duality are extensions of commitments that are present in the earlier work. But in neither case do the pairings do the work that language/literature does for Rosenak beginning in the mid-1990s, and to state the obvious, the broader investigation of Rosenak’s thought lies far beyond the scope of this particular article.) Finally, in his “Toward a Curriculum for The Modern Orthodox School” (Rosenak, 1991), he quotes S. R. Hirsch as calling for instruction “in the language of the civilized nations and introducing [children] into their literature” (p. 63)—but he does not bother to comment in that work on the pairing of language and literature.

² The concepts re-appear in an article titled “Between Texts and Contexts” (Rosenak, 1999, pp. 165–167 et passim), then in his book Tree of Life, Tree of Knowledge (Rosenak, 2001, pp. 4–9), then in “Educated Jews: Common Elements” in the edited volume Visions of Jewish Education (Fox, Scheffler, & Marom 2003, p. 80 ff.), and then in a paper entitled “Pictures and Models; An Exploration in Jewish Education Thought” (Rosenak, n.d.).

³ This is not to say that he refers to language/literature in every publication since the mid-1990s, which he does not. Notably, he does not discuss the concepts in his last work, Covenant and Community (Rosenak, 2013), perhaps because that book consists of a series of theological essays rather than more narrowly educational ones—although there are moments when he does allude to them. He mentions, for example, “the literature of Torah” (Rosenak, pp. 71–72), a phrase that would sound odd were he not implicitly referring to prior discussions of the literature of Torah; and he comments on teachers who “translate certain concepts into a relevant ‘language’ (or symbolic universe)” (Rosenak, p. 77), where the scare quotes around “language” and the parenthetical explanation are clear allusions to the metaphorical usage of the term. It is also worth noting that another scholar of Jewish education, Joseph Lukinsky, also refers to the language-literature distinction in his own work (see Lukinsky, 1990, p. 242), prior to the point at which the distinction became associated so strongly with Rosenak. Lukinsky, however, explicitly credits Rosenak for bringing the language-literature distinction into the field of Jewish education (Lukinsky, 2004, p. 34).

⁴ Is pluralism inevitable and a universal norm—or is it simply a product of our time and place? As one reviewer of this article notices, Rosenak calls our attention to the particular historical and cultural circumstances of modernity in several places, including the subtitle of Commandments and Concerns: Jewish Religion Education in Secular Society (1987). He is attuned to the particular conditions of modernity and wants his reader to be attuned to them as well. Yet the arguments themselves, it seems, including the core metaphor of language-literature, are not confined to this historical moment.

⁵ The language-literature distinction thus allows Oakeshott (1962) to articulate a familiar belief in a liberal arts education that focuses on process over product, on learning to think rather than learning information, while also avoiding the trap of form without content. “Learning to think scientifically is best achieved by studying, not some so-called ‘scientific method’, but some particular branch of science” (p. 313). This emphasis on subject-specificity has been echoed by a number of contemporary scholars of education, especially Lee Shulman and his students. For example, Sam Wineburg (2003): “There is no such thing as generic critical thinking. We think critically within the bounds of our disciplines.” We do not speak language; we speak a language or languages. We are not initiated into tradition; we are initiated into a tradition. We do not learn (or teach) generically; we learn (or teach) a particular subject or practice.

⁶ We might be tempted to associate Schwab’s (1978) distinction between syntactic and substantive structures of a discipline with Oakeshott’s language and literature. But this is a mistake. Both syntactic and substantive structures are, themselves, kinds of literature. If we are able to articulate these structures, they are, by definition, products (in a sense) of scientific thinking, the kinds of literature that we then use to foster scientific thinking.

⁷ The normativity of this statement is ambiguous. Is Rabbi Judah telling us how things are (an insight into human nature, whether or not we design educational arrangements on this basis), or how they ought to be (a normative prescription)?

⁸ It is true, of course, that we sometimes say that a person acted “out of mere habit,” and that we mean by that phrase that the person did not sufficiently reflect on the correct action in the situation. But this is just a quirk of language. As Peters (1974) puts it, “Habits need not be exercised out of force of habit” (p. 261).

⁹ This may be understood as a version of the hermeneutic circle of parts and wholes. We study a data set, we determine what it means, and we then decide that some data points are outliers or “noise.” We read a lot of poetry, we come up with norms of poetic excellence, and we then decide that some poems are better than others. We use the tradition, in other words, to critique the tradition.

¹⁰ There are also locations (e.g., in Rosenak 1999, 2003) where he offers examples of “Jewish language” that seem rather mundane, locations where he seems to be using the everyday meaning of “Jewish language” rather than the metaphorical usage. To observe, for example, that insiders know exactly what it means to ask, “When does Shabbat come in?,” while outsiders do not (Rosenak, 1999, p. 166), is accurate but entirely unremarkable linguistically. Conceptually, it amounts to little more than the fact that Jews, like everyone else, have their own language or dialect (or more accurately, a number of different dialects), rather than a demonstration of the distinct mode of thinking that “language” is supposed to represent in the language-and-literature metaphor. Significantly, this very example, about Shabbat “coming in,” appears in Rosenak’s (1986) Teaching Jewish Values, alongside a number of other similarly mundane linguistic examples. This suggests the following explanation. In his earlier phase, before developing the concepts of language and literature, Rosenak had a particular affection for the teaching of insider talk. Then, beginning in the early 1990s, he developed the more metaphorical usage of language-and-literature, which has little to do with this kind of insider talk. But the earlier, familiar examples stuck around, and re-appeared from time to time, even though they no longer suited his philosophical purposes.

¹¹ A reader might wonder, here and elsewhere, about the singular formulation. We might grant that the Jewish tradition can be encompassed by a collective singular noun “literature,” for certain purposes. But does that literature in fact instantiate a single language? Might we not, after considering the internal diversity within the tradition, talk about multiple Jewish languages? In fact, even the notion that there is a one-to-one correspondence between a particular work of literature and the language in which it is written may be called into question. A poem, for example, may be written in the language of certain poetic conventions. But it may equally well be described as being written in the language of human romantic interactions. This possibility of multiple descriptions suggests that any individual work of literature is actually a product of multiple languages. And if so, then the language that we learn, in studying the literature, depends on which description is primary for us at that moment. All of this is to suggest, again, as will be emphasized as my argument continues, that the desire for a transhistorical, authoritative and consistent language—a transhistorical, authoritative and consistent set of values and norms, standing behind the diverse manifestations of Jewish culture—is understandable but destined to be frustrated. I acknowledge Orah Minder (private conversation) who helped me to see this point.

¹² In a remarkable footnote, Rosenak (1987) calls upon Heschel as an ally in this fight. “This feature of Jewish adherence to Jewish language, namely that it has traditionally been believed to be from Heaven, protects the language from the subjective and sometimes irrational features of philosophies of culture that consider the language of convention and custom of particular groups immune to moral and rational critique. As revealed language, it is neither arbitrary nor simply conventional. Therefore, truth-talk or truth claims are not irrelevant to it” (p. 20, fn. 4). In other words, without the belief that language is divinely protected and hence eternal and eternally foundational, language would be arbitrary or merely conventional, and unable to do the work of critique that we need it to do. Rosenak is surely correct to point to Heschel as among those who insist on the reality of divine revelation, for epistemic and other reasons. But at the same time, Heschel participates in a tradition with others (including Franz Rosenzweig before him and Louis Jacobs after, and perhaps including James Kugel as well) who reduce revelation to minimal content. Ben Sommer (2010) discusses this view as affirming “the revelation as a real event in history in which God made God’s commanding presence known to Israel [but] this event did not necessarily involve any specific words. … The Written Torah is another sort of Oral Torah” (pp. 72–74).

¹³ The claims here echo James Kugel’s arguments about the emergence of the “Bible as it was” (Kugel, 1999a), and “traditions of the Bible” (Kugel, 1999b; see also Kugel, 2008), and the examples are borrowed from him. But the point can be generalized to include legal material as well. The idea that the Bible is the source and rabbinic law is the commentary may be true in one genealogical sense, but is also problematic. For example, whatever we imagine to be the language of Shabbat that is instantiated in the extensive rabbinic literature on the observance of Shabbat and its myriad restrictions, surely that language is not adequately represented by the biblical passages on Shabbat. In this sense, to claim that the biblical text is the source and the rabbinic texts are simply commentaries is deeply misleading.

¹⁴ Is this, in the end, a theological dispute about the origin of the Pentateuch? I do not believe so. One can affirm the Sinaitic or divinely inspired status of the Torah while still maintaining an antifundamentalist stance, that is, a rejection of the idea that the encounter with the text of the Torah provides an unmediated access to its “language,” its values and principles. The Torah may be divine without being self-interpreting. And once we acknowledge (as the rabbinic tradition overwhelmingly does) that the text needs its interpreters, we are back in the position of acknowledging that we only ever access literature, not language.

¹⁵ See note 10, above, regarding Rosenak’s effort to actually name specific concepts that populate “Jewish language,” where it was claimed that this effort is a conceptual mistake.

¹⁶ In a surprisingly idiosyncratic gesture toward a value that he apparently believes is shared by all Jews, Rosenak (2003) quotes Walter Rathenau on Jews’ disdain for hunting: “if a Jew tells you that he enjoys hunting, he is lying” (p. 184). Whether or not this quip holds true for the post-Enlightenment middle European Jewish bourgeoisie whom Rathenau had in mind, it seems an odd nominee for a fundamental and transhistorical element of Jewish language.

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Notes on contributors

Jon A. Levisohn

Jon A. Levisohn is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Chair of Jewish Educational Thought at Brandeis University, where he also serves as Director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education. E-mail: [email protected]