Using the Contextual Orientation to Facilitate the Study of Bible with Generation X

Abstract

This article investigates the use of the contextual orientation to the Bible—which seeks to understand the Bible as a product of its time, and in the context of historical-critical biblical scholarship—as a deliberate, significant aspect of a teacher's overall approach to reaching Jewish adults in their 20s and 30s. Through classroom observation and qualitative interviews, the authors (one of whom is the teacher in the article) explore how this approach affects student learning and engagement and facilitates a meaningful attachment to and understanding of the Bible. This article also reflects one teacher's examination of his own teaching orientation and its expressions, serving as a possible model for other such investigations.

Notes

¹The Plaut chumash, or Pentateuch, is produced by the Reform movement. It includes each Torah portion in the original Hebrew, the weekly haftarah (prophetic reading), English translations, and a variety of notes and commentaries (Plaut, 1981).

²While this article investigates Morrison's utilization of the contextual orientation, his teaching reflects aspects of several of Holtz's orientations, including parshanut; decoding, translation, and comprehension; literary criticism; reader-response; and personalization. (See Holtz, 2003, pp. 92–95.) Most often, about 75% of the class period attends to direct exploration of the biblical text; Morrison then directs students to one or more commentaries, traditional and/or modern. In this way, he exposes students to multiple types of Jewish texts as well as a multiple ways of approaching the Bible.

³One of this article's authors, Cousens, is currently involved in an empirical case study of The Riverway Project. Her academic interests focus on the Jewish growth of adults in their 20s and 30s. In studying The Riverway Project, she explores how the various strategies that Morrison uses enable participants to develop strengthened connections to Judaism and new understandings of the role that Jewish traditions and ideas can play in their lives. She relies on a variety of qualitative research methods to construct her study, including participant observation in all Riverway Project related activities and semi-structured interviews with Morrison and frequent and semi-frequent Riverway Project participants. This work on the contextual orientation will be part of her larger study.

⁴ Holtz (2003) defines this orientation as an approach that “aims at the contemporary meaning of the biblical text. These meanings may be characterized as psychologically oriented, politically oriented, or spiritually oriented. In all cases, the goal is to see the relationship between text and the life of today” (pp. 93–94). Holtz states elsewhere, “All personalist approaches … share a common goal: to find the links between a person's life and the biblical text” (p. 88).

⁵Writers about Generation X do not agree regarding the birth years that mark this population, each using different cultural events to note the beginning and end of the cohort. Following the birthrate, which decreased significantly in the mid-1960s and then increased in late 1970s, we understand baby boomers to have been born 1946 to 1964, and the next generation, Generation X, to have been born 1965 to 1980. Generation X, then, includes 46 million Americans compared to 80 million baby boomers and 76 million millennials, those who come after Generation X. (See Lancaster & Stillman, 1972, pp. 20–32.)

⁶Other aspects of Cousens' dissertation research demonstrate that Riverway Project participants feel demands from their other social networks to remove themselves from involvement in Judaism. The norms of these networks establish Judaism as fundamentalist; they pressure participants to be skeptical of Judaism, suggesting to participants that the tradition's teachings are dogmatic. For these individuals to become involved in a Jewish social network, then, they must view Judaism's teachings in a different way, developing an understanding of Judaism as anything but fundamentalist. The contextual orientation provides just that nonfundamentalist approach.

⁷For example, their participation in [T × 3] and in additional learning opportunities that Morrison leads has helped other participants to reformulate their families holiday celebrations (adding to them the study of traditional Jewish texts), to learn even more through the synagogue and in other Boston area programs, and even to consider sending their children to Jewish day school. In sum, a number of participants have become regular students of Judaism.