Contextualizing Community in Teacher Bible Talk

Abstract

This paper explores the interactions surrounding Bible teaching as a means of understanding how Jewish youth are discursively implicated within ideologies of community. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from linguistic anthropology and interactional sociolinguistics, I present a micro-analysis of a classroom lesson on the book of Leviticus to analyze how the social construct of communal identification is discursively and linguistically constructed through the teacher's use of deictic expressions, reported speech, and other rhetorical and lexical features. These contextual cues work to conflate the spatiotemporal boundaries between antiquity and the present-day classroom context, and mesh the experiences of the students with those of the ancient Israelites.

Notes

¹This framework is drawing from the work of interactional sociolinguistics, which is concerned with how speakers signal and interpret meaning in social interaction.

² To protect the privacy of the participants in this study, I used the pseudonym “Rothberg” throughout this article, as well as pseudonyms for all individuals.

³ The text “textpeople” is attributed to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and refers to individuals with deep metacognitive understanding of the connection between the sacred textual tradition and religious identification.

⁴ It is important to note that while Amy structures her utterances as direct reported speech, with the use of a metapragmatic verb, these are what Tannen (1986) calls “constructed dialogue”—an utterance that was never actually spoken.

⁵ The historical present tense is the use of the present tense form with past tense reference.

⁶ Sociologist David Hess (1993) refers to this way of imagining identity as dialogical, in which “identity is constituted not by its essential characteristics, but instead by a set of relationships to the Other, or whatever is not the Self” (p. 43, emphasis in the original).

⁷ Whether or not this particular genre is indexical of Jewish storytelling is perhaps an issue worthy of attention. This question was initiated by Amy, who upon hearing the recorded transcript in a feedback session, was surprised by how much God sounded like, in her words a “stereotypical overbearing Jewish mother from a Philip Roth novel.” Her perceived gendered performance of God and the implied lack of agency among the Israelites were only briefly touched upon in our discussion. A point that Amy did raise was that she was not surprised that she punctuated her performance with multilingual semantic choices, in that traditionally Jewish women managed their households and took care of family matters in multiple languages.

⁸ Although it was completely serendipitous, the students had been discussing with their homeroom teacher their own advancement from middle school to high school just moments before Amy's lesson began.

⁹ Her juxtaposition of these two overlapping narratives, along with her examples of going off to university, traveling, and figuring life out raise questions about the referent of the word them in line 24 and whether she herself has intertwined the two stories in her mind.