Learning to Learn with a Havruta: Pragmatic and Ethical Facets

ABSTRACT

What are students’ perceptions of havruta learning after osmotic socialization? This osmosis is achieved solely by observing and emulating behaviors from other havruta learners. Perceived benefits include improvement of thinking and social skills and correcting misunderstandings, whereas challenges include the limitation of one’s freedom and a sense of missing additional learning opportunities. Particularly relevant for educators seeking to cultivate intentional havruta practices among students., these findings underline the need for a nuanced pedagogy that is highly attentive to students’ spontaneous discovery of pragmatic and ethical insights, as well as how enhancement of the ethical dimension of havruta may support students’ engagement with personal challenges in this learning format.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative learning
• emerging ethics
• Havruta text study
• intentional learning
• learning by osmosis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An additional study on online havruta learning has been published recently. See Goldfarb Cohen (2022).

2 Several elements contribute to the need for this kind of sustained interpretive effort: the text is written in Aramaic, which is accessible as a second language at best, even for Hebrew speakers; it has no punctuation and few vowels; and it assumes a sophisticated background knowledge of conceptual, hermeneutic, and rhetorical legal terms. Creative interpretation is also one of the ways Jewish scholars find ways to apply ancient wisdom and laws to contemporary contexts.

3 The model is rooted in philosophical hermeneutics and expands on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. According to that philosophical tradition, the self is thought of not as an autonomous entity, but as radically interpersonal, continuously confronted with the presence of the Other. (”Other” is capitalized to signal the radical alterity that resides in the encountered learner as well as in the text.)

4 Inspired by the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Hans-Georg Gadamer (despite their differing views on this topic), the concept of the ethical-relational dimension of havruta text study has developed over the course of multiyear research (Holzer, 2006). For ethical traits that can be cultivated by the learner in relation to the text, see Holzer, 2007, and for insights into ethical dimension of havruta learning as it is reflected in rabbinic literature, see Holzer, 2009.

5 While originally referring to the Pentateuch, ”Torah” is often used to encompass a person’s religious knowledge writ large, including its practical enactment in life.

6 http://www.lind.org.il/.