How to Learn Bible
Wolf, Arnold Jacob
HOW TO LEARN BIBLE ARNOLD JACOB WOLF Learning Bible is both necessary and possible—necessary because American Jews do not know the book, possible because it can be learned. At Yale, the American...
...Perhaps the fact that God cannot bring himself to call human creation "good" (although the sixth day as a whole is "very good") shows a certain ambivalence about His last creature...
...Technical questions often lead beyond themselves: our task is to find out not only what is said but also what is meant...
...What is the question which gives rise to the interpreter's "answer," and what questions are raised by that answer itself...
...Rabbi Solomon Goldman once said to me that Jews never read books...
...The text is, itself, a kind of answer, though one that, like all profound answers, raises ever new questions...
...We teach carefully but never completely...
...Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf is Director of the Hillel Foundation at Yale University...
...If I am forced to give a word to the kind of questions I think are posed by Scripture, the word would have to be "existential," but that word, too, says considerably less than I mean...
...Solutions stifle, but deep questions drive inevitably deeper into our souls...
...Its God is not Olympian and will not conform to our image of Him...
...Each of us must be humble enough to see our own pet ideas demolished, and proud enough to war against other people's interpretations...
...The kinds of questions we ask should not, in most settings, be only scientific or aesthetic...
...one soon learns that it is also striking in its concern with living issues...
...Teaching and learning Bible means disclosure, confrontation, even careful extrapolation...
...If a book is not worth studying, he said, it is not even worth perusing...
...We might begin the study of the Flood with a trivial question about why the raven preceded the dove, since it did not in the earlier comparative Near Eastern material...
...Ideally, the student remembers less about the teacher than about the text...
...I believe there are also real contradictions...
...Questions posed should not be left vague nor completely open-ended, but they must also not be seen as gimmicks or entering-wedges for a preconceived solution...
...The difference is between reading what is there and using what is there for what is not...
...Its mood should rather be one of being driven back to the text to look again at what seemed first to be an answer but always turned out to be a deeper and harder question...
...how we got it is merely secondary...
...Jews, of all varieties and denominations, betray sketchy acquaintance with Biblical texts, even though some might happen to know rather more about Jewish holidays or Israeli history, or even if they can make out the Hebrew language...
...God does not (cannot...
...We must use the Socratic method more honorably than Plato did, not to prove what we already really know, but to sharpen our sensibilities in order to know and feel more...
...We can never specify it in some final fashion, only point to it and use it to point to where it points...
...More than we expect...
...For the Bible to be sacred it need not have come to us in any special way...
...Nothing seems more radical than naked tradition...
...It is a help to know source-criticism if only to discover that it, too, is no answer but a series of insoluble puzzles...
...It is also possible...
...We are not in the business of thinking up new thoughts, certainly not of de-constructing old ones, so much as in discovering our past, imagining the present, and remembering what many before us have already forgotten...
...Our act of repetition says that meanings continue to elude us, yet we continue to search them out...
...Everything...
...Words may be read alone or together, but meanings can often be disclosed only to a community of learners...
...No one is more subtle in this kind of ethical-personal query than the French Jewish savant, Emanuel Levinas, who goes to the heart of Scripture and rabbinic texts not with the equipment and concerns of the specialist, but with the philosopher's questioning passion and the Jew's conviction that there is more in the Bible than is dreamt of in our philosophy...
...He must not force scripture to affirm what he already holds, merely to authenticate his present conviction...
...produce a person, like a world, by fiat...
...The Bible must be read against its own environmental background, but the latter includes not only Ugarit and Babylonia but also myself...
...Everyone senses that Biblical material is absolutely basic...
...Each debate ends in a Talmudic teku...
...It is essential to our method that anyone may speak and no one be ignored...
...The end of each study session should not leave the group with a sense of closure, however much it might enjoy the sense of having solved a venerable riddle...
...Its Torah does not manContinued on page 54 Continued from page 40 date the ethics of Aristotle or Rawls...
...Tradition is a more valuable tool than mere innovativeness...
...The leader's role is, therefore, delicate...
...The truth is that we do not know the truth: the Bible asks unanswerable questions, and we must not claim more than to have posed them carefully and looked hard for explanations...
...A liberal Jew, any modern, doubting person, must, however, forego his doubts, suspend his disbeliefs and hold himself open to the infinitely self-renewing power of the word...
...Some have heard the Torah read (not, usually, carefully translated and almost never interpreted and discussed) during Sabbath services, but they have rarely even turned the pages of most of the rest of the Tanach...
...they were now seeking to do what they might have done long before in religious schools, but somehow never did...
...The Bible is not a book for speed readers...
...But study classically means study b'havruta, in a community, with a leader...
...Revelation cannot be skimmed...
...things may seem lopsided if we forget there is more— and different—wisdom elsewhere in the Book...
...So our questions must not be of the kind: in Scripture who is said to have lived the longest life...
...Scientific questions are not, of course, excluded in principle: they remain, however, inevitably preliminary...
...There is an irremovable distinction between going out to meet the Bible (to be sure, with all we have to bring) and forcing the text into our own, necessarily narrower categories...
...I have personally found far more significance in passages (like the Akedah or the story of David's rise to power) that offend me than in those that soothe, though the latter also have their time and place...
...It will not conform...
...The Bible is not the Boy Scout Manual...
...Within those limits, various numbers are possible...
...We refuse to go back to a pre-scientific dogmatism of any kind, but nineteenth century scholarly concerns are no longer our own...
...However much we want to use the text to prove something (even something true), the text must remain more sacred than anything we ever could prove...
...Times rejoin each other...
...Jewish learning is not hearing someone talk about a book...
...A good semester of study alone or in a synagogue or Havurah can cover a major book (like Deuteronomy) or a smaller one (Song of Songs) with additional comparative materials of many kinds...
...The text eludes our pursuit, so we must redouble our effort...
...We are not critics of the Bible but its co-conspirators...
...P'shat does not quite mean the plain sense or simple meaning of the text, as several recent studies have proved...
...He/she may neither dominate nor absent himself...
...A good teacher teaches the Bible's wisdom in his or her own ignorance...
...A weekly informal session can complete the two Books of Samuel in a year or the Five Books of Moses in about three...
...The leader is present more to raise questions than to provide answers...
...still, criticism is not our final task...
...Then, or another time, we might think about the deeper problem of a good person in a bad generation...
...it makes them dramatically vivid and often heartbreaking...
...We need not be afraid of questions about why Abraham lied, Moses killed, the Israelites committed genocide, the prophets exaggerated, or Ezra legislated ethno-centrism...
...What we are currently studying is not all there is...
...The Department of Religious Studies, confronted with enormous new enrollments in its Biblical courses, discovered that most students simply had never read most books of the Bible...
...I remember much about him, more about what he said about the book, but most about the book itself...
...The Jew reads his Bible as a Jew...
...In thinking about the Creation story, we might begin with Genesis' specific formulation of the creation of mankind which differs subtly from the earlier of God's creations...
...He does not come to it new-born, but instructed and chastened by generations of earlier readers, commentators and "learners" like himself...
...The Bible is not so much a book as a world, and our study of it must be not the study of literary forms only but of life...
...It also follows that group size is crucial...
...For those who cannot yet read Hebrew there are now excellent English translations, as well as important ones in other modern languages...
...He/she must steer the discussion's tone between levity and over-seriousness...
...a good teacher is translucent to what he is teaching, and this is never more true than with Biblical material...
...It is beyond our reach, so we reach ever higher...
...Accuracy in interpretation is essential...
...More than appears on the surface...
...How does a child honor a parent...
...A good word from an old interpreter often helps us more than an ingenious speculation by our contemporary...
...It does not condescend to our moral dilemmas...
...Unlike the vast Talmudic literature, for example, it is of manageable length...
...More than we can understand...
...The class will sound more like a bazaar or a courtroom than like a Quaker meeting...
...Apologetics has its place, but not in the kind of Biblical study here envisioned...
...He must not be guilty of pious anachronism nor dogmatic presupposition...
...It is a far more flexible and rich methodology than that...
...Our method of study must be dialectical, not dogmatic: the Biblical text is always, as Rabbi Heschel says'about all God-statements, an understatement...
...Its holiness is a holiness of expectation, not one of accomplished fact...
...The simple meaning of scripture is of course, not so simple, but it is far more precise and instructive than any interpretation, even and especially our own...
...The learner does not judge...
...The famous Israeli teacher, Nehama Leibowitz, is often brilliant at raising small questions that open out to vast concerns...
...We have no quarrel, either, with traditional believers so long as they do not identify their own beliefs HOW TO LEARN HUE ARNOLD JACOB WOLF with the history of Israel's faith...
...Study of Torah should reflect something of that infinite longing which is beyond both failure and success...
...Bible study is very confusing, but not stupefying...
...Why is usury forbidden to Jews...
...He would have good reasons for that...
...The crucial question is what we have...
...Everyone can read the Bible except one who thinks he already has...
...It is always more than we say it is, never less...
...Eric Auerbach has taught us that, unlike a much more explicit Greek literature, the Hebrew writer alludes and refers, speaks in silences, subtly...
...It is ancient and elusive and profound, but it is also straightforward and quintessential...
...It is as available in some respects to the neophyte as to the Talmudist, to the lover of literature as to the theologian...
...It is good for us Jews to have to read the Five Books over and over again year after year...
...No interpretation or interpreter is privileged, not Rashi, not Buber, not the teacher of our own class...
...There will be no consensus...
...The Bible is a mystery to be confronted, not a problem to be solved...
...Use the contradictions dia-lectically: why are both necessary...
...He/she is judged...
...I have merged my teacher, with the book...
...It is a great accomplishment to be a Biblical scholar, a still greater one to be the addressee of the Biblical message...
...he cannot and should not pretend that he is innocent of any pre-history...
...Not only what was, but what we are...
...It is important to note how many times and where a specific Hebrew word is used...
...Questions should proceed from the relatively minor to the most general and profound...
...The Bible js important, but our own views are always less than final...
...So a study of scripture is necessary...
...While I prefer a group of IS (that is the number set for Yale seminars by the Administration), I have found five or 30 are both feasible...
...We grasp some of its meaning, never the whole of it...
...We learn parts of the Book, never all of it...
...He or she cannot and should not pretend to know less than he does, though, of course, not more either...
...A traditional Jew can confront the Bible honestly only by foregoing his own preconceptions, by nakedly opening himself to the wholly unexpected...
...No text could possibly be more than that...
...Three people are too few, SO too many...
...Some truth, not the least important, can only be stated paradoxically...
...it should not mean sermonics, manipulation or histori-cism...
...It is also about what happens...
...I am, we are, the skein on which Scripture is continually woven...
...It does not need any of our ineffectual apologies...
...Yet neither is impossible...
...Themes of family, law, power, lust, faith and faithlessness, nationalism and war, suffering and death are the great themes not only of world literature but of human life...
...A little revelation is a very dangerous thing...
...The real question is not whether but how to teach the Bible to modern Jews...
...Its central characters are always ambivalent and sometimes doomed...
...We assume that the Bible can withstand relentless criticism...
...First of all, I believe, we must teach them p'shat and not d'rash...
...No scholar but has his day, no idea whose time will never come around...
...Many years ago my uncle and rabbi introduced me to the Book of Exodus...
...We should not try to smooth out its wrinkles nor hide its warts...
...Rather: how can a land be promised, and how rightfully taken by force...
...much can only be understood by a method of query and response and query...
...would ask: "What is Rashi's problem...
...Each view of each student, especially the teacher-student, will be resolutely attacked...
...He is primus inter pares, first among equals, not master of all he surveys...
...No one can learn Tanach who does not believe God is in the details, especially in the most boring ones...
...We owe the text honesty, which means confronting jarring as well as comfortable passages...
...We are all in it together, the dead as well as the living, the medieval as well as the postmodern...
...But no view is final, and no agreement sought...
...Data must be fully and precisely put...
...Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it...
...The study-room must be big enough to hold the participants but not too big so that it intimidates them...
...Nothing will be admitted without debate...
...A Jewish class, therefore, will be full of controversy...
...The same could be said for the teacher...
...It is not above the fray...
...Good...
...More, perhaps, than anything human beings have ever, unaided, themselves produced...
...Biblical material is as precise as a sonnet, more careful than a formula...
...Not only about ancestors but also, since what happened to them is "a sign" to us, about ourselves...
...The method of learning is discussion, not lecture...
...It is very important to use the Bible to interpret itself...
...There are in it apparent contradictions...
...Over and over again, in teaching Bible commentary, my teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel...
...We have no quarrel with the science of Judaism so long as it knows that Judaism is much more than science...
...it is studying a book, under expert teachers who are also themselves "students of the wise...
...Class members will be on their toes, not on their best behavior, because we honor Scripture best by taking it seriously enough to argue about—not for the sake of argument, but for the sake of Scripture...
...inconclusive, unfinished, ongoing...
...Our task is not to defend the Bible against its detractors who call it primitive, bloody, tasteless...
...Something important is at stake...
...The Bible is not only a book about what happened...
...More than moves in the depths...
...A Bible group should not be manipulated but opened wide up...
...Nor are we to see the beauties of the Bible as mere literature unless, as seems to me increasingly the case, literature itself is swallowed up in a much larger category...
...We need not assume previous knowledge to begin to enter the Scripture, but we must emphasize that learning some of it may be not only incomplete but also misleading...
...she must listen as carefully as she speaks...
...My only objection to her method is that it leaves questions only partly open, and "solves" problems that are too mysterious for solution...
...More than we want...
...we only study them...
...At Yale, the American Studies Department found that its students' knowledge of scripture was inadequate to a study of American literature, and instituted remedial sections to prepare students to approach their own literary history, one which consistently refers to Biblical themes...
...It is precisely explication de texte...
...We must be attentive to detail if we are to encompass signification...
...When I learn Jewish texts with students in open discussion, I feel myself back not only at the University of Chicago Great Books seminars where, sixteen years old, I painfully worked through the Republic and Paradise Lost with gifted teachers who could both listen and respond, but also much farther back in a most traditional Bet Midrash where Jewish scholars proved their learning not by displaying it in a fine discourse, but by leading their students carefully into the intricacies and depths of the sacred word...
...And that each of us can be...
...His or her task is not self-presentation nor pontificating...
...It is important what is said and left unsaid, who is described by whom, and how the Commandments in Exodus differ from those in Deuteronomy...
...it is the fray...
...He or she must, as Maimonides tells us in the Hilhot Talmud Torah, sit equally with his students and not above them, perhaps in a circle of chairs...
...The group teaches each other and the teacher is the teacher of them all who is taught by them all...
...Neither task is easy...
...Finally, we must sometime talk about the meaning of the world-covenant and God's promise of unending human history...
Vol. 4 • October 1979 • No. 9
