Studying Sacred Texts

An actor reads from the Torah:

With a sorrowful heart, God said, “I will blot out from the earth humankind whom I created—humans together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them.” But Noah found favor with God. This is the line of Noah. Noah was a righteous man; he was blameless in his age; Noah walked with God.

A second actor reads a student’s response:

Noah was a good man and Noah walked with God, but the earth was full of wickedness. So, basically, that means there was all these bad people, and they were trying to kill each other and everything. Like a wicked witch means that the witch was mean. The earth was like that. It was full of bad people, and there were armies, and there was like violence, and it was loud. That’s what it means.

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Host Aaron Henne: Welcome to Episode Seven of the third season of theatre dybbuk’s The Dybbukast. I'm Aaron Henne, artistic director of theatre dybbuk. We're happy to present the fifth in our five-episode series in partnership with the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. In this episode, we'll be investigating the ways in which students respond to sacred texts, with a focus on how they process selections from the Torah.

At the top, you heard actors from theatre dybbuk read an excerpt from the Torah and a student’s explanation of that text. Throughout the episode, you will hear a variety of such readings and accompanying responses from students. Dr. Ziva Hassenfeld, the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Assistant Professor of Jewish Education, discusses her work in studying how children develop interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, sharing about both the tensions and the opportunities that exist within learning environments. In her research, she has used qualitative methods, including ethnographic observation, stimulated recall interviewing, and think-aloud interviewing. We have used such interviews as the basis for this episode’s explorations.

And now, Season Three, Episode Seven: “Studying Sacred Texts”.

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Dr. Ziva Hassenfeld: My first love is texts. I love all Jewish texts, all literary texts, even a few legal texts. And I think that there is both something incredibly special about the language of biblical Hebrew — the way that it is so morphologically dense that lends itself to close reading — but also the interpretive milieu that we find ourselves in after generations and generations of looking at these texts and turning them over and over for meaning. And so when I talk about inducting students — children — into this interpretive practice, I'm talking about something that I think is unique to the Jewish people in the sense that this is something that is part of our cultural heritage. This is something that is part of our ethical heritage; that we look for ambiguity in texts, we look for multiple perspectives, and I think that’s part of our interpretive tradition. But I also think that it's actually part of, and this is — I would say this is a provocative statement, but I think, in as much as anything can be inherent to a text, ambiguity and multiple perspectives is there in our rabbinic texts, but it's even there in our biblical texts.

Actor 1: As the cloud withdrew from the tent, there was Miriam stricken with snow-white scales! When Aaron turned toward Miriam, he saw that she was stricken with scales. And Aaron said to Moses, “O my lord, account not to us the sin which we committed in our folly. Let her not be like the dead already half-decomposed coming from the mother’s womb.”

Actor 2: “Let her not be like the dead.” It’s kind of like an answer, sort of. And then she could have had leprosy and could have died because of it. Many women have had leprosy and died because of it and maybe, um…maybe only women can get it.

Ziva: The first misunderstanding when it comes to education is because everyone has experienced education, sometimes everyone fancies themselves an expert on education, and there is a challenge from moving from the anecdote of your own life to really being willing and opening yourself up to considering empirical research. I’m a researcher and my work is descriptive. So sometimes I see, particularly in journals that are targeted to the Jewish intellectual milieu, characterizations of progressive pedagogy versus transmission pedagogy. And the good old days was transmission. And Jewish education has been taken in by progressive educators who think kids should, who think kids should, but the truth is, our research, my research doesn't say “should”. It's always saying “it’s”. Kids do bring their life experience to text the same way that you do, the same way that I do.

Actor 1: The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with lawlessness.

Actor 2: They were doing bad stuff like trying to kill each other and having armies.

Actor 3: They’re fighting with each other and they are pinching.

Actor 2: Yeah! That’s what I mean, like all those kinds of bad stuff and hurting each other and, like, saying mean things.

Actor 3: And then when somebody is on their chair and with his brother, he pushes the chair down and then he pushes him off the bed and he’s really bad.

Actor 2: Mira?

Actor 3: What?

Actor 2: I think you are ripping something off of your own life. Does that happen to you?

Actor 3: Um, I sometimes do it to my sister.

Ziva: Students live with their multiple identities, and there are ways in which we can say to students, of course, of course you are a full person with all of the experience you have, and nobody has ever expected readers to put themselves to the side when making meaning of text. And so we're not gonna ask you to do that. And when that produces meanings that feel inconvenient or offensive to our educational goals, we have to sit with that. None of us read texts with a pause button on our life experiences and our identities. And so to ask children to do that in the name of training, in the name of comprehension strategies, in the name of learning those that came before them is simply anathema to what it means to interpret. And that's not progressive education. That's descriptive of what it means to participate in the project of language, of second order symbolism, and writing and reading, and it's absolutely what our Mefareshim rabbis have always done.

Actor 1: God created the great sea monsters, and all the living creatures of every kind that creep, which the waters brought forth in swarms, and all the winged birds of every kind. And God saw that this was good.

Actor 4: The monsters existed a long, long, long time ago but someone killed them.

Actor 2: No, the monsters were the dinosaurs but nobody killed them. They were extinct.

Actor 4: No, someone killed them.

Actor 2: No, monsters do not exist.

Actor 4: Yes, they do exist, but it was a very long time ago. My dad is 24 or 26 and he’s lived for a very long time and he said he’s seen a monster before.

Actor 2: My mom and dad said they do not exist, but I’m not telling you not to believe in it. If you want to, you can.

Actor 4: Maybe I should ask my dad.

Ziva: If you want any canvas, any text, to resonate for students, for — and I say students, but I mean humans — then you have to invite them in. You have to invite them to make that meaning. And that doesn't mean that there aren't parameters and rules. How do you as an educator grapple with the fact that, of course, you have goals — you have reading goals, you have skill goals, you have language goals, and you have coverage goals — with this fundamental commitment to wanting students to be able to experience these texts as a sandbox for their own questions and their own identities. And what I learned, and this is gonna be almost anti-climactic in its simplicity, but clarity. A teacher really needs to understand what her interpretive rules are, right? If you express your truth about this text through interpretive dance, and I'm not ready to receive interpretive dance, that's not an effective communicative act. And in a classroom, which is a pretty constrained space, we have to really, really articulate very clearly the ways that we are going to use this text. And so it's not anything goes, but it is a fundamental position of who has agency in this classroom.

Actor 2: What I was trying to say, Raphael, is if you think they exist, of course, but for me they do not. They can exist for you, but for me they do not.

Actor 4: I meant to say giants. Giants existed.

Actor 2: Well I do not really believe in monsters plus giants.

Ziva: In some ways, there is something magical that happens in the classroom, which is that there is a text to ground difficult conversation. I have an opportunity to tell you something about myself without directly telling you, hey, I'm sad, or I'm inspired, or I am gay. Whatever I want to tell you, I might not want to say it directly, and we have the capacity to train students to hear their classmates speak through text. And so when I talk about positive youth development, I'm talking about the opportunity for the text to help the student see themselves: hey, I'm noticing that I'm drawn to this word; I'm noticing that I'm drawn to this character. And that might be an iterative process. But also the opportunity to say, I know who I am, and I'm gonna tell you a little bit who I am by sharing my interpretation of this text.

Actor 1: Miriam and Aaron spoke about Moses concerning the Kushite woman he married for he had married a Kushite woman. And they said, “Does God only speak to Moses? Doesn’t God also speak with us?” And God heard.

Actor 3: I don’t understand why they repeat that he married a Kushite woman. Maybe they’re trying to say that God is also talking to the Kushite woman — Moses and the Kushite woman — and maybe they’re thinking if he talks to her, why not us too?

Ziva: So positive youth development is a framework that exists within education — broadly, within developmental psychology — and has actually been adopted widely by scholars of religious education because any mission-driven education hopes that their vision of a good life is achieved through their education. And so you actually end up seeing this term, “positive youth development,” show up across religious educational contexts. I have colleagues who look at Islamic education and Catholic education, who are drawn to this, and it makes sense that they're drawn to it. But the basic premise is that there's an opportunity to help young people have healthy attitudes towards themselves, towards their peers, and towards their environment, and that's achieved through a sense of responsibility and a sense of consequences and possibility for change.

Actor 1: God said to Moses, “Send the men to spy out the land of Canaan which I gave to the people of Israel. From each tribe send a man. Every man a leader.” So Moses sent them from the desert of Paran as God had told him to. “All of them leaders of the people of Israel, go out to the Negev and go into the hill country and see what the land is like and whether the people in it are strong or weak, whether they are few or many and whether the land they live in is good or bad and whether the cities they live in are camps or fortresses and whether the land is rich or poor and whether there is water in it or not. Be brave and bring back the fruit of the land.”

Actor 3: Why does Moses need to know all of these things? Why don’t they all go there and check it out together? And some of the questions are impossible to answer because they are opinions! Half of the 12 people could say they’re good and half of the 12 people could say they’re bad! And half of the 12 people could say they’re rich and half of the 12 people could say they’re poor! And half of the 12 people could say they’re strong and half of them could say they’re weak. They should do questions that are easy to answer and just go see for themselves.

Ziva: So, I wanna talk about one student called Jay. And Jay is in a classroom where certain ways of reading, certain interpretive stances, are privileged over others. And this is a classroom in which close reading, picking up on particular words, repeating words, repeating phrases, ambiguous phrases, all of these sorts of literary approaches to the text are welcome and rewarded, and any other way of reading the text is less welcomed in this classroom. And this may feel to anyone who's been in a classroom — it might feel like, oh yes, of course, the teacher always has their way of reading. What's interesting about adding a qualitative research perspective to it is it's like, well, actually, let me quantify that for you. This is exactly how a teacher makes clear; this is exactly the amount of minutes given to a student comment that the teacher likes versus doesn't like. And so Jay is a student who was never able to read the way that the teacher wanted to read and yet always had ideas. So when he got to the text of the spies in the Book of Numbers —

Actor 1: God said to Moses, “Send the men to spy out the land of 

Canaan which I gave to the people of Israel.”

Ziva: Jay was absolutely on fire. I sat with him before they ever had a chance to study it in the class, and I showed him the text, and the think-aloud method asked the student to read the text actually out loud and to pause every time they have a thought on it. And Jay could not stop smiling and talking about this text. And the first thing he says to me is —

Actor 4: I think it’s kind of sneaky.

Ziva: And he goes on to explain that it is odd to him. He feels a little bit uncomfortable with the ways in which Moses does every single thing that God tells him to do.

Actor 4: And why does Moses do every single thing that God tells him to? Because it might just be his imagination playing with him.

Ziva: And this is taboo because, of course, we want to avoid, in a Jewish educational context, the biblical character of God, right? If we're interested in elevating the text, if we're interested in elevating the interpretive practice, then we don't really have time or space to deal with the biblical character of God, because that's gonna raise a lot of theological problems.

Actor 4: Just his imagination playing with him, and it turns out his imagination is a good thing or something. Because when they were running away from Egypt — the guys — they could have maybe seen if one of them was friends with one or like that, and see if they would let them go through. Like my mom says, “Don’t run away from your problems.”

Ziva: It's so striking that he stays confident and resolute in his own way of reading. And I say that as someone who knows that he's going to get less and less literal time to talk in the classroom. As the year goes on, the teacher is simply going to stop calling on him because he's not helping move the agenda forward.

Actor 4: So, if they had a problem, why didn’t they try to find a solution? Like, why didn’t they say, hi, we’re Israelites. Can we please join your blah blah blah?

Ziva: I sat in a seventh grade classroom that was studying the major stories in the Book of Genesis, and it was time for them to study the story of Cain and Abel, which are the first siblings in the biblical narrative — perhaps the first siblings, according to the biblical narrative, in the world. And there's a seemingly clear narrative there, which is that Cain and Abel have some sort of argument, and Cain is warned to control his anger at his brother because God apparently enjoys his brother Abel’s sacrifice more than his.

Actor 1: And it was, after a period of days, Cain brought an offering to God of the fruit of the ground. And Abel also brought from the choicest of the firstlings of his flock, and God paid attention to Abel and his offering. And to Cain and his offering He didn’t pay attention to, and Cain got very angry and his face fell. And God said to Cain, why are you angry and why did your face fall?

Actor 5: His face fell, so that means that his respect for Abel fell down. And afterwards, God says, “Oh, you sinned, and sin crouches in your corner if you don’t change your ways.” Well, if you get angry from a sacrifice, you can’t change your ways from that.

Ziva: Some words are exchanged, in this sort of fascinating ellipses in the biblical text. We don’t know what words were exchanged but some words were exchanged in the field, and Cain gets up and kills his brother — the first murder.

Actor 1: And when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him.

Ziva: And in a million years, I would not have imagined students taking this story in the direction that they took it, but here they are, given the opportunity to discuss the text, and a student comes up with the idea — I'll call this student Ben — that perhaps this was not actually the story of the first murder, but perhaps this is a story of a suicide. And he makes a case, a textual case, for why he thinks that this could actually have been a suicide. And he uses very specific details about this morphologically dense language of biblical Hebrew to suggest that by the time the biblical text, “and he killed him,” “veyehargehu” —which is one word in the biblical Hebrew — that there's no other way to read it except for as a suicide, because all of the other details in the language are suggesting bullying, are suggesting an effort to belittle.

Actor 4: It doesn’t mean that he was the one that killed him. It does, but it doesn’t mean that he was the one that physically killed him. It means he only came to the realization that he’s been doing all of this stuff after the suicide.

Ziva: And as this child, Ben, is giving this interpretation of the text, I can barely breathe because I know his situation, and I know that he's a child who has experienced really, really difficult bullying. And I also know that none of his classmates know about it. That part of his capacity to be in school was to not share this.

Actor 4: Why didn’t Abel say anything? Abel didn’t say anything because what is there to say in response to bullying?

Ziva: This goes back to something that I discussed earlier — the capacity for texts to be the canvas on which we tell our deepest stories and truths. To me, as an adult, as a scared adult, it feels unimaginably vulnerable, and I'm so concerned for Ben. And what happens next is his classmates simply respond to the textual interpretations he made. They take one word that he interpreted, and argue that actually he misinterpreted that word. And I say, with no exaggeration, I believe I almost cried in that moment because his classmates did the best thing they could have ever done, and I don't think it was intentional at all.

Actor 2: Just, like, overall, I think that based on this text, I think that Abel hasn’t done anything wrong. I think that Cain’s just taking out his anger on him.

Ziva: I think this is actually the beauty of a classroom that creates real space for students to feel their agency as readers and interpreters, because the most respectful and authentic choice they saw in that moment was to engage with the textual interpretation that Ben had offered. Not one child said, hey, are you talking about yourself? No. They took his ideas about the texts and responded to those ideas, and in that way I think they showed him a level of respect and reception of his account that couldn't have happened in any other setting.

Actor 2: Because Cain’s mad at God, and he takes all of his anger out on Abel. Like, sometimes, when somebody favors somebody else, people get mad at the person that they favor even though they didn’t choose to be favored.

Ziva: There's a moment in the biblical narrative around Sarah and Abraham where, after being promised that they were gonna have a child and dealing with infertility, finally, God through angels tells Abraham — not Sarah, Abraham — that actually they are going to have a child. And Sarah comes out of her tent and she overhears the conversation and she laughs.

Actor 1: Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years; Sarah had stopped having her periods. And Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “Now that I’ve lost the ability, am I to have enjoyment—with my husband so old?”

Ziva: And after she laughs, we get the single line of dialogue between God and Sarah in the entire biblical narrative. First, God says to Abraham, why did Sarah laugh? And then Sarah denies it. And God says, no, you did laugh.

Actor 1: Then God said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, saying, ‘Shall I in truth bear a child, old as I am?’ Is anything too wondrous for God? I will return to you at the same season next year, and Sarah shall have a son.” Sarah lied, saying, “I did not laugh,” for she was frightened. Came the reply, “You did laugh.”

Actor 2: I think God doesn’t actually seem mad at all. God is just like, why did Sarah laugh? God was genuinely confused.

Ziva: I am sitting in this seventh grade class, watching them discuss this story. And this one student, Jackie, goes on to make the case that we see God, the biblical God, get mad throughout the Bible, and it looks pretty fierce.

Actor 2: Yeah, you see God getting mad a lot.

Ziva: Sometimes there's fire, sometimes people die, sometimes lots of people die. And so the fact that there are zero consequences to Sarah denying her laughter and God correcting Sarah suggests to Jackie that God wasn't mad. Actually, God welcomed the opportunity to speak with Sarah, and her classmate says like, really?

Actor 5: You think God’s not mad?

Ziva: And Jackie sticks with her case and builds it and says, yeah, because if God were mad, then God would not have given them a kid.

Actor 2: So I feel like if God really was mad, I feel like He wouldn’t have made it that Sarah has a kid. But instead, He gives Sarah a kid. He just seems genuinely confused.

Actor 4: I want to respond to Jackie. I think God could be mad. God is probably a bit hurt by this because Sarah is questioning Him. Sarah should know that even though she doesn’t know that the three people are angels, she knows that God is always watching. So God does have a reason to be mad because she’s questioning God.

Ziva: And this is such an incredible moment of both students working out the text, and also again expressing themselves. Jackie has reasons, in my interpretation of Jackie, for arguing that God genuinely wanted to talk to Sarah, right? Imagine that you are a modern Jewish girl reading the biblical text in a relatively progressive Jewish context, and you get to the single line of dialogue between God and Sarah. There might be reasons to want to redeem this line of dialogue, and so, to see her do that and to see her do it again in this textually intensive way and have her classmates engage with it in their own textually intensive way, I can't emphasize enough, like, this is beautiful. This is beautiful. This is what can happen in classrooms when we allow students to have the space to interpret. Of course, it takes training, but it takes a level of trust in children and to stop being afraid. We need to stop being afraid. Now I'm getting prescriptive. When I get really excited, I get prescriptive and I step out of my researcher fidelity and cautiousness.

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Aaron: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Dybbukast, “Studying Sacred Texts.” Actors featured in this episode are Rachel Leah Cohen, Adam Lebowitz-Lockard, Julie Lockhart, Clay Steakley and Inger Tudor. Thank you to Dr. Ziva Hassenfeld for sharing her insights. Our theme music is composed by Michael Skloff and produced by Sam K.S. Story editing was led by me, Aaron Henne, with support from Julie Lockhart. This episode was edited by Gregory Scharpen.

Please visit us at theatredybbuk.org, where you will find links to a wide variety of materials which expand upon the episode’s explorations. And if you want to know more about theatre dybbuk’s work in general, please sign up for our mailing list on that same website.

This is the fifth and final episode in our multi-episode series presented and produced in collaboration with the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. This is also the final episode of Season Three of The Dybbukast. This season of The Dybbukast was generously supported by a grant from Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah. The Dybbukast is produced by theatre dybbuk.

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Actor 5: I find it crazy that people here are saying that God would be mad that someone’s asking a question. I think no one should be mad for asking questions. Asking questions is good, isn’t it?

Actor 3: She’s not asking a question, she’s doubting Him.

Actor 5: Okay, so I agree. So why is doubting bad?

Actor 3: It’s like doubting your parents.

Actor 5: That’s how a ton of things start.