JACOB'S LADDER: MY STRUGGLE UPWARD
Jonathan Levin
Assistant Professor of English


classroom The Hebrew Bible: my favorite text during the first semester of Lit Hum, and far and away the hardest for me to teach. I look forward to it, and I am terrified by the prospect of actually teaching it.

I've always loved reading and discussing Torah. At my Bar Mitzvah, I read the Torah portion telling of Jacob's ladder, and I have spent the past two-odd decades trying to figure out what the passage means. I'm glad I inherited such a richly elusive passage to read and to live with. Every time I come to it again, I ask myself why Jacob is given this dream, why he is given it only as a dream, why the angels simply move up and down the ladder, and, most vividly, what's at the top of the ladder, beyond the margins of the dream, as it were.

This passage epitomizes for me my experience of the Hebrew Bible. It's full of questions, questions which, at their best, have guided the development of my own literary, moral, and spiritual imagination. Many stories have been meaningful for me in my life, but the stories in the Hebrew Bible have pride of place. I remember a children's illustrated Bible that pictured Abraham surrounded by his father's idols as he prepares to leave for the promised land. The message was vivid enough for me: no physical representations, only the word of God, which for me meant the word, a far more slippery embodiment of whatever moral and cosmic designs God stands for than idols, which can at least be seen and touched. What could it mean to have faith in a word? More questions.

But teaching this stuff in the secular classroom? It's one thing to teach Melville's Moby Dick or Ellison's Invisible Man, which are at least "American Literature" and so belong (or should belong) to every American. If they don't, they at least raise interesting questions about what it means to be an "American" and what it means to talk about an "American Literature." The Hebrew Bible represents another kind of inheritance altogether. My own religious sensibility was shaped by my father's father and the orthodox shul I sometimes attended with him (and later with my father after my grandfather died). After services, we would go downstairs for bagels and talk, sometimes about Torah, sometimes about other issues of the day. Almost everyone was (at least in my memory) over sixty, first generation immigrants. I sensed that these discussions, carried out in the thick accents of Eastern European Jews, were continuous with discussions that had been taking place in the basements of synagogues for centuries.

Now, when I participate in these discussions in my conservative Upper West Side synagogue, I continue to have that feeling. The accents are gone, but the concern to breathe life into inherited traditions is the same. What does it mean to have faith in words--written texts? It means discussing those texts, seeking out their meanings, listening to what Rabbis and scholars have said over the ages, sometimes disagreeing with them, understanding how the words have been adapted to meet new conditions, exploring how they might be adapted to meet our own conditions. We are more likely than not to disagree about fundamental meanings. I am convinced that no two people in my congregation have the same conception of God; how could they possibly agree about the significance of the binding of Isaac, of Jacob's ladder, of God's repeated hardening of Pharaoh's heart? It is not doctrine, but the shared discussion, that constitutes our community.

It is a different matter in the classroom, where our discussions sometimes leave me wondering what community we actually share. Several years ago, Stanley Fish coined the term "interpretive community" to describe the way in which a text's meanings are created and circulated. An interpretive community will not necessarily agree on the final meaning of any given text, but it will agree on how such meaning is produced in the first place: on the methods and underlying assumptions of reading. The Lit Hum classroom forms a kind of interpretive community: we all share a skill set. When we discuss the Iliad or the Aeneid, we have a good working sense of how the discussion should proceed: who are the major characters, what counts as a theme, how to use textual evidence in developing an argument, and so on.

These skills make us a community in reading the Hebrew Bible as well, but for many of us, we are bound to these texts because of the other communities to which we also belong. It is sometimes painful to read the Hebrew Bible in the classroom because we feel the pull of our different interpretive communities. Nothing is more difficult for me than listening to a student who comes into the discussion with such strong atheistic convictions that he or she attempts to guide every conversation toward the contradictions or the harsh cruelties inherent in the Bible. It is not the critical sensibility that disturbs me: in large measure I share that sensibility. Rather it is the unwillingness to read for other kind of meaning. I have a similar problem with readings that seem to come more from theological doctrine (often vaguely formulated) than from a careful encounter with the actual language of the text. It can be hard to see the actual language to respond to when the intervening layers of doctrine are so thick.

If I can get a class to take up a story like the one describing Hagar and Sarah and discuss that story in human terms, and then lead that discussion to questions about how the "divine" is imagined in relationship to that human drama, I have done everything I expect to be able to do as a teacher in this particular context. I want that discussion to incorporate as much diversity of interpretation as it can sustain. I want people to grapple with the difficult wisdom of the story. I want them to wonder why the story appears in a religious text. To the extent that a rabbinical or Christian interpretation can keep the discussion lively, I invite them. It helps, for example, to know that Nachmanides said that "the matriarch sinned by such maltreatment [of Hagar], and Abraham too by permitting it." Such information helps sharpen the questions which we are prepared, as an interpretive community that includes Jew and non-Jew alike, to face squarely.

As a Jew, I know that the Bible belongs to me and I to it. As a teacher at Columbia, I also know that the Bible has a more complex and general history. The truth is, the stories don't just "belong" to us: there is a specific inheritance, which is Jewish, but there is also a general inheritance, which is, in an important sense, human. This is easy to acknowledge, but sometimes very hard to live with.

I remember being asked by a teacher in religious school if we considered ourselves Jewish Americans or American Jews. I've never been able to answer that question, and I don't expect I'll ever answer it definitively. It's being able to ask the question, and being rich with stories and poems to endlessly mediate the question, that matters most to me. Everyone in the Lit Hum classroom has some shared questions, our general inheritance, and other more specific questions, a more specific inheritance, with seemingly endless permutations even within each tradition. It is a wonder that we share a language and a tradition of stories and poems, and interpretations, a language which allows us to carry on all this questioning in the space of a classroom.

This process is never easy, but it is well worth the effort. Though it is sometimes painful to read these books that mean so much to me in this academic environment, the pain can at least be taken as a sign that we are alive and engaged in the difficult business of creating, adapting, and sustaining meanings in a pluralistic society. When it's most painful, I remind myself that we have more to fear from the superficial facade of consensus than from vigorous debate. I remember Jacob's ladder: not a vision of paradise achieved, but rather of a passage, a movement between heaven and earth, mediating between human and divine, between a stubborn reality and the imagination that drives us on to whatever promised land we are blessed to envision.

Jonathan Levin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.

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