Lit Hum was my first true encounter with the Hebrew Bible. Unlike many
of my more religious friends, my previous experiences with the Torah were
scarce: a few lessons in my years of Hebrew day school and a few lessons
in preparation for my Bat Mitzvah. Prior to my Lit Hum study, the Torah
had yet to affect my day to day experiences. What made covering the
Hebrew Bible in Lit Hum so important for me, then, was that it was a
formative experience in my religious life. I appreciated the fact that
it was taught the way a Lit Hum text should be, as a work of literature,
rather than as a theological document or a series of philosophical
truths. My instructor was neither didactic nor wildly subjective in his
approach to discussing the Hebrew Bible. He treated it as he did any
other text we examined, asking the class to decipher a series of stories
and themes.
Moshe Gold's treatment of the Hebrew Bible enabled me, for the first
time, to analyze and think about those Biblical stories that play so
crucial a role in the array of literary texts that follow it. The
stories and themes from Genesis, Exodus, and Job are prominent in Dante's
Inferno, in St. Augustine's Confessions, and even in Shakespeare's plays.
In my Lit Hum class, the Hebrew Bible was placed in the continuum of
Western literature, a literature influenced by the stories and lessons of
the Bible. The body of Western Literature was more familiar to me that
the body of religious thought. Seeing the Torah as part of this
continuum was an unparalleled experience. It allowed me to fit the Torah
into my daily experiences and caused me to raise intellectual questions
about the Bible's role in my secular life.
This was my first true experience with an English translation of the
Torah, and that elicited from me a sensitive response to the text itself.
I was finally given the opportunity to examine portions of the leading
work of literature of all time, and the most important book of my own
tradition. The course presented this work in a manner that inspired
thought, participation, and thorough questioning that, for me, has
continued beyond the scope of my freshman year.
My Lit Hum experience with the Bible was probably different from that of
most of my Jewish friends. Several students transferred into my class for
the second semester, primarily because they opposed the way in which
their previous instructor had presented the Hebrew Bible. Perhaps my
instructor was more sensitive in his approach to the text because he
himself is Jewish, but I credit his well-focused discussions of the Bible
to his approach to the whole Lit Hum syllabus. We analyzed the critical
discussion of the five authors of the Hebrew Bible. We also discussed
the notion of "Judeo-Christian" culture; Judaism and Christianity, we
felt, are vastly different cultures, and the products of those cultures
are fundamentally different. Our approach to all the texts was governed
by a literary and historical sensibility.
I believe the study of the Bible is a vital aspect of the Core
curriculum. But I might believe otherwise if I had sat in another
classroom. My CC class was as intellectual as my Lit Hum class in its
approach to the excerpts we read from the Bible, concentrating on
Christian society's adaptation of Jewish tradition. Even in CC, my
experience was governed by a critical focus, as we discussed the
development of a Western philosophy and its Biblical foundations. My
professor engaged my class in debates about the legitimacy of Biblical
philosophies in the same way he engaged us in debates about the ideas of
Plato, Machiavelli, and Rousseau. Although none of those works may be
easily equated, it was evident that my professor was leading the class in
a course on critical thinking, one that inspired me to analyze the
relationships between Jewish moral lessons and my secular American
beliefs.
For me, a Jew unaware of the small distinctions and adaptations of
original Biblical teachings, CC was an influential experience. The
comparison of the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament inspired me to
realize that so much of what I had thought to be essentials of Jewish
beliefs were actually more influenced by Protestant culture. I was
forced to think about what made my Jewish beliefs on the idea of mitzvah
different from the Christian version of charity and benevolence, what
made my views of wrong-doing different from Christian doctrines on sin. I
began to search for those things that structured my belief and religious
practice. I began to question where I sided with Judaism and where I
sided with secular Protestantism on important theological issues. CC
also helped me focus my ideas on the difference between a tribe-specific
religion and a worldy one.
These discussions of the Bible were difficult for me, someone not so
religious or aware of advanced Judaic teachings. I had to reconcile my
religion with an American culture of universal opportunities. I was also
forced to decide whether I could be a Jew in modern society, to
participate in society as a Jew.
Lit Hum and CC both provided me with the opportunities to examine the
Bible as a seminal philosophical and intellectual work, one that affects
society at large. Had I not come into contact with the Bible as part of
the Core, I doubt I would ever have begun to read the Bible in a way
which provokes thought and stimulates discussion.
While the teachers of the Core approach the Bible far differently from
my Hebrew-school instructors or my teachers at Solomon Schecter, they did
reinforce the importance of questioning my position as a Jew in a
Christian world. What I gained, then, were not only lessons in critical
thinking, but also a more pronounced notion of my own Judaism. My Lit
Hum and CC experiences lent credence to the idea that even a secular
approach to the Bible can give Jews an appreciation of their differences
and particularities in a world where the boundaries between Jewish and
Christian beliefs are so easily blurred.