A FORMATIVE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Julie Yufe


books 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.

Julie Yufe is a Columbia College junior.

Comments?