Dear Shalom and List:
While Rabbi Yaakov Blau, my esteemed colleague at The Frisch School, makes some valid points about the overuse of literary techniques in teaching Tanach, I must take issue with him on both a personal and pedagogic level.
On a personal level, I remember most of my Tanach classes on the elementary and high school as a dry exercise in learning pasuk by pasuk with Rashi and occasionally other commentaries. Obviously, I value Rashi as the father of all the commentaries, and do not discount our other great medieval and modern commentators such as Ibn Ezra, Rashbam, Ramban, Seforno, Radak, Ralbag, Metzudot, Netziv, and Malbim and the list goes on and on. However, what this approach lacked was any knowledge of the "big picture" of what was going on or much room for original ideas and interpretations on the part of the teacher or the student.
I contrast this with my experience learning in a post-high school Israel program when I first fell in love with Tanach. My Madrich in Yeshivat Shaalvim, Rabbi Moshe Shulman, introduced me to what at the time I considered to be the revolutionary approaches of Rav Meidan and Rav Yoel Bin Nun. What made these approaches so exciting for me were how they looked at entire story units asking the big questions and daring to give original responses to these questions based both on their piecing together of various commentaries and their close reading of nuances of language and theme in the text. This is what I now attempt to impart to my students.
Pedagogically, let me deal which each of Rabbi Blau's issues point by point.
1) Breaking up the perek: I grant that our chapters are an artificial convention created by Christian monks in the early middle ages and can at times diverge from a traditional Jewish reading (although Nehama Leibowitz often had interesting exercises where she asked her students to justify why the Christians chose to break up the chapter where they did). However, the biggest value in having students read the chapter and break it down into sections is requiring them to go through the entire chapter before delving into the individual pesukim and commentaries. For example, if we wish our students to get a feeling for the story of Yosef in the parshiot from these past few weeks or the rise of Yehu in Kings II Chapters 9-10, then a Bekiut style reading chapter by chapter is imperative. As a technological aside, one great way to have students illustrate their breakdowns of the pesukim, is to project the perek on a Smart Board and have students come up to highlight their different sections in various colors writing a title for each.
2) Milat Hamincha: This exercise when done right can further help the student to see connections and general themes that the Tanach is trying to communicate to the reader. For example, in the Yaakov and Yosef storys which we have been reading in the parshat hashavua, the word HaKeR appears repeatedly in various contexts. The students can see that from various places in the story where these words keep appearing the general theme of hiding and seeking from the time Yaakov hides his identity from his father to get the blessing, to when he is then tricked by Lavan who hides Leah's identity, and his son's who hide the fact that Yosef has been sold to Egypt, and Tamar who hides her identity from Yehuda but then asks him if he recognizes his belongings which she attained in her secret encounter with him. This finally comes to a climax when Yosef recognizes his brothers in Egypt but hides his identity from them. In this example, the mila mincha stitches all of these various stories together. This is an exercise I find tremendously exciting to do with my students and, with the right scaffolding, I firmly believe, I can help my students to see this type of mila hamincha on their own. One tool that is great for revealing the mila mincha in 1-2 chapters of text is Wordle, www.wordle.net, which creates a word cloud of most commonly used words and works beautifully with Hebrew and nekudot. Here is an example of one that I created for Kings II Chapter 9 where one can clearly see the prominence of the mila hamincha, HaShaLoM: [
www.wordle.net].
3) Chiastic Structure: This is also a great tool especially in Biblical poetry and one that students can easily find on their own especially when looking for it in individual pesukim. I prefer to call this Tav structure since the Greek Chi and our English X were the letter Tav in ancient K'Tav Ivri. Chiastic structure can represent a number of things most notably divine justice as explained by Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks in his introduction to his siddur or as a mark of death as seen in Ezekiel Chapter 9 and the Gemara Shabbat 55a.
4) Intertextuality: I think I illustrated this above in my example from the stories of Yaakov and Yosef. More examples are too numerous to mention. Once again, if scaffolded well in a classroom setting, students can be trained to find these parallels themselves. This only adds to the excitement and understanding of the class as they view a text in a new light based on its comparison with a parallel piece from elsewhere in Tanach.
Once again, I thank Rabbi Yaakov Blau for starting this insightful conversation. I hope that through a combination of the parshanut and literary approaches we can continue to excite our students in learning Tanach and give them the skills to come up with new insights on their own.
Kol tuv,
Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky
Director of Educational Technology
The Frisch School
