David Gleicher notes that "Moshe Simkovich hinted at the real issue: Do the student even know the text?"
Yes and no. The idea of "knowing the text" is a deceptively simple formulation. Gleicher closes his contribution with an anecdote about a teacher who refuses to let students expound on a particular verse before articulating what the verse actually says. That is certainly one well-trod path to teaching Tanakh. But note that it assumes that the individual verse is the appropriate unit of analysis.
But why? Why should students know what each verse says, primarily, rather than (say) knowing what each chapter or other literary unit says? If we are really concerned that students do not come away from their years of study of Tanakh with a comprehensive sense of the text, perhaps that's because they have spent too much time looking at trees and precious little time looking at the forest. To understand the differences between Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, as Gleicher admirably hopes they will and believes they should, it may well take a different conceptualization of the work of Tanakh pedagogy.
Much may be gained through the standard pasuk-by-pasuk pedagogy, in particular, at least in the best circumstances, a relentless insistence of the importance of precise understanding of individual words. But much may be lost as well. To my mind, this is a different way of thinking about a literary approach to the text. It entails asking the question, "If we want students to develop an understanding of the whole text (of Isaiah or Amos or Numbers), including its central themes and motifs, how should we go about teaching it?"
My point is this: we will not make progress until we gain a clearer conception for ourselves of what we mean when we say that we want students to "know the text."
Jon A. Levisohn
Brandeis University
