What do you know, and how do you know it?
There are two stories I tell about the lows and highs of Jewish education. The first is about a rabbi who led a beginning Torah class for young professionals. This was in Washington, DC, more than a dozen years ago. The rabbi, slight and bearded, sat in a circle of clean-shaven men and hiply dressed women and led them in a discussion of that week’s Torah portion. The topic was Abraham and the famous incident when he tries to pass off his wife Sarah as his sister.
The rabbi asked his students why they thought a figure as iconic as Abraham would imperil his wife’s life and virtue in order to save his own skin. As each of the students assayed an answer, the rabbi shook his head. “No, that’s not it,” he said. “Next? No, that’s not right either.”
Second story: I was fresh out of college, backpacking in Israel, when I stumbled into a yeshiva for beginners. The avuncular rosh yeshiva — head of school — asked us to read a line of Jewish text and provide an explanation. “Could be, could be,” he said, as we offered our answers. “Sforno said something similar, although Rashi disagrees. The main thing is, on what are you basing your answer?” And then he asked the question that rocked my world: “How do you know what you know?”
The irony here is that both rabbis represented the same institution, an Orthodox outreach group that has made a specialty of turning secular young people into ba’alei teshuva, or newly observant Jews. They also represent the twin poles of religious education. One seeks a single answer to difficult questions. The other encourages an open-ended discussion, rooted in Jewish texts, that leads students to clarify their own world view.
I thought about the two rabbis when a reader confronted me about a small item that appeared on, of all places, our sports pages. Yeshiva University had prepared a curriculum for high school kids based on baseball’s steroids controversy. The 30-page curriculum was intended, according to the introduction, to engage kids in “discussing a…most contemporary matter, and which is rooted in the timeless arguments of our great sages from throughout the generations.”
The reader wanted to know, in essence, why the steroids controversy was Judaism’s business. And when he heard that I had actually used the curriculum as a trigger for a discussion with my sons and their friends, he wanted to know what purpose it served. “You’re basically teaching them that ‘God said not to use steroids,’” he said. “And that’s just coercive. It’s saying that you can’t make up your mind unless you check with the rule book.”
I wanted to say back, “It’s not like that at all.” But I remembered that, according to some teachers, it is exactly like that. Like the rabbi in Washington, they teach the Jewish tradition as if it is a set of declarations, unchanging and inviolate, and that our role as students is to take them to heart.
But there are also the teachers, and I’ve been lucky to have met plenty, who teach text not to impart rules, but to teach students how to think. That’s not to say that they don’t regard the Torah as Truth, but rather that there is a method for discovering its Truth. The method is not exclusive to Judaism. Lawyers use it when they argue over case law, lit majors use it when they read criticism, philosophy majors use it when they read Plato’s Dialogues. Each examines the premises employed by their predecessors, sees how they came to a conclusion, tests both the logic and morality of their arguments. (Whose logic? Whose morality? Well, that’s the point of the exercise.)
The method can confirm what students already believed, or, even better, bring them to a new understanding. Either way, the student has some basis with which to answer, “How do you know what you know?”
YU’s steroids curriculum admits that the rabbis never dealt with performance-enhancing drugs per se. It explains the legal categories in the rabbinic literature that can be applied to the discussion (a method of analogy that also allows us to refer to an 18th-century document like the Constitution when ruling on 21st-century dilemmas). And it asks probing questions. What is the distinction between artificial and natural? We accept medicine to make a sick person well, so why not a drug that can make a healthy man stronger? The author, Rabbi Joshua Flug, clearly reaches his own conclusions and believes it is possible to know what God does and doesn’t want. But he also includes disagreements among the rabbis themselves to demonstrate that in Judaism, there is rarely such thing as a single correct answer.
I didn’t stick with the Jerusalem yeshiva, partly because most of the teachers taught that there was a single correct answer. They taught Judaism as a catechism, not a method. It’s a lot easier to teach students the rules than the teach them to think. And I suspect that a lot of the young adults attracted to the yeshiva were looking for clear-cut answers, not open-ended discussions, at least in the early stage of their religious journeys.
But the yeshiva did change my life in a lot of ways. I learned to struggle against what I began to call the “default,” or the kinds of things I thought I knew but never bothered to test against the conclusions and methods of others who struggled with the same questions. It didn’t make me a better person, just one who was less likely to be stumped when someone would ask, “How do you know?” And when I was stumped, it made me confident that I could find out — and possibly learn something that could change my mind.
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