academic

Mapping the Talmud

April 5, 2012 by admin

Over the last year I have been experimenting with “concept mapping” in my classes. In my latest experiment I had my undergraduate students use a software package called CMap to “map” or outline a passage of Talmud that we have been studying this semester. The assignment ended up far exceeding my own pedagogical goals.

Concept mapping refers simply to representing visually the relationship between concepts. The basic technique is to write down or represent concepts relevant to a particular problem or question and then connect them with lines. The key step, however, is to use some kind of verb or verbal phrase in each line that shows the relationship of the concept. There is an excellent introduction to this technique, its goals, strengths, and weaknesses here.

CMap is a simple, free, software package that can be easily downloaded (on Mac or PC). My students had no problem either obtaining it or, after a very brief demonstration, learning to use it. A visualization tool, it can be used to create, modify, share, and collaborate on concept maps.

Last semester I used the program to create concept maps for my “Religion and Sexuality” class. At the beginning of the semester I asked groups of students, in class, to create concept maps showing the relationship between religion and sexuality. Then for the midterm, they had to do the same thing – but this time on their own. They then had to write a short paper comparing the concept map that they just created to the one that they created at the beginning of the semester. One goal of this assignment was to have them reflect on the learning that they had done in the class thus far. The results were very encouraging.

This semester I used CMap in my Talmud class not so much to map concepts as to outline a passage in the Talmud (syllabus here). For much of the semester we have devoted at least part of each class to reading through, together, a single coherent section in the Babylonian Talmud (beginning at Taanit 10a, Steinsaltz edition). One of the main difficulties of reading the Talmud, even for experienced readers, is determining the precise relationships between each sentence or paragraph. Is it a question, a refutation, a solution, or simply a digression? Does the statement connect to what immediately precedes it, or to something that appears earlier in the passage? We had discussed these relationships in class.

The midterm assignment, then, was deceptively simple: put each statement in a box (i.e, making it a “concept” in CMap), connect them and indicate the relationships, and then write a short essay reflecting on the results. My primary goal was to give them an opportunity to solidify their learning and, by working more intensely with the text, to better internalize the nature of talmudic logic (or its occasional lack thereof).

The results were really stunning. There is no single, mechanical solution to this problem, and students took very different approaches to mapping. Students also took full advantage of CMap’s flexibility (it allows for different shapes, lines, colors, etc.) on their own initiatives to represent other information as well, such as whether traditions were early, late, anonymous, etc. Some layouts emphasized the sequential flow of the text while others represented themes. The diversity of representations opened my own eyes to aspects of the passage that I had not seen before. Their written reflections were thoughtful and clearly demonstrated the learning that had taken place in the exercise.

A year ago I was intrigued but slightly wary of integrating concept mapping and CMap into my courses. Now, however, I am completely won over. These are very powerful tools that can directly contribute to student learning.

Serving God

January 5, 2012 by admin

This last summer, with the help of the Instructional Technology Group at Brown University, I interviewed several clergy members from around Providence, RI. The primary purpose of these interviews was to create video footage that I could clip and use in classes. Thus, for example, students in my course on “Religion and Sexuality” viewed short clips from different clergy members about the topics we covered (e.g., abortion, contraception, homosexuality), which we could then analyze together with the readings that they prepared. I thought it worked well.

In order to get the hang of splicing and combining footage, I decided to make from it a short public video that presented four different motivations for entering the clergy. I found them interesting, and I hope that you do too.

Paul, Homosexuality, and Midrash

October 4, 2011 by admin

Most scholars today believe that there is no concept of “homosexuality,” as we usually understand the term, in the Bible. That is, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although clearly familiar with homoerotic sexual acts, do not know of the “homosexual,” a person who has an identity based on the gender of their sexual preferences.

Although there are remarkably few verses in the Bible devoted to homoerotic activities, there is an enormous scholarly literature on the topic, much of it driven by modern theological concerns. I worked on this topic fairly intensively some years ago, and even then I wondered if there is anything new to say.

It’s been a while since I thought about this, but an insight emerged the other day in discussion in my undergraduate class, “Religion and Sexuality” (syllabus here). I have not kept up with the literature so I’m not sure how new it is or whether it would hold up to more rigorous examination, but it is worth thinking about.

Leviticus 18:22 reads:

Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abhorrence

The verse is cryptic, leaving open at least four questions:

What sex act is actually prohibited?
Is this to be read narrowly as a prohibition against only an activity (or activities) between men, or is it to be extended to female homoerotic activities?
What does “abhorrence” mean?
More generally, what is the reason for the prohibition?

Now compare Paul’s primary statement on the topic, in Romans 1:26-27:

For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged
natural intercourse for unnatural, ²⁷and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

Paul, as many have noted, is here reflecting some of the attitudes found in his larger Graeco-Roman context sprinkled with a healthy dose of Jewish condemnation against such acts (seen also, for example, in Philo). But in class we were wondering if Paul should be taken more seriously in this passage as an exegete of Leviticus. That is, Paul seems to offer answers to the questions posed above, even if these answers are themselves a bit slippery:

The “act” is to be read broadly (although still unspecifically) as “acts” between men;
The prohibition is to be extended to women;
“Abhorrence” means “shameless,” a social category;
The verse comes to prohibit acts that are “against nature.”

Paul thus takes seriously and wrestles with the meaning of the verse in Leviticus, ultimately offering an expansive reading of the prohibition. In this way his reading mirrors that attributed to Jesus in Matthew 5:27-30 which extends the narrow law of adultery found in the Hebrew Bible (where adultery is defined as sex between a married woman and a man who is not her husband) to simple lust. Both expand the scope of the sexual prohibitions.

Paul may not yet know the “homosexual”, but the comparision of his writing to the verse in Leviticus suggests that he is getting close. Paul may bring “nature” into the picture in order to answer an exegetical question, and he may mean it to refer only to physiology, but he opened a door. Later Jews reading only the Hebrew Bible would prohibit male homoerotic anal intercourse, but would be much vaguer and more wary of extending the prohibition, which floats without real rhyme or reason among many biblical prohibitions. Christians though, drawing on Paul, would develop a more robust anti-homoerotic/homosexual position.

The Self and Science

September 20, 2011 by admin

Several years ago I wrote an article, “‘And on the Earth You Shall Sleep’”: Talmud Torah and Rabbinic Asceticism” (Journal of Religion 83 [2003]: 204-225). In that article, I compared rabbinic “asceticism” (which I broadly define as a set of self-disciplinary practices and training of the self) to similar techniques employed by contemporary Greco-Roman philosophers (as well as early Christians). For both rabbis and philosophers, he entire point of these “ascetic” practices was to train or discipline the self. My own essay builds upon the studies of Pierre Hadot, who argued that the function of the Stoic exercises performed by Marcus Aurelius and others was precisely to cultivate the virtue of self-discipline, which in turn is a prerequisite for knowledge. The application of this insight to the rabbis was further extended by both Jonathan Schofer and Eliezer Diamond. Self-discipline, for these ancients, was not a single act but a state of being.

Earlier this week I was pleasantly surprised to hear a story on the radio about the latest scientific research on willpower. We have, it turns out, a single source of willpower. Every time we resist a temptation – that is, exercise our willpower – we deplete our store. And yet, like exercising a muscle, as we fatigue it we also strengthen it. By engaging in acts of self-discipline we strengthen our willpower. The piece went on to note that the practice of religion helps to “build up that self-control.”

Marcus Aurelius and the early rabbis may not have had access to controlled studies, but they were clearly onto something!

Between Us and Them

September 7, 2011 by admin

Praised be You, YHVH, our god, king of the universe, who has not made me a gentile;

Praised be You, YHVH, our god, king of the universe, who has not made me a slave;

Praised be You, YHVH, our god, king of the universe, who has not made me a woman

These three lines are recited daily as part of the series of blessings found at the beginning of the traditional Jewish morning liturgy. They have also been extensively discussed. Scholars have long noted the similarity of this triad to a similar daily thanksgiving attributed to the Greek philosopher Thales. Over the past century liberal Jews have wrestled with, and in most cases abandoned, these three blessings; they are too at odds with modern sensibilities.

These three blessings are but a single, relatively insignificant reflection of the binary thinking of ancient rabbis, which in turn reflect much much wider cultural assumptions. You are a “this” or a “that.” A man or a woman. One of us or one of them. For the sectarians who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls, you (if a man) were a “son of light” or a “son of darkness.” No “sons of beige” lived at Qumran.

In a funny way, we have not progressed all that far from this way of binary thinking. In most of our thinking and our forms, people are male or female; white or “ethnic”; Democrat or Republican. Sometimes we allow for other boxes as well, but these are often found on the spectrum defined by two poles that we define as opposites.

There is an article in a recent New Yorker describing a thought experiment offered by the philosopher Derek Parfit. Parfit asks us to imagine if we were replaced, cell by cell, with those of Greta Garbo. At the beginning of the process, we are clearly us, and at the end we are clearly Greta Garbo. But what about the middle? Who are we?

Parfit’s thought experiment is itself based on a spectrum anchored by a binary pair. But it reopens an old philosophical problem of the “self,” creating an opportunity for imagining selves – us and others – much more fluidly.

Here is another thought experiment: what if we refused to classify others or even ourselves in terms of checkable identities? How would our self-understanding change? On the one hand, it is easy to subscribe to the idea that we should recognize people in all of their unique, idiosyncratic glory. On the other, go ahead and try it. It is not at all easy to conceive of ourselves, to articulate our identities, without using blunt, pre-supplied categories.

Language thus becomes an agent of constraint, creating and limiting the very terms of our self, and different languages offer different limitations and opportunities for self-understanding. Am I the same in all languages? If not, who am I?