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I recently had the opportunity to to see the Dead Sea scrolls exhibit at the Discovery Center in New York.  The exhibit is being advertised heavily (it seemed like there was a poster on every other block in Manhattan) and has been extensively reviewed.  The reviews have been generally positive, if at times puzzled.  In The New York Times review, for example, Edward Rothstein calls the exhibit “understated” and asserts that it describes an historical arc, even if (in my reading at least) it is difficult to locate the shape of the arc.

The exhibit is essentially two exhibits.  The first floor contains artifacts relating to the biblical period (ca. 500 BCE and earlier).  Then one descends to the second floor, where in addition to a collection of scrolls there are some artifacts from Qumran (an inhabited settlement near where the scrolls were found) and Jerusalem more generally.  There are also side exhibits on Masada, the Ten Commandments (where the second-oldest manuscript of them will be displayed for a short period of time), and the origins of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

First, the positive:  The scrolls are always fun to see, even if most of the ones on display, in terms of importance, would be on the “B list” for scroll scholars.  (For those unable to get to the Discovery Center, the Google digitization project offers another, albeit virtual, way to access the scrolls.)  The objects on the first floor give a nice overview of issues in biblical archaeology, even if they don’t break any new ground.  The objects on the second floor – composed primarily, as on the first floor, of a lot of pottery – also add some context to the scrolls.

There is much that we still don’t know about Qumran and the scrolls, and the exhibit does a good, “understated” job not sensationalizing or drawing unwarranted conclusions.  The result, though, is vaguely unsatisfying.  I was left with a feeling that the curators themselves did not know how to link these objects.  In fact, I strongly suspect that they could not acquire enough objects to mount a respectable exhibition on the Dead Sea scrolls themselves, so they acquired other tangentially related objects to fill out the show and then didn’t quite know what to do with them all.  The exhibit had a failure of nerves.

Yet this raises a very interesting question: Given all that we do not know, and if one had access to any and all objects, what might a successful exhibit look like?  How do you make a narrative when we don’t have one?

One suggestion is to organize the exhibit according to the history of scholarship.  Here is my whimsical and schematic first stab on how such an exhibit might look:

1. Cairo Geniza: The discovery of the Damascus Document and the research that led scholars to link it to an early Jewish group.  Here we might also include information/artifacts on the early scholars of the literature that became known as the Pseudepigrapha (e.g., Jubilees);
2. Josephus and his history of the time, including discussion of the Jewish “sects”;
3. Discovery of the Scrolls, with the necessary story of the Bedouin shepherd and the Wall St. journal ad;
4. The earliest explanations of the scrolls, with the emphasis on eschatology;
5. The excavations of Qumran and the understanding of the community as a kind of “proto-Christian” monastery;
6. The work on and reconstruction of the scrolls;
7.  The Six Day war and the legal issues of scroll possession;
8. Evolving emphasis in the 1970’s on the place of religious law in the scrolls;
9. The struggle over and eventual publication of MMT, and the new insights that it gives us to the group’s origins;
10. Purity practices;
11. Food;
12. Prayer and angels;
13. Canonization and the developing sense of sacred literature, and the link to later Jewish and Christian canons;
14. New archaeological research on Qumran and the graveyard, and what it reveals;
15. Daily life for a member of the group

I feel like there should be a last exhibit that refers back to 1, but I can’t think right now of what that might be.

My point is that a thematically based exhibit with a (somewhat contrived) narrative thread might be the most effective mode of organization, while at the same time not speculating overmuch.

 

We have dragged our children to art museums most of their lives, and perhaps only because they didn’t know any better they have been remarkably tolerant.  We would, of course, try to help them to stay engaged through tours, audio guides, bribes of candy forthcoming, and, of course, the many wonderful activities that museums create for families.  These activities often include counting – how many paintings with sphinxes can you find?  That kind of thing.

My children need fewer incentives these days (although a well-timed bribe still works wonders), but lost deep within the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, recalling these museum activities, I asked them to count all the paintings that contain the Madonna and Child.  It was, of course, a joke – it would have been far easier to count the paintings that didn’t.  For students of the Madonna and Child, we had found the mother lode.

Room after room of such paintings bear powerful witness to the common assertion that during the Italian Renaissance painters increasingly turned to realism, or at least to realistic portrayals of idealized beauty.  We can watch the Madonna evolve from a wooden-looking stock figure to, well, a pretty attractive young woman.

This, though, raises a provocative question.  Most of this art was commissioned for religious settings.  What would it have meant to have had a portrait of a beautiful Madonna nursing her child above the altar?  And this in an environment that at least artistically and fashionably seems to have been well on its way to eroticizing the female breast.  That is, was the display of such art meant actually to produce sexual desire?

I am currently teaching an undergraduate class on “Religion and Sexuality,” and the intersection of religion and desire happens to be much on my mind.  There are strong notions in many religions that “desire” is a human force that produced without regard for its eventual target.  First, we “desire” – only then do we figure out what it is that we desire.  Hence, in these religions, sexual desire and desire for God exist in a very uneasy tension; they are two sides of the same coin.  Some religious thinkers deal with this tension by carefully separating human sexual desire from desire for God, as, for example, the book of Leviticus does by decreeing that contact with sexual fluids renders a person ritually impure.  Other thinkers, though, work to channel desire toward God, as, for example, the Jews and Christians who read the Song of Songs as an allegory of love between God and God’s people.  Many medieval mystical texts flirt productively with this tension.

So back to our sexy Madonna.  (This is not to exclude the possibility, by the way, that the same applies to a newly sexualized adult Jesus.)  It is possible that the inclusion of such erotic imagery in a sacred space was an aberration, an unintended byproduct of when changing artistic sensibilities outpace modes of art procurement and display.  I do not know if more conservative religious thinkers ever explicitly noticed this change in fashion and attempted to dial it back, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.  It is also possible, though, that there was some intentionality behind it.  Such art would help to produce more desire, which in turn could now be channeled to enhance religious experience.

If this was an experiment, it appears to have failed.  Much of this art was removed from its original religious context and sequestered to museums.  Sex, once again, is safely insulated from the sacred.

 

My friend Horace Taft, in his comment to a previous post, drew my attention to this TED video.  In it, Liz Coleman, the president of Bennington College, eloquently defends the value of the liberal arts.  She begins with a largely conventional critique of where the liberal arts (really the humanities) has taken a wrong turn and devotes the second half of the talk to explaining what Bennington is doing to restore the humanities to their central place in the curriculum.

Her critique is spot on.  Knowledge is so specialized and fragmented that the Academy is more concerned with creating experts (which, of course, is almost impossible to do within the four years of an undergraduate curriculum) than an educated generalist.  When we stop reading literature with an eye toward its exploration of the human condition and instead only deconstruct it with a highly specialized theoretical structure, she suggests, we lose something, not to mention our students and many of our readers.  We, the members of the academy, mostly have ourselves to blame for the mess we created.

It is at this point that I wonder if Professor Coleman takes a wrong turn, and Bennington with her.  The value of the liberal arts, she claims, is that it is a force for civic engagement and for good.  Leaning on Thomas Jefferson for support, she says that a healthy and thriving democracy depends on an educated citizenry.  Bennington, in turn, has created a program that explicitly weds study of the humanities to civic engagement and service.  The goal is to make a good citizen – albeit in the highly particular way that Bennington imagines such a person.

There is certainly nothing wrong with the Bennington model, although it is not for everyone.  What struck me was the general claim linking study of the humanities to civic society.  Does it hold water?  If everybody had a liberal arts education, would the world be a freer, happier, more peaceful and prosperous place?

I doubt it.  Despite the truly touching anecdote she tells at the beginning of emissaries from the former Soviet Union visiting her to learn more about how more robust liberal arts there could support their fledgling democracy, when not linked to a specific set of values – which someone has to determine – study of the humanities by itself does not lead to “good citizenry.”  In fact, it often leads to very clever, well educated charlatans and demagogues.

When the Greeks began thinking about this, their understanding of the “examined life” was hardly meant to be applied universally.  It was an elite activity.  Similarly, I think, the Renaissance humanists would have been mystified by the idea that links study to civic virtue.  Men of leisure had the ability to study the humanities in order to cultivate their own selves and enhance their own lives.

Study of the liberal arts is not for everyone, and if everyone in our society received such an education we would hardly be the better as a society for it.  The value of such an education, rather, is to be sought in the personal and (ironically) practical — it prepares individuals for high-value careers through inculcating certain habits of mind.  These and other habits of mind add value also to an individual’s experience of the world, but this is not to say (as, in fact, the traditional defenders of the humanities largely do) that life without a humanities education is impoverished.

I support civic virtue and service to the community.  Linking these activities to a liberal arts education, though, strikes me as both elitist and empirically unsupportable.

Have gum disease? Boils? Abscesses? Anal  sores? An ear ache? A swollen eye? Insect stings? Check out the Bavli for a remedy.

The Babylonian Talmud is full of medical advice. Enough advice, in fact, for Julius Preuss to fill a fat tome entitled Biblisch-Talmudische Medizin that he published in 1911 (translated by Fred Rosner as Biblical and Talmudic Medicine. Rosner has several other books on the topic as well). The advice frequently strikes us as suspect. Is it really true that burning a century old reed tube (hardly easy to come by as it is) filled with salt in one’s ear is the best and most efficient cure? Where can I get the fat of a goat that has never given birth? Will my insurance over it?

Joking aside, I recently stumbled on one of the longer extended discussions of medicine in the Bavli, at Avodah Zarah 28a–29a (where all the examples cited above can be found). The passage is as fascinating as it is tedious, and despite Preuss’s magnum opus – itself also both fascinating and tedious – I am sure that there is much more scholarly work to be done on this passage and those like it. Where did they get this information? What was their understanding of medicine? What did they do when the cures failed to work?

On this reading of the passage, though, I was struck by a much more technical and abstruse question: How can it be reconciled with contemporary theories of the redaction of the Talmud? Nearly all scholars today agree that there was at least one – and perhaps more – stages of redaction of the Bavli. The redactors, the theory goes, worked from collections of tannatic and amoraic sayings, the latter usually conveyed in pithy sentences.  The redactor(s) pieced these sayings together and connected them with the distinctive argumentative style known as stam. These redactors, the stammaim, added additional material as well, such as aggadah.

My question, in short, was how such a theory – and especially the theory of transmission – can account for a passage such as Avodah Zarah 28a-29a. Many of the cures are attributed to amoraim, predominantly Babylonian. Were these cures transmitted along with the amora’s short statements, to be reconstituted by a redactor in the form of this sugya? If so, what would these (hypothetical) transmission booklets have looked like?

To further complicate matters, there are two traditions in the sugya that record an amora saying, “I did all [of these cures], and I wasn’t healed until a certain merchant told me….”  In the first case, Abaye seems to respond to cures reported in the names of Rav Aha the son of Rava and Mar bar Rav Ashi. In the second, Rav Pappa seems to respond to cures reported by Rav Aha the son of Rava (again) and Rav Ashi. Could Rav Pappa really be responding to Rav Ashi? The same literary form of the two comments suggests the work of a redactor, but how extensive was the intervention?

How might we explain the redaction history of the passage?

(This was crossposted on The Talmud Blog.)

The humanities, we are now regularly told, are in crisis.  In colleges, enrollment in humanities courses has decreased as students flock to more “relevant” courses and majors.  Academic administrators, in turn, redirect resources to the areas that attract  students and that have the greatest chance of garnering grants.  Meanwhile, the students are doing this in part in response to their worried parents, many of whom have themselves little sympathy for the “irrelevancy” of the humanities.

I am not sure if there really is a “crisis” here, but there does seem to be a general malaise, a sense that the humanities is in need of revitalization.  Part of the turn away from the humanities to more obviously practical subjects is completely understandable as a response to the economy.  Nevertheless, the exercise of thinking through the bigger question of the role of the humanities in the twenty-first century can potentially be helpful.

There have been a stream of books and essays on this issue, and I confess that I have not read the vast bulk of them.  Until a serendipitous, long conversation with a colleague yesterday, I did not find the issue, in fact, to be terribly compelling.  Humanists complaining to each other humanists about their irrelevancy tends to be unattractive.

Yet in the course of this conversation and thinking about it afterwards, I realized that it is helpful for me personally to better articulate my own understanding of what it is I do, in the big picture.  Such a clarification could potentially have an impact of what and how I research, write, and teach.  I have not yet figured out these implications, but I do think that I have boiled down my understanding of the humanities to two points, neither of which I am sure are particularly new:

1.  Study of the human experience provides us with intellectual resources or tools that help us to lead meaningful lives.  This has always been a core mission of the humanities, and it remains no less so today: the humanities are about engaging with the essential issues of the human condition, the big questions.  The humanities do not have a monopoly on providing tools for a meaningful life, but they help to instill habits of mind (and perhaps even virtues) that I believe are far from “irrelevant.”

2.  We humanists are fond of saying that the humanities helps to develop portable critical thinking and communication skills that can be widely applied.  This remains true, but I think that we can also be more specific about the nature of those skills in today’s particular environment.  I was taken with Thomas Friedman’s argument in The World is Flat; to succeed in today’s global world we need to be intellectually agile, supple, and innovative. This translates into a specific set of skills.  We need to know (1) how to quickly sort and evaluate the massive flow of information to which we are all now subjected; (2) synthesize it;  and (3) create from this synthesis new knowledge.  Technical skill can be outsourced.  Study of the humanities helps to develop, again, habits of mind, that cannot be.

All of this needs fleshing out, but at least it’s a start.

As always, comments and thoughts are welcome!