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The ASOR Blog has published my note on my stay last year at the W. F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research as the Seymour Gitin Distinguished Professor.  It can be read here.  Please excuse the picture.

 

I have found myself at a delicate nexus this week.  I facilitated a faculty discussion on active learning; prepared a draft of a proposal to teach a MOOC through Brown; helped my oldest son to submit his college application; and, of course, went about my usual job of running my own university classes.  This particular confluence of events prompted me to reflect a bit more deeply about the very nature of teaching and learning and the “value added” (and yes, the monetary cost) of face-to-face college instruction.

I have never felt that MOOCs (massive open online courses, such as found at Coursera) threaten the future of higher education.  They are primarily “information delivery” platforms, with some very limited interactive abilities, that help to disseminate knowledge widely.  This strikes me as largely a good thing, even if it does have costs.  Yes, MOOCs may threaten institutions of higher learning that more or less structure their classes as “information delivery” platforms, but this strikes me largely as a good thing: for the sometimes extraordinary price that families pay, they should be getting more than information delivery.

In the past I have most often articulated the “value added” of the face-to-face classroom as providing the opportunity for dialogue and critique.  It is one thing to think that one has “learned” as a reader or auditor, but it is another to actively engage it.  Classrooms, and the writing assignments associated with them, are labs of self-formation in which students are given the opportunity to develop habits of mind through an ongoing interaction with the professor and their classmates.  They can take advantage of this opportunity to a greater or lesser degree, but the option is there to get something that no MOOC can ever deliver.  (Or, at least not yet.)

This week, though, I have begun to think more about the relationships involved in classroom teaching, both among students and between students and the teacher.  A real relationship, though – the deep transformative kind – involves some degree of vulnerability.  As a student, the more open I become – the more I am able to really hear the critiques and suggestions of my teacher and then to acknowledge and grapple with my weaknesses in conversation with others – the more and faster I am able to learn.  As a professor, the more open I am to students’ needs and concerns – to listening to their own critiques of my teaching – the more effective I will be.  Indeed, some of the most rewarding moments I’ve had as a teacher has been precisely when I open up and make myself vulnerable to my students.

Easier said than done, though.  I do not want to make myself open and vulnerable to all of my students each semester; even the thought of it is frightening and exhausting.  Nor, though, would doing so be professional.  There is a line between student and professor that I believe is important to maintain, even if it is often fuzzy.  The trick is finding it.

We don’t talk much about vulnerability in higher education, in large measure, I suspect, because it can bring with it the kind of overtones that can lead straight to thoughts of sexual harassment and disciplinary action.  But I think that the role that vulnerability plays in education should not be a taboo topic.  It is at the heart of what distinguishes the MOOC from the classroom.

 

Few biblical phrases have been as thoroughly parodied as the “goring ox.”  In fact, the entire ox-thing that the Bible has going is, for many, an ongoing source of amusement and puzzlement.  Why does such a great, lofty, and divine text spend so much time talking about oxen and other barnyard animals?  Most everywhere you turn in the Bible, when they are not being slaughtered, these animals are wandering about, falling into pits, digging up your neighbor’s garden, or trampling to death unsuspecting pedestrians.

One such passage deals with the latter case.  According to Exodus 21:28-30 (NRSV translation):

When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall not be liable.  If the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not restrained it, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and the owner also shall be put to death.  If a ransom is imposed on the owner, then the owner shall pay whatever is imposed for the redemption of the victim’s life.

This is a relatively common-sense approach to the case of a goring ox.  If the owner took proper precautionary measures, the goring ox is killed but the owner has no further liability for the damage (i.e., death) caused by the ox.  If the owner did have reason to think that the ox would gore, though, and did not take proper precautions, then he is liable for any damage that it causes.

The rule seems relatively clear and is cited, basically verbatim, in the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q251, fr. 8).  And yet, this issue is at the center of one of the Mishnah’s list of key issues that divided Pharisees and Sadducees:

The Sadducees say: We accuse you, Pharisees!  An ox or donkey that causes damage – [the owner] is liable [to pay damages].  But a slave or female slave [causes damage] – [the owner] is exempt [from paying damages]. (Mishnah Yadaim 4:7, my translation).

The Pharisee position here seems peculiar; it seems to directly contradict biblical law.  Some commentators explain that the Pharisees are here relying on a slightly later biblical passage, Exodus 21:35-36, that speaks of an ox that hurts the neighbor’s ox.  This is not impossible, but this latter biblical passage does not use this language of liability, as one might expect.

I was wondering if it might be possible that the reason that the Pharisaic position here seems to contradict the Bible is that it actually does.  Either these Pharisees knew the rule and rejected it, or they did not know that this biblical rule existed.  The Sadducees, and the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, on the other hand, gave more legal or normative authority to texts that they thought were divine.  Hence both the disagreement between the Sadducees and Pharisees and the citation of the verse in Dead Sea Scroll collection of laws.

Any thoughts?

 

Seventh-century BCE Judah is not typically thought of as a hotbed of feminism.  If the Hebrew Bible is to be believed, women were very much on the economic, social, religious, and legal margins of this society.  The texts portray a society largely created by and maintained for men.

It turns out, however, that these texts do not tell the whole story.  For seventh-century BCE Jerusalem, as for virtually all pre-modern societies, evidence for the non-male elite is sorely lacking; we often cannot know how the 90% lived.  Yet every once in rare while a small window into their lives will emerge from the ground.  For Jerusalem prior to the destruction of the first temple in 586 BCE, this window often takes the form of a tiny lump of clay that somebody has stamped with his – or her – seal.  The seals themselves rarely survive, but we already have an impressive number of stamps that were often used to mark ownership and validate legal documents that have long since crumbled to dust.

Not long ago I happened to stumble across the publication of one of these seal impressions, or bullae, that was made by a woman.  It was the first time I had encountered a seal impression of an Israelite woman, and I was unsure what to make of it.  What kind of woman in this society would own a seal?  In a wealthy family, would both a husband and wife possess a seal, or are we necessarily dealing with single (or widowed) women?  Does possession of a seal, which often belonged to scribes, imply literacy, and if so, how would a woman at this time have been educated?

I don’t think that we have an answer to these questions, but now I have discovered some further evidence that suggests that women were far more involved in public roles in the Kingdom of Judah than the biblical texts would lead us to suspect.  The following excerpts come from a publication of a seal that belonged to a woman named Hannah, and can be found in Nahum Avigad, “A Note on an Impression from a Woman’s Seal,” Israel Exploration Journal 37 (1987): 18-19:

We know from archaeological evidence that Israelite women in the biblical period owned seals.  A dozen or so of them have been found, and it has been inferred from this evidence that Israelite women had the right to sign legal documents, a fact which is not apparent from the biblical sources.

[This seal] proves that Hannah, the owner of this seal, was involved in a business enterprise.  She stamped jars which apparently contained some liquid merchandise such as oil, wine, or the like.  She probably acted in the capacity of a private estate owner marking the container of her products with her name, or else as a functionary in the service of some other estate.

Was Hannah a seventh-century BCE Gluckel of Hameln, that is, a woman who against expectations can be found running a business and fully able to look out after her own affairs, thank you very much?  We are very unlikely to discover the answer to this question.  We can, however, be reasonably confident that Hannah was not the only Judahite woman involved in commerce in her time and that our understanding of Judahite society must include room for her and her sisters.

A couple of months ago, I sat down with an Israeli journalist to talk about my work.  It turned out that she was primarily interested in the issue of when and how “Judaism” as we more or less know it today emerged from the Israelite religion of the Bible.  In the scholarly circles in which I travel, there is a loose consensus that this occurred during the “Restoration” period, beginning around 520 BCE with the building of the second temple in Jerusalem.  This reformed worship of the God of Israel continued with some hiccups until the rabbinic period, when the rabbis shifted the former emphasis on sacrifice to Torah.  I related this narrative to her and tried to tie it in to some of my more recent work.  The interview was recently published online in Hebrew on Ynet here.  I don’t know if it will be translated into English, but it does a nice job summarizing (in slightly sensationalistic form) this scholarly narrative.

I was stunned to watch this piece gather comments.  Over the week it was published, according to the YNet page, the article received 565 comments; 67 Facebook comments; and 1,200 “likes.”  The pace of comments has now slowed to a trickle.  Much more interesting than the number of comments, though, is what they said.

Somewhere close to 90% of these comments excoriate me for ripping down Judaism.  Maybe the tone of these comments is best captured in the one liner, “This is absolute heresy.  The professor is a bad man.”  These comments do not mention that at the end of the article I strongly separate the historical conclusions from issues of applied religion.  If they made it to the end, I guess that they either did not understand what I was trying to convey or did not care.

Nor did the end of the article register with another 5% of the commenters who used the article to show either (1) that today’s rabbis are evil and that Judaism in Israel must be reformed, or, more extremely, (2) that Judaism itself is a bad and modern religion.    The other 5% of the comments offered  reflective thoughts that more seriously engaged the issues raised in the article.

In my own reading of the comments, I was struck by the ease with which people read this article through the lens of their own worldviews.  Most of these readers approached this article with their own convictions firmly in place; their engagement with it was on the level of whether it confirmed or denied these convictions.  If the latter, then its arguments and its author must be explained, put into the right cognitive “box,” and safely stored away.

I am not observing anything new.  I see this kind of approach to new data and opinions all the time in the press; on partisan cable channels; on my Facebook page; and in my classroom.  Psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman have discussed the cognitive mechanisms that lead to such responses.  Watching it happen to me, though, in real time, was a a bit of a shock.  The vast bulk of the comments said much more about the commenters than they did about the article or the ideas presented therein.

There was another take-away for me.  I don’t think that an interview like this would have attracted very much notice if done in English in the U.S., even within the Jewish community.  One reason, I think, is that in the U.S. “public square” we talk and think about religion very differently than they do in Israel.  We have developed a civic discourse that to some extent bifurcates discussions that are consequential to religious communities from those that are about them.  This, in turn, has allowed us to discuss religion in a way that does not immediately escalate into verbal brawling; it has perhaps injected enough critical distance to take the potential edge out of these types of discussions.

And that makes me wonder:  If, in Israel, the more serious public discussions about religion and its relationship to the state had a tad less of an edge, might they also be a bit more productive?