One afternoon in the early 1800s, a group of Jewish teens, students in a yeshiva in Western Lithuania, eagerly awaited the arrival of the bookseller’s cart. They were hoping to find copies of Zalman Hanau’s Tzohar Hateiva (“The Window of the Box” or “The Opening of the Letter”), a 1733 treatise on Hebrew grammar. They were disappointed to learn that the bookseller did not carry books like this, anticipating that the Jews of Lithuania would be uninterested in the academic study of the Hebrew language. 

Indeed, while these yeshiva students were aware of the existence of dikduk, or Hebrew grammar, as an area of study, the rabbis in their school refrained from teaching it. At that time, the systematic study of dikduk was still limited to a handful of thinkers, often cloistered in universities in the capitals of Europe. One of their teachers, however — a maskil, a follower of the Enlightenment movement — introduced them to dikduk and got them hooked. If not for this teacher, the boys would not have known about the study of Hebrew as a language. They knew that the adults in their community had access to knowledge about Judaism, but without access to the academy and its books, this other Jewish knowledge remained beyond their reach. 

CHAMPIXX/GETTY IMAGES

This story, recounted in Eliezer Lipman Silberman’s 1875 autobiography, immediately came to mind when I read Zev Eleff’s recent excellent call to bring Jewish studies into Jewish education (“Jewish studies and Jewish education in tandem, not at odds,” Nov. 21). Eleff writes that, without access to “a powerful conduit to scholarship,” Jewish educators (and, I would add, rabbis) will find their content on the internet; and as we know, the algorithms that govern search engines show us only the content and insights that are most in demand. A curriculum based on internet searches is one that will double down on old modes of thinking, reifying content without asking the hard questions of how that content became prized in the first place. 

Scholarship is not merely the generation of new content, and scholars of history are not simply repositories of information. Perhaps the greatest gift of the academy is its capacity to challenge outmoded paradigms and offer new perspectives. The infusion of philology transferred how Jews read the Talmud, creating a generation of learners who find in the Talmud not an unchanging guide to the pious life but a living document that encodes centuries of history. Academic study of Tanakh gave rabbis new mechanisms from which to derive meaning from the text. Using psychoanalysis and anthropology allows for textual reads that would have been unheard of in Rashi’s day. These methodologies of study have helped our classrooms already, at least with regards to canonical text. If your beit midrash has a Brown-Driver-Briggs or a Jastrow dictionary, then your learning too has benefitted from Jewish studies. 

Eleff, himself a historian of the highest quality, points out examples of missed opportunities in how we study modern Jewish history. For instance, students encounter “the lachrymose school,” a model of Jewish history that begins in suffering, peaks with the Holocaust and ends with the State of Israel. This historiography was first challenged in the 1920s and yet remains in force in our schools and synagogues as a national myth. I am encouraged, however, to see initiatives to move our educational spaces past old ideas of history. 

In my work at the Jewish Theological Seminary, I am part of a team that launched the Emerging Leaders Fellowship. A research fellowship for 11th graders, this program is designed to give students a first encounter with Jewish studies. Unlike a college course, our fellows do research to inform work in a “traditional Jewish modality,” concluding with divrei torah, shiurim (lessons) or activities for camp. The goal is to build a cadre of scholar-leaders who can tackle the tensions of contemporary Jewish life and learning with nuance and confidence. I am thrilled to know that the Shalom Hartman Instiutite’s robust teen program is also overseen by a historian, and my encounters with young people in that program have been energizing. This comes in addition to the recent exciting new Robert S. Rifkind Professor of Jewish History, who will continue JTS’ tradition of being a builder of bridges between the academy and the classroom. 

In other words, the change that Eleff seeks is coming. 

For this shift to continue, Jewish institutions in America must remain open to new methods and perspectives. Unfortunately, Jewish studies scholarship is not always welcome in Jewish institutions. Eleff alludes to this tension: “Many [Scholars] within [Jewish studies] share views on Israel that diverge from the American Jewish mainstream and its cadre of major donors.” 

But here Eleff risks falling into a trap that keeps our worlds separate. The infusion of post-colonial methodologies has enriched Jewish history, even and especially as it has given us new language with which to understand Israel and Palestine. Jewish studies scholars’ views on Israel” cannot be taken as independent from their work. In fact, the politics of the academy is a product of its willingness to keep all questions on the table. If our leaders are serious about bringing critical scholarship into our classrooms, there cannot be ideological litmus tests. We cannot only embrace scholarship when it affirms our prior biases and beliefs. Leading with a conclusion is not scholastic inquiry: it is propaganda. There is a vulnerability in openness, but were our institutions to be open — truly open — to the possibilities of the academy, then they would be open to a potentially shifting status quo.

Openness is also modeling for students the capacity to encounter difficult facts and opinions and retain a sense of belonging. Bringing contemporary historiography into Jewish educational spaces means that young Jewish people encounter difficulties within the Jewish community and learn that we are strong enough to hold that plurality. Without this, I worry they will continue seeking truth without us. It is in our capacity for nuance that historians are best served to support Jewish students.

This openness has enabled the strength of Jewish modernity. Silberman, the teenager who led the quest for a book on grammar, became the founding editor of Hamagid, the first Hebrew-language newspaper in history. In fact, Hanau, who wrote the book Silberman hunted for, was the Hebrew teacher of Naftali Herz Wessley, the man who more than anyone else created modern Jewish education. Though it was siloed as dangerous knowledge in the 1810s, without Hebrew grammar as a field of study, we would not have day schools, Hebrew schools or a model of liberal Jewish education.

If our communities wish to build a more dynamic sphere of Jewish education, we must embrace the openness of Silberman, not the closed outlook of the leadership of the place and time in which he lived.

Philip Keisman is director of teen education at the Jewish Theological Seminary.