“Most of our religious experiences are midrash.” That’s what a peer said after I presented my plans for adjusting the current unit I teach on the Hebrew Bible, and I think that’s right.
Here’s the narrow definition of Midrash: interpretations of biblical passages, mostly associated with the Talmud. A broader category of Midrash includes a variety of tales, anecdotes, glosses, and retellings of Biblical stories.
One of the reasons we teach the Hebrew Bible unit at my Quaker school is because we want students to engage with the text itself. They’ve all heard some of the Genesis and Exodus stories before, but many of them have never read Genesis 1, or they are surprised to learn that one reading of the Garden of Eden story implies snakes only slither as a punishment for tempting Adam and Eve, etc.
I ask them to read selections from English translations of the Hebrew Bible, and then to reflect on how those Bible verses match up and diverge from the VeggieTales Jonah and the Whale episode they grew up with, or the Dreamworks Prince of Egypt version of the Moses story. It feels to me that the real work of the unit is in students realizing that they are indeed mostly experiencing these sacred, holy texts through multiple versions of translation, adaptation, and reframing.
Students are also coming to the class with ready-formed opinions about the same sacred texts. I have students saying at the start of the unit, “I refuse to see any value in this homophobic text” or “I just can’t see past the sexism of Genesis.” They say things like this about Macbeth too, but of course it feels different to acknowledge that Shakespeare’s early seventeenth century exploration of gender stereotypes is problematic than it does to say about Genesis: “This text and tradition, holy and sacred to millions, has ideas and ideals that don’t match our current values.”
But what’s the connection between VeggieTales, students frustrated by an ancient text’s attitudes, and a fellow teacher saying “mostly we experience midrash”? Here’s how this ICJS fellowship is helping me think about it.
For the most part, students do not get to those initial judgments about the Bible because they’ve spent a lot of time reading Deuteronomy. They form opinions about the Bible and really the rest of the world through versions of midrash—explanations, explications, etc.—rather than through direct experience of the text. Because their experience is with an interpretation of the text rather than their own, they are interacting with someone else’s version of an idea. I don’t just mean, “everything would be better if they read more holy texts,” even though that’s a big part of the unit. What I really, really want them to come away with is the notion that we are always translating and very often experiencing someone else’s version of an idea.
Professor Maeera Shreiber’s conversation with ICJS scholar Ben Sax on her book, “Holy Envy: Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone,” broadened my understanding of interacting with interpretations of holy text rather than the text itself. What I take away from that talk is the idea that interreligious experiences can be like encountering a foreign language. Studying or experiencing a foreign language or culture can make us pay attention to our beliefs and practices or experience of the world. It had never occurred to me, for instance, that “lightbulb” is a mix of two English words until I parsed the word glühbirne, which literally means “glow pear” but is actually the German word for lightbulb.
This realization was exciting to me because I wasn’t just memorizing vocab anymore—I was reflecting on my own language and experience of the world, and that experience was unsettling in a good way. It made English seem as strange and curious as this new language I was studying. To me, that is the main reason to ask our students to study the Hebrew Bible in an English class—it asks them to reflect on ideas and texts that unsettle them and asks them to reflect on their own relationship to religion and how their peers engage it too.
This happens when we talk about what is for most of them a new experience—digging into Jewish understandings and interpretations of the Bible and Jewish practices related to those texts. Early each year when I teach it, for instance, a student will say, “Wait, so…do Jews have a Heaven?” To me, that question is a little glühbirne popping on for students as they translate the idea in the Hebrew Bible text we’re reading into versions of ideas they’ve already thought about (usually a Christian version of faith or salvation or Heaven). I hope they are excited to peer into this new conception of the world, and that it helps them reflect on their own, previous conception.
Leaving this fellowship, I am going to spend more time in this unit next year on Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Sarah, and Hagar because I want students to reckon with the different ways that Jews, Christians, and Muslims have talked about Abraham in sacred texts, in interpretive texts, and in popular culture. I hope that as they hold two things in their heads at the same time—what they already know and what they are encountering (many of them for the first time)—they will reflect on what it means to honor and respect different ways to engage religion. For the student who has had a full and immersive experience of one faith, I hope it helps them reflect on their own faith as they see how other faiths approach these stories and ideas. For students who have rejected the Bible in the past, I hope they see why these texts have been so meaningful to others. For everyone in the class, I hope it’s one more chance to offer a “windows and mirrors” English class moment, where students get to peer through windows into other people’s experiences, cultures, and ideas and also feel the affirmation of looking into a mirror and seeing some aspect of themselves reflected and acknowledged.
To me, that’s what midrash can do—it gives us fleshed-out stories and interpretations that can help us push past the reasons we might initially reject someone else’s faith or relationship to religion. It helps us do some of that translating from someone else’s religious experience into our own religious experience, and it helps us feel that unsettling but ultimately rewarding feeling that our own conception of God or something else sacred is not threatened by someone else’s. That’s a warm and bright glühbirne for me, for now. I hope it is for my students too.
Joshua Ratner teaches English at Friends School of Baltimore and was a fellow in the 2022-2023 ICJS Teachers Fellowship. Learn more about the ICJS teacher programs for teachers here.
Opinions expressed in blog posts by the ICJS Teacher Fellows are solely the author’s. ICJS welcomes a diversity of opinions and perspectives.