Talmud, Curriculum, and the Practical: Joseph Schwab and the Rabbis by  Alan A. Block (Complicated Conversation, V. 2: Peter Lang Publishing) explores the seminal curriculum work of Joseph Schwab in the light of a Rabbinic Judaism to which Schwab did not—even, perhaps, could not--refer, but which Alan Block asserts might be central to a fuller understanding of Schwab’s prescriptions for ‘The Practical’. Using the language and methods of Rabbinic Judaism and Schwab’s eclectic arts, Block opens a new, practical perspective onto American education, studying and redefining issues confronting education at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium.

In Tractate Berakhot (3A) of the Babylonian Talmud there appears this story. Rabbi Jose recounts that once he was traveling along a road when it came time to pray. In order to

prevent being interrupted in his daily prayer, he stopped in an abandoned ruin. While he was thus praying, the prophet Elijah appeared, and stood in the crumbling doorway of the ruin and awaited the completion of Rabbi Jose's prayer. When he had concluded, Elijah cautioned Jose that he ought not to pray in dangerous and suspicious ruins but rather, when traveling, should stop and pray by the side of the road. And furthermore, Elijah said, when praying by the side of the road, so as to avoid being beset upon by bystanders or highwaymen, Jose must say a shortened prayer. R. Jose concludes:

I then learned from [Elijah] three things: One must not go into a ruin; one may say the prayer on the road; and if one does say his prayer on the road, he recites an abbreviated prayer.

I have spent my entire life in school as student and as teacher. It is not difficult to take note of the ruinous state of many of our educational establishments. It has been estimated that 75% of our school buildings are in need of some structural repair. And if there were no clear evidence of physical decay, certainly we might discover there some educational break down. Celebrants of both the political left and right decry the state of the schools in the United States. The national "No Child Left Behind" law, and the Wisconsin "Every Child Deserves a Great School" propaganda are both premised on the reputed inadequacies of the present state of education. There is no lack of alarm sounded concerning the present structures and states of education in the nation.

Of course, the state of our schools and our educational system has been a perennial topic for jeremiads. From the published letters of James Carter in the early years of nineteenth century, to the plaints Horace Mann through the mid-years of that same century, to the moanings of Arthur Bestor and Robert Hutchins and William Bennett, Diane Ravitch, Allen Bloom, and Rod Paige, in the century recently passed, the ineffectiveness and insufficiencies of the public schools have been a common subject in the world of politics and social critique. Joseph Schwab's book, College Curriculum and Student Protest (1969b), soberly castigated the state and practice of education in the United States. This book, he writes, is "an examination of the style, the expression, and some of the content of student protest as presenting symptoms of evils of their education; student ineptitudes and ignorances indicating neglects by the curriculum; perversities indicating distortions and mistreatments"(1969b, 3). Indeed, it was in that same year that Schwab would declare the curriculum field itself moribund. Given the desperate descriptions of the education system in the United States, one might expect that Elijah would have cautioned that it was not safe to pray in there. And yet Schwab spent his entire professional life within the walls of academia; I think he often said his prayers there. I do not think Schwab ever retreated to the sides of the road.

I, too, have spent my entire professional life in schools. I have never thought that I stood amidst ruins; the rhetoric notwithstanding, I do not now believe that our schools are in a state of ruin and decay; I have over the years prayed often there. I continue yet to do so. In the schools, engagement in study is engagement in prayer. I have written lately (see Block, 2001) on the relationship of prayer and study. Study, I aver, is a prayerful act. Study, like prayer, is a stance we assume in the world. Study, like prayer, is a way of being—it is an ethics. When we learn, as when we pray, we acknowledge in public our sense of wonder and awe. Wonder, as Abraham Joshua Heschel teaches me, is a radical amazement; wonder is a state of maladjustment to words and notions, the recognition of their fluidity. Wonder arises in the awareness of the world's glory, which always exceeds our comprehension and our grasp. To our sense of wonder we respond with awe, and when we stand in awe, we acknowledge that even in the smallest particle there is meaning that we can never fully understand. In prayer and in study, we acknowledge how little we know, and we then stand in awe at the complexities of our lives that we only, in part, can realize.

A blessing, as is study, is a moment of insight and an opportunity for direction. Study, as is prayer, is the awareness that we live amidst daily miracles, , , .. is more to the world than we will ever know. Abraham Heschel writes that "The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe." Prayer is an expression of awe; prayer sacralizes the mundane. So, too, does study. When we pray and when we study, we take a stance in awe and humility, and we actively acknowledge that "our lives take place under horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life, or even the life of a generation, a nation, or an era." Prayer and study emanate from the silence of awe and wonder. If contemporary chaos theory argues that there is order in the universe, and that that order is only recognizable in time, then engagement in prayer and study acknowledges our patience and our hope.

Prayer and study set standards to which we might aspire but never reach.

I think it is not for lack of trying that the standards cannot be achieved; it is that the standards must always elude us. They are a consummation devoutly to be sought for, but never to be achieved. Both engagement in study and prayer acknowledge that there is far more in the world than we will ever know. In prayer and in study, we acknowledge that our knowledge will never suffice and that what we undertake in the classroom is merely a hint of all that exists outside it. We ought to stand in our classrooms in awe and wonder. I like to think that Joseph Schwab would have appreciated this thinking.

I go regularly into public school buildings, and I study regularly there. I do not think these buildings will soon crumble, though perhaps they could do with some repair. Schwab devoted his life to the repair of education in the public and private schools of the United States. He has had remarkably little influence. Perhaps, it would be argued, this failure is due to the paucity of his ideas, though I do not hold to this position. I will have a great deal more to say about this later. Ian Westbury and Neil Wilkof state (1978, 2) that for some, "the character of [Schwab's] thought seemed unusual and puzzling." I do not think either adjective represents a fair measure of Schwab's thought. I will argue that Schwab's ideas were mistranslated, appeared in a tongue foreign to their fecund sources, and were, as a result, misinterpreted, dismissed or, for lack of better understanding, dismissed as commonplaces in educational circles. Wilkof and Westbury state that to fully appreciate the cogency and breadth of Schwab's ideas demands an understanding not of any on particular essay, but the intertextual character of all of Schwab's essays,

the "complex back-and-forth between the particular and the more general." I will speak to the power of Schwab's ideas, and I will attempt to situate these ideas in the grounds from which they took root and from which they flourished. That soil is generally Jewish and specifically Talmudic, and I think Schwab's ideas are best appreciated when they are viewed in this specific context. I think Schwab's educational prescrip­tions have greatest potency when these sources and roots are revealed. And further, because I am concerned with the progress of education in the United States, I want to employ these same Talmudic methods to study issues currently troubling education: issues of curriculum, issues of standards and high-stakes testing, issues of reading and scholarship, and issues of ethics. I think these methods are implicit in Schwab's thinking, but they are also methods to which for various reasons upon which I will later speculate, Schwab could not give authentic voice.

The schools are not in ruins, as I have said, but they are in need of some repair. It is to that repair that this book speaks. I like to think Joseph Schwab would have supported this effort.

A story is told of the Maggid of Zlotchov: One of his disciples asked: "In the book of Elijah it is said that `Everyone in Israel is in duty bound to say: `When will my work approach the works of my fathers and mothers, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah and Rachel?' How is it possible," the disciple asked, "to ever imagine that we could achieve what our ancestors achieved?" And the Maggid responded: "Just as our fathers and mothers invented new ways of serving, each a new service according to his or her own character: one the service of love, the other that of stern justice, the third that of beauty, so each one of us in our own way shall devise something new in the light of the teachings and of service, and do what has not yet been done."

 Talmudic Reasoning: From Casuistics to Conceptualization by Leib Moscovitz (Mohr Siebeck) The development of explicit legal concepts and principles in rabbinic literature reflects rabbinic legal thought at its most creative and sophisticated, as many of these con­cepts and principles deal with ab­stract, metaphysical entities. In this study Leib Moscovitz systematically surveys the development and impact of abstraction and conceptualization in the various legal corpora of rab­binic literature, illustrating the criti­cal and unique role that conceptualization plays in talmudic reasoning. He demonstrates how; the analysis of rabbinic conceptualization can shed light on numerous important aspects of rabbinic scholarship, such as the character and development of rab­binic legal thought, techniques of rabbinic legal exegesis, rabbinic juris­prudence, and various philological and historical issues in rabbinics, such as the chronology of the anony­mous stratum of the Babylonian Talmud.

Rabbinic conceptualization, though unique in many respects, shares cer­tain features with cognate disciplines, and this study utilizes these discip­lines (mainly jurisprudence, cognitive psychology, and philosophy) to illu­minate rabbinic conceptualization wherever relevant. The themes addressed in this study, include the use of casuistics, generalization, and implicit conceptualization in the earlier strata of rabbinic literature, classification and legal definition, legal fictions, legal explanation, ana­logy and association, and the deve­lopment and use of explicit legal concepts and principles in the later strata of rabbinic literature.

 

The Sinner and the Amnesiac: The Rabbinic Invention of Elisha Ben Abuya and Eleazar Ben Arach by Alon Goshen-Gottstein (Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences:  Stanford University Press) 

Excerpt:

This book focuses on the lives of two rabbinic heroes and the tales told of them: R. Eleazar ben Arach and Elisha ben Abuya. Neither sage appears as a central figure in the rabbinic world. There are virtually no legal traditions attributed to them, and they made only marginal contributions to the formation of the oral Torah and to Jewish culture and history in general. Yet they have unique reputations. There are rabbinic reports that suggest that both figures are exceptional. Though little is known of him, R. Eleazar ben Arach is viewed as the ideal rabbinical scholar while Elisha ben Abuya is viewed as the rabbinic archvillain. Despite a supposed common engagement in mystical studies, their biographies are quite different. Curiously, however, though because of their relative obscurity we might expect the stories told of them to be reliable and untendentious, the opposite is true. My research suggests that the stories of the two rabbis are part of the fictional process of rabbinic literature. Perhaps, indeed, the obscurity of the two heroes left the imagination more open to construct their images. Perhaps their marginality allows us to investigate the ways in which rabbinic biography serves purposes that are not strictly historical or informative."

The major portion of this study is devoted to Elisha ben Abuya. The posi­tivistic historical credulity of previous scholarship and its attempt to dis­cover the historical figure by means of a straightforward presentation of rab­binic statements may be most inaccurate in his case. Applying the criteria appropriate to the reading of rabbinic sources forces us to adopt a herme­neutic of suspicion concerning the reports of his activities. This is a case where careful reading of the text makes a difference to the historical con­struction of the world of the sages. In this case, the application of hermeneu­tics of suspicion might leave us bereft of the historical certitude that charac­terized our knowledge according to conventional models of interpretation; the more we are aware of the complexities accompanying the reading of rab­binic texts, the less certain is our knowledge of their historical accuracy. Yet if we lose something in terms of clear constructions of rabbinic history and life, we gain something in terms of our appreciation of rabbinic culture and its concerns.

Rabbinic sources do not relate neutral events in a historically objective manner. They construct stories that are then integrated into larger ideologi­cally motivated literary units in such a way as to impart particular ideologi­cal messages. The sources do not necessarily relate the historical facts about the heroes but they do illustrate the cultural concerns that find expression in the stories told about them. Central in the stories of both sages is the Torah and Torah study, an essential part of rabbinic Judaism. What this study sug­gests is the central place that Torah study occupies in all areas of religious life and writing. One cannot appreciate stories told of rabbis without being aware of the forms of Torah study and the struggle with the status of Torah study within rabbinic culture. When we become aware that the various as­pects of Torah study are the primary concerns of the various texts being analyzed, new agendas emerge to be examined, and new questions come to our attention.

If we are unable to reconstruct the historical facts of the period, our sources are important witnesses for the relevant ideological struggles. As a result, rather than asking when an event took place, we may question what drives, tensions, and forces shaped rabbinic culture. Certain types of texts are not so much the history of people and institutions as they are the history of ideas."

 

Writing a rabbinic biography entails difficulties beyond those already mentioned. They stem from the nature of the rabbinic sources and the sort of information contained in them. Rabbinic literature left no personal writings by rabbis in their own names, and certainly no autobiography or personal reflection.' What is perhaps even more significant is the lack of raw material. It appears that the sources were not interested in preserving the relevant in­formation concerning the details of the lives of most of the rabbinic heroes. Random anecdotal information is preserved, but even for some of the major figures of rabbinic Judaism, there is very little information about their real lives, and virtually nothing is known of their internal or subjective reality. There is no access to the kind of material that makes biographies interesting, because we know next to nothing about their feelings and struggles.

The difficulties relate to the nature of transmission and development of traditions. In a tradition that constantly recasts its stories and shapes its tra­ditions and memories, how do we re‑create the life of a sage?" One solution is to concentrate on the development of tradition, rather than to try to get at the historical reality itself: "Although questions about rabbis as historical figures ought not to be ignored, the character of the evidence suggests that the basic problematic of rabbinic `biography' is not the recovery of the life or mind of a given master, but the study of how and if his traditions change and develop across documents and through time."" The suggestion that the study of rabbinic biography is the study of the evolution of tradition allows us to reflect on the role of interpretation in the formation and development of biographical stories. I suggest that biographical traditions develop not