Abstract
This chapter explores the nature of Bible teaching in contemporary Jewish education. The chapter begins by looking at the history of Jewish Bible interpretation and argues that although we know very little about teaching the Bible before the modern era, we can extrapolate a good deal about it from examining Bible interpretation in the past, assuming that the record of Bible interpretation reflects the content of Bible teaching in the past. The chapter shows that the distinction between “midrashic” approaches to reading the Bible (emphasizing the “omnisignificance” of the text) and “peshat” or historical–contextual methods of reading the Bible later surface in contrasting curricular and pedagogic methodologies in our times. The chapter then explores these distinctions in contemporary Jewish education, looking at various curricular projects and pedagogies. The chapter concludes by looking at research that draws upon work in general education about “pedagogical content knowledge” and “orientations” to subject matter, exploring the implications of this scholarship for Bible teaching.
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Notes
- 1.
See Shapira (1997).
- 2.
The lingua franca of the Eastern European Yeshivah was Yiddish of course. In general (except within parts of the Haredi world) that changed in America and English became the new “mother tongue.” That change is not to be underestimated. Although most Jews in Eastern Europe did not speak Hebrew, the fact that Yiddish and Hebrew share the same alphabet and that Yiddish has so many Hebrew words and references embedded within it must have had an enormous impact on the experience of young students learning in the European school house.
- 3.
Ivrit b’ivrit is a methodology in American Jewish education dating back to the early years of the twentieth century. It was actively promoted by the most extraordinary figure in American Jewish educational history, Samson Benderly and his followers. Ivrit b’ivrit was a controversial idea and remained so. It might even be argued that the battle over ivrit b’ivrit is still being played out in contemporary Jewish education, but the playing field has moved from the supplementary school to the day school. For more on this background, see Graff (2008) and Krasner (2005).
- 4.
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Holtz, B.W. (2011). Bible: Teaching the Bible in Our Times. In: Miller, H., Grant, L., Pomson, A. (eds) International Handbook of Jewish Education. International Handbooks of Religion and Education, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0354-4_22
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