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Overselling Jewish Studies

Jacob Neusner (Sh'ma Trial Issue #2, June 9,1970)

American Jews have no use for half-way measures. For them only the Messiah is good enough. Consequently, any reasonably promising measure for the enhancement of Jewish life must be sold to the community through wild promises. Otherwise, no one will listen.

The rapid expansion of Jewish studies in universities has been accompanied by an inflated rhetoric. What no one could accomplish up to now - the judaization of young Jews - will be achieved on the campus in a course or two. Indeed, one editor proposes closing Hillel foundations and using the funds for professional salaries.

Anyone familiar with the problems of educating undergraduates - and few Jews active in community affairs are - would have wondered at the temerity of those who made such promises and conjured such visions.

First, studies in the 1950's onward have raised doubts about how profoundly undergraduates are reshaped in the college-experience. These investigations have reenforced the impressions of professors on the scene, that young people exposed to readings, lectures, assigned papers, discussions, and the like do not necessarily respond. The values of college students are not shaped primarily in the classroom, but probably by the peer group, so far as anyone can tell. In general, the eighteen-year-old has a nearly fully formed personality. What happens in the next four years is sometimes decisive, but not often. More routinely, the twenty-two-year-old graduate has learned things, acquired a veneer of information and academic jargon, but been left pretty much the same clod he was when he came.

It is only the unusual undergraduate who listens carefully, learns diligently, thinks critically, accurately, and meticulously, and expresses his ideas lucidly and thoughtfully. That seems to me a description of what the university can accomplish at its best. And that set of purposes quite property has little to do with change of character, values, or world-view.

By the time he comes to college the young Jew may well be Jewishly ineducable, if by that we mean acquiring a certain sense of self and not merely accumulating data. The obstacles between him and a deepening view of himself as a Jew are several.

First, before arriving on campus, he may have made up his mind negatively about Jewish matters. That means he will never choose to see a Hillel rabbi (though he may become a hasid of the local left-wing university chaplain), all the more so, take a rigorous course in Jewish studies.

Second, enrolling in Jewish studies, he may discover that such courses hardly conform to what he remembers of Hebrew school. The young Jew of a certain kind assumes a Jewish course will be a "gut," and drops out as soon as he discovers it is not. And few are, because most professors of Jewish studies are still young and sufficiently idealistic to care about the quality of their courses.

These two problems limit enrollments. Still a third keeps enrollments episodic - Judaism is an elective, not a major. Most Jewish college students take a highly vocational approach to liberal arts education. They choose those majors that lead to graduate or professional school. Outside of English, the humanities are not inundated with Jews. So Jewish students, who major in Religious Studies, Near Eastern Studies, and similar fields where Judaic learning is pursued, [do so] only in negligible numbers.

But there are further educational barriers, once students opt [for] a Judaica course. These tend to limit the hope that Jewish students will come away with more than a few more facts.

First, the deadening philistinism of the Jewish community has captured its rebellious generation, which, protesting all the way, copies the parents with commendable loyalty. That philistinism takes the form of subjecting all matters to the single criterion of personal opinion - and uninformed, unself-conscious, undisciplined, unsophisticated personal opinion at that. No one admires the visitor to the art gallery whose sole interest or perspective is what he likes and what he does not like. But what of the Jewish student, who lopes through the museum without walls that is Jewish literature, and cares only to make up his mind about what he "likes" and what he does not "like."

Would that that was the real issue! But it is not. Behind the Jews' childish subjectivism is a hidden agenda. To be a Jew, people imagine, is to be religious. One cannot be a Jew - except hypocritically if he does not believe in God. Therefore the great issue before the students is whether Jewish theology and related studies are able to persuade someone to believe in the God of Israel. As everyone knows, Judaic tradition is not rich in apologetics. But if it were, the achievements of modern and contemporary theology are lost on young Jews who have been predisposed to spiritual coarseness from their childhood.

No one has ever made clear the complexity and difficulty of Judaic theology, so the college student can hardly believe that his opinion is not of the same weight (except for himself) as that of Heschel, Fackenheim, Borowitz or Rubenstein (to mention contemporaries).

This leads to a second educational difficulty. Jewish students come from Jewish homes and Jewish schools where they learn to hold in contempt Jewish learning and Jewish teachers - above all, teachers. Mostly they recall from the dark afternoons of Hebrew school teachers who reduced Jewish learning to the mechanics of memorizing a language. This did not predispose them to respect the intellectual challenges of Jewish scholarship. By contrast they are brought up to take themselves very seriously. In countless youth groups they are taught through "unstructured discussion" - bull sessions. They have, in effect, been trained to a certain intellectual slovenliness where Judaism is concerned.

The university is a magnificent setting for Jewish learning. But the excellence, the promise of the university, is in its own terms and in accord with its own values. The university is a stage in life for the young men and women who pass through. But in its permanent, ongoing life, the university offers rich opportunities for the study of so interesting a human phenomenon as the Jewish people.

Only those Jews who regard the university as still another service station - along with the synagogue, the youth group, the funeral home - to be used as needed, then ignored, could have expected university courses in Judaic studies to solve the "Jewish problem." University studies are not meant to solve anyone's problems, but to understand them. But even if they could and did solve some problems, such studies would never be directed toward the indoctrination of young people in a pre-arranged set of values, propositions, or beliefs. A course ideally leads to discovery, not to already known conclusions.

A philistinism of the students accurately mirrors that of the community from which they come. It is simply hopeless to demand that university courses in Jewish matters accomplish what, by definition, no university course should intend: the reduction of learning people to a single -ism, let alone their -ization.