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TORAH LITERACY IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOLCLASSROOMLaila Lipetz aa Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of TorontoPublished online: 12 Aug 2010.

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TORAH LITERACY IN THE ELEMENTARYSCHOOL CLASSROOM

Laila LipetzOntario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

Abstract

As a lover of language and literature, as a serious yet secular Jew,and as a long-time educator in Jewish schools who strives to im-plement the best practices possible, the author found herself in aneducational trap. Typically, even in liberal Jewish practice, WrittenLaw, i.e. the Torah, and Oral Law, i.e. the rabbinic commentaries,are tightly bound together. In educational practice, this results inintroducing commentaries on a primary text far earlier than done inLanguage Arts studies. According to the author, students are boundby a tradition and methodology that do not serve them well, as itrecognizes the text but not the reader or the context. This articlegrows out of a desire to break out of traditional practices and teachTorah with the contemporary awareness of reading theory, withoutactually breaking with tradition.

TORAH LITERACY IN THE ELEMENTARYSCHOOL CLASSROOM

In Better than Life, Pennac’s (1999) ode to reading and books, hecomments ironically on his students’ reaction to describing a book. Hemight easily be describing the Torah, the Jewish Bible:

When I ask them to describe a book, it’s as if a UFO had landed in the class-room. A mysterious object, deceptively simple, an intruder both powerfuland dangerous, a sacred artefact, demanding exaggerated care and respect,to be placed with reverence on the shelves of an immaculate library, andthere to be worshipped by a sect devoted to cultivating the enigmatic (p.64).

With all the suddenness and excitement of a UFO, Torah descendedon Mount Sinai. Moses went up the mountain and disappeared intoan otherworldly scene of thunder, lightning and smoke. He camedown with the words that would transform a band of fleeing refugeesinto a people. Mystery surrounds the Torah—where it was given, its

Religious Education Copyright C© The Religious Education AssociationVol. 99 No. 2 Spring 2004 ISSN: 0034–4087 print

DOI: 10.1080/00344080490466723

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authorship, even its unusual form. While Moslem tradition has a JebelMusa, a Moses Mountain, Jewish tradition claims no knowledge ofwhere revelation took place. According to tradition, God is the author,Moses the scribe, who received the Torah during his forty days up onthe mount. Modern Jewish scholarship sees Torah as “a book whichhad its origin in the hearts and minds of the Jewish people . . . Godis not the author of the text, the people are; but God’s voice may beheard through theirs if we listen with open minds” (Plaut 1981, p. xix).Less poetically, modern scholarship sees four main voices writing atdifferent times, united by a single voice that created the largely unifiedtext we read today (p. xxi). Mysterious, too, is that long past the firstdays of the printing press, even longer past the days of the first books,the Torah is still in the ancient form of a scroll. It is painstakingly hand-written by a special scribe who uses tools of millennia past to createthe sacred text.

The Torah is deceptively simple, its language seemingly clear yetburying a richness of meaning. The opening sentence “In the begin-ning God created the heavens and the earth,” simple enough for achild to understand, has an entire body of scholarship. Its simplicitybelies its power, which influenced the course of Western civilization.Torah not only shaped the destiny of the Jews but influenced the pow-erhouse religions of Christianity and Islam. Plaut (1981) says, “Forover two and one-half millennia the Torah has been the keystone ofJewish life, the starting point of Christendom, and the background ofIslam. As such it has played and continues to play a significant role inthe world” (p. xix). Over two thousand years after its appearance, itis still a bestseller, read in translations throughout the world. Implicitin the Bible’s power is its danger, the wars, crusades, Inquisitions andforced conversions being plentiful testament to the threat of the word.Even today, the religions that look back to the Bible find discord andconflict over differing interpretations of the same stories.

The Torah is sacred artefact, demanding exaggerated care andrespect, to be placed with reverence on the shelves, if not in the im-maculate library that Pennac describes, then in an immaculate ark.Bamberger (1981) notes that the “reverence and love evoked by thescroll is expressed in its outward adornments . . . (that) the removal ofthe scroll from the ark to the pulpit for reading and its return to theark after the reading constitute a ceremony of considerable pomp”(p. xxxvi). The Torah is dressed in velvets and silk, draped with jew-ellery, its parchment untouched by human hand, kept in an elaboratelycovered ark. We kiss it, we carry it as a loved one, we venerate it. When

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it is no longer legible, it is put to rest in a burial plot in a sacred ceme-tery, as though it were human. Yet are we also, to complete Pennac’sanalogy, a sect which in its devotion to Torah, cultivates the enigmatic?

Torah is at the heart of Judaism, for all streams of Jewish prac-tice, both in the past and present. Yet Torah is both the sacred scrollswhich are accorded singular and special status, as described above,and the entire body of Written (the Bible) and Oral (the commen-taries) Law, both believed to be God-given at Sinai. As such, they areforever connected. Neusner, in distinguishing between the Bible, asunderstood by Christians as the Old Testament, and Torah as under-stood by Jews, writes “the Torah encompasses not only the Scriptures,it also includes an oral component, which comes down from Sinai inoral formulation and oral tradition, only to be written down much lateron . . . Accordingly, I read “the Torah” whole and complete, the writtenpart and the oral part. For the Torah came to Israel, the holy people,in two media” (Greeley and Neusner 1990, p. 7). Holtz (1984) usesthe analogy of a “vast inverted pyramid” (p. 13) to describe Oral Law’srelationship to Written Law: “The Bible is at the base, but the edificeexpands outward enormously—midrashic literature, the Talmud, thecommentaries, the legal codes, the mystical tradition, the philosoph-ical books. All this literature is Torah . . . Jewish literature is strikinglyunique: it is creative, original, and vibrant, and yet it presents itself asnothing more than interpretation, a vast set of glosses on the one trueBook, the Torah” (p. 13). Sarna (1989) echoes an early sage’s directionon Torah study, “Turn it and turn it, for all is in it” (Pirke Avot 5:25)when he states that “in fact, Jewish intellectual and spiritual historymay be said to be essentially the record of the variegated attempts tounfold the sense, meanings, purposes, intents, and applications of thebiblical texts . . . the Hebrew Bible is a prism that refracts varieties oftruth” (p. xvii). Plaut (1981) confirms this understanding, stating thatthere is a “long tradition of holding up the book like a prism, discov-ering through it and in it a vast spectrum of insights . . . Jews cannotknow their past or themselves without this book, for in it they willdiscover the framework of their own existence”(p. xix).

The Torah as Written and Oral Law constitutes a continuous chainof tradition that not only builds on what was before but also becomesa piece of the whole. Bamberger (1981) states that “for us as for ourancestors, the line between written and oral Torah cannot be drawnoversharply. We too read the text in the light of the experiences andassociations that have become attached to it” (p. xxxvi). Encylope-dia Judaica (1971) fully describes this tradition of continuity, from

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Torah at Sinai through the original Oral Law, which was at first trulyoral, through Medieval Rabbinic commentaries, where the enigmatichomiletic approach developed, wherein “the commentator strives tointerweave his ideas with the text even if the simple meaning of the lan-guage and the context are at variance with his interpretation” (p. 892)through to modern Jewish exegesis, both in Israel and throughoutworld Jewry. As Bloom (2000) describes, it is a “chain of tradition inwhich sage comes after sage, and wisdom endures . . . (even faced withhistorical disasters) the genealogy of normative tradition remainedserene” (p. 279).

This record of continuity creates a picture of commentatorsthroughout the ages in eternal dialogue. This aspect is made con-crete in the pages of a Torah book used for study. In the centre arethe verses of the Torah surrounded by the various commentators, en-gaged in a timeless dialogue to which the reader is invited to listen andlater respond. Yet, despite this continuous line of seemingly disem-bodied voices, it is recognized that commentators belonged to theirtime and place. They were responding not only to the text, which wasitself altered and reshaped by each new commentary, but as individualpeople shaped by their contexts and sensibilities. Plaut (1981) statesthat “in reading the Torah one should keep in mind that what theauthors said in their own time to their own contemporaries withintheir own intellectual framework is one thing and what later gener-ations did with this text, what they contributed to it by commentaryand homily is another . . . There is no doubt that tomorrow’s generationwill hear the words differently again and the search for new answerswill always continue” (p. xix–xx). Bamberger (1981) states that “In itswanderings, Judaism encountered many new constellations of idea.Sometimes these novelties were rejected by Jewish thinkers: but oftenthey were accepted as compatible with Judaism. In such cases an effortwas made to show that these ideas were already suggested in Scripture”(p. xxxii). Similarly, “derash was a subjective method which attemptsto make the text applicable to the time of the exegete” (EncyclopediaJudaica, Volume Two, p. 890). Consequently, “homiletic commentarydeveloped because of various cultural requirements and because of thenecessity of finding a correspondence between scriptural views andthe prevailing opinion in different ages” (p. 892). Hellenistic Jews“felt the need to prove that the teachings of the Bible are conso-nant with Greek wisdom” (p. 896). Rashi, the great eleventh centuryFrench commentator, conversely had little contact with the larger cul-tural context in which he lived, while Mendelssohn, a child of the

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Enlightenment, was “influenced by contemporary Christian biblicalresearch and commentary”(p. 897). By the end of the nineteenth cen-tury, “study was liberated from the theological confines to which it hadbeen limited” (p. 921), due to a growing secularism in contemporaryWestern society.

The special status of the scrolls coupled with the awareness thatcommentators were not only working within the Jewish tradition ofscholarship but also within their contexts, suggest that, contrary to tra-dition, commentary may be separated from primary source. Rosenberg(1984), who writes on the strengths of the commentaries, suggeststhis when he states that “the text still coheres remarkably withoutcommentary . . . (The Bible) is also only itself: an elegant and soft-spoken narrative with many beginnings and many endings, a lucidexposition of dilemmas that seem very familiar, even when read forthe first time” (p. 32).

The narratives, then, have meaning on their own to a contempo-rary Jewish reader. Yet, current practice in Torah study is still gov-erned by a tradition that transmits knowledge, the knowledge of thecommentators. Grishaver (1990) explains it simply for his readers thus:“Traditional Torah study is predicated on the belief that God wrote theTorah and gave it to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Moses received not only theWritten Law but also the Oral Law. So when you learn Torah tradi-tionally, you never do it without commentaries, codes, and the otherexplanations. You need the Oral Law to understand the real meaning ofthe Written Torah. Traditional Torah study is based on the assumptionthat each generation understands less about Torah than the precedinggenerations. The closer you are to Sinai (in time), the more you under-stand.” (p. 102). Holtz quotes Scholem (1984, p. 14) that “The effortof the seeker after truth consists not in having new ideas but rather insubordinating himself to the continuity of the tradition . . . commen-tary is the legitimate form through which truth is approached.” Pearl(1970), in explaining the status of Rashi, explains that people “taughtthe Pentateuch with Rashi to their children almost from the day theybegan to read Hebrew. And so it has been to our own time. Anyonewith the faintest pretension of studying some Bible—and particularlythe Pentateuch—would study Rashi” (p. 26). In the introduction toHirsch’s commentary on the Torah, Grunfeld (1959) writes, “The unityof the Written and Oral Law is one of the fundamentals of authen-tic Judaism; it is the pillar on which traditional Judaism rests . . . Theconnection between the Written and Oral Law is not merely a legalmatter; it is fundamental for the interpretation of the whole text of the

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bible, which cannot possibly be understood without the oral tradition”(p. xiii–xv).

A dialectic has been set up so far, with the special status of the Torahscrolls and an awareness that all Torah learners, like the great com-mentators of tradition, belong to their times and places supporting theseparation of Written from Oral Law, in opposition to the traditionalexpectation and current belief that all Jewish Torah study be done withcommentaries. A few practical examples from Genesis, often thefirst stories encountered by children, may highlight what is at stake.Abraham’s childhood and youth are not described in the text andcommentators have filled in the gap with stories of his childhood.As Telushkin writes (1997), “if you attended a Jewish school as achild, you undoubtedly were taught the famous rabbinic midrashabout Abraham, which tells that even as a young child he disbelievedin the powers of idols” (p. 22). The story itself involves Abrahamphysically smashing his father’s idols, lying, then boldly admittingthe truth and contemptuously rejecting his father’s beliefs. Thepopularity of the commentary indicates that it must have beenunderstood as an excellent way in which to fill in the gap in the text.I suggest that this commentary creates more problems, through itscurrently unacceptable violence, deception and intolerance, thanstudents’ imagining for themselves what Abraham was like as a child.The commentaries regarding Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac perceiveAbraham’s response to God’s request as a test that he passes withflying colours. Today’s students would likely understand the textquite differently, and legitimately so, as children to fathers and astwenty-first century Westerners. Yet another example is of Jacoband Esau, who are described as struggling in the womb. Rabbinicdiscussion ensues as to the different personalities that already wereapparent pre-birth, with Jacob already struggling to leave the wombin order to attend a house of study. While this commentary introducesliterary and moral themes that will be further developed in the text,young students, still unable to think in abstract terms unrelated toreality, would likely have difficulty understanding the metaphor ofa foetus trying to leave the womb in order to study. Our students,however, still living in close quarters with siblings, exposed to a greaterincidence of multiple births due to modern fertility treatments, andfamiliar with human biology as studied in their Science classes, areable to bring new and personal insights into this story of twinship.

These examples are a window into teaching and learning to-day. One no longer assumes that someone older and wiser is the

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repository of all pertinent knowledge, nor that the wisdom of the ages isnecessarily today’s wisdom, nor that children’s opinions are, in their“childishness,” irrelevant. For an understanding of this view, for away of giving further support to separating the study of commen-taries from the primary text, one must look beyond Jewish critics tocognitive and literacy theory in the secular world. The constructivistapproach, which is “the basis for many current reforms in education”(Meece 1997, p. 117) states that “children must construct their ownunderstanding of the world in which they live. Knowledge is not some-thing teachers can directly transmit to learners. The information mustbe mentally acted on, manipulated, and transformed in order to havemeaning for the learner”( p. 117). This approach assumes that “humansconstruct knowledge; we do not receive and internalize predigestedconcepts without simultaneously reacting to them and engaging themwithin our own mental maps and previous experience (Gagnon andCollay 2001, p. x). The emphasis is on learning as opposed to teach-ing, making meaning as opposed to being told the meaning. Becausestudents actively connect with the world, they can understand onlywithin the context of their developmental stage. Piaget, whose theo-ries of cognition contributed to these changes in educational approach,explains child development in stages, from sensory based understand-ings through prelogical, concrete logical to abstract thinking (Meece1997; Labinowicz 1980). These stages shape a child’s ability to learnand, similarly, should shape the learning opportunities provided to achild. During elementary school most children are in a stage of thinkingthat is grounded in reality; only towards the end are students develop-ing the ability to think in abstract terms, an ability much required tocomprehend the timeless dialogue of the commentators and the dualrevelation at Sinai.

Rosenblatt (1978), in her groundbreaking theory of literacy, pro-vides tacit support for postponing the reading of the commentaries inher description of the critic. In her transactional theory of the literarywork, because the reading event depends on the reader to transactwith the text to make meaning, the role of the critic, or for our needs,the commentator, is circumscribed. She says:

No more than any other reader, however, can the critic read the text forus. Nor should we turn to him as an authority decreeing what we shouldlive through in the reading. To learn the critic’s interpretation before ourown encounter with a text often inhibits a spontaneously personal read-ing. Coming to the critic after one’s own transaction with the text, one canbe helped to realize more keenly the character of that experience . . . The

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critic may have developed a fuller and more articulate awareness to theliterary, ethical, social, or philosophic concepts that he brings to the literarytransaction . . . In this way, critics may function not as stultifying models tobe echoed but as teachers, stimulating us to grow in our own capacities toparticipate creatively and self-critically in literary transactions (p. 148).

The commentator, in the role of what Rosenblatt refers to as the roleof critic, prevents the personal reading, the true literary transactionbetween reader and text that is seen as critical to meaning making. Us-ing her model, commentators would be brought in after the student’stransaction with the text. After could mean later the same day or week,or, better, even years later, when the students are ready to understandthe role of commentary. As Pennac (1992) says, “When we’re young,we’re not mature enough for some works, I’ll grant you that. But un-like good wine, good books don’t age. They wait for us on our shelveswhile we age” (p. 185). It is no denial of the commentaries to ask themto wait on the shelves while our students mature, both in their abilityto understand abstractions such as metaphor, analogy, anachronism orhistorical timelines and in their ability to converse actively with theTorah readers throughout the ages.

A picture develops of a text that may or may not include com-mentaries in transaction with a reader who brings his own personalityand cultural perspective to bear on the text. Rosenblatt’s model (1978)serves us well. She explains the three-point partnership of the read-ing event thus: “A specific reader and a specific text at a specific timeand place: change any of these, and there occurs a different circuit,a different event—a different poem” (p. 14). Harvey and Goudvis(2000) echo Rosenblatt when they say “True comprehension goes be-yond literal understanding and involves the reader’s interaction withtext . . . Readers naturally bring their prior knowledge and experienceto reading, but they comprehend better when they think about theconnections they make between the text, their lives, and the largerworld” (pp. 8–10).

A specific reader in a specific time and place—I suggest these areour prisms for making meaning, not the commentary. If one can acceptthe delaying of commentary, as argued above, we are free as educatorsto look at the reader and context. Instead of wondering first what Rashihas to say, as recommended by both the teachers of my childhoodand sadly, thirty years later, by the otherwise excellent educators Iencountered at the local Jewish Teachers’ Seminary, at educationalconferences and at lectures, we wonder first what our students think;instead of turning to an eleventh century, ritually observant, French

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male who read the Torah believing in its divine authorship, we turnto the original responses of our students. Their voices must be heardand given weight in the classroom.

Imagine a classroom of young students today. Torah students havethemselves changed. Looking at our young Torah readers, “the identitycategories—race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, wellness,age, etc.—that schools were asked to focus on during the reform ef-forts” (St. Pierre, p. 29), are not equally pertinent. Race and ethnicitymay be shared with the commentators. Sexual orientation is as yet amoot point for our pre-pubescent students. Our school age childrendiffer from the commentators largely in regard to age, gender and, sug-gested in the “etc.” of the last quotation, learning styles and personalstrengths. In the elementary classroom, we are teaching children, girlsand boys, who study secular as well as religious studies, not the boysand adult males of tradition, studying only the great Jewish texts of tra-dition. The commentaries, which speak well to students with stronglinguistic and logical skills, may not easily reach those who respondand understand best in emotional, social or artistic modes. To use thefirst verse of the Torah again, beginnings trigger different responses ineach of us, as do emotionally laden words like created, heavens, earth.The first sentence in a large text may signal a world of possibilities toone, an overwhelming burden to another. The entry points to that onesentence are both personal and endless, as are potential responses. Wemust accord our young readers an opportunity to respond first fromtheir own vantage points.

Gender issues are acutely felt in Torah studies. The relatively mi-nor and often passive presence of women, such as the Matriarchs,makes young girls struggle to connect. If one adds in the purely malevoices representing the male perspectives from the male dominatedsocieties of the past that are reflected in the commentaries, girls mayearly become estranged from their tradition. Jacob’s daughter Dena,for example, who “went out” to see the young women of the area and israped, is castigated for being the type of girl who “goes out.” Blamingthe victim is a disturbing stance for today’s students to respect. Sherr(1991) states, “The literate person understands the deeper social andpolitical meaning of what he or she reads, and thus has the knowl-edge that makes it possible to liberate self from unexamined, perhapsunjust, life conditions” (p. 154). For our purposes, the unjust life con-ditions are of being a twenty-first century girl daily required to readtexts in which she is invisible or devalued. We must allow our girls tobe literate as defined by Sherr, and engage with the text as females.

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While the Torah itself is considered, in all contexts and by allreaders, part of the Jewish canon, we must yet avoid methodologiesclosely associated with teaching of canon. Damrosch (1997) speaks“of the preservation and transmission of a culture” (p. 3). Aronowitzand Giroux (1998) refer to “transmission and imposition” (p. 194),which degrade “teaching and learning to the practice of implementa-tion and mastery” (p. 183). These are reminiscent of the metaphorsonce used for children’s learning, that of learners as empty vessels andtabula rasa, metaphors which are worlds apart from contemporaryunderstandings of students as meaning makers, understandings oftenapplied in the secular classroom. Aware of the non-interactive natureof the transmission model and of current pedagogy in the larger world,Jewish educators are looking for different models. Weiss and Cutter(1998) claim that:

A tradition of authority . . . may lend itself to more authoritarian modes ofdelivery, though it need not . . . For Jews, the styles in which seminary peoplewere taught have come under closer scrutiny lately, replacing the concernsrestricted to the nature of the material taught. Lecture and informationgathering have been supplanted by dialogue and meaning making (pp. 87–91).

As in the forward-thinking religious seminaries described above, ourstudents, too, should have dialogue and meaning making.

We can look to contemporary scholars in both Jewish and secu-lar studies for guidance in the pedagogy of literacy. Rosenberg (1984)says, “To read biblical narrative is to submit oneself to a lesson inhow to read” (p. 32). While he works within the tradition of biblicalcommentary, he analyzes their methods and offers up their tools tothe contemporary reader. He believes that reading Torah is interac-tive, echoing the transaction of Rosenblatt. In order for the reader toknow how to read, he isolates strategies for reading text analytically,strategies much related to those for reading poetry, such as aware-ness of ambiguity, wordplay, non sequitur, anticipatory informationand redundancy (pp. 37–51). Much as in the study of poetry in theearly school years, when students learn to identify similes without ac-tually reading a scholarly essay on the poem studied, our studentswould acquire the tools for literacy before reading how others haveapplied these tools. Each of Rosenberg’s strategies needs to be taughtand used by our students, first-hand, before students explore how theyare used by commentators of years gone by.

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A contemporary Jewish feminist proposes yet another model ofresponse. Goldstein (1998) proposes a revisioning, a rereading insteadof a rewriting, which requires one to:

. . . imagine women’s voices on that traditional commentary page . . . (to rec-ognize) the yearning of both men and women who read the old tales withnew eyes. There are those who view the traditional writing with anger, whofeel disenfranchised or disillusioned . . . There are those who have studiedthe Torah for years and yet have never asked critical sociological, historicalor spiritual questions” (pp. 26–27).

She recommends that we be both inventive, by making our ownmidrashim, and revisionist, when we “view the text head-on and placewomen squarely inside it, even if the traditional commentators haveplaced us on the outside” (p. 30). She works within a belief in cultivat-ing a critical literacy of Jewish thought, where the power structures andtheir influences throughout tradition are perceived and responded to.

Booth (1998) envisions personal response at the heart of meaningmaking. While respecting the text, he brings the child to the centreof the original reading event. His prompts for responding to books aswell as “Questions that Matter” (pp. 76–77) provide tools to create thereading event, as reader, text and context meet to forge comprehen-sion. Drama, art and graphic organizers allow further expression of theconnections they are making with text, as well as implicitly recognizingthe diversity of students’ learning styles. Reading response journals,notebooks in which students respond in writing to their readings andwhich implicitly value the students direct responses to the readingevent, have become a part of many Language Arts classrooms. Thesemay be introduced in the Torah class as the first step to students writ-ing their own midrash. In doing so, students will learn to see theirpersonal responses as part of the larger chain of tradition, that theyare part of the Torah conversation that spans the ages.

In addition to the text-self-world model introduced by Rosenblattand tacitly supported by Booth, Harvey and Goudvis (2000) distinguishyet another connection, text-to-text connection. This provides oppor-tunities to look at Torah through the overlap between literature, film,television, music and other media and artistic forms of expression. Thisechoes the synthetic reading described by Rosenberg (1984), which“involves understanding a given unit’s role in the finished composi-tion we know as the Bible, to note what precedes and what follows it,to trace the permeation of its verbal and thematic echoes in relatedepisodes and stories, to study the timing of its montage in sequence

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and, above all, to see it as an unfolding story, to evaluate what it addsto the cumulative narrative we have read so far” (p. 35). Text-to-textconnections take Rosenberg’s model one step further, by going beyondthe confines of the Bible. Torah readers may look for what precedesand what follows, for verbal and thematic echoes in the full range ofaesthetic experiences. The arts and particularly contemporary mediaoffer forms of personal response that acknowledge the context of thestudents. Recognizing intertextual connections between the ancient,sacred text and secular, Western contemporary culture places Torah ina “big world” perspective, one of meaning to our twenty-first centurystudents.

A traditionalist might find this approach troubling, a traditionalisteducator even more so. Where is the respect for our past? Where is therespect for the teacher who most assuredly knows more than the youngstudents? Is this not giving more respect to a child’s opinion than tothe greatest scholars within our tradition? Even if one were to acceptthis approach, where would one find teachers to teach this way, foras mentioned earlier, almost all have been raised to teach Torah withthe commentaries close at hand. It truly requires a paradigm shift ineducational model, from transmission mode to a transactional mode,where recognizing the unique perspective of each child, as a specificreader in a specific context, is a given. The teacher facilitates the learn-ing rather than dictating the learning, allowing the student to activelyconstruct meaning. The commentators, different readers in differentcontexts, quietly wait in the wings for the child’s first personal responseto take place. The issue of finding teachers is the same as that of findingteachers in any field to teach using contemporary models of pedagogy.Teacher training, professional resources, time to engage in dialogueamongst colleagues and personal reflection are key to changes in anyfield. There are still many current teacher guides that recommendthe traditional ways. Weisman (1996) writes “And, naturally, you willwant to learn Rashi’s explanations on the Chumash (Torah), becausewithout Rashi, no one understands properly what is going on” (p. 13).Stern (1984) includes commentaries alongside even simplified transla-tions for students, Fields (1990) encourages commentaries as the keyto student understanding and Loeb and Kadden (1997) immediatelyfollow their Synopsis sections with Insights from the Tradition. Thereare, however, some new resources that reflect reader response as crit-ical to student engagement with Torah. Grishaver and Golub(1985)and Golub and Grishaver (1994) include initial reader response on the

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part of their young students as an important step in transaction withTorah.

To conclude, by respecting the text, reader and context, andthereby allowing a true response to occur, we move our students awayfrom being “a sect devoted to cultivating the enigmatic,” as suggestedby Pennac’s model. We have respected our cultural canon at the sametime that we have shaped, modified and postponed the study of parts.We have respected our student’s personal worlds by allowing personalreader response to precede the use of commentaries. We have re-spected their contexts by empowering their larger worlds to have va-lidity in relation to the ancient texts and the worlds of our commenta-tors. Instead of pushing away our young people from the text of theirculture, we bring them into the fold.

Preserving a Jewish literate future requires flexibility regardingthe traditional canon, modern pedagogy, and an embrace of our multi-cultural, female empowered, popular culture-based world. The incli-nation to guard the past is “not insidious, not lazy, not turf protec-tors, just folks believing that what they have always had is what isgood”(Weiss and Cutter 1998, p. 95). It is, however, a mistake to doso at the expense of creating literate Jews who know themselves, theirculture and their worlds.

Laila Lipetz, M.Ed., is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum Studies atOntario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. She hasbeen an educator in elementary and high schools for twenty years. E-mail:lailalipetz@hotmail.com

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