[Be-Ahavah U-Be-Emunah – Ekev 5772
– translated by R. Blumberg]
As is
well-known, Professor Nechama Lebowitz left her stamp on the study of Tanach,
not just amongst adults, but also, through her methodological approach, amongst
students of Israeli schools. She worked hard to make this study meaningful and
to engrave it deeply in the students’ memories.
So what
would she say about the new approaches to the study of Tanach being advanced?
Actually, there’s no need to guess, because the issue came up when she was yet alive.
It is recounted in Chevata Deutch’s book “Nechama”. There, in Chapter 15,
Chevata tells the story of how some twenty years ago, a Rabbi, one of her own
teachers, presented himself for the position of national superintendent of
Tanach Studies, in order to foment a revolution in the way it was taught. What
he had in mind was an interdisciplinary approach. He thought a new –Land-of-Israel-school-of-thought
should be created that would not fear the new Tanach research, but would use it
to expand the field of study. He argued against Nechama Lebowitz, whose whole
aim was simply to transmit knowledge and understanding. In his method, the
Rabbi argued, everything begins with love.
Availing ourselves of Biblical realism answers this “love” by connecting
the student to the Torah, and saying to
him, “The Torah is relevant in the here and now.”
Obviously,
Nechama Lebowitz also sought to endear Torah learning to the student, but the
question was how to do it. She made light of using Biblical realism, and viewed
it as cheap exhibitionism. To her, it seemed foreign and petty.
She
greatly loved, for example, to teach Tehilim Chapter 23, “Hashem is my
shepherd, I shall not want.” To the argument that you can not understand the
chapter without understanding shepherding concepts, she responded with ridicule,
explaining that the Torah transcends time and is universal, and it should not
be lowered down to the earth.
Multi-disciplinary
study includes geography, archaeology, grammar and history, and not just commentaries
as a “crutch”, in that Rabbi’s words.
Lebowitz, by contrast, sought to distance herself from all this. She was quite familiar
with those approaches - after all, she had studied in Germany at the
Universities of Heidelberg, Marburg and Berlin, and at the Advanced Beit
Midrash for Jewish Studies at Berlin, which greatly appreciated these fields.
And she was awarded a PhD from the University of Marburg. She was an expert in
the school of Biblical Criticism! Yet in contrast to those who believe that one
must be familiar with Biblical Criticism in order to confront it, she
determined that the best approach is to ignore it by staying close to the
traditional commentaries. She held that one must learn “the opus itself, not
the stages of its coming into being, not the factors that influence its creation
and not the story and the content out of which it sprouted, but the object
itself. Likewise, it mustn’t be studied as a document attesting to things
outside of itself, regarding the moment of its creation in the religious,
political or economic sphere. In short, Bible mustn’t be studied as an entity
that reflects a period, but as one speaking on its own behalf.”
She writes,
for example, about the beginning of Parashat Masa’ei: “Before us we have about
forty verses consisting of nothing but the names of places. This dry list is certainly of great interest
to scholars of antiquities and geographers who toil to identify names, but what
does it have to do with the Torah, which, as the Divine poet wrote in Tehilim (19:8-9)
is “enlightening”, “brings one joy”, and “restore’s one’s sanity”? After all,
it was that way, and not as grist for archaeological, historical and
geographical stories that its true students of every generation viewed it,
always searching for what was promised to us in its regard, ‘For I give you good
instruction” (Mishlei 4:2). And what is the good instruction hidden in this
list of names? And as though the Torah already wished to warn us that we
mustn’t make light of such a list of names, which for the person seeing with
human eyes seems devoid of content, it therefore, precisely here, prefaced the
list with the words: ‘Moshe recorded the starting points of their various
marches as directed by Hashem’ (Bemidbar 33:2).”
The rule
to be learned is this: The Torah constitutes good instruction. It restores
one’s sanity. It is enlightening. It sets out to teach us moral lessons!
Therefore,
the program that was being presented to the schools, and that was set to replace,
partially, the previous approach, made Nechama Lebowitz shudder. Whoever tried to
convince her otherwise could not persuade her in the slightest degree.
Obviously,
we mustn’t accuse her of arrogance because she steadfastly held on to her
approach. Everyone knows that besides her having been a professor, she also
lectured to the masses, was full of humility, and was known for her simple way
of life. Her students called her “Nechama”, and she preferred the title of
“teacher” to that of “professor”. “Teacher” is what appears on her tombstone.
Here is an
example of her work: There is a well-known question: After Yosef rose to greatness,
why didn’t he send off in search of his father? To this a new interpretation
was offered: Yosef thought that his father had accepted the brothers’ argument
and had rejected him the way Avraham had rejected Yishmael and Yitzchak had
rejected Esav.
Yet
Nechama Lebowitz responded to this interpretation, saying: It could not be that
Yosef would suspect his father of such! It could not be that Yaakov would stop
loving Yosef!
Another
example: A theory arose according to which the sin for which King Shaul lost his
kingdom was not his taking spoils from Amalek and sparing Agag – the reasons mentioned
by the Prophet Shmuel in his rebuke of Shaul to explain his severe punishment –
but rather his wiping out of only part of Amalek rather than all of it.
Nechama
Lebowitz asked: If so, why didn’t Shmuel point this out to him? The response
offered was that Shmuel did not know…
For
Lebowitz, reading the Tanach without the commentaries constituted conceit, even
arrogance.
Indeed,
above all else, Nechama Lebowitz was a great educator. She therefore “ascribed
little importance to the question of whether the student knows the source of
the educational truth he has absorbed from the sources – Scripture itself or
our Sages’ commentaries. She had a wealth of stories, at the center of each of
which stood a simple, unlearned person, who had absorbed a moral/educational
idea from our Rabbinical commentaries and had accidentally ascribed that idea
to Scripture itself. For example, a mother castigated her son for mistreating a
cat, and she quoted to him what was ‘written in the Torah’ about Moshe saving
the young goat. In another case, a soldier who had fought in Sinai related how
he and his comrades fell under heavy fire. Suddenly one of them was wounded,
and the medic endangered himself and crawled, under fire, to administer
first-aid. ‘Surely he got this from Avraham,
whom the Torah says jumped into a fiery furnace,’ explained the soldier.
Nechama quoted him excitedly, saying, ‘What does it matter where he learned his
self-sacrifice from? So what if people get confused, as long as they take away values
and models to apply throughout their lives.”
Simply
put, she did not teach in an academic manner. Her approach, rather, was based on
faith, education, Rabbinic commentaries and tradition.
