Teachers and (their and our) Errors

Dear beloved fellow members of Harvard’s Jewish community,

I hope my message finds you, and those you love, well.

I want to open with appreciation for Amelia Heller ‘27, Sarah Silverman ‘28, and Moriah Lit, our director of student life. The three of them have coordinated a packed Visitas schedule for prospective students this weekend. When people ask what it’s like to be Jewish at Harvard, alongside all the other images you’ve seen, think of the calendar that’s linked above: a cappella concerts, challah braiding, ice cream, gift bags, and more – all created by and for Jewish students who care enough to put their time and talents to work building Jewish life that’s as fun and compelling as anything else on offer at Harvard.

I was raised, as I think most of us were, to conceive of learning as an act undertaken by an individual, who may or may not be aided by a teacher. One can learn from a book, observation of nature, reflection, dialogue, and yes – instruction from a learned mentor.

Our Rabbis of blessed memory saw things differently. A child’s obligation to study Torah (Bavli Kiddushin 34a) is derivative of his parent’s obligation “to teach [these words] diligently to your children” (Deut 6:7 and 11:19). In other words, it is not clear in Judaism that there is such a thing as ‘learning’ divorced from ‘teaching’ – and if there is, it is an edge case. I’ve often thought about what it would look like to take, as our paradigm of intellectual work, not Newton reflecting on a falling apple or Darwin in the Galapagos; but children listening to their parents read them books, or asking them why glue is sticky in the midst of a crafting project, or whether they will still be able to talk to one another after the parent passes on from this life.

A story in this week’s parasha, Shmini, becomes the locus of our tradition’s formulation of what it means to learn, by way of articulating what it means to be a student. The background is the aftermath of the sudden, tragic death of two of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, during the inauguration of the Tabernacle. As Aaron and his remaining two sons are grieving, Moses instructs them to eat from one of the day’s sacrifices, and Aaron points out that Moses has erred in his interpretation of the law: Aaron’s obligation as a father, to mourn, takes precedence over his duty, as a priest, to eat of the sacrifices. Moses recognizes that Aaron, not he, was correct, and the narrative continues.

But for us, Moses and Aaron’s intellectual and spiritual descendants, this story is only the beginning. What does it mean to recognize that even Moses, the greatest student of Torah who will ever walk the face of this earth, who learned the Torah directly from the mouth of the Almighty, got something wrong? And what does it mean that Aaron, who had learned the Torah from Moses, was in the right to challenge his teacher? We have here both a ceiling on what can and should be expected of our teachers – imperfection is by no means disqualifying – and a demand that students approach what they are taught critically, in the best sense of that word.

No one sensed this more clearly than Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner (1856–1924), a fiercely independent Hungarian Orthodox rabbi (and the only one of his cohort to endorse Zionism). Glasner, in a book whose frontispiece looks more like a Mondrian than the traditionally baroque aesthetics of Jewish books, broke with standard Rabbinic practice of deference to his predecessors. Reflecting on the significance of the anti-authoritarian elements of his hermeneutics and epistemology, he advised his readers to apply this same critical lens to his ideas (introduction to Commentary on Hullin):

Dear reader: don’t suspect that I imagine I am correct every time I challenge my predecessors of blessed memory. Such arrogance would be the height of stupidity, especially since it completely contradicts my method. I have been bold enough to challenge earlier figures based on the principle that every person errs, even the greatest of the great – for Moses himself erred in judging the status of Aaron’s goat, and Aaron corrected him. So there is no person in the world who does not sometimes miss the mark, and it is no disgrace to anyone to make a mistake, as long as she does so only rarely. I have relied on this in criticizing and challenging, according to my thoughts and understanding.

I don’t want my words to be accepted, even after their publication or after my soul is gathered up by God. Just the opposite – readers should check what I’ve said as best they can, and they will certainly find many places where my conclusions are wrong. Every person is biased towards her own words and ideas, and I too am unable to escape the net of error spread before every person. This is the way of Torah: one person builds something, and a second comes after him and critiques it, separating the inedible from the edible in order to find the truth, which is more beloved than all…

Our Rabbis said (Mishna Avot ch. 5), “There are four kinds of people who sit before scholars: sponge, funnel, strainer, and sieve. And the best of them is the sieve, which allows the [coarse] flour through and retains the fine flour”… It is impossible to have wheat without chaff, and the sage herself cannot know how to clarify her own words to eliminate everything inedible: this is the work of the thinking student.

In other words – what it means to be a student in Judaism is to have a teacher, a revered and trusted one. But that reverence and that trust are not a blank check any more than a student should make herself into a blank slate. Rather, there is a trustingly critical stance: most of what we are fed by our teachers, and our parents, is good – but inevitably some of it is not, and it is our responsibility to discern, identify, and remove the ugly and the untrue from what we have inherited. And we should know that our own ideas are similarly fallible, plagued by errors that are invisible to us. Our hope and dream should be to have students who care about our teachings and about us enough to identify our errors, and transmit a purer Torah to their students – even though they too will inevitably err.

It can be easy to formulate two polarities of intellectual postures: one is a deference to authority that rules out the possibility of our teachers having fallen short, and requires us to contort our minds around ideas we cannot, in good faith and with integrity, accept. The other is to reject any claim to authority based on a single error, leaving us orphans in history bereft of guides and teachers. What these ostensible opposites share is an agreement that to be a good and worthy teacher means to be inerrant – and what it would mean to be the student of such a teacher would be to imprint their words and their ideas on our minds.

But our tradition tells us that this dream is a fiction, a distortion of what it means to be a teacher, a student, and ultimately a human being. It’s my hope that our students today find this mixture in their teachers in the classroom and in the staff of Hillel – nourished and also expressing principled, true objections – and committing, because and not despite the complexity, to keep learning and to begin teaching.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jason Rubenstein
Executive Director