Teaching literature in an Orthodox Jewish school for girls as an Orthodox Jewish woman comes with a number of challenges. Almost daily, I must convince students that a person’s word is worthy of analysis, in addition to God’s. My students are committed to the Bible as absolute truth, leaving little regard for anything finite. I also must encourage students to examine antiheroes with a sympathetic lens, even when they have transgressed a commandment. My students come to see that, as we strive towards perfecting ourselves, we tend to adopt harsh attitudes toward even unavoidable mistakes.
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What drew me to literature long before I was drawn to teaching was the magical wisdom contained on a page. Along with beautiful diction and plays on words, I was given a person, fictitious in essence but alive on the page, and with this person came imaginary conflicts meant to mirror my own. Whether it was Anne of Green Gables or Little Women or Caddie Woodlawn, I loved the texture of these stories. I loved how the protagonist could both charm and frustrate me and how, ultimately, the mistakes she made formed her as a person.
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My students ask me why we bother reading and studying the mere workings of a fevered imagination. I think back to the biblical tale of Nathan the Prophet and his disquieting task of reprimanding King David for his affair with Bathsheba. The text of the story indicates that King David spots Bathsheba, a married woman, and becomes involved with her. He sends her husband to the frontline in battle to ensure his elimination. Rather than approach David with a lecture and wagging finger, Nathan wisely spins a fictitious tale of an errant shepherd who takes what is not his. David freely casts judgment on this man. Upon hearing that he is the shepherd in the story, David’s instant remorse serves not only as a lesson on repentance, but an indication of how much easier it is to take criticism when it is in the guise of a story.
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Fiction entices me not because it excuses away our sins, but because it humanizes and universalizes them. We can then adopt a kinder attitude toward each other and a more critical attitude toward ourselves. As a child I saw some of my own antics and attitudes reflected in Jo March’s stubborn pride, Anne Shirley’s quick temper, and Elizabeth Bennett’s critical gaze. It was so much easier to see the circumstances, the losses, and the flaws in someone else, only then to realize why they resonated with me as much as they did.
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It was this connection that drew me to literature. As an English major at Stern College, a strictly Orthodox Jewish institution, I saw how the classroom became an excellent space for this process of shared, public self-reflection. My fellow classmates and I grappled with the choices the protagonists made, juxtaposed with Jewish law. We considered Lady Audley of Lady Audley’s Secret. She is a woman whose husband left her after insisting that he would not return until he had a fortune worthy of her. Years pass, the husband is presumed dead, and Lady Audley grows tired of waiting. She flees to a new town, pretending to be someone else and weds a wealthy man who is charmed by her delicate, feminine ways. Soon enough, Lady Audley’s original husband returns, and our heroine stands to be outed as a scheming and despicable harlot.
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Do we sympathize with Lady Audley? Do we judge her harshly? The conversation took a distinct edge when we held this book against the backdrop of Jewish law, whereby a presumed death is not enough to eradicate a marriage. This law — that can bind a woman to a missing husband for years — can seem unfair, misogynistic, and even cruel. But in reading this novel, we discussed the other side of this criticized law. We considered the binding quality of marriage and the depth of the commitment two people make to each other. Suddenly a law that seemed to be rigid and even arcane could be perceived as a reinforcement of the true intent in marriage: a promise that must only be made with the most serious of intentions.
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Armed with the inspiration I found in fictional texts, I chose to teach literature in the very high school I attended as a student, where English was taught in a more perfunctory fashion. We started our day with religious texts and only then turned to our secular studies. If not for Regents Exams, we may have skipped it altogether. Teaching literature was a daunting task, but bringing relevancy to a secular classroom excited me.
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The challenge was, and continues to be, harder than I ever imagined. As someone who always felt drawn to literature because of its embracing of the human experience, I was taken aback by my students’ responses to the books we read. They sat as judge and jury as we discussed the failings of our characters, and it became my job to defend them and their actions, upsetting a delicate balance that lay between my students’ religious, moral standards and the premise of our novels. People make mistakes and can still be heroes.
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I started the year off with The Scarlet Letter. September coincides with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a time when we are meant to be searching within ourselves, confronting and ultimately uprooting our own wrongdoings. Atonement is a theme that runs throughout the novel. The heroine is scorned for having committed adultery, and her lover, the minister of the town, suffers internally because only the heroine and God know his sin. What a good time, I thought, to ask my students to cast aside their own preconceived notions of sinners being beyond forgiveness and to gain strength from Hester Prynne. Here is a woman who suffered and grew by the hand of her own mistakes. I wanted them to see how a person can still be a heroine, despite having erred. In fact, maybe she is more heroic for having taken responsibility and learned from her mistakes. And to think that a man of God could sin in a most basic and inexcusable way could remind us of how frail even the holiest people are.
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My students warmed to the idea of a fallen woman emerging heroic, but a sinning minister disturbed them. Ultimately, finding sympathy for Hester proved difficult for them. I implored them to take a step away from their religious notions of right and wrong and their firm understanding of absolute wrongs in a murky world. After all, Hawthorne took great pains to create a story with dimension, where a black and white sin could, in fact, be seen with a gray lens. But this felt threatening to them; they worried about shifting their paradigm in a direction that undermined their ideology.
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Teaching in a religious high school, perhaps even more so when religious myself, means there is much more personal baggage brought to the discussion for me and my students. There are so few certainties in life, and all the more so amid an ever changing backdrop of right and wrong in our broader world. Laws of marriage shift and change, the standard of what is appropriate to wear, say, and publish flies in the face of the sensibilities that are embedded within our communities. And so the religious standards take on a dire importance for these young women, leaving the ambiguous world of literature cast in a suspicious light.
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How does a teacher bridge the gap between religiously instituted presuppositions and the very essence of literature? Our preconceptions tell us adultery is never acceptable and stealing is always wrong. Literature asks us to re-examine life from a less certain place. My job became much more than preparation for exams and relaying information; it became about aligning texts with our own lives so that my students’ worldview and religious perspective could be enhanced.
I looked to Frankenstein, replete with Biblical parallels, to draw my students into deeper discussion. We analyzed how even a murderer has a perspective and is perhaps worthy of our sympathy. We read The Crucible and discussed the redemptive qualities of an adulterer who takes ownership of his mistake. We studied Macbeth and battled free will versus predetermined destiny.
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Time and again, as I pointed out passages and scenes where a character’s struggle is emphasized, a handful of students would always respond with, “But they were wrong,” followed by, “What is the point in our finding sympathy for villains? Once we’ve done that, haven’t we undermined any standard for human behavior?”
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Their concerns are valid. As Orthodox Jews, we live in a world within a world. Outside of our zone, political correctness has led society to a place of acceptance, a willingness to tolerate and perhaps even respect many kinds of behavior. We ask, “How can everything be okay?” But being religious does not mean shutting down one’s critical thinking. It means establishing goals and standards for ourselves while endeavoring to appreciate the struggles of those around us.
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One particular student who could not be moved by the novels we read was particularly disturbed by our class discussions. She found my eagerness to defend Frankenstein’s Monster and Hester Prynne anathema to her own tightly held beliefs. Time and again we sat together, and I repeated my refrain of the need to develop empathy while maintaining one’s own standards of behavior. “You are not compromised as a person,” I argued, “because you can appreciate someone else’s journey. It is easy to build an ivory tower as a means of distancing yourself from others’ pain. But when it is your turn to fail, would you not want someone to be sympathetic to you?”
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When my students wonder why we bother with literature when they have classes dedicated to analyzing Bible, a work much more worthy of their mental energy, I remind them that their studies are a marriage. We study Jewish law, and we embrace Jewish values. Then we enter the world of literature, which serves as a practical exam of the values we so unquestioningly take on. How do we view Jewish ideas in light of behavior of the characters in The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman? What kind of people can we become if we subscribe our lives to a high moral standard but empower ourselves to allow for human frailty? What kind of people are we if we cannot?
God Himself is the ultimate Judge, we are taught, not we. And even He can look kindly on those who sin. Are we not able to do the same? Juggling those two sides of ourselves — that of aspiring for purity and perfection, and that of our inevitable failures — are the very basic components of what it means to be alive and to grow. We are human because we fail, because we can improve, because we can learn from each other and withhold judgment while staying true to ourselves. This dance is a challenging one, but the alternative — that of turning a blind or judging eye to others’ pain and errors — means hardening ourselves. It means allowing our religion to be an isolating armor rather than an opportunity to search, think, and develop. The English classroom, specifically because it is not a religious one by nature, has turned out to be the best arena for my students to flex these thinking muscles and, hopefully, emerge as more complex and sophisticated religious followers and leaders because of it.
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