The Second Conversation: Interpretive Authority in the Bible Classroom (Mandel-Brandeis Series in Jewish Education) 1684581893, 9781684581894

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. My Classroom | The School, The Students, The Subject Matter, The Teacher, and the Research Agenda
2. Creating a Classroom of Interpreters
3. Stepping into My Students’ Scriptural Literacy Practices
4. The First Conversation | Interpretive Rules in the Classroom
5. The Second Conversation | Discussing Interpretive Rules in the Classroom
Conclusion | The Stakes of Knowing How to Have the Second Conversation
Methodological Appendixes
Appendix 1: Coding the Culminating Whole-Class Discussion Transcripts
Appendix 2: Barry Holtz, Orientations, and JTS Standards and Benchmarks
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Second Conversation

The Mandel-​­Bran­d eis Series in Jewish Education Sharon Feiman-​­Nemser, Jonathan Krasner, and Jon A. Levisohn, Editors The Mandel-​­Bran­deis Series in Jewish Education, established by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education, publishes scholarly monographs and edited volumes of compelling research on Jewish educational settings and processes. The series is made possible through the Mandel Foundation. For a complete list of books that are available in the series, visit https://brandeisuniversitypress.com/series/jewish-​­education/. Ziva R. Hassenfeld, The Second Conversation: Interpretive Authority in the Bible Classroom Joseph Reimer, Making Shabbat: Celebrating and Learning at American Jewish Summer Camps Alex Pomson and Jack Wertheimer, Inside Jewish Day Schools: Leadership, Learning, and Community

The Second Conversation Interpretive Authority in the Bible Classroom

Zi va R . H a s s e nfe l d

Bran­d eis University Press Waltham, Massachusetts

Bran­deis University Press © 2024 by Ziva R. Hassenfeld All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Richard Hendel Typeset in Utopia by Passumpsic Publishing For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Bran­deis University Press, 415 South Street, Waltham MA 02453, or visit brandeisuniversitypress.com Library of Congress Cataloging-​­in-​­publishing Data names: Hassenfeld, Ziva R., author. title: The second conversation : interpretive authority in the Bible classroom / Ziva R. Hassenfeld. description: Waltham, Massachusetts : Bran­deis University Press, [2024]  | ​ Series: The Mandel-​­Bran­deis series in Jewish education  |  ​Includes bibliographical references and index.  | ​Contents: My classroom: The school, the students, the subject matter, the teacher, and the research agenda—Creating a classroom of interpreters​— Stepping into my students’ scriptural literacy practices​— The first conversation​— Interpretive rules in the classroom​— The second conversation​— Discussing interpretive rules in the classroom​— Conclusion: The stakes of knowing how to have the second conversation.  | ​Summary: “An appreciation of the importance of shared literacy practice in a classroom and responsibility of a teacher to induct students into the particular interpretive rules. The author makes the claim that the ‘first’ and ‘second’ conversations also offer an answer to a pressing question in literacy studies and educational theory”​— Provided by publisher. identifiers: lccn 2023036786 (print)  | ​lccn 2023036787 (ebook)  | ​ isbn 9781684581894 (paperback) | ​ i sbn 9781684581887 (cloth)  | ​ isbn 9781684581900 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: Bible. Old Testament​— Criticism, interpretation, etc., Jewish.  | ​ Bible. Old Testament​— Study and teaching. classification: lcc bs1186 .h37 2024 (print)  | ​lcc bs1186 (ebook)  |  ​d dc 221.6​— dc23/eng/20231017 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036786 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036787 5 4 3 2 1

For Jonah​— my forever chevruta.

‫זאת הפעם עצם מעצמי ובשר מבשרי‬ Genesis 2:23

Contents Acknowledgments / ix Introduction / 1 1. My Classroom The School, the Students, the Subject Matter, the Teacher, and the Research Agenda / 16 2. Creating a Classroom of Interpreters / 31 3. Stepping into My Students’ Scriptural Literacy Practices / 52 4. The First Conversation Interpretive Rules in the Classroom / 71 5. The Second Conversation Discussing Interpretive Rules in the Classroom / 100 Conclusion The Stakes of Knowing How to Have the Second Conversation / 121 Methodological Appendixes Appendix 1 Coding the Culminating Whole-​­Class Discussion Transcripts / 131 Appendix 2 Barry Holtz, Orientations, and JTS Standards and Benchmarks / 134 Bibliography / 143 Index / 155

Acknowledgments All thought and language is a conversation with others. My impossible task here is to thank the others who have been in conversation with my words and thoughts in this book. I want to start by thanking my teacher colleagues for trusting me and embracing me in joining their school communities. Thank you to Dr. Susie Tanchel for mentoring me from my first day as a teacher and for pulling me back into the classroom after I completed my doctorate. Thank you to my mentors and advisors at Stanford University: Ari Y. Kelman, Claude Goldenberg, and Maren Aukerman. Without Ari, I would have never finished my doctorate. His kindness, patience, and deep respect for students inspires me daily. Without Claude, I would never have felt I belonged in literacy. Claude took me in as a student, odd as my research interests were, and made me feel like I was part of the team. Maren’s effort to engage seriously with children’s ways of thinking is countercultural and profoundly right. My whole research agenda began from the questions she helped me ask. Thank you as well to my student research assistant, Liat Fischer, who became a partner in my teaching and research during her years at Bran­ deis. And most significantly, thank you to my seventh-​­grade students (now in college!), who taught me so much about interpretation and texts through their openness and persistent inquisitiveness. Several individuals provided critical feedback on drafts of chapters, helping me find my voice for this book. These include my colleagues in our Bran­deis writing group: Sharon Feiman-​­Nemser, Jonathan Krasner, Jon Levisohn, Danielle Igra, and Leah Gordon. Thank you to my faculty mentors at Bran­deis, Ulka Anjaria and Carina Ray, for enabling and encouraging me to run a book-​­manuscript workshop. The feedback I received from Cynthia Lewis, Lara Handsfield, and Mary Juzwik moved this book from a quirky account of my own teaching journey to a coherent, timely, and organized scholarly book for the field of literacy research. I am forever grateful to them for making the time and agreeing — ix —

Acknowledgments

to the workshop. Thank you to my colleagues in NEJS at Bran­deis for believing in Jewish education. Thank you to Madadh Richey, Yuval Evri, Eugene Sheppard, and especially Jonathan Sarna, who gave me the best advice I ever received: “Start writing your first book today; it takes a while.” I am grateful to my home at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Bran­deis University; their support has been critical to this research every step of the way. I truly appreciate Aileen Cahill for the meticulous work she put into helping this book cross the finish line. Finally, I am beyond grateful to my family: to my parents, Joseph and Gail, and my in-​­laws, Joni and Danny. To my mother, especially: on top of grandparenting, she has been my most careful and helpful reader at every stage of this book. To my husband, Jonah: I can’t count the number of hours you sat with me reading, writing, reworking, thinking, and encouraging me. It is no wonder that with you came my three greatest gifts in this world, Amal, Tehila, and Moshe. I thank our children for reminding me of the better world this book seeks to help build​— starting with classrooms that honor and engage children’s minds at their most formative stage.

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The Second Conversation

Introduction It was a Tuesday afternoon, and I had sixteen twelve- and thirteen-​­year-​ ­olds on the edge of their seats, holding the printed text of Genesis 2 in their hands. The temperature in the room was already high; to borrow Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor, the emotional elephants were out and stampeding (2012). The fate of our discussion had eclipsed the usual humdrum, and we were fully in our own world, fighting for interpretive clarity. Did the Hebrew Bible teach that men and women were equal or that men were superior to women? Specifically, did Genesis 2 tell a tale of a divine surgery performed on the first man to turn his rib into a woman or the dividing of a single androgynous being? It was as if my students’ entire Jewish educational lives were on trial. Was this sacred text that they had been asked to study and revere for years right or wrong​— good or bad? I asked the seventh-​­grade students in my Hebrew Bible class to always focus their interpretive analysis on the words in the text in front of them. This was how we made meaning in my classroom; this is how they were being asked to decide what Genesis 2 means and what values it reflects about women and gender equality. And then Gabe spoke up: “I want to address something pretty big. We’ve all been functioning in this class under the idea, for argument’s sake, that the Torah [Hebrew Bible] was created by God. But if we take a different idea that other people have had, that the Torah was created by multiple writers over thousands of years, . . . I think it could have been written with the intent to have women be inferior to men, like that’s the point of the story. It’s a creation story, but we have to think about who this was written by and the time it was written.” Gabe’s remark shifted the entire focus of our classroom conversation (at least for a while). We had been talking about the words on the page, and now he suggested we talk about something different: the imagined authors of the biblical text. —1—

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What I have learned in the years since this classroom moment is that Gabe’s comment revealed for me, the teacher, a core dilemma of practice. Gabe challenged the way we were reading the biblical text and offered an alternative way to read it. His comment demonstrated that he understood the way our class was reading and interpreting the biblical text together​— “We’ve all been functioning in this class under the idea, for argument’s sake, that the Torah was created by God”​— and that he felt comfortable challenging it. Gabe knew how to interpret the biblical text within the boundaries that I, the teacher, had set for the class. He also knew how to contrast the way we were reading the text in class​ —that is, within our classroom interpretive community​— with the rules that guided other interpretive communities he occupied or knew about. This was significant. My dilemma was not a theological dilemma​— it was a pedagogical one. Gabe invoked background knowledge that I had not provided to my other students. And yet, he was genuinely and earnestly expressing a way of reading that was important to him. How was I to respond?

During the 2017–18 school year, I joined the faculty of a Jewish day school as the seventh-​­grade Hebrew Bible teacher. I was pursuing a teacher research project generously funded by the Sylvia and Moshe Ettenberg Research Grant in Jewish Education and completing my postdoctoral fellowship at Bran­deis University. I taught for fifty-​­five minutes, four days a week, for an entire academic year. Using research memos, teacher journals, transcriptions of recorded classes, and student work, I documented my teaching journey with a focus on the dilemmas of practice that came up for me. While there has been important research in the teaching and learning of the Hebrew Bible in Jewish day schools, this book is the first to examine classroom pedagogy from the teacher perspective. Communities rely on their education systems to induct students into their literacy practices. One might think that Bible classrooms in religious schools have a clear set of literacy practices they seek to induct students into, but in Jewish education that is not the case. Jewish schools in the US find themselves trying to prepare students for lives both as members of various Jewish communities and as Americans. This tension makes Hebrew Bible classrooms in American Jewish schools a par—2—

Introduction

ticularly interesting case to study. How do teachers in these classrooms negotiate among the literacy practices they want to teach, the practices they are expected to teach, and the ways in which their students want to read? This book explores these questions through the lens of my own teacher research in one Hebrew Bible classroom over the course of one school year. It sheds light on how a literacy practice and interpretive community can be cultivated in a classroom, the broader Jewish and secular literacy practices that formed the backdrop of my students’ reading, and the purposes and goals of contemporary Jewish education. In the following pages, I will locate the argument of this book in four separate bodies of research: philosophy of language, Jewish scriptural literacy practices, Hebrew Bible education, and situated learning.

Philosophy of Language There is a long tradition in philosophy of language and sociolinguistics that sees all linguistic interactions as unfolding as if according to rules. Erving Goffman (1981) argues that our days are filled with linguistic encounters that unfold as if according to rules that each party knows. When one party doesn’t know the rules, awkwardness ensues. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1998) calls these rituals “language games” and argues that any use of language can be seen as a game. In the analogy of a board game, one might see the words as pieces and the way a speaker uses them as following implicit, unspoken rules for how to play that game. In Goffman’s famous example, if someone asks, “Do you have the time?” a listener knows to respond, “Sure. It’s five o’clock,” rather than saying, “Sure,” and nothing more. A simple “yes,” plainly answering the question, reveals that the listener doesn’t know the rules of that particular language game (1981, 16). Another example is in the ritualized greetings we hear every day. When you see a colleague at work and ask, “How was your weekend?” you’re not looking for a detailed account of the ups and downs of your colleague’s past few days. Instead, the question plays a role in creating a quick connection and a reorientation to the work week. A simple “Fine, thanks. How was yours?” generally suffices. These rituals can become quite complicated. One of the standard language-​­based rituals that shows up in education is the famous initiation-​­response-​­evaluation (IRE) sequence (Mehan 1982). A teacher asks a question to which she knows the answer. In reading a picture book —3—

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about a duck, the teacher might ask, “Where is the duck on this page?” The teacher knows the answer, and the students know she knows the answer. A student raises his hand, offers the right answer, and the teacher responds with an evaluation of the answer, such as “Great job!” John L. Austin (1975) points out that everyone understands that when actors make a statement on stage, they are making that statement in character, and, therefore, Macduff can announce his intention to kill Macbeth without audience members calling the police. In other words, the audience understands how the language game of “theater” is played. This is a simple example, but the more one looks, the more language games one finds. In fact, almost every use of language follows the rules of a language game. Think about some of the following uses of language: getting directions, going grocery shopping, pumping gas, dropping kids off at school, seeing an old friend for the first time in years, and so on. Each of these encounters will have its own ritualized uses of language analogous to the ways in which rule-​­based games unfold. Though the word rule might seem to suggest a rigid consistency, I believe that it is useful to think about interpretive games as unfolding according to rules because it highlights the degree to which interpretive discourse is highly patterned and structured. Over the course of this book, I hope the reader will come to find the analogy of rules useful in understanding what happens when students interpret texts together and, especially, those moments when rules are broken or challenged. As we move through the world, we are constantly interpreting the language we find around us. To arrive at the correct interpretation​— that is, to respond to language in the expected way​— one needs to master a host of language games and the rules by which they are played. These rules can usually be inferred from observation and rely on an interplay between the text (whether visual, auditory, or what have you) and the context (what Goffman [1974, 10] calls the “frame” in which the text appears). This is true in both oral and written language. Like any setting, classrooms can accommodate an extraordinary variety of language games. Raising one’s hand and waiting to be called on, responding to a teacher’s question, even saying, “I want to add to what Paulette was saying”​— each of these represent moves in different language games typical of the classroom. To see how these classroom language games are governed by implicit (but no less rigid) rules, one need only imagine a student that raises his foot in order to gain the floor or a —4—

Introduction

student who expresses surprise that her teacher has to ask students to remind her of basic multiplication facts. In this book, I don’t address most of the spoken and unspoken rules that govern classroom behavior and discourse. I focus instead on a very specific language game governed by its own set of rules, that is, the language game of textual interpretation in the classroom. When students and teachers read a text closely together, especially when it is written in another language, they interpret that text. They transform the words of the text into other words meant to be equivalent. The language game of textual interpretation in the classroom, like all language games, is governed by rules, in this case interpretive rules (Fish 1980; Haroutunian-​­Gordon 2009). These rules govern which interpretations are valid and which aren’t. What are readers allowed to say and do with the text, and what are they not allowed to say and do? Other writers have used slightly different phrases for what I see as basically the same idea. For example, some writers talk about “frames” (Cole 1996, 186), “orientations” (Holtz 2003, 51), “semiotic modes” (Kress 2010, 80), or “designs” (New London Group 1996, 73). Each of these phrases highlights that interpretations of texts follow patterns and that, in different settings, interpretations of the same text may play out according to different patterns. For example, does an author’s biography shed light on the meaning of a text? It depends on what interpretive game you are playing. Sometimes, we do talk about the author’s childhood experiences or birthplace. At other times, we might require that “the text speak for itself.” These are two examples of particular interpretive rules one might apply. Although literary theorists have tried to argue that one set of interpretive rules might be superior to another (for example, see Wimsatt and Beards­ley 1946), for the sake of this book, I won’t evaluate interpretive rules. Instead, I will treat them as a given in any particular textual interaction and a reflection of the communities and literacy practices we inhabit. As I describe moments when readers interpret texts, I will focus on articulating the interpretive rules being used rather than talking about what the “best” rules would be.

Jewish Scriptural Literacy Practices Communities of readers tend to use related sets of interpretive rules. These sets of rules make up the literacy practices characteristic of that —5—

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community. Literacy practices are rarely articulated explicitly or taught directly in communities (Luke 1992). Nonetheless, schools see themselves as responsible for inducting students into particular literacy practices. Of course, students don’t enter schools as blank slates; they come already well versed in various literacy practices (Heath 1983; Street 1995; Lee 2007; New London Group 1996; Smagorinsky 2001). For example, a student’s literacy practice when she enters school may be for an adult to tell her what a book is about before they begin to read it together. Or it may be for her to read to herself and ask questions of an adult. Or it may be to use the illustrations on the page to help comprehend what’s happening. Or her literacy practices might not include books at all but center around cereal boxes and comics. Even the child who reads books daily with an adult may not be familiar with the particular rules and contours of the literacy practice her teacher is using (Heath 1983). For example, a teacher may ask a student to sit quietly and listen to an entire book without interruption. You can imagine that for the child who is used to asking questions of their parents on every page, this would feel like a strange literacy practice. In recent decades, educational research has suggested that teachers need to attend to the literacy practices students bring to the classroom (Gee 2015; Gonzáles, Moll, and Amanti 2005; Kress 2010; Lee 2007; Purcell-​­Gates 2007). Because I focus my analysis on the teaching of the Hebrew Bible in Jewish schools, I want to briefly explore traditional Jewish scriptural literacy practices. Jewish studies scholars will debate the fine points of this set of literacy practices, but here I will describe it in broad strokes. In summarizing these Jewish scriptural literacy practices, I follow in the footsteps of other literacy scholars interested in religious communities (see Eakle 2007; Juzwik 2014; LeBlanc 2015; Rackley 2016; Sarroub 2002). In the Talmud​— the written record of centuries of Rabbinic discussions and debates​— the Rabbis adopted a close way of reading the Hebrew Bible. Although the rabbinic approach to interpreting texts (whether biblical or rabbinic) would evolve and change over the centuries, there are some core features of rabbinic literacy practices. The goal of the reader in the rabbinic imagination is not to figure out a single correct interpretation of the biblical text, but rather to participate in the endless and ongoing process of examining the text to discover deeper and novel layers of meaning. Jonathan Boyarin argues that “the means of appropriation of the ongoing tradition is reflective” (1993, 228). The —6—

Introduction

Jewish tradition contains multiple aphorisms designed to articulate this idea, including the famous idea from Bamidbar Rabbah 13:16 that there are “70 faces to the Torah,” and Ben Bag Bag’s statement in Pirkei Avot 5:22 that one must “turn the Torah over and over, for everything is in it.” Many editions of the Hebrew Bible position the biblical text surrounded by close to a dozen commentaries written in different times and places. This approach may strike some, especially those familiar with the biblical literalism found in some Christian evangelical communities, as a strange way to approach a religious text. Christians and others who believe the text to be the literal word of God are often committed to a single interpretation of the text (Bielo 2009; Luhrmann 2012). But this approach has never found favor in the Jewish tradition of reading the Hebrew Bible. Modern readers may find other aspects of the traditional Jewish scriptural literacy practices puzzling. For the Rabbis, every textual unit, no matter how small, could be subject to interpretation. Every aspect of the text​— even units smaller than the word or the letter, as small as the shape of the letter or the spacing in a scroll​— were worthy of interpretation (Boyarin 1993). This attention to the details of the text includes even the crenellations added to certain letters when they appear in a correctly scribed Torah scroll (see Talmud Tractate Menachot 29B). Traditional Jewish scriptural literacy practices treat the text as having an infinite depth of interpretive possibility. In my classroom, I strove to make space for students to notice the details that stood out to them and engage in this set of traditional Jewish literacy practices as active, reflective readers in Jonathan Boyarin’s sense. I wanted them to feel like they could speak to the text. This proved more challenging than I had anticipated.

Hebrew Bible Education In the modern period, Jewish communities encountered a wide range of other literacy practices and started applying these practices to the Hebrew Bible. A significant example of this is the Bible program of the Melton Research Center, developed in the 1960s. This curriculum focused on exposing students to modern academic Biblical scholarship. In the view of the Melton curriculum writers, there were two goals for Hebrew Bible education in Jewish education. First, the Hebrew Bible needed to promote character development. Second, following Jerome Bruner’s idea of the structure of a discipline (1960), they believed the —7—

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teaching of Hebrew Bible in Jewish education ought to mirror the academic structure of Bible scholarship. This included modern literary scholarship and ancient Near East historical-​­critical scholarship (Holtz 2011). Students of the Melton curriculum were meant to see the Hebrew Bible as a source of values and as an academic field. The curriculum, however, did not invite teachers to consider that these particular approaches and literacy practices were being chosen from among many possible literacy practices. Instead, the two approaches were presented as self-​­evidently correct (Holtz 2011; Zielenziger 1989). In his book Textual Knowledge, Barry Holtz builds on the reality that the Melton curriculum opened the door to a wide range of literacy practices one could use to read, interpret, and teach biblical texts. Holtz identified numerous additional literacy practices, which he called “orientations” (2003, 73), that one could apply to the Hebrew Bible. In his own words, Holtz explains, “In conceptualizing the Bible as a subject area, I tried to delineate a more expansive list of orientations that seemed relevant to teachers of this particular text” (2011, 383). Holtz offers nine orientations (see appendix 2). He named the two orientations privileged by the Melton curriculum the “contextual orientation” and the “moralistic-​­didactic orientation” (2003, 95). The “contextual orientation” entails studying the Hebrew Bible as a text composed by multiple authors in the ancient Near East. Contextual readers notice certain elements in the text (e.g., place names and their connections to ancient kingdoms) and look for answers in the history of the text, its historical and cultural milieu, and its composition and redaction. Other readers, following the “moralistic-​­didactic orientation,” look to the biblical text for moral insights, guidance, and inspiration. Holtz’s book created a vocabulary for analyzing the orientations, or literacy practices, of Hebrew Bible teachers. With Holtz’s list of orientations, Hebrew Bible teachers in Jewish education could reflect on which interpretive games they played​— that is, which literacy practices they brought to bear. Holtz allowed teachers to locate themselves in a landscape of possible approaches and literacy practices. His work generated further scholarly attempts to explore and articulate the contours of these orientations and produced efforts to extend the orientations to other areas of Jewish education (Cousens, Morrison, and Fendrick 2008; Levi­ sohn 2008) that paralleled work in English teaching (Appleman 2015). When teachers realize that they read the Hebrew Bible according to —8—

Introduction

a particular literary practice, this can help them with their teaching. It helps identify the essential questions they want their students to consider, to choose curricular materials, and to name outcome goals and evaluate students’ success accordingly. Seeing their particular orientation to reading the Hebrew Bible on a list of nine possible orientations also helps teachers understand that their way of reading is just one among many options, which might push teachers to explore new ways of reading. Even with all these important benefits, the framework of orientations has little to say about the nuts and bolts of teaching. Are Hebrew Bible teachers in Jewish education trying to get students to read like they do? How would teachers actually accomplish this? Maybe most importantly, what should the teacher do if a student doesn’t want to read according to the teacher’s orientation? The field of Hebrew Bible education has remained silent on these questions.

Situated Learning The questions I listed in the previous section apply to all text teachers, whether they’re teaching Hebrew Bible or not. All these questions are pieces of a larger question: How do you teach students to interpret texts? Appleman (2015), analogously to Holtz (2003), identifies multiple literary theories English teachers could teach their students. Appleman argues that teachers should strive to teach students multiple literary theories in the secondary English classroom and make time for students to explicitly compare and contrast them. However, I believe that for students to benefit from exposure to multiple literary theories or orientations, teachers would have to induct students into the interpretive practice of those orientations or literary theories. Teachers must teach students how to read according to the orientations or theories they encounter, not just transmit the readings these orientations or theories produce. The idea of teaching textual interpretation by doing it has its roots in situated learning (see Greeno 1997, 16, for his discussion of the term situated and situative to designate the theoretical perspective). Beginning in the 1980s, anthropologists of education started to explore how learning happens outside of formal school settings. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger studied models of apprenticeship that made it clear that “a community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge” (1991, 98). In other words, people learn by doing with others. —9—

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Indeed, learning may only exist and be activated within the activity of doing. According to Lave and Wenger, effective learning contexts share three features: legitimacy, peripherality, and participation. First, a community of practice must accept a learner as legitimate. The community must see the learner as a potential member of the community of practice. Second, a learner occupies a peripheral location on the margins of a community of practice. The learner must be able to physically observe what the community of practice does, but not be a full member. Finally, the learner must have the opportunity to participate in the community’s activities. As a central example, Lave and Wenger describe how young tailors in a particular community apprentice to more experienced tailors. The master tailor sees them as future tailors, and therefore, they are legitimate learners. They get the chance to watch the master tailor at work and experience the ebbs and flows of that practice. They are, therefore, peripheral. Finally, they are given ever more complicated pieces of tailoring work to do, and therefore they get to participate in the practice of tailoring. Lave and Wenger use their research to build a powerful critique of formal schooling in the western world. They argue that sequestering kids in school buildings cuts them off from the community of practices they are, one day, supposed to join. Instead, they learn to “do school” (Pope 2008). That is, they learn how to succeed in the environment of formal school without learning how to transfer those skills to the adult world. Situated learning suggests that text teachers should think about the ways that adults actually read and make meaning of texts in their every­ day lives. Schools should help students access the literacy practices of their own and, perhaps, other intended communities. Being inducted into these literacy practices is the best use of instructional time in school. To achieve this, however, students have to practice those literacy practices. Students who passively watch a teacher interpret texts will not be able to interpret texts outside of school in the same way; it will be “encapsulated” in the teacher’s instruction and classroom (Engeström 1991). Students who discuss a text with one another and the teacher and engage in “learning talk” (Juzwik et al. 2013) following the interpretive rules of the literacy practice will acquire the literacy practices characteristic of adult communities. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines make the case for the role of discussion and learning talk in learning (Boaler 2008; Brown — 10 —

Introduction

2006; Lampert 2001). More than two decades of research have shown that this type of teaching, with a focus on student sense-​­making and structured discussion, promotes deep understanding of texts and the capacity to engage in deliberative reasoning. Organizing the classroom around learning talk, dialogue, and discussion is “uniquely beneficial to learning in a wide range of content areas” (Sawyer 2004, 16).

Situated Learning and Jewish Education Many scholars in Jewish education have noted the centrality of debate and discussion in modern adult Jewish scriptural literacy practices (Bekerman and Rosenfeld 2011; Resnick and Resnick 2018; Shargel 2013). That is, adult Jewish reading of scripture prioritizes debate and discussion, whether following the interpretive rules of traditional Jewish scriptural literacy practices, applying modern academic literacy practices, or blending together the traditional and the modern. Yet the existing empirical research in Jewish education shows that the predominant pedagogy in Hebrew Bible classrooms in Jewish education is teacher-​ ­centered, lecture driven, and transmission oriented (Bekerman and Kopelowitz 2008; Galili-​­Schachter 2011; Katzin 2015; Lehmann 2008; Segal and Bekerman 2009). Some explain the prevalence of this mode of teaching as rooted in the “dissonance between text-​­centered instructional environments and the ‘normative’ Western classroom” (Grisha­ ver 1988, 1). That is to say, secular education prioritizes transmission of textual meaning over engaging with the activity of interpretation itself (Nystrand 1997), and so Jewish education has followed suit. According to Daniel Resnick and Lauren Resnick (2018), the decline of text study in modern Jewish educational contexts can be explained by this desire of Jewish schools and Jewish educators to model their educational settings on American classrooms: “Text study for children diminished over decades of trying to bring Jewish education into closer alignment with the formalized patterns of American education. Classroom discussion, until recently, was not an active part of American classroom practice . . . the model that dominated formal American education was an information-​ ­delivery model. The textbook reigned supreme, with an authority that could not be questioned .  .  . Jewish religious education mimicked the norms of general American education” (2018, 82–83). An increasing number of scholarly voices in Jewish education have called for a renewed focus on student interpretive activity in Jewish-​­text — 11 —

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classrooms using the reasoning of situated learning (Hassenfeld 2016; Kent 2006; Kent 2010; Kent and Cook 2012; Lehman and Kanarek 2011). And yet, while the focus on discussion, interpretive activity, and learning talk offers some pedagogical direction for teaching, it still leaves a number of questions unanswered: Does a teacher have a responsibility to introduce students to any particular orientation or literacy practice? Does this depend on the school context? The students in the room? The students’ real adult communities? The students’ aspiring adult communities? If teachers do have a responsibility to introduce students to any particular orientation or literacy practice, how do they balance this teaching mandate with keeping discussion central? What happens when students don’t read within the particular orientation or literacy practice during discussion? Most importantly, what happens when a teacher successfully introduces an orientation or literacy practice but a student pushes back? We saw this earlier in the example of my student Gabe, who wanted to interpret the Hebrew Bible in its historical context while understanding that I was asking for something different. The teaching I write about in this book and the journey I explore has learning talk, discussion, and student interpretive activity as its starting point. I came to this seventh-​­grade Torah teaching position after completing my doctorate at Stanford University. I was deeply influenced by my mentor and advisor Maren Aukerman and her work and commitment to this sort of teaching​— what she and her colleagues call dialogic instruction (Aukerman 2007; Juzwik et al. 2013; Nystrand 1997; Reznit­ skaya et al. 2001). What I didn’t fully realize was how committed I was to also teaching a particular literacy practice​— something connected to traditional Jewish scriptural literacy practices​— a commitment which, when not shared by my students, presented a tension with dialogic teaching. The delicate balance of inducting my students into a particular literacy practice while fostering a dialogic classroom centered on student interpretive activity is the focus of this book, and I hope that my own dilemmas of practice will offer practitioners and scholars important insights, if not answers. As the reader will see unfold in these pages, thinking about these matters and then putting them into practice was an iterative process. I went into this classroom firmly convinced that transmission of interpreta— 12 —

Introduction

tions and teacher interpretive authority was wrongheaded, but then I had teaching experiences that complicated my commitment to learning talk, discussion, and student interpretive activity. I tried to build a theoretical apparatus to accommodate and make sense of my teaching experiences. Sometimes I was able to change my teaching on the spot; other times, I wasn’t. I write about moments that I now wish had gone quite differently. I also write about tensions and outright contradictions in my teaching choices. In sharing an honest record of my struggles as a teacher, I hope to honor the incredible effort all teachers put into their craft. While we cannot be successful at achieving our aims all the time, reflecting on our practice and committing to a teaching landscape where teachers are encouraged to reflect on their practice can help us succeed more often.

How the Book Unfolds Chapter 1. My Classroom: The School, the Students, the Subject Matter, the Teacher, and the Research Agenda This chapter introduces the context and setting of my research. I discuss the rise of full-​­time Jewish day schools in North America, the structure of the school day in Jewish day schools, and the unique characteristics of the particular Jewish day school I taught in. I introduce the focal students featured in this book, and I reflect on my own positionality as teacher, researcher, and author as I try to situate my work in the extant categories of research, practice, and the existing bridges between them. Chapter 2. Creating a Classroom of Interpreters Through a close read of my seventh-​­grade class’s first culminating whole-​ ­class text discussion, I consider the importance of dialogue in teaching and learning. I introduce dialogic instruction, a pedagogy I was trained in during my doctoral work and hoped to implement in my classroom. At the heart of this chapter is an exploration of my real-​­time struggle in trying to adopt these pedagogical practices in my classroom. I take the reader inside the early months of my seventh-​­grade classroom, when it became clear to me that I did not want to just hand the interpretive baton over to my students. I experienced a need to create interpretive rules to guide our collective interpretive activity. That is, I began to experience the lived realities of the classroom again and saw the blind spots of dialogic instruction. — 13 —

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Chapter 3. Stepping into My Students’ Scriptural Literacy Practices In chapter 3, I explore how I tried to understand the interpretive rules and assumptions my students brought to my classroom and the literacy practices they represented. I look at how and why I identified the interpretive rules any given student comment operated within, especially when the comment seemed plainly “wrong” or misguided. In my teaching, I wanted to identify my students’ interpretive rules and scriptural literacy practices for two reasons: first, because noticing the interpretive rules in which a student comment operated helped me understand my students and, second, because noticing the interpretive rules in which a student comment operated helped me understand and articulate my own interpretive rules for this classroom and this group of students. This chapter is the journey I took from striving to exclusively use dialogic instruction and negating all of my interpretive authority as the teacher to being willing to notice and name interpretive rules I wanted for our classroom interpretive community and the particular literacy practice they represented. Chapter 4. The First Conversation: Interpretive Rules in the Classroom Chapter 4 looks at the interpretive rules I became comfortable insisting on in my classroom. It theorizes these rules from a variety of perspectives, including traditional Jewish scriptural literacy practices, as well as examining the process of building a classroom community of belonging and taking into account the important detail that this was a multi­lingual classroom where the text students were reading was not in English. The chapter then reflects on the possible place for interpretive rules in any dialogic classroom, before I switch gears from the theoretical to the practical and explain how I reinforced these rules in my classroom. I describe the facilitation and teaching moves I used. I also show what it looked like once my students were able to engage in the first conversation, an interpretive discussion about a passage of biblical text informed by our classroom’s interpretive rules and literacy practice. Chapter 5. The Second Conversation: Discussing Interpretive Rules in the Classroom Wherever there is a first conversation, there will be a second conversation. Chapter 5 looks at how the second conversation, that is, those mo— 14 —

Introduction

ments where my students pushed back against the interpretive rules of our classroom (explicitly navigating their multiple literacy practices), unfolded in my classroom. Students wanted to think about and sometimes use their alternative ways of reading and literacy practices. This was an impulse to embrace, and a moment to frame, the second conversation. Sometimes I did this, and other times I missed the opportunity. The second conversation allows the classroom discussion to shift from the meaning of the text within a literacy practice to a discussion of the multiple literacy practices we could bring to the text. This chapter explores the second conversation as it happened in my classroom as well as how I wish it had happened.

Conclusion: The Stakes of Knowing How to Have the Second Conversation In the concluding chapter, I review where my teaching journey took me, from a desire for total abdication of teacher interpretive authority to an appreciation of the importance of having a shared literacy practice in a classroom and the responsibility of a teacher to induct students into particular interpretive rules. I reflect on the implications of this realization for Jewish education specifically and make the claim that the first and second conversations also offer an answer to a pressing question in literacy studies and educational theory.

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1 My Classroom The School, the Students, the Subject Matter, the Teacher, and the Research Agenda

The Hebrew Bible classroom in a Jewish day school takes a traditionally out-​­of-​­school literacy practice, scriptural literacy, and places it back in the classroom. In Jewish education, we often forget this feature of Jewish day schools. It requires us to consider the theoretical significance of bringing religious literacy into the structure of American schooling (Bekerman and Rosenfeld 2011). Does it change the teaching of the Hebrew Bible? Or does the teaching of Hebrew Bible within the school change the structure of schooling (at least for Jewish day schools)? Put differently, does the Hebrew Bible classroom become a space in which a traditionally out-​­of-​­school literacy practice gets elevated attention? Or does the Hebrew Bible classroom reproduce a dynamic of school as an agent of authoritative transmission and cultural reproduction mapped onto a Jewish context? Could it be both? These are questions that animated my research and teaching. Before I dive into my teaching, though, it’s important to situate the work I did in its context, both where I was working and with whom.

The School The Jewish day school at which I taught is part of a universe of Jewish day schools in North America. The growth of these schools was called “one of the most remarkable social facts of North American Jewish life” (Pomson 2008, 306). Enrollment in American Jewish day schools reached — 16 —

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292,172 students by 2019, a 58.5 percent increase between the 1998–1999 and 2018–2019 school years (Besser 2020). Some tell the story of the growth of Jewish day schools in America in romantic terms, where the charms of parochial education are seen to have attracted the Jewish community after a long-​­running affair with public schooling (Beinart 1999). Others are less enthusiastic, arguing that the growth of Jewish day schools significantly declines following the primary grade levels due to their lack of economic stability and diversity (Shrager 2002). Research has pointed to the following reasons for the overall growth in Jewish day school enrollment: Jewish embourgeoisement; the “confluence of multiculturalism and the ‘school choice’ movement” (Pomson 2008, 308); the “decay” of public education (Pomson 2008, 311), which some scholars have reframed as fear of “desegregation” (Smith 2017, 96); and concerns about Jewish continuity (Bekerman and Kopelowitz 2008; Chazan, Chazan, and Jacobs 2017). While it is unlikely that day schools will ever become the mainstream American Jewish educational framework, they have become an important site of Jewish education in America. As in most Jewish day schools, Shalom Academy (pseudonym), the K–8 Jewish day school at which I taught, split the school day between Jewish studies and Hebrew language, on the one hand, and secular classes in language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, technology, the arts, and physical education, on the other. Some Jewish day schools have reduced the religious coursework to one- or two-​­class blocks (Wertheimer and Pomson 2022), but Shalom Academy is committed to giving equal time to Jewish studies and secular studies. Shalom Academy describes itself as “pluralistic.” It accepts all Jewish students regardless of their beliefs or denominational affiliations. In its mission it seeks to provide intentional opportunities for students to talk with each other about their different beliefs and relationships to Jewish culture. In this manner, Shalom Academy is distinct from the more common “community” Jewish day school, where diversity of Jewish practice is a reality of the demographics (all Jews are accepted into these schools regardless of practice) but not a celebrated feature of the schools. Shalom Academy, as a “pluralistic” school, sees the diversity in its school as a central asset of the curriculum and culture of the school. Shalom Academy does not have a strong commitment to any particular approach to Hebrew Bible instruction, though it does prioritize — 17 —

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Hebrew language skills in both modern Hebrew and biblical Hebrew. While I was on the faculty, some of my colleagues taught the Hebrew Bible with English as the language of instruction (as I did), some taught with modern Hebrew as the language of instruction (more so in the lower grades), and some moved back and forth. Some teachers focused on teaching students the text in its original biblical Hebrew, as I did, and others felt comfortable using an English translation as the primary text, especially those teachers trying to cover large chunks of text (a number of chapters versus a number of verses). Students and their families held diverse perspectives on the divine origin of the text as well as on the importance of being able to read the text in the original biblical Hebrew.

The Students Here I present a detailed portrait of each focal student to help readers humanize the interpreters I write about. These portraits provide a basis for understanding the complexity of the interpretations shared and co-​ ­constructed in my classroom and depicted throughout the book. My seventh-​­grade class had fifteen students. This was the entire seventh grade in this small Jewish day school. Many of these students had been together since kindergarten. The families were drawn to the school for a variety of reasons, ranging from an appreciation of the educational stance of the school to an embrace of the Jewish pluralism to the phenomenal learning support provided by the school. Besides all being Jewish and in seventh grade, the students didn’t share many other demographics. The class was predominantly white, but there were also students of color. There were slightly more males in the class than females. The students traveled from across the larger metropolitan area, some from urban areas, some from suburban areas, and some from more rural areas. A portion of the students came from wealthy backgrounds and others from working-​­class and middle-​­class homes. Some of the students considered themselves only culturally Jewish, other students considered themselves Orthodox Jews, and many of the students identified elsewhere on the spectrum, including as nondenominational, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and mesorti (traditional). My study focuses on five students. I write about these five because the particular classroom interactions that furthered my understanding of the pedagogy I wanted to pursue featured these students. Each student I taught that year contributed to our classroom interpretive com— 18 —

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munity and culture. You will hear from many of them throughout this book, though not to the same extent that you’ll hear from the students described below. Jenna Jenna was successful academically but not so powerful socially. She was a very gifted mathematician, and this was central to her identity. She didn’t like religion, which she made clear to me whenever she could. She had a best friend in the class but clashed with the other girls. She acted out and called out of turn. The other girls would sometimes laugh and sometimes roll their eyes. Jenna wasn’t an easy student to have in class; she often defiantly ignored instructions, called out off-​­topic ideas and questions (e.g., “Do we have Pizza Tuesday this week?”), or would completely shut down during class. But frequently, along with all those behaviors, she found her way into participating during whole-​­class text discussions, sometimes with a comment that was both insightful and disruptive. She didn’t care to chat with me before class, or casually in the halls, but once in a while, in treasured moments, she would approach me after class to express something she needed in her learning (e.g., for me to let her call out more or to partner with her friend). I saw Jenna most come to life in a learning project about mikvaot (ritual baths) in Judaism. She took the job of presenting the class’s mikvah design through a Minecraft model. She worked with deep concentration. The result was an amazing project she presented with her classmates to a panel of teachers. Jenna could be wiry and thorny, but she was also sincere and authentic. Gabe Gabe was powerful academically and was in his own lane socially. He was brilliant and he had a lot to say. He was also a bit awkward and certainly did not have the “too cool for school” affect that some of his male peers/classmates had. When I first met him, I thought he might position himself in my class as an intellectual superior, but he did not. He was warm and kind and open. He engaged earnestly and sincerely in every class. He didn’t want to chitchat. He never asked me about my family or life or weekend plans or how I was doing. He did, however, want to talk about big ideas and texts. He frequently asked me after class whether I had read this book or that book and what I thought. During class — 19 —

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discussions, Gabe often prefaced his comments by situating them in the interpretive web we had spun: “I am going to now disagree with Kate and build on Jenna and contradict myself from a few minutes earlier.” Kate Kate was powerful socially and confident academically. She wrote me one of the most articulate emails I have ever received from a student in our very first week of school (and the majority of my teaching years were high school, not middle school). She wrote about how excited she was for my class but that she had one concern​— the “popcorn reading” I said we would do in class when reading the biblical text in its original biblical Hebrew. She explained that she had had inconsistent Jewish education due to family moves and was insecure about her biblical Hebrew reading fluency. She then proposed a solution and asked if I would consider it. Could I let her know before class which verse she was going to read out loud so that she could practice it before she was called on? I was so impressed with the poise and responsibility of her email. We worked something out quickly. Kate was outgoing, socially confident, and relatable. She greeted everyone with smiles and hugs. “How are you, Ziva?” she would say enthusiastically as she entered the room. When she saw me with my kids outside of school, she would run up to them and remind them that I was her teacher before engaging them in some game. In class, she was lively and focused, always willing to contribute an idea, work on a project, or do independent work. Saul Saul was strong. He did a form of martial arts at a very high competitive level. His shoulders were broad, and he stood tall. Saul was from a religious home, his family more traditional than most at this school. Many of the teachers at the school wanted to tell me about Saul. They explained that when he transferred to the school in early elementary school he was, in their words, out of control. He would throw tantrums that would require the entire class to be evacuated. The teachers told me this history with pride because of the Saul I was meeting in seventh grade. He was calm and focused, his intensity directed toward the academic subjects at hand. Saul was earnest and engaged. He was kind and considerate. He waved his hand impatiently to speak but always waited his turn, listening to what his classmates said. He offered elaborate, complex, and long — 20 —

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interpretations when it finally was his turn. Saul’s learning accommodations had him working exclusively with English text (I would give him my own written translations of the biblical text we were studying). While his classmates worked on translating the biblical Hebrew, he asked me to give him extra commentaries (in English). He devoured them. I could never give him enough. Michael I always laughed and cringed when I rewatched the recordings of my class because there would be Michael right in the middle of the shot, looking like he would rather be anywhere than in my class at that moment. Sometimes he’d simply look bored. Sometimes he’d look bored and slumped. And sometimes he’d actually have his head down. Michael took multiple bathroom breaks every class, and I let him​— it was too painful not to. He was never rude in class but also never disguised his dismay at being there. Perhaps surprisingly, given the above description, he participated regularly. All the students did, and Michael was no exception. His comments were subversive at times, suggesting that we were spending way too much mental energy on an error-​­riddled text, and surprisingly sincere at other times, acknowledging his personal resonance with the narrative. Outside of class, Michael was socially popular. Teachers reminded me that to fully understand Michael, I needed to go to the lunchroom and watch him with his younger brother. The love and care he showed towards his brother would remind any teacher that Michael had much more going on than his classroom demeanor demonstrated.

The Subject Matter The biblical texts I taught were short excerpts that contained a compelling narrative arc, including character development, rich language, and conflict among characters. They ranged in length from eight to sixteen verses. To understand the interpretive work we did in the class, it’s important to understand that every biblical text we discussed was presented to the students in the original biblical Hebrew, which required significant translation work. While our own comments and discussion were always in English, the students were asked to read and respond to the biblical Hebrew text. Reading the biblical text in the original biblical Hebrew required significant instructional scaffolding. For some students — 21 —

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it required nothing but a dictionary; for others, it required a dictionary and a word bank; and for others, it required significant chunks to be pre-translated. Sharon Avni, a scholar of Hebrew language education, notes “the uniquely strong connection” Jews have “to the original language of their sacred texts” and, concomitantly, “an aversion and antipathy to their translations” (2012, 79). While I have neither an aversion nor antipathy to translated texts, that is, I do not subscribe to the “dogma of untranslatability” (Bassnett 2014, 147), I did feel an obligation to help my students gain familiarity with the texts in their original form both because it built on the instructional work of their previous years of Hebrew Bible study in the school and because so much of the meaning of the biblical text is conveyed in linguistic form (e.g., alliteration, ambiguity, word play, and ellipses) and is lost in even the most thoughtful translations because the semantic meaning is prioritized over the syntactic meaning. Hebrew Bible education in America has always struggled with how much to prioritize biblical Hebrew given that it’s really hard for students. This struggle has persisted over the last century with Hebrew ascendant at some moments, and meaning ascendant at others. For example, Y. H. Pollack’s Hebrew Bible curriculum, a widely used curriculum during the period of the Talmud Torah schools (an intensive five-​­days-​­a-​­week, three-​­hours-​­an-​­afternoon Hebrew school program that existed from the early twentieth century to the end of the 1960s), focused on teaching biblical Hebrew language skills (Reimer 1995). The curriculum truncated certain verses, chapters, and even books of the Hebrew Bible to make the language more accessible. In the opening letter to teachers at the beginning of the curriculum, Pollack stressed (my own translation from the Hebrew), “It is the obligation of the teacher to teach the students the language of the Torah and the style of Chumash in its original form” (1934, 1). In the 1960s, however, the Bible program of the Melton Research Center opted to use translations of the biblical text and focus on meaning-​­making goals instead, which replaced the teaching of language skills. Ruth Zielenziger explained, “I think it is fair to say that by and large we ignored the Hebrew angle of the Bible program” (1989, 164). More recently, the Tanakh Standards and Benchmarks Project (Jewish Theological Seminary 2022), the largest professional-​­development program for Hebrew Bible teachers in Jewish day schools, made decoding, fluency, and comprehension of biblical Hebrew an optional focus, — 22 —

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among others. This standard reads: “Students will become independent and literarily astute readers of the biblical text in Hebrew.” Many day schools, including the one I taught in, committed to this fluency standard. Most American Jews cannot study the Hebrew Bible in the original biblical Hebrew. However, in many full-​­time day schools, Shalom Academy included, it remains a priority to teach students basic fluency and comprehension of biblical Hebrew (Pomson and Wertheimer 2017). Because biblical Hebrew is such a complex language (Walker and Goldberg 2017) and my students were at very different levels with their biblical Hebrew comprehension, the study of the biblical texts in their original ­Hebrew required the following: 1. Creating different versions of the text with different levels of biblical Hebrew and English to differentiate for students’ varying skill levels. 2. Choosing excerpts of biblical texts that weren’t too long so that the biblical Hebrew was not overwhelming. 3. Spending time before each new text reviewing key biblical Hebrew vocabulary and grammatical constructs (and even syntactic structures unique to the Bible) that were going to show up in the next text of the curriculum. I created my own translations for every text I taught. I consulted other translations I valued (e.g., Robert Alter 2019, Everett Fox 1995) as well as dictionaries and lexicons (The Brown-​­Driver-​­Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon 2007, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar 2006). I moved among them and put together a translation that balanced fidelity to the flow and form of the biblical Hebrew (a syntactic translation), easy comprehension (a semantic translation), and use of dictionary definitions as they appeared in the dictionary my students were using, the Brown-​­Driver-​ ­Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (a pragmatic translation). Throughout this book, I present the texts I taught in the translations I had made for my students (only a couple of whom received my full English translation, while the rest worked to translate from the biblical Hebrew and I used my translation as a reference point in guiding them). The goal was to make sure all the students arrived at the same translation for key phrases and words, whether they were translating on their own or using my translation. Besides any designated key phrases and words, — 23 —

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the students’ translations could and did differ from one another in small ways. This was always an opportunity for interpretive discussion.

The Curriculum My curriculum included twelve units with twelve texts. Unit 1: God Commands Abraham to Leave, Genesis 11:30–12:7 Unit 2: A Famine in the New Land, Genesis 12:10–12:20 Unit 3: God Promises Descendants, Genesis 15:1–15:8 Unit 4: Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar, Genesis 16:1–16:10 Unit 5: God Promises Abraham and Sarah a Child, Genesis 18:1–18:15 Unit 6: Sodom and Gomorrah, Genesis 19:1–19:13 Unit 7: The Birth of Isaac, Genesis 21:1–21:8 Unit 8: The Akeda (Binding of Isaac), Genesis 22:1–22:13 Unit 9: Creation of Humans, Genesis 2:7–2:10; 2:15–2:25 Unit 10: Garden of Eden, Genesis 3:1–3:13 Unit 11: Cain and Abel, Genesis 4:1–4:16 Unit 12: The Aftermath of the Flood, Genesis 9:1–9:15 Each unit’s cycle of classes moved students through the following activities, all designed to help the students understand the texts in the original biblical Hebrew: 1. Exposure to necessary background information 2. Previewing relevant vocabulary and grammatical constructs 3. Read aloud 4. Translating the text in pairs (chevruta) 5. Generating questions 6. Reading parshanut (classical Jewish commentaries) 7. Reader’s theater 8. Whole-​­class discussion This was the structure of the class for every unit. The focus of this book is step 8, but the class couldn’t get to the whole-​­class culminating text discussions without all the work that came before.

Myself as Teacher-​­R esearcher This book is based on my research in a classroom where I was the teacher, in a school located in my own community. The students I write about were my students, and the teaching choices are ones I alone made. — 24 —

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Though I write with the theoretical grounding and data-​­analysis skills of a trained educational researcher, I am writing about what I personally experienced as a classroom teacher. As a result, I was particularly close to the data I analyzed. Before leaving for graduate school in California, I had taught at a Jewish high school in this same community. When teaching high school, from time to time I had the children of my own former teachers in my class. This pattern continued when I came to teach seventh grade at Shalom Academy. The education researcher and ethnographer Sally Campbell Galman (2015) writes about the leakiness of small communities and their schools. She explains that in rural communities, because of their smallness, “communities and spaces may . . . ‘leak’ into and across boundaries, rendering them much less rigid, more plastic and perhaps less inflexible in daily practice” (2015, 319). “Left to their wits,” Galman continues, “leaky and viscous practices and the cushion of ambiguity they afford [are inevitable]” (2015, 322). Though Jewish day schools are often located in big cities rather than rural communities, their relatively small size results in some of the same leakiness Galman describes. I would argue that these leaky boundaries and dynamic relationships and histories strengthened my capacity not only to teach these students but to analyze the data (of myself, my students, the biblical texts we read together, and the space within that triangle). But alongside the strengths of closeness, my own identity and experiences inevitably created blind spots as well. I, too, attended Jewish day school. After spending my K–8 years in a Jewish day school, I chose public high school over a Jewish high school. It was there, in my local public high school, in an alternative democratic school within a school, that many of my ideas about what teaching and learning in a school could be actively took root. Inquiry and student discussion was centered across subject matter. If we were learning algebra, we were discussing PEMDAS and the theory behind it, not just memorizing it. The teachers pushed us to write about ourselves in relation to the novels we read and the history we learned. I became interested again in Jewish learning and Jewish scriptural literacy practices during my senior year of college. I spent two years post-​­college studying sacred texts full-​­time in Israel. I then received my MAT at Bran­deis University through the DeLeT Program and became a high school Hebrew Bible teacher. After four years of teaching, I left my — 25 —

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high school teaching job to pursue a doctorate at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where I trained with inspiring scholars in literacy research, many of whom I write about in this book. I have now been teaching Hebrew Bible for fifteen years, and I have been conducting research on Hebrew Bible classrooms for almost ten years. I see the Hebrew Bible as an occasion to engage in traditional Jewish scriptural practices that, to my mind, can train students to appreciate multiple and conflicting interpretations. My fascination with, and love of, the Hebrew Bible has always focused on the elasticity of meaning in its texts and their ability to hold many different interpretations. I love Jewish scriptural literacy practices that celebrate and center on this feature. Going back through my writing from my first year of teaching to today, I am amazed at how my reasons for teaching Hebrew Bible have remained remarkably consistent. Consider the two excerpts that follow. The first is from an article in HaYidion (a practitioner journal) that I wrote while I was a high school Hebrew Bible teacher. It is not unusual in a Tanakh class to encounter two conflicting interpretations. If we teach even two parshanim (traditional Jewish commentators), we will inevitably present two conflicting readings. Each teacher has a choice about how to approach conflicting interpretations. Rather than seeking resolution, I choose to suspend my students between both readings. I actively encourage my students to refrain from siding with a particular commentary in my classroom and to consider what is compelling about each. .  .  . I under­stand and appreciate my students’ need to have one, uniquely right and true answer for any question​— one right and true reading of any text. My goal is to push back against this desire. When a student is confronted with two readings, she responds with anxiety. She feels destabilized by not knowing which reading is right. The student then rushes into firmly supporting one of the readings. My strategy is to develop the students’ comfort with a liminal space. My goal is to teach the students how to be able to consider each reading before prematurely concluding that one reading is better than another. This pedagogical approach promotes the development of what I call cognitive pluralism” (Reimer 2012, 30). — 26 —

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This second excerpt is from a popular piece I wrote ten years later on JewishBoston.com; by this point, I was a tenure-​­track professor of education and the parent of day school students. For me, the paradigmatic example of how day schools can teach kids to encounter differences lies in how biblical texts are read and taught. When Jews study Torah, the text rarely appears alone; it is accompanied by many commentaries . . . composed across Jewish history from the second century to the 19th century. These commentaries represent a conversation​— often a fierce debate​— that has taken place over thousands of years. The traditional layout of the Hebrew Bible constantly reinforces the value of multiple interpretations, and that Jewish learning approaches a text as fundamentally ambiguous and able to accommodate more than one “right” answer. This task of learning how to hold multiple interpretations is at the heart of Jewish learning and is the skill I value most in Jewish education. This skill, to listen carefully to what others say, [to] ground your own beliefs in close reading and evidence and to remember that there are limitations to any position or world­view transfers “off” the page. It is a skill that comes into play when reading people, situations, and contexts. When my kids spend half their day engaged in Jewish learning, they are not only learning their own history and culture but they are learning a way of thinking and reading that is a deep training in empathy and perspective-​­taking. (Hassenfeld 2022) In both pieces I write about the power of Jewish scriptural literacy practices that celebrate the elasticity of meaning in these (and all) texts and elevate their capacity to hold multiple interpretations. The most salient feature of my own positionality is my personal love for these literacy practices and my belief in their power to imbue students with skills that will help them in all areas of their lives. The research on which this book is based is not exactly practitioner research (Cochran-​­Smith and Lytle 2009). I was not a full-​­time teacher engaging in research. I was a full-​­time researcher engaging in teaching as my research. I call it “teacher research” (a subgenre of practitioner research) because in embarking on this research I was motivated by the same rationale as practitioner research, a rejection of the prevailing assumptions that “teachers are primarily technicians, [and] the goal — 27 —

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of teacher learning initiatives is to make teachers more faithful implementers of received knowledge and curriculum” (Cochran-​­Smith and Lytle 2009, 2). I started off as a teacher of Hebrew Bible; I then moved into research. For this particular research project, I returned to teaching to answer my persistent questions about teaching literacy and the Hebrew Bible. I was interested in the experience of a teacher committed to student talk and dialogic instruction. In particular, I was interested in how such a teacher felt and navigated moments where students’ comments felt wrong or “off.” I wanted to know which comments were most difficult for a teacher (e.g., comments that lacked background knowledge or comments that were socially offensive) and how a teacher felt and responded in those moments. In my dissertation, I followed six teachers and tried to understand this research question. I watched their classes and led them through stimulated recall interviews (Calderhead 1981) where I would sit with each teacher, rewatch their class recordings, and discuss moments where they felt disappointed or thrown off by a student response. My doctoral research was incredibly insightful but it also left me wondering, What if these teachers had been more committed to dialogic instruction? I kept faulting them, even being the great teachers they were, for not celebrating their students’ diverse literacy practices more. I wondered: Was I out of touch with the reality of teaching? Or were these teachers lacking the theoretical apparatus I had gained in graduate school? There was only one way to truly understand how a teacher deeply committed to dialogic instruction navigated these moments: to feel them myself. I am intentional in writing this academic book from the perspective of a teacher.

Caveats about the Research We know that there is always so much more happening in a classroom (or any social setting) than the academic task at hand. We also know that a host of social factors lead to some students having more agency than others. This book is about how I learned to create an interpretive community in my classroom that was as inclusive as possible, honored my students’ subjectivities as readers, acknowledged their painstaking work in translation (multilingual space), and introduced them to important Jewish literacy practices. The book explores how a shared literacy practice in a classroom with clear interpretive rules (and space to discuss this — 28 —

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literacy practice and compare it with other literacy practices) holds tremendous promise for learning. But for all its promise, it cannot overcome the obstacles that make it difficult for certain students to express their ideas. Even shared literacy practices don’t make it easy to talk about marginalized identities and difficult experiences. In my role as the teacher (the role in which the students knew me), there were topics that were in my purview, and topics that were outside of it. When students opened up to me about social dynamics and their feelings, I engaged deeply. However, when they did not, I could not step into the role of researcher and begin to interview them. This is the limitation of this type of teacher research. I was their teacher, not a neutral or sympathetic observer. There was information I would have loved to ask them about as a researcher, but as their teacher, I could not. Even with my limited knowledge, I was aware of the social dynamics in my classroom that gave some students more power and agency than others. While I don’t address the social experiences and dynamics my students brought into my classroom head-​­on in this book, I tried to teach and write this research with an awareness and sensitivity to the students’ differing social statuses. I also don’t address the social experiences I brought into the classroom. When I began this research, I didn’t think it was relevant, but those too can’t be ignored. So many teachers grow their families while teaching. Four years later, I am more aware of the ways that my growing belly, my changing body, my losses, my hopes, and my physical and spiritual vulnerability informed, limited, and enriched the teacher I was that year. How could I have taught and led discussions around biblical texts that center on infertility, childbirth, parenting, sibling relations, and even child sacrifice without displaying in some way my own proximity to these subjects? Lara Handsfield starts her article “Momentos de cambio: Cultivating Bilingual Students’ Epistemic Privilege through Memoir and Testimonio” with a reflection about her own experience battling breast cancer while being in Patricia Valente’s (the second author’s) classroom conducting research, and how she explained it to the students she observed every day (Handsfield and Valente 2016). Including this detail in her academic journal article made the research real and profound. Marjorie Faulstich Orellana helps us understand why. She writes: “Researchers who also have important life experiences (e.g., as — 29 —

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teachers, parents, activists, and members of assorted other communities of practice), and who find ways to integrate the perspectives into our work rather than bifurcating our different identities, may help to construct new understandings for others. People ‘in the middle’ are keys to the conversations that we can all have” (2012, 135). I had so much to say about the biblical texts we studied that year. I felt an intense affinity for both the biblical Sarah in her infertility and the biblical Hagar in her maternal vulnerability. I intentionally tried to keep my own ideas about the text to myself. But was I truly able to keep that all inside and only instruct around the interpretive rules of the literacy practice I wanted to induct my students into? Maybe not. While I may not have articulated my interpretive preferences verbally, wasn’t it likely that I betrayed them in my body language or facial expressions? These are questions I still wonder about today.

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2 Creating a Classroom of Interpreters When I began teaching my seventh-​­grade class, I wanted to make sure I was not positioning myself as the sole interpretive authority in the classroom. To do so, I committed myself to practicing dialogic instruction (Nystrand et al. 1997). Dialogic instruction is a pedagogy that grows out of the theoretical and empirical research on talking to learn and collaborative learning. It focuses on shifting interpretive authority from the teacher to the students, distributing both analysis and talk turns more evenly across the classroom. It turns on the assumption that teachers ought to engage students in the activity of textual interpretation in order to break free from the encapsulation of school (Engeström 1991). Critiques of teacher authority in education abound. Jean-​­Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed all start from the principle that the best education is rooted in a process of inquiry. All three of these theorists argued at different moments in time and from different contexts the same point about education: learning is a process of self-​­discovery rooted in the activity of inquiry. All of these critiques foreground the kind of learning that looks for opportunities for student inquiry and developing those skills that transfer outside of the school building. They foreground in literacy specifically a recognition that people need to do many different things with texts, reciting their teachers’ ideas about texts being the least common of the ways we ask adults to relate to and use texts in the world. I wanted my students to engage in an interpretive activity that resembled the reading and interpretation they would be asked — 31 —

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to do outside of school. Traditional Jewish scriptural reading practices ask readers to position themselves as “possible knowers” (Aukerman 2007, 77), that is, “empowered disputants” (Sarris 1993, 263). Dialogic pedagogy seemed like a good way to get there. Jewish scriptural literacy practices may be unique in that they celebrate independent interpretation. This is significant because the insight of situated learning is that we ought to have reading and interpretation in school resemble the ways adults actually read and make meaning of texts outside of school. In a community or culture where recitation of authoritative interpretations is highly valued among adults over independent interpretation, a pedagogy that distributes interpretive authority might not make sense. Though most assume this of scriptural literacy practices (see e.g., Bakhtin 1981; Scholes 1985), it is really not the case with Jewish scriptural literacy practices.

The Blessing and the Challenge of Distributed Interpretive Authority There is a classic example in literacy teaching that powerfully illustrates how even the most well-​­intentioned teachers can inadvertently adopt an authoritative mindset that can prevent students from reading and interpreting texts on their own. And as the example shows, that approach results in a loss not only for the students, but for their classmates and teacher as well. The example I have in mind comes from Cynthia Lewis (1993). The fourth-​­grade class Lewis was working with was reading the fable “The Pelican and the Crane” by Arnold Lobel, in which the crane invites the pelican over for tea, and the pelican proceeds to make a big mess. The story ends this way: “His shirtfront was covered with crumbs. ‘I hope you will invite me again,’ said the Pelican. ‘Perhaps,’ said the Crane, ‘but I am so very busy these days.’ ‘Goodbye until next time,’ said the Pelican. He swallowed many more cookies. He wiped his mouth with the tablecloth and left. After the Pelican had gone, the Crane shook his head and sighed. He called for his maid to clean up the mess” (Lobel 1980, 35). The fable ends with a moral written at the bottom of the page: “When one is a social failure, the reasons are as clear as day” (1980, 35). However, after hearing her read the fable, Rick​— one of Lewis’s students​— suggested the narrative had a very different moral: “Give people a chance.” When probed, Rick offered the explanation that the crane — 32 —

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should have given the pelican a chance and “then maybe he’ll like him” (Lewis 1993, 457). Lewis speculates that Rick was making a connection between the pelican and his own messy mother. She notes that the pelican and Rick’s mother are both individuals without money, with their own quirks, living in a world of the wealthy and trying to make sense of their rules. Rick pointed out that the pelican’s own home was messy. He wondered if the pelican had less money than the crane, who had a maid. Lewis goes on to explain that Rick’s conclusion is a perfectly logical moral to infer from the details in the fable, given the internal consistency of Rick’s reading. From the start, he saw the crane as a rigid, unaccepting character and the pelican as “the regular guy” who tries hard but can’t make it in the crane’s world. In his comments, Rick notices salient features of the text that build on this; for example, Rick was the only student to point out that the crane has a maid. When Lewis asks Rick if he feels bad for the crane, given the mess the pelican made, Rick responds, “No. . . . He just makes a mess, and then he gets the other person to clean [it] up” (1993, 456). Rick also notices the crane’s white lies, he “doesn’t want him over again. Might not be that busy. He just don’t want him over” (1993, 456). Rick picks up on the crane’s ease and comfort with dishonesty for the sake of avoiding confrontation. Lewis concludes her analysis with a remarkable confession: Rick was better able to see Crane’s faults than I was. He saw through Crane’s “white lie” as most skilled readers would, but in keeping with his interpretive frame and the way he had constructed those characters, he thought Crane’s lie was worth mentioning. . . . His comments revealed how much Rick knew about the way to construct meaning from texts. . . . During my interaction with Rick, I did not question the social origin of my thinking about that text. . . . I wanted to identify with​— and I wanted Rick to identify with​— the character whom I saw as socially appropriate. . . . My selective reading of the fable acknowledged Pelican’s social failings but dismissed Crane’s responsibilities as a social being who ought to be compassionate towards others. I accepted this exclusion, but Rick resisted it. He conformed to the expectation schools place on children to give texts a close reading, but he did not conform to my cultural expectations that his interpretation support certain socially coded behavior. (1993, 457) — 33 —

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After realizing what had happened with her student Rick, Lewis argues that interpretations that emerge from students’ own experiences and identities should be celebrated, not corrected. She realizes that often teachers push students toward a particular “authoritative” interpretation, even when the text can hold multiple interpretations (1993, 460). In their efforts to ensure comprehension or meet standardized benchmarks, teachers often end up flattening texts. They turn dynamic stories with myriad possible interpretations into multiple-​­choice tests, requiring students to accept a single interpretation. In so doing, teachers communicate explicitly and implicitly to students​— and disproportionately, students from marginalized backgrounds​— that their textual hypothesizing and ways of reading are not valued. And yet, it is the capacity to textually hypothesize that will actually serve these students best in the world​— much more than being able to recite their teacher’s interpretation. In defending his interpretation, Rick would make the case to his fellow readers to show kindness when someone acts outside of social norms. Rick would argue that the crane failed to show this sort of kindness and flexibility toward the pelican. Rick might extend the argument to reflect on how his own upbringing informs his reading of this particular fable and the broader texts of human interaction. I need not spell out how all these points better serve Rick as a reader and thinker than memorizing the moral Lewis, via Lobel, had in mind. In the effort to ensure comprehension, too often teachers move far away from the educational ideals of Rousseau, Dewey, and Freire and therefore far away from learning that can transfer outside the classroom.

Conversation and Dialogic Instruction To support the activity of interpretive inquiry, dialogic instruction asks teachers to abandon the classic pattern of teacher question, student answer, and teacher evaluation (Initiation-​­Response-​­Evaluation, or IRE) that characterizes most classrooms and instead emphasize conversation among students (Cazden 2001; Mehan 1982). In dialogic instruction, students propose ideas, ask questions, debate, and work together to make meaning of what they read. Crucially, in dialogic instruction, the teacher refrains from evaluating students’ ideas, interpretations, and questions. Instead of just replacing the “sage on stage” with the “guide by the side,” dialogic instruction goes further by limiting the teacher’s role to that of — 34 —

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facilitator, ensuring the free flow of ideas without imposing limitations on what direction the conversation flows. Proponents of dialogic instruction argue that this will allow for a classroom where students engage in an interpretive activity where they are positioned as “possible knowers” (Aukerman 2007, 77; Juzwik et al. 2013; Reznitskaya et al. 2001). One way to conceptualize the difference between dialogic instruction and more traditional pedagogies is through the distinction between inauthentic and authentic questions (Cazden 2001). A teacher question is inauthentic if the teacher has a particular answer in mind. When teachers structure their lessons as a series of inauthentic questions, they may give the appearance of encouraging student participation, but in fact what they are encouraging is student passivity through the teachers’ reiteration of their authoritative interpretations, which produces a series of answers to inauthentic questions. What then makes an “authentic” question? One can’t always tell whether a question is authentic merely from the fact that it is open-​ ­ended. A teacher might ask students, “What do you notice in this poem?” This question is only authentic if the teacher genuinely intends for students to share what they notice. If the question is posed because the teacher wants them to notice the rhyme scheme, then the question isn’t authentic. It is simply a vehicle for the teacher to elicit what she wants her students to say. Some of this might sound obvious. Few teachers would describe their own teaching as a series of “inauthentic” questions. But it’s not so easy to ask truly authentic questions and put aside ideas you are hoping students will take away from the text. If a teacher asks students what they notice in a poem, students​— especially those with little experience reading poems​— might overlook particular turns of phrase, evocative images or symbols, and even themes running through the poem. They might instead notice the color of the paper, the size of the font, or the number of words in the poem. This can feel stressful for a teacher. Students make these kinds of observations all the time​— in fact, they happen almost every time I give students a text and ask them what they notice. However, if teachers truly abandon the goal of achieving a single particular understanding of the studied text, then the outcome of asking authentic questions is dialogue. Dialogic instruction tackles issues of interpretive authority and insists on allowing students to make sense of texts in the ways they wish. It — 35 —

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certainly requires a teacher to abandon a particular understanding of a text, but as I learned studying with my advisor, Maren Aukerman, it also requires teachers to abandon any particular way of reading the text. This was more challenging for me. Maren Aukerman introduced me to dialogic instruction. In her writing and our teaching of Stanford teacher candidates, we emphasized that the classroom is the place where students’ authentic reading practices are drowned out by teachers with a textual agenda. Aukerman’s particular version of dialogic instruction is called shared evaluation pedagogy (SHEP), which asks teachers to let students bring in whatever ways of reading and literate practices they wish. Of course, “comprehension-​­as-​­outcome” pedagogies violate SHEP. As Aukerman writes, in this approach it is “the content of the material, and not reading itself, that is being taught” (2008, 54). But Aukerman also critiques approaches that emphasize what she calls “­comprehension-​­as-​ ­procedure” pedagogies as one-​­dimensional. She writes: “[The] problem [with ‘comprehension as procedure’] is that it sees the process of comprehending as something that all good readers do fundamentally the same way, thereby making it teachable through . . . step-​­by-​­step coaching that might help a young child learn to tie her shoe. But is reading comprehension in fact a procedure that can be executed with the same relative uniformity as tying one’s shoe?” (2008, 54). Aukerman believes that we should not teach students to comprehend the same way because we each read in our own individual manner out in the world. Her answer to how texts should be taught in classrooms essentially asks teachers to drop any interpretive agenda: “I argue that reading requires the ability​— and freedom​— to make decisions about a text and to subsequently evaluate and revise those decisions. There is evidence that, when given the opportunity, children have different interpretive styles of engaging in the process of comprehending, but that these individual styles frequently become invisible when the emphasis is on lockstep approaches” (2008, 54). Key elements to teaching this way are to “follow students’ ideas” and “hold back” because imposing a particular set of interpretive rules constrains students in a harmful way (2007, 77). Aukerman explains the danger of students yielding to authoritative discourse in text classrooms. When a student submits to the authoritative discourse (which includes for Aukerman even ways of reading), despite the fact that it is not inter— 36 —

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nally persuasive, that is, it is not their own preferred way of reading or interpretive stance, it ultimately takes away the student’s capacity to engage in textual interpretation. Aukerman explains: Comprehending a text demands taking an evaluative stance with respect to it: That is to say, the reader must be in a position of one who knows, seeks to know, and discovers​— and who has the authority to make claims about what a text says and means and what s/he thinks of that. Thus I propose that reading is a fundamentally evaluative task, and that by making the child’s evaluative stance towards the text irrelevant (which is what happens when reading instruction principally focuses on the teacher’s interpretation and interpretive techniques), we misrepresent to children what reading actually is (2007, 90–91). While one might intuitively think that a student adopting a teacher’s preferred way of reading or interpretive stance or interpretive strategies is evidence of growth and learning, Maren argues that it can actually be just the opposite. They are no longer asking their questions and suggesting their ideas about the text, but rather imitating the teacher’s. This is an act separate and wholly distinct from the act of reading and interpreting in Aukerman’s mind. Maren has a particular conception of what reading in the world looks like. Her definition of reading, even as broad as defining it as an evaluative task where a reader must be in a position of “knower,” is in tension with the sociocultural axiom that literacy practices are always culturally determined. For example, Allan Luke, a leading scholar of sociocultural and critical literacy, writes, “there is no ‘right way’ to read but rather that differing approaches to reading shape or form up what will count as reading differently, from literary recitation, to baseline decoding, from scriptural memorization to word recognition, to doing job tasks and filling in forms ‘effectively’” (1992, 8). Scriptural memorization does not include any evaluative task. Does that mean, according to Maren, it is not reading? To be clear, Luke’s notion of scriptural memorization does not reflect Jewish scriptural literacy practices. Traditional Judaism has always embraced hermeneutics. However, there are other scriptural literacy practices, in other faith traditions, that do focus on recitation and memorization. These too must be considered reading from a sociocultural perspective. — 37 —

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Back to My Teaching My goal when I began teaching my seventh-​­grade class was that by the time we arrived at the culminating whole-​­class text discussions, I would not say a word. It was the students’ space to interpret the text how they wished, together, through dialogue. I would be perfectly dialogic, teach with SHEP. My focus on dialogic instruction specifically, as opposed to other sociocultural pedagogies such as Y-​­PAR (Handsfield 2016, 79), was due to my doctoral training under Aukerman and my work teaching her Foundational Literacies course in the Stanford Teacher Preparation Program. However, I did not anticipate how frustrated I would be with the direction the discussion would go. (Maybe some readers did!) I began my year of teaching thinking that after I had taken my students through the entire cycle of lessons in which they “prepared” the biblical text​— that is, translated it, performed it, answered questions about it, brainstormed their own questions about it, and read classical Jewish commentators’ questions and ideas about it​— they would be able to have a text-​­focused, student-​­led discussion. That is, I thought I had followed the suggested scaffolds for dialogic text discussion as laid out in chapter 1. So I imagined constraining my interpretive authority and simply allowing my students to engage in authentic meaning making would be wonderful. It wasn’t. My students weren’t as creative and textually grounded as Rick. My students were not living up to expectations I didn’t realize I had.

The First Whole-​­Class Discussion We began the year studying the text of Genesis 11–12, in which God instructs Abraham to leave his home to go to a new place that God would show him. Genesis 11:30–12:7 (translation my own)1

‫ו ְַּת ִ ֥הי ׂשָ ַ ֖רי עֲקָ ָ ֑רה ֵ ֥אין לָ ּ֖ה ו ָ ָֽלד׃‬ ‫וַּיִ ּקַ֨ ח ֜ ֶּת ַרח אֶ ת־אַ בְ ָ ֣רם ּבְ נ֗ ֹו וְ אֶ ת־ל֤ ֹוט ּבֶ ן־הָ ָרן֙ ּבֶ ן־ּבְ נ֔ ֹו וְ אֵ ת֙ ׂשָ ַ ֣רי ַּכּל ָ֔תֹו ֵ ֖אׁשֶ ת אַ בְ ָ ֣רם ּבְ נ֑ ֹו‬ ‫ַוּיֵצְ ֨אּו ִא ֜ ָּתם מֵ ֣אּור ּכ ְַׂש ִּ֗דים ָל ֶ֙לכֶת֙ ַ ֣א ְרצָ ה ּכְ ַ֔נעַן ַוּיָבֹ֥ אּו עַד־חָ ָ ֖רן וַּיֵ ְׁ֥שבּו ָ ֽׁשם׃‬ 1. The translations provided here are the translations I made for my students who could not work in the Hebrew because of their Individualized Educational Plans (IEP). I tried as much as possible to maintain the rhythm of the biblical Hebrew. — 38 —

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‫אתיִ ם ׁשָ נָ ֑ה וַּיָ ֥מׇ ת ֶ ּ֖ת ַרח ּבְ חָ ָ ֽרן׃‬ ֣ ַ ָ‫י־ת ַרח חָ ֵ ֥מׁש ׁשָ ִנ֖ים ּומ‬ ֶ ֔ ֵ‫וַּיִ הְ י֣ ּו יְ מ‬ ‫ֲׁשר אַ ְר ֶ ֽאּךָ׃‬ ֥ ֶ ‫ּומ ֵּב֣ית אָ ִ ֑ביָך אֶ ל־הָ ָ ֖א ֶרץ א‬ ִ ֖‫ּומ ּֽמֹול ְַד ְּתָך‬ ִ ֥‫ַו ּ֤י ֹאמֶ ר יְ הֹ וָה֙ אֶ ל־אַ בְ ָ ֔רם לְֶך־לְ ָך֛ מֵ אַ ְרצְ ָך‬ ‫וְ ֶ ֽאע ְֶׂשָך֙ לְ ג֣ ֹוי ּגָד֔ ֹול ַוא ֲָב ֶ֣רכְ ָ֔ך ַו ֲאג ְַּדלָ ֖ה ְׁש ֶ ֑מָך וֶהְ יֵ ֖ה ּבְ ָר ָ ֽכה׃‬ ‫ּומקַ ּלֶלְ ָך֖ אָ אֹ֑ ר וְ נִ בְ ְרכ֣ ּו בְ ָ֔ך ֖ ֹּכל ִמ ְׁשּפְ חֹ֥ ת הָ אֲדָ ָ ֽמה׃‬ ְ ‫ַוא ָ ֲֽב ְרכָה֙ ְמ ָב ְ֣ר ֶ֔כיָך‬ ‫וַּיֵ ֣לְֶך אַ בְ ָ ֗רם ַּכאֲׁשֶ֨ ר ִּד ֶּב֤ר אֵ לָיו֙ יְ הֹ ֔ ָוה וַּיֵ ֥לְֶך ִא ּ֖תֹו ל֑ ֹוט וְ אַ בְ ָ ֗רם ּבֶ ן־חָ ֵ ֤מׁש ׁשָ נִ ים֙ וְ ִׁשבְ ִ ֣עים ׁשָ ָ֔נה‬ ‫אתֹו מֵ חָ ָ ֽרן׃‬ ֖ ֵ‫ּבְ צ‬ ‫ֲׁשר ָר ָ֔כׁשּו וְ אֶ ת־הַ ּנֶ ֖פֶׁש‬ ֣ ֶ ‫ׇל־רכּוׁשָ ם֙ א‬ ְ ‫וַּיִ ַ ּ֣קח אַ בְ ָר ֩ם אֶ ת־ׂשָ ַ ֨רי ִא ְׁש ּ֜תֹו וְ אֶ ת־ל֣ ֹוט ּבֶ ן־אָ ִ֗חיו וְ אֶ ת־ּכ‬ ‫אֲׁשֶ ר־ע ָׂ֣שּו בְ חָ ָ ֑רן ַוּיֵצְ ֗אּו ָל ֶ֙לכֶת֙ ַ ֣א ְרצָ ה ּכְ ַ֔נעַן ַוּיָבֹ֖ אּו ַ ֥א ְרצָ ה ּכְ ָ ֽנעַן׃‬ ‫מֹורה וְ ַ ֽהּכְ ַנע ֲִנ֖י ָ ֥אז ּבָ ָ ֽא ֶרץ׃‬ ֑ ֶ ‫ַו ַּיעֲבֹ֤ ר אַ בְ ָרם֙ ּבָ ֔ ָא ֶרץ ַ֚עד ְמ ֣קֹום ְׁש ֶ֔כם עַ ֖ד אֵ ל֣ ֹון‬ ‫ַוּי ָ ֵ֤רא יְ הֹ וָה֙ אֶ ל־אַ בְ ָ ֔רם ַו ּ֕י ֹאמֶ ר לְ ַ֨ז ְרע ֲָ֔ך אֶ ֵ ּ֖תן אֶ ת־הָ ָ ֣א ֶרץ הַ ּ֑ז ֹאת ו ִַּי֤בֶ ן ׁשָ ם֙ ִמז ֔ ְֵּבחַ לַיהֹ וָ ֖ה הַ ּנִ ְר ֶ ֥אה‬ ‫אֵ ָ ֽליו׃‬ 11:30. And Sarah* was barren. There was not to her a child. [*”Sarah” is referred to as “Sarai” until God changes her name in Genesis 17. For the sake of clarity, especially for readers who are not familiar with Tanakh, I refer to her as “Sarah” throughout.] 31. Terah took his son Abraham, his grandson Lot the son of Haran, and his daughter-​­in-​­law Sarah, the wife of Abraham, his son. And they set out together from Ur Casdim for the land of Canaan; but when they had come as far as Haran, they settled there. 32. The days of Terah were 205 years; and Terah died in Haran. 12:1. God said to Abraham, “Go forth from your land, from your birthplace, and from the house of your father to the land that I will show you. 2. I will make of you a great nation, And I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. 3. I will bless those who bless you; and the one who curses you I will curse. And all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.” 4. Abraham went forth as God had commanded him, and Lot went with him. Abraham was 75 years old when he left Haran. 5. Abraham took his wife Sarah and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had possessed (acquired), and the persons that they had made in Haran; and they set out for the land of Canaan. When they arrived in the land of Canaan, 6. Abraham passed through the land as far as the place of Shechem, at Alon Moreh. The Canaanites were then in the land. — 39 —

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7. God appeared to Abraham and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” And he built an altar there to God who had appeared to him. I chose this text to start the year because it presented rich opportunities for interpretation. Here are just a few questions that occurred to me as I was preparing this text: Why does this story open by mentioning Sarah’s infertility (11:30) when God’s first promise to Abraham is to “make of you a great nation” (12:2)? Why does God only speak to Abraham (12:1) and not Sarah as well? How can God tell Abraham to go from his birthplace (12:1) when it appears that Abraham’s father, Terah, already moved them from Abraham’s birthplace to Haran (11:31)? Does God not know that the move had taken place? Might the passage be relating the story out of chronological order? How does Terah’s move (11:31) relate to the move God asks Abraham to make (12:1)? What do any of the promises in verse 3 really mean? How will “families of the earth” bless themselves through Abraham? What are the “possessions” Abraham and his family had and why are they important enough to mention (12:5)? Who are the “persons that they had made in Haran” (12:5)? Why did they bring these people? Did they bring them by force or was it their own volition to come? The questions go on and on. After preparing the text for two weeks, translating it, performing it, and generating questions, it came time for our first culminating whole-​ ­class text discussion. In preparation for the discussion, I asked students to consider their most pressing questions about the text. To mark that the culminating discussion was a different kind of class, we moved our chairs from behind our desks into a close circle in the middle of the room. I was excited to see where the conversation would go. Would they focus on Abraham and Sarah’s relationship? Or would they be more interested in the dynamic between God and Abraham? What details in the text would they be drawn to? To me, the possibilities for genuine and fruitful interpretive dialogue seemed endless. Within seconds, it became clear that students weren’t interested in any of these questions. They focused on verse 32: “The days of Terah were 205 years; and Terah died in Haran.” That number stood out to them, and more than one student eagerly asked, “How did he live so long?” To see how this conversation unfolded, I want to examine a short but representative excerpt from the discussion. — 40 —

Creating a Classroom of Interpreters

Saul: Before Noah, people lived to 1,000. So that’s the answer. Noah was like 400-​­and-​­something and Terah was soonish after . . . Kate: In the text you see a lot of different ages, and one theory that I’ve heard is that the time scale changes from like early years to our current time, so it could have switched. Jackie: Kind of a question but also an add-​­on. Wasn’t it Moses, during his time, after he died, that you could only live until 120? Natan: Yeah, that’s what I’m pretty sure of too. Only after Moshe [Moses] died. Gil: Going back to the time scale, if you see in creation it says that all of earth was created in seven days, but when you get to people you see that they’re living for a really long time and then it gets shorter. Now how is the world created in seven days? That’s obviously wrong. Scientists have proven that it was created over billions and billions of years ago. Saul had jumped to an earlier part of Genesis, one we hadn’t read in the class. He invoked his background knowledge that the Bible describes many characters, like Noah, who live far longer than humans do today. He might have been referring to the oldest person referenced in the Bible, Methuselah, who lived to well over 900 years in age (according to the text of Genesis 5). In saying, “that’s the answer,” Saul asserted that it is simply a fact that people used to live a very long time. Therefore, there was nothing particularly troubling about Terah living to be 205. Kate took a different approach to solving the conundrum of Terah’s seemingly impossible age. She built on Saul’s claim that, in her words, “In the text you see a lot of different ages” and referenced “a theory that [she] heard” from outside the text and proposed that “the time scale changes.” In essence, her idea was that we shouldn’t understand the word year in the text to mean what we now mean by the word year. Rather, Terah lived 205 of some other unit of time. For Saul, the average lifespan of people changed. For Kate, the meaning of the word year changed. Jackie didn’t follow up on Kate’s point but picked up on Saul’s idea that human lifespans changed at some point and volunteered an additional supporting idea. She too brought in something she learned somewhere else, that until the time of Moses people lived longer, and then after that they could only live to 120 years. Natan agreed with Jackie and — 41 —

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repeated her comment, but instead of voicing it as a question, he framed it as a claim that he was “pretty sure of.” Finally (though again this was just a small portion of the overall discussion) Gil returned to Kate’s idea (“Going back to the time scale”) that the length of a year is what changed. He offered support for her point by again referencing material that wasn’t part of the text we had studied​ —the fact that the first chapter of Genesis states that the world was created in seven days, even though that’s “obviously wrong” because scientists have “proven” the universe “was created over billions and billions of years ago.” Therefore, the time spans of Genesis, Gil concluded, are suspect. (“Now how is the world created in seven days?”)

A Teacher’s Disappointment Later that day, I wrote the following in my journal: “Very disappointing discussion. The conversation felt unproductive. They were throwing out theories that had nothing to do with the text. It felt like a competition over background knowledge. No one referenced the text in front of them that they had been working on for so long. They got into science. They asked a lot of questions about ‘does the Torah say this.’ I’m struggling with how directive I should be” (9/20/2017). Reading this journal entry, it’s natural to ask why I was frustrated. Despite my comment that “they were throwing out theories that had nothing to do with the text,” these students were talking about the passage we read. They were referring to it, building on each other’s interpretations, and doing it all with little involvement from me, their teacher. Going back over the transcript, every student referenced some part of the Hebrew Bible, if not the particular passage we had studied. Moreover, their analysis was focused on this particular passage. They certainly were not throwing out answers that had nothing to do with the text in front of us. Wasn’t my goal to share interpretive authority with my students? To let them follow their questions, their ideas? Didn’t I accomplish that? Reading over my journal several years later, it strikes me that I was feeling something I could not yet put into words. Reflecting now, I realize that my frustration stemmed from the fact that my students, even while talking about details in the passage, seemed more interested in sharing what they thought they knew than in closely reading the text in front of them. They were engaged in the question of Terah’s age, but they didn’t try to answer it based on textual evidence. — 42 —

Creating a Classroom of Interpreters

Instead, they appealed to other theories they had heard explaining the general phenomenon of characters’ longevity in the Bible. There were two theories offered in the class discussion I excerpted above. One camp believed that average lifespans used to be longer; as Saul put it, “Before Noah, people lived to 1,000.” The other camp argued that the length of the unit of measurement changed; in Kate’s words, “The time scale changes.” Both explanations are plausible. But neither student offered evidence from the passage itself to support their positions. Instead, they justified their positions by referencing external authorities. Kate talked about “one theory that I’ve heard”; Gil cited scientists; and although Natan’s words might make him appear to be engaged in independent meaning making (“Yeah, that’s what I’m pretty sure of too”), what in fact he’s referring to is the same external evidence that Jackie was citing. Despite our weeks of preparation, none of the students tried to make a textual argument. I understand that some colleagues of mine in literacy may bristle at this last statement. Why, after claiming to be open to student dialogue and student sense-​­making, after wanting to be perfectly dialogic and implement SHEP, am I harshly characterizing this student discussion as void of textual arguments? Others (like Sophie Haroutunian-​ ­Gordon) might agree with me. Text discussion should have more textual evidence. In the moment, I felt disappointed. I wanted more than what my students gave. Despite my desire not to go this route, I wanted a particular type of interpretation even though I didn’t want to impose it, and even though I certainly didn’t expect it to lead to a single particular interpretation. Still, this was a moment of reckoning for me. When I began teaching this class, I tried very hard to remove myself as an authority from the discussion. I didn’t want to tell students what the text meant. But they filled the absence of my authority with other sources of authority.

What Went Wrong in Our First Discussion? In dialogic instruction, who’s to say what makes something a good “noticing”? This question pulses through the frustration I felt after this first culminating whole-​­class text discussion. As seen in my journal, it was my desire not to interfere with my students’ interpretive activity and text discussion​— to be perfectly dialogic in my orientation​— that produced my frustration. At the end of that journal entry, I articulated the question — 43 —

t h e s e c o nd c o nve rs at ion

that bothered me to my core. I didn’t want to rely on my authority as a teacher in constructing the meaning of texts, but in this conversation, students started filling the teacher authority void by invoking other, more nebulous authorities (“I heard a theory,” “I’m pretty sure that’s right,” “Noah lived  .  .  .”). Their invoking authority seemed just as bad, if not more problematic, as their relying on my authority. There was no textual work to do when the answer to Terah’s age was that the time scale was different before Moses. There was no room for hypothesizing about the significance of Terah’s age being given in this passage or exploration of what in the text might explain his longevity. Instead, Jackie took on the authoritative role of expert, and Natan accepted. The text was not brokering the discussion the way I hoped it would. Dialogic instruction was not enough to get my students to engage in the interpretive activity I wanted them to engage in. Part of that activity was for the students to offer their own ideas and debate them, but another part of that activity, I realized, was to support those ideas with evidence from the text. I didn’t feel like the literacy practice they had landed on, offering up authoritative statements about background knowledge without any citations, had much value. Certainly not when compared to other literacy practices we could be using. I believe that texts ground us. They allow us to engage in civil discourse and not wind up with hurt feelings, misunderstandings, or worse​— outright conflict. We can talk through the text and surface our assumptions. We can fruitfully talk about our differences, debate the merits of one another’s positions, and identify where we are operating with shared assumptions and where we are operating with different assumptions. We can fundamentally understand where another person is coming from​— understand their interpretive rules—But only if we talk through the text. I wanted my students to follow the interpretive rule of grounding their ideas and interpretations about the text in the words of the text itself. It is tempting to justify this burgeoning interpretive rule I realized I had​— the desire to have students ground interpretations in the words of the text​— in academic justifications, such as disciplinary literacy (Brock et al. 2014; Shanahan and Shanahan 2008) or extant work on interpretive discussions (Haroutunian-​­Gordon 2009; Saunders, Goldenberg, and Hamann 1992). I will resist these justifications, however, and explain it instead with — 44 —

Creating a Classroom of Interpreters

more specific reasons. This interpretive rule is part of traditional Jewish literacy practices. Moreover, because my students were reading the text in a foreign language, biblical Hebrew, and spending significant time translating it, they were able to use this interpretive rule with the original text. It would be a missed opportunity if they didn’t read with this interpretive rule, and, pedagogically, it was important to have them use the text and the fruits of their translation work in their interpretative discussions.

Close Reading, but Not that Close Rabbi Shai Held writes that Jews have traditionally displayed their love of Torah, and in turn deepened it, by “reading texts with exquisite care and attention to detail” (Held 2017, xxi). Held, inspired by the words of Rabbi Levi Lauer, reiterates the idea that “one of the greatest contributions the Jewish people have made to civilization is the gift of close reading.” But for literacy scholars and educators, the term close reading has come to mean something more negative. In the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English Language Arts (ELA), close reading means a focus on the text to the exclusion of the reader. Students are positioned as text detectives who follow a number of steps to uncover the meaning of a text. The idea that a text’s meaning might differ depending on the child is completely absent from CCSS’s understanding of close reading. The close reading R. Lauer referred to, that Rabbi Held writes about, and that I cared about in my class, resembles what Lara Handsfield and Patricia Valente call “pedagogies of closeness,” a variation on (CCSS) close reading that recognizes that “comprehension processes​— making meaning​— are inseparable from socially and historically grounded processes of making selves and making worlds” (2021, 203). There is no meaning in a text to uncover; it is always refracted through the reader and her experiences with words and worlds. When I say that I wanted my students to use the details of the text and bring textual evidence, this was never to the exclusion of their cultural and linguistic identities. I was not after a narrow close reading that ignored readers’ situated and cultural knowledge. I was after Handsfield and Valente’s “pedagogies of closeness.” The close reading I wanted, the textual evidence I hoped my students would provide, sought to invite my students’ whole selves to the reading. — 45 —

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So There Was Something I Wanted. Now What? As I thought about the potential place for interpretive rules in dialogic teaching, I thought back to two fourth-​­grade Hebrew Bible classrooms at two other Jewish day schools I had studied during my doctoral research. Both educators, Menachem and Yonatan, felt that the biblical text could hold many different readings and that their students could help them see things they had never identified before. Both teachers posed authentic, open-​­ended questions in class, often taking their questions from the students’ comments, and both facilitated student-​­driven text discussion in which students engaged in collaborative textual interpretation. Nonetheless, the discussions in each classroom looked very different. Each class embodied its own set of interpretive rules, which produced very different interpretive activities. Yonatan’s students interpreted the text through a secular lens that saw it as a purely literary work. Menachem’s students interpreted the text through a religious lens that offered a historical account of real events. These schools were just a few miles apart, and while both fourth-​­grade classes were studying the same biblical texts (in the Joseph story), it might as well have been two different texts. Menachem’s class treated rabbinic emendations to the text as part of the biblical text itself. As the scholar Leora Batnitzky explains, “Traditional Jews have never read the scripture alone, but always as mediated by the history of rabbinic exegesis” (Batnitzky 2016, 6). Menachem and his students filled textual lacunae with rabbinic material. But the rabbinic material never ended the discussion; it simply became part of the text to be studied, analyzed, and debated. Students treated the rabbinic material as almost equivalent to the text and then addressed the new textual problems that emerged. It was as if the text they studied was not simply the Hebrew Bible, but rather a composite of the Hebrew Bible and additional rabbinic material. For example, Genesis 43:16 refers to Joseph’s chief servant simply as “his servant.” He remains nameless. Menachem told the class that the rabbinic tradition identifies the servant as Joseph’s son Menashe. This led the students to ask the question, “Why did Joseph choose Menashe to be his chief servant?” One student raised his hand and said, “But he had two sons.” Another classmate offered an answer, “I was going to say, like you wouldn’t trust anyone else. But I know if Menashe was only nine — 46 —

Creating a Classroom of Interpreters

years old, Ephraim was definitely too young!” This student answered his classmate’s question by bringing another rabbinic emendation absent from the biblical text: Menashe’s age. This piece of information becomes essential to his sense-​­making of the text and answer: Menashe was chosen because at least he was nine (imagine giving this big responsibility to an eight-​­year-​­old!). For Menachem’s students, the rabbinic identification became a part of the text, and the task then became to understand this new version of the text. This exchange shows how the interpretive rules operating in Menachem’s class​— that the text is a record of real historical events, and that the rabbinic tradition fills in details absent from the biblical text​— shape class discussion. The interpretive task was to use all the available sources to reconstruct a compelling account of the events. In contrast to Menachem’s class, Yonatan’s class assumed that the text was a literary work, rather than a record of actual events. Since the text is self-​­contained, all questions must arise from it and refer to it. To ask questions about events not found in the text would make no more sense than asking questions about whether, in reality, Reverend Dimmesdale’s hair was parted when he admitted his affair with Hester Prynne. For Yonatan, meaning could only be found in the literary devices that the text employed. For example, in one class, students were studying the biblical story in which Joseph is elevated to chief servant in Potiphar’s house. In Genesis 39:6, Potiphar places Joseph in charge of everything except Potiphar’s own bread. The students began asking questions about why Potiphar would want to retain control over his bread when he put Joseph in control of everything else in his possession. One student reminded the class that Joseph’s brothers had eaten bread after they threw Joseph in the pit. Another student named Adi took this connection and suggested that, in invoking bread, the text may be foreshadowing the evil that is about to befall Joseph, adding, “It might mean something bad for Joseph because they ate bread after they threw Joseph in the pit.” Yonatan restated the point in the literary language that characterized his class, “So Adi says bread is always going to be a symbol of something bad to come. We’re going to see because bread’s going to come back.” It’s true that both teachers established interpretive rules that constrained students’ interpretive activity. But this fact does not negate their — 47 —

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focus on students’ meaning making. It merely directs it. They were leading wonderful dialogic conversations​— meaningful discussions of what the text meant within a particular set of interpretive rules. What may have undermined their efforts to promote student meaning making is that neither teacher ever named their interpretive rules during their class (at least not while I was observing). One classroom was governed by one set of interpretive rules that shaped the development of discussion, and the other by a different set. Each relied on different rules for textual engagement. Menachem’s class was expected to treat the text as a record of actual historical events, whereas Yonatan’s class was expected to relate to the text as a literary work whose stories had no reality outside its pages. The rules were assumed and reinforced implicitly, but not said explicitly. And indeed, I saw students in each class visibly confused by the interpretive rules. One of these students had even transferred from Menachem’s school to Yonatan’s school, and for the life of him, he could not understand the way Yonatan was asking him and his classmates to read and interpret the biblical text. Having spent considerable time in both of these classrooms and fallen in love with the interpretive activity in which both Menachem and Yonatan were able to engage most of their students, I gained invaluable “lessons learned” for my classroom. I loved that both teachers structured their class to center on students engaging in interpretive activity, but I saw potential challenges because they did not explicitly make clear their interpretive rules and boundaries for their students. For the most part, these classrooms ran smoothly and students engaged in deep interpretive work, participating fully. But in both classrooms, there were some students who didn’t quite understand the operative interpretive rules. Because Menachem and Yonatan wouldn’t name these rules explicitly for the students, these students continued to be confused, and their misaligned comments were marginalized. In Yonatan’s classroom, I regularly interviewed three students who did not understand his interpretive rules. These fourth-​­grade students didn’t ask the “right” type of questions or make the “right” kinds of interpretations. When I asked them in interviews whether they could predict which questions would be deemed good questions by Yonatan, they all expressed a sense of bewilderment. As one student put it, “You might think it’s a really good [textual comment] and it’s perfect, but then Yonatan might say it’s not that good or something. Or you might think it’s ter— 48 —

Creating a Classroom of Interpreters

rible, and Yonatan says it’s good. So you really don’t know.” Unlike their classmates, who understood the implicit interpretive rules operating in Yonatan’s classroom, these three students saw the system as arbitrary. I wanted to avoid this in my classroom. I wanted to pursue an alternative type of classroom where I, as the teacher, cultivated a greater sensitivity to students’ interpretive rules. But I also, like Yonatan and Menachem, had interpretive rules I wanted my students to follow. I would not, in the end, fully implement Aukerman’s SHEP in my teaching. Once I recognized that I had a literacy practice I wanted to induct my students into, the next question was how. I would need to take the time to explicitly explain the interpretive rules I wanted my students to follow in my classroom. I would need to name them, explain them, answer questions about them, over and over. I would also need to allow my students to push back against them (that is, allow them to have the second conversation). If there was a way of reading I wanted my students to engage in, a literacy practice I wanted to guide their reading, I was committed to saying so explicitly. I was going to have to figure out what that meant for our class and my teaching. It would have been an easy and harmonious resolution if in that first culminating whole-​­class text discussion, I stepped out of the way and handed over the wheel to my students, and they proceeded to do exactly what I wanted them to do with the biblical text. If this had happened, I could have imagined that I was succeeding in dialogic instruction and even SHEP. But they did not, and so I had to confront the fact that I had competing desires (or at least desires in tension). In retrospect, what happened turned out to be the best possible outcome. The first discussion revealed my commitment to a particular literacy practice. Dialogic instruction was important but so was a particular literary practice. How could I do both?

Dialogic Instruction with Interpretive Rules While it’s impossible to interpret texts without rules, to simply assume that everyone is operating with the same interpretative rules is a mistake. This is true both in and outside of the classroom. A few years ago, I was driving home from work one evening, tired and ready for the couch. I sent my husband a quick text (after first pulling over to the side of the road, of course): “Pizza tonight?” In a few seconds, his response came back: “Fine.” But instead of picking up a pizza, I had second thoughts. — 49 —

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What was wrong with pizza? Was this part of our argument about not spending money? A reminder that we had recently decided to eat healthier? Why would he respond in such a passive-​­aggressive way to a simple suggestion? Didn’t he care how tired I might be after a long week? What did this say about the state of our marriage? I am likely not alone in interpreting “Fine.” as a passive-​­aggressive dismissal. But when I analyze this exchange in light of the above argument about texts and interpretive rules, it raises a lot of questions. How is it possible to interpret the word fine as a sign of annoyance? How could I interpret a one-​­word response​— “Fine.”​— to suggest that pizza was not fine? The answer lies in relatively recent conventions that have emerged governing how to interpret text messages. It was the period at the end, more than the word choice, that shaped how I interpreted his text. It’s come to be understood that periods communicate a passive-​­aggressive attitude. As sociolinguist Lauren Collister explains, there’s a reason why a period at the end of a text has come to sound angry. As texts have grown more casual, fewer and fewer texts end with any punctuation at all. Including punctuation now reads as an intentional finality​— a sense of “this discussion is over.” Perhaps to overcorrect for this, exclamation points (and especially emojis) have become more and more common in texts as a way of signaling, “I am happy and enjoying this exchange!” (Collister 2016). When I text with my parents, I have to remind myself that they don’t usually follow this norm​— good luck getting a winking smiley face out of my father. I often find myself hearing my parents as being annoyed when they text me, only to remember that they’re just writing according to the conventions of English grammar as they understand them. To them, LOL is a typo, and complete sentences ought to end with a period. What seems like an obvious interpretive convention to one group of readers (cell phone natives) can seem totally unfamiliar to another group of readers (old-​­school grammarians). In short, interpretive rules can come to feel as objective as the plain meaning of the words, but they are in fact rooted in conventions about what to do with certain words in certain contexts. Interpretive rules and events are constructed and learned in families, cultures, communities, and institutions. Reading and interpretation always happen within an implicit or explicit set of interpretive rules. Similarly, Stanley Fish writes, “Interpretive strategies are not natu— 50 —

Creating a Classroom of Interpreters

ral or universal but learned. This does not mean there is a point at which an individual has not yet learned any. The ability to interpret is not acquired; it is constitutive of being human. What is acquired are the ways of interpreting and those same ways can also be forgotten or supplanted, or complicated or dropped from favor” (1980, 172). Fish explains that while the ability to interpret is part of what makes us human, the ways we interpret​— that is, the interpretive rules we use to interpret texts (“texts” understood broadly)​— are situated in our cultures and communities. Most significantly, we must learn these rules. After this first discussion, I was ready to use my teacher authority to enforce (I know this is a harsh word; I will return to it) my text-​­based interpretive rule and make sure all the students understood it. I therefore resolved after this first text discussion to do two things going forward in my teaching. First, I would begin to be more explicit about any interpretive rule that I wanted for our classroom interpretive community. Second​— and this was critical​— I wouldn’t pretend any rule was obvious or objective. I would make clear that I was aware that my students operated in different and competing discourses and literacy practices. I would try to make this, too, explicit to my students, that in our classroom we were going to read and interpret according to these rules and not those rules. And I would allow them to discuss how they felt about the rules we used. But first I had to figure out what exactly my rules were. Was there more than just textual evidence?

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3 Stepping into My Students’ Scriptural Literacy Practices It was clear that the culminating whole-​­class text discussions would need some guardrails. I hoped to use my authority in a limited and intentional way to create an interpretive community in my classroom through clear interpretive rules. It might sound counterintuitive: How could imposing rules create community? My belief was that if students could debate and contest the text within a set of interpretive rules that every single student understood and could articulate, then they would be better set up to share themselves and their ideas about the text, the world, and themselves. But not just any set of interpretive rules​— I wanted a particular set. And yet, what exactly my interpretive rules for our classroom were was not yet clear. I knew I wanted my students to use textual evidence and work with the words on the page. I believed (and continue to believe) that learning to interpret texts in a way that prioritizes careful, close reading is extraordinarily valuable. I believe it prepares students for important reading contexts, including Hebrew Bible reading, academic reading, and even social reading. I believe a commitment to the text is essential for respectful discourse and talking across difference. In my effort to be dialogic I had lost sight of this core principle, perhaps because I had hoped it would happen without my having to enforce it. — 52 —

Stepping into My Students’ Scriptural Literacy Practices

I needed to get clear about what exactly my interpretive rules for our classroom would be. To do so, I would first have to understand where my students were coming from. Following the first culminating whole-​ c­ lass text discussion, I resolved to pay closer attention to my students’ interpretations. I would ask myself: What rules must they be following to arrive at these interpretations? What assumptions inform their interpretations? This process would allow me to articulate more clearly my own interpretive rules by framing them in dialogue with the interpretive rules I saw my students following and the literacy practices they reflected. Courtney Cazden reminds us: “Teachers, like physicians and social workers, are in the business of helping others. But as a prerequisite to giving help, we have to take in and understand” (2003, 76). This chapter focuses on how I took in my students’ literacy practices before I tried to help them learn a particular literacy practice.

Acknowledging Interpretive Rules Even in Student-​­Centered Classrooms One of the most influential scholars in literacy research is Judith Langer. She has helped move the dial in literacy education from transmission-​ ­oriented classrooms to more dialogic classrooms focused on independent student interpretation. In her 2010 book, Envisioning Literature, Langer articulates an approach to teaching literature that puts students and their ideas at the center of the classroom conversation. She also explicitly addresses the question of interpretive rules and boundaries. She is a paradigmatic example of how scholars often acknowledge that students do need a shared set of interpretive rules to guide their interpretive activity, but the teacher need not explicitly name and impose this set of interpretive rules because students can together uncover interpretive rules that are obvious and intuitive and hold one another accountable. Langer’s approach begins from the idea that when people make sense of the world, they build “envisionments,” sets of interconnected ideas, questions, interpretations, and connections that constitute an individual’s understanding (2010, 10). When teaching texts, she goes on, teachers ought to support the development and elaboration of their students’ envisionments of that text. She addresses the criticism that this approach is too open-​­ended. “People,” she writes, “are often concerned that any ideas that come to students’ minds will be considered appropriate” (2010, 106). What limits — 53 —

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the possible interpretations of a text that students might offer? Langer assures her readers that they need not be concerned. In a section titled “Does Anything Go?,” Langer addresses this concern. She describes the boundaries of text discussion: “One way to think about the boundaries (what is in or out of ‘bounds’) . . . [is that] a centripetal force is also operating, counteracting an aimless outward motion and pulling the ideas back inward towards some central core” (2010, 106). According to Langer, something (a “centripetal force”) keeps students from voicing inappropriate interpretations and ideas about the text. But what is that something? She continues: “Good and reflective thinking is embedded in the social forces within the classroom. Everyone expects to make sense and communicate” (2010, 106). She assumes that students will practice “good and reflective thinking.” But Langer doesn’t say what makes thinking “good” or “reflective.” The use of the passive “is embedded” is perhaps telling. How does this thinking become embedded? Langer seems to hope this will take care of itself. She goes on to describe the role students play in creating boundaries for each other. “Students,” she writes, “learn to listen to and reflect on new ideas and take it upon themselves to ignore or reject those that are not working. Thus, students either incorporate new ideas into their envisionments or abandon them as irrelevant or too far afield” (2010, 107). Langer seems to assume that students bring a shared set of interpretive rules to the classroom. They enter the classroom already part of a single interpretive community. But what makes an idea work or not work? How do students decide whether an idea is relevant? Students might agree, they often do, but they might not agree, which also happens. How do they proceed? By what criteria does the teacher decide if an idea is irrelevant or too far afield if the students are divided on the question? My response is that we actually need explicit interpretive rules to be able to make judgments of rationality and relevance, too. What’s rational is relative, and so is what’s relevant. This is learned in particular interpretive communities. Without appealing to some set of interpretive rules stemming from one of these communities, it’s hard to know how we would make any judgment at all about an interpretation. In describing the process of students enforcing their own interpretive rules and boundaries, Langer seems to rely on the very type of boundaries she claims don’t need to be enforced. To understand the significance — 54 —

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of this abdication (i.e., assuming that no teacher authority is necessary for interpretation to happen within particular boundaries), it’s helpful to imagine a really extreme example. Imagine a student who decided that his interpretations could only be communicated through the medium of interpretive dance. The class would be reading a text; he would begin dancing. Further, let’s imagine that the teacher refuses to take responsibility for naming and enforcing interpretive rules in her classroom. So she doesn’t ask this student to explain what he’s saying through dance. As Langer insists, the teacher instead leaves it up to the rest of the class to decide what to do with this interpretation. When pushed to explain what his dance means, the student might demur (“the dance speaks for itself”), or he might say, “If you don’t get it, I can’t explain it.” How should his classmates and teacher navigate his approach? In reality, when a student’s way of interpreting falls this far out of the implicit boundaries, and there’s no language around interpretive rules in the classroom to help talk through the distance, the student is generally considered a problem. He is powerless. He may be removed from the classroom or disciplined or marginalized in a variety of other ways. In my own teaching, I noticed myself wanting less and less to call on those students who didn’t read texts in the way I felt was rational and reasonable, that is, who didn’t ground their interpretations in the words on the page in front of them. In my classroom, I felt like it wasn’t fair to leave it up to my students to “arrive” at a shared set of interpretive rules through a “centripetal force”​— at least if I wanted a set of interpretive rules of which I approved. One might wonder if I was simply after a much more restricted and regimented interpretive activity than Langer or if I was overly rigid about my particular rules. Perhaps so, but perhaps not. We don’t exactly know what falls within Langer’s boundaries of rational and reasonable because she doesn’t articulate it. In my classroom, I wanted to articulate those boundaries clearly for every single student. To do so, I would have to play an explicit role in shaping the interpretive rules that would guide interpretive discussions in my classroom. I would have to provide a language and a reference point for navigating outliers and “wrong” interpretations. I would do this even if it seemed my students did agree on many implicit interpretive rules. There is value to articulating the operating interpretive rules in a classroom even when it seems there is consensus. To not name interpretive rules explicitly in — 55 —

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a classroom, to not say “these and not others,” is to continue to perpetuate what one famous group of literacy researchers deemed the “carefully restricted project [of ] formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-​ ­governed” approach to literacy (New London Group 1996, 61). It is to say there is no need to name the rules because I assume they are normative for all of you students sitting in my classroom. Langer wishes teachers would leave it up to the students to uncover an agreed-​­upon set of interpretive rules and boundaries, but in that proposal, she falls back on normative conceptions of rational and reasonable, leaving students who come from different backgrounds and different interpretive communities with no language for moving inside the classroom’s interpretive community and no language for representing their other interpretive communities and literacy practices. Think back to Menachem and Yonatan’s classrooms, described in chapter 2. They both ran classrooms with clear sets of interpretive rules reflecting particular interpretive communities and literacy practices. Most of their students intuitively knew or picked up the rules. Both Menachem and Yonatan were perfectly rational teachers, yet it was clear that not all of their students caught on to their rules. The student who had moved from Menachem’s school to Yonatan’s school couldn’t understand how Yonatan was asking him to read and interpret the biblical texts they studied. He was really thrown by the fact that Yonatan was willing to entertain textually grounded but theologically unorthodox interpretations in his classroom (e.g., that something else in the text besides God and God’s angels might have had divine powers). What interpretive rule allowed for this? Outlier students like the one in this situation are effectively interpretively blind in classrooms where the operating interpretive rules are not articulated. What’s worse is that these very students might share the interpretive rules of a different classroom just across town. To help such students (who are really any of us placed in a new interpretive community) remove their blindfolds, teachers need to clearly articulate their conceptions of rational and reasonable by naming and discussing the interpretive rules for their classroom.

Finding My Interpretive Rules by Noticing My Students’ Interpretive Rules It is hard pedagogical work to mine student comments for the interpretive rules guiding them. It was a necessary step, however, on the road to — 56 —

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formulating my own explicit interpretive rules for my classroom. When I began to keep track, I found, for example, that my students often wanted to explain seeming omissions or additions in the biblical text as typos or copyediting mistakes. Technically, that meant they were interpreting the words on the page as I hoped. But I realized I had more implicit interpretive rules. I wanted the students to try reading the text with the assumption that every single word was meaningful. Once I realized this, I understood that I would need to articulate this as an interpretive rule, as well. This would become a second interpretive rule for our classroom. I paid close attention not just to what students were saying, but why they were saying it. I discovered that the best way to find students’ interpretive rules was to listen for their “off-​­the-​­wall” comments (Saunders, Goldenberg, and Hamann 1992, 206). When a student said something that gave me pause or seemed completely wrong, I trained myself to ask: What rules about this text would I need to hold for this comment to make sense? Sometimes, I would even pull the child aside after class for a quick confirming conversation. By taking time to break down student text comments that seemed to me to be particularly off-​­base, by noting them the first time they come up and then being on the lookout for them to come back a second time, I began to identify the interpretive rules informing students’ textual comments. I began this process in our second unit. My focus in discussing the excerpt below from our second culminating whole-​­class text discussion will be to show how students’ interpretations, with some analysis, reveal their interpretive rules. Only rarely did students state their rules explicitly. No student ever stood up and announced in my classroom, “I always look for a lesson when reading.” None of them ever prefaced an interpretive comment with “Just so you all know, I read biblical texts with the rule that all biblical protagonists must be good and right by modern ethical standards.” I unearthed students’ interpretive rules by listening closely to the assumptions behind their ideas and interpretations. Over the course of the second unit, I got better at listening to my students. I tried to understand what in the biblical text drew their attention and how they interpreted it.1 1. In many ways, this is the work Cynthia Lewis retrospectively did with her student Rick’s interpretation of the Arnold Lobel fable discussed in chapter 2. — 57 —

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Mining Student Comments for Their Interpretive Rules In this second text unit, we studied the second half of Genesis 12. In this story, Abraham and Sarah encounter a famine in Canaan. Concerned about food and water, they decide to travel to Egypt, where both are plentiful. As they begin their descent into Egypt, Abraham worries. Sarah is beautiful, and he is sure that the leader of the land, Pharaoh, will want to take her as a wife. Fearing for his life, Abraham asks Sarah to tell the Egyptians that she is his sister so that his “soul will live.” When they arrive in Egypt, as Abraham predicted, Sarah is taken as a wife for Pharaoh, and Abraham is given many gifts. In retribution, God strikes Pharaoh with plagues. Pharaoh returns Sarah to Abraham and asks why Abraham lied to him and then sends them away with their possessions. Genesis 12:10–20 (translation my own)

‫וַיְ ִ ֥הי ָרעָ ֖ב ּבָ ָ ֑א ֶרץ ַו ֵּ֨י ֶרד אַ בְ ָ ֤רם ִמצְ ַ ֙ריְ מָ ה֙ לָג֣ ּור ׁשָ֔ ם ִ ּֽכי־כ ֵָב֥ד הָ ָרעָ ֖ב ּבָ ָ ֽא ֶרץ׃‬ ‫ֲׁשר הִ קְ ִ ֖ריב ל ָ֣בֹוא ִמצְ ָ ֑ריְ מָ ה ַו ּ֙י ֹאמֶ ר֙ אֶ ל־ׂשָ ַ ֣רי ִא ְׁש ּ֔תֹו הִ ּנֵה־נָ ֣א י ֔ ַָדעְ ִּתי ִ ּ֛כי ִא ָ ּׁ֥שה יְ פַת־‬ ֥ ֶ ‫וַיְ ִ֕הי ַּכא‬ ‫מַ ְר ֶ ֖אה ָ ֽא ְּת׃‬ ‫וְ הָ ָ֗יה ִ ּֽכי־יִ ְר ֤אּו אֹ תָ ְך֙ הַ ִּמצְ ִ ֔רים וְ אָ ְמ ֖רּו ִא ְׁש ּ֣תֹו ֑ז ֹאת וְ הָ ְרג֥ ּו אֹ ִ ֖תי וְ אֹ ָ ֥תְך יְ חַ ּיֽ ּו׃‬ ‫ֲבּורְך וְ חָ יְ ָ ֥תה נַפְ ִ ׁ֖שי ּבִ גְ ל ֵ ָֽלְך׃‬ ֔ ֵ ‫ב־לי בַ ע‬ ֣ ִ ַ‫ִא ְמ ִרי־נָ ֖א אֲחֹ֣ ִתי ָ ֑א ְּת לְ ַ֙מעַן֙ ִ ֽייט‬ ‫ת־ה ִ֣אּׁשָ֔ ה ִ ּֽכי־יָפָ ֥ה ִ ֖הוא ְמאֹֽ ד׃‬ ָ ֶ‫וַיְ ִ֕הי ּכְ ֥בֹוא אַ בְ ָ ֖רם ִמצְ ָ ֑ריְ מָ ה וַּיִ ְר ֤אּו הַ ִּמצְ ִרים֙ א‬ ‫וַּיִ ְר ֤אּו אֹ תָ ּה֙ ׂשָ ֵ ֣רי פ ְַרעֹ֔ ה וַיְ ַ ֽהלְ ל֥ ּו אֹ ָ ֖תּה אֶ ל־ּפ ְַר ֑ ֹעה וַּתֻ ַ ּ֥קח הָ ִא ָ ּׁ֖שה ֵּב֥ית ּפ ְַר ֽ ֹעה׃‬ ‫ּוׁשפָחֹ֔ ת ַואֲתֹ ֖ ֹנת ּוגְ מַ ִ ּֽלים׃‬ ְ ֙‫ֲבּורּה ַו�ֽיְ הִ י־ל֤ ֹו צ ֹאן־ּובָ קָ ר֙ ַוחֲמֹ ִ ֔רים ַועֲבָ ִדים‬ ֑ ָ ‫יטיב ּבַ ע‬ ֖ ִ ֵ‫ּולְ אַ בְ ָ ֥רם ה‬ ‫ַל־ּד ַב֥ר ׂשָ ַ ֖רי ֵ ֥אׁשֶ ת אַ בְ ָ ֽרם׃‬ ְ ‫וַיְ ַנ ֨ ַּגע יְ הֹ וָ ֧ה ׀ אֶ ת־ּפ ְַר ֛ ֹעה נְ ג ִ ָ֥עים ּגְ דֹ ִ ֖לים וְ אֶ ת־ּבֵ ֑יתֹו ע‬ ‫וַּיִ קְ ָ ֤רא פ ְַרעֹ ה֙ לְ אַ בְ ָ ֔רם ַו ּ֕י ֹאמֶ ר מַ ה־ ּ֖ז ֹאת ע ִ ָׂ֣שיתָ ִ ּ֑לי ָ֚לּמָ ה ל ֹא־הִ ּגַ ְ�֣דּתָ ּלִ֔ י ִ ּ֥כי ִא ְׁש ְּתָך֖ ִ ֽהוא׃‬ ‫ל ָ ָ֤מה אָ ַ֙מ ְר ָּ֙ת אֲחֹ֣ ִתי ִ֔הוא וָאֶ ַ ּ֥קח אֹ ָ ֛תּה ִ ֖לי לְ ִא ָ ּׁ֑שה וְ ע ֕ ַָּתה הִ ּנֵ ֥ה ִא ְׁש ְּתָך֖ ַ ֥קח ו ֵ ָֽלְך׃‬ ‫ת־א ְׁש ּ֖תֹו וְ אֶ ת־ּכׇל־אֲׁשֶ ר־לֽ ֹו׃‬ ִ ֶ‫וַיְ ַצ֥ו עָלָ ֛יו ּפ ְַר ֖ ֹעה ֲאנ ִ ָׁ֑שים ַו�ֽיְ ׁשַ ּלְ ֥חּו אֹ ֛תֹו וְ א‬ 12:10. There was a famine in the land, and Abraham went to Egypt to live there because the famine in the land was very heavy [intense]. 11. And it was when he came close to coming [arriving] in Egypt he said to Sarah his wife, “Behold now I know that you are a beautiful looking woman. 12. And it will be that when the Egyptians see you and say, ‘She is his wife,’ they will kill me and let you live. 13. Please say that you are my sister so that it will go well for me because of you and so my soul will live because of you.” — 58 —

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14. And it was when Abraham came to Egypt the Egyptians saw his wife and saw that she was very beautiful. 15. Pharaoh’s courtiers saw her and praised her to Pharoah. She, the woman, was taken to Pharaoh’s house. 16. And for Abraham it went well [good] because of her. He got sheep, oxen, donkeys, male and female servants, female donkeys, and camels. 17. Then God inflicted Pharoah with large plagues, as well as his house, because of the matter of Sarah, Abraham’s wife. 18. Then Pharaoh called to Abraham saying, “What is this that you did to me?! Why did you not tell me that she is your wife? 19. Why did you say, ‘She is my sister?’ so that I took her [thinking of her] as your sister for myself as a wife. And now behold, she is your wife! Take! Go!” 20. And Pharaoh commanded his people and they sent him away [Abraham] and his wife and all that was his. The discussion excerpt I analyze below comes from our culminating whole-​­class text discussion at the end of the unit. As was our practice, for this discussion the students moved their chairs from behind their desks and formed a circle in the middle of the room. Each student had their translated text and notes in their lap. Kate raised her hand to start the discussion. Kate: So my question is, why doesn’t Sarah respond to Abraham’s statement that she was beautiful? It doesn’t say a lot of things in the Torah. I don’t know if he said she was beautiful, and then there was silence. She must have reacted in some way. Because I don’t think it would make sense if she . . . you don’t have a conversation with one person saying something and no one responding. It doesn’t really make sense. Kate began with a question rooted in something missing from the text. Her question was, “Why doesn’t Sarah respond to Abraham’s statement that she was beautiful?” She then went on to make a claim about the Hebrew Bible in general: “It doesn’t say a lot of things in the Torah.” But she insisted that Sarah “must have reacted in some way.” To Kate, it’s inconceivable that Sarah would have nothing to say after Abraham says that she is beautiful and that she should lie and say he’s her sister. But even as Kate explained her question, it changed subtly. It went — 59 —

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from asking why Sarah didn’t respond to asking why Sarah’s response was omitted from the text. The biblical text itself offers no indication of whether Sarah did or did not respond to Abraham’s request (except, of course, the fact that it doesn’t record a response). But Kate can’t imagine that Sarah wouldn’t have responded. To Kate, it was obvious that Sarah did respond. When Kate read this text, she applied her own interpretive rules that shaped how her interpretation unfolded. This is important to note, because on the surface it appears that she ended her interpretation in confusion, but a close look clarifies that Kate is not the confused party. By her rules, it is the Hebrew Bible that doesn’t make sense. Regarding this notion about how the Hebrew Bible tells its stories, Kate had a particular interpretive rule. As she put it, “It doesn’t say a lot of things in the Torah.” When she reads the Hebrew Bible, she stays on the lookout for parts that might have been left out. Her interpretation took for granted that there could be more to the story than what is written on the page. The Hebrew Bible (or its author) makes choices about what to include and what to leave out. If readers follow this rule, they should read every story with a kind of suspicion: What might the text not be telling me? (It’s also easy to imagine an alternative rule​— namely, that if it’s not in the text, it didn’t happen. Given this rule, a reader might still ask, why didn’t Sarah respond? But they couldn’t ask, why might her response have been left out of the text?) Kate also had a second interpretive rule that has to do with how the text represents the behavior of its characters. She assumes that characters in the Hebrew Bible will behave in the same ways as people she knows: “You don’t have a conversation with one person saying something and no one responding.” Her belief was that there is simply no way that a person could hear what Abraham proposed and fail to say anything in response. It’s this interpretive rule that makes the text puzzling. When you combine this interpretive rule with the other interpretive rule, that the text could have left something out, it becomes clear by Kate’s reasoning that the text must have omitted Sarah’s response.

Continuing the Conversation Kate’s two interpretive rules shaped and constrained the rest of the conversation about the biblical text we were reading. Her classmates implicitly accepted her interpretive rules in this discussion. In fact, they worked — 60 —

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with her to respond to her question, and over the course of the exchange they collaboratively built an interpretation as to why Sarah’s response may have been omitted from the text. Together, the students discussed a shared question: Why didn’t the Torah record Sarah’s response to Abraham’s plan and his specific comment noticing his wife’s beauty? But even as my students accepted the interpretive rules that made this question possible, they offered different answers to the shared question. Let’s look at how the rest of that conversation unfolded. Saul: It’s possible that she did have a response, but it wasn’t, like, a big enough response to affect the overall plot of what was going on. Like, if she just said, “Oh thanks,” that doesn’t affect anything. There’s no real reason for the Torah to mention it. Lev: Just like adding on, the Torah doesn’t say a lot about what Sarah does, so I’m guessing she does respond somehow. But like Saul said, it’s not something that would mean something later on. She just said, “Aw thanks,” or something like that. So it didn’t affect anything that would happen later. Natan: Well, I was going to say basically what Lev said, because Sarah barely talks. Like maybe the Torah is trying to make a statement by not making Sarah talk so they just wouldn’t say that. Me: Like what kind of statement? Natan: Like that it’s just not important and that Sarah is with Abraham and will do what Abraham does. Saul: Except that she doesn’t. Saul reacted to Kate’s comment by proposing a reason why the text might have omitted Sarah’s response. He proposed that Sarah might have responded, but that her reply was unimportant to the plot and so it was left out. In this way, he built on Kate’s principle that there are parts of the story that the text doesn’t mention. Saul then applied his own interpretive rule: the Hebrew Bible may omit historical details that do not affect future events. Saul accepted Kate’s rule that historical details get left out of the text of the Hebrew Bible and added a guiding principle for what is included and what is omitted. Lev continued to play out Kate and Saul’s point. He suggested that some characters in the text matter more than others. In his view, Sarah, in general, plays a minimal role (a debatable point, to be sure), but therefore, her offhand comments could be omitted from the Hebrew Bible — 61 —

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without missing anything. Lev’s rule was slightly different than Saul’s rule. Saul’s rule was that the text only includes dialogue and actions of characters that impact the future. Lev’s rule is that only important characters deserve to get quoted. Natan continued to explore why the text might have omitted Sarah’s response to Abraham. Natan, however, offered a very different reason and implicit interpretive rule. Natan repeated Lev’s observation that Sarah is a minor character and suggested that the Hebrew Bible skips reporting her comments in order to make a statement. He goes on to suggest that by not recording her words, the Hebrew Bible asserts that she is an unimportant character, a kind of extension of Abraham in the text’s view. Natan’s implicit interpretive rule stands in stark contrast to Lev’s despite the fact that he began his comment, “I was going to say basically what Lev said . . .” He doesn’t​— in fact, he says something very different. Natan did not claim that the Hebrew Bible excludes inconsequential historical details (because a text can’t include everything) as Lev did; rather, Natan claimed that the exclusion itself hints at a deeper meaning. Accepting Kate’s rule that Sarah must have had some sort of reaction, Natan suggested the Hebrew Bible almost assumes the reader will expect and want an account of Sarah’s reaction. Natan argued that the biblical text withholds it intentionally​— specifically to communicate Sarah’s unimportance. It’s as if the text is saying, “You, reader, might want to know Sarah’s response, but let this be a reminder of how inconsequential she truly was.” Lev and Natan at this point have offered interpretations rooted in conflicting interpretive rules. Lev says the text omits unimportant historical details for practical reasons of space. Natan says the text could omit important historical details to convey a message about the unimportance of certain characters. If important details are intentionally left out because they happened to unimportant characters, think about how that would change other biblical stories. Chapter 2 of this book examined the biblical text of God’s command to Abraham to leave his home and go to the land that God would show him. In that text, Sarah does not speak. Following Lev’s interpretive rule, it would be fair to assume her not speaking suggests a general assent to Abraham’s choice to listen to God and move. Following Natan’s interpretive rule, however, a very different assumption might be reasonable. Perhaps Sarah protested loudly and emphatically to her husband’s decision to move the family, but be— 62 —

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cause she is not an important character, the Hebrew Bible left her protest out of the story. In the class discussion, Saul then jumped in to respond and challenge Natan with the exact interpretive rule I hoped to promote​— using the text in front of us for evidence. Saul pointed out that the text in front of us (Genesis 12:10–20) was not consistent with the second part of Natan’s comment: “that Sarah is with Abraham and will do what Abraham does.” Saul pointed out that according to the text, Sarah doesn’t follow Abraham’s plan. It’s not clear what Saul’s referring to, but there is certainly a plausible interpretation of the text to support him. After all, the text doesn’t report her saying that she is Abraham’s sister, which is exactly what Abraham asks her to do. Abraham told Sarah (12:13), “Please say that you are my sister.” Later in the text, Pharaoh discovers that Sarah is not actually Abraham’s sister. He comes to Abraham and asks (12:18-19), “What is this that you did to me?! Why did you not tell me that she is your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister?’” According to Pharoah, Abraham himself said the sister line, not Sarah. If Sarah refused to execute Abraham’s plan, then she certainly does have a will of her own according to the text. Natan’s answer, therefore, can’t be correct​— not at least if one reads the text in front of us closely. At the same time, Saul did not address Natan’s interpretive rule​— just his claim about the text. None of her classmates challenged Kate’s two interpretive rules. Instead, the exploration of the text and its story in this class took for granted both of Kate’s interpretive rules about the text: that Sarah would have responded and that the text left out her response. The question my students ended up discussing wasn’t Kate’s original question, why didn’t Sarah respond? but rather, why did the text leave out Sarah’s response? It is clear that a conversation in which students held different interpretive rules would have unfolded very differently.

Reacting and Reflecting about Student Interpretations I wanted this culminating whole-​­class text discussion to stay in the students’ hands, following their interpretive direction. Nonetheless, I was having a lot of emotions. My internal monologue was on overdrive. I was reacting to every student comment in my mind, and I noticed a pattern. Comments that aligned with what I would have said next had me smiling with excitement, and comments that went in a different direction — 63 —

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caused my eyebrows to furrow. There were clear criteria for comments that had me smiling (or holding back a smile impulse). I wanted my students to always point to some explicit detail or hint in the text to justify their interpretation. In fact, the smaller the hint, almost the better. I was excited that Kate noticed that Sarah doesn’t respond to her husband, Abraham, in the text. This was great textual grist for our interpretive mill. I was disappointed that she then jumped to the assumption that Sarah’s response was omitted from the text but pointed to no textual evidence to support her conviction that Sarah did in fact respond. Then Saul noticed that Sarah doesn’t actually follow Abraham’s plan in the text, and I felt very excited again. This observation requires noticing something pretty subtle in the text and provides a textual warrant for Kate’s claim that Sarah’s response was omitted (or at least that Sarah wasn’t onboard with this plan, regardless of what she did or didn’t say). When Saul pointed this out, I noticed myself hoping that the class would use this subtle textual observation to begin to build robust textual interpretations. They didn’t, and that was OK​— it was only our second unit. But noticing my reaction to these comments helped me much more clearly articulate the interpretive rules that I wanted to promote. Reflecting honestly about myself as reader, I know that I took issue with both Natan’s and Lev’s interpretations, both of which cast Sarah as an insignificant character, unimportant to the biblical narrative (Natan’s interpretation doing so in a more intentional and sinister way). When I read and interpret biblical stories myself, female characters are always powerful and driving forces. My personal interpretive rule, taken from biblical scholars like Phyllis Trible, Avivah Zornberg, and Ilana Pardes, is to always look for women’s subtle but important roles in the story. That’s how I read the Hebrew Bible. But I had to ask myself, was this an interpretive rule I was willing to impose on my students in my class? As much as I wanted them to see the subtle and often subversive role biblical women play in the text (as I read it), it was not an interpretive rule I was willing to ask my students to follow. The interpretive rules I wanted them to follow, the literacy practice I hoped to induct them into, had a particular position towards the details in the text but did not extend to any particular ideological perspective. My students would not be pushed or required to read with a feminist or any other ideological lens, even if I personally read with a feminist lens. So what interpretive rules would I ask my students to follow? What — 64 —

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interpretive rules constituted the scriptural literacy practice I hoped to induct them into? I wanted my students to offer only those interpretations that they could “support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text” (de Man 1986, 23). This simple rule sets a high bar. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to follow it all the time. But setting this bar, even if we often fail to meet it, would create textual discussions that engage the scriptural literacy practice I wanted to induct my students  into. Thinking about this exchange led me to affirm my first interpretive rule and notice a second interpretive rule: 1. We would try to ground all of our interpretations in the text itself. We would share only those interpretations that we could “support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text” (de Man 1986, 23). 2. We would treat every part of the biblical text as potentially meaningful. We would avoid explaining something as an error, unintentional omission, or arbitrary authorial choice. These two rules were very much related to one another. If we were bound to the biblical Hebrew, that is, the “language that actually occurred in the text,” this was going to be our well of meaning, and we needed every ounce of potential meaning we could get. Every detail needed to be treated as important, every seeming repetition treated as meaningful. For example, when, in Genesis 12:13, Abraham gives two reasons for Sarah to lie about her relation to him, each reason needed to be considered in its own right: “so that it will go well for me” and “my soul will live” (12:13: ‫ֲבּורְך וְ חָ יְ ָ ֥תה נַפְ ִ ׁ֖שי ּבִ גְ ל ֵ ָֽלְך‬ ֔ ֵ ‫ב־לי בַ ע‬ ֣ ִ ַ‫ ִא ְמ ִרי־נָ ֖א אֲחֹ֣ ִתי ָ ֑א ְּת לְ ַ֙מעַן֙ ִ ֽייט‬: “Please say that you are my sister so that it will go well for me because of you and so my soul will live because of you.”). It would seem as though there was only one reason Sarah should pretend to be Abraham’s sister: so that he wouldn’t get killed. Why does Abraham give two similar reasons in the biblical text? This demanded further analysis. We needed to consider what it revealed about Abraham’s motives for making this request of Sarah. Another example: if all we had was the text in front of us, we would need to consider every explicit naming of the subject of a verb (e.g., 12:15: ‫וַּתֻ ַ ּ֥קח הָ ִא ָ ּׁ֖שה ֵּב֥ית ּפ ְַר ֽ ֹעה‬: “She, the woman, was taken to Pharoah’s house”) for our interpretive sandbox. Why did the text explicitly note the subject — 65 —

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(“the woman”) and why in this way, when biblical Hebrew, through its conjugation system, always has the option to denote the subject of a verb without naming the subject ‫וַּתֻ ַ ּ֥קח‬: “and she was taken”)? We know whom she refers to, so why does the biblical text add the explicit subject (“the woman”)? This detail is interpretively meaningful. Attention to the details of every discrepancy between the stated plan and the execution of the plan also offers striking material for interpretation (e.g., 12:19: ‫ל ָ ָ֤מה‬ ‫אָ ַ֙מ ְר ָּ֙ת אֲחֹ֣ ִתי‬: “Why did you [Abraham] say, ‘She is my sister’?”). Abraham told Sarah to say she was his sister, but Pharaoh recounts Abraham saying it. This discrepancy is full of interpretive potential, as discussed above. In the end, I wanted my students to treat every part of the biblical text they had in front of them, in its original biblical Hebrew, as potentially meaningful because we were going to ground our interpretations in the text itself. Hearing the conversation among my students and monitoring my own reaction helped me clearly articulate these two interpretive rules. My students discussed the biblical passage and shared the assumption that Sarah must have responded to Abraham’s comment to her and request of her. They then began to generate reasons why the text didn’t include her response. It was not until Saul’s final comment that the class discussion returned to the “specific use of language that actually occurred in the text” (Rule 1). Here is how I wish the conversation had unfolded and how I filled it in for myself while listening. Realizing what I wanted specifically out of each student comment helped me identify the common thread underlying my reaction, namely, my first two interpretive rules. The actual transcript is repeated below. My desired additions to their comments, additions that would move each of these comments into interpretive rules 1 and 2, are italicized. Saul: It’s possible that she did have a response, but it wasn’t, like, a big enough response to affect the overall plot of what was going on. Like, if she just said, “Oh thanks,” that doesn’t affect anything. There’s no real reason for the Torah to mention it. Like we see in verse 15, Sarah “is taken.” The passive form of the verb suggests that she went willingly to Pharaoh’s house without resistance. I think we can infer from this that she was OK with Abraham’s plan and went along with it (Rules 1 and 2). — 66 —

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Lev: Um, just like adding on, the Torah doesn’t say a lot about what Sarah does, so I’m guessing she does respond somehow. But like Saul said, it’s not something that would mean something later on. She just said, “Aw thanks . . .” or something like that. So it didn’t affect anything that would happen later. They arrive in Egypt in verse 14. The Egyptians do in fact notice that Sarah is beautiful, as Abraham predicted. They then take her without any resistance in verse 15, as Saul pointed out, and in verse 16 we see that Abraham lives. This smooth progression of a rather traumatic series of events is evidence of Sarah’s partnership and compliance with Abraham’s plan (Rule 1). Natan: Well, I was going to say basically what Lev said, because Sarah barely talks. Like maybe the Torah is trying to make a statement by not making Sarah talk so they just wouldn’t say that. As Saul mentioned, it seems the use of the passive form of the verb in verse 15​— that Sarah “is taken” when the biblical text could have easily said “the Egyptians took” using the active form of the verb​— supports the idea that the Hebrew Bible is making a statement. The use of the passive verb is meaningful (Rule 2). The verbal form is a statement about just how passive (and willing) Sarah was. Me: Like what kind of statement? Natan: Like that it’s just not important and that Sarah is with Abraham and will do what Abraham does. Saul: Except that she doesn’t. Pharoah reports in verse 19 that Abraham was the one who had to say, “She is my sister.” It says, “Why did you say, ‘She is my sister’?” If Pharoah’s account is true, then it seems plain that Sarah did not go along with Abraham’s plan. Abraham’s plan as seen in verse 13​— “Please say that you are my sister”​— i.e., is for Sarah to say it, not for him to say it. She must have refused his plan and refused to say, “I am his sister” (Rules 1 and 2). So perhaps the passive verb in verse 15​— that Sarah “is taken,” when the biblical text could have easily said “the Egyptians took” using the active form of the verb​— supports the idea that the Hebrew Bible is making a statement, as Natan said, but the statement is actually the opposite statement. Sarah resisted going and so she had to be “taken” against her will. — 67 —

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As I filled in this conversation while I listened to my students, it became clear to me what I wanted. I was OK with my students’ ideas about the characters (even if I personally disagreed). I was willing to have them push that Sarah was so compliant with Abraham’s plans, her response so obvious, that, in fact, there was no need to include it in the text itself (even if the feminist in me cringed at this interpretation). Textually, the idea was just fine. But what I was waiting for was for my students to support the idea using the text itself. I felt Saul was the first student to sort of get us there at the end, or at least move us in that direction. As I filled in the textual support for them in my head, my first two interpretive rules crystallized: first, use only the text and, second, nothing in the text is too small, nuanced, or fanciful to use as support for your ideas. I had a third interpretive rule I articulated for myself as well after listening to the recording of this second whole-​­class culminating text discussion and writing down how I filled in each of their comments. This third rule was less about how we read and used the text; it was much more focused on how we read and used the text together. It was a rule about how to proceed if one of my students had an interpretation different from someone else’s. This rule became clear to me after listening to Saul’s final comment: “Except that she doesn’t.” Yes, I was excited that he moved us back towards the text itself. I was also excited that he disagreed with his classmate. I wanted disagreement. I believed that a willingness and comfort with disagreement was necessary if we were really going to follow Rules 1 and 2 as articulated above. I named this third and final interpretive rule to myself: Rule 3: as readers, we would strive to clarify the meaning of the text by articulating opposing interpretations and then marshalling textual evidence to support one or the other. Saul’s final comment was so important in my mind because he was going to push his classmates. Rule 3 nudged students in the direction of Rules 1 and 2 because it pushed the students to defend their interpretations in the face of contrasting interpretations.

How Compatible Are My Rules with My Students’ Rules? So where did this effort to understand my students’ interpretive rules leave me? It helped me realize that my interpretive rules were going to be compatible with many of the ways my students wanted to read while also pushing them to support and articulate their readings in particular — 68 —

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ways. It was fine if Kate had a feeling, based on how humans interact in her world, that biblical Sarah must have had a response to Abraham’s request. It was also fine if she believed the text omitted that response. These could stand with my first rule, that students offer only those interpretations that they could “support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text.” Kate just needed to find that textual hint implying that Sarah had responded. I realized that my interpretive rules would often only ask students to add one more step to their interpretations, a textual-​­grounding step that moved them into alignment with my first interpretive rule, and​— depending on the textual grounding they chose​— my second interpretive rule. I wanted them to articulate what I articulated for them in my mind (shown in the italicized transcript comments). My three interpretive rules were designed to introduce students to a way of careful reading: focusing on the words on the page, sitting with their ambiguity, and generating multiple and conflicting interpretations that were characteristic of Jewish scriptural literacy practices. This commitment to keeping the text at the center is not an idiosyncratic preference of mine; it is a reflection of a very real interpretive community and also a celebration of the difficult second language work my students were doing to read the text in biblical Hebrew, even as we discussed it in English. In my desire to be dialogic, I was increasingly OK with the rules that would serve as the boundaries of dialogic discussion.

Conclusion: Understanding Students as Interpreters The idea of interpretive rules made it possible for me, as the teacher, to better understand my students. Asking myself what rules my students might be following in creating their interpretations helped me as the teacher reframe misunderstandings or off-​­the-​­wall comments or just eyebrow-​­furrowing ideas into legitimate interpretations that were based on a different but coherent set of rules about how texts produce meaning. It allowed me to better understand and respect my students (one of the tenets of dialogic instruction). Equally important, it helped me define my own interpretive rules for the classroom. These rules needed to be defined relative to my students. Much of what they wanted to do with the biblical text was compatible with the boundaries I wanted to set, but some of it was in tension. There — 69 —

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were moments where they explicitly, and sometimes defiantly, didn’t want to use the biblical text to support their interpretations. This was not because they couldn’t​— following my interpretive rules, especially Rule 2, there was always some creative, small hint in the biblical text of even the most fanciful interpretations. Some of what my students wanted to do was in tension because they wanted it to be. Sometimes, as the year went on, they declared they didn’t want to follow my interpretive rules. They felt their interpretation had better grounding in human psychology or historical reality and so didn’t need textual evidence. These moments were powerful because they demonstrated that my students understood the interpretive rules governing our class. This was a huge accomplishment. The work it took to clearly articulate and enforce my three interpretive rules, once equipped with an understanding of those rules, is the focus of the next chapter. What I did in the moments of tension, what I came to call “the second conversation,” is the final exploration of this book. At this point in my teaching, I was able to articulate my three interconnected interpretive rules, and I was able to share them explicitly with all my students so that they would know, without any guessing, what I wanted them to do with texts in my classroom. For some of my students these rules would feel natural, and for others they would feel awkward and imposing. I was committed to the idea that both groups of students, and every student in between, would have an equally solid grasp of the rules. I did not want students in my classroom feeling as though the good questions and comments in the classroom were totally arbitrary and random (as discussed in chapter 2). But stating rules and having students truly absorb them are two different matters. In chapter 4, I explore how, after this second unit and culminating whole-​­class text discussion, reinforcing the interpretive rules became one of my main teaching objectives.

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4 The First Conversation Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

In his book Is There a Text in This Class?, the literary critic Stanley Fish states that interpretive rules “exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around” (Fish 1980, 171). All of us come to texts already embedded, knowingly or unknowingly, in literacy practices, governed by a set of interpretive rules. For example, before we even see a text, we have expectations regarding whether the text will communicate a coherent message to us, whether or not we expect the text to be commensurate with our reality, and whether or not it’s appropriate to read the text as poetic and full of allusions and metaphors or as a straightforward literal text​— what literary theorist Louise Rosenblatt called an “aesthetic” or an “efferent” reading (1995, 292). If we want to discuss the text with others, it is helpful to share answers to these questions, at least for the duration of the text discussion. That is, we need to engage in the same literacy practice, follow the same set of interpretive rules, even if that shared practice takes us to different interpretations. We can decide the meaning of a text only because we are equipped with these rules and expectations. Fish explains that the interpretive rules we read with can be widely shared or somewhat idiosyncratic. But they are always a reflection of an interpretive community with a particular literacy practice. Fish goes on to explain that we all exist in multiple interpretive communities and move among them. Rules that are widely shared in one context and community may feel idiosyncratic in another (think back to the student who moved from Menachem’s school to Yonatan’s school). We all move — 71 —

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between literacy practices, depending on where we are and who we are with. Central to my teaching was the realization that my students don’t read scripture according to the same literacy practices, but it would be helpful if they did​— at least for the duration of my class. This realization was one of the most essential points in my teaching journey. I came to understand that part of my work as a teacher was to introduce my students to our classroom as an interpretive community. A “community” because interpretive activity happens only within interpretive communities governed by interpretive rules. “Introduce” because, as Barry Holtz’s work on orientations and later the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Tanakh Standards and Benchmarks professional development program made clear, the interpretive community of a Hebrew Bible classroom cannot be assumed (Holtz 2003). The interpretive community has to be announced, even​— or especially​— because given the ethnoreligious nature of the text classroom in a mission-​­driven school, one might think it can be assumed. Naming and introducing the literacy practice and its interpretive rules was work for me to do as the teacher before stepping aside and abdicating interpretive authority in the name of dialogic teaching. The classroom can offer instruction in another critically important part of reading: reading together. Elizabeth Long (1982) writes about the iconographic history of portraying the reader and writer as alone and solitary and how this has contributed to “the theoretical location of reading in the private sphere or, more extremely, in the heads of isolated individuals” (1982, 190). She then goes on to explain, “The ideology of the solitary reader . . . suppresses recognition of the infrastructure of literacy and the social or institutional determinants of what’s available to read, what is ‘worth reading,’ and how to read it” (1982, 193). In other words, in our popular image of reading as a solitary act, something done in private on one’s own, we ignore all the ways that reading is fundamentally social, both in how we read and what we read. Long reminds us of the ways in which we have not only failed to recognize reading as social but worked hard to imagine it as the very opposite​— private and personal. Jewish reading has always understood itself to be a collective act (Boyarin 1993; Heilman 2017; Holzer and Kent 2013), but this too has been forgotten in formal Jewish schools where Jewish text education is often modeled on secular text education in the transmission mode of literacy: the teacher moving students towards a single authoritative interpreta— 72 —

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tion. The paradigmatic Jewish tradition of learning in the beit mid­rash (study hall) with a chevruta (a study companion) (Kent 2010)​— in other words, studying texts in a community with at least one other person in a room filled with many people​— speaks to the collective nature of Jewish reading (as an activity). When I decided to approach my Hebrew Bible classroom as an opportunity to form an interpretive community governed by interpretive rules, I was arguably going back to the traditional conception of Jewish reading as a collective act. I understood the validity of my three interpretive rules as a reflection of traditional Jewish scriptural literacy practices that I could induct my students into in my classroom. Asking my students to learn a new literacy practice, to enter a new interpretive community, was not in and of itself problematic. It is, what reading is. The classroom can become an occasion for demystifying the nature of reading for students. It can become an occasion to articulate unspoken truths about reading, including that students are often expected to read with certain rules in one particular class or space and not another. Framing the classroom as an interpretive community being formed with interpretive rules (some familiar, some not) can help develop students’ understanding about the ways we read and the ways we are asked to read. I am not the first to suggest that the classroom can be a meaningful interpretive community. In her book Literacy Practices as Social Acts, Cynthia Lewis writes just that. She explains, “[I take] a view of [the] classroom life as a temporary culture with a 9-month life span. Viewing the classroom as a culture is useful in that it provides a context for examining discourse and ritual as they represent group life and, in this case, define what it means to read and discuss literature” (2001, 12). Seeing the classroom as its own intentional interpretive community, or as a culture (in Lewis’s words), creates another affordance. It allows my Hebrew Bible classroom to contribute to a culture of Jewish belonging for my students. Jonathan Boyarin argues that in Jewish tradition, “the means of appropriation of the ongoing tradition is reflective” (1993, 228). Readers need not agree with the message of a text or accept someone else’s derived message from a text; they only must engage with it. Jewish tradition invites readers into the conversation and elevates their status, in the words of Maren Aukerman, to “possible knower,” that is, a reader who has the authority and power to be in conversation, to reinterpret, or to disagree with sacred texts (2007, 77). By telling my stu— 73 —

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dents the rules we would use when reading the biblical texts together as a class, I was assisting them in assuming their roles as “empowered disputants” together (Sarris 1993, 263).

Reading Together : How Does the Dialogic Teacher Impose Interpretive Rules? The classroom doesn’t have to be either repressive or an open market for students to work everything out while the teacher watches from the sidelines. The key to inclusion, recognition, and celebration of students as readers​— helping students engage in the activity of interpretation​— is not the absence of a teaching agenda, but transparency about a teaching agenda. I’d ask students to follow these three rules for my classroom, I’d explain the reasons why I chose these rules, and I’d recognize that there could be other rules and that students might read differently in other spaces in their lives. This clarity and transparency around the interpretive rules of a classroom, which takes a tremendous amount of work, is what would make my classroom a meaningful and inclusive interpretive space​— more so, in my strongest opinion, than stepping to the sidelines. I wasn’t going to alienate any students for not coming from the same background and interpretive community as I did, but I also wasn’t going to let my classroom simply be a room full of kids dancing to their own songs. We were going to dance together.

Reading a Text and Reading a Text Together (Talking about Reading a Text) In my classroom, I decided I was going to set the interpretive rules. And yet, if I wanted to follow dialogic instruction as closely as possible, why didn’t I let the students weigh in on interpretive rules for our class and decide them together? This is a tension in my teaching. It would have been possible to take the time to let the students decide the interpretive rules, but I didn’t. I wanted to induct them into particular traditional Jewish scriptural literacy practices. In the end, this consideration outweighed the more dialogic option of letting students participate in deciding the interpretive rules. It is important to acknowledge that in any classroom, the interpretive rules are just one component of the larger literacy event. That is, how the teacher expects students to engage in discussion in class (using — 74 —

Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

the rules or not). John Gumperz writes about contextualization cues in the context of classroom talk. That is, the unspoken expectations (verbal and nonverbal signs) that relate to how we share our ideas and questions. Gumperz provides the following example from a classroom (1982, 147): Teacher: James, what does this word say? James: I don’t know. Teacher: Well, if you don’t want to try someone else will. Freddy? Freddy: Is that a p or a b? Teacher: (encouragingly) It’s a p. Freddy: Pen. The teacher’s response indicates her interpretation of James’s “I don’t know” not in terms of its literal meaning, but as an indication that James did not wish to try to answer the question. Gumperz argues that because “I don’t know” had final rising intonation, it was perhaps expressing a desire for encouragement (“I need some encouragement”). Reflecting on this example from Gumperz, Deborah Schiffrin writes, “Thus, we might say that the teacher did not retrieve the contextual presuppositions needed to accurately interpret James’s message (his speech act) from his use of rising intonation” (1996, 314). Similarly, in my classroom some students knew the implicit contextual cues for participating in a way that other students did not. As Cynthia Lewis explains, “To be a successful student, one must demonstrate knowledge of standards for participation. . . . Students who do not develop such competence are excluded from other related events in academic settings” (2001, 77). Part of writing about the classroom as a potentially meaningful interpretive community and community of belonging requires consideration not only of interpretive rules but also standards for participation in demonstrating knowledge of the interpretive rules. I work to consider both throughout my analysis and reflection.

Teaching My Three Interpretive Rules Recall my three interpretive rules for my seventh-​­grade Hebrew Bible classroom: 1. We would try to ground all of our interpretations in the text itself. We would share only those interpretations that we could “support — 75 —

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by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text” (de Man 1986, 23). 2. We would treat every part of the biblical text as potentially meaningful. We would avoid explaining something as an error, unintentional omission, or arbitrary authorial choice. 3. As readers we would strive to clarify the meaning of the text by articulating opposing interpretations and then marshalling textual evidence to support one or the other. The constraints of these rules, in particular being limited to the words on the page in front of you, foster a kind of discipline that can be helpful even when adding other interpretive rules and assumptions into the mix. These rules helped create a more equal playing field among students with varying biblical background knowledge. And these rules were articulated in conversation with the ways of reading I saw my students engaging in​— their interpretive rules and assumptions. But the why behind explicit interpretive rules doesn’t make the how any easier. How did I get explicit about the interpretive rules we would follow in our Hebrew Bible classroom?

How Did I Teach My Three Interpretive Rules? First, I engaged in constant, intentional modeling. When I taught, I asked the students questions about the text that were rooted in textual details as we read and translated each verse. I pointed out ambiguities in the text and modeled different ways to resolve those ambiguities. For example, I would ask my students to consider ambiguous pronouns while translating the text in preparation for our culminating whole-​­class text discussion. When no actor was connected to a particular action and verb in the text, I would point that out and ask students which character might have done that action. I then asked the students (and guided them) to identify the implication of each resolution for the meaning of the text. For example, when we studied Genesis 16, the story of Sarah making Hagar her surrogate, I pointed out the ambiguity of pronoun in verse 4 (translation my own):

‫ֵינֽיהָ ׃‬ ֶ ‫ַו ָּי ֥ב ֹא אֶ ל־הָ גָ ֖ר ו ַ ַּ֑תהַ ר ו ֵַּ֙ת ֶרא֙ ִ ּ֣כי הָ ָ ֔רתָ ה וַּתֵ ַ ֥קל ּגְ בִ ְר ָ ּ֖תּה ּבְ ע‬ And he came to Hagar and she conceived; and she saw that she had become pregnant, and her mistress was lowered in her eyes. — 76 —

Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

It is clear who became pregnant: Hagar. It is less clear who noticed that Hagar was pregnant: Was it Hagar herself, or Sarah? Even the next clause of the verse maintains some ambiguity​— who became lowered in whose esteem? “Mistress” most likely refers to Sarah, but not conclusively. I announced to my class that we had interpretive liberty to insert any character we wanted who fit the pronoun. I asked them to slot in each character who fit the pronoun and then explain what the implication of that was for the narrative. I modeled Rule 1 by focusing on the words of the text. I modeled Rule 2 by showing how something as small as an ambiguous attribution of a verb could serve as important textual evidence. Finally, by considering every character that could fit the ambiguous attribution, I modeled Rule 3: that we wanted to uncover and entertain competing interpretations. Second, I talked constantly during class about “trying on” a set of interpretive rules. In each unit, students spent multiple classes translating and understanding the biblical passage (eight to sixteen verses) in the original biblical Hebrew. This meant going over grammatical constructs in biblical Hebrew; reviewing biblical Hebrew vocabulary; reading the passage out loud as a class, over and over, for fluency; and having the students sit in small groups to make sure they could translate and understand the biblical Hebrew. Throughout these classes, we engaged in reader’s theater (Prescott 2003), where the students acted out the passage, with one student playing narrator and other students playing each character. During performances, interpretative choices were on display, even in the students’ choice of intonation to perform the passage, especially in the dialogue. It was in these moments that I pushed the students to reflect on their implicit interpretive choices. I pushed in a number of ways. I asked a lot of interpretive questions. When they read or performed the passage, I asked why they used a particular tone in reading dialogue. What interpretations did their choice of tone reflect? I asked the same type of questions about their staging of the scenes from the text. For example, in Genesis 12, the passage we studied in the second unit (discussed in chapter 3), it’s unclear where exactly the character Sarah physically was when she and her husband Abraham reached Egypt. It is also equally unclear where exactly Pharaoh physically was. Their staging of the scene required interpretive choices. I reminded them of this, over and over. The biblical verse (Genesis 12:15) states (translation my own): “Pha— 77 —

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raoh’s courtiers saw her and praised her to Pharaoh. She, the woman, was taken to Pharaoh’s house.” Some groups staged it based on an interpretation that Pharoah himself did not see Sarah, only his servants who brought her to him saw her. Others staged Pharoah into the scene, looking directly at Sarah. Both stagings assumed interpretations: first, since Pharoah is not included in the subject of the verb saw her, he wasn’t there, or second, while the text does not mention his presence explicitly, Pharaoh was there and saw Sarah with his own eyes and decided himself to take her as a wife. These different stagings allowed us to review our interpretive rules. The students had to defend their staging with reference to the text (Rule 1); consider small details in the text (Rule 2); and, finally, because different groups staged the scene differently, defend their staging against competing interpretations (Rule 3). Requiring my students to explain their tones, staging, and implicit interpretive choices in their performances pushed them to use our interpretive rules. I tried to be clear about what I was doing, too. In asking them for textual evidence (Rule 1) and asking them to support claims they made about characters’ motivations or to point to hints in the text that led to details they may have added to the narrative (Rule 2), I was constantly reminding them that in our class, in our interpretive community, we would stay as close as we could to the words on the page. When they resisted or brought an explanation from outside the text (e.g., “so-​­and-​­so told me so”), I reminded them that while that was a great way to know something about the text, it was not our way in this classroom. When they offered ideas about the text, I reminded them to always finish their ideas by pointing to textual support. Finally, by hearing other groups of classmates articulate the interpretive choices behind their readings and performances, the class was able to play with opposing interpretations and competing textual evidence (Rule 3). If one group used an angry tone for God’s dialogue in reader’s theater, and another group used a calm and caring tone for God’s lines in dialogue, hearing each group support their opposing interpretations of God’s tone became an opportunity to make explicit how two interpretations could emerge from the same text. This is how I worked to model and be transparent about the interpretive rules for my classroom and our interpretive community. Each student was invited to make whatever meaning they wished out of the texts we studied, but the meaning had to be constructed within the boundar— 78 —

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ies of these rules. This was how I hoped we would become a community of interpreters and not simply spectators to one another’s siloed interpretive activity​— or worse, an extension of an existing unspoken interpretive community that some students were in and others not.

Whole-​­C lass Discussion: Moves for Promoting Interpretive Rules The culminating whole-​­class text discussions were designed to belong to the students. The discussions were intentionally framed as the students’ interpretive space; I didn’t want to intervene much. As such, I had to tread particularly lightly in promoting my interpretive rules during these classes. Facilitating conversations became its own sort of dance, and, to that end, I developed four moves for these culminating whole-​ ­class text discussions to reinforce our rules and gently remind students about them in the midst of their interpretive space and discussion. Reminding While the students were having their whole-​­class text discussions, at the end of every unit, I allowed myself to interrupt occasionally to remind the students of the interpretive rules, gently pushing them to always start with the text in front of them. During one culminating whole-​­class discussion, for example, a student made a reference to the text without quoting any specific words. I responded, “OK, good, I’m going to ask you to go look that up, because we need the text. I don’t want you to just trust me, and I don’t want your classmates to just trust you either.” In this comment, I tried to reinforce the rule that it was the language of the text, rather than my memory or his, that counted. On occasion, I would even begin a whole-​­class discussion by saying, “Who would like to open our class discussion? You can only open it if I see that you have the text in front of you, because what could you have to say about the text if you’re not looking at the text? Now who would like to begin?” Here you can see me reminding the students that our textual discussion should stay close to the words of the text (Rule 1), so close that it would be hard to discuss the text without having it open in front of us as a reference. Another example of reminding was how I would support students who were themselves enforcing a class interpretive rule. For example, in one whole-​­class text discussion, after a series of comments, one of my students decided to enforce Rule 1. After her classmates offered — 79 —

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consecutive non-​­text-​­intensive comments, she said, “How are those connected to text? I feel like this is off topic!” I took the opportunity to support my student’s interpretive enforcement and chimed in, “OK, so we’ve now had your classmate suggest that maybe this discussion is a little off text. We spent a lot of time preparing this text, so does anyone have a question they found in the text? This is your space, but . . .” My response and reminder in this instance could be a little more explicit and heavy-​ ­handed because I was amplifying a student voice. In both examples, my reminder served to refocus students on the text at hand. Reminding might seem almost too simple to be deemed a “strategy,” but there’s a reason it ranked first in my “go-​­to” toolbox of gentle strategies for enforcing my interpretive rules during culminating whole-​­class text discussions. In an effort to curb my teacher authority and have clear interpretive rules for my classroom that would allow for collaborative interpretive discussion, the strategy of reminding felt like a relatively unintrusive and effective way to normalize and make explicit the interpretive rules. If a conversation went off track, I always tried to bring it back by first offering a general reminder. As the gentlest of the four strategies, it was a way to intervene before students became too invested in a discussion beyond the bounds of the words of the text, focused, perhaps, on other biblical stories or background knowledge of historical context. Probing Sometimes during the culminating whole-​­class discussions, I would step in and probe student comments. Students often made comments where they left their textual evidence implicit. In these moments, I asked the students to articulate their textual evidence explicitly. This helped promote the rule that interpretations require specific, textual evidence (Rule 1). For example, after a student offered an interpretation, I would say, “OK, what’s your best proof for that?” I allowed myself to ask questions like this during the discussion. I might say, “Where do you see that in the text?” or “What in the text makes you say that?” or “That’s great, but I want you to build your case. What’s the evidence?” The transcripts of the classroom conversations are littered with comments like these (see appendix 1 for complete codes from classroom discussion transcripts). I might also say, “No textual detail is too small to prompt an idea!” This reminded them of Rule 2, that they could use any feature or detail of the text. — 80 —

Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

On one occasion (which will be discussed in more depth below), a student offered a reading of God’s motivation in the biblical text that had, in my mind, clear textual support. But the student didn’t quote the text in offering his comment. He only said, “I think God chooses . . .” So I probed, “What makes you think that?” Again, he didn’t mention the text. I probed more, “Where do you see that?” After the second probe, my student delivered. He quoted the text and explained why he thought the very words of the text were evidence of his reading of God’s motives. It wasn’t a particularly clear or compelling explanation, but still he pushed his comment over the line into our interpretive boundaries. Probing was probably my most aggressive strategy during the culminating whole-​­class discussions. While I always aimed to come off with the energy of “Your idea is great! Now just provide the textual support for it that you know is there,” I am sure that it didn’t always come through that way for the students. At times, my probing may have come off more as “Your idea doesn’t belong here because it doesn’t play by the rules.” One time I said to a student, “Where do you see that in the text?” And the student responded with resignation, “I don’t.” Another time a student answered to the same probe, “It isn’t in the text. I just think that.” For this reason, probing was not my primary go-​­to strategy. It could itself be interpreted as too aggressive, policing student comments as welcome or unwelcome, legitimate or illegitimate. Still, probing was a very important strategy to have in my toolbox because often it would push my students to rework their interpretations into the boundaries of our classroom literacy practice with seemingly no harm done. More often than not, I was just asking them to state the evidence they already had in mind. Other times, my probe required my students to return to the text to build their textual support for their interpretation, but they were happy to do it. Whatever their reaction, probing worked to reinforce the point that all interpretations should be rooted in the words of the text and that with a little creativity, effort, and close reading of the text, most interpretations can be rooted in the text. Reviewing and Narrating Interpretive Activity I sometimes stopped whole-​­class text discussions to narrate and review students’ actions to emphasize how their interpretations aligned with our interpretive rules​— in particular Rule 3, which emphasized the value of surfacing conflicting and competing readings. Reviewing and — 81 —

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narrating student comments in terms of this interpretive rule was a tool I used to explicitly frame student debate as purposeful and meaningful. For example, during one culminating whole-​­class text discussion, some students expressed frustration at all the different readings flying around the room. I stepped in to narrate how this supposed chaos was actually in the service of our interpretive rule of naming alternative possible readings and evaluating them in light of the text. “Hold on, metapoint,” I said. “This discussion is hard, because it’s fast and you have to keep track of all the readings. Each one has implications for the next one, and we start branching upon branches. This is a good thing, to consider these competing interpretations” (Rule 3). In this comment, I tried to narrate for the students “from the balcony” what we were doing and why it was valuable (Heifetz and Linsky 2017, 51). I affirmed that we had many interpretations on the table and even acknowledged that students were frequently changing their minds in response to new evidence or arguments from their classmates and that this change of mind on one interpretive choice had implications for many others. But this was what I wanted, as it reflected all of our interpretive rules in harmony, the engagement in our literacy practice. “We want to be doing this!” I explained and tried to make it clear that changing our minds in response to evidence was the point. “I admire your dwelling in the gray zone,” I told one student. I also celebrated their many different readings, making comments like, “Oh! We have so many different opinions,” or, “Great job reading the text in so many ways.” Sometimes my narration took the form of summarizing student comments to show how they established a range of interpretive answers for a single textual question. In doing so, I hoped to remind the class that they had already articulated opposing readings and that these debates were alive and open for students to continue to weigh in on. For example, in one culminating whole-​­class text discussion, we were discussing the text of Genesis 22, the story of the binding of Isaac, when God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac to him. The student discussion came to focus on the question of whether or not Isaac knew Abraham’s intention. After a number of comments, I stepped in. “So what do you think? Are you willing to take a position on what Isaac knew or didn’t know, or believed or didn’t believe? Or do you think the text is intentionally ambiguous, and if so, why?” In this comment, I was narrating the options that lay before the students, options they had generated themselves in the discussion, — 82 —

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highlighting how the students had embraced Rule 3 through clarifying the meaning of the text by articulating opposing interpretations and then marshalling textual evidence to support one or the other. It could be option A, or it could be option B, or it could be that the text doesn’t want to provide us with enough evidence to choose between the two. Only Enforcing Interpretive Rules Perhaps the most important strategy I used was something I didn’t do. I refrained from correcting students, except for when one of my three interpretive rules was at stake. This was by far the hardest strategy to employ. On many occasions, a student made a comment so out of left field, so “wrong” (relative to my background knowledge) or offensive, that I desperately wanted to correct it or provide more background knowledge. I understood, however, that every time I stepped in with the “right” answer, I ran the risk of undermining my goal of creating an interpretive community through dialogic instruction so that my students could engage in authentic interpretive activity. I had to let my students make their own mistakes and correct each other (or not). I had to make clear to my students that as long as they followed the interpretive rules, every interpretation was in play. This fourth strategy of refraining from intervening is the hardest to see in practice. In the next few pages, I want to explore what it actually looked and felt like. In our third unit of the year, we studied a passage from Genesis 15. This was early November, and the students were becoming increasingly comfortable with the routines of my classroom and the interpretive rules I had found words for after the second unit’s culminating whole-​­class text discussion. We were in our fourth unit but still deep in the narrative of Abraham. Genesis 15: God’s Promise of Children to Abraham (Again) In Genesis 12, God promised Abraham children (see chapter 2). Later, in Genesis 15, Abraham wonders when that promise will be fulfilled. Genesis 15:1–8 (translation my own)

  ֙‫ירא אַ בְ ָ ֗רם אָ נֹ כִ י‬ ֣ ָ ‫ל־ּת‬ ִ ַ‫אַ ַח֣ר הַ ְּדבָ ִ ֣רים הָ ֗ ֵאּלֶה הָ יָ ֤ה ְדבַ ר־יְ הֹ וָה֙ אֶ ל־אַ בְ ָ ֔רם ַ ּֽבּמַ חֲזֶ ֖ה לֵאמֹ֑ ר א‬ ‫מָ גֵ �֣ן ָ֔לְך ְׂשכ ְָרָך֖ הַ ְר ֵּב֥ה ְמאֹֽ ד׃‬ ‫יתי ֖הּוא ּדַ ֶ ּ֥מׂשֶ ק‬ ִ ֔ ֵ‫ן־מׁשֶ ק ּב‬ ֣ ֶ ֶ‫ה־ּתּתֶ ן־לִ֔ י וְ אָ נֹ ִ ֖כי הֹולֵ ְ֣ך ע ֲִר ִ ֑ירי ּוב‬ ִ ַ‫ַו ּ֣י ֹאמֶ ר אַ בְ ָ ֗רם אֲדֹ נָ ֤י יֱהֹ וִ ה֙ מ‬ ‫יעזֶר׃‬ ֽ ֶ ִ‫אֱל‬ — 83 —

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‫יֹורׁש אֹ ִ ֽתי׃‬ ֥ ֵ ‫יתי‬ ֖ ִ ֵ‫ַו ּ֣י ֹאמֶ ר אַ בְ ָ ֔רם ֵה֣ן לִ֔ י ֥ל ֹא נ ַ ָ֖תּתָ ה זָ ַ�֑רע וְ הִ ּנֵ ֥ה בֶ ן־ּב‬ ‫ֲׁשר י ֵֵצ֣א ִמּמֵ ֶ֔עיָך ֖הּוא ִ ֽי ָיר ֶ ֽׁשָך׃‬ ֣ ֶ ‫י־אם֙ א‬ ִ ִ‫וְ הִ ֵּ֨נה ְדבַ ר־יְ הֹ וָ ֤ה אֵ לָיו֙ לֵאמֹ֔ ר ֥ל ֹא ִ ֽי ָיר ְׁשָך֖ זֶ ֑ה ּכ‬ ‫ּוספֹ ר֙ הַ ּכ֣ ֹוכ ִָ֔בים ִאם־ּתּוכַ ֖ל לִ ְס ֣ ֹּפר אֹ ָ ֑תם‬ ְ ‫ַּיֹוצא אֹ ֜תֹו הַ ֗חּוצָ ה ַו ּ֙י ֹאמֶ ר֙ הַ ּבֶ ט־נָ ֣א הַ ּׁשָ ֗ ַמיְ מָ ה‬ ֵ֨ ‫ו‬ ‫ַו ּ֣י ֹאמֶ ר ֔לֹו ֥ ֹּכה יִ הְ יֶ ֖ה ז ְַר ֶ ֽעָך׃‬ ‫וְ הֶ א ִ ֱ֖מן ַ ּֽביהֹ וָ ֑ה ַוּיַחְ ְׁש ֶב֥הָ ּל֖ ֹו צְ דָ ָ ֽקה׃‬ ‫אתיָך֙ מֵ ֣אּור ּכ ְַׂש ִּ֔דים לָ ֧תֶ ת לְ ָך֛ אֶ ת־הָ ָ ֥א ֶרץ הַ ּ֖ז ֹאת לְ ִר ְׁש ָ ּֽתּה׃‬ ֙ ִ ֵ‫ֲׁשר הֹוצ‬ ֤ ֶ ‫ַו ּ֖י ֹאמֶ ר אֵ לָ ֑יו א ֲִנ֣י יְ הֹ ֗ ָוה א‬ ‫ֹאמר אֲדֹ נָ ֣י יֱהֹ ִ֔וה ּבַ ָ ּ֥מה אֵ ַ ֖דע ִ ּ֥כי ִ ֽא ָיר ֶ ֽׁשּנָה׃‬ ֑ ַ ‫ַוּי‬ 15:1. After these things the word of God was on Abraham in a vision, saying, “Do not fear, Abraham! I am a shield to you and your reward is great.” 2. Abraham said, “Lord God, what will you give me? I walk barren [I am childless] and the one in charge of my household is Dammesek Eliezer!” 3. Abraham said, “You have not given me offspring. Here the charge of my house will be my inheritor.” 4. Behold the word of God was on him, saying, “No, this one, he will not be your inheritor, none but the one that comes from you will be your inheritor. 5. And He took him outside and He said, “Look at the heavens. Count the stars if you can count them.” And he said to him, “That’s how great your seed is going to be.” 6. And He trusted in God. And God counted that to Abraham’s merit. 7. And He said to him, “I am your God who took you out from Ur Kasdim to give to you this land to inherit.” 8. And he said, “Lord my God. How will I know that I will inherit it?” In our culminating whole-​­class text discussion, my students were interested in Abraham questioning God. They wanted to explore what this said about Abraham’s motivations throughout the book of Genesis. At this point in the narrative, Abraham and Sarah had already left their home to move to Canaan, the land that God had shown them. The promise was that in the land of Canaan, God would make Abraham and Sarah’s descendants into a great nation. And yet, Abraham and Sarah still had no children and were infertile. God reminds Abraham of his good fortune and future in the text we studied (Genesis 15), and Abraham has some questions for God. — 84 —

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I had debated whether to include this passage in the curriculum, as it seemed a little dull to me. I ultimately decided to include it because the story is a highly cited and valued moment in Jewish biblical memory. As it turned out, I am glad that I included it because my students found the passage quite rich and filled with potential meaning. They were excited to jump into a discussion. To them, this was a dramatic moment between Abraham and God and their faltering and perhaps cynically motivated relationship. I mention this to offer one more argument in favor of these rules and this literacy practice​— this way of engaging with the text produces interpretations that can even surprise and invigorate the teacher’s understanding of the text. It’s a cliché to toss out the idea of the teacher as a learner, but my students regularly taught me about the texts we were studying. Below is an excerpt from the class discussion that starts with Gabe’s comment about Abraham’s faltering faith in God. Gabe: At the beginning, we saw that Abraham believed in God a bit, but now he’s questioning God so much and he’s asking when his reward will come. I’m wondering did he actually believe in God, or has this all just been about the reward for him? Michael: I think God promised Abraham that he was going to have kids, but I think God is waiting a little because Abraham is asking so much about it. He [Abraham] won’t let it go, and God chooses to do it. Me: What makes you think that, Michael? Michael: I think God is waiting because Abraham wouldn’t be a good role model for patience if he got his child. Me: Where do you see Abraham’s impatience? Michael: Well, when he keeps on asking, “I am childless” [verse 2]. Basically, when are you going to give me a kid? Meira: I first want to say, Abraham doesn’t really keep on asking because he’s just mentioning it now. And also, I want to go back to what Gabe said about stopping believing in God. The fact that he’s talking to God and has a vision shows that he believes in God. But whether he believes what God is going to do is a different thing than believing in God. Gabe posed a question that then became the focus of the students’ conversation. Does this dialogue between God and Abraham expose a — 85 —

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loss of trust in God on Abraham’s part? Michael built on this hypothesis. Michael’s comment suggested that God is punishing Abraham for his impatience. Michael felt like God was withholding children to teach Abraham a lesson in patience. I understood what Michael was getting at, but I wanted him to use the text to make his point, so I stepped in. I probed Michael’s thinking, hoping he would offer textual evidence. I asked, “What makes you think that, Michael?” After I probed, Michael made his point a little more explicitly (“I think God is waiting because Abraham wouldn’t be a good role model for patience if he got his child”), arguing that God wants Abraham to model patience. But Michael had still not referred to the text to support his interpretation. I probed a little more: “Where do you see Abraham’s impatience?” The question “where” encouraged Michael to locate a place in the text, which he did: “Well, when he keeps on asking, ‘I am childless.’ Basically, when are you going to give me a kid?” He quoted Abraham saying “I am childless” to illustrate Abraham’s impatience. Michael referred to the text to support his claim that Abraham is impatient. As Meira’s comment made clear, Michael’s evidence wasn’t particularly strong. He claimed that Abraham repeatedly talks about being childless, but only cites a single example. Meira pointed out that Abraham is only now bringing his childlessness to God’s attention. He doesn’t “keep on asking.” Meira’s point is well-​­taken. From my perspective, what I wanted was for Michael to reference the text in making his argument (Rule 1). He did that. Once he did, he had succeeded in using the interpretive rule of referencing textual evidence. At that point, my intervention had to stop. I couldn’t chime in and say Meira had a good point, that there’s only this slender example in the text supporting Michael’s reading. I was tempted to do so, to agree enthusiastically with Meira and shout, “Yes! So far you brought weak evidence; keep looking!” But I didn’t. I had to limit my authority to enforcing the three interpretive rules and nothing more, lest I undermine the students’ sense of interpretive agency. As much as my interpretive rules helped me decide when to intervene, they also helped me decide when not to intervene. Instead of going by feel in deciding when to step in, I had a clear principle in facilitating student interpretations: only step in if an interpretive rule was being broken. It could be argued that there was more probing that I could have done and stayed within my self-​­designated dialogic role of — 86 —

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only intervening to push the discussion back within the boundaries of our interpretive rules. But I really wanted to have as light a touch as possible during the culminating whole-​­class text discussions. Throughout my teaching, I tried to stay focused on getting students to read according to my three interpretive rules. At the same time, I didn’t want to be overbearing or intervene too often. If a single comment was misaligned with my interpretive rules, I might let it go. If the class went on a misaligned streak, I would try to use one of the strategies discussed above to pull them back to our classroom’s interpretive rules. I saw the process of promoting a set of interpretive rules as a long one, with many bumps along the way. None of these moves were foolproof. Sometimes they would help foster a discussion grounded in the literacy practice guiding our interpretive community. Other times, students would ignore my suggestions, and go on with whatever point they had been making. But even those — even anmoments where students deliberately ignored the rules​ nouncing their intentions to ignore them​— they too helped foster a feeling that our classroom was an interpretive community guided by a clear set of interpretive rules (rules, after all, are meant to be broken).

Background Knowledge in the Classroom There are some readers who might find my intervention too light. Why not interject with missing background knowledge if my students say something wrong? On the face of it, this critique seems to expose a central weakness of my approach. If one piece of information, one short explanation on the part of the teacher, could help students more quickly get to the “right” answer, why not give it to them? “Correcting the rec­ ord” might not be one of my interpretive rules, but isn’t it still my responsibility or even obligation as a teacher? How could a little helpful background knowledge undermine the students’ interpretive activity and agency? Here’s the problem. Having sat in many classrooms first as a student, then as a teacher, and finally as a researcher, I have witnessed first-​­hand that there is no limit to what is possible to count as background knowledge. It’s not as though teachers see the schema formation light go off in their students’ heads and know, “OK, that’s enough background knowledge.” There is always more context possible. There is always more information that would shed light. — 87 —

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It is the limitlessness of knowledge that leads so many teachers back to transmission pedagogy. Interrupting my students’ interpretive activity every time they were missing a piece of background knowledge would send a clear message: “I know what the text means; you don’t.” I wanted to be very cautious when going down the path of just correcting when it was a matter of background knowledge. That doesn’t mean no background knowledge. The slippery slope comes when students in a classroom are unsure when their textual ideas will be vetoed because of background knowledge they didn’t know they didn’t have. Background knowledge then slips into disempowering students as readers and interpreters. My rules didn’t completely forbid the invocation of background knowledge by students. After all, my students’ knowledge of English vocabulary was a kind of background knowledge. Their ability to parse figurative language represented a kind of background knowledge. All of their interpretations drew on some background knowledge. I just didn’t want to be the authority figure who added biblical background knowledge after every student idea. My rules became a check on my urge to intervene. They became a list of conditions that had to be met to justify intervention.

What about Dialogic Instruction? There are some readers who might find my interventions too heavy-​ h ­ anded. “Why,” they would ask, “do you care so much about your particular way of reading, your literacy practice? You’re doing exactly what you claim to oppose. You’re forcing your conception of textual meaning on your students with these interpretive rules​— that meaning should be grounded in the specific features of the text.” These readers might list the different ways students have of engaging. The text may prompt them to make personal connections (“text-​­to-​­self”) or connections to other texts (“text-​­to-​­text”) their classmates may not have read. Why choose to impose any interpretive rules at all? Why not let the students decide the interpretive rules together? How can I claim to be working towards and inspired by dialogic teaching when I’m dictating the interpretive rules of our classroom interpretive community? Among readers who feel this way may be other proponents of dialogic instruction. Whether or not to have interpretive rules, I hope I’ve successfully argued, is not a choice. The problem is that educational research and dis— 88 —

Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

course interested in the dialogic instruction has yet to grapple with the importance of a teacher taking the responsibility for articulating interpretive rules for their classroom​— think back to Judith Langer. No one has truly answered the following questions: What does it look like for a teacher to take responsibility for articulating those rules while at the same time remaining aware and clear that they are choosing a particular set of rules among many? How does a teacher bring their students inside these rules and the literacy practice they serve to make sure that every single student in the classroom understands how they are being asked to read and interpret texts? And finally, once a teacher does this, how do they give their students a meta-language for talking about their multiple interpretive communities, literacy practices, and the tensions among them? Teacher authority has an important positive role to play in the formation of an interpretive community where every student understands the rules and can participate in the activity of interpreting together. When students lack the capacity to name the interpretive rules in the classroom, they don’t have many options when they disagree. There is value to articulating the operating interpretive rules in a classroom, even when there seems to be a consensus. Whatever interpretive rules a teacher hopes students will follow, these rules should be explicitly taught. They should be clearly articulated and consistently named as the interpretive rules for the classroom and promoted throughout the year. This reflects Allan Luke’s call for “a model of reading that enables one not only to decode and construct messages, but which makes explicit and the overt social relations of power around the text, and places squarely on the table the issue of who is trying to do what, to whom, with and through the text” (1992, 10). If my interpretive rules come across to some as dogmatic, that’s OK. If they come off as paradigmatically Jewish to others, that’s even better. They seem justifiable on many grounds and offer a bare-​­minimum basis for forging a shared interpretive community. Most important, by defining and articulating those rules, I could hold myself accountable as the teacher. These rules became my barometer for intervention. If students were making claims about the text based on theories outside the text, without also referencing evidence in the text, I reminded them that this pushed against our interpretive rules in our classroom (Rule 1). I — 89 —

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reminded them that the text held details and nuance that could serve as evidence for almost any interpretation (Rule 2). It also helped me know when not to intervene​— when my intervention would actually hinder students’ independent meaning making and break Rule 3 because I’d be putting my thumb on the scale of interpretations. If I could not articulate the interpretive rule a student comment violated, I did not correct it. If I could not explain the interpretive rule that a student textual idea crossed, my students definitely wouldn’t be able to, and then they would experience my correction as another authoritative pronouncement from the teacher, made without rhyme or reason.

The Paradigmatic First Conversation I want to share what it looked like once my interpretive rules had been explicitly articulated and all of my students understood the interpretive rules I was asking them to use in my class. This conversation comes from the eighth unit of the year. At this point in the biblical narrative, Hagar and Ishmael are out of the story. Sarah has given birth to her miraculous son, Isaac. Just after that joyous moment, God tells Abraham to go and kill Isaac as a sacrifice for God. After two weeks of studying the biblical passage of the Akeda (Binding of Isaac) in Genesis 22, the class once again came together for the culminating activity of the unit: whole-​­class text discussion. This is arguably the most difficult passage in the Hebrew Bible. God commands Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, and Abraham acquiesces to God’s command. Abraham is about to kill his son when an angel calls out and tells him to stop. The questions one could ask about this text are almost endless. Within minutes, my students had settled into discussing the following question: How close did Abraham actually get to sacrificing Isaac? They were discussing this text in the original biblical Hebrew. Saul raised his hand: “I don’t think Abraham was going to go through with it because it just says ‘‫ת־הּמַ אֲכֶ ֑ לֶת‬ ֽ ַ ֶ‫[ ’וַּיִ ַ ּ֖קח א‬he took the knife]; it doesn’t say ‘he raised it up.’” Saul, perhaps thinking about the artwork we had looked at in the beginning of the unit, in which Abraham always had his hand lifted in the air above Isaac, commented that the biblical text doesn’t mention Abraham “lifting” the knife. In considering what the text says and doesn’t say, Saul was deeply embedded in our first interpretive rule. Jackie, clearly excited (and annoyed) by Saul’s comment, raised her hand and read the entire verse (Genesis 22:10) in Hebrew: — 90 —

Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

‫ת־הּמַ אֲכֶ ֑ לֶת לִ ְׁשחֹ֖ ט אֶ ת־ּבְ נֽ ֹו׃‬ ֽ ַ ֶ‫וַּיִ ְׁשלַ ֤ח אַ בְ ָרהָ ם֙ אֶ ת־יָד֔ ֹו וַּיִ ַ ּ֖קח א‬ And Abraham sent his hand and he took the knife to ‫[ לִ ְׁשחֹ֖ ט‬kill] his son. (translation my own) Jackie observed: “It doesn’t even just say ‘to kill’​— it says ‘to kill his son.’” Jackie not only quoted the verse, but considered the exact words. Her comment embodied the first and second interpretive rules. Saul revoiced his point: “It just says he takes it out, it never says ‘lifted.’” Using Rules 1 and 2, Saul then brought to bear Rule 3: as readers we should strive to clarify the meaning of the text by articulating opposing interpretations and then marshaling textual evidence to support one or the other. Gil jumped in to align himself with Jackie: “Yeah, we don’t know if he lifted his hand. We don’t have that detail. But we do know he took out the knife with the intent to kill. He’s already bound his son over fire. So . . . ?” Gil is deep in the literacy practice of our classroom. His comment again exemplifies the interpretive rules for how to make meaning of the text, thinking through which details the biblical passage provides and which details it does not. A new hand went up, and the conversation veered back to another pressing question: Did Isaac know what was going on? But Gil could not let the point about the knife go. Soon his hand was up again: “Going back to the knife thing. I don’t think the text would have added ‘to kill his son’ to ‘Abraham took the knife’ if that wasn’t his intention. I also want to add one more thing: everyone envisions the way Abraham would kill Isaac is raising the knife up, but that’s not how you kill things for a sacrifice, and it says, ‘‫לִ ְׁשחֹ֖ ט‬.’” Reading the biblical Hebrew, Gil noticed something crucial for the class’s debate. The Hebrew word they’d been quoting was ‫( לִ ְׁשחֹ֖ ט‬to slaughter), which is a particular type of killing. The “Abraham delayed” camp in the classroom had been basing their argument on the fact that Abraham did not lift the knife, but only took it out. They had imagined he was holding the knife by his side, stalling for time. This interpretation was challenged by the fact that the act of animal slaughter, ‫לִ ְׁשחֹ֖ ט‬, for kosher meat need not involve lifting a knife. In other words, the fact that Abraham’s hand was not lifted could not be evidence of a missing (and — 91 —

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perhaps delayed) step in killing his son. If he was going to kill his son, he was not going to need to lift the knife to do so, and so unreported knife lifting could not be evidence of Abraham’s effort to delay. All of the interpretive rules danced together in this comment. The first rule meant we would try to ground our interpretations in the text itself. Gil was right there in the specific use of language in the text. The second rule meant we would treat every part of the biblical text as potentially meaningful. Gil was taking the exact order of words, choice of words, and even space left between the words as interpretively meaningful. Our third and final interpretive rule committed us to strive to clarify the meaning of the text by articulating opposing interpretations through textual evidence. Gil wanted to articulate a text-​­focused alternative interpretation to his classmates. His comment showed his comfort with our classroom’s literacy practice. What should stand out from this excerpt of class discussion is how deeply rooted it was in the text itself. The students’ ideas and arguments emerged from a close reading of the text. Every argument they made was supported with careful analysis of the language of the text. This is what class discussion looked like when I was able to make our interpretive rules clear and explicit, I was able to share them with all my students, and they were able to understand the rules for our classroom interpretive community.

engaging our literacy practice Cynthia Lewis and Elizabeth Moje, two scholars who think deeply about power and literacy in the classroom, explain the idea of agency. They write, “Agency might be thought of as the strategic making and remaking of selves, identities, activities, relationships, cultural tools and resources, and histories, as embedded within relations of power. At times, but not always, the relations of power are disrupted and remade” (2012, 18). By clearly articulating the interpretive rules for my students and being consistent about enforcing those interpretive rules and not others, I was trying to give agency back to my students in a meaningful way. There has been incredibly important work in literacy around helping teachers move from a deficit perspective of their students to an asset perspective of their students. We have to value the interpretive resources students bring into the classroom (an asset perspective). We have to not simply see students for what they don’t yet know and can’t yet do (defi— 92 —

Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

cit perspective). We have to create classrooms where students’ home literacies (Gutiérrez, Baquedano-​­López, and Turner 1997) and funds of knowledge (Gonzaález, Moll, and Amanti 2005)​— that is, their ways of reading texts, their valued literacy practices​— are honored and seen as important by the teacher. I’m suggesting, however, that the world of literacy scholars must also be open to the possibility that the interpretive communities classroom teachers intentionally form in their classroom are also valuable. Clear, text-​­based interpretive rules give students agency to talk about themselves, their worlds, and their experiences in a compelling and textual manner. I want to end with one such example from my class. George was one of my most rewarding and difficult students. He struggled during his seventh-​­grade year. With eyebrows that belied anxiety despite his affected disinterest and cynicism, he was the type of student you wanted to reach out and hug. During our year together he missed significant chunks of school. Throughout, his classmates were unaware of his struggles. “George is ‘sick’ again,” they would joke to one another, assuming that his ailments were made up so he could miss school. The truth was quite different: the slightest tense social situation would bring him to his knees with stomach pain. George did not want any of his friends or classmates to know about his situation, and so he did his best to act normal in class. In my class, no question was too small or technical to evoke a declaration of his anti-​­theology nihilism. “Can anyone remind us who the subject is, given the verb’s conjugation?” “It doesn’t matter,” George would respond if called on, “because it’s simply irresponsible to go on acting as if this text is important when we know there is no God.” George’s dismissive comments were received with enthusiasm and laughter from his classmates all the way through Thanksgiving. But by December his classmates began to tire of them, and the laughs subsided. George, seemingly aware of his classmate’s loss of appetite for his humor, stopped commenting at all. This was the case until March, when the class began its study of Genesis 4, the text of Cain and Abel. The story of the first brothers in the Bible, the text tragically ends in the death of Abel at the hand of his brother Cain. During our culminating whole-​­class text discussion, George raised his hand and offered an impressive and exhaustive reading of the text. George delivered this as one single talk turn. First, I want to share the text of Genesis 4, the story of Cain and Abel, — 93 —

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that the class had studied. It’s always helpful to linger on the biblical text for a few minutes and notice what questions come to mind. For example, why did God prefer Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s? What did God’s cryptic message to Cain in verses 6 and 7 mean? And finally, what happened in the field? What words were exchanged and alluded to in verse 8? Genesis 4:1–16 (translation my own)

‫֥יתי ִ ֖איׁש אֶ ת־יְ הֹ ָוֽה׃‬ ִ ‫וְ ָה֣אָ ֔ ָדם י ַ ָ֖דע אֶ ת־חַ ּוָ ֣ה ִא ְׁש ּ֑תֹו ו ַַּ֙תהַ ר֙ ו ֵ ַּ֣תלֶד אֶ ת־קַ֔ יִ ן ַו ּ֕ת ֹאמֶ ר קָ ִנ‬ ‫י־הבֶ ֙ל ֣רֹ עֵה ֔צ ֹאן וְ קַ֕ יִ ן הָ יָ ֖ה עֹ ֵב֥ד אֲדָ ָ ֽמה׃‬ ֶ֙ ִ‫ת־ה֑בֶ ל ַו�ֽיְ ה‬ ָ ֶ‫וַּתֹ֣ סֶ ף ָל ֶ֔לדֶ ת אֶ ת־אָ ִ ֖חיו א‬ ‫ַו�ֽיְ ִ ֖הי ִמ ֵ ּ֣קץ י ִ ָ֑מים ַוּי ֨ ֵָבא קַ֜ יִ ן ִמּפְ ִ ֧רי ָ ֽהאֲדָ ָ ֛מה ִמנְ ָח֖ה ַ ֽליהֹ ָוֽה׃‬ ‫ל־מנְ חָ ֽתֹו׃‬ ִ ֶ‫ל־ה֖בֶ ל וְ א‬ ֶ ֶ‫ּומחֶ לְ בֵ ֶה֑ן ו ִַּיׁ֣שַ ע יְ הֹ ֔ ָוה א‬ ֽ ֵ ‫ַם־הּוא ִמּבְ כֹ ֥רֹות צ ֹאנ֖ ֹו‬ ֛ ‫וְ ֨ ֶהבֶ ל הֵ ִ ֥ביא ג‬ ‫ל־מנְ חָ ֖תֹו ֣ל ֹא ׁשָ עָ ֑ה ו ִַּי֤חַ ר לְ ַ֙קיִ ן֙ ְמ ֔ ֹאד ַו�ּֽיִ ּפְ ל֖ ּו ּפ ָָנֽיו׃‬ ִ ֶ‫ל־קיִ ן וְ א‬ ֥ ַ ֶ‫וְ א‬ ‫ל־קיִ ן ָ֚לּמָ ה ָח ָ֣רה ָ֔לְך וְ לָ ּ֖מָ ה נָפְ ל֥ ּו פ ֶָנֽיָך׃‬ ֑ ָ ֶ‫ַו ּ֥י ֹאמֶ ר יְ הֹ וָ ֖ה א‬ ‫יטיב לַּפֶ ֖תַ ח חַ ָ ּ֣טאת רֹ ֵב֑ץ וְ אֵ ֶ֙ליָך֙ ְּת ׁ֣שּוקָ ֔תֹו וְ אַ ָ ּ֖תה‬ ִ֔ ֵ‫יטיב֙ ְׂש ֔ ֵאת וְ ִאם֙ ֣ל ֹא ת‬ ִ ֵ‫הֲל֤ ֹוא ִאם־ּת‬ ‫ל־ּבֹו׃‬ ֽ ‫ִּת ְמׁשׇ‬ ֣ ָ ְ‫ל־ה֣בֶ ל אָ ִ ֑חיו ַו�ֽיְ הִ י֙ ּבִ ה‬ ֶ ֶ‫ַו ּ֥י ֹאמֶ ר ַ ֖קיִ ן א‬ ‫ל־ה֥בֶ ל אָ ִ ֖חיו ַוּיַהַ ְר ֵגֽהּו׃‬ ֶ ֶ‫יֹותם ּבַ ּׂשָ ֔ ֶדה וַּיָ �֥קׇ ם ַ ֛קיִ ן א‬ ‫ַו ּ֤י ֹאמֶ ר יְ הֹ וָה֙ אֶ ל־קַ֔ יִ ן ֵ ֖אי ֶה֣בֶ ל אָ ִ ֑חיָך ַו ּ֙י ֹאמֶ ר֙ ֣ל ֹא י ֔ ַָדעְ ִּתי הֲׁשֹ ֵ ֥מר אָ ִ ֖חי אָ ֽ ֹנכִ י׃‬ ‫ן־האֲדָ ָ ֽמה׃‬ ֽ ָ ‫ַו ּ֖י ֹאמֶ ר ֶ ֣מה ע ִ ָׂ֑שיתָ ֚קֹול ְּד ֵ ֣מי אָ ִ֔חיָך צֹ ע ִ ֲ֥קים אֵ לַ ֖י ִמ‬ ‫ת־ּד ֵ ֥מי אָ ִ ֖חיָך ִמּי ֶ ָֽדָך׃‬ ְ ֶ‫ת־ּפיהָ ל ַ ָ֛קחַ ת א‬ ִ ֔ ֶ‫ֲׁשר ּפָצְ ָ ֣תה א‬ ֣ ֶ ‫ן־האֲדָ מָ ה֙ א‬ ֽ ָ ‫וְ ע ָ ַּ֖תה אָ ֣רּור ָ ֑אּתָ ה ִמ‬ ‫ת־האֲדָ ֔ ָמה ֽל ֹא־תֹ ֵ ֥סף ּתֵ ת־ּכֹ ָחּ֖ה לָ ְ֑ך נָ ֥ע וָנָ ֖ד ִ ּֽתהְ יֶ ֥ה בָ ָ ֽא ֶרץ׃‬ ֣ ָ ֶ‫ִ ּ֤כי ַ ֽתעֲבֹ ד֙ א‬ ‫ַו ּ֥י ֹאמֶ ר ַ ֖קיִ ן אֶ ל־יְ הֹ וָ ֑ה ּג ָ֥דֹול עֲוֺ ִנ֖י ִמּנְ ֽׂש ֹא׃‬ ‫יתי נָ ֤ע ָונָד֙ ּבָ ֔ ָא ֶרץ וְ הָ יָ ֥ה כׇל־‬ ִ ‫ּומּפָנֶ ֖יָך אֶ ּסָ ֵ ֑תר וְ הָ ִ֜י‬ ִ ‫הֵ ֩ן ּג ַ ֵ֨ר ְׁשּתָ אֹ ֜ ִתי הַ ּי֗ ֹום מֵ ַע ֙ל ּפְ נֵ ֣י ָ ֽהאֲדָ ֔ ָמה‬ ‫מֹ צְ ִ ֖אי ַיֽהַ ְר ֵגֽנִ י׃‬ ‫ַו ּ֧י ֹאמֶ ר ל֣ ֹו יְ הֹ ֗ ָוה ָלכֵן֙ ּכׇל־הֹ ֵ ֣רג קַ֔ יִ ן ִׁשבְ ע ַ ָ֖תיִ ם י ָ ֻּ֑קם ַו ָּ֨יׂשֶ ם יְ הֹ וָ ֤ה לְ ַ֙קיִ ן֙ ֔אֹות לְ בִ לְ ִ ּ֥תי הַ ּכֹות־אֹ ֖תֹו‬ ‫ּכׇל־מֹ צְ ֽאֹו׃‬ ‫ת־עדֶ ן׃‬ ֽ ֵ ַ‫וַּיֵ ֥צֵ א ַ ֖קיִ ן ִמּלִ פְ נֵ ֣י יְ הֹ וָ ֑ה וַּיֵ ׁ֥שֶ ב ּבְ ֶ ֽא ֶרץ־נ֖ ֹוד קִ ְדמ‬ 4:1. And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she became pregnant and birthed Cain and she said, “I have acquired a man with God.” 2. And she additionally birthed his brother, Abel, and Abel was a shepherd and Cain was a worker of the ground. 3. And it was, after a period of days, Cain brought an offering to God of the fruit of the ground. 4. And Abel also brought from the choicest of the firstlings of his flock, and God paid attention to Abel and his offering. 5. And to Cain and his offering He didn’t pay attention to, and Cain got very angry and his face fell. 6. And God said to Cain, “Why are you angry and why did your face fall? — 94 —

Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

7. If you improve you will be forgiven, and if you don’t improve, sin rests at your door, its desire is towards you, yet you can conquer it.” 8. And Cain spoke to Abel his brother when they were in the field, and Cain rose up against Abel his brother and he killed him. 9. And God said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” And he said, “I don’t know, am I my brother’s guardian?” 10. And He said, “What did you do? The blood of your brother calls out to Me from the ground. 11. And now, you are cursed from the ground which opened its wide mouth to take the blood of your brother from your hands. 12. When you work the ground it will no longer yield its strength to you; you will become a fugitive and a wanderer in the land.” 13. And Cain said to God, “My sin is too great to bear. 14. Behold, You have banished me today from the face of the earth and from Your face I hide and I will be a fugitive and wanderer in the land, and whoever finds me will kill me.” 15. And God said to him, “Therefore, whoever kills Cain, before seven generations have passed he will be punished.” And God put a mark on Cain, so that none who find him will strike him. 16. And Cain left from before God and he settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. After several classes of preparing the text of the Cain and Abel story, George offered the following interpretation:1 Why didn’t Abel say anything? Abel didn’t say anything because what is there to say in response to bullying? Remember when there’s the bad offering, and after the bad offering, it says ‫ו ִַּי֤חַ ר‬, which means “he got very angry.” I thought that was a brief summary of the fact that Cain was actually bullying Abel, that he was harassing him and beating him up and stuff. “His face fell,” so that means that his respect for Abel fell down. And afterwards, God says, “Oh you sinned, and sin crouches in your corner if you don’t change your ways.” Well, if you get angry from a sacrifice, you can’t change your ways from that. It’s because he was bullying that he needs to 1. George’s translation is his own throughout, and differs in key ways from the translation I provide on the previous pages. — 95 —

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change his ways. Then after all that, there’s something said in the field. And I believe that it couldn’t be written in the Torah because it was so bad. It couldn’t be written in the Torah because it’s sacrilegious and blasphemous. And then ‫ ַוּיַהַ ְר ֵגֽהּו‬, “and he killed him,” it doesn’t mean that he [Cain] was the one that killed him. It does, but it doesn’t mean that he was the one that physically killed him. It means he only came to the realization that he’s been doing all of this stuff after the suicide. Abel killed himself. He realizes ‫ ַוּיַהַ ְר ֵגֽהּו‬, “and he killed him.” And the next pasuk [verse], when he [Cain] says, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he’s not saying that in a sarcastic way; he’s saying it in a way asking God, “Was I supposed to help my brother and not do this?” Because he’s one of the first humans on the planet, and he does not have a good sense of right and wrong. With that, George concluded. There’s a lot going on in this comment. I will try here to read George’s ideas carefully and offer plausible suggestions about what he may have been indicating in his interpretation and why it follows the interpretive rules of this classroom. It’s not always clear what George’s reasoning process is, and so, to some extent, my analysis is a reading of George’s reading. George draws together a set of hints he found in the text to explore a possible interpretation that this text is about bullying. In offering that interpretation, George offers interpretive resolutions to several perplexing points in the text. George builds his interpretation by following Rules 1 and 2. George focused on four places in the text. First, in the text Cain says something in the field, but the Hebrew Bible does not record what Cain says or how Abel responds (verse 8). George noticed that the text says, “Cain spoke to Abel . . . ,” followed immediately by “Cain rose up.” George followed the interpretive rules to assume this textual ellipsis is meaningful and not a scribal error. So he applied his hypothesis of bullying to the ellipse. He suggested that the Hebrew Bible must have intentionally omitted what Cain said to Abel because “it couldn’t be written in the Torah because it’s sacrilegious and blasphemous.” That is, the Torah didn’t want to record the bullying words Cain said to his brother. Then, according to George, the reader doesn’t read Abel’s response because there is no response. George explains, “What is there to say in response to bullying?” The missing response became interpretively meaningful. — 96 —

Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

Second, George noticed a particular word choice in the text. Verse 5 reads, “and Cain got very angry.” George turned his interpretive attention to these words: “very angry.” What is anger, George asked? George believes that people always take out their anger on those around them and not necessarily on the root cause of the anger. In interpreting the conclusion of the story, where, according to George, Abel commits suicide, it is clear to George that the biblical description of Cain as “angry” is, in George’s words, a “brief summary of the fact that Cain was actually bullying Abel.” George filled in the interpretation of Cain’s anger and decided that Cain’s anger at God was manifested through bullying his brother Abel. Third, George focused on the phrase in verse 5 that states Cain’s “face fell.” He interpreted this phrase as meaning that Cain lost respect for Abel. In George’s words, Cain’s “respect for Abel fell down.” George may have been making a connection to the idea of a person “losing face” and then reading that idiom into this text. Whether he used the best schema or not, his effort to read closely was deeply aligned with the interpretive rules I was promoting. Fourth, George focused on the fact that in verse 7, God tells Cain to change his ways. For George, God’s comment “sin rests at your door” suggests that Cain’s behavior went beyond merely incorrect sacrifices. George sees these words in the text as a further hint that Cain was bullying Abel and that God was warning him to stop, lest there be a really terrible consequence. Ultimately, George interprets the statement “he killed him” in verse 8 as meaning that Cain killed Abel by pushing him to suicide, even if he didn’t actually lay a hand on him. Something about this story suggested bullying to George. Reading through his interpretation, it’s not clear which place in the text first suggested bullying to him. And it’s easy, if one is so inclined, to poke holes in his interpretation. There are other plausible explanations for the elliptical “Cain spoke to Abel his brother . . .” in verse 8, and it’s easy to imagine someone getting angry without taking it out on someone. The fact that the text simply says, “And Cain got very angry,” (verse 5) doesn’t necessarily suggest much of anything about Cain’s relationship with Abel. George also seems to misinterpret the phrase “and his face fell” (verse 5). It’s hard to see how that phrase could mean that he lost respect for Abel. Finally, God’s somewhat cryptic rebuke of Cain to change his ways (verse 7) could also be read several ways. Maybe in the world of — 97 —

t h e s e c o nd c o nve rs at ion

the text, problematic sacrifices were a serious issue that would require immediate correction. Yet, George’s interpretation is a valid reading according to our classroom’s interpretive rules. George offered a fascinating hypothesis and then developed it through reference to specific textual details. This is what it looked like for a seventh-​­grade student to read the text with our classroom’s literacy practice. He was using his hypothesis as a way to resolve, to his satisfaction, a number of really strange moments in this text. He was also staying as close as he could to the words on the page. In this interpretation, George was able to draw on the three interpretive rules for our classroom in conversation with his own interpretive agenda. George’s comment shows both the strengths and the weaknesses of my particular interpretive rules. George lacked background knowledge that another teacher might fault me for not providing. But through the three interpretive rules, George had learned how to identify a group of interesting textual moments, ask questions about them, and then offer a theory that turns them from a set of problems into a coherent and self-​­consistent story. He was embodying the literacy practice I had hoped to induct my students into. What does the case of George show? It shows that the three interpretive rules, when clearly articulated to my students, empowered them to come up with their own interpretations​— ones that were personally meaningful to them but that could also stand up to other interpretations and give them agency as people. George interpreted the biblical passage of Cain and Abel as being about bullying. In his own life, he had dealt with being bullied at school. Giving him the tools to interpret texts that way gave him agency to name what had happened to him, point it out to his classmates, and show them that he’s not powerless in the face of bullying. Our classroom interpretive community was for all of us. By adopting the same rules, we could read “together.” But, at this point in the year, I was beginning to feel an inkling that the second conversation would become as important as the shared interpretive rules themselves and the opportunity to have the first conversation. If we were going to be our own interpretive community, even one that reflected a particularly important literacy practice, I would also need to create space for my students to reflect on navigating their multiple literacy practices and the other interpretive communities they were a part of. They would need the — 98 —

Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

opportunity to recognize and discuss the existence of multiple literacy practices, interpretive communities, and the fact that texts don’t really mean anything without them. They would need space to consider other interpretive rules and communities in their lives and how sometimes they can conflict with what they are asked to do with texts in school.2

2. My attempt to frame our classroom as an interpretive community, with clear interpretive rules, aligns with the pedagogy of multiliteracies articulated by the New London Group in their famous “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” (1996): 1. Situated Practice: “Immersion in meaningful practices within a community of learners who are capable of playing multiple and different roles based on their backgrounds and experiences” (1996, 85). 2. Overt Instruction: “Active interventions on the part of the teacher and other experts that scaffold learning activities . . . allow the learner to gain explicit information at times when it can most usefully organize and guide practice” (1996, 86). 3. Critical Framing: “Here, crucially, the teacher must help learners to de-​ ­naturalize and make strange again what they have learned to master” (1996, 86). 4. Transformed Practice: “Transfer in meaning-​­making practice, which puts the transformed meaning to work in other contexts or cultural sites” (1996, 88). — 99 —

5 The Second Conversation Discussing Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

This chapter will show what it looked like in my classroom when the students understood the interpretive rules and the literacy practice I was inducting them into but didn’t want to read that way. I explore how they mounted intentional challenges against the classroom’s interpretive rules. I describe what it looked like when my students, by the second half of the year, were able to not only make meaning of the text within our literacy practice but also reflect on the rules that governed it. I also explore what I’ve realized since but didn’t then know: this second conversation, this opportunity to develop meta-​­awareness and meta-​­language for helping students think through their multiple interpretive communities and navigate their multiple literacy practices, is an essential responsibility for any text teacher. And it was often a missed opportunity in my teaching.

The Second Conversation In what follows, I want to share what the second conversation looked like in my class. The content of what we said is less important than what we were doing in saying it (Austin 1975). How did my students make clear their request for the second conversation? This chapter will look at what actually happened in our classroom when the students were ready to move into the second conversation, and how I responded. I will then turn to what I wish had happened, how I would respond given the chance to do it again. — 100 —

Discussing Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

I want to start with a moment during a culminating whole-​­class text discussion where one of my students invited the second conversation in the blink of an eye, almost too quickly to notice. We were studying the second chapter of Genesis, in which God creates the first man and the first woman. The attentive reader may recall that this is the example discussed in the introduction. The second chapter of Genesis is the second creation story in the Hebrew Bible, following the first creation story in the first chapter. Contemporary Bible scholars use the double creation story in Genesis 1 and 2 as evidence that the Hebrew Bible is a composite text composed by different authors at different times. The rabbinic tradition offers several ways of explaining the apparent doubling. We hadn’t studied Genesis 1 in my class, but as will become clear, at least some students were aware of it. After several minutes of conversation, one student in my class, Kate, looking frustrated, raised her hand. She clearly had something on her mind. Kate: OK, I don’t know how to do this without going into the Lilith story. Me: Go ahead. I was to spend some time reflecting on this two-​­line exchange that passed between us in a moment. What happened in this moment? What was Kate doing? At first glance, it might seem like Kate was describing her own lack of knowledge. She said, “I don’t know how to do this.” I then responded, “Go ahead.” This response shows that I understood her not as describing her own lack of knowledge, but rather as doing something, namely, requesting permission. While students request permission in class all the time (to go to the bathroom, to sharpen a pencil, or to borrow a pen), Kate wasn’t asking for any of these things. She wasn’t even asking permission to speak. She already had the floor. What was she asking permission to do? At this moment, Kate requested permission to reference a rabbinic story. This rabbinic story holds that before God created Eve, God created a woman named Lilith. We hadn’t studied this rabbinic story in class. There was no obvious reference to Lilith in the text we had in front of us. So what was Kate asking permission to do? Kate was requesting permission to momentarily suspend an interpretive rule of the classroom (Rule 1: We would try to ground all of our interpretations in the text itself. We would share only those interpretations that we could “support by a — 101 —

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specific use of language that actually occurred in the text” [de Man 1986, 23])​— to reference something outside the text we were studying, something she had learned elsewhere in her Jewish education, namely, the rabbinic story about Lilith. Her request showed that she understood the interpretive rule I had established in our classroom of only referencing texts we had in front of us. Why else ask permission to violate it? At the same time, her comment demonstrated that she wanted to challenge this interpretive rule. Kate understood the interpretive rule that operated in our classroom, but in this moment, she was so eager to share what she was thinking that she made an explicit request to suspend our interpretive rule so that she could say what she wanted to say. From a sociolinguistic perspective, the question must be asked of what contextualization cues (Gumperz 1982) allow “I don’t know how to do this” to mean a request, specifically a request to break an interpretive rule in the classroom. In my classroom, I understood it as a request and not a literal statement. If you accept my reading of Kate’s comment, the next question is, How did I respond as the teacher? This request created a choice for me. Kate knew that she was asking to do something that in general I discouraged students from doing. She pushed me as a teacher to make a tough choice. She was excited, really excited. She’d made a text-​­to-​­text connection in her head that felt relevant. And instead of blurting it out, she asked (in not so many words), “Hey, can I share something that matters to me?” The question I faced was whether I should suspend our literacy practice in this moment. In this case, I granted her permission. Although I wanted my students to interpret within our literacy practice, I did make exceptions. It was easier to do so when a student acknowledged what they were doing. In the moment I felt sure that Kate’s statement “I don’t know how to do this without . . .” could be paraphrased as “May I please break Rule 1 and reference something outside of the textual passage we have in front of us?” Why did I let Kate go forward? Didn’t that decision fly in the face of my hard work to ensure consistent interpretive rules and boundaries? Yes and no. I wanted my students to interpret within the directives of our classroom’s three interpretive rules. Kate, in my mind, understood those boundaries insofar as she was able to recognize that her comment violated them. She was a sophisticated enough reader to shift us into the second conversation by asking permission to violate our interpretive — 102 —

Discussing Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

rules. It was as if she had said, “I understand that I’m invoking a different set of interpretive rules (one that includes the corpus of rabbinic stories as an integral tool for understanding the text), but it’s important to me.” Her sincerity and excitement moved me. Kate was aware of the interpretive rules functioning in our classroom and was developing the skills to negotiate among the rules, as well as other ways she wished to understand the text at different moments. This short interaction with Kate demonstrates how quickly the opportunity for the second conversation could come up. The work of getting to this point was great. But once students knew the interpretive rules of the classroom, any time they challenged the rules, they were inviting the second conversation. The challenge could happen in a few seconds. What I should have done with Kate’s comment was acknowledge to my students everything I wrote above. But in the real moment of teaching, I simply didn’t have that awareness and readiness with this meta-​­language. Writing and reflecting on this interaction now, I realize how much more I would have done. I would have highlighted the negotiation Kate had started. This would have allowed the class to move into the second conversation and practice the important skill of building meta-​ ­knowledge and meta-​­language for navigating multiple literacy practices and interpretive communities. We could have discussed the literacy practice I was inducting them into and compared it with alternative literacy practices. Kate wanted to consider another text, the rabbinic story of Lilith. If we all had that text in front of us, we could have considered this text following the three interpretive rules of our classroom. The only reason Kate’s reference to Lilith was outside of our interpretive rules was because we didn’t happen to have that text in front of us​— I should have said all this to the students. In this year of teaching, I didn’t have clear criteria for when to allow students to violate our interpretive rules. It felt like I spent most of my time trying to gently enforce the three interpretive rules. When and why I let up on them feels less clear to me. I know I was more inclined to allow interpretations that violated our interpretive rules when the student first seemed to acknowledge the interpretive rules when they requested, at least implicitly, to break them. That said, the criterion for exceptions was not as consistent as merely asking permission to violate the rule. Students’ eagerness was a factor (as I highlighted above, with Kate). My — 103 —

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mood was a factor (the reality of any human endeavor, including teaching). And my in-​­the-​­moment understanding was a factor. I didn’t always even understand that a student comment was a request for the second conversation until later, after class, when I rewatched the recording.

Dancing towards and around the Second Conversation: Interpretive Rules Negotiated Once I had given Kate permission, saying, “Go ahead,” Kate tried to summarize the rabbinic story of Lilith for her classmates. Lilith is a complicated story found in the Talmud that suggests that the first man, Adam, had a first wife, Lilith, who was later replaced by Eve, the wife mentioned in Genesis 2. Kate’s summary seemed to confuse her classmates. They listened respectfully but quickly moved the discussion back to the passage they had studied and had in front of them. The students had prepared a section of Genesis 2, and two verses in particular became the focal point of the class’s text discussion: 18 and 21. Genesis 2:18 and 21 (translation my own)

‫ֹא־טֹוב הֱי֥ ֹות ָ ֽהאָ ָ ֖דם לְ בַ ּ֑דֹו ֶ ֽאעֱׂשֶ ה־ּל֥ ֹו עֵ ֖ זֶר ּכְ נֶגְ ּֽדֹו׃‬ ֛ ‫ֱֹלהים ל‬ ִ֔ ‫ַו ּ֙י ֹאמֶ ר֙ יְ הֹ וָ ֣ה א‬ ... ‫ֱֹלהים‬ ֧ ִ ‫יׁשן וַּיִ ּקַ֗ ח אַ חַ ת֙ ִמּצַ לְ עֹ ֔ ָתיו וַּיִ ְס ֥ ֹּגר ּבָ ָ ׂ֖שר ּתַ חְ ֶ ּֽתּנָה׃ ַו ַּי ֵּפל ֩ יְ הֹ ֨ ָוה א‬ ֑ ָ ִ‫ּתַ ְרּדֵ ָ ֛מה עַל־הָ אָ ָ ֖דם וַּי‬ 2:18. And God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him an ‫[ עֵ ֖ זֶר ּכְ נֶגְ ּֽדֹו‬lit: a helper against/corresponding to him].” . . . 21. And God cast a deep sleep on the man and he slept and [God] took one of his sides/ribs and he closed the flesh under it. In the next ten minutes of class discussion after Kate referenced Lilith, her classmates began discussing the fact that in verse 21, we are told that woman was created after man and from man. In verse 18 God refers to woman as an ‫( עֵ ֖ זֶר‬literally “a helper”) ‫( ּכְ נֶגְ ּֽדו‬literally “corresponding to him,” and also sometimes translated as “against him”). The student conversation crystallized around a single question: What do these two verses imply about the equality of men and women? After a number of comments from her classmates engaged with the question above, Kate raised her hand again. I knew she might want to go outside our passage of text, violating our first interpretive rule again, but — 104 —

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I still called on her. I’m honestly not sure why, except that her eagerness to engage moved me. And in her next comment, Kate did try again to bring in the idea of Lilith, the text we had not studied. But instead of asking me to suspend the interpretive rules of the classroom, this time she adopted a different strategy to advance her interpretation: bypassing my interpretive rules altogether. Kate: Obviously, we didn’t study this part, but what do you all have to say about the fact that first, it does say that men and women were created at the same time, and then it goes on to say they weren’t created at the same time and that woman was created from man? So, do you think it was two different people or women? Ten minutes earlier, Kate had asked me permission to discuss the Lilith story. This time she took a different approach. Instead of asking me to suspend the interpretive rule of grounding interpretation in the text in front of us, she offered her interpretation (that went beyond our passage) and invited her classmates to respond. Kate’s move illustrated the different ways that students, once they understand a set of interpretive rules, can challenge them. “Obviously, we didn’t study this part,” she began, “but what do you all have to say about the fact that . . .” In this comment, Kate acknowledged that she was referencing something outside the text in front of us but nonetheless put a question to her classmates. When Kate said, “first, it does say that men and women were created at the same time,” she was referring this time not to the rabbinic story of Lilith but to Genesis 1, where the Hebrew Bible also describes the creation of the first man and woman. In Genesis 1, the humans, men and women, are created at the same time in the same verse​— not man and then woman as told in Genesis 2. Kate linked the double creation of humans to the rabbinic story of Lilith she referenced earlier. Kate was trying to get her classmates to consider her ideas about the two “first” women: Lilith and Eve. But she also bypassed me and appealed directly to her classmates, and in this instance, it worked. Her classmate, Jess, chose to directly answer Kate’s question about the significance of the double creation story. Jess: I think that there is what God wanted, and then what the people wanted. I think at the beginning, woman was created to be a — 105 —

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helper, like it says: ‫[ עֵ ֖ זֶר ּכְ נֶגְ ּֽדֹו‬a helper corresponding to him], a woman was created for man, to be inferior, and that’s what God wanted. But these are people, they’re not robots with a program, so they decided they wanted to be equal. People aren’t going to do exactly what they were made for. God’s plan was for woman to be made for man, but they went against this. Jess made two comments here. First, she offered an interpretation that was in the first conversation, interpreting the text according to the class’s interpretive rules. She argued that the phrase ‫עֵ ֖ זֶר ּכְ נֶגְ ּֽדֹו‬, or “a helper corresponding to him,” implies that the biblical text sees women as inferior. If you’re somebody’s helper, you’re inferior to them. It is clear from her comment that she is not aware of Genesis 1, referenced in Kate’s previous comment. She is only discussing Genesis 2, which we studied. She then went on to share some of her ideas about human free will. While Jess began from a textual reference, citing the phrase ‫עֵ ֖ זֶר ּכְ נֶגְ ּֽדֹו‬, it’s not obvious how that reference connects to her ultimate interpretation of the text as saying that “they decided they wanted to be equal.” In reading it, I wonder which part of her comment was more important to her and what the connection was. The first part was a first conversation comment focused on the words in front of us. The second part extended beyond our interpretive rules and literacy practice to focus on theology and assert the independence of people from God. This second part of her comment was outside our class’s interpretive rules. I see this now as a negotiation move​— what I might call compromising, offering a comment that is part first conversation and part beyond our rules. Another student, Jenna, after listening to Jess, perhaps saw an opening for interpretations that didn’t require textual evidence. Jenna seized the opportunity to offer her own idea and ignored the interpretive rules of our classroom. Jenna: My conspiracy theory is that Adam was pregnant with Eve. It’s hard to know what Jenna was getting at here. It’s possible that the idea that Eve was created from Adam’s rib made her think of pregnancy. There are probably a lot of ways to cite the language of the text to develop her interpretation, but she didn’t do that. Jenna may have used the phrase “conspiracy theory” to signal that she knew her interpretation went outside our rules and that she wasn’t going to try to support — 106 —

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her statement with textual evidence. Like Kate, she was simultaneously challenging the interpretive rules of our classroom, even as she demonstrated her awareness of them. But as the class discussion unfolded, it became clear that Jenna had gone too far. I’m sure I considered stepping in to redirect the conversation in the moment, but in this case, I didn’t have to. Her classmate Mel stepped in. Mel: But it never says that in the text. Mel’s response to Jenna shows how my students negotiated with each other over our classroom’s interpretive rules. Mel was not interested in conspiracy theories. She rejected the legitimacy of Jenna’s interpretation by appealing to the first interpretive rule of our classroom: comments must be grounded in the language of the text. In so doing, Mel reinforced a rule I had worked hard to promote all year. She appealed to that rule as a way of dismissing Jenna’s “conspiracy theory.” This was another missed opportunity on my part to make the second conversation explicit. Jenna’s comment, rejected by her classmates, may have demonstrated a literacy of imagination (Enciso 2019; Gallas 2003), but it did not include explicit textual support. If Jenna had offered textual support for her “conspiracy theory,” I believe she would have gotten more uptake in the text discussion. Still, I wonder, was her move substantively different than Kate’s or simply a matter of lacking the necessary contextualization cues (Gumperz 1982)? How might I have responded and elevated Jenna’s invitation into the second conversation? These are important questions to consider. However, before I had a chance, her classmate Mel had already dismissed her comment.

Getting Explicit about the Second Conversation In the first few comments of this discussion, students had only talked about the interpretive rules of our classroom indirectly. Mel’s comment was the first to invoke the rules explicitly. In so doing, she began the class’s intentional march towards the second conversation​— the conversation about why these interpretive rules and not other interpretive rules. Mel believed that the students in the class should accept my first rule of staying close to the text. But Gabe disagreed. He was usually willing to play along with the interpretive rules I set for the classroom​— to ground his interpretations in — 107 —

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the language of the text, to treat every part of the biblical text as meaningful, and to consider opposing viewpoints. But this time​— the instance I cited at the start of this book​— Gabe wanted to do something different. He didn’t explicitly challenge any interpretive rule of our class, but he offered a perspective that certainly implicitly challenged those rules. Gabe: I want to address something pretty big. We’ve all been functioning in this class under the idea, for argument’s sake, that the Torah was created by God. But if we take a different idea that other people have had, that the Torah was created by multiple writers over thousands of years . . . I think it could have been written with the intent to have women be inferior to men, like that’s the point of the story. It’s a creation story, but we have to think about who this was written by and the time it was written. Gabe said that he wanted to “address something pretty big.” And indeed, it was pretty big. He wanted to explicitly state the idea that, he argued, “we’ve all been functioning . . . under.” In other words, he wanted to explicitly state what he saw as the central interpretive assumption of our work together, motivating our particular interpretive rules: the assumption that “the Torah was created by God.” Of course it should be noted that this wasn’t, in fact, our interpretive assumption. At the same time, I can certainly see how interpretive rules that ask readers to read each word closely and consider each word’s many possible meanings and eschew any explanation that would consider scribal error, might reinforce the idea that this text is divinely authored and therefore worthy of extraordinarily careful reading. And in broad strokes, Gabe’s comment was a direct challenge on Rule 2 as well​— if the Hebrew Bible was written by multiple authors, it’s likely that there are errors and confusions in the text as a result of that. Not everything in it would necessarily be a product of intentionality. After paraphrasing the interpretive rules we had been following, Gabe proposed an alternative assumption that he believed would logically lead to different interpretive rules. He said, “But if we take a different idea that other people have had, that the Torah was created by multiple writers over thousands of years . . .” He was not using the term interpretive assumption, but the concept is implicit. His understanding and acceptance that we could approach the text with “a different idea” suggests his awareness (and perhaps appreciation) of the possibility of — 108 —

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shifting the interpretive rules we could employ in our interpretive work. Gabe was explicitly raising the point that there are different sets of interpretive rules, different literacy practices, and different interpretive communities from which we could approach the biblical text. For Gabe, “a different idea” meant thinking about historical context. Instead of reading each word as meaningful in itself, Gabe argued that the text ought to be understood in light of its historical context, a context in which societies treated women as inferior to men. “We have to think about who this was written by.” For him, it was this historical context, more than any particular details in the text, that shed light on the question of what the text means. Even as he challenged the classroom’s interpretive rules, he demonstrated his ability to articulate his own. This is an important accomplishment. Gabe was the first student to make the need for the second conversation really explicit. Moreover, Gabe was advocating for a literacy practice and a set of interpretive rules that most Bible scholars would say is absolutely the right way to read biblical texts. In the moment, as the teacher, I paraphrased what he said to validate his alternative method of interpretation: “Meaning it was written to justify an existing reality?” I asked in response. Gabe confirmed: “Yes.” The dilemma I faced as the teacher was, first, that Gabe was taking us down a path that departed from Rule 1 and Rule 2 by looking to authorial intent and considering historical authors who may have been flawed and, second, the background knowledge​— I had not taught my students source criticism or historical context. For some students in the class, this was the first time they encountered the idea that the Torah (even the first four books) wasn’t written by God or even a single author. Gabe proposed an alternative set of interpretive rules that required contextual knowledge that I had not provided to all of my students. In the teaching moment I experienced the following choice: I could take up his request to consider the text under a different, and legitimate, set of interpretive assumptions and rules, or I could reinforce the interpretive rules of our classroom. In reflecting on this moment now, I believe this was the wrong way to frame my teaching decision. It was not a choice of reinforcing or relaxing my rules, it was a moment to have the second conversation about interpretive rules and literacy practices. Again​— in the moment, I did not take us to that space of meta-​­awareness and meta-​­reflection; I tried to keep us in the first conversation. I offered a — 109 —

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compromise: I invited Gabe to ground the historical point he wanted to make in the language of the text in front of us. Me: You still have to provide evidence in the text, because there is evidence that the text does not assert that they are equal. Gabe argued that we should abandon the rule that interpretations need to be grounded in the text. He argued that the words of the text were less important than the motives and world­views of the authors. In my reply, I offered that his interpretive suggestion (that we should take historical context into account) was actually compatible with the first interpretive rule I had been promoting all year. I was saying, in essence, that if he believed that the text reflected a cultural bias against women, he needed to find evidence of that bias in the language of the text itself. His classmates had actually already done this, detailing the ways that this text suggested that men are superior to women. I wonder now, looking back on my response, whether this was genuine or just an attempt on my part to redirect us back into the first conversation. I didn’t suggest we talk about the ways that considering the ancient Near East historical context and cultural milieu of the biblical authors might be valuable. I didn’t invite the consideration of how this historical perspective and shift to authorial intent might be in tension with my interpretive rules. I didn’t name the fact that if the Bible is a composite text with layers of redaction, my second interpretive rule might not make sense because there could be editorial errors in the text. I didn’t explain why I chose in my class to avoid considering historical context and authorial intent. I swept all these important second-​ c­ onversation questions under the rug. Not surprisingly, Gabe didn’t pursue my offer. In this case, he gave up. Gabe: “Yeah, I don’t know.” Here we had the opportunity for the second conversation unfolding in real time in my classroom. Gabe’s comment, that we had been operating under the idea that the Hebrew Bible was written by God, suggests that students can become aware of the fact that classrooms operate under a set of interpretive assumptions that lead to different interpretive rules and that are open to debate. Kate’s request to suspend an interpretive rule to offer an interpretation based on a text we didn’t all have in front of us did the same. In her own way, so did Jess’s theological comment and — 110 —

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Jenna’s conspiracy theory. These students invited the second conversation. Gabe, in particular, invited us to move into a meta-​­conversation and develop meta-​­language to navigate our multiple literacy practices. I didn’t accept the invitation in the moment because I didn’t see it. Gabe and Kate may have simply been trying to bring other information they had and were excited about into the discussion. Gabe likely encountered the documentary hypothesis and source criticism of the Bible elsewhere. Kate had clearly studied and been inspired by the story of Lilith. Gabe and Kate found meaning in this knowledge and wanted to bring it into the classroom. They both had a sense that bringing this knowledge was a problem given our interpretive rules, but perhaps didn’t exactly understand why. Was it as simple as introducing a second text for us to read closely, or did the information they wanted to introduce challenge my first or second interpretive rules head-​­on? Reflecting on these moments from my classroom, I regret that I did not move us into the second conversation and answer the questions implicit in their requests.

The Ideal Second Conversation I wish I had taken Gabe’s comment more seriously and given it more instructional time and space in the class. I wish I had had a meta-​­language mini-​­unit ready to go when the class finally got to this place. Here’s what I would have done differently. In that moment, I would have stopped the class. This was a moment for me to introduce meta-​­language. I would have then asked Gabe to write out his interpretive rules and assumptions for how best to read biblical texts. I would have assigned every student this homework: What do you think the best way to read biblical texts is? Should we read them as inerrant? Full of scribal error? The word of God? A reflection of an ancient and misinformed society? Should we read each word as full of meaning or look at the larger picture of the entire story? Do you think texts have a single right meaning? Biblical texts? Novels? Newspaper articles? Text messages? How important is an author’s identity for understanding the meaning of a text? Should we say out loud who we personally think wrote the Bible, or does it not matter? Why yes or why no? If we change our assumptions about a text’s purpose, will that always change the meaning of the text? Do you think you are asked to follow different interpretive — 111 —

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rules and ways of reading in your Jewish studies classes than in your language arts classes? What about from one Jewish studies teacher to another Jewish studies teacher? These are big questions, but I would have had the students answer every single one. Then I would have had them interview their parents to answer the same questions. We would have come into class and we would have spent an entire week of class talking about interpretive rules and introducing a meta-​­language for understanding the ways we move among different sets of interpretive rules, interpretive communities, and literacy practices. I would use examples from outside of Torah study and school. For homework later that week, I would have asked my students to think about two different sets of interpretive rules they use in different contexts. Perhaps the rules of Torah study versus language arts class, or perhaps text messaging with friends versus text messaging with parents​ —any two examples they wished to explore. I would have asked them to identify some of the interpretive rules operating in these contexts. The next class would have focused again on interpretive rules. We would have discussed why we should have shared interpretive rules for our classroom. I would have reviewed again the rules I had picked for our class. I would have offered my explanation for why these particular rules. I would have explained why I think they connect us to big interpretive communities outside of school. Then I would have asked my students at the end if they agreed with these rules or wished we would follow different ones, and I would have led a discussion about this. Students rarely get to debate and reflect on the interpretive rules of their teacher and classroom. Imagine if Kate hadn’t known that I wanted her to use the text we had studied, that this was an interpretive rule in our classroom. She would have raised her hand excited to share the Lilith story, a comment she felt was relevant and meaningful. Without knowing the interpretive rule of staying close to the text we had in front of us, my hesitation to allow her to continue with her comment would have felt very arbitrary. At least in my classroom, she knew the rules. That was the accomplishment I was focused on. But I missed the next accomplishment: having the second conversation. Perhaps some would argue that the second conversation is too sophisticated for middle school students, but I think it’s necessary. — 112 —

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Each time a student offered an interpretation outside the set interpretive boundaries of my Hebrew Bible classroom, I, as the teacher, had choices. I could engage it and thereby communicate that the interpretive rules of the classroom were flexible; I could reject it and reinforce interpretive boundaries; or I could ignore it and leave it up to other students to respond. Over the course of the year, I made each of these choices. My choice depended on my goals at any given time. Often, in the course of a few minutes, I might attempt to reaffirm interpretive boundaries​— only to relent a minute later in the face of student pushback and allow a reading to proceed. I was not consistent. But one thing that should have happened, the very thing I’m sure I did not accomplish, was the developing of meta-​­language for the students, for them to be able to talk about the different interpretive rules they had been asked to use in different classrooms and contexts. Gabe’s comment was my chance to have the second conversation explicitly and to frame the second conversation and provide my students with meta-​ ­language. Putting aside all the good reasons I had for wanting to move us back into the first conversation, and our shared literacy practice, I wish I had found a way to make space for a longer, more intentional second-​­conversation unit, where I could give my students the tool of meta-​­language.

Developing the Skills to Have the Second Conversation I have focused so far on how to ready a class for the second conversation through instruction and teacher talk around explicit and consistent interpretive rules. Missing from my discussion is how to develop a culture in a classroom, among the learners and teacher, that encourages student ideas and emotions to the point that they feel safe and comfortable to openly challenge the teacher’s interpretive rules, to speak up for alternative ways of reading, and to share interpretive rules that they use elsewhere in their lives and that they personally value. I have talked about the cognitive work that goes into preparing a class to be able to have the second conversation but have not yet addressed the social-​­emotional work. Here, the work of Orit Kent and Allison Cook (2018) and their program Pedagogy of Partnership are critical to realizing the ideal classroom I hope for. Kent and Cook’s work provides core chevruta practices (listening, articulating, wondering, focusing, supporting, and challenging) for — 113 —

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students to become well-​­versed in. These core practices help students learn to value their own voice, as well as their classmates’ voices when agreeing​— and even more significantly, when disagreeing. To have the meta-​­conversations I wish now that I had facilitated, students and teachers must be in deep relationship with one another. We can’t respect each other’s ways of reading without first respecting each other. Students must develop the habits of heart and mind that are essential for successful second conversations.

Guidelines for the Second Conversation Relationships are essential for having the second conversation. Once the relationships are formed, the second conversation can proceed. Here are the guidelines I would use for the second conversation in my teaching: Everyone in the room needs to be able to name, articulate, and agree on the interpretive rules operating in the room, that is, the rules that they are being asked to follow in this reading activity. The dissenter needs to be able to articulate the alternative rules she wishes to use to derive textual meaning and to articulate the meaning she derives with her alternative rules. Those in the room need to discuss the merits of the competing set of interpretive rules and avoid debating the alternative textual meaning without reference to the interpretive rules (realizing that each meaning might make sense within its own set of interpretive rules and assumptions).

The Paradigmatic Second Conversation I have come across paradigmatic moments for the second conversation outside my own classroom, as well. In her book Literacy Theory as Practice, Lara Handsfield compiled dozens of vignettes from literacy classrooms to profile different theories of literacy in practice. The vignettes also provide rich material to see moments for the second conversation with a little more distance than I had in studying my own classroom. There is one particular vignette from Handsfield’s book that deeply resonates with me in how it demonstrates where the second conversation is called for (2016, 145). Handsfield introduced Mrs. Cardona, an experienced Latina teacher — 114 —

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in a racially and economically diverse district in the Pacific Northwest. Her class was reading Albert Camus’s novel The Plague. Published in 1947, the novel tells the story of a plague overpowering the French Algerian city of Oran. The novel presents a snapshot of life in Oran as seen through the author’s point of view. In preparation for the day’s discussion, the students were to read the beginning of part 4 of the book, in which Camus details the tortured death of a child. The class began with students submitting written comments electronically which were then projected on the board for the class to read and reflect on. One student, James, wrote, “It don’t matter that an innocent child was killed. There won’t be no cure till white folk start dyin’” (2016, 147). This comment caught the student Mikaela’s attention and prompted class-​­wide discussion. Mikaela: “I don’t know. I think the point is that innocent people are dying. You can’t get more innocent than a little kid. . . . I think . . . what the author is saying​— the plague will kill anyone, even innocent people.” Darryn: “The doctor​— Rieux​— couldn’t do anything. He had to sit there and watch the child die.” The conversation turns to Algeria in the 1940s. It was a French colony, the class reminds each other. The question comes up as to whether Camus talks about any inequities in treatment of the plague in Oran. A student named Jocelyn says she doesn’t think there is anything explicit in the text about inequalities regarding who gets the experimental vaccine, but she did think the fact that Othon’s son gets it​— Othon being a magistrate and judge​— might suggest some inequity. Jocelyn: “Maybe because Othon is an important person​— a magistrate.” After some discussion, a student named Miranda asks a question. Miranda: “I don’t get why Camus doesn’t really talk about it. I mean, if it was a French colony and under French rule, wouldn’t there be divisions between the French and the local​— you know, Arab people, who were there first?” Omar: “Yeah, the French probably got better treatment.” Mrs. Cardona: “But does it say that in the text?” — 115 —

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Omar: “No, I​— I don’t think so. But it could’ve been that way.” Bokeo: “Yeah, ’cause Camus was French.” Mikaela: “He was born in Algeria, though.” Bokeo: “Well, yeah, but he’s still French. He’s white or European. So did he just like ignore that? I mean, no way was it equal there.” As the class works together to figure out the nuances of Camus’ identity, James remains focused on his original comment on racism. James: “Ain’t no way it’s not racism. Black lives don’t matter to white people.” Jocelyn: “That’s not true. white people do care. And besides, you didn’t even read the book.” James: “Dang, I ain’t got to read no book to know that!” Mrs. Cardona: “James, it’s true, you don’t have to read the book to know that, but you do have to read the book for my class. Let’s talk about this some more, but in the context of the book.” Handsfield, in her analysis of this vignette, points to the way in which sticking to the text is an interpretive rule at play in this classroom. She writes that James “resists many texts at once. First, he resists the separation between the novel and [life]. Next . . . [he] resists Mrs. Cardona’s requirement of ‘close reading’ to highlight what he views as the most important issue: current racial inequities” (2016, 149). A student in Mrs. Cardona’s class has asserted that he doesn’t need to have read The Plague to know that it’s racist. Many teachers might question whether James’s comment counts as an interpretation of the text at all. Does it really reflect an alternative interpretive rule? Can you have an interpretive rule that gives you a pass on looking at the text? But it is clear that James is making a claim about what the text means. He is essentially saying, “I know this text is racist, and I don’t have to read it to know.” James is challenging the interpretive rule that you must reference specific textual evidence to make an interpretive claim. To most people, the interpretive rule that you must read a book to know what it’s saying seems to be self-​­evident. But James clearly doesn’t see it that way. The truth is, we all read this way sometimes. All of us confidently interpret texts without having read them. Imagine coming across a book by David Duke, longtime Klan leader and prominent Holocaust denier. We would likely feel confident that his book is racist without reading it. — 116 —

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We would be operating under the interpretive rule that James is following: you can use biographical information about the author of a text to support a claim about what that text means. Of course, James is using biographical information that is more controversial. He is suggesting that knowing that Camus is white and European is enough biographical information to know that he is racist and elides over inequalities experienced between white people and people of color in all matters, plagues included. The point is not whether the interpretation is compelling, only that James’s interpretive rule is one we all use. In other words, James is happy to talk about the text and to use the information he’s learned about its historical context and the identity of its author to draw conclusions, but he’s not interested in finding textual evidence to support his claims. From his perspective, Mrs. Cardona’s (and his classmates’) insistence that he read the text is not internally persuasive; it can only be imposed authoritatively (Bakhtin 1981). The fact that Mrs. Cardona thinks it is reasonable to insist that her students read the text doesn’t mean that she isn’t relying on authority to assert that boundary. The fact that we might think it is reasonable for her to insist that her students read the text doesn’t mean that she isn’t relying on authority to assert that boundary. When an interpretive rule is imposed, all that matters is the perspective of the person it is imposed upon, not the perspective of the person imposing it. Mrs. Cardona had an option here to move into the second conversation. She could have allowed other students to respond to James’s point. They may well have pushed back on his interpretive claim or pushed him to articulate it more completely. Mrs. Cardona could have opened a conversation about why it’s important to cite textual evidence. This conversation would have taken the class even farther from Camus’s text, but it might have ended up convincing James of the value of specific textual evidence. With the distance of looking in on someone else’s classroom, I see here the paradigmatic opportunity for the second conversation. Mrs. Cardona would explain her interpretive rule, and James would explain his. I’m not saying Mrs. Cardona was out of line in demanding that students read the books she assigns and that they use textual evidence in their interpretations. I share this interpretive rule. It might be really important for her to put her foot down on this point. Citing textual evidence might be so important that it outweighs James’s clearly sincere — 117 —

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alternative interpretive rule. What’s important here is that Mrs. Cardona, like I did so many times in my own classroom, ultimately chooses to use this as a moment only to reinforce her interpretive rule​— not to have the second conversation. She relies on her authority as a teacher, like I did, and insists that James must read the book. I can’t imagine a better moment for her to have stopped to have the second conversation about why she wants James to read the book before deciding whether it is racist.

Limits of the Second Conversation The second conversation is incredibly valuable. That said, the second conversation can’t comprehensively address all issues of power in the classroom. I am aware that I was a teacher in a traditional school setting that is broadly part of an educational system that has always been punitive and destructive towards marginalized students. Andrea Avery reminds us in her beautiful essay on her high school teaching of Lucy Grealy’s memoir, Autobiography of a Face, of “the implications of [teachers’] own bodies” (2022, 333). Avery goes on admonishing educators to “acknowledg[e] that the stakes of such disclosures are higher for some bodies than others” (2022, 333). Avery discusses the marginalization teachers and students experience who are disabled and/or chronically ill. Chezare Warren, Dorinda J. Andrews, and Terry K. Flennaugh (2022) write that antiblackness positions the “American school as incapable of honoring and respecting Black people’s humanity, predisposing any Black child’s schooling experience to be potentially assaultive regardless of how well-​­meaning the educators with whom they interact” (2022, 114). I was a cis-​­female, able-​­bodied, religiously traditional, white teacher. The second conversation could not fully transcend the structures of school or society and the power bestowed on me by these characteristics. Gabe may have been the most explicit in his challenge to my classroom’s literacy practice and his move into the second conversation precisely because he was particularly confident and academically powerful. Missing from this book, and many of the whole-​­class text discussions, were the voices of the most marginalized students in my class. George found his voice in our interpretive community, but there were other students who, even with clear interpretive rules, remained quiet much of the time. Perhaps, had I done a better job creating space for the second conversation, these students would have spoken up more. But perhaps not. The first and second conversations can’t — 118 —

Discussing Interpretive Rules in the Classroom

fix all of the deeply embedded issues of power that follow us into the classroom.

What Does the Second Conversation Get Us? Still, the second conversation can provide a meaningful structure for addressing some issues of power in the classroom. The second conversation can help foster a community of belonging through a shared interpretive practice and open discussion around literacy practices and the multifaceted, heteroglossic worlds we all inhabit. We reconceptualize culture from something akin to a treasure box filled with artifacts that we pass from generation to generation untouched (represented by an E. D. Hirsch model of literacy, see Hirsch 2016) to a way of being. That is, when we understand culture as an iterative and dialogic participation with a body of texts and evolving ways of interacting, thinking, and knowing, then the very act of having the first conversation around a classical text’s meaning, and, ideally, being able to have the second conversation, is an act of living culture. And by living culture, we are transmitting culture. This is particularly important for Jewish education and Jewish culture. Zvi Bekerman and Sue Rosenfeld remind us what doesn’t work with formal Jewish text classrooms as they are currently run: [Students] are told that achieving Jewish textual literacy will allow them to become proud representatives of their community and partners in securing its continuity, though they are not told how this will happen, nor do they see models of it being done. . . . What the students have been taught in Jewish education was dispensable: Life outside did not require the texts that the Jewish education system felt were necessary. . . . Our schools have perhaps forgotten that Judaism, to be relevant, has to be relevant not only to Jews themselves but to the rest of the world. Most importantly, Judaism has to be relevant to the Jews’ world, which does not exist in isolation. (Bekerman and Rosenfeld 2011, 49–50) Bekerman and Rosenfeld think that the very structure of formal schooling is the problem. I am more optimistic. Yes, schools are not immune to the issues of power that pervade society, but classrooms can become spaces of interpretive belonging. The classroom, like everywhere else, can be a meaningful literacy context. In today’s world, everyone needs be a thoughtful reader, a sophisticated reader, a reader — 119 —

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capable of navigating multiple literacy practices and interpretive communities. When a teacher does the work necessary to allow for students to interpret together with a clear set of interpretive rules​— to form an interpretive community following a single literacy practice and to engage in the first conversation​— and when she also facilitates the second conversation, I believe she gives her students the opportunity to become thoughtful and sophisticated readers. In the Jewish day school, Torah study can become an occasion for becoming a sophisticated reader. If students leave my classroom feeling like they understand why I am asking them to read the way I am, with the interpretive rules I have, if they can see the value of trying on new interpretive rules and following the same set of interpretive rules as a class, and if they, at the same time, feel empowered by me, the teacher, and the class, to hold on to their own alternative ways of reading, then I succeed in achieving meaningful Jewish cultural transmission. This is the experience of legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger 1991) in the activity (Leont’ev 1981) of Jewish reading and literacy. I have a friend from my first teaching job who teaches full-​­time and is entering her thirteenth year of teaching. She often says about her students, “I’m not concerned about preparing them for Jewish life, I’m focused on helping them live their Jewish life, right now.” It is this conception of culture that the first and second conversations help achieve. Texts have always participated in enculturation. Reading and writing have been used throughout world history, especially since the advent of the printing press, for planned approaches to enculturation. Governments, churches, and schools have used reading and writing “to impose their values, histories, and practices on individuals and societies by inscribing them in print” (Tierney and Pearson 2021, 5). Texts can be a tool of subjugation or liberation (Willinsky 1998). This book reimagines biblical reading and biblical literacy in service of a different type of enculturation. This enculturation reflects sociocultural conceptions of culture as something lived and evolving, something always rooted in activity and something participatory. This new vision of culture and of teaching is what I hoped to offer here.

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Conclusion The Stakes of Knowing How to Have the Second Conversation

Jewish students learning Torah in Jewish day schools is a case of literacy learning that is at once unique and, at the same time, sheds light on a central question in literacy research. Over the last two decades, literacy researchers have argued that literacy as a construct is more complicated than knowing how to read, write, comprehend, or interpret. Literacy intersects with identity, social purposes, culture, and history. These researchers have sought to integrate anthropological insights into the ways that different communities use texts and psychological insights into how young people learn to interact with texts. Today, many scholars view literacy education as a delicate balancing act between the literacy practices characteristic of home communities, students’ own interests and inclinations, and the effort of educators to inculcate certain literacy practices. This book, which focuses on Jewish students learning Hebrew Bible in a Jewish day school, is a case study of how one teacher tried to accomplish that balancing act in a single classroom. Literacy scholars are well aware, perhaps even tired from discussions of, the shift that has taken place over the past twenty-​­five years in literacy educational theory. The shift moved scholars away from an “autonomous” view of literacy towards a “multiple literacies” view (Street 1995). Built by an array of scholars from different disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and education (see e.g., Collins and Blot 2003; Heath 1983; Street 1995; Tierney and Pearson 2021), this shift refuted the prevailing view of literacy that imagined a “clear, cumulative distinction between literacy and orality” (Collins and Blot 2003, 4). — 121 —

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It refuted “the literacy thesis” that there exists “unified, cumulative effects of literacy, in social and cognitive development” (Collins and Blot 2003, 6). The autonomous view of literacy was replaced with a situated view of multiple literacies (Collins and Blot 2003; Handsfield 2016; Hull and Schultz 2001; Purcell-​­Gates 2007; Scribner and Cole 1981; Smagorinsky 2001; Tierney and Pearson 2021; Willinsky 1998). This new view, sometimes called “multiliteracies” or “new literacy studies” or “multiple literacies,” emphasized the ways in which reading and literacy are culturally and socially situated and how students move between different literacy practices. With this shift, schools were criticized for “being agents of social and cultural reproduction.” That is, serving those with “social and political power, status and privilege” (Purcell-​­Gates 2007, 2). Schools were criticized for privileging those students with academic literacies and marginalizing those without. That is, for perpetuating existing power structures and creating a guise through which “underclass” groups can be dismissed for the seemingly meritocratic reason of academic failure (­Purcell-​­Gates 2007, 6; Gordon 2015). This adds up to “commit[ing] ‘symbolic violence’ by disallowing marginalized discourse as capital and convincing even those marginalized that dominant discourses of the privileged, to which they will have no real access, are legitimate” (­Purcell-​­Gates 2007, 6). Many of the literacy scholars who criticized schools began to celebrate “everyday practices of literacy” (Purcell-​­Gates 2007, 4), “vernacular literacies,” and “out-​­of-​­school literacies” (Gee 2015; Hull and Schultz 2001). Seminal studies documented how people read and use texts out in the world and the positive cognitive impact of these literacy practices among the so-​­called illiterate (Street 1995; Heath 1983; Purcell-​­Gates 2007). This included recitation of Quranic verses, reading labels while food shopping, Christian Bible study, reading store signs, cooking, and even playing video games (Gee 2003). Scholars proposed ways to bring children’s home literacies into the schools to enhance their academic literacy learning (Brown, Cooks, and Cross 2016; Dyson 2003; Hull and Schultz 2001; Lee 2007; Mahiri and Godley 1998; and González, Moll, and Amanti 2005). Researchers compared the negative experience of school and the teaching of academic literacies to the positive experience of out-​­of-​­school religious literacy learning (Ek 2008; McMillon and Edwards 2000; Sarroub 2002). — 122 —

Conclusion

But the critique of school literacy and appreciation of home literacies eventually led to the question, now what? (Purcell-​­Gates 2007, 9). That is, even if it’s true that literacy has been uncovered as a complex construct that exists in many places and in many ways, depending on culture, identity, and community, and it is, it still leaves the question, since “everyday practices of literacy” (Purcell-​­Gates 2007, 4) are learned without schooling, where does that leave the eight hours a day mandated to schooling? Shouldn’t the focus in school remain on academic literacies, which are still highly valued in mainstream culture and economy? The answer that literacy scholars came up with was yes, but “validating the literacies within communities in school would go a long way toward motivating students to learn from instruction” (Purcell-​­Gates 2007, 9). That is, if a teacher creates room for students to build on, reference, and consider their home literacies in the context of the classroom (i.e., validating the literacies within the students’ communities in the school classroom), the students will be more motivated to learn the new academic literacies because they will feel less marginalized and more recognized. In my classroom, the “academic” literacies I was teaching were classical Jewish scriptural literacy practices. I chose this literacy because I believed the larger Jewish world valued it. In addition, I believed it evened the playing field with regard to Jewish background knowledge and aided the school’s educational mandate of gaining fluency in the biblical Hebrew language. However, the Jewish scriptural literacy practices I aspired to induct my students into were not the scriptural literacy practices they were necessarily familiar with, nor were they necessarily the ones they used at home. There were students in my class, for example, whose families engaged in scriptural literacy practices that focused on memorization and recitation. There were other students whose families only thought of scriptural literacy as the weekly chanting from the Torah in synagogue on Saturdays. This realization, that even in an ethno-​ ­religious, mission-​­driven educational context like a Jewish day school, the literacy practice promoted by the teacher in the Hebrew Bible classroom can feel at odds with the students’ home biblical literacy practices, is essential. It means that the Hebrew Bible classroom, just like every other classroom, needs to contend with the tension between the authoritative (academic) literacy being used by the teacher and the potential marginalization of the students’ home literacies that they value and use — 123 —

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outside the classroom. The Hebrew Bible classroom in the Jewish day school replicates the academic-​­versus-​­multiliteracies tension of general education and literacy theory. In this book I offer an answer to this pressing charge in literacy theory for teachers to try “validating the literacies within communities” for “motivating students to learn from instruction” (Purcell-​­Gates 2007, 9). In my teaching and research, I worked to uncover what that actually looks like. What does it sound like and feel like as the teacher to validate the literacies my students brought? I have described my efforts (and dilemmas of practice) in attempting to leverage my students’ home literacies to motivate them to learn from instruction. For me, it came down to pursuing the first and second conversations. Creating the context for good first and second conversations in the text classroom allowed me to accomplish both instruction and induction into a new literacy practice and a recognition and celebration of students’ existing literacy practices. The first conversation embodies situated learning because it allows students to engage in the literacy practice, in the interpretive activity, together with understanding what they’re being asked to do. The second conversation is a chance to share home literacy practices, compare home literacies to academic literacies, and to use both in the classroom. The first and second conversations are not independent of one another, but are dialectical, each informing the other. How the first conversation is built in a classroom, what interpretive rules are articulated and why, is influenced by dialogue with the students in the room and the literacies they bring. Likewise, how the second conversation unfolds is influenced by dialogue with the first conversation, as students consider the literacy practice of the classroom in contrast to their home literacy practices. I made mistakes along the way, but I landed on my next aspiration for my teaching.

Second Conversation for Life Every classroom brings together individuals from various interpretive communities with one reader who is given authority: the teacher. Teachers often bring very different interpretive rules from different literacy practices than their students. I hope the first and second conversations resonate for all teachers teaching texts in the classroom. I hope teachers of texts from picture books to The Scarlet Letter and everything in between find this book and the conceptual tools of the first conversation — 124 —

Conclusion

and the second conversation helpful. I have argued in this book that all textual meaning requires not only interpretation but also agreed-​­upon or negotiated rules of interpretation and that talking about those rules in the multiliteracies reality we live in is important. The truth is, I think the first and second conversations are already being attempted in most text classrooms, just not successfully. In the first conversation, students and their teachers are offering interpretations and asking: What does this text mean? What are the arguments for and against any particular interpretation? This first conversation obviously works best when the interpretive rules are shared. It is made more inclusive when the teacher clarifies the interpretive rules by which the students are being asked to read, when the teacher names and articulates these interpretive rules and the literacy practice for her classroom community. But it is attempted either way, even if it ends up looking like an initiation-​­response-​­evaluation (IRE) sequence where only the teacher’s interpretive agenda is moved forward. Most classrooms are also running into the second conversation. When students start to notice how their teacher is asking them to read and interpret texts, whether the teacher has been clear or not, consistent or not, students will begin to think through, implicitly or explicitly, how that lines up with the ways they want and know how to read and interpret texts. In the second conversation, readers reflect on the rules of interpretation and ask: Who has the authority to decide what a text means? What assumptions shape the process of interpretation? Why is my teacher asking me to read this way and not that way, follow these implicit rules and assumptions and not those rules and assumptions? The less clear and intentional the first conversation, the less clear and intentional the request for the second conversation may be. Nonetheless, it will always come. It is the student in Yonatan’s fourth-​­grade Hebrew Bible class asking about why God has a nose in the text (and implicitly asking why such questions don’t get addressed in Yonatan’s class). It is the transfer student from Menachem’s school into Yonatan’s class who is outraged that a classmate was allowed to offer an interpretation that suggests polytheism. When done well, the teacher is able to hear in these comments the subtle and implicit request for the second conversation and take the opportunity for the class to have a proper second conversation: a meta-​­conversation that helps students to navigate their multiple literacy practices and the reality that we all exist in, to recognize that we — 125 —

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move between multiple interpretive communities with different sets of interpretive rules, even, or especially, a group of American Jewish children in a Hebrew Bible classroom in a Jewish day school. This book focuses on the importance of the first and second conversations in school classrooms, specifically Hebrew Bible classrooms, and the way that the first and second conversations can make the text classroom a more authentic, relevant, and real literacy space and Jewish space. The idea of the first and second conversations, however, has implications far beyond the classroom. When I reflect on the deep partisan divisions that plague our society today, I am struck by the extent to which people seem to be playing by different interpretive rules. I am sure that if we could learn to recognize the interpretive rules we’re reading with ourselves and see when they differ from the interpretive rules our fellow citizens, neighbors, friends, and family members follow, we could learn how to move into the second conversation. And if we could learn how to start talking about the interpretive rules that underlie our beliefs, we would be better served and better able to talk across those differences. It is my firm belief that if we truly want to build an inclusive, diverse, and just society, we all must learn how to recognize the first conversations we operate in and find the courage to engage in the second conversation in every context.

A Portrait of the Possible I want to end by sharing one of my favorite portraits of a good, confident reader who knows and understands how to move between the first and second conversations. This is not a modern reader​— this is an ancient reader. This portrait can be found in the Torah itself, in Exodus 2. The great reader is Miriam, Moses’s sister.1 The book of Exodus begins with Pharoah making a decree that every Jewish baby boy is to be killed. Moses’s mother, Yocheved, hides Moses for three months, at which point she is no longer able to hide him. At a loss of what to do, she puts Moses in a basket and takes the basket down to the Nile. The biblical text tells us that after Yocheved put Moses’s basket in the Nile and leaves, Miriam, his sister, remains there. She stands at a bit of a distance “to know what would be done to him” (Exodus 2:4).

‫ָׂשה לֽ ֹו׃‬ ֖ ֶ ‫וַּתֵ תַ ַּצ֥ב אֲחֹ ֖תֹו מֵ ָרחֹ֑ ק לְ דֵ ָ֕עה מַ ה־ ֵּיע‬ 1. All translations in this section are my own unless noted otherwise. — 126 —

Conclusion

And then, in a miraculous turn of events, Pharaoh’s own daughter appears​— one of the most powerful women in the land. The biblical text tells us that she has come to the Nile to bathe. There at the Nile, she sees the basket with baby Moses in it, she has the basket retrieved by her servants, she opens it, she locks eyes with the crying baby Moses, and she takes pity on this abandoned baby. “And she opened it, and she saw him, the child, and behold, the lad was crying. She pitied him and said, ‘from the children of the Hebrews is this.’” (Exodus 2:6)

‫ו ִַּתפְ ּתַ ח֙ ו ִַּת ְר ֵ ֣אהּו אֶ ת־הַ ֶּ֔ילֶד וְ הִ ּנֵה־נַ ֖עַר ּבֹ כֶ ֑ה וַּתַ חְ מֹ֣ ל ָע ָ֔ליו ַו ּ֕ת ֹאמֶ ר ִמּיַלְ ֵ ֥די ָ ֽהעִ בְ ִ ֖רים ֶזֽה׃‬ At that exact moment, Miriam, who has been standing there watching, approaches the daughter of Pharaoh and says to her, “Can I call for you a nursing woman from the Hebrews to nurse for you this boy?” (Exodus 2:7).

‫אתי לְָך֙ ִא ָ ּׁ֣שה מֵ י ֶ֔נקֶ ת ִ ֖מן הָ עִ בְ ִר ֹּ֑ית וְ תֵ ִינ֥ק לָ ְ֖ך‬ ִ ‫ַו ּ֣ת ֹאמֶ ר אֲחֹ ת ֹ֮ו אֶ ל־ּבַ ת־ּפ ְַרעֹ ֒ה הַ אֵ ֵ֗לְך וְ קָ ָ ֤ר‬ ‫אֶ ת־הַ ָ ּֽילֶד׃‬ The daughter of Pharoah agrees, and because of Miriam’s intervention, Moses is saved and the entire course of biblical history is changed. Miriam, a young girl who has just watched this traumatic moment of her mother abandoning her baby brother, offers the daughter of Pharoah an interpretation of the scene in front of her. This is an incredible intervention! Miriam approaches a princess, the very princess whose father made the decree to kill all the Hebrew boys. If Miriam understands who this woman is standing before her, looking at her baby brother Moses in a basket, then this was truly a crazy, dangerous choice to make. It is brazen. It is baffling. And it is brilliant.2 Miriam is reading. Not a print text of course, but an embodied text standing before her. She is reading the princess, the daughter of Pharaoh, and she sees a way to approach her. She has an ability to read the princess so well​— to know exactly what to say to her. Miriam knew what interpretation to offer the princess of the “text” of an abandoned baby in a basket on the Nile, an interpretation that the daughter of Pharaoh would find compelling and would move her to do something other than put it back on the Nile to float away. 2. I am grateful to Yochi Brandes for sparking my thinking on this in her incredible retelling of the story on the Israeli podcast Ohseem Tanakh (Brandes 2019). — 127 —

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Miriam’s intervention worked because she was able to read the situ­ ation carefully. She saw the daughter of Pharoah, who was bathing by the Nile and was merely intrigued by a basket with a baby in it​— not outraged. Pharoah’s daughter was not interested in a structural critical interpretation of this scene, an interpretation that might point to the harm caused by her father’s fear-​­mongering xenophobia and policy of infanticide (see Exodus 1:10). Rather, the daughter of Pharaoh, Miriam understood, is content with her world. The daughter of Pharoah was looking into the eyes of this particular baby, only ready for an interpretation that focused on the personal. The princess’s interpretive rules did not include room for political or structural critique. Again, the verse reads (Exodus 2:6), “And she opened it, and she saw him, the child, and behold, the lad was crying. She pitied him and said, ‘from the children of the Hebrews is this.’” The daughter of Pharoah saw him, this one child, who happened to be crying. She pitied him, this one child, not the system that created this reality. She knew from what people this baby came, but her focus was only on him, this little baby. Miriam noticed this and stepped into the interpretive rules of the daughter of Pharoah. She offered an interpretation of the situation that the daughter of Pharaoh found compelling: that this one particular little baby happened to need food, that was why he was crying, and that she could stop the crying. With that, Miriam saved her brother’s life. Miriam perfected the skill of moving between interpretive rules for reading the world and noticing her fellow readers. She saw that the text of a baby in a basket on the Nile was a very different text for the daughter of Pharaoh than it was for her. Any of us who have fantasized about what we would say given the chance to come face-​­to-​­face with an evil politician who has created policies that have viscerally impacted our families, our lives, and the lives of those we care about can appreciate this moment. And yet, Miriam understood that there is a time and a place for structural critiques or resistance, and she made a choice. She had the chance to attack, but she chose to do something different. Miriam could see the situation so clearly; she could see which interpretation (following which interpretive rules) of the text of her baby brother would be meaningful to the reader standing in front of her, the daughter of Pharoah. She had the capacity to shift her perspective and move into those interpretive rules. Perhaps it is this capacity that ultimately earns Miriam the title of Mir— 128 —

Conclusion

iam HaNeviah: Miriam the prophetess (Exodus 15:20). Miriam is called a prophetess in the biblical text, though she never speaks to God. What earns her the title of “prophetess”? The Hebrew Bible itself leaves that ambiguous. I will fill that ambiguity with this final idea: Miriam earns the title of prophetess not by talking to God, but by being such a sophisticated and capable reader. If this is true, then the story of Miriam teaches us that good reading, the ability to recognize the interpretive rules operating in any first conversation and to move skillfully among different first conversations, interpretive rules, and interpretive communities, by having the second conversation with yourself or others, is akin to prophecy. Miriam is a lofty vision of the possible. If we can train our young students to read like Miriam, if we can refocus our classrooms to thoughtfully and clearly induct students into particular literacy practices, and also to listen for and then welcome the request for the second conversation, then we can raise the next generation of prophets. This is the central challenge of our time, in Jewish education and in all literacy education. It is telling that Miriam receives her prophecy as a child.

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Methodological Appendixes Appendix 1 Coding the Culminating Whole-​­Class Discussion Transcripts Throughout this book I discussed classroom moments from my teacher-​ ­research study. Here I provide the more comprehensive analysis of the data from my teacher-​­research study. To code the data set of culminating whole-​­class discussions from each unit, I drew on the tools of conversation analysis (Goodwin and Heritage 1990). I analyzed the transcripts of these whole-​­class discussions to understand how meaning emerged from sequential student and teacher comments. I coded ten whole-​­class discussions comprising 1,044 content-​­related comments. Every content-​­related comment received a code. Transcripts were coded by me, the researcher, and an independent coder. We had 92 percent reliability, with an additional 6 percent resolved through discussion; 2 percent we could not resolve. Comments fell into four categories: • Many comments were aligned with my interpretive rules. That is, many comments made during whole-​­class discussions by my students and me did in fact refer to textual details to build our interpretations. An example of a student comment that received this code is, “You could read the verse, ‘God will show the ram, my son,’ or you could read it, ‘God will show the ram,’ which equals, ‘my son.’” In this comment, this student offers a creative interpretation of the Akeda, the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22). He suggests that Abraham subtly told Isaac that he was going to be sacrificed. He reads this line of dialogue as Abraham saying, essentially: “Isaac, YOU are the ram!” This is an unconventional interpretation for sure, but also clearly grounded in a close — 131 —

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reading of the words on this page. For this reason, it was coded as being aligned with my interpretive rules. • A second category of comments were misaligned with my interpretive rules. That is, students, and sometimes even I, made comments that brought in outside knowledge or drew on analogies to our own experience, in ways that violated our interpretive rule to stay on the page in front of us. For example, a student comment that received this code was “one theory that I’ve heard is that the time scale changes from like early years to our current time, so it could have switched.” This comment references outside authorities and makes no attempt to ground the idea in the text itself. For this reason, it was coded as misaligned with my interpretive rules. • Third, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there were a fair number of comments that stepped back from the text and talked about the interpretive rules in the classroom. I called these “meta-​ ­comments.” These meta-​­comments were sometimes aligned with my interpretive rules. Such comments occurred when I or my students explicitly appealed to my interpretive rules​ —for example, in insisting that other students ground their interpretations in textual details. One such comment that received this code was, “I know there can be multiple ways of answering this. But I’m asking according to the text.” This comment named and asked for an answer that followed our interpretive rule to use the words of the text in front of us. • Finally, some meta-​­comments explicitly challenged and articulated a competing interpretive rule. One student comment that received this code was, “I just want to say, we know what’s written in the text, but what if other stuff was happening that they just didn’t write down?” This comment received this code because the student was saying quite explicitly that she wanted our interpretation of the text to move beyond the words on the page itself and to consider what else might have happened that had no hints or explicit evidence in the text itself. To give a sense of the data set as a whole, here’s how the codes broke down across all content-​­related comments (see graph 1). (Remember, I didn’t include procedural comments, such as calling on students, in this — 132 —

Coding the . . . Whole-Class Discussion Transcripts graph 1: Student and Teacher Comments

total). This is a numeric representation of the interpretive dynamics and work this book unpacks. The overwhelming majority of my own comments (which constituted 28 percent of all content-​­oriented comments) were aligned with my interpretive rules or were meta-​­comments explicitly aligned and reaffirming those rules. This is important because it provides evidence of fidelity of implementation​— that is, I did what I set out to do: I took the stance towards textual interpretation that I said I would take and that I asked my students to take. I offered interpretations following my three interpretive rules. The students, on the other hand, while they made many comments aligned with my interpretive rules, especially in discussions later in the year, had a greater mix of comment types. Throughout the year they made comments about the text that violated our three interpretive rules. They also made comments that explicitly challenged our three interpretive rules, moving us in the direction of the second conversation.

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Appendix 2 Barry Holtz, Orientations, and JTS Standards and Benchmarks The idea of interpretive rules is both connected and distinct from Barry Holtz’s work on orientations and the Jewish Theological Seminary’s (JTS’s) Standards and Benchmarks program. Every orientation and standard has implicit interpretive rules, but the conceptual tool of interpretive rules is far more context-​­specific than orientations and standards. Interpretive rules are always relative to the readers in the room. I want to take a minute to review Holtz’s orientations and the eight standards from the JTS Standards and Benchmarks (see table 1). I also want to consider the contribution the Standards and Benchmarks program has made to Hebrew Bible education in Jewish full-​­time day schools. The Standards and Benchmarks project is by far the most influential Tanakh professional development program in Jewish full-​­time day school education; it has set the general instructional tone for Tanakh education in most community day schools. And yet, the document and program itself grew out of a particular moment and trend in education policy. The Standards and Benchmarks project grew out of the shadow of the National Standards movement on the state and federal level (Ravitch 1996, 134).1 Following this national trend, in 1999 the Avi Chai Foundation funded a small project to create Tanakh standards in Jewish education with the goal of eventually creating a national assessment for 1. In 1992, the congressionally established bipartisan National Council on Education Standards and Testing released its historic recommendations calling for the development of voluntary national standards and a voluntary national system of assessments (because the federal government doesn’t have the constitutional right to mandate education standards to states). Thus, as Ravitch tells the story, began a national-​­standards movement. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics was the first to develop standards, followed by the National Academy of Sciences. Things got complicated with the attempt to create history standards, as might seem obvious in hindsight. — 134 —

Barry Holtz, Orientations, & JTS Standards & Benchmarks Table 1: Holtz’s Orientations (Holtz 2003, 95) Holtz’s Orientation

Holtz’s Definition (Key Element)

The Contextual Orientation

Bible in the context of its own time

The Literary Criticism Orientation

Tools of modern literary criticism applied to the Bible.

The Reader-​­Response Orientation

Tools of postmodern literary criticism applied to the Bible.

Parshanut, the Jewish Interpretive   Tradition

Exploration of classical commentators’ understanding of Bible.

Moralistic-​­Didactic Orientation

What is the moral lesson that the Bible teaches us?

The Personalization Orientation

How can the Bible speak to us​— psychologically, politically, spiritually?

The Ideation Orientation What are the “big ideas” of the Bible? Melton curriculum. Appears in non-​ ­Orthodox schools. The Bible Leads to Action Orientation

Study leads to performing commandments; ethical behaviors

The Decoding, Translating, and   Comprehension Outcome

Decoding the Hebrew, comprehending the basics

Tanakh for day school students. The project, led by Charlotte Abrahamson, was a two-​­year grant, and the product was to be standards. She convened a group of scholars and educators, and together they came up with fifteen overarching outcome goals for Tanakh education. They then brought in ten master teachers who worked with the group to move from fifteen to eight standards and to improve the language. The team then began writing benchmarks for each standard. Charlotte Abrahamson shepherded the writing of all standards and benchmarks, and at the end of the two-​­year grant, there existed a standards document similar to those being produced for general education. The document paralleled the work of Barry Holtz. Holtz’s 2003 book Textual Knowledge argued that teachers must think about purposes in teaching Tanakh. What are the outcomes they are looking for? “In what way do we ‘justify’ the enterprise of teaching the Bible?” What kinds of — 135 —

a ppe ndi x 2 Table 2: Standards and Benchmarks’ Standards (Jewish Theological Seminary 2022) Tanakh Standards Definition

1 Students will become independent and literarily astute readers of the biblical text in Hebrew.



2 Students will be engaged in the learning of ancient, rabbinic, and modern modes of interpretation of the biblical text and will see themselves as a link in this ongoing chain of interpretation.



3 Students will appreciate Tanakh as a multivocal text with a complex history of development.



4 Students will view Tanakh as the formative narrative of the Jewish People​— past, present, and future.



5 Students will, through the study of Tanakh, understand and value that the land of Israel informs and shapes the historical, theological, and sociological experience of the Jewish People.



6 Students will develop an appreciation for the sacredness of Tanakh as the primary record of the meeting between God and the people of Israel and as an essential text through which Jews continue to grapple with theological, spiritual, and existential questions.



7 Students will understand, through the study of Tanakh and its interpretations, the role of mitzvot [commandments] in the shaping of the ethical character and religious practices of the individual and the Jewish People.



8 Students will develop a love of Torah study for its own sake and embrace it as an inspiring resource, informing their values, moral commitments, and ways of experiencing the world.

knowledge does a Tanakh teacher need to have? “How must that knowledge of subject matter be structured and conceptualized?” Holtz argued that the essential question in Tanakh education is, which scholarly conception of the discipline does the teacher want to adhere to? If a teacher can answer this question, Holtz argued, they will have purpose and focus in their text instruction (2003, 4). The Tanakh Standards and Benchmarks document took the baton from Holtz and articulated eight different standards a school could adopt — 136 —

Barry Holtz, Orientations, & JTS Standards & Benchmarks

for their Tanakh program, paralleling, to a large extent, Holtz’s nine orientations. JTS then began running professional-​­development programs in Jewish day schools to help Jewish studies departments align their curricula with chosen standards. Participating schools were required to pick two standards around which to focus their curriculum. The Tanakh Standards and Benchmarks project represented a major leap forward by offering schools the language with which to name their implicit priorities, but it did not easily transfer to practice. As discussed in the body of this book, the Standards and Benchmarks document could inspire a teacher to define her interpretive rules and boundaries and explain for herself why one interpretation will be valued over another in her classroom, but it leaves pedagogical questions around whether or not to share the classroom’s orientation unaddressed. Direction on how to identify the interpretive rules implicit in each standard is also left unaddressed. Most significantly, the Standards and Benchmarks document doesn’t help a teacher determine her pedagogy. I want to explore this point with an example from my earlier years as a high school Tanakh teacher. The Jewish high school I taught at had a Tanakh scope and sequence designed by the Bible scholar Marc Brettler and his doctoral student Dr. Susie Tanchel. The first year was dedicated to academic study of biblical Hebrew. The fourth year was dedicated to the study of source criticism. Tanchel writes about this principled choice: At present, no other community high school invests significant time in teaching the history of the five different schools of thought that produced the Pentateuch as well as some of the actual methods of source criticism. Some choose instead, for example, “to examine the assumptions that are brought to the biblical text by traditional commentaries and comparing/contrasting these assumptions to those of modern academic scholars.” . . . When discussing modern methods of interpretation, these schools mainly focus their energies on literary criticism, which does not involve the same potential theological pitfalls. (2008, 43) The middle two years were spent studying meforshim, the classic Jewish medieval commentators on Tanakh. I was assigned to teach ninth, tenth, and twelfth grade. Enamored with the Hebrew Bible as a tool for teaching multiple sets of interpretive — 137 —

a ppe ndi x 2 Table 3: Standards and Benchmarks Standards: Standards for Grades K–2 (Jewish Theological Seminary 2022) Example K–2 Benchmarks Standard from Each Standard Standard 1: Students will become independent and literarily astute readers of the biblical text in Hebrew

Know that the Tanakh is a Hebrew text; read verses from the Tanakh in Hebrew.

Standard 2: Students will be engaged in the learning of ancient, rabbinic, and modern modes of interpretation of the biblical text and will see themselves as a link in this ongoing chain of interpretation.

Know that there are special stories​ —mid­rashim​— that help explain and teach lessons based on the Torah’s words and narratives.

Standard 3: Students will appreciate Tanakh as a multivocal text with a complex history of development.

Suggested big idea: Some people believe that God wrote the Torah, and some people believe that very wonderful and wise people wrote it.

Standard 4: Students will view Tanakh as a formative narrative of the Jewish People​— past, present, and future.

Recognizes central themes of the Torah narratives; connects relevant holiday or celebration to the biblical narrative.

Standard 5: Students will, through the study of Tanakh, understand and value that the Land of Israel informs and shapes the historical, theological, and sociological experiences of the Jewish People.

Explains that the Land of Israel was a special place for the Israelites in the Tanakh and is still a special place for Jewish people today; associates the “seven special species” with the land of Israel.

Standard 6: Students will develop an appreciation for the sacredness of Tanakh as the primary record of the meeting between God and the people of Israel and as an essential text through which Jews continue to grapple with theological, spiritual, and existential questions.

Demonstrates and articulates the need for respectful behaviors towards the sefer Torah (ritual scroll); knows the appropriate berakhot (blessing) and procedures for learning and reading the Torah.

(Continued)

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Barry Holtz, Orientations, & JTS Standards & Benchmarks Table 3: (continued) Standard 7: Students will understand, through the study of Tanakh and its interpretations, the role of mitzvot [commandments] in the shaping of the ethical character and religious practices of the individual and the Jewish People.

Understands that a key of our relationship with God is mitzvot, and that that’s why the Torah outlines mitzvot. Knows key mitzvot/phrases and differentiates between ethical and ritual commandments. Applies basic mitzvot to their origins in the Torah.

Standard 8: Students will develop a love of Torah study for its own sake and embrace it as an inspiring resource, informing their values, moral commitments, and ways of experiencing the world.

Shows excitement and respect for Torah study; links specific value behaviors with biblical personalities in narrative settings; applies values to personal Jewish practice.

Source: https://avichai​.org/wp​‑content/uploads/2012/01/Tanakh​‑Standards​‑Benchmarks​ .pdf

rules, it was obvious to me how I would teach source criticism and the contextual orientation: I would teach it as a particular set of interpretive rules. I would teach the students the interpretive rules and assumptions, and then ask them to apply them to texts. After all, this is what Dr. Tanchel envisioned. I got to work on my curriculum. Having gone through adolescence at the height of the hip-​­hop artist Eminem’s career, and close enough in age to my students at that time that they too knew Eminem, I opened my curriculum with a fictional paper my husband​— the avid Eminem fan Dr. Jonah Hassenfeld​— and I wrote for the course: “A Layman’s Introduction to the Multi-​­document Hypothesis of the Eminemic Canon.” In this fictional article, he took the main axioms, the interpretive rules, of source criticism and applied them to the canon of songs written by Eminem the artist. There were four interpretive rules I identified for the contextual orientation (Standard 3): • • • •

Different names of protagonist/God indicated different sources. Differences in style and language indicated different sources. Different thematic material indicated different sources. Contradictions in storyline indicated two different sources. — 139 —

a ppe ndi x 2

In this twenty-​­three-​­page fictional piece, an unnamed author engaged the methodology of source criticism to reveal the “true” multiple authorship of the Eminemic canon. This paper introduced the methodology of source criticism and its particular “rules for reading” and then applied them to the songs of Eminem. It argued a demonstrably false, yet compelling, case for multiple authorship of these songs. The purpose of this paper was to separate the methodology of source criticism from the emotional and religious baggage of the documentary hypothesis for Jewish high school students. An excerpt from the paper illustrates the point: The argument against a single author of the Eminemic Canon has traditionally stood on four central arguments. Understandably, many thinkers have been resistant to the multi-​­document hypothesis and have answered each of the central arguments with a variety of counter arguments. In the following, I will summarize each argument in turn and provide responses to the most compelling counter arguments that more traditional thinkers have supported. The first argument rests on the obvious differences in the name by which the protagonist is called. Sometimes the protagonist is called “Slim Shady” (or simply “Slim” or “Shady”), sometimes “Eminem” and sometimes “Marshall Mathers” (or “Marshall”). The three sources are referred to respectively as S, E, and M. There are also a number of poems in which some combination of these names is used. This fact has been widely promoted by the critics of the multi-​­document hypothesis and has led some to hypothesize a later redactor to whom credit is given for combining the three sources into their current form. The students had to read the article and answer the following questions: 1. According to the article, what are the four central arguments to the multi-​­author/document theory concerning the Eminemic Canon? 2. What, according to this article, is the relationship between the “Slim” text and the “Eminem” text? 3. Are you convinced by the argument? Do you think that the Eminemic Canon might be three different sources, or do you think it is one single unified source? — 140 —

Barry Holtz, Orientations, & JTS Standards & Benchmarks

4. If it is three different sources, how would that change how you listen to/understand Eminem’s music? Remarkably, or perhaps predictably, many of the high school students did not pick up on the fiction of the article. Many wrote yes to question 3 and answered question 4 sincerely. When I pointed out in class that the article is written from the perspective of the future and that Eminem is alive and well in our lifetime, it gave the students pause. The point of the exercise was to introduce them to the interpretive rules that define source criticism. It was to demonstrate how a single set of interpretive rules can be applied widely, across texts and genres, and that the rules themselves define the boundaries of possible textual meaning. Once my students realized it was a fictional piece, we put the question of veracity to the side and began to recognize how this method of reading, empirically true or not, could still teach something about a text, regardless of whether one was open or not to accepting a human, multi-​ ­author conclusion. The basic idea was to introduce source criticism as a set of interpretive rules, a particular lens through which we could read the biblical text. Each student admitted that they had not noticed the “Kim cycle” in Eminem’s songs before reading this essay. They had not noticed that the story of Eminem’s wife, Kim, a theme in his songs, is told in three different ways (sad, angry, and violent), each of which correspond to one of his names: Slim Shady, Marshall, or Eminem. Yet once they were conscious of reading for multiple authorship, these features of the Eminem canon stood out to them. The next project in the course was to apply this method of reading to the flood story in Genesis 6–9. To do this, I created a physical project called “The Flood Project.” Every pair of students received a folder. The folder included a detailed instruction sheet, a materials sheet, all the materials, and the assignment and assessment sheet. The students had to follow the “rules for reading” of source criticism to come up with two flood stories. They logged every choice they made for each verse. They then presented their final two versions of the flood story based on their division criteria following our “rules for reading.” I could not have been prouder of this project. It was conceptually sophisticated and aesthetically beautiful. The students enjoyed it, too. However, when I showed it to my department chair, I will never forget his disapproving response: “Don’t you think you’re putting the cart before — 141 —

a ppe ndi x 2

the horse?” He went on to explain that first I needed to teach my students, or, more accurately, transmit to my students, what the two flood stories are, and then I could teach them​— if there’s time​— why scholars divided them that way. As a twenty-​­four-​­year-​­old teacher with no academic language to support my gut intuition about how to teach Tanakh, I was crushed. The way my department chair wanted the contextual orientation taught was as the big reveal, the pulling up of the curtain to show the truth. We would teach the students that, after twelve years of being taught otherwise, the truth was that the Hebrew Bible had multiple authors and was a composite text. We would explain that all those funny features and details in the biblical stories they grew up with were actually reflections of multiple authors with different political agendas. We would transmit this knowledge to the students. Their intellectual work would center on emotionally processing these truths. In other words, this was not about continuing to build students’ skills of textual interpretation. Rather, it was about transmitting “authoritative discourse” (Bakhtin 1982). My chair’s model curriculum had many journal entries and seminars dedicated to helping students adjust their Jewish identities to these new and perhaps inconvenient truths. We agreed on the orientation (Standard 3 in the Standards and Benchmark program), but not on the textual pedagogy. As I write this, I imagine many readers wanting to refer to the Tanchel article I referenced earlier and point out how Dr. Tanchel herself, architect of the original and now extinct curriculum, said that the documentary hypothesis should be introduced and taught as an “actual method” (2008, 43). But this is exactly the point. The huge push for orientations and focused Tanakh curricula around the Standards and Benchmarks document still did not resolve the pedagogy question. Each orientation can be taught as a set of interpretive rules, or each can be used as a collection of meanings a teacher chooses to transmit. It is for this reason that I believe this book moves us forward, in a critical manner, from the shoulders of Holtz’s orientations and JTS’s Standards and Benchmarks program to a theory of teaching interpretation and Tanakh that prepares our students for literacy and Jewish identity in the twenty-​­first century.

— 142 —

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Index Abraham (bible character): Binding of Isaac, 82, 90–92, 131; God’s promises to, 38–45, 83–86; and Sarah, 58–68, 69, 77 Abramson, Charlotte, 135 Adam and Eve (biblical characters), 94, 104–6 aesthetic reading, 71 agency, of students, 28–29, 86, 92–99 Akeda (Binding of Isaac), 82, 90–92, 131 American/Western education, 10, 11 Appleman, Deborah, 9 apprenticeship, and situated learning, 9–10 asset vs. deficit perspective, 92–93 Aukerman, Maren S., 12, 32, 36–37, 38, 73 Austin, John L., 4 authentic vs. inauthentic questions, 35 Avery, Andrea, 118 Avni, Sharon, 22 background knowledge, invoking, 87–88 Bamidbar Rabbah 13:16, 7 Batnitzky, Leora, 46 Bekerman, Zvi, 119 Ben Bag Bag, 7 biblical Hebrew, 21–24, 38n, 45, 66, 67, 76–77 biblical texts, 21–24, 48, 108–13, 141–42. See also Exodus 2:4–6; entries beginning with Genesis Binding of Isaac (Akeda), 82, 90–92, 131

boundaries of text discussion, 48–49, 53–56, 69–70, 86–87, 117–18 Boyarin, Jonathan, 6, 7, 73 Brandes, Yochi, 127n Brettler, Marc Z., 137 Bruner, Jerome S., 7–8 bullying, 95–98 Cain and Abel (biblical characters), 93–98 Camus, Albert, 115–16, 117 Cazden, Courtney, 53 CCSS (Common Core State S ­ tandards), 45 centripetal force, 54, 55 chevruta (group of study companions), 24, 73, 113–14 Christian evangelical communities, 7 classrooms: as interpretive communities, 71–75, 89–90, 125; language games in, 3–5; Menachem’s and Yonatan’s, 46–49, 56, 125; Mrs. Cardona’s, 114–18; as spaces of interpretive belonging, 119–20. See also communities; dialogic instruction; students at Shalom Academy close reading, 45, 52 Collister, Lauren, 50 commentaries, on Torah, 7, 26, 27 Common Core State Standards (CCSS), 45 communities: Christian evangelical, 7; and distributed interpretive authority, 32; and interpretive rules,

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Index 5–6, 54–56, 71–74, 125; and literacy practices, 5–6, 123; Shalom Academy, 16–30; and situated learning, 9–10, 32. See also classrooms comprehension-​­as-​­procedure and comprehension-​­as-​­outcome pedagogies, 36–37 contextualization cues, 75, 102 contextual orientation, 8, 135 Cook, Allison, 113–14 critical framing, in pedagogy of multiliteracies, 99n culture and cultural transmission, 119–20 curricula: author’s, 21–24, 139–42; Brettler’s and Tanchel’s, 137, 138, 142; Melton Research Center’s, 7–8, 22; Y. H. Pollack’s, 22 daughter of Pharoah (bible character), 127–28 deficit vs. asset perspective, 92–93 Democracy and Education (Dewey), 31 designs. See interpretive rules developing interpretive rules, 52–70; author’s goals in selecting rules, 52–53, 123–24; author’s rules, 57, 64, 65–70, 75–76; noticing students’ rules, 14, 53, 56–63; reaction of author to students’ rules, 63–64, 68–69; rules as setting boundaries of text discussion, 48–49, 53–56, 69–70 Dewey, John, 31 dialogic instruction, 31–51; about, 12, 31, 34–36; author’s initial attempt at using, 12–13, 31–32, 38–45, 49; author’s journey away from exclusive use of, 14, 49, 69, 74; and interpretive rules as learned conventions, 49–51; in Menachem’s and Yonatan’s classrooms, 46–49, 56, 125; and potential objections to interpretive rules, 88–90; shared

evaluation pedagogy (SHEP), 36–37, 49; transparency of teaching agenda, 74 dilemmas of practice, 1–3, 9, 12, 28, 89. See also dialogic instruction; teacher research project discussing interpretive rules. See ­second conversation documentary hypothesis, 108–13, 139–42 effective learning contexts, 10 efferent reading, 71 ELA (English Language Arts), CCCS in, 45 elasticity of meaning, 26–27 Emile (Rousseau), 31 Eminem (hip-​­hop artist), 139–41 empowered disputants/possible knowers, 32, 35, 73–74 enculturation, 119–20 English Language Arts (ELA), CCCS in, 45 Envisioning Literature (Langer), 53–56 envisionments, 53 evangelical (Christian) communities, 7 Eve (bible character), 94, 104–6 Exodus 2:4–6, 126–29 female biblical characters: author’s personal interpretive rule regarding, 64; Eve, 94, 104–6; Hagar, 30, 76–77; Miriam, 126–29; Pharoah’s daughter, 127–28; Sarah, 24, 30, 38–45, 58–68, 69, 76–78, 84, 90 first conversation, 71–99; author’s goals in teaching rules, 49, 51, 55–56, 74–75, 123–24; classrooms as interpretive communities, 71–75, 89–90, 125; dialectic with second conversation, 124; fostering students’ agency, 28–29, 86, 92–99; in most classrooms, 125–26;

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Index paradigmatic example of, 90–92; potential objections from dialogic perspective, 88–90; teaching and reinforcing interpretive rules, 14, 76–87. See also inclusion of students Fish, Stanley, 51, 71–72 formal schooling, critique of, 10, 119 frames. See interpretive rules Freire, Paulo, 31 funds of knowledge, 93 Galman, Sally Campbell, 25 Genesis 1, 42, 101, 105 Genesis 2:7–10; 2:15–25, 1, 101, 104–106 Genesis 4:1–16, 93–98 Genesis 5, 41 Genesis 11:30–12:7, 38–45 Genesis 12:10–20, 58–69, 77–78 Genesis 15:1–8, 83–87 Genesis 16:1–10, 76–77 Genesis 22:1–13, 82, 90–92, 131 Genesis 39:6, 47 Genesis 43:16, 46–47 God: Binding of Isaac, 90; and Cain and Abel, 94–96, 97; creation of Adam and Eve, 101, 104–6; promises to Abraham, 38–40, 83–86; striking Pharoah with plagues, 58–59 Goffman, Erving, 3, 4 Gumperz, John J., 75 Hagar (bible character), 30, 76–77 Haidt, Jonathan, 1 Handsfield, Lara, 29, 45, 114–16 Hassenfeld, Jonah, 139 Hassenfeld, Ziva R., 24–30, 139 Hebrew. See biblical Hebrew; language of instruction; translated texts Hebrew Bible, 6–7, 26. See also biblical texts; translated texts Hebrew Bible education: vs. adult Jewish reading of scripture,

11; author’s curriculum, 21–24, 139–42; documentary hypothesis, 108–13, 139–42; Holtz’s orientations, 8–9, 72, 134–37, 135, 142; Melton Research Center Bible program, 7–8, 22; multiple interpretations and cognitive pluralism, 26–27; and structure of American schooling, 16; Tanakh Standards and Benchmarks Project, 22–23, 72, 134–42, 136, 138 Held, Shai, 45 Holtz, Barry W., 8, 9, 72, 134–37 home literacies, 93, 122–24 inauthentic vs. authentic questions, 35 inclusion of students: via close reading, 45; via interpretive rules, 92–99, 126; via the second conversation, 113–14, 118–20; via transparency, 74, 78–79, 89, 125; via validating home literacies, 93, 122–24 interpretive authority: author’s initial reluctance to adopt, 12–13, 31, 38, 43–44; author’s later adoption of, 14, 51, 55–56; and boundaries of text discussion, 53–56, 86–87, 117–18; distributed, 32–34; positive role of, 89; students’ challenges to interpretive rules, 1–2, 14–15, 87, 100–111; and teacher background knowledge, 87–88. See also dialogic instruction; interpretive rules; teacher authority; teacher research project interpretive communities, 71–75, 89–90, 125 interpretive games, 3–5 interpretive rules: in analysis of Eminemic Canon, 139–41; and community literacy practices, 5–6, 123; defined, 5; development of (see developing interpretive rules);

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Index fostering student agency, 28–29, 86, 92–99; Holtz’s orientations, 8–9, 72, 134–37, 135, 142; implicit vs. explicit, 48–49, 50–51, 53–56, 57, 89; as learned conventions, 49–51; in Menachem’s vs. Yonatan’s classrooms, 46–49, 56, 125; meta-​­conversation about (see second conversation); Miriam as using, 126–29; in most classrooms, 125–26; teaching and promoting/reinforcing (see first conversation). See also Rule 1; Rule 2; Rule 3 interviews, simulated recall, 28 IRE (initiation-​­response-​­evaluation) sequence, 3–4 Isaac (bible character), 82, 90–92, 131 Jewish culture, and second conversation, 119–20 Jewish day schools, 2, 16–30, 120 Jewish religious education, 11, 119–20. See also Hebrew Bible education Jewish scriptural literacy practices: applied to works of Eminem, 139–41; in author’s classroom, 14–15, 31–32, 40–45; vs. Christian evangelical, 7; communal nature of, 72–73; and definition of reading, 37; and enculturation, 119–20; Holtz’s orientations, 8–9, 72, 134–37, 135, 142; and multiple/conflicting interpretations, 26–27; traditional, 6–7, 11, 32, 45, 46, 72–73. See also interpretive rules Joseph (bible character), 46–47 JTS (Jewish Theological Seminary), 22–23, 72, 134–42, 136, 138 Kent, Orit, 113–14 Langer, Judith A., 53–56 language games, 3–5 language of instruction, 17–18, 21–24.

See also biblical Hebrew; translated texts Lauer, Levi, 45 Lave, Jean, 9–10 learning, 9–13, 27, 134. See also dialogic instruction; pedagogy learning contexts, effective, 10 legitimacy, in effective learning contexts, 10 Lewis, Cynthia, 32–34, 57n, 73, 75, 92 Lilith story, 101–5 literacy education and scholarship, 31, 53–56, 93, 121–24 literacy events, 74–75 literacy practices, 5–6, 10–11, 31, 93, 121–24. See also interpretive rules; Jewish scriptural literacy practices Literacy Theory as Practice (Handsfield), 114–18 Lobel, Arnold, 32–34, 57n Long, Elizabeth, 72 Luke, Allan, 37, 89 marginalization and power, 34, 56, 89, 118–20, 122–23. See also inclusion of students Melton Research Center Bible program, 7–8, 22 memorization, of scripture, 37 Menachem (teacher), 46–49, 56, 125 Menashe (bible character), 46–47 meta-​­language/meta-​­conversation. See second conversation meta-​­language mini-​­unit, 111–13 Methuselah (bible character), 41 Miriam (bible character), 126–29 modeling, of interpretive rules, 76–77 Moje, Elizabeth B., 92 moralistic-​­didactic orientation, 8, 135 Moses (bible character), 41, 126–28 multiliteracies, 99n, 121–22 National Council on Education Standards and Testing, 134n

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Index New London Group, 99n Noah (bible character), 41, 43 Orellana, Marjorie Faulstich, 29–30 orientations (literacy practices), 8–9, 72, 134–37, 142 overt instruction, in pedagogy of multiliteracies, 99n parshanim (traditional Jewish commentators), 26 participation, in effective learning contexts, 10 pedagogical dilemmas, 1–3, 9, 12, 28, 89. See also dialogic instruction; teacher research project pedagogy: of closeness, 45; comprehension-​­as-​­procedure and comprehension-​­as-​­outcome, 36–37; of multiliteracies, 99n; shared evaluation pedagogy (SHEP), 36–37, 49; of transmission, 11, 35, 72–73, 88, 142. See also dialogic instruction “A   Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” (New London Group), 99n Pedagogy of Partnership program, 113–14 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 31 “The   Pelican and the Crane” (Lobel), 32–34, 57n peripherality, in effective learning contexts, 10, 120 Pharoah (bible character), 58–59, 63, 66, 67, 77–78, 126–28 Pharoah’s daughter (bible character), 127–28 philosophy of language, 3–5 Pirkei Avot, 7 The Plague (Camus), 115–18 pluralism, 17, 26–27 Pollack, Y. H., 22 possible knowers/empowered disputants, 32, 35, 73–74

Potiphar (bible character), 47 power and marginalization, 34, 56, 89, 118–20, 122–23. See also inclusion of students practitioner research, 27–28 probing student comments, 80–81, 86 punctuation, in text messages, 49–51 questions, inauthentic vs. authentic, 35 rabbinic literacy practices, 6–7 rationality and relevance, 54–56 reader’s theater, 77–78 reading: Allan Luke’s call for model of, 89; Aukerman’s definition of, 37; close, 45, 52; efferent/aesthetic, 71; of Pharoah’s daughter by Miriam, 127–29; as rooted in interpretive rules, 50–51; social nature of, 72–73. See also literacy practices reading comprehension, 36–37 relevance and rationality, 54–56 research, of author. See teacher research project Resnick, Daniel P., 11 Resnick, Lauren B., 11 review and narration, 81–83 Rosenblatt, Louise, 71 Rosenfeld, Sue, 119 Rousseau, Jean-​­Jacques, 31 Rule 1 (textual grounding): defined, 44–45, 65–68, 69; examples, 69, 90–92, 96–98, 101–3, 109–11, 116–18; teaching and promoting, 75–78, 79–80, 81, 86, 89 Rule 2 (meaningfulness of all parts of text): defined, 57, 65–66, 69; examples, 90–92, 96–98, 108–11; teaching and promoting, 76–78, 80 Rule 3 (articulate opposing interpretations): defined, 68, 69; examples, 81–83, 90–92; teaching and promoting, 76–78

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Index Sarah (bible character), 24, 30, 38–45, 58–68, 69, 76–78, 84, 90 Schiffrin, Deborah, 75 schools: criticism of, 10–11, 119, 122; Jewish day schools, 2, 16–30, 120; and literacy practices, 5–6, 10; Shalom Academy, 16–30; Talmud Torah, 22 scriptural literacy practices, 5–7, 37. See also Jewish scriptural literacy practices second conversation, 100–120; defined, 107; dialectic with first conversation, 124; as facilitating enculturation, 119–20; guidelines for, 114; ideal, 111–14, 124–26; issues of power and marginalization, 118–19; in most classrooms, 125–26; moves and invitations into, 14–15, 100–111, 114–18; need for, 98–99; as remedy for societal partisan division, 126; students’ challenges to interpretive rules, 1–2, 14–15, 87, 100–111. See also interpretive authority secular education, 10, 11 semiotic modes. See interpretive rules Shalom Academy, 16–30. See also students at Shalom Academy shared evaluation pedagogy (SHEP), 36–37, 49 SHEP (shared evaluation pedagogy), 36–37, 49 simulated recall interviews, 28 situated learning, 9–13, 32, 124 situated practice, in pedagogy of multiliteracies, 99n standards, 22–23, 45, 72, 134–42, 134n, 136, 138 students at Shalom Academy: descriptions of, 18–21, 23; and dialogic instruction, 38–45; and first conversation, 82–83, 85–86, 90–99; home communities’ literary practices, 123; interpretive rules of,

56–63; and second conversation, 1–2, 87, 100–111, 118; social dynamics, 29 Talmud, rabbinic literacy practices in, 6–7 Talmud Torah schools, 22 Tanakh Standards and Benchmarks Project, 22–23, 72, 134–42, 136, 138 Tanchel, Susan E. “Susie,” 137, 139, 142 teacher authority, 31, 51, 54–56, 89, 117–18. See also interpretive authority teacher research project, 1–31, 131–42; author’s background, 2, 12, 24–30, 118, 139; caveats, 28–30; coding of class transcripts, 131–33, 133; process and questions, 2–3, 12–15, 28; relevance to literacy education and scholarship, 121–24; setting and ­student characteristics, 16–21, 23, 25, 123; supporting research, 3–13, 27–28; texts taught, 21–22, 23–24. See also interpretive authority teachers: authority of, 31, 51, 54–56, 89, 117–18; Cazden on, 53; effects of Holtz’s orientations on, 8–10; forming interpretive communities, 119–20, 125. See also interpretive authority; pedagogical dilemmas teaching interpretive rules. See first conversation Terah (bible character), 39–44 text messages, 49–51 textual grounding, 12, 42–47, 55–56, 125. See also Rule 1 textual interpretation, 5, 9–11, 31–32. See also scriptural literacy practices Textual Knowledge (Holtz), 8, 135–36 Torah. See Hebrew Bible transcript coding methods, 131–33, 133 transformed practice, 99n translated texts, 17–18, 21–24, 38n,

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Index 45, 69, 77. See also Exodus 2:4–6; entries beginning with Genesis transmission pedagogies, 11, 35, 72–73, 88, 142 transparency, 74, 78–79, 89, 125 Valente, Patricia, 45 validation, of students’ home literacies, 93, 122–24

Wenger, Etienne, 9–10 Western/American education, 10, 11 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3 Yocheved (bible character), 126 Yonatan (teacher), 46–49, 56, 125 Zielenziger, Ruth, 22

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