Teaching Mishnah, Midrash, and Talmud at the University

VoLume 9, No.3 Spring 1991 TEACHING MISHNAH, MIDRASH, AND TALMUD AT THE UNIVERSITY Tzvee Zahavy Tzvee Zahavy is Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the author most recently of The Talmud of the Land of Israel: Tractate Berakhot (1989) and Studies in Jewish Prayer (1990). 119 During the past 25 years Jewish Studies and Hebrew language courses have become part of the curricula of many major colleges and universities in the United States. In a few instances where student demand, administrative support, and faculty expertise coincide, the offerings have included courses on rabbinic literature. While the ongoing study of Torah has been the central value of rabbinic Judaism for nearly two millennia and hence nothing new internal to the system, the presentation of the classic texts of rabbinism as part of the humanities curriculum of a secular university is novel and poses several problems. Courses in Mishnah, Midrash, and Talmud at the university address the classical texts either in the original Hebrew and Aramaic or in English translation. In analyzing the nature of such offerings we need to treat several issues independently. First, what are the goals and expectations of instruction of rabbinic texts in the originaL Languages as part of the advanced Hebrew curriculum ? How does the background of students affect the presentation? How does one select texts and textbooks? What are the secondary resources available ? How does one achieve content-based language-skill acquisition? My experiences at the University of Minnesota since 1976 illustrate how I have met some of the concerns we face. Each year I have taught two to three upper-division undergraduate Hebrew 'courses mainly dealing with rabbinic texts of late antiquity through the middle ages. The size of the classes has varied each quarter from at most 15 to at least 2 students. Let me pause here to answer the inevitable (and mostly irrelevant) question: the majority (60 percent or more) of the students in these courses over the years has been Jewish. Some of those students had Talmud Torah backgrounds. Often students have been products of our own Hebrew program with no prior parochial Jewish training. It should be noted that non-Jewish students study these texts mainly to fulfill requirements for a Hebrew or Jewish Stud- 120 SHOFAR ies major. This pattern of student enrollment in Hebrew text courses contrasts sharply with that of our larger Jewish Studies courses where enrollments are estimated to include up to 60 to 70 percent non-Jewish students (e.g., 250-300 out of a large '"Introduction to Judaism" class of 400), most with no previous exposure to the subject. The goals of my Hebrew text courses vary. In "Talmudic Texts," a twoquarter sequence, my aim has been to introduce the student to the Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmud Bavli. Generally, in the first quarter I focus on Mishnah and Tosefta. I expect students to learn a tractate or several chapters. I conduct the class as a seminar with students presenting their assigned texts and analysis. At times I require them to memorize their materials to demonstrate better the formal traits of the "Oral Torah." I gradually introduce issues of literary and form criticism, manuscripts, editions and textual variants, dictionaries , grammars, classical commentaries, and modern scholarship. Students then progress to study the overall structure and contents of the tractate and of Mishnah as a whole. Next they investigate Tosefta as a supplement and commentary to Mishnah and as a repository for independent traditions. In the second quarter we turn to the Talmud on the same tractate. Naturally in thirty classroom hours we can tackle only a few selections from an average-length Talmud tractate. I choose these to illustrate how Talmud builds on Mishnah and uses Tosefta, how it independently analyzes pericopae of Mishnah, and how it seeks out and sometimes harmonizes contradictions in the Tannaitic sources. I select other texts to demonstrate the nature of Amoraic traditions, especially those that epitomize features of rabbinism in late antique Babylonia. ' From this brief precis it should be clear that I do not use the traditional Yeshiva approach to designing a syllabus, i.e., start on page 2A and learn...