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117 From Sacrificial Violence to Responsibility The Education of Moses in Exodus 2–4 When toward the end of his life Moses tried to stave off death, God said to him: “Did I tell you to slay the Egyptian?” —Midrash1 Part One: Education in Plato and Judaism The word “education,” of course, comes from the Latin, educare, meaning “to lead out” or “to bring up,” and both its Latinate morphology and the semantic value it assumes in English reflect its peculiar history. To “lead out” implies in the first place leadership, which is to say a relationship between one designated as a “leader” and another (or others) designated as the “led.” The notion of leadership also entails a movement through which the leader propels the led, namely, from a region designated as “inside” to another designated as “outside.” Within the Western context, which is to say, within the Western European historical experience which traces itself back through the romance language–speaking countries to Rome and ultimately to Greece, the primary articulator of the notion of education we have inherited is, of course, The Education of Moses 118 The Prophetic Law Plato. Although Plato’s Republic is nominally about justice, and even more specifically the “just” State, commentators have long pointed out that it is really about education.2 How shall the guardians of the State that we shall term “just” be educated, Plato’s interlocutors ask themselves. In this regard, of course, Plato was challenging the educational system already in place at the time, at the head of which was Homer and the Homeric epics, and substituting for an older oral culture founded on an elaborate system of mnemonics another founded more decisively upon writing and the alphabet. Some have argued that in place of an aural or hearing-centered culture Plato was inaugurating a visual or video-centric cultural organization, and much work is currently being done in this area.3 What was Plato’s educational solution? It was an appeal, in short, to the true, to the language of reason, and to the realm of the ontological as the context in which the true could be defined. The true, as the phenomenological tradition has taught us, may be regarded as the separation of that which has being from that which does not have being, that which only appears or seems to be from that which truly is. Reason, in this context, is the method or modality of thinking by which such difference or distinction between the true and the false becomes articulated. Education may then be said to be the process by which all of this occurs, by which one learns to separate appearances from reality, the true from the false, the reasonable from the unreasonable, and thereby the process by which one avoids slavery. For at bottom the enemy for Plato remains slavery and the goal remains freedom from its ravages. Plato, for one, defines his program in specific opposition to Greek tragedy, which he takes among the species of mimesis or of mimetic poesis that he cites to be the worst threat to his program of absolute difference. The tragic poets leave us without an antidote, he tells us, to its irresistible seductions. Even the best of us—by which he would certainly include Socrates, who has been educating these young men about the processes of education—go to the theater, follow the theatrical performance with enthusiasm, beat their breasts along with the players, and finally praise as most worthy those playwrights who most enable this enthusiasm to take place. The distinction between the true and the mimetic, between the true and the imitational or representational, between that which has being and that which only shadows being, is always on the verge of collapsing in this The Education of Moses 119 context. And as a consequence the only safe state, Plato tells us, is the one that excludes theatrical performance from its premises. There is no place in the present context to develop any further the complicated relationship Plato has with his predecessors, and I have hinted at this relationship elsewhere.4 Suffice it to say that Plato remains in this regard the master in Western circles of all serious educational programs, a program that has been invoked to lead us out of the dangers that accrue from overattachment , from the idolatries in endless varieties that arise to lure us into cultural and psychological bondage. WithinaJewishcontext,ontheotherhand,educationhasbeenconceived quite...

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