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livThere are a couple of interfaith text study things I've been meaning to talk about for a while.
I'm really pleased I've managed to find a Scriptural Reasoning group locally. This is an approach to interfaith where Jews, Christians and Muslims look at three short excerpts from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur'an, thematically related but not always directly parallel. The discussion follows a pre-set structure, which really helps to avoid some of the pitfalls that badly run interfaith groups can fall into, but it can also feel a bit limiting.
It's specifically for Jews, Christians and Muslims. The website says that other religions can do it, but it's designed and set up for those three religions. And even then, you need to choose three specific ones to participate, it's never just generic interfaith. Or even generic Abrahamic monotheisms, it's not culturally Christian atheists or Christo-Pagans or Mormons or Bahá'ís. You don't officially explain which of the three religions you belong to, but it's usually pretty obvious.
You try to focus as much as possible on the text in front of you. You might explain some minimal context so the excerpt is comprehensible, but you're not supposed to talk about commentary or relate it to other bits of scripture or go into homiletics or explain the place of those verses in religious practice. You read all three texts aloud in English, and then focus in detail on each in turn, with a timer so that all three get exactly equal time. You go round the circle and each person says something that struck them about the text, and then you open out to more general discussion. The moderator is supposed to make sure that all participants get equal talking time; you can use a talking stick or strict turn-taking if it's called for. You're supposed to speak for yourself and your personal, immediate reaction to the text you're reading, not explain your religious traditions to the audience or talk, or ask, about "the Jewish interpretation".
This is good because it means you don't get stuck in the well-worn grooves of too comfortable interfaith dialogue. It's really quite good at avoiding the thing where well-meaning but unconsciously dominating Christians take interfaith dialogue as an opportunity to ask all the questions they are curious about regarding "other" religions, often based on more or less off-beam assumptions about how those other religions work. We basically never end up with people airing their opinions about The Middle East or The Role of Women. But it's more than just platitudes and 'isn't it nice how we all get on?'. I do actually learn things about the texts, and peripherally about other participants' attitudes to religion, without putting them on the spot to Explain Their Faith.
It's impossible to keep things completely balanced, of course. Inevitably, Jews and Muslims are much more familiar with Christian customs and theology and Scripture than Christians are with ours, and just numerically there's almost always a majority of Christians. And there's no way round the fact that the Hebrew Bible is part of the Christian Bible; we don't ever get to look at the Old Testament from a Christian perspective. Equally we can't address the fact that Jews rarely just read the 'naked' Bible without layers and layers of commentary; we have to leave that out or it wouldn't be balanced. There's the terribly endearing thing where all three passages are provided with parallel texts, politely ignoring the fact that most Christians never look at the New Testament in Greek. There are rules about using the original text 'to open up, not to shut down', which mostly work well.
But sometimes it can be frustrating. Some people are naturally quieter in a discussion without necessarily being excluded, and the strict turn-taking can feel forced. And sometimes avoiding directly parallel versions of the same story in favour of thematically related passages, and eschewing comparisons between the texts, is unnecessarily limiting. Short texts are a good idea because spending 20 minutes discussing 3-4 verses in detail is better than trying to handle anything longer, but sometimes 3-4 verses don't stand alone, or we talk about a text 'not mentioning' something that was actually in the next verse after the chosen extract ends. And yeah, sometimes I want to actually get into the theology. Like reading three verses from Matthew describing Joseph's reaction to Mary's pregnancy, but not being allowed to talk about the Incarnation or the theology of angels or what Christians mean by 'Messiah', or to look at the reference to an OT prophecy in the following verse, well. It's all right for me because I usually manage to grabcjwatson as soon as I can and we talk about all the tantalizing context and interpretation (though we can only get so far with the Qur'an passages in translation).
The other thing I've mentioned a few times, but not talked about in detail, is the Hagaddah reading group at work. I joined the chaplain's Bible reading group soon after I first came here; it's very much an academic reading group, where we work through a book of the Bible over the course of a term or so, and discuss it in an intellectual way. We did Revelation when I first joined, which was fascinating. And then we did Song of Songs, and when we got to the end of the short book with a couple of weeks of term still to go, I got a chance to teach it as a Jewish text with lots of associated midrash. People liked that, so they asked me to lead the group this term, on 'a Rabbinic text'. I explained that there's no such thing, there's no coherent book of midrash that you could work through in a term. So I decided on the Hagaddah, which is short, and intentionally collated, and contains a lot of midrashic material.
It's going really well. We have a couple of new people, in addition to the chaplain and some English academics and a really thoughtful recent graduate who now works for the university: an African Christian, and, of all people, an Israeli student. I was quite worried about the last, because I pitched this discussion at Christians with no knowledge at all of Judaism or the Seder, but she seems to be enjoying herself and is learning something new from talking about historical context.
So far, I've done one session talking about what the Hagaddah is and its general origins. Since Wikipedia is terrible on this: the core of this comes from Mishnaic era material, though quite a lot of it is Baraita or quoted in the Jerusalem version of the Talmud, rather than being in the Mishnah itself. It's probable that most of the text was composed in the Gaonic era, so around the time of early Islam, when the first recognizable prayerbook was put together, but we don't actually have a surviving Hagaddah from then. Some of the songs from the Hagaddah come from early Mediaeval manuscripts, 9th-10th centuries. But the first complete text we have is quite late, from 13th century Germany. We then skimmed through the book to get a sense of the shape of the liturgy.
We spent one session reading Exodus 12-13, the actual narrative of the departure from Egypt, as I've already mentioned. Then I spent a session talking about the seder plate and the objects on it. Three directly mentioned in the Mishnah, the bitter herb, the charoset sweet paste and the spring herb. Two, the roasted egg and the shank bone, that are symbols of the lamb sacrificed at the original Passover and in the Temple. And the mysterious 'remainder' and the range of options for what it can be, the leafy top from the bitter herb if you use horseraddish, the salt water that you need for the ceremony anyway, the orange for LGBT+ (originally gay and lesbian, I think) inclusion. We talked about Elijah's cup and how it's there for Elijah in case he turns up, not for anyone to drink from, and the tradition of reclining, more or less similar to Roman or Greek style couches.
We had most of a session on Kiddush, getting just a little way past that with the unblessed handwashing and eating the spring herb. That was quite interesting because I said I wasn't going to get into technical detail about the order of operations when Pesach falls on Shabbat, but we did talk about the relationship between Pesach and Shabbat on a broader level, particularly the fact that the sabbath, and all other festivals, are called 'a remembrance of the departure from Egypt'. The Chaplain had interesting thoughts about that, he said that in his version of Christianity, everything is ultimately about Easter and Jesus' Passion and resurrection, and was Passover like that? And I said, not exactly, if you're looking from that perspective, the ultimate purpose of creation is the giving of Torah, but the redemption from Egypt is a necessary part of that. He was interested about the connection between our focus on actual revelation compared to the idea of Jesus as "The Word".
Then we did the Four Questions in quite a lot of detail last week. I pointed out the original version in the Mishnah, where the traditional questions are only asked if the child is too clueless to think of spontaneous questions. Also the probably defective text in the Mishnah which says,
And we got to the first part of the answer, This is the bread of affliction. We had something of a digression because that passage is in Aramaic, so we talked about the relationship between Aramaic and Hebrew, and about using the vernacular for part or all of the Seder. And because the ritual statement ends with
This week we had lots of fun reading the various midrashes about the Rabbis. The one where they sit discussing the exodus until it's time for the morning prayer, and whether they were really celebrating Pesach or plotting against the Romans. Several about the timing of when we celebrate the Seder; I used the legend about R' Elazar suddenly acquiring white hair to talk about the fracture in Rabbinic Judaism caused by the destruction of the Second Temple, and how a lot of the Pesach ceremony comes from that era, just at the end of the first century CE, when they were trying to remake Judaism without the Temple. And of course the Four Sons. We went through that slowly and looked up all the quoted verses from Torah, and the issue of what it means that the wicked son would not have been redeemed.
And we just got as far as the blessing thanking God for keeping the promise to Abraham at the Covenant of the Portions. We went and looked up Genesis 15. We had some interesting discussion about that; I referred to the whole episode as a vision, and the chaplain said no, for him the vision is just the first few verses where God tells Abraham to prepare the animals, but the bit where the stove and torch pass between the portions actually happened, because God makes a covenant with Abraham and that had to be historical (like the New Covenant Jesus makes), not a mere vision. I am not sure it's either necessary to read that way, or completely justified by the text, but I was interested to hear that that particular context is important to his Christian theology.
Anyway, please feel free to ask questions, especially if I'm using too much jargon. My head's really deep in this at the moment and I'm really happy to explain more. But I've tried not to write too much detail while I'm summarizing four weeks of discussions!
I'm really pleased I've managed to find a Scriptural Reasoning group locally. This is an approach to interfaith where Jews, Christians and Muslims look at three short excerpts from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur'an, thematically related but not always directly parallel. The discussion follows a pre-set structure, which really helps to avoid some of the pitfalls that badly run interfaith groups can fall into, but it can also feel a bit limiting.
It's specifically for Jews, Christians and Muslims. The website says that other religions can do it, but it's designed and set up for those three religions. And even then, you need to choose three specific ones to participate, it's never just generic interfaith. Or even generic Abrahamic monotheisms, it's not culturally Christian atheists or Christo-Pagans or Mormons or Bahá'ís. You don't officially explain which of the three religions you belong to, but it's usually pretty obvious.
You try to focus as much as possible on the text in front of you. You might explain some minimal context so the excerpt is comprehensible, but you're not supposed to talk about commentary or relate it to other bits of scripture or go into homiletics or explain the place of those verses in religious practice. You read all three texts aloud in English, and then focus in detail on each in turn, with a timer so that all three get exactly equal time. You go round the circle and each person says something that struck them about the text, and then you open out to more general discussion. The moderator is supposed to make sure that all participants get equal talking time; you can use a talking stick or strict turn-taking if it's called for. You're supposed to speak for yourself and your personal, immediate reaction to the text you're reading, not explain your religious traditions to the audience or talk, or ask, about "the Jewish interpretation".
This is good because it means you don't get stuck in the well-worn grooves of too comfortable interfaith dialogue. It's really quite good at avoiding the thing where well-meaning but unconsciously dominating Christians take interfaith dialogue as an opportunity to ask all the questions they are curious about regarding "other" religions, often based on more or less off-beam assumptions about how those other religions work. We basically never end up with people airing their opinions about The Middle East or The Role of Women. But it's more than just platitudes and 'isn't it nice how we all get on?'. I do actually learn things about the texts, and peripherally about other participants' attitudes to religion, without putting them on the spot to Explain Their Faith.
It's impossible to keep things completely balanced, of course. Inevitably, Jews and Muslims are much more familiar with Christian customs and theology and Scripture than Christians are with ours, and just numerically there's almost always a majority of Christians. And there's no way round the fact that the Hebrew Bible is part of the Christian Bible; we don't ever get to look at the Old Testament from a Christian perspective. Equally we can't address the fact that Jews rarely just read the 'naked' Bible without layers and layers of commentary; we have to leave that out or it wouldn't be balanced. There's the terribly endearing thing where all three passages are provided with parallel texts, politely ignoring the fact that most Christians never look at the New Testament in Greek. There are rules about using the original text 'to open up, not to shut down', which mostly work well.
But sometimes it can be frustrating. Some people are naturally quieter in a discussion without necessarily being excluded, and the strict turn-taking can feel forced. And sometimes avoiding directly parallel versions of the same story in favour of thematically related passages, and eschewing comparisons between the texts, is unnecessarily limiting. Short texts are a good idea because spending 20 minutes discussing 3-4 verses in detail is better than trying to handle anything longer, but sometimes 3-4 verses don't stand alone, or we talk about a text 'not mentioning' something that was actually in the next verse after the chosen extract ends. And yeah, sometimes I want to actually get into the theology. Like reading three verses from Matthew describing Joseph's reaction to Mary's pregnancy, but not being allowed to talk about the Incarnation or the theology of angels or what Christians mean by 'Messiah', or to look at the reference to an OT prophecy in the following verse, well. It's all right for me because I usually manage to grab
cjwatson as soon as I can and we talk about all the tantalizing context and interpretation (though we can only get so far with the Qur'an passages in translation). The other thing I've mentioned a few times, but not talked about in detail, is the Hagaddah reading group at work. I joined the chaplain's Bible reading group soon after I first came here; it's very much an academic reading group, where we work through a book of the Bible over the course of a term or so, and discuss it in an intellectual way. We did Revelation when I first joined, which was fascinating. And then we did Song of Songs, and when we got to the end of the short book with a couple of weeks of term still to go, I got a chance to teach it as a Jewish text with lots of associated midrash. People liked that, so they asked me to lead the group this term, on 'a Rabbinic text'. I explained that there's no such thing, there's no coherent book of midrash that you could work through in a term. So I decided on the Hagaddah, which is short, and intentionally collated, and contains a lot of midrashic material.
It's going really well. We have a couple of new people, in addition to the chaplain and some English academics and a really thoughtful recent graduate who now works for the university: an African Christian, and, of all people, an Israeli student. I was quite worried about the last, because I pitched this discussion at Christians with no knowledge at all of Judaism or the Seder, but she seems to be enjoying herself and is learning something new from talking about historical context.
So far, I've done one session talking about what the Hagaddah is and its general origins. Since Wikipedia is terrible on this: the core of this comes from Mishnaic era material, though quite a lot of it is Baraita or quoted in the Jerusalem version of the Talmud, rather than being in the Mishnah itself. It's probable that most of the text was composed in the Gaonic era, so around the time of early Islam, when the first recognizable prayerbook was put together, but we don't actually have a surviving Hagaddah from then. Some of the songs from the Hagaddah come from early Mediaeval manuscripts, 9th-10th centuries. But the first complete text we have is quite late, from 13th century Germany. We then skimmed through the book to get a sense of the shape of the liturgy.
We spent one session reading Exodus 12-13, the actual narrative of the departure from Egypt, as I've already mentioned. Then I spent a session talking about the seder plate and the objects on it. Three directly mentioned in the Mishnah, the bitter herb, the charoset sweet paste and the spring herb. Two, the roasted egg and the shank bone, that are symbols of the lamb sacrificed at the original Passover and in the Temple. And the mysterious 'remainder' and the range of options for what it can be, the leafy top from the bitter herb if you use horseraddish, the salt water that you need for the ceremony anyway, the orange for LGBT+ (originally gay and lesbian, I think) inclusion. We talked about Elijah's cup and how it's there for Elijah in case he turns up, not for anyone to drink from, and the tradition of reclining, more or less similar to Roman or Greek style couches.
We had most of a session on Kiddush, getting just a little way past that with the unblessed handwashing and eating the spring herb. That was quite interesting because I said I wasn't going to get into technical detail about the order of operations when Pesach falls on Shabbat, but we did talk about the relationship between Pesach and Shabbat on a broader level, particularly the fact that the sabbath, and all other festivals, are called 'a remembrance of the departure from Egypt'. The Chaplain had interesting thoughts about that, he said that in his version of Christianity, everything is ultimately about Easter and Jesus' Passion and resurrection, and was Passover like that? And I said, not exactly, if you're looking from that perspective, the ultimate purpose of creation is the giving of Torah, but the redemption from Egypt is a necessary part of that. He was interested about the connection between our focus on actual revelation compared to the idea of Jesus as "The Word".
Then we did the Four Questions in quite a lot of detail last week. I pointed out the original version in the Mishnah, where the traditional questions are only asked if the child is too clueless to think of spontaneous questions. Also the probably defective text in the Mishnah which says,
on other nights we dip only once, whereas the modern Hagaddah quotes the likely correct version,
on other nights we do not deep even once. One of the participants was reminded of the Wicked Bible which says
Thou shalt commit adultery! And the replacement of the question about how to eat the sacrificed meat with one about reclining. We got into a bit of a discussion about
My father was a wandering Aramean, even though that comes a little later in the Hagaddah itself, because it's mentioned in that mishnah. I explained about the ambiguous translation and the possible reading
An Aramean tried to kill my father, in which case "An Aramean" is Laban and "my father" is Jacob, rather than both referring to Abraham.
And we got to the first part of the answer, This is the bread of affliction. We had something of a digression because that passage is in Aramaic, so we talked about the relationship between Aramaic and Hebrew, and about using the vernacular for part or all of the Seder. And because the ritual statement ends with
Now we are slaves; next year may we be free. Now we are here; next year may we be in the land of Israel, the grad asked, can I ask about eschatology? So I talked a little bit about Jewish ideas of the Messianic redemption. I'd been meaning to keep that back until some of the more overt Elijah stuff towards the end of the ceremony, but it fit really well there.
This week we had lots of fun reading the various midrashes about the Rabbis. The one where they sit discussing the exodus until it's time for the morning prayer, and whether they were really celebrating Pesach or plotting against the Romans. Several about the timing of when we celebrate the Seder; I used the legend about R' Elazar suddenly acquiring white hair to talk about the fracture in Rabbinic Judaism caused by the destruction of the Second Temple, and how a lot of the Pesach ceremony comes from that era, just at the end of the first century CE, when they were trying to remake Judaism without the Temple. And of course the Four Sons. We went through that slowly and looked up all the quoted verses from Torah, and the issue of what it means that the wicked son would not have been redeemed.
And we just got as far as the blessing thanking God for keeping the promise to Abraham at the Covenant of the Portions. We went and looked up Genesis 15. We had some interesting discussion about that; I referred to the whole episode as a vision, and the chaplain said no, for him the vision is just the first few verses where God tells Abraham to prepare the animals, but the bit where the stove and torch pass between the portions actually happened, because God makes a covenant with Abraham and that had to be historical (like the New Covenant Jesus makes), not a mere vision. I am not sure it's either necessary to read that way, or completely justified by the text, but I was interested to hear that that particular context is important to his Christian theology.
Anyway, please feel free to ask questions, especially if I'm using too much jargon. My head's really deep in this at the moment and I'm really happy to explain more. But I've tried not to write too much detail while I'm summarizing four weeks of discussions!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-08 07:37 am (UTC)Have you gotten to Dayenu! yet?
I'm not sure if you could argue that it's a list of priorities, or if the verses should be in a different order. Out of Egypt, support in the wilderness, Shabbat, Torah. Every Friday night, thanks for that liberation because slaves don't get to take a day off every week.
Of course, my mother is far from the only Jew who thinks Passover is important, and it's only hard-core fanatics who pay much attention to Shabbat. There's something very uncomfortable about looking at a religious text out of context, when so many people have tangled so much shared understanding around it.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-10 05:39 pm (UTC)It's certainly possible to be fanatical about Shabbat. That can also seep into Pesach I think; for some people, the festival is about cleaning your house to ridiculously high standards and then only socializing with immediate family for a week because everybody else might not be kosher enough. I think Pesach and Shabbat are quite inter-twined in a way, but I can definitely see the point of prioritizing the festival.
Which bit exactly are you uncomfortable with when you say ?