Successful Failure: The building of liberal Jewish education Failure... · commonly view as the failure of liberal Jewish education is not failure at all, but rather a successful

Running Title: Successful Failure 1

Successful Failure: The building of liberal Jewish education

Zvi Bekerman, Ph.D.

School of Education, The Melton Center

Hebrew University,

Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, 91905

Israel

Email: [email protected]

Introduction

What follows is an essay in the traditions of both storytellers and social scientists.

Jerome Bruner distinguished between narrative and paradigmatic approaches to

differentiate between the posture in which knowing and understanding are achieved

by means of general laws and inductive and deductive truths, and an alternative

posture in which knowledge and understanding are not explained but interpreted.

In the first section, the mostly narrative one, I argue systemically, that what we

commonly view as the failure of liberal Jewish education is not failure at all, but

rather a successful adaptive strategy to hegemonic western socio-historical contexts.

The term liberal Jewish education points to a wide variety of non-orthodox, religious

and non-religious groups, which hold to open perspectives regarding the possible

integration between tradition and modernity. Regarding the use of the word ‘failure’,

it’s worth noting that I use it loosely; more as a reflection of the general discourse in

multiple encounters with professional and lay leadership and students, than as the

product of systematic empirical research, a research that is sorely missing in our field.

I assert that western paradigmatic perspectives have shaped the educational

epistemology, rhetoric, and practice of liberal Judaism in such a way as to hide the

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fact that the ‘failure’ of Jewish education is not due to the quality of individuals

(teachers and/or students) but to that of systems; those same systems which liberal

Jews jointly and cooperatively build and sustain (in and with the world).

I suggest that when critically reviewing our paradigmatic sources we might be better

off asking: “How do the world and communities get organized in such a way as to

‘succeed’ in their educational efforts while considering this success a failure?” In

short, I propose that if we are interested in change we should shift our interests from

individual students’ or teachers’ minds to world systems and their politics.

Lastly, I introduce the concept of Cultural Education geared towards the co-

production of instructors/mediators aware of historical processes, the interdependence

of social phenomena, and the participation of a multiplicity of powers and interests in

the shaping of present meanings. I suggest that the learning of “languages and

languaging” within a carnivalesque mode might be helpful in getting us through the

next moments of our liberal history.

Reflecting on Successful Failure

Let us keep the paper theoretically light, I said to myself. Reflecting on this thought

for a second time, I wondered why I assumed that if I wanted to be in any way

relevant to Jewish educators I ought to be theoretically light. Maybe it is because my

experience tells me that we have made sure in our communities that our teachers feel

threatened or have a sense of despair when confronted with materials that seem only

indirectly connected to their immediate realities. Could it be possible, I wondered,

that this phenomena has anything to do with our teachers’ sense of failure in


achieving success with their students whenever teaching what has come to be known

as Jewish education? Yes!

During the many opportunities I have had to teach or to be present in sessions in

which educators are being trained, I have paid attention to the fact that as soon as

these educators- teachers (and for that matter many other adults) are seated, in rows

and or behind tables, according to educational ritual, they adopt the posture of what

five minutes ago they themselves would have characterized as that of the typical

obnoxious student.

If I am right in this observation, then it follows that students are not obnoxious but

instead, that there are settings in which people, young or old, become so. It seems

then that being obnoxious is not a quality of mind but a quality of settings, more a

function of the system than a function of the individual. If so, I wondered, could it be

that the failure of Jewish education is not due to the quality of individuals (teachers

and/or students) but due to that of systems, those systems which ‘we’ (professional

and lay leadership, students, parents, and our contexts) all jointly and cooperatively

build and sustain, while trying to preserve the appearance of creating a ‘worthwhile

reality’? Yes!

Now I had to ask myself: “How have kids and adult teachers, usually smart (at times

too smart), come to believe that the supposedly failing Jewish school system was the

best and most successful option available?” Maybe the failing Jewish educational

system was adaptive to local systemic circumstances. But if this was so what could

this possibly mean? It might mean that what is being taught at schools is at risk, if


adopted, of creating types of knowledge and activity that if displayed in relevant,

surrounding, social contexts would be considered misfit or dangerous in one way or

another. But how could this be?

At schools and in in-service training sessions we see youngsters and adults, for the

most part struggling with …(what indeed do they struggle with?) Are they texts? Yes

they are …and plenty of them! Mostly traditional texts. Talmud and Bible and other

texts in which students and teachers dwell on ideologies and history. Teachers in in-

service training sessions dwell on philosophical educational texts as well.

When confronting these texts, youngsters and adults alike find themselves being

asked to allow these texts to become part of their associative worlds, to become part

of their cultural resources when confronting similar situations; in short to think about

the potential relevance of these texts to their present realities. Achieving Jewish

textual literacy will allow them, so they are told, to become proud representatives of

their ethnic/religious group and partners in securing its continuity. While trying to

achieve this literacy, youth and teachers alike are subject to continuous ‘explanations’

by the experts teaching the texts, as if something prevents them from understanding

these texts as they are present(ed) (from the Latin prae-sens [sum]- “being in front

of”; as if something stands behind those words they are asked to read which is not

accessible to a normal eye (I). Their reading is continuously mediated by the expert

understandings of caring sages/teachers. Thus the ‘true’ understanding is not of the

text (the one they con-front), but of the experts’ reading of the text; which is also a

text, but not necessarily the one they have been asked to read. Of course students are

never told this, making sure that they, once again, believe understanding to be a


complex achievement. The constitutive texts of the tradition supposed to be theirs, are

never accessible to them. If this is so we should ask: “If the texts are not accessible

how can they become useful?”

It has happened in the past that I have regularly found myself in situations in which I

have been able to observe those same students who seemed somewhat restricted in

school, acting in clever ways when confronting situations in which they had to find

solutions to problems similar to the ones presented in the text they had studied,

without needing to refer to the text at all. It seemed that that which they had been

taught was quite dispensable. Life outside seemed not to require the texts that school,

in all of its forms, felt were necessary.

I thought to myself: “Could this be an explanation of why not learning at school

would make sense?” If indeed the outside world had no use for the knowledge

acquired, why should anyone learn it? I asked and was perplexed. I said to myself:

“Many times we learn and teach things which, though not of immediate use in our

current extra-curricular experience, can become useful in the future for ourselves or

our communities.” This being true, I was in need of a better explanation for the fact

that students seem often to achieve non-learning in spite of the efforts invested by our

teachers. I thought the reason may be that not only in our present environments is

there no need for this knowledge but that this knowledge could also be damaging in

one way or another. Though it sounded impossible, I reflected on this option. I

recollected and recognized that many times the texts presented in our schools might

suffer from being a-historical and de-contextualized and, possibly even worse, the

texts and the ways they were introduced and handled presented Jews as detached from


the world itself. In a sense it seemed that the efforts made in Jewish education were

such that they included a hidden message that Jews and Judaism can exist in isolation,

without recognition of and dialogue with the other, as though the development of the

Jewish People is free from historical, contextual influences. Such a message would

clearly oppose our common (and empirical) knowledge that things ‘become’ through

the differences they present, thus making ‘Jewish’ possible only when contrasted to

the non-Jewish other. It has always been clear to me that if there were only Jews (and

nothing but Jews), “Jewishness” would lose its relevance as a sign of differentiation.

This is not only true for Jews, but for all world categories which become such only by

the possibility of being contrasted to others which can be, in turn, differentiated from

them. If so, teaching ‘Jewishness’ in isolation would make little sense. Our schools

seemed to have forgotten that Jews and Judaism, to be relevant, have to be relevant to

the world and not just to the Jews.

From this perspective, not learning would indeed be adaptive. Applying Jewishness in

outside contexts as it is presented in our educational institutions might even be

dangerous. If one’s Jewishness lacks content, then one’s claim to difference is

supported with essentialist explanations, which can imply arrogance and even racism.

Moreover, it became apparent to me that that which is being taught is not reflective of

the everyday activity of the students (that Jewish at school was not the same as Jewish

outside of school), again making it prudent not to learn since otherwise our students

might find themselves mal-adapted to the world immediately outside of their

communities. And what about our students being smarter than what we thought they

were? What about the possibility that our students, in a paradoxical way, were indeed

learning what they are taught; in this case meaning that they are learning the possible


hidden message of our educational system, that is: “In school we will teach you the

‘ought to do’ of Judaism not the ‘what to do’” – not ‘the how of truth’ but rather ‘the

what of truth’.

If the above is correct our opening question should be amended from: “Why do

individuals fail to learn?” to “How do the world and communities get organized to

make it worthwhile for their educational efforts to fail?” In short, if we are interested

in change, we should shift the focus of our interest from the minds of individual

students or teachers to social systems and their politics.

Today, given their guiding principles, liberal Jewish educational institutions

contribute little to that which is central to present world realities when teaching Judaic

studies. They offer little if anything at all, that may serve Jewish kids in their

encounters with the fiercely competitive and global world of today- that same world

in which they want them so much to succeed. Paradoxically, the contents of the

secondary texts taught (the explanatory texts of the teachers) usually carry messages,

which attack this competitive spirit, thereby rendering the texts even less pertinent.

Even when implicitly supporting competition (through, for an example, a Bible quiz)

these anti-competitive mediated texts are negated in practice, which only reinforces

their practical irrelevancy.

These educational institutions, as we have already mentioned, teach Jews Judaism, or

so they say. This category is assumed to be unproblematic and descriptive of a ‘true’

identifiable world outside. This follows from the institutions’ a-historical and a-

contextual approach to the contents taught. Many institutions use the word ‘Jewish’ as


a prefix to secure their identification, since it is quite difficult to identify them as such

apart from a few ritual moments in their trajectories. Jewishness might be easily

recognizable in those compartmentalized ritual moments in which reified cultural

aspects are brought into play (i.e. festivals, text learning), but other than that, it would

be difficult to say what else is Jewish about these institutions.

Coming as I do from critical and constructivist theoretical perspectives, it seems to me

that teaching this way means sustaining a worldview that has by now long become

unacceptable by moral and empirical standards. It means that only rarely are we

invited to consider the necessary conditions that allow a group or an individual to be

recognized, stereotyped, and at times privileged or made to suffer. It means, in one

way or another, making the learner participate in the production of racism, directed

towards the other for the most part, but towards himself and his people as well.

Teaching this way means denying our experience that, though we work very hard to

make them appear otherwise, borders are ever fuzzy and porous.

Border work might indeed be necessary. But border work can be done in at least two

ways. There is the old-fashioned Western colonial way of denial and there is the

dialogic ‘humane’ way by which true recognition can be achieved. True recognition

can be dangerous to static cultural views because it also carries a strong creative

impulse. If indeed Jews (as any other cultural category) ‘become’ in difference, then

Jews ‘are’ only in dialogue, at times hazardous dialogue. Knowledge of becoming in

dialogue with others means we risk finding the other more attractive and, if continuity

is what we are in search of, that we had better find ways to make our own no less

attractive.


Indeed if Judaism ‘is’ and Jews ‘are’ givens, static and reified, and at present are not

attractive because of their contents or forms, then there is little chance for anyone to

become engaged in the Jewish learning process. Moreover liberal Jewish education

presents Judaism as learning and a Jew as a quality of mind, rather than Judaism as

practice and a Jew as becoming-in-activity. Therefore even when youth learn at

schools, their functioning in the world will not allow them to apply their learning

successfully. The world cannot read a Jew’s mind; it will notice only material or

interpretative difference. However liberal Jewish education does not ‘do’ rhetorical or

embodied practice. Students well know (or will soon learn) that for them to become

lawyers (or doctors, or teachers, or parents) they are mostly dependent upon hard

interactional work, equipped by languages to be rehearsed, fashions to be worn, and a

whole set of practices recognizable in context. If they fail to enact this work, at the

right time, with the right people, in the right interpretative moment, they risk

forfeiting their chosen identities. Even without venturing far into the future, students

already realize that while perhaps Jews in sentiment, they are Americans or Israelis in

their conversational and behavioral practice. This is indeed a poor compromise, since

such Jewishness is rendered meaningless without action. In return Jews are offered a

chance to succeed in the West, a West that has not necessarily been kind to difference

in general and Jewish difference in particular. So there you go, another good reason

for failing… that is, succeeding to fail.

By failing to learn ‘Jewishness’, students are fully adapting to a system, which leaves

little room for cultural variability in those domains that culture deems successful. The

‘successful domains’ of western culture are usually, in one way or another,


homogenized and thus very western. Hence those interested in liberal Jewish

education would do well to move from the study of children and teachers, each failing

at school or each failing each other, to the study of cultural settings in which that

failing can make sense. When doing so, we find ourselves dealing in politics, that one

issue that is still messy in western homogenized educational culture – that’s to say the

one issue disdain by the powers that be.

If we care about education, we should also ask: “What is education all about?” In a

sense it seems to be about learning. Teaching to learn is what we seem to try to get

our students to do. The problem is that we have never seen anyone learn, not the

“three R’s”, nor Judaism. What we might have seen, for better or worse, is students

focused, or not, upon texts or teachers. It is this sight that we have assumed to be

‘learning’.

The most we see in schools is people interacting, mostly verbally and at times

physically. Learning, as recent theorists tell us, is embedded in a myriad of activities

that hold a child long enough for something to change enough so that the next day’s

activities look different. In this sense, learning is less about individuals and much

more about contexts in the world. These contexts allow some knowledge to be shown

as relevant and useful while other knowledge is discarded as irrelevant.

We should ask ourselves how we believe the continuous repetition of texts induces

them to become relevant in the world contexts that surround us. If we find that our

texts are indeed irrelevant, we return to politics. That’s to say, having to search for

ways to make the world contexts in which we live amenable so as to allow for the


knowledge we seem to teach to become relevant. Alternatively, we can think about

how to adapt the knowledge we value so that it may become relevant to our present

contexts. Again the present western world is not helpful here. It seems not to allow for

much of our knowledge to become relevant, so it is western politics that we might

need to challenge, and not so much our students or teachers. But then we should ask if

this is indeed what we want. I doubt the answer would be a positive one for liberal

Jews. Left unchallenged, educational life becomes difficult because knowledge is

expected to be retained only as useless memories. For learning to be actively

maintained, it is in need of the active involvement of community. Learning is a

cumulative process, which requires the ongoing participation and organization of

people in specific settings who diachronically and in a multitude of settings apply the

things learned.

If learning is indeed an ongoing practice set in community and never an individual

action, it is endangered by the ‘emancipatory’ message that forms the basis of our

functioning in the western world. Particularistic cultures in the West, if allowed to

exist, are expected to be secluded to the privacy of the individual sphere, far from the

public eye (I), their public appearance constrained to ritual events. If this is so, we

have one more reason to challenge the political system. But, in spite of present

multiculturalist trends, we do not seem to want to become Lubavitchers now,

practicing Judaism in the agora (public sphere) any more than in the past, and

rightfully so. Present multiculturalist trends are ready to offer recognition, but not

necessarily equality, and we seem to prefer equality to the recognition of difference.


We might be better off then if we ask not why our schools fail, but instead, why

dominant cultures are unwilling to accept cultural differences, and then decide if we

want to do something about it. Instead of doing this, liberal Jewish schools seem to

teach types of intolerance as a way to flesh out their particularistic identity,

reproducing within Jewish culture the same sense of exclusion produced by the

dominant culture, without realizing that since Jews are not dominant, such intolerance

is in the long run counterproductive to the Jewish community. Paradoxically, while

investing inside our community through such Jewish education, we serve the larger

outside world, which denies us and others like us. Alternatively, this could be

interpreted as achieving our aims. On the one hand we tell ourselves that we try inside

our community, but on the other hand, we successfully ‘fail’ in the outside world.

In brief, let me conclude this section by summarizing the main points I have raised

which are contrary to accepted theory and practice in liberal Jewish education.

1- The (at times) perceived failure of, or dissatisfaction with the

products of Jewish education, have little to do with the quality of

teachers or students and a lot to do with the quality of the systems

we (all) cooperatively construct.

2- Failing to understand the above means confusing failure for what

are adaptive moves to local and global systemic circumstances.

3- Positivist western paradigmatic perspectives are responsible for the

present educational perspectives that guide liberal Jewish educational

theory and practice. Educational change will occur only after we first

change these paradigmatic perspectives.


4- Changing paradigmatic perspectives means that education cannot be

isolated in the autonomous individual; located externally in a static,

coherent culture; and transmitted through specific and measurable

‘educational’ tasks. It means realizing that the individual, culture, and

the learning process are best represented as contextualized,

historicized, and interactive processes.

5- I have implied that from any feasible communicational theory, for

Jews to be relevant to themselves they have to be relevant in and to the

world, an almost trivial point when considering that meaning is by

definition not a representational given but the outcome of difference

management on an historical trajectory.

6- Lastly, I have suggested that, if the above were correct, Jews would

do well to look for better educational solutions in the reorganization of

present western world politics than in the limited parameters of their

school settings or in the individual minds of teachers or students.

If up until now Jewish education has meant thinking about group membership,

individual learning and school failure, we need to change our approach. There is

nothing individual about learning, there is no prerequisite literacy for membership,

and schools are not necessarily the settings in which to achieve relevant, productive,

adaptive learning.


What then can we do? We can start by trying to create educational settings that

achieve success not for others (the West and its expectations for the proper

functioning of their minorities), which has meant failure for our own. How to achieve

this is a more difficult question upon which I would like to partially and tentatively

reflect in the following section.

Cultural Education

We might start by re-conceptualizing Jewish education as a particular case of Cultural

Education. By Cultural Education (CE) I mean the educational efforts invested by

minority groups who want to sustain what they perceive to be their socio-historical

heritage, while confronted with the globalizing, assimilatory power of an hegemonic

West.

Cultural Education is geared to cultivate in members of culturally, economically, or

politically ‘oppressed’ groups, a critical consciousness of their situation as the

foundation of their liberatory praxis while recognizing that their greatest enemy is the

fatalistic faith in the inevitability and necessity of existing beliefs and structures.

The classic humanities curriculum, that which traditionally guides educational efforts

towards enculturation into given traditions (Jewish, democratic, or other), implicitly

(and partially explicitly) assumes certain modern understandings of concepts such as

culture, identity, and education, which are associated with autonomous, cognitive, and

individual activities. Rather recent theoretical developments within the ‘new’

humanities and social sciences have led to a reexamination of these concepts and their

related issues.


Understandings of culture, identity and education (and related concepts such as

language, power and memory) have undergone a shift from de-contextualized, ideal

models to historicized, dialogically produced and transformed ones. The focus has

therefore shifted from the individual to the social arena and from the intra-

psychological to the inter-psychological. This theoretical relocation into the social

interactional sphere where historically situated participants calibrate their positions

according to complex socio-cultural relations, has the potential to promote a re-

thinking of educational aims and strategies and set the grounds for the radical (from

Latin radix for root – not a bad metaphor for Jewish education) move in Jewish

education that I suggest.

This relocation does not necessarily rule out the possibility of continuing in part with

what has been done so far, but implies the need to promote new representations of

possible models of teachers and students responsive to the new and diverse challenges

encountered today in a transnational, global world. The moment identity, culture

(cultura-ae, Latin for work) and education (from the Latin, educare, e-“out” +

ducere- “to lead”) recover their contextual historical dimensions and regain their

process-like and dialogical co-constitution, they can no longer be presented in their

glorified historical remoteness (as traditionally done by philosophy and textual studies

in Jewish education). Neither can they be presented in their present detached solitude

as static traits or pure forms (contents), as cognitive/mental properties, available for

proper transmission given a becoming context. Rather forceful consideration should

be given to the contextual socio-historical character of social processes and meaning


construction, emphasizing the interdependence of all such developments and

phenomena.

This calls for a deep curricular involvement with all of those humanities and social

sciences that, in the last decades, have started a critical reappraisal of modernity. This

involvement would guide participants through a reflective process toward a new and

hopefully better understanding of their own condition and social situation, and of the

powers and processes involved in their becoming. These would then no longer appear

as natural events, but rather be seen to be the result of human social activity, that

would first require understanding before steps are taken toward change, when

necessary.

It is the organization of educational practice towards these aims and its resulting

practices, which I call Cultural Education (CE). CE is geared towards the joint

production of instructors/mediators aware of historical processes, the interdependence

of social phenomena, and the participation of a multiplicity of powers and interests in

the shaping of present meanings (jewishness, or other). This awareness should allow

participants in the process to devise the strategies necessary for change (if change is

indeed their goal), and to consider the feasibility of their implementation in the

multiple arenas in which interested powers struggle for domination (i.e. educational

institutions, media channels, political arenas, etc.). These are not uniquely Jewish

educational challenges. They are salient for a multitude of other cultural groups,

which have suffered from western social, cultural, political, and or economic

colonizing tendencies in the modern era.


A tentative analysis of modernity using these tools would unmask “modernity” as a

homogenizing (middle-class, white, heterosexual, male, etc.) process, which tends to

control the particular narratives of ‘others’, thereby subduing them to national and

global commodifying industrial forces.

These homogenizing commodifying forces have been unleashed by the processes of

modernization which have taken place in much of the world by virtue of the

expansion of the sphere of influence of western socio-political organizations (i.e. the

nation-state, the corporation, etc.), together with their related values (anonymity,

homogeneity, literacy) and accompanying phenomena (economic crisis, ecological

crisis, detraditionalization, migratory forces, Diaspora, etc.).

The move suggested is similar to that taken in anthropology when examining central

paradigmatic perspectives in general education – its study and practice. It starts by

restoring, respectfully, the concept of culture to its historical sources; it follows by

developing the restored meaning into a methodology – cultural analysis – which in

turn allows for a shift from the individual or the socializing group as the crucial

analytic unit for educational analysis to the production of cultural contexts; and last, it

leads to a new articulation of major policy issues related to – no longer Jewish

education and its components, individual students, teachers, parents, curriculum, but

to the analysis of particular Jews in the particular context of particular western

societies.


If so we should then train teachers and students to be sensitive to and to uncover these

universalizing homogenizing processes and procedures as well as to consider possible

paths of action to prevent their course. Adopting this view would mean that teachers

and students would, in one way or another, be involved with the challenges posed by

globalizing commodifying educational systems and cognizant of the risks they present

to a variety of subgroups with diverse legitimate (ethnic, religious, cultural, political,

etc.) interests.

If we can agree on the above, then we should consider viewing the task of Jewish

education as the collaborative production of cultural teachers, instructors, mediators,

and students, socialized and/or acculturated to particular (peripheralized western)

socio-historical traditions. While socializing individuals into particular traditions, our

aim is to foster creative development and productive dialogic cross-fertilization within

and between traditions.

Agents participating in the process outlined would become mindful that culture has

little to do with the habits we train people to adopt and has everything to do with the

environments we build for people to inhabit. Indeed culture as activity in context, is

not so much something into which one is placed, but an order of behavior in which

one participates. In short, they would realize that our interaction in context is what

continuously produces and maintains culture.

Agents would come to share the belief that perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical

fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying or

being taught at the time. Collateral learning in the way of the formation of enduring


attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the

textual or managerial lessons that are taught.

Finally agents would come to consider that the most important attitude to foster is the

desire to go on learning. Good education is a social enterprise in which all individuals

have an opportunity to contribute and to which all feel a responsibility. Accordingly

their goal would become the creation of educational processes which invite

participants to uncover the conditions (and the mechanisms which construct these

conditions as natural and inevitable) for a group to become recognized, stereotyped,

and/or functionally dysfunctional, thereby successfully adapting to an exclusive,

homogenized outside world.

These goal may be achieved by developing educational programs which bring to their

awareness our own cultural processes– assumptions, goals, values, beliefs, and

communicative modes – in their manifold forms within their historical, evolutionary

contexts as they are expressed in political, social and institutional life. This awareness

of their own cultural processes would permit them to see these as a potential bias in

social interaction and in the acquisition or transmission of skills and knowledge.

For teachers and students, this awareness is necessary so as to allow them to realize

that their failures and successes are not so much theirs but products of intricate webs

of relations located within and between complex historicized cultural patterns. It is

also relevant to make each aware of their own cultural assumptions and the effects

these have on their educational planning and behavior. And last, but not least, it is


necessary to raise consciousness concerning the unequal power relationships that are

endemic to state and educational institutions.

Thus we should raise our teachers and students to realize that as Jews we not only

exist through our texts, but also author ourselves as texts, poetic patch worked

narratives, composed of the multiple, evolving discursive products of numerous

chains of production. These interwoven chains of production include, among others, a

financial structure of regional, national, and global circuits; an aesthetic experience

expressed in our architecture or commodity packaging; and a social-status-creating

mechanism which regulates power, organizing body, space and time and the relations

between them. These chains produce ideological experiences, images of community,

and perspectives on the use of time and the meaning of pleasure, all of which impact

and shape our sense of Jewishness.

Our educational instructors/mediators need first and foremost to be able to read the

world and its chains of production. This literacy requires abundant theory and

descriptive power in order to uncover and cope with the complexity of the sites or

social phenomena. They need familiarity with a variety of disciplines and discourses:

Economic discourse for discussing commodities, supplies,

management.

Aesthetic discourse, to discuss architecture, advertising, display.

Political discourse, to discuss bodies, policies, planning, discipline.

Ethnographic discourse to find the beauty of the particular responses to

all of the above.


Historical discourse to talk about change in organization, consumption,

community.

Interpretative discourses to articulate understandings of each of the

texts, and their necessary intertextuality in practice, which, in concert,

create culture, Jewish or otherwise.

All of the above are needed to read the world and the activities that construct it, not

only in the world outside but also inside the classrooms. This might not be all that is

needed but it’s a critical start without which the rest will not follow.

All in all this essay points at the need to enrich our ‘customers’, teachers and students

alike, with languages, dialects and discourses. The central solution I offer involves the

discursive practice of ‘language-in-action’ as the generative tool of individual and

social experience. Indeed I write assuming that it is expression that organizes

experience and constructs reality, and not the other way around. From this

perspective, ‘self’ is authored in dialogue, and social groups develop their own

relatively stable coherent styles, though stylistic coherence never becomes a finished

product.

Knowledge of the uses of language (gesture and verb), the learning of ‘languaging’,

enables the recognition that we are not unrestricted agents constructing our realities,

but that, if we author the world at all, we do so by drawing upon words authored by

others. Choice of expression (identity, role, what have you) is a result of the historical

development of “heteroglossia”, the multiplicity of languages defined by their own

semantic and axiological content, which rule social life.


The understanding of the historical and contextual situatedness of language supports

the partial solution I have suggested regarding the possibility of overcoming our

present educational position. If indeed in our present position we ‘language western’

and lack the potential to successfully ‘language Jewish’ because of western

absolutism which has instituted its universalizing unitary language and abstracted

semantic domains, then the simple learning of language might not be enough. Thus

we might have to consider the option of counteracting it through the most powerful of

linguistic devices - that of parody and Bakhtinian carnivalesque.

Indeed since time immemorial the carnivalesque spirit has epitomized the popular

counter-culture, which rejects the ‘high culture’ of officialdom, itself ultimately

expressed in hegemonic western domination. Parody and the carnivalesque stand for

the embodied, the ambivalent, the generative, as opposed to the abstract, the fixed and

represented. The carnivalesque unsettles our present epistemological comfort. By

being grotesque, it distorts present understandings, transcends ‘natural’ boundaries,

opens an invitation to fusion and communion, and thus becomes a threat to

officialdom.

True modernity has recognized the power of the carnivalesque and has retained it as a

safety valve through which to secure its tyranny. Still the teaching and practice of

heteroglossia, parody and historicized language might serve to counteract our present

situation by supporting a new free and critical historical consciousness.

Our present situation, like any ideology, is not a given; neither is it eternal. It is not a

mystical abstraction but rather the product of socio-cultural practice expressed in


utterances, shaped by a common ordained language. Training towards an

understanding of language and discourse affords the possibility of de-centering the

present hegemonic authorial voice. The exploration of languages and the study of

discourses might be modest steps in the right direction.

Note

Part of the arguments forward in this paper are deeply indebted to an unpublished

work by R. McDermott and Herve Verenne, this in no way means they share

responsibility for the statements made.


References

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Successful Failure: The building of liberal Jewish education Failure... · commonly view as the failure of liberal Jewish education is not failure at all, but rather a successful