Science as a Narrative*

By: Mr. Yarone Tokayer, Science Faculty (HS '09)

There is an unfortunate gap in confidence between so-called “math-science people” and “humanities people” in science classes. I am not sure where this notion came from, but true or not, it is perhaps the most toxic and limiting nomenclature that has been adopted by educators. Science, especially at a high school level, ought to engender excitement, not fear. Furthermore, we should be teaching and modeling life values in all of our classes, not just in Judaics and the humanities. I believe that teaching science, not as a laundry list of immutable facts, but as a narrative is a small step toward addressing these important issues.

When I was in engineering school, I took a class on drafting, in which we learned how to draw pedantically precise schematics of parts by hand. We were introduced to the T-square, different types of pencils, and all sorts of tools to make perfect circles and clear drawings. Points were deducted for noticeable erasures, improper notation, or lines that weren’t just the right shade. It would take up to 7 hours to complete just one draft. Halfway through the semester, our professor introduced us to CAD software, which helps with doing all of this on the computer. My classmates and I felt betrayed, and could not believe that we had spent so much time on drawings that could be done in minutes using computer programs. However, we soon discovered that without that intimate knowledge of the old method, we would not be able to use the CAD software correctly, nor would we have any idea what a proper draft looks like, since it evolved from the manual techniques. Our professor showed us that to fully understand and appreciate the new technology, we had to understand how it developed and what it aimed to do. I believe that the same is true of the sciences: to truly understand them, we must understand their development as well.

Science is more than a list of interesting facts. It develops out of a complex web of collaborations and feuds, false hypotheses, serendipitous findings, and religious dogma. In its theories lies a profoundly human story—of curiosity, achievements, and failures. I have tried to tell this story in my physics classes. For example, in our recent unit on planetary models, we did not only study the Solar System as we view it today, but we discussed the earlier models as well, together with their flaws and how they were revised. We learned that astronomers through the ages were driven by a fervent belief that the universe is symmetric and neat. Reconciling that belief with what was seen in the night sky every night proved very difficult. It took until the 17th Century for a model to finally be developed that abandoned these convictions (as it turns out, orbits are more like ovals than circles). In this way, students understand astronomy as a narrative; a story of natural philosophy that spans centuries and connects fascinating characters, and one that continues today as we are still researching and better understanding the heavens.

On last month’s Junior shabbaton, a couple of students approached me with questions about astronomy (we had just finished the unit). What began with me trying to explain why the sky is blue very quickly evolved into questions of how we are to understand the vast expanse of the universe: “Why would God make all of that if it has nothing to do with people?” Needless to say, I could not provide satisfactory answers to their insightful questions, but it started a conversation that lasted into the next week at school about how our understanding of nature feeds back into our understanding of ourselves. Science raises many difficult questions of this nature, and as citizens that are in touch with the intellectual world, our students will encounter them sooner or later. I am proud that our students intuited this profound intersection between science and values, and I am thrilled to be introducing them to these questions in the safe and non-threatening setting of the classroom. Which brings me to my last point.

Part of SAR’s mission is for its students to be “participants in the grand conversation between Torah and the world.” We teach that our tradition should illuminate our understanding of the world, and our understanding of the world should feedback into our Torah and religious experience. In science classes, this usually translates to something like, מָה-רַבּוּ מַעֲשֶׂיך ה כֻּלָּם בְּחָכְמָה עָשִׂיתָ, “How manifold are Your works, God! In wisdom You have made them all” (Psalms 104:24). This is a powerful message to be sure, but we can do better. One more example from the planetary models unit in physics: In the 16th Century, Nicolaus Copernicus presented a heliocentric model of the universe, which had the Earth rotate around the Sun instead of the Sun around the Earth. After teaching his model, I mention the verse from sefer Yehoshua “the sun stood still, and the moon stayed” (10:13), which implies that usually the Sun moves, not the Earth. This Biblical passage was one of the primary objections that the Christian Church had to heliocentricity. Since our students study tanakh and understand what it means to value text, they can appreciate the tension that people at the time felt between Church teachings and scientific theory. The history of science is intricately intertwined with that of religion; as Torah educated Jews, our students are uniquely situated to understand the interactions between the two.

Science classes today are very similar to the type that my parents and grandparents sat in: a series of facts about nature are presented, demonstrations and examples are used to convince students of those facts, and then students are tested on how well they know those facts. This model has succeeded in teaching science to generations of students, but I believe that it gives an inaccurate picture of what “science” is. More importantly, this model misses out on an opportunity to give students that might not conventionally be turned on by the sciences an appreciation of how rich those subjects are. By emphasizing the narrative of science, we can expose its human elements, and give all students ownership of these beautiful and rewarding subjects.

* this formulation is inspired by my teacher, Professor Stuart Firestein

The Purposeful Journey through the "Eternal Abyss" - Gemara Study as an Exercise in עבודת השם

By: Rabbi Akiva Block, Judaic Studies Faculty

"במחשכים הושיבני כמתי עולם (איכה ג:ו)" - אמר רבי ירמיה, זו תלמודה של בבל. (סנהדרין כד.)

"God has made me dwell in darkness like the eternally dead (Eicha 3:6)" - R. Yirmiyah said, this refers to the Babylonian Talmud. (Sanhedrin 24a)

I remember vividly the first time in my life I was able to understand a passage of Gemara on my own. Not because of how smart it made me feel or how hard I worked to master it - though both were true - but because of how palpably I felt God's presence during the experience. No Artscroll, no dictionary, no teacher there to hold my hand through it; just me and my chavruta (study partner) alone in a beit midrash. Words became phrases. Phrases became sentences. Sentences became arguments and questions and answers -- and then, voila! We had ourselves a sugya, an entire passage. Admittedly, what took me literally hours then would probably take a matter of minutes today. But for as long as I live, I'll never forget the euphoric feeling I had when I finally "got it." I'd swear that, at that very moment, I could almost feel God's hand on my shoulder.

As a teacher of Torah Sheba'al Peh, I constantly struggle to make the case to my students that God is to be found in Talmud study. To be sure, there is much that stands in the way of an enjoyable high school Gemara experience, let alone a spiritually meaningful one. Whether it's the constant back and forth without ever arriving at a conclusion, the seeming irrelevance of the subject matter, the language barrier that Talmudic Aramaic presents, or the simple and inescapable fact that the words of the Gemara themselves are multiple steps removed from the revealed word of God, in contradistinction to Chumash - finding God in the convoluted and unwieldy texts of Gemara is an elusive goal indeed. 

This challenge is compounded in the mission-driven environment of SAR. In our community's unending pursuit of the Grand Conversation, one of our most sacred tasks is indeed making the case that all our learning contributes to a fuller spiritual life; that my English class can be a place for spiritual growth just like any Judaic studies class can. In many respects, we've been successful. Even if not always in practice, students at SAR understand at least in theory the concept of the Grand Conversation, and the term is bandied about in classroom discussions all throughout the building. Faculty, parents and students are attuned to the concept, which leads inexorably to our question in an even more pronounced form: what contribution can Gemara make to my religious and spiritual make up? Where is God in the study of Gemara? How is learning Gemara עבודת השם?

This question is different from the equally important question of why study Gemara. Many good answers can conceivably be given to that question that do not involve God. We can talk about how Gemara study cultivates and sharpens our critical thinking skills; we can show how Gemara trains us to look at virtually every issue from multiple perspectives, even ones that we would intuitively think are clear-cut; we can mention how understanding the inner workings of the halakha, instead of just the perfunctory dos and don'ts, immeasurably enhances our performance; we can even speak of the Talmud as informing our mission as Modern Orthodox Jews today, what Yaakov Elman incisively calls "a microcosm of Torah society in formation." But do any of these help me find God in its study?

Now that we've sufficiently developed the question, you may be surprised to discover that I have no good answer. Moments of transcendence are, by their very nature, personal. But as I think back to my experience in the beit midrash all those years ago, I am moved to ask what it was about that experience that caused me to feel God's presence.

On the one hand, perhaps, our ability to sense God in our study, any study, can be directly commensurate with our desire and willingness to do so. As Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk famously once asked his students: where is God? When they responded, "Why rebbe, God is everywhere," the rabbi said, "That is incorrect. Where is God? Wherever you let God in." If we truly wish for learning to be what Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein calls, "a dialogic encounter with Ribbono shel Olam," then the nature and extent of that encounter will be a function of our attitude. I'm not sure it had ever occurred to me before that I could feel God's presence in my learning, and therefore I had never attempted to let God in and make that a reality.

Beyond this however, what characterized that experience was that more than at any time in my life I felt as though I was a part of something larger, deeper, and richer. Although in that beit midrash on that day I didn't (yet) love learning Gemara, I realized then you don't need to love something for it to be spiritual. You do, however, have to invest in it. You have to immerse yourself in it. You have to care about it. 

And on that day, I cared. I cared enough to work hard at it, and to reflect upon the experience. There I was, having mastered a small portion of a text that has been the birthright of my people for the better part of two thousand years. I was taking my place, and have since continued to firmly entrench that place, among centuries of learners who immersed themselves in this text and made the pages of the Gemara their spiritual and intellectual home. I was learning what Jews who learn learn, what they've always learned. Even if I didn't then understand why, the sense of perspective and context that moment provided, that my world was part of a larger world that extended forth both vertically and horizontally in either direction, was more empowering and inspiring than anything I had ever felt.

And I continue to feel that way. Not all the time, perhaps not even most of the time, but on occasion, I am able to recapture the euphoria of that experience, and see yet glimpses of it in others. Aside from in my own learning, I feel it when I see students' faces light up as they finally understand a challenging passage in the Gemara, a line in Rashi, or a difficult conceptual question, all through hard work and toil. I feel it when I see and hear of parents studying Torah with their children. This, in my view, is the essence of עבודת השם.

In accepting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George Bush in January 1993, Ronald Reagan said of America that, "this is the land that has never become, but is always in the act of becoming." As a Gemara teacher, I have the same wish for my students; that they never become anything, but continue to engage in the act of becoming. Care about the endeavor. If learning Gemara is frustrating, keep at it. It may be hard, but, to quote Tom Hanks, it's supposed to be hard. The hard is what makes it great. 

Are God and spirituality to be found in Gemara? Definitely. How? That I can't definitively say. Like many of my life's most basic and fundamental truths it is rooted more in intuition, and can't really be proven. But it's there. Would that our students care enough to keep looking...

במחשכים הושיבני. The prospect of a life of Gemara study is daunting indeed, like, R. Yirmiyah teaches us, being placed in a dark abyss. But the thing about a dark place is, when you care enough to find your way out, when you work hard and get to a point where you've let in just a bit of light, the reward and sense of accomplishment are immeasurable.

Modeling Civil Discourse in an Uncivil World

By: Dr. Rivka Schwartz, Associate Principal, General Studies

I keep telling my students not to make the mistake of thinking that this year’s campaign is typical of past presidential election cycles, which they just failed to notice because they were too young to pay attention. No, I tell them again and again, this campaign is, in many ways, unprecedented in our lifetimes. And one way, certainly, is in the ugliness and rancor it has engendered.

Polling data tells us that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the two most unpopular presidential candidates, ever. A substantial number of voters are voting against the opposing candidate more than they are voting for the one they putatively support. The rhetoric, political and otherwise, surrounding this campaign has been coarse and angry, amplified by the profusion of media outlets and the ability of social media to give voice to people with fringe views.

As educators, we have two goals in this election cycle. One is to inform students about the issues and the mechanics of how a presidential election works. (We don’t assume that our students, particularly those who have not yet studied American history, understand the arcane workings of the Electoral College.) But a second, even more important, is to model and teach engaging in civil and reasoned discourse with those with whom we disagree.

There are unfortunately few examples of this in the broader public discourse. In the quest for viewers, clicks, and retweets, confrontation and bombast are the currency. Candidates’ surrogates make their names by being provocative and combative. Calm, reasoned discussion that seeks to understand the other’s view and empathize, even as you disagree, doesn’t make for the most riveting television.

But it is vital that we teach and model this all the same, for reasons that range from the individual to the national. First, at the most fundamental level, we are trying to instill values in our students. We want them to engage the world, as the SAR mission exhorts, with humility and openness. Listening to someone else’s point of view respectfully must be part of that. Second as educators, we teach students to formulate arguments and to contend with the evidence for and against those arguments (rather than simply asserting that they are right at ever-higher volume.) One’s own position may be changed by that encounter, and, even if it is not, it is strengthened by having been tested against others’. And third, as citizens in the American body politic, we are witnessing an increasing sorting of people into like-minded communities, in the real world and online, in which they never encounter Americans of differing views. This siloing, and the divisions it reinforces, is already being felt for the worse in many ways in our national discourse and politics. For all of these reasons, it is important to encourage our students to hear each other out respectfully, and to work on expressing disagreement without delegitimation.

This ability to disagree without denying the other’s basic humanity is a value that emerges from the Talmud’s story about the canonical halakhic disputants, Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai. The Talmud attests that whatever their differences, they continued to marry into each others’ families. When we know each other as people--when we care about each other--even as we continue to hold our own strong points of view, we talk and think differently about those who think otherwise.

We know, too, that in most cases, Beit Hillel’s point of view is preferred to that of Beit Shammai. The Talmud, in explaining why this is so, says that Beit Hillel would study the viewpoint of Beit Shammai before studying their own. We can read this simply as courtesy on Beit Hillel’s part, but there is more here than that. In thoroughly seeking to understand the position of Beit Shammai before articulating their own, Beit Hillel ensured that their positions were tested against the strongest opposition, and their own positions were stronger and more compelling for it.

We want our students to care deeply about politics, policy issues, and election outcomes. But as we encourage them to be knowledgeable about this election and what it means for the future direction of the United States, we must work to teach and model how to disagree so fundamentally and about such important things without losing the ability to talk and listen to one another.