Michael Satlow: Teaching

Teaching stands at the heart of my job. Whether it is through my writing or lecturing, my job is to communicate ideas that in one way or another, directly or indirectly, by enriching or provoking, contribute to the continuing intellectual growth of my audience. My own teachers (my parents foremost among them) conveyed to me not simply a love a learning, but also its joy; the incredible excitement and rush that accompanies a new idea, however silly I may ultimately come to think it was. It is this freedom of mind – the curiosity and disposition that allows one to think unconventionally; the skills that allow ideas to take shape, and that then refine them; and the knowledge out of which these ideas are made – that I want to convey to my own students. In this way I am coming to see myself as more of a facilitator than a teacher h different strengths and challenges and pressing issues, and few pleasures are as sweet for me as helping an individual to discover his or her own intellectual path, and continue the journey.

I primarily teach three constituencies, undergraduates, graduates, and adults. Each, generally speaking, has different needs. My teaching of undergraduates is weighted toward critical skill development: How do you make and critique arguments? How can you communicate them effectively? How do you productively engage an idea or a set of facts? For graduate students, the weight shifts toward developing the skills necessary for the production of specialized knowledge. At this level I train students for a professional life studying the Jews of antiquity. For adults, many of whom have active and demanding professional lives, the need more often is for knowledge that is more immediate, immediately applicable, and provocative.

My approach to undergraduate teaching continues to evolve, but is grounded in three core convictions:

I believe in the value of a liberal education. Much of life is about learning to ask and grapple with the right questions, even while admitting that the answers are sometimes elusive. Learning to ask those questions and to find frameworks for answering them, though, is an acquired skill. In all of my courses I seek to develop and strengthen the critical thinking and reasoning skills that are essential for a full and informed life.

A liberal education provides more than marketable skills, although it certainly does that. (I like to tell my students that after graduating from college with my BA in ancient Jewish history I took my first job at an investment bank on Wall St. before returning to graduate school; this is the one factoid about me that they consistently remember.) It develops habits of mind that lead to personal freedom and pleasure. I still receive a sense of subversive delight when questioning a conventional understanding and experience the joy of a new idea. Almost nothing is professionally more satisfying to me than watching as a student experiences the same pleasures.

I believe that learning is best done actively rather than passively. Education is not about the delivery and memorization of data, although knowledge of course content is surely important. It is about knowing what to do with that stuff.

I have known for a long time about the large body of educational research that indicates that active engagement and practice is far more pedagogically effective than lectures. While I have always encouraged discussions and assigned much written work (I often require a short paper each week) in order to foster such engagement, Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges galvanized me. I have been increasing my efforts to move away from lecturing in order to achieve better learning outcomes.

I believe that education is a relationship, not a transaction. The classroom is a dynamic environment in which human beings engage each other. My goal in the classroom is to set up a safe learning environment that challenges each of us to further our human potential.

Judaism
This course surveys the major practices, traditions, and beliefs of the Jews, with an emphasis on modern Jewish communities. How does a Jewish community shape its practices and beliefs against its own specific historical circumstances to create a coherent and meaningful religious system?

A problem of definition lies at the heart of this course. What is “Judaism”? How can a definition of “Judaism” be inclusive enough to include the black-caftanned Lubavitch Hasidim of Brooklyn, the Reform Jews of Israel, religious Zionists and anti-Zionists, and American Reconstructionist Jews who have replaced many references to a male God with references to a female One? Might it be more accurate to talk of “Judaisms,” or are there in fact characteristics that hold these different Jewish communities together into a single coherent group?

In addition to the definitional problem there is an analytical one. It is not enough to describe a religious system; as students of religion we also seek to explain it. One goal of this course is to introduce you to the academic study of religion. Each discipline has “good” and “bad” questions: Within the context of the academic study of Judaism (or indeed, any religion), what are the “good” questions, and what are the methods for trying to answer them? A sample syllabus can be found here.

The Beginnings of Judaism
Prior to 586 BCE, the Israelites worshipped a warrior God whom, they said, forged them into a nation and continued to protect them: He was their king, and they were His subjects. In allegiance to this God, whom they called YHWH, they regularly offered sacrifices at their Temple in Jerusalem. When the Babylonians razed the Jerusalem Temple in 586 BCE, resettling part of the population in Babylonia, they also unintentionally sparked the transformation of the religion of the Israelites.

A little over a century later a “remnant” of this people returned to Jerusalem, this time as Jews. Now bringing a book they called the Torah, they began to construct a religion fundamentally different from that of their Israelite ancestors. This course is the story of how the religion of ancient Israel was transformed into Judaism. Our story starts with the building of the Second Temple and ends about 1,000 years later, with the flourishing of the rabbinic movement and the creation of the patterns of thought and rituals that have lasted to the present day. A sample syllabus can be found here.

The Jews: History, Culture, and Religion
(Bible to Middle Ages)
This course surveys Jewish history, culture, and religion from the biblical period through the middle ages. We will pay particularly close attention to issues of Jewish identity and religious expression: What did it mean to be an Israelite or a Jew in antiquity? What is the relationship between the Israelites, whose beliefs and practices are reflected in much of the Hebrew Bible, and the Jews, who returned from the Babylonian captivity to Jerusalem around 520 BCE to rebuild their temple? What linked, and divided, different Jewish groups? Who were “the rabbis,” and why were they so important for the development of Judaism? We will also focus on the production and canonization of the texts (e.g., Bible, Talmud, Zohar) that remain important for Jews today. A sample syllabus can be found here.

Talmud
Judaism, as we know it today, is an invention of the Rabbis. Living almost 2000 years ago, in both Palestine and Babylonia, the Rabbis (also known as the classical rabbis, or in Hebrew, hazal, an acronym for “our sages, may their memories be for a blessing”) produced a voluminous literature that would come to shape the way that Judaism was viewed and practiced. With midrash, a unique form of biblical interpretation, the rabbis created a distinctly “Jewish” form of reading the Bible. With aggadah, stories, they created a new genre of theological reflection. And with the Talmud they created a legal tradition whose authority they traced back to Mt. Sinai, but which contains the ability to adapt to changing historical circumstances.

In this course, we will survey the literary legacy of the rabbis with a focus on the Talmud. There are four primary goals of the class:

To develop your ability to read rabbinic texts (in translation) on your own;
To expose you to scholarly approaches to these texts;
To use these texts, with all of their inherent weirdness to most modern western minds, to get you to think “outside the box”;
To demonstrate how these texts have functioned in Jewish communities up the present.

A sample syllabus can be found here.

Judaism and Christianity in Conflict
Although rabbinic Judaism and Christianity emerged at about the same time in the same place, their relationship over the last 2,000 years has not been one of sweetness and light. Until very recently, Jews and Christians have engaged in an often tense relationship, characterized by bitter polemics. In this course we will trace the history of these polemics, with the goal of better understanding current themes in Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Please note what this class is not. We will not actually engage in polemic: this is an academic study of dialogue rather than the dialogue itself. Nor is this course an exploration of how Jews and Christians do and can get along. While we will occasionally come across some attempts at reconciliation, this course is an exploration of the dark side of the relationship.

Note also that from whatever background you come from, it is likely that some of the material presented in this course will offend you. You might feel attacked or embarrassed at times by the violence of the language and its assault on your own faith commitments. While I want you to take this material seriously, and to allow yourself to be challenged by it, I am also sensitive to the fact that these challenges could hinder your ability to learn. If you find material particularly disturbing, please do not hesitate to talk to me. A sample syllabus can be found here.

Jewish Mysticism
This class will trace the history and major themes of Jewish mysticism from antiquity to the present. Using both primary and secondary sources (all in English translation), we will explore “mystical” experiences reported in the Hebrew Bible, Jewish apocalyptic texts, rabbinic literature, early Jewish mystical writings, the Zohar, and Hasidic writings. We will pay special attention to the definitional problems inherent in such study: What is “mysticism”? What is Jewish about “Jewish” mysticism? A sample syllabus can be found here.

Religion in the Dead Sea Scrolls
First discovered over fifty years ago in the caves near the ancient settlement of Qumran off the western bank of the Dead Sea, the Dead Sea scrolls have been the subject of searing academic debate and popular interest. From the time of their discovery to the present, the Dead Sea scrolls have been surrounded by an aura of mystery, as if buried within them lie the secrets of early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. Yet as public imagination of these texts far outstripped anything remotely contained within them, their scholarly appraisal has until recently been mired in issues of lower criticism: piecing the fragments together into a readable text; establishing the relationships between variants; debating the relative chronologies. Only in the past few years, with the full publication of the scrolls have scholars begun to move beyond these fundamental issues to assess the meaning of these texts. What kind of religious community, or communities, do these texts represent? How did the authors of these scrolls envision their relationship with the divine? How did they worship? How did they understand religious and moral perfection? What, for them, did it mean to be a member of Israel? In this class we will survey most of the Dead Sea scrolls in English translation, and consider these and other academic questions of religious meaning. A sample syllabus can be found here.

The Mishnah
The Mishnah is a seminal Jewish text. Compiled around the year 200 CE in ancient Palestine, it became the foundation of the two Talmuds and thus, all later Judaism. But it is still in may ways a mystery: Why was it comiled? Who was its intended audicne and what was its fuction? What are its antecedents? This graduate seminar has two interlocked goals. One is to strengthen your ability, bot linguistic and ocnceptual, to read and decode Mishnah. The second is to survey and gain some facility with modern scholarly approaches to the Mishnah. In the process we will also discuss the social historical and religious implications of our tractate, Peah. A sample syllabus can be found here.

Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Ancient World
This is a graduate level seminar that will examine the concept and development of “Orthodoxy” in antiquity, with a strong focus on Jews. “Orthodoxy” is meant here in two senses: (1) the first-order discourses by which groups defined the “one true path,” and (2) its potential to serve as a second-order analytical term for this phenomenon. How and why are orthodoxies and heresies created?

This class will also serve to develop and strengthen technical and critical skills for the analysis of ancient Jewish literature, particularly rabbinic texts. You will be expected to prepare Hebrew and Aramaic texts in the original for most classes, and we will devote part of most classes to reading and translating them. Syllabus can be found here.

Philo
To modern scholars used to working with bits and pieces of fragments of pseudonymous authors whose literature floats without context, Philo –much of whose vast literary output is extant – stands as a solid point of reference. Raised in a wealthy and clearly well-educated Jewish household in Alexandria around the turn of era, Philo appears to have spent much of his privileged life ruminating about the Hebrew Bible and Greek philosophy. Never one to leave a thought unwritten, he leaves an oeuvre that is as fascinating and insightful as it is frustrating and tedious, and a legacy of Jewish neglect and early Christian lionization. It is, in fact, only through the Christian preservation of his work that any of it survives.

This goal of this graduate seminar is to introduce you to Philo and his contemporary, academic study. By the end of this class you will have read most of Philo’s surviving literary works and be conversant with most of the pressing academic issues that they raise. Syllabus can be found here.


	Teaching

		Click here for Undergraduate Courses. Click Here for Graduate Courses. Teaching stands at the heart of my job. Whether it is through my writing or lecturing, my job is to communicate ideas that in one way or another, directly or indirectly, by enriching or provoking, contribute to the continuing intellectual growth of my audience. My own teachers (my parents foremost among them) conveyed to me not simply a love a learning, but also its joy; the incredible excitement and rush that accompanies a new idea, however silly I may ultimately come to think it was. It is this freedom of mind – the curiosity and disposition that allows one to think unconventionally; the skills that allow ideas to take shape, and that then refine them; and the knowledge out of which these ideas are made – that I want to convey to my own students. In this way I am coming to see myself as more of a facilitator than a teacher h different strengths and challenges and pressing issues, and few pleasures are as sweet for me as helping an individual to discover his or her own intellectual path, and continue the journey. I primarily teach three constituencies, undergraduates, graduates, and adults. Each, generally speaking, has different needs. My teaching of undergraduates is weighted toward critical skill development: How do you make and critique arguments? How can you communicate them effectively? How do you productively engage an idea or a set of facts? For graduate students, the weight shifts toward developing the skills necessary for the production of specialized knowledge. At this level I train students for a professional life studying the Jews of antiquity. For adults, many of whom have active and demanding professional lives, the need more often is for knowledge that is more immediate, immediately applicable, and provocative. Teaching Principles My approach to undergraduate teaching continues to evolve, but is grounded in three core convictions: I believe in the value of a liberal education. Much of life is about learning to ask and grapple with the right questions, even while admitting that the answers are sometimes elusive. Learning to ask those questions and to find frameworks for answering them, though, is an acquired skill. In all of my courses I seek to develop and strengthen the critical thinking and reasoning skills that are essential for a full and informed life. A liberal education provides more than marketable skills, although it certainly does that. (I like to tell my students that after graduating from college with my BA in ancient Jewish history I took my first job at an investment bank on Wall St. before returning to graduate school; this is the one factoid about me that they consistently remember.) It develops habits of mind that lead to personal freedom and pleasure. I still receive a sense of subversive delight when questioning a conventional understanding and experience the joy of a new idea. Almost nothing is professionally more satisfying to me than watching as a student experiences the same pleasures. I believe that learning is best done actively rather than passively. Education is not about the delivery and memorization of data, although knowledge of course content is surely important. It is about knowing what to do with that stuff. I have known for a long time about the large body of educational research that indicates that active engagement and practice is far more pedagogically effective than lectures. While I have always encouraged discussions and assigned much written work (I often require a short paper each week) in order to foster such engagement, Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges galvanized me. I have been increasing my efforts to move away from lecturing in order to achieve better learning outcomes. I believe that education is a relationship, not a transaction. The classroom is a dynamic environment in which human beings engage each other. My goal in the classroom is to set up a safe learning environment that challenges each of us to further our human potential. Selected Undergraduate Courses Judaism This course surveys the major practices, traditions, and beliefs of the Jews, with an emphasis on modern Jewish communities. How does a Jewish community shape its practices and beliefs against its own specific historical circumstances to create a coherent and meaningful religious system? A problem of definition lies at the heart of this course. What is “Judaism”? How can a definition of “Judaism” be inclusive enough to include the black-caftanned Lubavitch Hasidim of Brooklyn, the Reform Jews of Israel, religious Zionists and anti-Zionists, and American Reconstructionist Jews who have replaced many references to a male God with references to a female One? Might it be more accurate to talk of “Judaisms,” or are there in fact characteristics that hold these different Jewish communities together into a single coherent group? In addition to the definitional problem there is an analytical one. It is not enough to describe a religious system; as students of religion we also seek to explain it. One goal of this course is to introduce you to the academic study of religion. Each discipline has “good” and “bad” questions: Within the context of the academic study of Judaism (or indeed, any religion), what are the “good” questions, and what are the methods for trying to answer them? A sample syllabus can be found here. *The Beginnings of Judaism* Prior to 586 BCE, the Israelites worshipped a warrior God whom, they said, forged them into a nation and continued to protect them: He was their king, and they were His subjects. In allegiance to this God, whom they called YHWH, they regularly offered sacrifices at their Temple in Jerusalem. When the Babylonians razed the Jerusalem Temple in 586 BCE, resettling part of the population in Babylonia, they also unintentionally sparked the transformation of the religion of the Israelites. A little over a century later a “remnant” of this people returned to Jerusalem, this time as Jews. Now bringing a book they called the Torah, they began to construct a religion fundamentally different from that of their Israelite ancestors. This course is the story of how the religion of ancient Israel was transformed into Judaism. Our story starts with the building of the Second Temple and ends about 1,000 years later, with the flourishing of the rabbinic movement and the creation of the patterns of thought and rituals that have lasted to the present day. A sample syllabus can be found here. The Jews: History, Culture, and Religion (Bible to Middle Ages) This course surveys Jewish history, culture, and religion from the biblical period through the middle ages. We will pay particularly close attention to issues of Jewish identity and religious expression: What did it mean to be an Israelite or a Jew in antiquity? What is the relationship between the Israelites, whose beliefs and practices are reflected in much of the Hebrew Bible, and the Jews, who returned from the Babylonian captivity to Jerusalem around 520 BCE to rebuild their temple? What linked, and divided, different Jewish groups? Who were “the rabbis,” and why were they so important for the development of Judaism? We will also focus on the production and canonization of the texts (e.g., Bible, Talmud, Zohar) that remain important for Jews today. A sample syllabus can be found here. *Talmud* Judaism, as we know it today, is an invention of the Rabbis. Living almost 2000 years ago, in both Palestine and Babylonia, the Rabbis (also known as the classical rabbis, or in Hebrew, hazal, an acronym for “our sages, may their memories be for a blessing”) produced a voluminous literature that would come to shape the way that Judaism was viewed and practiced. With midrash, a unique form of biblical interpretation, the rabbis created a distinctly “Jewish” form of reading the Bible. With aggadah, stories, they created a new genre of theological reflection. And with the Talmud they created a legal tradition whose authority they traced back to Mt. Sinai, but which contains the ability to adapt to changing historical circumstances. In this course, we will survey the literary legacy of the rabbis with a focus on the Talmud. There are four primary goals of the class: To develop your ability to read rabbinic texts (in translation) on your own; To expose you to scholarly approaches to these texts; To use these texts, with all of their inherent weirdness to most modern western minds, to get you to think “outside the box”; To demonstrate how these texts have functioned in Jewish communities up the present. A sample syllabus can be found here. *Judaism and Christianity in Conflict* Although rabbinic Judaism and Christianity emerged at about the same time in the same place, their relationship over the last 2,000 years has not been one of sweetness and light. Until very recently, Jews and Christians have engaged in an often tense relationship, characterized by bitter polemics. In this course we will trace the history of these polemics, with the goal of better understanding current themes in Jewish-Christian dialogue. Please note what this class is not. We will not actually engage in polemic: this is an academic study of dialogue rather than the dialogue itself. Nor is this course an exploration of how Jews and Christians do and can get along. While we will occasionally come across some attempts at reconciliation, this course is an exploration of the dark side of the relationship. Note also that from whatever background you come from, it is likely that some of the material presented in this course will offend you. You might feel attacked or embarrassed at times by the violence of the language and its assault on your own faith commitments. While I want you to take this material seriously, and to allow yourself to be challenged by it, I am also sensitive to the fact that these challenges could hinder your ability to learn. If you find material particularly disturbing, please do not hesitate to talk to me. A sample syllabus can be found here. Jewish Mysticism This class will trace the history and major themes of Jewish mysticism from antiquity to the present. Using both primary and secondary sources (all in English translation), we will explore “mystical” experiences reported in the Hebrew Bible, Jewish apocalyptic texts, rabbinic literature, early Jewish mystical writings, the Zohar, and Hasidic writings. We will pay special attention to the definitional problems inherent in such study: What is “mysticism”? What is Jewish about “Jewish” mysticism? A sample syllabus can be found here. *Religion in the Dead Sea Scrolls* First discovered over fifty years ago in the caves near the ancient settlement of Qumran off the western bank of the Dead Sea, the Dead Sea scrolls have been the subject of searing academic debate and popular interest. From the time of their discovery to the present, the Dead Sea scrolls have been surrounded by an aura of mystery, as if buried within them lie the secrets of early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. Yet as public imagination of these texts far outstripped anything remotely contained within them, their scholarly appraisal has until recently been mired in issues of lower criticism: piecing the fragments together into a readable text; establishing the relationships between variants; debating the relative chronologies. Only in the past few years, with the full publication of the scrolls have scholars begun to move beyond these fundamental issues to assess the meaning of these texts. What kind of religious community, or communities, do these texts represent? How did the authors of these scrolls envision their relationship with the divine? How did they worship? How did they understand religious and moral perfection? What, for them, did it mean to be a member of Israel? In this class we will survey most of the Dead Sea scrolls in English translation, and consider these and other academic questions of religious meaning. A sample syllabus can be found here. Selected Graduate Courses The Mishnah The Mishnah is a seminal Jewish text. Compiled around the year 200 CE in ancient Palestine, it became the foundation of the two Talmuds and thus, all later Judaism. But it is still in may ways a mystery: Why was it comiled? Who was its intended audicne and what was its fuction? What are its antecedents? This graduate seminar has two interlocked goals. One is to strengthen your ability, bot linguistic and ocnceptual, to read and decode Mishnah. The second is to survey and gain some facility with modern scholarly approaches to the Mishnah. In the process we will also discuss the social historical and religious implications of our tractate, Peah. A sample syllabus can be found here. *Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Ancient World* This is a graduate level seminar that will examine the concept and development of “Orthodoxy” in antiquity, with a strong focus on Jews. “Orthodoxy” is meant here in two senses: (1) the first-order discourses by which groups defined the “one true path,” and (2) its potential to serve as a second-order analytical term for this phenomenon. How and why are orthodoxies and heresies created? This class will also serve to develop and strengthen technical and critical skills for the analysis of ancient Jewish literature, particularly rabbinic texts. You will be expected to prepare Hebrew and Aramaic texts in the original for most classes, and we will devote part of most classes to reading and translating them. Syllabus can be found here. *Philo* To modern scholars used to working with bits and pieces of fragments of pseudonymous authors whose literature floats without context, Philo –much of whose vast literary output is extant – stands as a solid point of reference. Raised in a wealthy and clearly well-educated Jewish household in Alexandria around the turn of era, Philo appears to have spent much of his privileged life ruminating about the Hebrew Bible and Greek philosophy. Never one to leave a thought unwritten, he leaves an oeuvre that is as fascinating and insightful as it is frustrating and tedious, and a legacy of Jewish neglect and early Christian lionization. It is, in fact, only through the Christian preservation of his work that any of it survives. This goal of this graduate seminar is to introduce you to Philo and his contemporary, academic study. By the end of this class you will have read most of Philo’s surviving literary works and be conversant with most of the pressing academic issues that they raise. Syllabus can be found here.
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