A Manual for Teaching Biblical HistoryKohn, Eugene
Religion
A Manual for Teaching Biblical History
Kohn, Eugene
Jewish religious education of children -- United States
=Three factors determining method of instruction.= Every discussion
of pedagogic method as applied to a particular branch of study must
take three factors into consideration: the aim of instruction, the
subject to be taught, and the child--his mode of thought, interests
and capacity.
THE AIM. The first thing that we must bear in mind is that the aim
of all Jewish education must be a Jewish life; that the aim of each
branch of Jewish study must be formulated not primarily in terms
of information to be conveyed, but of Jewish habits of thought and
action to be cultivated. It follows that Biblical history as taught
by a Jew who believes in the authority of the Torah and the mitzvoth
over our lives must be very different from the same subject as
taught by one to whom Judaism is merely a number of moral maxims
and the dogma of the unity. This book, attempting as it does to
treat the problem from the point of view of traditional Judaism,
considers that the main object of instruction in Biblical history is
to inspire the child with an appreciation of the religious ideals
that have moulded Israel's life in the past, with an understanding
of how these same ideals express themselves in the religious
institutions of the present day, and with the desire to further the
historic aims of Israel's existence through identification with the
institutional life of Israel, that is through the observance of the
mitzvoth, affiliation with the synagogue, etc. Particularly must
we create in the child the sense of his personal identity with his
people, for this is the lever by which the events of the Biblical
narrative can move the Jew to active interest in Judaism. He must
feel that God's choice of Israel means that God has chosen him to
live a certain life, the life of the Torah, and that if he fails
to live this life, he sins against God and betrays his people. He
should feel proud of the heroes of his nation and inspired with a
sense of the obligations that his noble descent imposes. He must be
made to discover the spiritual kinship that links him with the rest
of Israel in the past, present and future. Unless we can accomplish
this we have not succeeded in our teaching of Biblical history.
=Wrong and right conception of aim illustrated.= A lack of
appreciation of these aims has often led to the treatment of the
Biblical narrative as if it were merely a series of moral stories
or, at any rate, of stories into which a moral can be read.
According to this method the connection of the Jewish people today
with the people of the Bible is almost wholly ignored and there is
no appreciable difference in the way the events of the Biblical
narrative are taught and, let us say, the incidents of some highly
moral fairy tale or folk-lore of other peoples. To give an example I
quote the following summary of a lesson on "Moses' Return to Egypt":
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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