A Manual for Teaching Biblical HistoryKohn, Eugene
Religion
A Manual for Teaching Biblical History
Kohn, Eugene
Jewish religious education of children -- United States
=Must give Biblical moral to Jewish history.= Very few teachers
in our Jewish schools, if any, would make the mistake of teaching
the events narrated in the Bible merely as cold facts without any
attempt at giving them religious significance, though frequent
efforts at rationalization tend in this direction. For the most
part, the aim in teaching the early history of our people is felt to
be a religious one and to call for a religious interpretation of the
events recorded. We are not loath to attach a moral to the stories
we tell our children, but where we fail is that we imagine any moral
which we can read into the story is satisfactory. We have already
shown how the consideration of the aim of instruction in Biblical
history, from the point of view of traditional Judaism, opposes this
method and limits the moral which should be taught in connection
with any given story, but the consideration of the subject-matter
to be taught limits it still further. We must not only give a
Jewish moral to each episode in the Biblical narrative but we must
give the child the specific moral that the Bible itself attaches
to that episode. If we take our Bible seriously, if we regard its
interpretation of the events of our history as essentially true,
as indeed part of the Torah, a divine revelation, then it becomes
our duty to give this interpretation of events and not another to
our children. We sometimes excuse to ourselves the perversion of
the Biblical moral on the ground that because children are children
they frequently cannot grasp what is really the Biblical lesson. If
in any given instance this is the case, it is better not to teach
that story at all to the child than to falsify it. But usually the
ideas of the Bible can be brought home to the child if we but take
the trouble to translate them into the language of childhood and
illustrate them out of the child's own experience. It is largely
due to indolence on the part of the teacher that we so frequently
sin against the Biblical sense of a story. I have heard the story
of Abraham's divorce of Hagar told as if it were a mere family
squabble in which Sarah, by shrewish persistence finally prevails
upon the meek and submissive Abraham somewhat reluctantly to send
away Hagar, who had aroused her jealousy. Abraham was made a rather
doubtful hero who represented the virtue of loving peace--peace
at any price as the narrative showed--and Sarah was regarded as
acting in a mean and ungodly capacity. Had that teacher read her
Bible carefully and intelligently before coming to class she could
not have been guilty of such grotesque distortion of the Biblical
story, by which it is made not only trivial but ludicrous. She would
then have realized that Ishmael had to be separated from Isaac for
the same reason that Lot had to be separated from Abraham and Esau
from Jacob, because they were not of the seed from which Israel was
destined to spring; that even before the birth of Ishmael we have
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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