It's Time for a Jewish Middle Earth: Cultivating Imagination in Torah Teaching with Olivia Friedman (231)

Orthodox Conundrum

Is Jewish education too focused upon a rationalist and scientific worldview, such that we sometimes don’t leave enough room for the imagination? I think that this may be true for large segments of the Orthodox world, particularly among the Modern Orthodox population. While we dare not undermine the great advances that our scientific worldview has given humanity, an overemphasis on rationality can also eliminate wonder and mystery from our understanding of the universe - and that can undermine our ability to live a full and even colorful Judaism. This doesn’t mean that we should deny a rationalist approach so much as it implies that we shouldn't narrow Torah and Judaism so that only one approach is considered valid.

Olivia Friedman is an educator who has given significant thought to this issue, and I was pleased to discuss how Jews in general, and teachers in particular, need to help cultivate the imagination in order to help generate a fuller and richer Jewish experience. This doesn’t mean to just pretend; sometimes it means to open ourselves up to the fact that we actually know much less than we think we do. In that vein, Olivia and I talked about the the difference between “happening truth” and “story truth,” the possibility of taking some surprising midrashim literally, how we we can acknowledge the existence of multiple truths without falling into the trap of thinking of truth as relative, what can we learn from the movie “Wicked” about the different types of truth, why teaching midrash from kindergarten through 8th grade is essential to our kids’ Jewish development (and why using only pshat creates serious educational and theological problems), whether we should we establish a hard distinction between pshat and drash, the importance of pointing out that midrash isn’t just fantasy literature, but a serious genre based on very close reading - and yet why it’s time for the creation of more Jewish fantasy literature along the lines of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the ways that we unfortunately “shrink the world down to the size of our certainties,” and more.

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