(RNS) — Drive along the main highways of America. You will see buildings with signs: “Read your Bible.”
Those buildings are always evangelical churches.
They are never synagogues.
Jews don’t read the Bible. We study Torah. Beyond that, the only Bible we are likely to hear in synagogue consists of psalms scattered through the service, and the prophetic texts that we read weekly.
Keep that difference in mind.
Last week, the Texas State Board of Education approved a mandatory reading list for more than 5 million public school students requiring Bible passages at every grade level.
Rabbi Joshua Fixler of Houston said it plainly: “This list is full of Christian texts that are inappropriate for public school classrooms.”
What do I think about this?
First: I oppose this, and most mainstream Jewish groups will too.
Look at what made the list: The New Testament sits at the center; the Hebrew Bible mostly supplies backstory.
This is where I remind you: Jews don’t read Bible the way evangelicals do. Evangelicals go right to the text for a personal message about faith. Not Jews. We always read the text through the lens of rabbinic sages, midrash, medieval commentators and modern scholars.
The Jewish kid in a sixth grade glass in Dallas who raises his hand and says: “Well, in Hebrew school we learned that RASHI said … ” You know that expression “like a deer in the headlights”? That would be his teacher looking back at him and quietly praying that she can just get through this lesson plan before lunch.
Rabbi Fixler named that risk: Teachers “may be put in a position to teach religious texts they are not familiar or comfortable with.” I can absolutely guarantee that this will happen.
Even a perfectly balanced list — half Torah, half Gospel — would still violate the separation of church and state. The establishment clause protects everyone, Christians included, from a government that picks a religion and teaches it to other people’s children.
Second: At a time that cries out for unity, this manufactures division.
Gov. Greg Abbott framed the whole effort as a curricular move — getting students “back to the basics of education.” But board member Brandon Hall said the actual word out loud: “We’re going to stop watering down American history. We’re going to teach the truth. Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state.”
Thank you, Mr. Hall, for saying your truth right out loud.
I have already mentioned that this is problematic for Jewish kids. But what about Muslim kids, Hindu kids, Buddhist kids — not to mention atheist kids? To enter the public school, and to study literature, will only serve to reinforce their sense of otherness.
Let’s go back to the time before Engel v. Vitale ended school prayer in 1962. Prayer reading reminded those who did not belong that they did not belong.
That will happen again. A reading list centering one faith in a state with 5.5 million public school students and real religious diversity doesn’t build a shared “us.” It breaks rather than heals.
Unless that is the real purpose of teaching Bible in school. Unless the purpose of doing that is to sing (with apologies to Woody Guthrie): This land is my land — it isn’t your land.
But, now, third: There is real value in teaching about the Bible. You cannot understand American culture without it.
I did not say that we should teach Bible.
I said that we should teach about the Bible — as literature, and as a central part of the American story.
Let’s just take a small tour of our cultural inheritance.
John Steinbeck didn’t call his California epic “A Story About Two Families.” He called it “East of Eden,” straight from Genesis 4:16, where Cain is banished “east of Eden.”
The “I Have a Dream” speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is not just an impassioned speech about racial equality. That piece of American oratory reaches for Amos’ and Isaiah’s prophetic register. “Let my people go” was never only about Pharaoh; it was a cry that was supposed to resonate across the ages and across the oceans.
Consider Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” When Santiago, the old fisherman, carries the mast, it exactly mirrors the position in which Jesus carried his cross on the way to his crucifixion.
You cannot even understand American geography without understanding the Hebrew Bible.
When I drive through New England, I invariably pass through places like Salem, Bethel and Canaan. Why? Because the early settlers of New England believed that they were fleeing an Egypt ruled by a Pharaoh, and that the Atlantic Ocean was the Red Sea, and that New England was their promised land. Hence, the idea of “a shining city on a hill” — America as the New Jerusalem.
I grew up near Bethpage, Long Island — named for Bethphage, the biblical village on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem. North of us — Jericho. South of us — Wantagh. Its original name, dating back to the 17th century, was Jerusalem. Our synagogue in Wantagh was on Jerusalem Avenue.
You cannot understand our nation’s capital without understanding biblical geography. Why is Washington, D.C., located close to the geographical center of the 13 original colonies? In order to bridge North and South, belonging fully to no region. That mirrors Jerusalem — on the border of the biblical tribes of Judah and Benjamin, a city no single tribe could claim. The land for D.C. itself was originally ceded by two neighbors — Maryland and Virginia, the way Jerusalem sits stitched along a border between two tribes, and two sons of Joseph.
This is not religious instruction or a forced catechism. It is cultural fluency.
If the good folks down in the heart of Texas asked me to give my own biblical curriculum, I might suggest a few teachings:
- The idea of humanity being made in the divine image (about which Tomer Persico has so masterfully written) — which guarantees the freedom and dignity of the individual and which has parallels in the Declaration of Independence.
- Leviticus 19:18 — “Love your neighbor as yourself … ” Enough said about that.
- The most cited commandment in the Torah: to take care of the stranger and to know that the Hebrew term ger actually means immigrant.
- Let’s throw in some good old Song of Songs — the erotic love poetry of the Bible. Totally hot.
How I would love to be there at the school board meeting when someone complains about our kids being exposed to “filth.”
I would stand up and say: “But, hey, you wanted the Bible.”
