As a prelude to the convening of the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, I was honoured with an invitation from Israeli President Shimon Peres to join a dozen other professors in meeting with him to discuss the current state of Jewish studies.
The congress is a five-day academic conference that convenes once every four years at the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This year, more than 1,400 and graduate students in all fields of Jewish studies from around the world gathered to share the fruits of their latest research. The congress encompasses an astonishing range of topics, from antiquities to post-modernism, from rabbinics to film studies.
The conference program – resembling a thick paperback book – concretely illustrates the range, scope, and abundance of work in Jewish studies today. Presented with the program book, Peres began a dialogue with the scholars invited to his home about the shape of contemporary Jewish studies and the challenges that the field faces.
The 86-year-old president is an articulate, cultured and keenly intelligent man, deeply concerned with questions of education in its broadest sense. In particular, he embraces the importance of Jewish studies at the university level as an important source of ethics, values and culture, and as a means to maintain vital connections with deep historical roots and philosophical traditions.
For this reason, he was interested in discussing what many foresee as a crisis in Jewish studies and, more broadly, in the humanities. Especially in face of an unsettled economy, many students have begun to seek out degrees more focused on career goals than the general humanities curriculum. Even students with a natural inclination towards literature, history, art and other less vocationally oriented subjects find that their parents and other life advisers steer them away from these areas in favour of fields whose direct application in future employment in more clearly apparent.
This phenomenon is especially acute in Israel, where many students begin their higher education studies after several years of army service, some already married and with families to support. In addition, in Israel, unlike North America, university students are plunged directly into their major area of study, to the exclusion of other subjects. As a rule, they don’t encounter the range of more general and diverse courses required by the North American university curriculum. Moreover, professional training for areas such as law and medicine – which, in North America, follows the earning of a broadly based undergraduate degree – is pursued in Israel at the undergraduate level, with little free time for electives in other subjects. In addition, a growing number of michlalot, or colleges, in Israel, offer focused vocational training in a wide range of fields, such as education, business management, and branches of engineering. A pragmatic society, Israel provides an increasing number of ways for young people to catapult directly into certification for employment, without the “digression” of courses in the humanities.
While acknowledging the economic considerations that impel this system, Peres sees the current diminution of humanities education as a profound loss, one with serious consequences to Israeli society and to Israelis. “The humanities teach someone how to think, how to ask questions,” he noted.
A serious reader and writer himself, the president is committed to working with scholars in the humanities and with educational institutions to broaden the reach of the humanities in Israeli education. One possibility might be to incorporate the beginnings of a broadly based higher education into army service itself. “We can send soldiers to the university,” he said, “and we can send professors to the bases.”
That kind of broad reach is important to the health of culture and society, and vital on the individual level. The exposure to the humanities can reveal untapped talent, he added. “You can never know who will turn out to be talented, a future luminary.”
Here, too, in Canada, the temptation, during an unstable economy may be to dismiss the humanities as an irrelevant, unaffordable luxury. But the great humanistic questions, posed across subjects, compel us to struggle with questions we can’t easily answer and whose consideration not only enriches our lives, but also is at the heart of the democratic society that we value.
