Our lesson in elders\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 quorum last Sunday was on the importance of scripture study. I shared a story that I frequently share when called upon to say something about studying the scriptures. As I was retelling it this Sunday, however, I had an epiphany: I was being a Jim Faulconer poseur.<\/p>\n
The story goes like this: During my first year of law school I joined an informal study group sponsored by a visiting professor of international law. The professor was also an orthodox Jew and the study group was on the Torah rather than GATT or the Geneva Convention. Each student was provided with a copy of Rashi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s commentary on passages dealing with the construction and service of the tabernacle. (Rashi was a great medieval rabbi.) We also went through Esther for Purim.) I was amazed at the amount of meaning that the professor (and Rashi) could wring out of apparently stale passages dealing with construction and procedure. The meaning did not come from any Nibley-esque erudition in the historical context of the scriptures. Rather it came from a painstaking attention to the details of the text and a knowledge of and engagement with all of the different (often playful) glosses that had been given to the text by various rabbis through the ages. What it impressed on me was how much depth one could find by simply carefully and slowly reading the text of the scriptures and asking questions about the text itself.<\/p>\n
As I told the story this Sunday, it seemed oddly familiar and then it hit me. This is a story that Jim Faulconer tells. When he was in graduate school, he set up an independent study class with a philosophy professor who was also a rabbi and they did a close reading of the Book of Genesis with similar results. As I recall, Jim\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s story had the same moral: slow reading with careful attention to textual detail reveals that the scriptures are much richer than we often assume.<\/p>\n
I first heard Jim tell this story when I was an undergrad. Perhaps I sought ought this law professor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s study group with some secret desire to re-enact Jim\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s story. It is worth noting on this point, that I basically only tell this story to illustrate Jim\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s point about close reading of the scriptures. I could just as easily endow it with other meanings. It was a strange and ecumenical mix of students ranging from Israeli atheists to observant and orthodox Jews to white and black evangelicals to Catholics to me, the lone Mormon. Maybe there is some nugget of meaning in there about religious pluralism. The professor in question got universally bad student reviews as an international law teacher. Yet he was exceptionally warm and engaging as a guide through Leviticus. Again, perhaps there is some moral or meaning here. Yet this is not how I tell the story. Instead, consciously or unconsciously, I tell it as a recapitulation of Jim\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s experience.<\/p>\n
At the end of the day, I suppose that this is what teachers are supposed to do: Permanently infect the brains of their students. It can be a bit of a blow to one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pretensions of originality to find that the personality and experiences of others have been grafted, woven, and squished into your own personality and experiences. It runs counter to myths of individualism and intellectual self-sufficiency. Maybe some day I will get my revenge by infecting someone else with my thoughts and experiences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our lesson in elders\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 quorum last Sunday was on the importance of scripture study. I shared a story that I frequently share when called upon to say something about studying the scriptures. As I was retelling it this Sunday, however, I had an epiphany: I was being a Jim Faulconer poseur.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}