I have always loved the early-modern use of the word “mysterie” to denote “a craft, art, trade, or profession.” It is, in fact, the second definition of the word in the OED where we learn that it began life describing ministerial occupations like the priesthood (Chaucer), matured through use to include all trades—hangman included (Shakespeare); and died when refined out of existence to mean “an expert skill.” It is, to my mind, the perfect word to describe teaching. It is indeed a mystery that bookish people—whose natures are subdued by the materials of their craft—books, papers, the conversation of dead men—manage to stand before a classroom, overcome nearsightedness enough to make eye contact with students one or two generations removed, speak a language the students understand, and translate subjects that we know intimately and love. Doing what we do well requires an idiosyncratic faith, a childlike faith, and a deep faith that there is something foundational about face to face encounter. Our subject is beloved, it is ours, we have internalized it; indeed, many of us know it by heart. I think the reason many of us feel like “frauds” the first week back has to do with the performative dimension of our role. Because we’re not performers, many of us feel the urge to apologize for being “flat unraised spirits”—human beings—that have the daunting task of getting inside the heads of our authors. “O for a muse of fire!” It’s no wonder we suffer a kind of embarrassment, confessing our passion before blank faces. No wonder at times my mother—the product of a one-room schoolhouse and maternal instruction—has had to tell me in utterly pragmatic terms to “put on [my] clothes and get over to that school. [I had] a job to do.” A job, given to me with an interrogative that still plagues me in the form of the question that my teaching mentor at BostonCollege—Dayton Haskin, ex-Jesuit and Miltonspecialist—asked me before I met my first class: “What gives you the authority to teach?” I stammered out the best answer I could manage at a time when only six years separated me from freshman students, “because I’ve probably read more than they have?”
Initially, I copied the performance style of my Ph.D. advisor, a petite bespeckacled, very smart “girl” from Spotsylvania, Virginiawho graduated BA, MA, PhD from Harvard in classics and Renaissance literature. She sat on the table in the front of the room, swung her legs back and forth, joked with students, and conversationally delivered very intelligent readings of obscure 16th-century plays like The Shoemaker’s Holiday. I could do that, and I did it. As my own thinking matured, I simply shared the ideas I’d formulated, rode my own wave of inspiration, modeled how to use literature to think and feel with. Although I had reasonable success, I never felt exactly comfortable with my management of the mystery. The character I projected in class was not quite me.
Then I opened THE BOOK late in life (almost 50) and discovered Moses! I’m not kidding. As the first Hebrew political leader, he had to teach. The patriarchs of Genesis were God’s “pets,” but they did a horrible job of managing their families, let alone a whole people. And look what happened. Slavery in the land of Egypt! It’s Moses the castaway—born Hebrew but raised Egyptian—hopelessly out of touch wherever he is—who must teach slaves to desire liberty, to imagine a future beyond the bricks and mortar of Egyptian building projects, to burn without being consumed. But what really convinced me that there might be something for me to learn about teaching from this man, Moses, was that he didn’t want the job. He begs God not to ask this of him: “Please, my Lord, no man of words am I, not at any time in the past nor now … for I am heavy mouthed and heavy tongued.” A few chapters later in Exodus, Moses blames his language problem on being “uncircumcised of lips.” Funnily, there has been endless speculation by rabbis about whether Moses had an actual speech impediment—some suggest that he stuttered. But whatever his doubts about his own expressive capacity, his own ability to communicate, what’s most striking to me is that God did not choose a facile speaker. Why? It is possible that he preferred a person who didn’t have ready-made words, because new ones had to be created, new teaching methods invented to translate Moses’ subject: a burning bush that introduces itself as “I will be what I will be.” We think our subjects are untranslatable! In the spirit of play—which is the true spirit of Torah interpretation, the same spirit that generated midrashim that piece out scriptural lacunae with thoughts, telling us about Noah awake throughout forty nights due to the various feeding schedules of his animals or Noah, who improvised by piercing a hole (window) in through which he fed the Giant, Og—in this playful spirit, I ask on behalf of the heavy-tongued in our midst, “What would Moses do?” were he to try to educate today’s students. Educate is a verb whose root reveals that it is particularly applicable to Moses’ relationship with brothers from whom he is alienated by age, experience, upbringing and years of study. Educate comes from the Latin educare which means to rear or bring up, and it also derives from ducere which means to lead or to bring out. Moses was drawn out of the Nile as a baby, and in manhood he is tasked with having to draw the Israelites out of Egypt: finally, the only effective way to keep their spirits up throughout the wilderness where food and water is scarce is by drawing out of them the desire for liberation and a spiritual hunger for their own history and their own God.
Preserve a connection to the inner source of reverie and power—childhood. I bet when most of us hear the name, Moses, we think of two stories: Baby Moses drawn from theNile by Pharaoh’s daughter and gray-beard Moses receiving the tablets on Sinai in horrible weather conditions. In Exodus, Moses magically reaches adulthood in one sentence that follows his rescue from theNile by Pharaoh’s daughter: “And it happened at that time that Moses grew and went out to his brothers and saw their burdens.” The baby is suddenly a man whose actions show that he draws on a reservoir of powerful unconscious instincts for brotherhood and for social justice. After killing the first Egyptian he witnesses abusing a Hebrew slave, Moses flees to the desert, becomes obsessed with the “great sight” of a bush on fire “that does not burn up,” and when he moves in close to study it, God knows he’s found a teacher. Moses begins to be taught that language must prevail over violence. The teacher must burn from within. Tell the Israelites that “I will be who I will be,” charges the burning bush. Moses must teach an entirely new, incredibly abstract, name for God to people who do not trust him. God 111, Passover Practicum, and Liberation 207—what a schedule!
Commit to a story and believe in its power. The Israelites, like many of our students, are overworked. Numbed with repetitive labor in the most materialistic of ancient cultures, they’ve lost their susceptibility, they can’t hear Moses’ words, they are as hard as Pharaoh himself or Pharaoh’s bricks, stiff-necked and recalcitrant. So … Moses must capture them with wild stories of the plagues that God will wreck on the Egyptians: frogs, lice, swarms of bugs, death of livestock, darkness outside and in—a darkness one can feel. I like to think of Moses’ “magic” staff (that becomes a serpent) as a life-giving pen. The living stories he tells and “writes” open hard hearts, split the sea apart, draw water from rock. We have to believe that the stories we teach have the same transformative power to open up small worlds. If we believe in the real power of the tools of our trade—books, the word, the pen—then, perhaps, we can feel less worried about our limited human show.
Bring the fire inside: active learning on Passover. Moses saw the burning bush. He had the direct experience of inspiration, but the Israelites have only work and more work. So God, through Moses, devised a performance exercise—a form of play—designed to make the Israelites aware that they had the potential to come alive from the inside out. We first learn that the slaves have houses—dwellings with light inside—when God gives Moses the instructions for the Passover celebration that will make them feel the excitement of being chosen, singled out, special. They are to buy a lamb, sacrifice it, paint their doorposts with blood, light a fire, roast the lamb and eat it all. What’s more they must do this with a sense of urgency, with loins girded, as if preparing for flight. Deadlines energize student creativity, and students need explicit instructions. All of this is to give them a sense that something is happening, something is stirring, they might have their own story to tell: “And this day shall be a remembrance for you, and you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord through your generations.” Shakespeare’s teacher-leader Henry V steals the idea when he motivates his troops before battle with the promise that in future days, “this story will the good man teach his son, / And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by / From this day to the ending of the world / But we in it shall be remembered, / We few, we happy few, we band of brothers—“. We can “steal” the same teaching trick: use performance, teach students to stir their own cooking pots, consume everything, and tell the story.
Share your own dialogue with the sources of inspiration. The people have followed Moses out of Egypt and through the Red Sea, but they periodically murmur about the lack of food and water (Egypt had graves enough … did you bring us out here to starve us?). At Sinai, God tells Moses that he will come in a cloud upon the mountain, “so that the people may hear as I speak to you, and you as well as they will trust for all time.” Heading into the unknown of a new semester, into territory that is frightening, where there is no familiar language are no quick and easy pleasures, students grow weary. If we expect them to continue discovering inspiration in our arcane (to them) subjects and texts, we should do what we can to share our own inner personal lives. I don’t necessarily mean we should tell personal stories, but we can share the struggles involved in our own efforts to find in old words and dense texts insights that we can use in our own search for wisdom, our own efforts to know God in our own ways. Not all the explanation in the world can take the place of a direct feeling of value. Knowing that my “God” may be different from yours or theirs, I still need to show my feelings about what I’ve discovered.
Put it in writing. Moses the teacher is also the first Jewish writer. God first instructs Moses to write after the Israelite victory over the forces of Amalek. Interestingly, Moses had stationed himself on a mountain to oversee the battle. The Israelites prevailed as long as Moses’ hands were raised, but his hands grew heavy. The physical weight of Moses’ hands needed support. Where is the “magical” staff? Clearly not in his hand for his hand gesture is the classic one of being outstretched in prayer. Open, defenseless, groping upward, not clenched around a weapon, this is the hand that brings victory on this occasion. After the battle, God gives Moses a new use for his heavy, human hands: “Write this down as a remembrance in record … .” Moses’ visceral experience of human limitation and weakness seems to be the precondition for him to become a writer. We know from our own experience that when we write, we become starkly aware of our limits: the limits of inspiration, the limits of form, the limits of our ability to craft form to the image in our minds … etc. We know, on some level, that each person alive is similarly limited and in the same struggle to articulate the shining, singing life of the soul. Moses’ writing (I feel) celebrates the truth that limitations are what bind us to this world and to one another. Victory does not belong to the warrior, or to the leader, or to the leader’s supporting staff: any victory—military or educational—is the result of collective action. Weaving words into a text is the perfect activity and the perfect form in which to express unity and the organic interrelationship of parts to whole. As the exodus continues, writing becomes Moses’ primary vehicle for teaching. To prepare the Israelites to receive and accept the Torah (the commandments and laws), Moses writes down the words God has taught him on the mountain and reads “the book of the covenant” in the ears of his people. Rabbis suggest that what Moses wrote was Genesis—the prehistory of the people, forgotten during the hundreds of years of slavery; he opens the people with narrative history in preparation for their reception of the Torah. No one really knows what is in the book of the covenant, and I believe that each teacher must write her own. I’d love to be behind all of the closed classroom doors, listening to shy people in the company of trusted students who find words to spark inflammable silence. All those words make up that secret book.
Accept failure. Despite his best efforts, Moses fails. We all fail or fall short much of the time. The students don’t get it, don’t care, turn their attention from imaginary worlds to “gods they can see”—okay, not golden calves maybe but tech toys and pleasure reading. They hunger for the “fleshpots” of America. What did Moses do when, coming down the mountain with tablets that were “God’s writing,” he saw the calf and the dancing? He freaked out! He “flung the tablets from his hand and smashed them at the bottom of the mountain.” Then he burned the golden calf and took the silt from the fire, mixed it with water, and made the people drink it. His actions only seem crazy. But they reflect the important lesson that was finally sinking in: all the “grade contracts” and lists of “Thou Shalt Nots” on tablets or syllabi—like writing in books—all are meaningless really if not internalized. But Moses tried to do what cannot be done: force internalization.
When I mentioned these funny parallels to our teacher/leader, Steve, he asked, “So does that mean I should shred my syllabus and scattered it over the students?” I felt silly and never got to the point. In truth, what I find so moving about Moses is how he handles failure and betrayal. He is heartsick when he hears God say that he should continue doing his job … ALONE: “I shall not go up in your midst.” We’ve all had those moments when we lose our inspiration or feel like we have nothing left to give. Surprisingly, it is at this point that the people empathize with Moses. They open their ears and begin to feel: they “heard this evil thing, and they mourned, and none of them put on their jewelry.” Depressed, Moses retires to his office—well, he pitches the “Tent of Meeting” outside the camp. The people are, for the first time, transfixed. They stand at the entrances of their own tents and with their eyes and minds following Moses. When they see the pillar of cloud descend, “all the people would rise and bow down each man at the entrance of his tent.” From this I learn that no matter what happens, I must continue my own search for inspiration, for “I will be what I will be.” If I am true to my subject and my spirit, the students may learn most from my example. The people see Moses’ back. Moses’ is only allowed to see the “back of God.” Why? Because “I will be what I will be” is in constant motion. Follow the leader.
What baffled the rabbinic commentators is that God did not promote the teacher to full professor. Instead, he chose Moses’ brother, Aaron. Why? How did Moses fail in God’s eyes? Was it because he consistently resisted God’s project? Was it because he wasn’t a good speaker? Did Moses want or expect to become high priest? The rabbis ask endless questions. It’s also true that Moses is denied entry into the Promised Land. Why? God places him at the seashore of endless worlds but gives him the greatest consolation prize: he is given The Torah (the Word) as “a plaything.” This seems exactly right and befitting each brother’s unique relationship to language: Aaron is the capable and facile speaker who may have an easier time with the role of leader or priest (which has an educative component), but Moses has the creative ingenuity and inspiration to play with the words of the Torah—that is, to accept distance and loneliness, and to recreate union in the fluid and changing interactions with the Word. In this sense, play is entirely untrivial. God’s world depends upon it. It is Moses who, in Jewish tradition, is considered “Moses, Our Teacher (or Rabbi).” I wrote this to comfort myself and all of my fellow teachers who lay awake on the night before classes begin or who suffer insomnia on and off throughout the semester. I wrote this to say that there is a reason for our struggle, our failure, our seemingly endless search for the right words to liberate ourselves and our students every day in every class. It is our job.
The "horns" that appear on Moses' head in the Michaelangelo sculpture are the result of a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for "radiant."
Finally, after nearly 25 years of teaching, I can answer Dayton Haskin’s question: I have the authority to teach because Moses is my model. According to St. Paul and John Milton, Moses had all the learning of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Greeks, but his heaviness of mouth and slowness of speech involved him in a struggle to find words for the mysteries within and without. He leads and he struggles at the same time, and he learns to show both the sweat and the radiance as he learns to share his inner life with his students. I have much to learn from his example, but I also learn from and admire my colleagues. I’m thinking of Steve’s professed aspiration, inspired by the conclusion of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, “to burn always with a hard, gemlike flame” and Stephanie’s wise saying that “the rich joy and sometimes heartbreak of teaching is that it is always about seeing where you are and where you wish you were.” But I am also a teacher because it moves me beyond comment when a student opens his heart in response to a text or pulls out a line that he treasures and reads it as if it immediately became his own. This happened on the second day of ENG 241. We were discussing an essay written by a young Clarence Darrow on the subject of “Realism in Art and Literature,” and a young man read a line that gave me my portion of manna for the day: “Angels may be well enough, but all rational men prefer an angel with arms to an angel with wings.” The student’s face was radiating, and I found the words to reflect back his radiance. Sometime after class, I recalled that when Moses comes down from Sinai where he has had to rewrite the tablets in his own human hand, he meets a people who is ready to receive the message, and “Moses did not know that the skin of his face had glowed when he spoke with Him.” The Israelites are moved by the face of their teacher—moved to donate to the collective project of building the tabernacle from “their own hearts.” Today there is a tendency for teachers to submit their personalities to the greater power of technology and, in contrast, to obey the urgent calls demanding that we assess ourselves and become more reflective about our practices. But the trend toward virtual teaching, the lectures on pedagogical strategies, the recycled buzz-words—all of these weigh us down while we’re contending with our own heaviness. What’s worse is that they obscure the essence of the mystery of teaching which is so beautifully expressed in the simple phrase of the Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas: “the Torah is given in the light of a face.”
Best wishes for a wonderful semester and special New Year’s wish to our Jewish colleagues.
Mary Jo