Unit 17 · The Tanakh in Jewish Life and Capstone

Open a Jewish prayer book, called a siddur (the word means "order"), and you are reading the Tanakh again, rearranged. Whole psalms, single verses and short phrases are set side by side with prayers the rabbis composed. Scholars describe the siddur as a mosaic: hundreds of small pieces of Scripture set into a new pattern. Its shape took form over many centuries, and the earliest complete written orders of prayer that survive come from the ninth century CE, from the Babylonian sage Amram Gaon.

The heart of the morning and evening service is the Shema. It is not a prayer in the usual sense. It is three passages of Torah recited word for word: Deuteronomy 6:4 to 9, Deuteronomy 11:13 to 21 and Numbers 15:37 to 41. The first verse, "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one" (JPS 1917), gives the whole unit its name, since shema means "hear." Jewish tradition treats saying these words twice a day as a commandment drawn from the passage itself, which speaks of lying down and rising up.

The Mishnah, the rabbinic law code edited c. 200 CE, opens its very first tractate, Berakhot, with the question of when the evening Shema may be said. That detail tells a reader how central the passage already was. Around the Shema the siddur places blessings that frame it: before, blessings about creation and about the Torah as a gift. After, a blessing that recalls the exodus and leads into the Song of the Sea. The order carries an argument of its own, moving from creation to revelation to redemption, as many modern commentators on the liturgy have pointed out.

The book of Psalms, Tehillim in Hebrew, is the most quoted book in the siddur. Each weekday morning service includes a set of psalms called Pesukei DeZimra, "verses of song," which builds up to Psalms 145 through 150, the closing praises of the book. Psalm 145 is said three times a day in traditional practice, and the Talmud in tractate Berakhot (4b) praises anyone who recites it that often. The reason the rabbis give is that the psalm is an acrostic, running through the Hebrew alphabet. It also speaks of God feeding every living thing.

Shabbat has its own psalms. Friday evening opens with Kabbalat Shabbat, "welcoming the Sabbath," a sequence of Psalms 95 to 99 and 29 arranged by the mystics of Safed in the sixteenth century. Then comes Psalm 92, whose own heading calls it "a Song for the sabbath day." On festivals the community sings Hallel, Psalms 113 through 118, which begins "Praise ye the LORD" and includes Psalm 114, a short poem about the sea fleeing at the exodus. The Mishnah already describes Hallel being sung at the Passover meal.

Reading the Psalms this way changes how they are heard. In a classroom, Psalm 23 is a poem about a shepherd. In the siddur, it is sung at the third Shabbat meal and at funerals. Psalm 137, "By the rivers of Babylon," is a lament of exiles. In Jewish practice it is recited on weekdays before the grace after meals, keeping the memory of the destroyed Temple at an ordinary table. Literary scholars such as Robert Alter note that the Psalms were always meant to be performed. The siddur is where that performance continues.

In Exodus 14 the Israelites cross the sea and the Egyptian army is drowned. Exodus 15 then breaks into poetry: "I will sing unto the LORD, for He is highly exalted; the horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea" (JPS 1917). Scholars widely regard this poem, often called the Song of the Sea, as among the oldest pieces of Hebrew in the Tanakh, though dates are debated. Its Hebrew is dense and its lines are short and parallel. In a Torah scroll it is written in a special brick-like layout with staggered lines.

The siddur places the whole song into the daily morning service, at the end of Pesukei DeZimra. On the Shabbat when the Torah reading reaches Exodus 15, called Shabbat Shirah, "the Sabbath of Song," many congregations sing it to a special tune and stand for it. Two of its lines, "Who is like unto Thee, O LORD, among the mighty?" (15:11) and "The LORD shall reign for ever and ever" (15:18), are lifted out and repeated in the blessing after the Shema. There the exodus is recalled as a reason for trust.

The song also opens a conversation about how to hold violent memory. The Talmud (Megillah 10b and Sanhedrin 39b) records a midrash in which the angels wish to sing at the drowning of the Egyptians and God stops them, saying that the work of God’s hands is drowning. Many Jewish teachers cite this story to explain why only a shortened Hallel is said on the last days of Passover. The passage is thus both a victory song and, in rabbinic reading, a check on gloating. A reader has to notice both.

Every Shabbat morning a Torah scroll is carried through the synagogue, opened and read aloud. The reading follows a fixed yearly cycle: the Torah is divided into 54 sections, each called a parashah (plural parashot). One is read each week. Some are paired in years that have fewer Shabbatot. The cycle begins on Simchat Torah, "the joy of the Torah," in the fall. The last lines of Deuteronomy are read, and the reader turns straight back to Genesis 1:1. Jewish tradition describes this turning back as showing that the study of Torah has no end.

The yearly cycle is the Babylonian custom, and the Talmud (Megillah 29b) also knows an older Land of Israel custom that took about three years to finish the scroll. Scholars have found evidence of that triennial cycle in manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah. Some modern congregations read a third of each parashah every week, borrowing the idea. After the Torah reading comes the haftarah, a passage from the Nevi’im, the Prophets, chosen long ago to echo the week’s portion or the season. The parashah of Noah, for example, is paired with Isaiah 54, which mentions "the waters of Noah."

The scroll is read, not recited from memory, and it must be a handwritten Sefer Torah with no vowels or punctuation. Readers learn the chant, called trope or cantillation, from marks in a printed text that the Masoretes fixed by about the tenth century CE. A young person who reads a portion at a bar or bat mitzvah is taking a place in a chain. The same passage, in the same week, has been read in synagogues from Baghdad to Chicago for well over a thousand years.

On the first night of Passover Jewish families read the Haggadah, "the telling," at the seder meal. A reader might expect the story to come from Exodus. Instead, the central section, called Maggid, is built on four verses from Deuteronomy 26:5 to 8, the short declaration a farmer was to recite when bringing first fruits: "A wandering Aramean was my father, and he went down into Egypt" (JPS 1917). The Mishnah (Pesachim 10:4) already instructs that the telling begin with this passage and expound it to the end.

The Haggadah reads the passage phrase by phrase, pausing on each to bring a verse from Exodus that proves or expands it. This method, called midrash, is the rabbinic way of reading closely and filling in. Deuteronomy says "the Egyptians dealt ill with us," and the Haggadah brings Exodus 1:10, where Pharaoh says "let us deal wisely with them." The effect is a compact summary of the exodus stitched from verses, so that a child who has never opened Exodus hears its key lines at the table.

Even the first three words are read two ways. The Hebrew Arami oved avi can be taken as "my father was a wandering Aramean" (the JPS and most modern translators, with Ibn Ezra, understanding Jacob or Abraham as a landless wanderer) or, as the Haggadah and Rashi read it, "an Aramean tried to destroy my father," with Laban the Aramean as the villain. The grammar allows both. The choice shows what a reader wants the passage to do. The Haggadah wants a story of danger and rescue, and its reading of the verse sets that story in motion.

Grouped together in the Ketuvim are five short books that Jewish tradition calls the Megillot, "scrolls": Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther. Each is read publicly on one holiday. Esther is read from a handwritten scroll on Purim, the holiday the book itself establishes (Esther 9:20 to 28). Lamentations, a set of poems over the ruined Jerusalem, is chanted by candlelight on Tisha B'Av, the fast that mourns the destruction of both Temples. The pairings of the other three are later customs, first attested in the early medieval period.

The pairings work by season and by theme. Song of Songs, full of spring blossoms and vineyards, is read on Passover. The rabbis also read its love poetry as an allegory of God and Israel at the exodus. Ruth, a story set at the barley and wheat harvest that ends with a convert joining the people, is read on Shavuot. That is the harvest festival, which tradition also links to the giving of the Torah. Ecclesiastes, with its refrain that all is vapor, is read on Sukkot, the fall festival of temporary huts. Many readers find the match pointed: rejoice, but do not hold on too tightly.

The most famous line in Ruth is her promise to Naomi: "whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God" (Ruth 1:16, JPS 1917). Jewish tradition treats Ruth as the model convert. The Talmud finds in her words the outline of a conversion conversation. Because the book closes by naming Ruth as the great-grandmother of King David (4:17), reading it on Shavuot ties harvest, covenant and kingship together.

The first paragraph of the Shema ends with two commands: "And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thy house, and upon thy gates" (Deuteronomy 6:8 to 9, JPS 1917). Jewish tradition has read these verses literally for a very long time. The mezuzah (the Hebrew word for doorpost) is a small parchment on which a scribe writes Deuteronomy 6:4 to 9 and 11:13 to 21. It is rolled, placed in a case and fixed to the right doorpost of a home’s rooms.

Tefillin are two small leather boxes with straps, worn on the arm and the forehead during weekday morning prayer. Inside are four passages on parchment: Exodus 13:1 to 10, Exodus 13:11 to 16, Deuteronomy 6:4 to 9 and Deuteronomy 11:13 to 21, the four places in the Torah that speak of a sign on the hand. Tefillin from the first century CE were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, so the practice is at least two thousand years old. The Talmud (Menachot 34b) discusses the order of the passages, and Rashi and his grandson Rabbeinu Tam disagreed about it. Some people wear both kinds.

Not every Jewish reader has taken these verses the same way. Some medieval commentators, including Rashbam on Exodus 13:9, noted that the words could be understood as a figure of speech for keeping the teaching always in mind, while still affirming the practice. Historians point out that the Samaritans, who share the Torah, do not wear tefillin. For the classroom, the point is how a verse becomes an object: a scribe, a doorpost, a leather strap, and a family passing the same words every day.

Jewish practice surrounds ordinary acts with a berakhah, a blessing, a one-sentence formula that begins "Blessed art Thou, LORD our God, King of the universe." The rabbis of the Talmud built the system. They often anchored a blessing in a verse. The grace after meals, Birkat HaMazon, is traced to Deuteronomy 8:10, "And thou shalt eat and be satisfied, and bless the LORD thy God for the good land which He hath given thee" (JPS 1917). Tradition reads that verse as a command to bless after eating. The grace is, in a sense, a verse performed.

Shabbat begins on Friday evening with candles and Kiddush, the blessing over wine that "sanctifies" the day. The traditional Kiddush opens by reciting Genesis 2:1 to 3, the verses in which God finishes creation and blesses the seventh day. Parents bless children at the table with words drawn from Genesis 48:20, where Jacob blesses Ephraim and Manasseh. They also use the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24 to 26, "The LORD bless thee, and keep thee." A family that has never studied the Tanakh in a classroom has heard these verses every week.

The home blessings also show how tradition adds. Nothing in Genesis says to light two candles. The rabbis connected two candles to the two versions of the Sabbath command, "Remember" in Exodus 20:8 and "Observe" in Deuteronomy 5:12, a reading found in later commentaries. The braided bread, challah, takes its name from the portion of dough set aside in Numbers 15:20. Each object at the table has a verse behind it, and each verse has a history of readers who decided what it should look like on a Friday night.

When Jewish writers in nineteenth-century Europe began to write modern Hebrew poetry and fiction, the Tanakh was the Hebrew they had. Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873 to 1934), is often called the national poet of modern Hebrew. He wrote in a language thick with biblical phrases. Naphtali Herz Imber’s poem "Tikvatenu" (c. 1878), which became the anthem "Hatikvah," answers a verse: in Ezekiel 37:11 the dry bones say "our hope is lost," and the anthem replies that the hope is not yet lost. Zionist thinkers also argued about the text. Ahad Ha’am and others debated whether the Tanakh was a national book, a religious one or both.

The revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, led in part by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858 to 1922), reached back into biblical vocabulary for new words. Israeli place names, children’s names and public speech still quote the Tanakh daily. The novelist S. Y. Agnon, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, wove biblical and rabbinic language into modern stories. Scholars note that a reader of Hebrew literature who does not know the Tanakh misses half the echoes.

Yiddish, the everyday language of most Ashkenazi Jews for centuries, treated the Tanakh differently: it retold it. The Tsene-rene (c. 1590s), a Yiddish retelling of the weekly portions with midrash woven in, was read mainly by women. It became one of the most reprinted Jewish books. Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the dairyman, in stories written from 1894 on, quotes verses and then twists their meaning for comic effect. The joke only works if the reader knows the original. In Chicago, Yiddish theaters and newspapers on the West Side carried that culture in the early twentieth century.

Enslaved African Americans, mostly reading or hearing the King James Version (1611), made the exodus story their own. The spiritual "Go Down, Moses," first published in 1861, turns Exodus 5:1 into a refrain: "Let my people go." "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho" retells Joshua 6, and "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel" sings Ezekiel 1. Historians read these songs as both worship and coded speech: Pharaoh’s Egypt stood for slavery, and the Jordan for freedom. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, called "Moses" by those she led north, both used the exodus as a frame for their work.

American civic speech has quoted the Tanakh from the beginning. The Liberty Bell was cast in 1752. It carries Leviticus 25:10 in the King James wording, "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." In 1790 George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, using Micah 4:4, that every one "shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig-tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid." Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (1865) closes its argument about the war with Psalm 19:9, "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether" (KJV).

In the twentieth century Martin Luther King Jr. built "I Have a Dream" (1963) on Amos 5:24 and Isaiah 40:4 to 5, and his last speech, in Memphis in 1968, took the image of Moses seeing the promised land from Deuteronomy 34. Emma Lazarus, a Jewish poet from New York, wrote "The New Colossus" (1883) for the Statue of Liberty and also wrote poems on Jewish history rooted in the prophets. Scholars of American religion point out that these speakers were not doing exegesis. They were claiming a story. That, too, is a way a text lives.

Chicago’s first Jewish congregation, Kehilath Anshe Ma’arav ("Congregation of the People of the West"), was founded in 1847, only ten years after the city itself. Known as KAM, it later merged with Isaiah Israel and now meets in a domed building in Hyde Park. Chicago Sinai Congregation, founded in 1861, was one of the first Reform congregations in the country. Reform Judaism’s changes to prayer and the Torah reading were argued out in cities like Chicago. Today the city’s synagogues span Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and independent communities, and every one of them reads the Tanakh, in different amounts and different ways.

In 1893, alongside the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago hosted the World’s Parliament of Religions, the first large gathering of representatives of many faiths. Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch of Chicago Sinai and other Jewish speakers took part. They presented Judaism and its Scriptures to an audience that had mostly heard about them only from Christian pulpits. Historians treat the Parliament as a turning point in how Americans learned to describe religions other than their own. That is the same skill this course has practiced.

The Tanakh is also taught in Chicago’s schools. Jewish day schools teach it in Hebrew with Rashi, and Spertus Institute, founded in 1924 as the College of Jewish Studies, has trained teachers and holds a major Judaica library. Public schools in Illinois, like this one, may teach about the Tanakh as literature and history; the U.S. Supreme Court said in Abington v. Schempp (1963) that study of the Bible "presented objectively as part of a secular program of education" is allowed. That sentence is the legal frame for everything in this course, and the next chapter asks what it means to read well inside it.

The capstone asks you to do what this course has watched others do for two thousand years: read a passage closely, hear its readers, and make a claim. The first move is choosing well. A passage should be short enough to quote in full, usually three to fifteen verses, and rich enough to have a history of readers. Genesis 22, Genesis 4:1 to 16, Exodus 3:1 to 15, Jonah 4, Ruth 1, Psalm 22 and Isaiah 6 all work. A whole book does not. A single word can, if it sits in a verse readers have argued about, like oved in Deuteronomy 26:5.

The second move is a question the text raises, not one you bring to it. "Is God fair?" is a question you brought. "Why does Genesis 22:2 give four descriptions of Isaac before his name?" is a question the verse raises, because a plain reader notices the pile-up. Test a question by asking whether two careful readers could answer it differently by pointing at the text. If only one answer is possible, the question is too small. If no line in the passage helps, it is too big.

Keep the question descriptive and the stance neutral, as the whole course has. You are not being asked whether the Tanakh is true, whether God exists or whether Abraham did right. You are asked what the text does with its words and how Jewish readers, and where relevant Christian and academic readers, have read it. That frame is not a limit on thinking. It is what makes a public-school classroom able to study a sacred text at all, and it is what lets people who disagree about God agree about a verb.

The course’s text is the Jewish Publication Society translation of 1917. It is in the public domain, and it follows the traditional Hebrew text and its Jewish reading. Set beside it one other translation: the King James Version (1611), the American Standard Version (1901), or one to read but not quote: the New JPS (1985), Robert Alter (2004 for the Torah) or Everett Fox (1995). Where two translators agree, the Hebrew is probably plain. Where they differ, you have found a place where the Hebrew forces a choice, and that is a place to dig.

Take Genesis 22:2. JPS 1917 reads: "Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac." The KJV reads: "Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest." The KJV moves Isaac’s name earlier, smoothing the sentence; JPS keeps the Hebrew order, in which the name comes last. That small difference is the whole point of Rashi’s dialogue, which only works if the name is delayed. Fox, who tries to echo Hebrew rhythm, keeps the order too. A student who read only the KJV would never see the question.

Translation differences also reveal readings. Isaiah 7:14 has almah, which JPS 1917 renders "young woman" and the KJV "virgin," a choice that reflects the Christian reading of the verse through Matthew 1:23. Psalm 22:17 (22:16 in Christian numbering) has a disputed Hebrew word that JPS renders "like a lion" and the KJV "they pierced." Naming both renderings and the readers behind them, without ranking, is exactly the skill the capstone rewards. Always name the translation and its year when you quote.

Peshat is the plain sense of the text: what the words say, in their order, in their context. Medieval commentators such as Rashbam and Ibn Ezra insisted on it first, and modern literary readers agree. Start by marking the passage’s structure. Where does it begin and end? Who speaks, and how many times? Genesis 22 has three calls and three answers of "Here am I" (JPS 1917): to God in verse 1, to Isaac in verse 7, to the angel in verse 11. Noticing that pattern is peshat, and it already suggests a reading: the text organizes the story around Abraham answering.

Next, find the repeated words. Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, translating the Tanakh into German in the 1920s, named this a Leitwort, a "leading word," one that recurs so as to carry meaning. In Genesis 22 the Hebrew for "son" appears again and again, and the word for "see" runs through the passage until the place is named "the LORD seeth" in verse 14. Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981) made this method familiar to English readers. It works in a JPS translation with a pencil. Check the Hebrew word behind the English when you can.

Then read the passage’s shape against its neighbors. Genesis 22 comes right after Abraham sends away Ishmael in chapter 21, so "thine only son" is loaded before God says it. A capstone that notices such context is doing what Ramban did constantly. It is also what Nechama Leibowitz (1905 to 1997), the great modern teacher of the weekly portion, trained a generation to do. Ask why this verse is here, and what changes if you imagine it gone.

Biblical narrative is spare. Erich Auerbach, in the first chapter of Mimesis (1946), compared Homer, who lights every detail, with Genesis 22, which tells nothing of the three days’ walk, Abraham’s face or Isaac’s thoughts. Auerbach called the biblical style "fraught with background": everything is there, but withheld. Meir Sternberg’s The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (1985) turned this into a method, reading gaps as places where the text makes the reader work. A capstone that names its passage’s gaps has found where the arguments will be.

Genesis 4:8 is a famous gap. The JPS 1917 reads: "And Cain spoke unto Abel his brother. And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him." Cain speaks, but the text never says what he said. The Samaritan Pentateuch and the ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint, supply "Let us go into the field," and many scholars think words dropped out. Genesis Rabbah (22:7), a midrash collection of c. 400 to 500 CE, instead fills the silence with a quarrel: the brothers divided the world and each claimed the Temple site. Same gap, two kinds of filling: a textual repair and a story.

A gap is not a flaw to fix; it is the text’s invitation. Some gaps are permanent: we are never told how old Isaac was, so Ibn Ezra’s estimate and the midrash’s thirty-seven are both guesses, and a careful student says so. Some are closed by the passage itself: verse 12 tells the reader what the test was for. List your passage’s gaps in a column, and for each note whether the text ever closes it. That list is the raw material for the next section, where the commentators arrive.

Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, Rashi (1040 to 1105), lived in Troyes in northern France. He wrote the commentary that Jewish readers have opened first for nine hundred years. He states his method at Genesis 3:8: he has come to give the plain sense and the aggadah that settles the words of Scripture. In practice that means he moves between peshat and derash, the interpretive filling, and a capstone should say which one he is using at your verse. On Genesis 22:2 he is using derash, borrowing the dialogue from Sanhedrin 89b and Genesis Rabbah 55.

Read Rashi as answering a question. On 22:2 the question is why four descriptions come before the name. His answer, in paraphrase, is that God gave the command slowly, to make it dear to Abraham and to reward him for each step. Notice what that reading assumes: that every extra word in the Torah is meaningful, that God speaks with intent, and that a delay is a kindness rather than a cruelty. A good capstone states the assumption, since it is the assumption, not the dialogue, that later commentators argue with.

On other verses Rashi is a strict peshat reader. On Genesis 22:12, "now I know that thou art a God-fearing man," he answers the obvious objection that God knew already. He reads "now I know" as "now I have an answer for those who ask." Whether or not a reader accepts the move, it shows Rashi doing what the capstone asks. He finds the difficulty, names it, and offers a reading that fits the words. Quote Rashi in paraphrase, cite the verse he is commenting on, and mark it "Rashi on Genesis 22:2."

Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089 to c. 1164), born in Spain and a wanderer across Europe, wrote a commentary that is short, sharp and grammatical. He often dismisses a midrash as not the plain sense and then offers his own. On Genesis 22, he rejects the tradition that Isaac was thirty-seven with an argument from the text: if a grown man let himself be bound, his merit would be greater than his father’s, and Scripture would have said so. He settles on about thirteen. Whether or not one agrees, it is a model of arguing from what the passage does and does not say.

Moses ben Nahman, Ramban (1194 to 1270), of Girona in Spain, wrote a commentary that constantly quotes Rashi and Ibn Ezra, agreeing, correcting, sometimes scolding. He also brings a layer neither of them has, hinting at kabbalah, the mystical reading, which he marks as secret. On Genesis 22:1, "God did prove Abraham," Ramban asks what a test can mean if God already knows. His answer, in paraphrase, is that a test is for the sake of the one tested. It brings a good that was only possible into action. So it earns a reward for a deed, not merely for a heart.

A capstone that uses both commentators shows a conversation across a century. Ibn Ezra asks what the words allow; Ramban asks what the event is for. Put them in your argument as voices, not as authorities: "Ibn Ezra objects that…" and "Ramban replies that…" Cite each as "Ibn Ezra on Genesis 22:4" or "Ramban on Genesis 22:1," in paraphrase. And keep a fourth voice, the midrash itself, since Genesis Rabbah 55 and 56 are the source both men are reacting to.

The last voice in your capstone is a modern one. Literary readers such as Robert Alter and Meir Sternberg ask how the story is built and what its silences make the reader do. Historians and biblical scholars ask when a passage was written and what it meant in the ancient Near East. On Genesis 22, some connect it to laws against child sacrifice elsewhere in the Torah, such as Leviticus 18:21, while others, with Jon Levenson in The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (1993), read it as a story about the transformation of an older idea. Neither claim is settled. A capstone reports both as scholars’ proposals.

Feminist readers ask who is missing. Phyllis Trible, whose God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (1978) opened the field, and later readers note that Sarah never appears in Genesis 22. She dies at the start of chapter 23. They ask what the story looks like from her side. Midrash had already noticed the gap, which is why Genesis Rabbah connects her death to the news of the binding. Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, in Genesis: The Beginning of Desire (1995), reads the midrash together with modern psychology and literature. Jewish and Christian readers, too, can be compared here. Christian tradition from the early church read Genesis 22 as prefiguring the crucifixion, a reading the capstone describes without ranking.

Pick one modern reader, read a few pages, and paraphrase carefully with the author, title and year. The point is not to declare that the modern reader is right and Rashi is wrong, or the reverse. It is to show what each reader’s question lets them see. A rabbi in eleventh-century France, a grammarian in twelfth-century Spain and a professor in twentieth-century Berkeley each notice something the others did not, and the passage is large enough to hold all of them.

A thesis is one sentence that a reader could disagree with and that the rest of your paper defends. Weak thesis: "Genesis 22 is a powerful story about faith." No one can disagree, and it points to no line. Stronger: "Genesis 22:2 delays Isaac’s name to make the reader feel the weight of the command, and Rashi’s dialogue, Ibn Ezra’s question about age and Auerbach’s ’background’ are three ways of filling the same pause." That sentence names a feature of the text, a claim about its effect, and a claim about its readers, and each part can be checked.

Build the thesis from your peshat notes and your gap list. The pattern is usually: the text does X (structure, key word, gap); the effect on a reader is Y; readers A, B and C respond to X in ways that show Z. Keep the verbs about the text: delays, repeats, withholds, frames, echoes. Avoid verbs about truth: proves, reveals, shows that God. This is the same discipline as the course’s voice: "the text says," "Rashi reads," "scholars propose."

Then outline. A clear capstone has an opening that quotes the passage in JPS 1917 and states the thesis. A peshat section on structure, key words and gaps. A section on the commentators, each cited on the verse. A section on a modern reader. A section that names other readings and what they see. And a closing that says what the argument leaves open. The Talmud’s teachers argued this way, too: Pirkei Avot (5:22 in most editions) reports Ben Bag Bag’s saying, in paraphrase, to turn the Torah over and over, for everything is in it. A thesis is one turn.

Citation in this course is simple and strict. For the Tanakh, give book, chapter and verse: Genesis 22:2. Note that Jewish and Christian chapter numbering sometimes differs; Psalm 22:17 in JPS 1917 is 22:16 in the KJV, because JPS counts the heading as verse 1. When you quote, name the translation and year: "(Genesis 22:2, JPS 1917)." When you paraphrase a modern translation such as Alter or Fox, say so: "Fox renders the phrase as roughly…" Do not quote modern translations at length; they are under copyright, and the course’s rule is public-domain quotations only.

For a commentator, cite the verse he is commenting on, not a page: "Rashi on Genesis 22:2," "Ibn Ezra on Genesis 22:4," "Ramban on Genesis 22:1." For midrash, give the collection and section: "Genesis Rabbah 55:7." For the Talmud, give the tractate and page with side: "Sanhedrin 89b." For Pirkei Avot, chapter and mishnah: "Avot 5:22." For a modern book, author, title and year: "Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 1981." Everything you cite must exist and say what you say it says. If you cannot check it, leave it out; that is the same rule this course has followed on every page.

Citations do a second job: they attribute. "Isaac was thirteen" is a claim you cannot support. "Ibn Ezra, on Genesis 22:4, argues that Isaac was about thirteen" is a fact about a reader, which you can. Attribution is how a paper on a sacred text stays honest in a public school: every belief has a believer, every reading a reader, and the student stands outside describing them. That is not a weaker position than arguing for a belief; it is a different, and harder, discipline.

The rabbis built disagreement into their texts. The Mishnah records minority views by name. The Talmud in Eruvin 13b tells that after years of dispute between the schools of Hillel and Shammai, a heavenly voice declared, in paraphrase, that both are the words of the living God, and that the law follows Hillel because his school was humble and taught Shammai’s view before its own. Whatever one makes of the voice, the practice is clear: state the other side first, and state it well. The printed Mikraot Gedolot page does the same, setting Rashi, Ibn Ezra and Ramban around the verse so a reader sees them argue.

In a capstone, a section on other readings does three things. It names a reading that differs from your thesis, in its own strongest form. It shows what that reading sees in the text that yours does not. And it explains why you still hold your thesis, or how your thesis changes to take the other reading in. If Rosa’s thesis is that the delayed name makes the reader feel the weight, the best other reading is Rashi’s: the delay is a kindness to Abraham, not a pressure on the reader. Rosa has to say what Rashi’s reading explains that hers does not.

The most famous rabbinic story about disagreement is the oven of Akhnai in Bava Metzia 59b. Rabbi Eliezer calls on miracles and a heavenly voice to prove his ruling. Rabbi Joshua answers with Deuteronomy 30:12, "It is not in heaven," and the majority’s reading stands. Readers have taken the story in many directions, from a charter for human interpretation to a warning about how the majority treated Eliezer afterward. For the capstone the lesson is modest: a reading is defended with the text and the argument, not with authority, and the losing side is still recorded by name.

Jewish study has long been done in pairs. The word chavruta comes from the Aramaic for "friend" or "companion," and it names both the partner and the method. Two people read a text aloud, question each other and argue until each can state the other’s view. Pirkei Avot 1:6 records the advice, in paraphrase, to get yourself a teacher and acquire a companion. The Talmud in Ta’anit 7a reads Proverbs 27:17, "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend" (JPS 1917), as a picture of scholars sharpening each other. Walk into a beit midrash, a study hall, today and the sound is not silence but a hundred arguments.

The capstone presentation borrows this form. Two students who worked on related passages sit facing each other, with the class around them. One states a thesis and reads the key lines. The other does not applaud; the other pushes: which word carries that? what does Ramban say against you? what would a feminist reader notice? Then they switch. The class’s job is to write down the strongest question asked and the best answer given. A presentation is judged partly on how well a student states the partner’s reading back, since that is what chavruta trains.

Rules keep it kind. Every challenge points to a line. Nobody speaks about a tradition’s truth, only about its readings. Nobody is stuck defending a thesis that the argument has improved; changing your claim in the middle, and saying why, is a win. Dev and Rosa in the opening story did exactly that, and they ended with a shared question instead of two separate answers. That ending is the point of the form: the text got read more closely than either of them could have managed alone.

The rubric rewards the moves this chapter has taught. Close reading of the passage in two translations, with structure, key words and gaps named. Commentators used as distinct voices, cited on the verse. A modern reader paraphrased with author, title and year. A thesis about what the text does, defended from lines. Other readings stated fairly. Every belief attributed, every source real. And a presentation in which the student can state a partner’s reading back. Style counts less than accuracy: a plain sentence that cites a verse beats a grand one that does not.

The final page is a reflection, and it asks a question the course has carried since its first chapter. This is a public school in Illinois. The Supreme Court said in Abington v. Schempp (1963) that the Bible may be studied "objectively as part of a secular program of education," and Justice Clark’s opinion added that one’s education is not complete without a study of religion. That sentence set the frame: describe, attribute, compare, and never tell a classmate what to believe. Write about what that frame made possible and what it made hard. Was there a moment when describing a reading felt different from holding it? Did any reader, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Trible, Alter, make you see the text in a way you did not expect?

Some students in the room hold the Tanakh as Scripture. Some hold other Scriptures. Some hold none. The course has asked all of them to read the same verse with the same care and to say "the text says" and "Rashi reads" in the same voice. Jewish tradition has a phrase for study done for its own sake, Torah lishmah, and the rabbis praised it above study for reward. A public-school course cannot ask for that in a religious sense. It can ask for something near it: reading a text well because it is there, because people have loved and argued over it for millennia, and because learning to describe a belief you may not share is one of the best things a school can teach.