Moodle Midrash

Moodle Midrash

Naming my Hebrew Bible class “The Jewish Bible” was a calculated risk. On the one hand, the goal was to attract students who might otherwise not enroll in a class with “Hebrew” in the title (apparently, there had been confusion in the past over whether or not such a class required knowledge of the Hebrew language). On the other hand, it was an unfamiliar term—students are generally more used to the terms ‘Hebrew Bible” and “Old Testament,” and as a temporary faculty member, changing a well-known course’s name might have made it unrecognizable.

As it turned out, though, I needn’t have worried. Not only was “The Jewish Bible” self-evident as a class title, it also opened up a set of possibilities that I hadn’t considered when I formulated it. As someone who studies the rabbis more than the composition of the biblical text, the newly-named class allowed me to shift the focus to ancient reading practices and interpretation as integral to our understanding of the Hebrew Bible as a text in the world. Little did I know, of course, that a name-change would be the smallest of the transformations that this course would eventually go through. 

A few weeks before the class was slated to begin in late March, my institution went entirely remote. This turned my class on its head, and while there’s no need for yet another narrative of how exactly I attempted to transform my class, the remote format and slightly broader scope did combine in order to produce a particularly effective pedagogical activity: the Moodle Midrash.

Moodle, for those of you who don’t know, is a Learning Management Software, but its main importance here is as an alliterative qualifier for our Midrash discussion boards. The assignment was pretty simple: every week, I would make a post in a discussion board with a few verses from one of the biblical texts we had read that week (ideally, it was a section of the text that we would not cover extensively in class). I asked students to write two paragraphs on each discussion board each week: the first, an interpretation in the style of any of the ancient interpreters we covered in class, and the second, an analysis and explanation of their own interpretation, paying especially attention, for example, to the four assumptions of ancient biblical interpreters as outlined by James Kugel.[1]

We got off to a bit of a rocky start, admittedly. I encouraged students to be creative and expansive in their interpretations, and to compose them, at least initially, with only the biblical text itself as a referent. This was a different style of discussion board posting than they were used to, being essentially a creative writing prompt coupled with a self-reflection; eventually, however, everyone got into the swing of it. I started to notice some patterns emerging, which I think it will be helpful to clarify here, in an order to explain why this ended up being such a useful exercise.

Perhaps most obviously, and maybe most surprisingly to me, was the way in which some students’ posts began resembling traditional midrashic compilations. Despite having very little exposure to the genre, students were creating interpretations, providing proof texts, and expanding on the terse language of the text with their own imaginative material. As an experiment, I added a section of Genesis Rabbah to their reading for one week—and was delighted to discover that they had very little trouble making sense of a text that other students had found complicated and hard to access. In creating Midrash of their own, my students were much more primed to read classical rabbinic midrash attentively, carefully, and even empathetically.

There were other, more intentional effects of this exercise, however. In addition to cultivate a first-hand understanding of how ancient interpreters worked, I wanted to sensitize my students to the types of issues that are present in the biblical text. I had to do this, however, without requiring them to read the text in Hebrew. Asking for interpretations and close readings based on the idiosyncrasies of a specific text meant that I could curate texts that would generate interesting readings even in their English translations. Students’ commentary focused on breaks in the text, inconsistencies, and moments that read as strange and mysterious to us today—all of which were also fertile ground for the ancient interpreters, as well.

I also found that having students produce their own internal-to-the-text interpretations attuned them to far more than just compositional issues surrounding the Bible. It helped them think through the complex relationship between theology and religious studies, for example. By asking the students to reflect critically on their own interpretations, they gained a much sharper awareness of the perspectives of their own questions: what are the different stakes that are present in the text, for different readers? What did it mean to read is a “scholar,” and what did it mean to read as a “believer?” What were the locations where those stakes overlapped, and what did that tell us about the enterprise’s entire construction? 

At the end of the course, each student had a loose archive of their own interpretations. I didn’t take the project farther than this, but I could have: I thought about compiling the materials together into our own Midrash Rabbah, and having students examine it critically, trying to think through what insights might be gained from a corporately-authored, composite text. (Next time, I tell myself.) By making creative interpretation as much as part of the course as historical-critical reading and scholarship, Moodle Midrash opened a variety of new, productive avenues for my students’ thinking.

Daniel Picus is an Assistant Professor in the department of Global Humanities and Religions at Western Washington University, where he will have to think of a new alliterative title for this exercise, since his new LMS is Canvas.

[1] James Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2007) 14-17.