interest in novels. It was in that reading room, inspired as I was by the content of my courses, the pedagogy of my instructors, the obvious devo- tion to research I witnessed around me, and the help that I could get from scholars in the next seat where I came to see myself as a student capable of real research. My Talmud teacher from Mechon Greenberg was usually at the back of the room, working on his own doctoral research, but always willing to help. Nechama Leibowitz would enter, smile, and offer assistance. A few times, she recommended articles she hoped would broaden my scholarly perspective. That reading room became sacred to me, and I have visited it since with some degree of reverence. Several years ago, when I requested a meeting with Talmud scholar Dr. David Weiss Halivni, I was pleased to do so in the reading room, at his customary seat. It was like a pilgrimage.
that inspired me in later years to search for ways in which children could connect to the emotional content of the biblical narrative, and not merely with the rational study of text. Years later, while composing that part of my doctoral work I called “Midrashic Drama,” I could still see my professor’s teaching, with all her passion. She took a special interest in some of her students, invited us to her home, and eventually arranged some private tutor- ing in Talmud from her neighbour, Yona Ben-Sasson, the father of Menachem Ben-Sasson, a former president of Hebrew University. I think she was convinced that as both JTS and Mechon Greenberg students, we needed more exposure to Talmud. Even though I was a Talmud major at JTS and we had a full course in Talmud at the Machon, she was right. Prof. Zvi Werblowsky taught comparative religion at Hebrew University and was the dean of the humanities faculty by 1965. He taught a seminar on Jewish mysticism. I was 19 years old and had a total of only three semesters of college behind me, but I craved that advanced course. The other students were older and had some background in the subject. When it was my turn to lead the sem- inar on an assigned topic, I asked permission to do so in English. Since all the readings were in English and my spoken Hebrew was still elementary, it seemed like a reasonable request. At the next session, Werblowsky asked the class for permission to have “Mr. Epstein speak to us in a language other than our holy tongue”! Despite that remark, I could still appreciate the breadth and depth of his scholarship and was especially grateful for a field trip on Easter eve to Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion to see a traditional Easter Vigil service in Latin. Werblowsky pointed out the chanting of Shirat haYam (Exodus 15:1-19) in Latin as Catholics came out of the mourn- ing of Holy Week to the joy of Easter Sunday. Quite the motzei Shabbat for a young Jew from Toronto. Pilgrimages to the reading room Before I recount other inspiring teachers from that year, I must mention a specific room that also had a lasting effect on my abilities as a student. The Jewish Studies reading room at the National Library on the Givat Ram campus was where I became a real learner. I was not a natural reader and did not come from a family of readers. In both high school and my first years at col- lege, I found it quite difficult to concentrate on assigned readings, and I showed little
to hear his poems read by their author and we came to appreciate his views on litera- ture, religion, and politics. We also noted his obvious appreciation of beautiful women. He taught us that modernity’s rejection of re- ligion was, at least, a recognition of religion as a force, but that an indifference to religion or an ignorance of its power was not feasible for him: Every night God takes his glittering merchandise out of his showcase- holy chariots, tables of law, fancy beads, crosses and bells- and puts them back into dark boxes inside and pulls down the shutters: “Again, not one prophet has come to buy.”
Gabriel Haim Cohen was my Tanach teach- er at the Machon. Gabi, as he was known by all, taught us some megillot and the Book of Jonah. He had mastered New Criticism, a lit- erary approach to the Hebrew Bible that had us analyzing the intricacies of biblical diction and grammar. In his Swiss-accented Hebrew, he was a teacher par excellence. I have been using his techniques ever since and recently completed a radical commentary on Esther that was originally inspired by his insights. I came to know Gabi and his wife, Nechama, and, in later years, as country director in Morocco for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, I sent North African students to Mechon Gold, which Gabi then directed. I even brought him to North Africa to lecture to local teachers in a training seminar. Yehuda Amichai taught poetry at Mechon Greenberg. When I tell people that Israel’s greatest poet of the last years of the 20th century was my poetry teacher, there is some disbelief. But in 1965, Amichai was still struggling to earn a living from writing, so he taught. We surveyed a great deal of early Zionist poetry, the poetry of his contemporar- ies, and some of his own. We were fortunate
(From Poems of Jerusalem , translated by Yehuda Amichai and Ted Hughes).
Years later when I stayed at the Inbal Hotel where Amichai swam daily, we renewed our relationship. I invited him to speak to my colleagues at the Joint Distribution Commit- tee but by then, his bitterness about certain aspects of Israeli society was overwhelming. I prefer to remember the young writer and his passion for all that was poetic. Will I surprise you some more by saying that Aharon Appelfeld was our prose teacher?
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