The Rural We: Edan Dekel And Jeffrey Israel
Reading one page of a book each day doesn’t sound daunting…unless that book happens to be "Moby-Dick," and you have committed to discussing that one page with your reading partner every single day. That’s what Williams College faculty Jeffrey Israel (associate professor and chair of the religion department) and Edan Dekel (Garfield Professor of Ancient Languages and chair of the Jewish studies program) are doing. The daily page-and-discussion concept for the book was inspired by a Jewish tradition called Daf Yomi (Hebrew for “page of the day”), a daily focus on a single page of the Talmud. On March 6 at 5:30 p.m., the Berkshire County Historical Society will present a free virtual lecture during which Israel and Dekel will share the story of their impressive voyage.
Edan Dekel: Over the past decade or so, Jeff and I have developed a series of different approaches to thinking about how we read texts and teach texts to students. We teach a course, “The Jewish Art of Interpretation,” and can spend 75 minutes in a room with a group of people looking at even the smallest text. If you keep talking about it in different ways, all sorts of meaning will emerge and you begin to build something together, a shared sense of creativity and a life of interpretation.
As we’ve been planning these courses and how to teach together, we sort of circled around the idea that it would be interesting to read Melville together, and use the idea of this Jewish reading practice, Daf Yomi.
Jeffrey Israel: In our classes, we challenge students to live the life of interpretation beyond the classroom, to see how they can engage in meaning and in life. Daf Moby is one of the ways in which the two of us together are living this life. We have no intention of publishing it, we just live this life for its intrinsic goodness, for its own sake, opening up possibilities for creativity and imagination. We both have connections to American literature, and with Melville, there is greatness and insight in Moby-Dick. This has become an opportunity to model in our own lives what we are trying to invite students into — kind of a really serious but also playful way of living with texts. It’s the kind of thing we bring to our life as scholars and intellectuals to the students.
Daf Yomi, the practice where Jews everywhere in the world study the same page on the same day, was started 100 years ago. It’s just a coincidence, but we started the Daf-Moby project on the day of the 100th anniversary of when Daf Yomi was proposed at a congress of rabbis in Vienna.
ED: We’re just about one-third of the way through the novel. Our practice is to read a page a day before 10 a.m. When we saw that you could rent out Melville’s office at Arrowhead for an hour, we did that and spent the hour in the very space where Melville wrote Mody-Dick. To have that space to ourselves, to think and discuss, was an extraordinary experience.
JI: We started on Rosh Hanshana 2023 at the very beginning, the title pages. There are 30 pages before you get to “Call me Ishmael.” It feels like morning prayer. I won’t get into my emails until I’ve dwelled in that moment of reading Daf Moby. Everything else in the universe has to wait while I go to sea.
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