At Hebrew University's Mt. Scopus campus this May, Dr. Steve Copeland, professor of Jewish thought and education, opened a dialogue with students by showing them a drawing of the prophet Samuel at a moment of prophetic reception. When asked what he thought of the drawing, one student said it didn't really say anything to him.

"That's because you're not participating in its potential life," Copeland challenged, in his characteristically intense way. "A great text won't give of itself easily; it forces us to be involved, initiate, search, wrestle—participate. That's when it becomes excitingly response-able."

The student offered a limited response. Unrelenting, Copeland asked, could these ideas be something commanding to him, rather than merely interesting?

Writing the word "interesting" on a piece of paper, he then climbed over a few desks and chairs toward the nearest window, and tossed the word to the wind.

"I, too, have no time for only interesting books, texts, university courses, films, artworks, friends, lovers, trees," he said. "Rather, I seek out that which might be excellent, seizing, compelling to me—involving a difference that might make a difference in our lives."

As scholar-in-residence this spring at Hebrew University (HU), Copeland introduced his dynamic teaching philosophy—helping students find the inspirational in each moment and text—to graduate education students and a faculty seminar. The three-week trip was co-sponsored by HU's Center for Jewish Education, the Institute for Contemporary Jewry and the Comparative Literature Department. In addition, Copeland gave a shi'ur at Kehillat Yedidya and led a tikkun leyl Shavuot at the home of Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, a friend and HU professor of modern Hebrew literature.

A highlight of the Israel trip was Copeland's public lecture the evening of May 24, "'No lightning scares away': Rejecting Assumptions Comfortable for the Fragile Soul in the Poetry of Zelda and Emily Dickinson."

Exemplifying the excellence he seeks to bring to the classroom, this poetry, explained Copeland, offers glimpses into the ways the authors personally wrestled with the world around them. Comparing verses from both poets to a talmudic passage from kiddushin, he demonstrated how the texts all begin with commonly held assumptions—such as "time heals all wounds"—and then use personal experiences to contradict these "domestically safe falsehoods."

"This searching, stubborn, insistent honesty of Zelda and Emily Dickinson and rabbinic thought—as I see them—is a particular kind of religious perspective that celebrates existence as it is, in its finitude, mundane character, contradictions and even difficulties," Copeland said.

Imploring the students he met not to be passive readers of classical texts—indeed, not to be passive friends, film-goers, art beholders and citizens—Copeland also cited the line from one of Yehudah Halevi's medieval "prayer-poems" to the Divine: "When I went out approaching You, [it is then that] I saw You coming toward me."

"A text changes me, only when I change the text, too," Copeland said.

Photo by Ben Harmon

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