The Transformative Power of Humanities Education
For me, the High Holidays have always marked the beginning of the school year as much as the start of the Jewish calendar. As a child in Israel I remember tasting the hope and apprehension of the first days of school in the freshly sliced apple and sweet pomegranate seeds. Having immigrated from Russia, my mother and grandmother dutifully set the table for the holidays, but didn’t say much about their religious meaning. Perhaps that is why Rosh Hashanah’s celebration of renewal and Yom Kippur’s spirituality became so closely linked to the return to the classroom.
Though I was always a serious student, it wasn’t until I began studying the humanities at an American college that my education started to fulfill the promise of those early High Holidays.
In Israel, majoring in science was the only option. Even though I loved reading and writing, no one had ever suggested that I study literature or history. Teachers and classmates assumed that Russian immigrants — or “Russians” as we were called — were good at math, but couldn’t possibly excel at a subject that called for a mastery of Hebrew and (implicitly) a rootedness in Israeli history.
At eighteen, when I emigrated with my family to the U.S., my Hebrew was near-perfect. My English was passable, but not as good as that of my American peers. Still, when I found myself at Boston University with my parents a long train ride away, I decided to major in literature. I discovered that I was no longer a “Russian,” and that, in fact, no one particularly cared to know who or what I was. As long as I passed my classes and paid my tuition, I could do as I pleased.
Studying literature, history and philosophy was the closest I came to a religious experience. I would go to the library in the afternoon, sit at a desk by the window, open my book and step into another world. It wasn’t simply that I became lost in a novel or a play, but rather that the books allowed me to see reality from a new vantage point: like seeing the image of the earth from space for the first time.
Just as importantly, the humanities allowed me to see myself as fully human at times when others did not. In America I may have stopped being a “Russian,” but I was still an immigrant — and a woman. It didn’t take long for me to learn that very often that meant that I couldn’t have a voice, or that I would be passed over for scholarships and jobs.
This confidence in my own humanity and the world’s intelligibility also helped me survive the political turmoil of the last two decades. When I was in college, in the early 2000s, some of my family still lived in Israel. At the end of each day, I would navigate to an Israeli news site to see if there had been a terrorist attack in my hometown. As I watched the U.S. become mired in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I could relate neither to my college classmates’ quietism nor, later, to the jargon-filled tirades of some of my professors in grad school.
It was a lonely place, but every once in a while I would read a book that made some part of this painful reality comprehensible. That kind of understanding transcended (at least for a moment) personal anxiety, and allowed me to grasp something of the world’s complexity beyond the anger and bitterness of political debates.
Today I teach humanities courses at two New York City colleges. Some of my students had never read a book, and many struggle to keep their attention on the page when their cellphones are calling out with more enticing messages. I do my best to help them see the enduring relevance and capaciousness of a Shakespeare play or a story by Franz Kafka. Though few become English majors, for many these works open up new ways of thinking and speaking about subjects that matter.
Sadly, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do this work for much longer, or whether a humanities education will be available for another generation. The amount of funding for these subjects has been steadily decreasing. In most public colleges there are now only a handful of humanities departments, and most of the courses they offer are in general education. The vast majority of the teaching faculty are adjuncts like myself — overburdened and underpaid.
So as we enter the Days of Awe, a time when Jews traditionally affirm their faith, I will take the time to revisit the books that have sustained me spiritually and emotionally throughout the years. The Tanakh and other Jewish texts are on the list, but so are works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edith Wharton, W.H. Auden and Amos Oz. As I try to reawaken the habits of thought and feeling that I learned from these books, I hope that others may do the same.
Regardless of religion, the humanities allow us to inhabit the world more fully and thoughtfully, to abstract from personal injury and relate to others with greater openness and compassion.
