Erase the past; erase your self

Jewish repentance — teshuva — has a message for humanities educators today, especially those who ‘cancel’ the past: We and our students can only be, as the poet John Milton wrote, ‘authors to ourselves’ if we remember from where we came.

Satan: ‘We know no time when we were not as now / Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais’d.’ (Gustave Dore)

But Humanities teachers, long ago abandoned the core activity of the Humanities – to teach reading and writing.

Today, students read works of the past only to disqualify them.

Cancel Shakespeare.

Deface sculptures of Churchill.

Problems solved, supposedly.

But instead of cultivating resilience and courage, woke professors encourage the entitled insecurity of their students, fastening them in the protective armor of their identity politics.

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They indoctrinate a politics of resentment – where there is no responsibility, never gratitude, only grievance.  King Lear’s ‘I am more sinned again than sinning’ becomes the motto for a radicalized and coddled generation.

Cultural Revolution

The post-Humanists occupying Humanities  Chairs in major American universities enact their own Cultural Revolution. They do not adjust course syllabi, nor do they modify canons, but toss them out altogether. As arbiters of moral purity, they throw views, other than their own, into the trash-bin of history. This is an ideology of sameness (see under: idolatry, fascism).

Cancel Culture Curricula. (created with AI)

These professors condemn history from their perch of privilege, creating followers who identify themselves through political cliches and slogans. The only questions students are trained to ask are versions of ‘how have I been wronged?’ – how are works of the past markers of racism, patriarchy, colonialism, or sexism?

The glance is never inwards – ‘for what am I responsible?’

Jewish Humanism

God creates ‘teshuva‘ before the Six Days of Creation. For the Creation to exist, teshuva, a metaphysical equivalent of gravity, must come first.

Christians require a savior to redeem the Human. God says to Jews: Become part of the Book of Life by writing yourselves into it.

Self-authorship means keeping track of the wrongs we have suffered, but more importantly, the suffering we may have caused others. The reckoning is not always, as university students are taught today, for other people.

We also – and this is the most difficult – acknowledge the wrongs we have inflicted upon ourselves. Especially when despair, or shame, or anger defines our pasts, making a future of justified inaction and apathy.

What the Talmud calls repentance ‘out of love. starts with a generous recognition that the past can be open to many stories. We redeem ourselves, not by rejecting the past, but by re-narrating our stories so we can live with ourselves.

Jewish humanities. (created with AI)

The revolutionary pedagogy of Judaism starts with the self: Open up your book, and know yourself as a work-in-progress.

In this process, self-discovery and self-invention of the self are inseparable.