Going back to Israel

I was granted a very generous fellowship from the Harvard Center for Jewish studies through the Anne B. Malloy Memorial Fund to return to Israel this summer to do some exciting research!  I will be attending a program at Tel Aviv University entitled “Jewish-Christian Encounters in the First Centuries CE,” a topic which has been the focus of much of my studies here at Harvard.

The focal course will compare early Jewish and Christian literature in how they approach certain topics like gender, ethnicity, and the Bible, and also how these literatures interacted with one another. We’ll also be visiting locations in the Galilee and Jerusalem and various archeological digs. One of my few regrets about my previous time in Israel was that I didn’t do enough of this kind of travel because I had no time to. The program also includes an advanced course in Hebrew during the early-Rabbinic period which will flesh out my Biblical Hebrew skills. I hadn’t taken any Hebrew before I started here at Harvard, and this course will make five full semesters before I start the second year of my Master’s! I’ve come a long way since then. There will also a lecture serious, on “Talmud and Theology,” which will discuss the Talmud’s relationship to modern Jewish thought and practice, and provide me with the practical context for better understanding modern Jewish theology. I’ve dug myself into the beliefs of the ancient world so much it will be helpful to engage in the modern world a bit.

Being at Tel Aviv University will also place me just a short distance from the Wolfson Medical Center, the main hospital I worked in during my first sojourn in Israel in 2009. Hopefully this summer study will allow me to pay a visit or two.

I’m still finishing up my papers for my spring semester here at Harvard, which has kept me from writing much here, but I hope I will be able to follow up with plenty of updates during this summer program.

MTS or MDiv?

A brief update in the midst of my furious paper writing pace this semester. I am considering switching from the Master of Theological Studies program to the Master of Divinity program. The difference is the latter would allow me to flesh out the theological and ministerial aspects of my education which, as I said in my last blog, I have found lacking in my current degree which is catered specifically to academia. It would also make the possibility of ordination easier and might reflect the balance I have tried to strike between academia and serving in the Church. The Master of Divinity (MDiv) is three years as opposed to the two years of the Master of Theological Studies (MTS). Academically speaking this may also be beneficial by giving me an additional year to fit in more classes, languages and get more acquainted with professors for PhD applications. One difficulty is that, because my focus has been Jewish Studies, I may have a hard time filling the degree requirements for an MDiv in Christianity. The other more looming concern is, of course, finances. I would need to find a way to pay for a third year of grad school here at Harvard. In order to manage that I can do nothing but throw my hands up to God. I hope you will join me and pray for me in sorting this out, and that if it is God’s will, a source of provision will make itself apparent. I will likely need to make a decision in the coming weeks, and as things stand right now, I will certainly be staying an MTS.

Sneaking a blog in a snow storm

So much has happened since my last blog, far too much to include in a biographical entry. It's a shame really, I know how important these years are. I have certainly had much to write about in my typical fields of interest, but graduate school at Harvard has a way of keeping one busy. I write now because it is early enough in the semester to not be aware of how swamped I am, classes are canceled tomorrow due to a snow storm, and my mood is just somber enough for me to pen my thoughts with the genuine recklessness of candor I think makes the energy worthwhile and memorably for me.

My spiritual life has largely been disconnected from my coursework. I no longer feel like any kind of aspiring theologian, rather I feel simply like a historian of religion, the kind of scholarliness purged of the motivational bias that generated the love of the field to begin with. It's not bad, but the questions I began with have been long obscured by the esoteric stratigraphy of academia. Spirituality is something I encounter listening to the five minute childrens' sermon on Sunday, or on my staircase. Staircases make good altars. They go someplace familiar; steps too, in good Wesleyan fashion, offer a vehicle to represent struggling for holiness. Crawling up stairs is a symbolic gesture with no parallel in church furnishings that I'm aware of. Even more an intimate gesture than falling to one's knees, if only slightly more embarrassing. I do see an apologetic aspect to my research this semester, hopefully peeling away some of the falsely perceived distinction between modern Jews and Christians through some insights concerning their relation in Antiquity. Apart from this and the physical realm outside my basement lair, my piety remains expressed by and large through the guilt, feelings of desperation and outcastness, and paranoia of starvation and homelessness that I have come to equate in a twisted way as a sign of intimacy with God. I say "twist" not because I believe it any less, I cannot help that, but because of how bad it sounds when I say it. I have changed so so much in these last few years and I wish there was someone that could remind where I've gone. More than this derelict blog anyway.

Harvard, what’s it like?

I began a Master’s degree at Harvard about a month ago now, and things are well underway. I’m in the Master of Theological Studies program, with a concentration in Jewish Studies. Watch our convocation here. My impressions of everything so far…

Student Body

The Divinity School at Harvard is certainly a one of a kind place. While there certainly are a lot of very smart people, there’s something characteristically “misfit” about the div school. Harvard, in its attempt to pull people in from the fringes to bring new voices to the foreground , and certainly to be seen as a place of diversity, has crafted what I would see as a Kingdom community. These are the sort of people that are at once interesting and peculiar, people I imagine Jesus hanging around with. They are of course all brilliant in their own right, and I am not without my own quirks. I seldom encounter a person who has not been on a journey as peculiar as my own. On the other hand, however, I do think the div school has overreached in certain areas without reaching far enough into others. The sheer number of people that identify themselves as non-heterosexual was not something I expected, and I’m still growing accustomed to it, especially having just arrived from my work in the Middle East where this issue simply has not been on my radar. Queer Theology and Women’s Studies in Religion is the focus of a very large percentage of the student body. The issues presented by these disciplines are inevitably something I will confront and dialogue with during my time here. The other issue which I had hoped would be more focal has been the interfaith integration and diversity of religious backgrounds. There certainly are students doing Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies (like myself), and so forth, though they are dwarfed by the Christian and Unitarian communities, and they also seem to largely hail from America, rather than the Middle East. I still feel as though I am not fulfilling certain opportunities to truly connect with these students on a personal level, though perhaps this will change in time as I discover more opportunities. My work study job as a circulation librarian has made me something of a div school bartender—as I check peoples’ books in and out I get to hear everyone’s passions and (more often) woes, and meet people I wouldn’t have otherwise. I hope, in due time, this will be a means of making some of the connections I have been seeking. 

One other unforeseen consequence of having this diverse student body has been that the level of academic familiarity with the more esoteric Biblical Studies disciplines is not as high as it would have been if I went to a different school. For example, a class on Jesus and the Gospels at the Vanderbilt Divinity School would certainly have consisted of students with a background in Biblical Studies, probably familiar with ideas of text criticism, and a number would have had some Greek. Here at Harvard however, because of the diversity of religious backgrounds, my class on Jesus and the Gospels has a number of students that are reading the New Testament for the first time in this class. This has its pluses and minuses of course, because it allows me, with my background, to stand head and shoulders above much of the class, but it also means that the level of depth in our conversations about the topics at hand is stunted in many ways. This is compensated for in many classes with pre-requisites of certain languages and so forth, though this is often not the case.

Regardless of the goals, orientations, and background of the students, they are nearly all very friendly and strike me as nothing less than genuinely good folks. The few students that fit the Harvard snob stereotype are truly the exception that proves the contrary.  

Grounds

The Harvard campus itself is famous, and deservedly so with a history reaching further back than this country by more than a century. It’s nearly a daily happening that walking to class I have to avoid getting in the frame of someone’s photo of the buildings. The first div school building itself goes back to the early 1800’s.

The most recent addition to the div school is the Center for the Study of World Religions, not all that impressive architecturally, but books and covers and so forth.

Andover Hall is an immense building housing classrooms, the adjoining Andover-Harvard Theology Library, chapels, and various other fancy Harvard type things. It turned 100 this year.

The original div school building, the eponymous Divinity Hall is the first building Harvard constructed outside the Yard, and the oldest div school building, going back to 1826. It has an incredible history of its own, including a chapel that has been host to the theological giants of the last few hundred years, and more than its share of controversy from the pulpit.

The Semitic Museum houses div school courses and exhibits along with stuff for the related Arts and Sciences department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. It’s pretty cool to say that I have a class in an actual museum.

Memorial Church and Memorial Hall are over in the Yard, but too immense and beautiful to not include. Each is a memorial to the concurrent war, WWI and the Civil War respectively.

Finally, the Widener Library, which depending on how you count, houses somewhere between the 5^th and 10^th largest collection of books on the planet. Not bad right?

Teachers and Courses

The teachers…they are simply prolific scholars, but this goes without saying. Before arriving I was very anxious about how they would be in person, but so far they are all incredibly gracious, friendly and approachable.  The fact that my advisor is Diana Eck and that I sit in a classroom with Jon Levenson, Michael Coogan, and Helmut Koester on a daily basis really blows my mind, especially when I have had the opportunity to speak with them one on one. It really is surreal. I think so far, this is my favorite thing about the div school.

My courses this term are:

Intermediate Classical Hebrew

So far his second year of Hebrew has been a little disconcerting, students have been dropping the class like flies because it has been very demanding.

Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament with Michael Coogan

As you probably know, I have been acquainted with this material—however, it is being taught by Michael Coogan, a prolific Bible scholar and senior editor of the New Oxford Annotated Bible. I’m taking the class as an audit, just so I can sit in the room and osmote from him.

Jesus of Nazareth and the Gospels with Helmut Koester

Helmut Koester has been a professor at Harvard Divinity School since about 1955…if that doesn’t tell you something I don’t know what will. He was one of Rudolph Bultmann’s protégés, who himself published research quite literally a century ago. As far as I am aware there is no other figure of New Testament scholarship still living that can claim his sheer scope of experience in this field. He reads his lectures from the lectern which aren’t enthralling, but speaking to him person to person in our section, the profound insights he has shared have me leaving every Thursday in awe of his experience and knowledge.

Judaism: The Liturgical Year with Jon Levenson

This course serves as something of an introduction to Judaism by studying Jewish holidays, their origins, how they inform the Jewish faith in history, and how they are practiced today. Jon Levenson is another prolific writer in the field of Biblical and Jewish Studies. His particular niche of using historical critical Biblical research for interreligious dialogue is something I would love to piggy back onto. Recently, for example, his research into ideas about resurrection in Judaism have brought to the attention of modern Jews how significant resurrection was for them in their history, and that it is a part of their tradition they have unfortunately allowed to fade, undoubtedly in the shadow of Christianity. He argues that this is a common theme that both Jews and Christians ought to cherish and in so doing grants us a new avenue of interreligious dialogue.  

Ancient Near Eastern History

Taught through the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department, this class will give me the context of what was going on in the rest of the Ancient Near East from pre-history through the time of the Old Testament.

Seminar for Advanced New Testament Studies: The Q Riddle

I needed something to distinguish myself from everyone beginning this Master’s program without substantial background in Biblical Studies. This year-long course, designed for advanced Master’s and PhD students, lets me flex some of my academic background, while hopefully being impressive on my transcript. If you don’t have a clue what the “Q Riddle” is, that ought to give you an idea of how advanced the course is.

Living Situation

Last but not least, my place. I’m renting a basement from a retired minister and his wife out in Arlington. It’s quite a long trek, a 30-40 minute bus ride each way to Harvard, but it’s cheap and I’ve made it my own. I have room for my clothes, my books (for now), and my mementos, which is plenty of room for me. I have my own half bath, and I even have a desk with a window!

What Took Me So Long...Plus a Great Resource for Biblical Languages!

I neglected to mention why I've been away from my blog in the last post. It was because I was doing a year’s worth of Biblical Hebrew (the language of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible) in 56 days! Along with a few other responsibilities, it kept me very busy. The class was a blast, my classmates were very engaging, the professor was very down to Earth and made the course fun, and of course, like Greek was, it’s thrilling learning the language of the Scriptures! I’ll continue taking more Hebrew during the year, potentially until I finish my Master’s, but I theoretically know all the grammar now, and have already translated the book of Jonah, and other passages.

When the summer term finished I remembered that, at one point, I had a Greek paradigm cheat sheet. Recalling how useful it was for a quick parsing reference, I began to scour the Internet for a Hebrew equivalent to stay fresh. After digging for a bit, I located the perfect resource, and for students of both Greek and Hebrew alike! It turns out Logos Bible Software makes the perfect paradigm charts for quick reference, and you can download and print the PDF version completely free! Grab them here. Pretty nice right?

Signs, Dreams, and Decisions

It was a decision that was more than a year in the making, researching, writing, perfecting…obsessing; but like I often find the case to be, it took the coercion of a deadline (even an extended one) to force me to make my decision. In trying to decide which grad school to attend, I made as much use of my personal relationship with God that I could leverage, praying and asking for signs and dreams. I developed an affinity for the ‘dream’ revelation after a vivid dream that took place little more than 2 years ago now, in the middle of a course on apocalyptic literature, which having forced me to read Daniel about 7 times in a two weeks span, apparently had a profound effect on my subconscious. It was not long after waking, processing, sharing the dream with others, and writing it down that I realized it was not the first dream with profound metaphorical or allegorical implications that could be described as nothing less than ‘revelatory,’ about my current life situation or perhaps even the future. As I train more and more to effectively become a scientist of the Bible and Ancient Near Eastern culture I feel it is important to maintain some grounding in the individual spiritual experience, and dreams are something that provide an outlet for that because they escape the realm of present scientific verification. Granting my very skeptical nature, dreams allow me to circumvent the irresistible desire to discern if they are merely illusory, or genuinely theophanic, they can be neither dismissed nor verified, and I like it that way. I think perhaps it’s someone of a gentleman’s agreement between God and I; I ask for little more certain than a dream, and I suspend my skepticism when they come. From time to time, it works, and it’s really the only somewhat objectively manifest spiritual function that I experience. All that said, I got no dreams…apart from ones without the trappings I expect in the aforementioned ‘revelatory’ sort.

What I got instead were signs. What I forgot to ask for however was the means to interpret them… Doing the manual labor I spend so much of time occupied with, my mind has the freedom to roam and contemplate decisions like this one, and there were a few moments when I felt something was being show (or shouted) to me. The first was the shepherds that daily graze their sheep and goats in the field adjacent to our worksite, the pleasant simplicity and serenity of this daily scene offered me some rest and reassurance that the sun would still rise regardless of what I chose, and I was able to be at rest merely in watching the herds among the other various critters scurrying about the work site. Two other events I interpreted as signs I couldn’t deduce a substantive meaning from despite my feeling that they had one. I believe it was a Saturday that I came to the work site to put in some extra work, hammering away at decades old window sealant that had hardened in the frames of broken out windows. I stepped away for a moment to use the bathroom, and at that very instant a tremendous branch, the size of a large tree itself, simply snapped off and landed on the fence bordering the work site and our neighbors property. Being out of sight, I assumed the loud sound was some children that have vandalized the property in the past, and I thought to myself “at last, an opportunity to confront them and yank them by the ear to their parents.” When I came around the corner and saw this huge branch blocking my path, I was surprised to say the least. As I write this, two things come to mind, the first that the tree falling on the fence was merely to say I was on the fence, a fairly obvious observation…or perhaps it was a reminder of a scene in the originally dream I mentioned earlier which itself contained a large broken tree on its side. The next sign occurred a few days later after I flipped over a brick to discover a scorpion beneath it. Keen to keep it as a pet and show it off to my neighbors I caught it in a water bottle and continued working. As I finished working and reached for my water bottle for a drink I remembered at the last moment to look down to make sure it was the bottle of water and not the bottle of scorpion. It was indeed the bottle of water, but the notion of having the option to drink refreshing water or a scorpion, and my heightened sensitivity to looking for signs meant I took this to be one, though I couldn’t discern which school was the water and which was the scorpion.

The final spiritual contribution to my decision was when, hours before the deadline, I prayed, and grabbed my, by now dusty, Bible to sit down to read it for direction. I opened it at random, like so many middle schoolers seeking divine guidance, but the place to which it opened truly did have meaning for me. It opened to James 1, likely not due to a divine hand, or my own, but because the pages and their binding had grown so accustomed to opening there. This truly was a sign, for as I read the familiar words I was reminded of who I was and received the affirmation that as long as I was true to myself, kept the words of James that I am so passionate about close to my heart and continued to persevere under trial, I would receive the crown of life promised by God.

It was with this divine blessing, some incredible and unexpected financial contributions from my immediate family, and enough planning an calculating for a lifetime on my part, that I’ve decided to attend Harvard.

So now, what does this mean for my ministry in the Middle East? The obvious questions is concerning it’s length. I will start Harvard’s program in mid-June which means that I will be coming back to America as of June, just a month from now. While this puts a hold on ministry here, I sincerely believe the training I receive at Harvard will, in the long run, allow me to be of far greater service to the current situation in Israel-Palestine, and perhaps the entire Middle East and America as well. As I mentioned in a prior blog, one of the reasons Harvard was my number one choice was because of its pluralistic environment. While I understand “pluralistic” is a vulgar word to many conservative Christians, attending Harvard Divinity School will provide me with opportunities like no other seminary in the world to study in precisely the situation I find myself here, with the hope of an outcome that will allow me to serve better here because of it. It also doesn’t hurt that I will have a world class education from the top university and top Biblical Studies and theology scholars on the planet.

I have a lifelong history of pairing ministry with the academic study of the Bible and hope that you too can see attending seminary as a continuation of my ministry rather than an interruption of it. In fact, I hope you see it as the opposite, in my commitment to do Masters level work in theology I hope you can see that in so doing I have made a lifelong commitment to serving God. Because of this, I would also welcome continued financial support through seminary if you feel so called, as there still remains a substantial need to be met, both in the money I have spent ministering here, as well as in what I will need once I begin seminary.

From my past, and future blogs I hope you can see that I truly do love serving here, the life, the culture, the places, the people, I could go on. God willing I will not be gone long.

Is Going to Harvard a Stupid Idea?

Here's the situation, I got into Harvard Divinity School MTS program with a 50% scholarship, I got into Vanderbilt Divinity School MTS with a 70% scholarship. Both are virtually equal in terms of reputation in the Biblical Studies field. I have to decide which one to go to in less than a week.

My background:
I have about 40k in debt right now from undergrad
I make virtually no money
I want to teach at a Christian university after getting a PhD...or if I become disenchanted with academia, I'd probably come back here to the Middle East to work with some kind of NGO again.

I want to go to Harvard more because:
I'll be in the Jewish studies concentration under Jon Levenson, a guy I'd really like to work with, wheras I don't really know anyone from Vandy
It's pluralistic environment is more conducive to the line of work I may go into if I don't go on to a PhD
It's Harvard, and if I decide not to do a PhD in Biblical Studies, the name alone will open doors for me elsewhere
Boston seems like a nicer place to live than Nashville
I could constantly brag about going to Harvard

I'd rather go to Vanderbilt because:
It seems like the program is specifically geared toward getting you into a PhD which, right now anyway, is my goal
It would be far cheaper, like $22,000 debt for the degree versus like $50,000 (which even with loans I haven't come up with yet)
I could get a condo for the price of a room in Boston
It's Christian only (pretty much) environment is more conducive to edifying my personal faith

Here is another variable, this new Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program thing. My debt will be canceled after 10 years of being a professor (even adjunct), or working with an NGO, and I already have a year down. Am I missing something or is this, combined with income based repayment, an easy out, and essentially make the amount of loans I take out completely inconsequential? It sounds too good to be true, which makes me hesitant to rely on it, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

O God

“Deconstructing” is a term I’ve grown accustomed to. To me it means that deeply held assumptions and beliefs, when faced with sufficient contradicting experience, have a habit of producing cognitive dissonance, which compels a reassessment. Just like Jenga, it’s only a matter of time before chipping away at the tower leads to its collapse. It’s become such a frequent occurrence for me that I seem to have developed a bit of acrophobia since the last time I was brave enough to be introspective.

The process was introduced to me in formal academic study of the Bible, and that’s certainly where it’s been most industrious. What other field can offer such an enticement as truth of an eternal consequence…if only you study a bit more. Though the consequences seem to involve deconstructing more than constructing, I accepted long ago that it would be better to live behind a humble perimeter of reliable and genuine faith than to hide behind a bulwark of “truth” based on lesser standards.

Memory, it seems, has been among the casualties I’ve attributed to the general toll the year in the Middle East took on me, but the atrophy of my prayers remains vivid. Verbosity in prayer has never been my talent, but especially in this last year, to experience the deconstruction of prayer itself has been matched in brutally only by its intimacy. Prayer is the most authentic locus I have right now for understanding my feelings about the spiritual arena. The inability to reconcile the prayers I speak with my experiences and what I disbelieve has left me mute. The gravity of the issues before me in prayer multiplied by the deluge of internal conflict has reduced my prayers to “O God.” It’s all I can muster, and certainly these 4 characters do not supply the weight accompanying them when they escape my lips. Maybe this is truly all that’s left when the dross is finally stripped away and words cease to offer meaning for what I have to hold up to heaven. Or maybe these 4 characters are all that’s left after an overzealous deconstructive approach to Biblical Studies has taken its toll, having finally received the coup de grâce from the extreme nature of the work in the Middle East. Time shall tell.