Simon Schama is a genius. But that's not his greatest gift. There are few broadcasters whose erudition translates so beautifully into education by conversation, learning by contagious passion, and for once a creative balance between scepticism and faith, or to put it in other terms the complementarity of an hermeneutic of suspicion and an hermeneutic of trust. The new BBC1 series on the Story of the Jews began last Sunday evening and goes for a further 4 weeks.
I remember doing history of the Ancient Near East, the history and religion of Israel, and a wide ranging introduction to the Hebrew Bible as part of my Arts degree at Glasgow University – there I encountered an hermeneutic of supsicion, and little patience in the classroom with trust as faith commitment. I revisited some, but not much of that material in my theological education, this time in a College where trust and faith commitment were part of the hermeneutical process. Of course this was without ignoring or demeaning the gains from critical scholarship, with respectful practice of a disciplined critical and historical analysis of text, culture and context, and as part of a multi-disciplinary subject-field that was diverse and required an approach to learning we would now call integrated.
So this first episode was a treat. From the sceptical reflections on the absence of hard histoirical, archaeological evidence for the Exodus, to the sequence of family scenes at Passover celebrated in Schama's own household, to the ecstatic and passionate love for Torah, for words and for reading and for the scrolls, that is utterly characteristic, essential, to Judaism – this was wonderfully captured in the scenes at the synagogue. This is superb television; more than that it is a first class education at an accessible level in what it means to be a people of faith, albeit a faith diverse, historically rooted in change and continuity, and that continuity despite repeated persecution measurable on a scale stretching from ridicule to the Holocaust.
I don't always agree with some of the premises, or conclusions of the programme, but that is only judging by the first episode. We will wait and see what is still to come. But I look forward to sitting down with time and attentiveness in what is a master class in contemporary education that aims at heigtened awareness of issues, balanced provision of information, posing of questions that compel reflection rather than make-do answers, and that brings a world different from mine alive, with sympathy, insider knowledge, humour and Schama's geuine greatness as a scholar whose learning elicits admiration, and invites engagement with his world of thought.
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