“Are you really sure you want to do this?”

Ten years ago, Rabbi Tully Harcsztark posed that question to me when I interviewed for a position at SAR High School. I think he was asking if I was prepared to stop studying and teaching Gemara at the highest levels. Having served as the academic director of a graduate Talmud program at Yeshiva University for six years, I assumed that a shift to high school meant I would forgo advanced scholarship for two reasons. First, the time spent on grading, classroom management, lesson plans, and other high school necessities would inevitably reduce the time I could devote to scholarship. Additionally, high school students would surely not demand the same comprehensiveness and depth as graduate and semicha students, thus lessening the level of my preparation.

With 10 years of hindsight, however, I now recognize that some of my assumptions about high school Gemara education were mistaken. Yes, I spend a good deal of time on high school responsibilities; these can be even more time consuming than I had anticipated because of SAR’s narrative report cards, known as anecdotals. But even with these added duties, my Gemara teaching and my scholarship have been meaningfully enhanced by my primarily interacting with high school students.

Let me explain. My years of yeshiva study trained me to focus exclusively on conceptual questions related to the Gemara, and this conceptual method, known as Brisker lomdus, formed the core of my teaching to advanced students. That was what my students expected to learn, and that was what I taught.

But high school students are curious about so many details of the Gemara that I had previously overlooked. Bright, intellectually curious high school students want the Gemara to “make sense” and are frustrated when a drasha or a line in the Gemara seems arbitrary or defies logic. So while much of my teaching remains rooted in introducing high school students to the world of conceptual learning, I now prepare every line of Gemara informed by the questions I know students will ask. In order to answer their questions, I find that I need to deploy a broader range of methods, including literary analysis, which not only make the Gemara more accessible and enriching to students but have also deepened my own understanding of many sugyot, opening up new vistas of scholarly insight.

A brief example may help. When teaching the laws of the tunneling thief (ba b’machteret, Sanhedrin 72a-72b) to graduate students, I had exclusively focused on the conceptual basis for the permission to kill and the relationship between ba b’machteret and the category of rodef (the pursuing killer). I ignored a number of the Gemara’s more technical drashot because they lacked conceptual payoff. But with high school students, I am challenged to explain the drashot of the Gemara in ways that make sense and attend to each detail.

This attention to detail has yielded greater insight and meaning. In one place, for instance, the Gemara asserts that a beraita ruling that the homeowner may kill the thief only if certain the burglar would kill them refers to a scenario of a father tunneling in to steal from his son. The Gemara differentiates this scenario from another beraita, which refers to all other scenarios, including a son stealing from his father. In the terse language of the Gemara: “Kan b’av al haben; kan b’ben al ha’av.”

My high school students question the opacity of the Gemara’s distinction: Why does the Gemara employ such ambiguous language of father vs. son and son vs. father in differentiating the drashot? It would certainly have been easier for the Gemara to state that one beraita deals with a case where we are confident the burglar will not physically harm the homeowner and the other beraita does not.

After struggling to make sense of this passage with my students, I realized that an additional layer of analysis was required: this line must be read against the backdrop of the larger literary unit of the chapter, Perek Ben Sorer U’Moreh. The mishnayot establish a significant literary connection between the “wayward and rebellious son” and the “tunneling thief” by invoking the shared terminology and legal framework of “nidon al shem sofo” (judged according to their end) as the reason that, in both instances, we may kill the would-be criminal preemptively. The Gemara takes this literary link a step further. In the sugya devoted to the “wayward and rebellious son,” the Gemara asserts (71a) that this law would never be applied because no parents would bring their beloved son to be stoned at court.

This earlier passage is the key to making sense of the tunneling thief distinction. Its specific scenario and language provide a powerful, albeit subtle, literary and thematic allusion to the wayward and rebellious son. The seemingly confounding distinction between a father robbing a son and a son robbing a father underscores the prior message: no parents would willingly kill their son, not if the son were wayward and rebellious, and not if the parents’ circumstances forced them to tunnel into their son’s home to steal property. And the sugyot, when paired, also reinforce that the wayward and rebellious son is capable of anything, including murdering a parent. Ultimately, the distinction doesn’t merely delineate when a homeowner is permitted to kill a burglar. It serves as a powerful paean on the abiding nature of parental love and as a reminder of the harm a troubled child can wreak.

This particular literary insight is merely one example of how teaching high school students can yield enriching readings for teenagers and adults alike. Teaching high school, rather than lessening the quality of my engagement with the Gemara, has actually improved it. Though I was not sure 10 years ago whether the switch to high school was right for me, I now embrace both the challenges and opportunities of high school Gemara education.

Rabbi Hain is the rosh beit midrash at SAR High School, where he directs the graduate beit midrash fellowship, teaches advanced Judaic studies classes and co-directs Machon Siach. He is spiritual leader of YIOZ in North Riverdale/Yonkers. Rabbi Hain was awarded the Daniel Jeremy Silver Fellowship at Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies (CJS) for the 2020-2021 academic year and is a visiting scholar at CJS during the spring 2022 semester. He has co-authored and edited several volumes of Torah and academic scholarship, including a volume in The Orthodox Forum series titled “The Next Generation of Modern Orthodoxy” (Ktav: 2012).

In this column sponsored by SAR High School, Faculty Beit Midrash fellows explore topics related to Jewish education, curriculum and culture. These editorials are condensed from the fellows’ more comprehensive research. Please visit www.machonsiach.org  for more information.

By Rabbi Shmuel Hain,
Rosh Beit Midrash,
SAR High School;
Co-Director, Machon Siach