If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem with Rabbi Rocklin

Описание: Have we forgotten Jerusalem, even as we remember Athens and Rome? Classical education has rightly focused on the Greco-Roman tradition and its medieval branches, and has also inspired students with an understanding of how Christianity built the West. We often fail, however, to recognize that the West was born through the transfiguration of Greco-Roman culture through a Jewish lens. The Greeks saw man as capable of searching for himself, but it was the Jews who insisted that God Himself is in search of man, giving us an imperative to join the search.

This covenantal understanding allowed for a fundamentally new view of man and provided humanity with a new sort of wonder: the realization that, while but dust and ashes, man fills the role of a partner in divine creation. What could be more wondrous than the implication that man stands at the center of creation - indeed, that every man can say, as the ancient Jewish sages put it, that the world was created for me? It was this poetic intuition that formed the background for the development of Christianity. Nevertheless, classical schools usually fail to impart to our students even a basic knowledge of Judaism, let alone a sense of the divergent worldviews held by Jews and pagans.

This talk will offer an explanation of how our civilization depends upon developments that originate in Judaism, before discussing opportunities to round out classical education with a more thorough treatment of Judaism and the Jewish people in the ancient Near Eastern, Hellenistic, and Roman worlds.