rafa kern

Advisor: Ari Y. Kelman

Abstract: The study of texts plays a central role in religious the world over, and while texts have been a focus of religious studies since its inception as an academic discipline, how religious practitioners study texts is still a fledgling area of research. The limited research in this area has pointed out that religious communities conceive of their reading practices in ways that privilege either personal significance (Bielo, 2009; Luhrmann, 2012) or communal coherence (Crapanzano, 2000; Heilman, 2002). The scholars who study these communities have pointed out that the interplay between the personal and the collective is much more complex and interesting, but they have focused on the ways that collective reading practices and shared interpretations shape individual meanings. This dissertation centers the role of individual meanings in collective meaning making, asking: how do readers make public meaning of the texts with which they engage in religious contexts, and what role do personal meanings play in that process?

To answer this question, it zooms into the case of adult liberal Jews reading Talmud at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, where readers explicitly sought to establish meanings that were both shared and personal. The study is built on participant observation of a full-length “Year Program” at Pardes with a focus on the advanced class. I supplemented observations and field recordings with three types of interviews: semistructured interviews inspired by Levy & Hollan’s person-centered interviewing (Hollan, 2005; Levy & Hollan, 2015), read-alouds (Ericsson & Simon, 1984; Gottlieb & Wineburg, 2012), and stimulated recall interviews (Calderhead, 1981; Dempsey, 2010;Lyle, 2003). Analysis was conducted using microethnography (see Bloome et al., 2022; Garcez, 2008).

The first chapter establishes the theoretical foundation, proposing that meaning is about the location of a sign in a network of pre-existing association, some of which are public and some of which are private. The second chapter uses theories of embedded and extended cognition to describe how readers make meaning collectively by building shared networks of resources. Chapter Three asks how come different meanings are relevant for different people and argues that this has to do with readers’ conceptions about the texts they are reading and their personal circumstances. Chapter Four focuses on the conceptions of liberal Jewish Talmud study, arguing that, unlike the meaning making scholars have described in Orthodox Jewish or Evangelical Christian communities, readers actively strive to make their personal meanings public, thereby expanding the public associations of the text to encompass their personal experiences.This allows these readers to participate in the public meaning and engage fully with the text while also maintaining the integrity of their experiences.This dissertation seeks to contribute to academic conversations about reading in religious contexts, reading more broadly, and Jewish education by describing in detail the processes of meaning making that enable liberal Jewish readers of Talmud to actively make meaning in ways that are collective but that spring from their personal experiences.