Learning From the Rabbis to Nurture Joy
As a scholar, Dr. Sarah Wolf studies rabbinic legal literature from the perspective of how emotions are represented, often shame or anger. As assistant professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at The Jewish Theological Seminary, she imbues her classrooms with deep emotional awareness, knowing that cultivating joy contributes to an effective learning environment.
In both these roles, Wolf draws on the excitement she felt when she was first exposed to rabbinic texts as an undergraduate literature major at Yale. “My friends encouraged me to take a graduate seminar where we had ‘fun’ decoding the linguistics of Babylonian Aramaic manuscripts of classic stories from the Talmud. We didn’t talk at all about the meaning of the texts, just the linguistics, but the stories themselves captured my curiosity.” Following that intellectual and emotional experience, she entered The Rabbinical School of JTS, came to realize her heart was in academia more than the pulpit, and ultimately completed her PhD at Northwestern.
For the rabbis of the Talmud, said Wolf, emotions are generally linked to action. “The mitzvah to be happy on a holiday is not about how one feels, but what one does, like shaking a lulav. The rabbis of the Talmud were responding to times of crisis and communal change where action mattered a great deal more from a legal perspective than emotion.”
Throughout rabbinic texts, Wolf identifies human emotions alongside—and often within—the legalistic sources. She explores what she calls “the rabbinic legal imagination.” To illustrate the tension between action and emotion, Wolf cited the account in Berakhot 30b of Rabba criticizing his student Abaye for joking around while wearing tefillin.
Abaye was sitting before his teacher Rabba, and Rabba saw that he was excessively joyful. He said to Abaye: It is written: Rejoice with trembling, one’s joy should not be unrestrained. Abaye said to him: It is permissible for me because I am donning phylacteries now, and as long as they are upon me they ensure that the fear of God is upon me.
In this account, Wolf sees Abaye challenging the dichotomy that Rabba maintains between behavior and emotion. He believes that human beings can express spontaneous joy at the same time as they engage in serious tefillah. “The section just before this story introduces the idea that it can’t be expected that everyday people would emulate the supercharged prayer of Hannah or David,” said Wolf. “Here Abaye stresses the recognition that most people have everyday emotions, and these emotions can exist alongside the fulfillment of legal obligations.”
The commandment to feel a certain emotion, such as joy at a holiday or fear during prayer, may have been linked to action in rabbinic literature, but according to Wolf, in contemporary life, we believe we can actually produce deliberate emotions on demand, not necessarily through action but through intention. Wolf pointed to the practice of cultivating gratitude, instituting a deliberate mindset to shape a day-to-day emotional state. Teachers—even those in the Talmud—understood the power of intention. “We know the rabbis thought a lot about what a class looks like and how to create an atmosphere that nurtures orality and memorization,” Wolf said. Similarly, she thinks proactively about the emotional environment of her classroom.
“As teachers, we can work intentionally to help people reach particular emotional states,” she said. “Many students enter a Talmud class with anxiety—almost like what we hear about math anxiety—and that kind of stress can be an impediment to learning.” One strategy Wolf employs to combat the stress over grades is contract grading, where at the start of the semester students agree to complete a certain amount of work and attendance in order to attain the grade for which they individually contract.
Contract grading depends on trust and open communication between teacher and learner, and Wolf has found that when students take responsibility for their own achievements, the pressure of grades is reduced. “Not everyone contracts for an A,” she said. “Students appreciate the freedom to enter the semester with an honest assessment of what they expect to accomplish. JTS students are so motivated and come from so many diverse backgrounds. Contract grading creates some measure of equity and empowers them, makes them comfortable, and enables more pleasure in learning.”
In a Talmud class, Wolf has found that prioritizing hevruta learning—even in the online and asynchronous Introduction to Rabbinic Literature class she teaches for William Davidson students—can remove some of the strong emotions some students bring to a “required” class. She has also found that implementing a thematic approach to the texts she uses encourages students to connect themes to their own personal or professional life.
In the fall 2023 semester when the war in Israel raised the level of anxiety for so many, Wolf recognized that the classroom could become a “welcome reprieve,” where students could tap into the intellectual joy of unpacking a difficult sugya. “Study can be engrossing, even intoxicating,” she said, citing the rabbinic accounts of students who needed to be reminded to go home for Yom Kippur. “Our job as teachers is to create an environment where the joy of learning can stimulate the mind and feed the soul of our learners.”
