Chicago Censors Talmud
Teaching on Sex Gets Prof Pilloried
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Forward, April 15, 1994
If Graydon Snyder only knew that he would be convicted of sexual harassment for teaching the Talmud, he might have kept his mouth shut.
But Mr. Snyder, a Bible professor at the United Church of Christ’s Chicago Theological Seminary, could not have foreseen the dangers that lurk in talmudic discourse, and he now stands at the center of perhaps the most bizarre and troubling political-correctness case yet.
In a graduate-level Gospels class two years ago, Mr. Snyder told a story from the Talmud’s Baba Kama tractate, a book that covers tort law. Mr. Snyder says the story, which contains one of the Talmud’s more famous and challenging hypotheticals, helps his students understand the differences between Jewish and Christian notions of sin.
Accidental Sex
A man is fixing the roof of a house, the Talmud says, when he falls onto a woman below and accidentally has sexual intercourse with her. What does the roofer owe the woman, the Talmud asks. Medical expenses? Yes. Pain suffered? Yes. But does he owe her for the indignity she suffered? No, the sagacious guide answers, because the roofer’s intent was not to rape or seduce. Mr. Snyder contrasted this with a lesson found in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in which feelings of “lust in the heart” are considered as sinful as the actual act of adultery.
All this was apparently too much for one of Mr. Snyder’s students, who brought charges against him for creating a hostile sexual atmosphere. The case was heard by the seminary’s Sexual Harassment Task Force, whose members include students, professors and the seminary’s president. The task force found Mr. Snyder guilty and placed him on probation.
In effect, though, the task force also found the Talmud guilty — of being one of the world’s oldest dirty books.
“I asked the task force, ‘Are you aware that this is the Talmud I’m talking about, that I took this story from a Jewish holy book?’ ” said Mr. Snyder, who is Christian. “They indicated that they knew what they were doing.”
‘Offensive Environment’
In a circular distributed last year to the seminary’s students, faculty and staff, the members of the sexual harassment committee wrote that Mr. Snyder engaged in “verbal conduct of a sexual nature” that had “the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work or academic performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working or academic environment.”
Now, Mr. Snyder has sued the school for defamation and continues to defend his telling of the story, calling it “part of the Jewish tradition, which is part of the Jesus tradition.”
“The implication is that a professor at CTS is in trouble if he tells a story that is offensive to a student, even if the story is from his own field of study,” he says.
Mr. Snyder says he detects a note of anti-Semitism in the decision. “By telling me that I can’t tell stories from the Jewish tradition — that’s anti-Jewish,” he says.
Some respected Talmudic scholars agree.
‘Low and Vulgar’
“It is very low and vulgar, what they have done to him, and is reflective of anti-Semitism,” says Rabbi Aaron Soloveitchik, one of the world’s leading talmudic authorities. “This is so strange — everything is sexual harassment today.”
A spokeswoman said that Kenneth Smith, the seminary’s president, would not comment on the case, and attempts to reach the student who brought the charge were unsuccessful.
Mr. Snyder said the student told him shortly after the class that she had a lifetime of bad experiences with men.
“She said that men who have abused her always say they didn’t intend to, and that I buttressed this feeling by telling that story,” Mr. Snyder says.
Rabbinical experts say that some Christians might not grasp that it is not incompatible for the Talmud, a “holy” book, to contain frank and explicit language about a variety of earthly matters.
“It’s real life guide to problems and questions,” says Nosson Scherman, the general editor at Mesorah Publications, a religious-books publisher in Brooklyn and a columnist for the Forward. “The Talmud discusses the sexual obligations of a man to his wife, but even when the Talmud speaks about erections, it’s discussed very clinically.”
Chilling Effect
For Alan Kors, a University of Pennsylvania professor on the barricades of the free speech debate in academia, the issue in the Snyder case is not the Talmud itself, but the chilling effect he says decisions like the seminary’s can cause.
“This is an astonishing case,” says Mr. Kors, who emerged as the foremost defender of the student accused in a case last year at University of Pennsylvania in which a Jewish student was accused of racism for calling a black female student a “water buffalo.” “It technically means that there is harassment taking place wherever the Talmud is taught.”
One of the ironies of the case, Mr. Snyder says, is that the roofer tale is not nearly the most sexually explicit story contained in the Talmud — or in the Bible. “How can I teach the story of Lot or the story of how Bathsheba seduced David?” he asks. Mr. Snyder says he no longer tells the story of the roofer to his classes.
“The school should protect my right to tell these stories,” he says. “It should also protect the Talmud.”