On Original Sources

I thought this op-ed in the New York Times was a fascinating defense of learning sources in the original languages, and I think a lot of what the author says is very applicable to our situation as Jewish educators. For example, he writes, in support of learning ancient texts:

But what they gain is a glimpse into the past that provides a fuller, richer view of the present. Know Latin and you discern the Roman layer that lies beneath the skin of the Western world. And you open up 500 years of Western literature (plus an additional thousand years of Latin prose and poetry).

This, it seems to me, is our argument as well: learn the sources because they inform our present realities. We don't learn our texts just because they are old and they are ours, we learn them because the past has something to say to the present about the future. That is beauty of being in a chain of a tradition; the link to the past is not what defines us, it is what informs us. Read the whole piece.