Michael Zank

On May 17, 2014, Jennifer Medina published an article in the NYTimes that may forever change the way we approach the teaching of literature in the college classroom. It deprived us of our innocence. Under the heading, “Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm,” Medina points to a new form of self-censorship, called trigger warnings, that instructors are now widely supposed to offer students before exposing them to texts (in the wider sense of text that includes movies, for example) that might set off psychological triggers by describing or depicting racism, rape, violence against women, suicide and other types of behavior that may cause the reader or viewer to relieve traumatic experiences of their own.

Before we dismiss this trend as political correctness or a curb on free speech, we should admit that images, especially moving images, but also words and texts can hurt. Sometimes our own words hurt others. They often do so inadvertently. This is more than regrettable. It is a cause for concern. Aren’t we to provide a safe environment for our students and interlocutors, including those who may be traumatized or offended by things that ordinarily roll of our tongues without giving us pause? Perhaps that is the most valuable aspect of this conversation on the limits of speech. It gives us pause. It makes us think before we speak. Is this not what every decent wisdom tradition has always demanded?

Exposing students to graphic violence or pornography without warning and without a clear pedagogical rationale is inappropriate, though there may be a grey zone. I once inadvertently offended students in a class on Judaism when I read an excerpt from Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (without proper warning). I thought of it as a humorous illustration of Jewish family life, of stereotypes of ethnic family life. But that’s not how I introduced the excerpt, which was my mistake. There are many ways to offend students, and not all are pedagogically justified. Part of the problem is the lack of shared assumptions. Students are often ill prepared for a lecture that uses irony or sarcasm to get a point across. Powerpoints are never sarcastic.

When you teach a text or subject that is dear to students’ hearts, such as the Bible, for example, you are likely to offend. Perhaps it helps to start out with a trigger warning. This could run as follows.

Students should be advised that in this class we will be reading texts that contain offensive material. This includes fratricide (Cain and Abel), incest (Lot and his daughters), child sacrifice (the Binding of Isaac, Jephta’s daughter), rape (Dina at Sichem), adultery (David and Bathsheba), graphic sexual imagery (Ezekiel 16, a speech about Jerusalem as a harlot), erotic imagery mentioning body parts (Song of Songs), suicide (Judas Iscariot), divinely sanctioned genocide (passim), divinely sanctioned spearing or hacking to pieces (Pinhas, Samuel), implied homoeroticism (David and Jonathan), gay-bashing (Lev 18:22), lurid lists of forbidden sexual relations (Leviticus 18:6-18), masturbation (Onan), Satan (1 Chr 21, Book of Job, the New Testament), a deity trying to kill his own prophet (Exodus 4:24), angelic sex (Gen 6), a divinely ordained mass drowing of humanity (Flood story), and violent images about the end of the world (passim).

I realize just how problematic the Bible really is every time I teach it. Once I assigned Ezekiel 16 – the prophet’s derisive review of Jerusalem’s history from its origins as a bastard child of Amorite and Hittite parentage to its impending destruction at the hand of its “lovers” – in a course on Jerusalem. I advertised the passage as my favorite biblical text about Jerusalem. When we read it in class the next day – more precisely, as I was reading it aloud and commented on it – I was disturbed at the text’s implications, and at that moment I no longer knew why I had called it one of my favorite passages. Before we read the text I had shown the trailer of a film about Jerusalem’s only gay bar, a place where Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims, secular and religious Jews, men and women, gay and straight all meet as equals, where it does not matter what they are. I showed the clip because it defied the sanitized images we had watched the day before when we saw the most recent National Geographic feature on Jerusalem at the Omni IMAX theater at the Museum of Science in Boston, which had ended on the note that it was not yet time for the three communities, Jews, Christians, and Muslims to meet. This view was presented by the three young women who served as guides to their respective communities. At the end of the film they convened at the same spot in Jerusalem’s Old City without interacting. The film about the gay bar was the perfect antidote. Here everyone met everyone, on the grounds of a shared human need for acceptance and community. Some students responded uneasily (by misplaced laughter) to the display of gay sexuality. Others expressed surprise that this kind of thing existed in Jerusalem, though they imagined that gays might be more comfortable in Tel Aviv. Most found it shocking to hear that during a gay pride parade a Jewish orthodox man attacked marchers with a knife.

As it turns out, Ezekiel provides a script for knifemen and religious extremists. He condemns Jerusalem for its pluralism. He takes it for granted that the proper handling of an adulterous wife is that she be stripped naked in public and stoned. The Bible is an uncomfortable anthology. A vademecum that always needed to be sanitized by the Jews and Christians who call it sacred. Sacred sometimes means scary.