Today at StartleResponse we give mad, heartfelt props to a formative influencer, an undersung educator of the variegated hordes picking up prereqs at the estimable UNC-Chapel Hill. I speak of G.O.A.T. professor Dr. David J. Halperin (DDJH), who taught an introductory course in Judaism when I was an undergrad back in the day, circa 1990.
Please pause your commitments for a brief moment in time to listen to his personal story of Gaza. You will know your abandonment of TikTok & SnapChat was not in vain when you hear DDJH say:
How do you know what impact a small good thing can have when you throw a stone into the pond? How far do you know its ripples go?
https://www.risk-show.com/story/grace-in-gaza/
My friend Beth & I took Dr. Halperin’s course at Chapel Hill and hinged on every word the man said. He was not a professor who suffered fools, and if you were late for his class, you sat in the penalty box. We are better people for it. (I might even arrive too early for every event now.) And he allowed us to take over a class session to talk about feminism. My friend Beth, on a path to divinity school; another classmate, a lesbian sister studying world religions; and I, careening toward hippiedom, asked him if we could do this, and he said yes! What in the world did he make of us, talking about Lilith and mysticism? Whatever he might have thought, he gave us the safe space to explore our interests and engage our classmates beyond the syllabus.
And so this post of StartleResponse is a tribute to OG educators like DDJH, who make you stop and think, in moments of peril, along the lines of “WWDDJHD?” We pair DDJH’s story of Gaza with the iconic poem by Paul Antschel, “There was earth inside them”:
https://poets.org/poem/there-was-earth-inside-them
