Of Whales and War: Reading Melville in Jerusalem
The first time Shalem historian Dr. Asael Abelman read Melville’s classic Moby Dick, he was a sixteen-year-old high-school student living in Jerusalem. In other words, about as disconnected from the world the book describes as it’s possible for a reader to be. Nonetheless, he explains, he found himself in thrall to America’s nineteenth-century whaling industry, both “because it opened a window onto a starkly different time and place, and because the big questions on which it touched felt deeply relevant to my life then and to this day.”
Decades later, however, when Dean of the Faculty Prof. Leon Kass suggested he teach the novel at Shalem, Abelman decided that to grant his students a real feel for the setting and labor of Yankee whaling, he’d need to cross an ocean himself for a study trip to Nantucket.
“As a metaphor for the confrontation between humans and untamed nature, it doesn’t get much better than whaling,” explains Abelman. “But it’s important not to lose sight of the reason those many thousands of whalemen set sail. The barrels they filled with blubber quite literally fuelled America’s rapid industrialization, and I wanted to help my students understand the steep and very concrete price men paid for that advancement.”
To do so, Abelman visited the island’s famed whaling museum, home to the skeleton of a 46-foot male sperm whale—and the tiny 28-foot whaleboat used to hunt the largest creatures on earth. He also spoke with local whaling experts about what it took to turn whaleships into “true sailing factories.” He brought this knowledge back to the Shalem classroom, hoping to help students peel back the layers on a foundational period in Western history. At the very least, he hoped to prevent them from thumbing past the book’s more technical chapters. Looking back, Abelman says he was wrong to worry on that score.
Dr. Asael Abelman
“To these students’ immense credit, they read the entire book. Each week, we had in-depth discussions about the previous week’s reading, and it was clear that everyone had read every chapter and could expound on it confidently,” recalls Abelman. “There were many students who missed classes on account of reserve duty, and yet they still worked hard to keep up with the reading. A few even read the entire book with us while they were stationed in Gaza. They wrote their final papers about reading Moby Dick while fighting a war.”
According to Abelman, the two are more similar than you might think. There are, he explains, the same issues of obedience and authority, and the theme of responsibility toward a mission, both individually and collectively. “When we reached the part where Captain Ahab reveals that his real mission is to kill Moby Dick, students shared their own experiences of receiving and obeying orders in life-and-death situations,” Abelman says.
Finally, alongside personal parallels, students tried to draw connections to contemporary American culture.
“We read the novel during the last, heated months of the elections, and often students used it to try and shed light on what they were reading in the news,” says Abelman. “They wanted to get to the roots of the American culture that’s at once so familiar and foreign to them, and it was wonderful to see them use the work as a starting point for conversations about modern politics.”
Ultimately, Abelman says he was simply gratified that students had the same reaction as his sixteen-year-old self: pure fascination. “At the beginning of the course, I mentioned that Melville first visited Nantucket only after Moby Dick was published,” he says. “That means that he wrote about a place he’d never visited, and yet you feel that he knew it intimately. Students told me over and over how much they loved that fact, that it’s possible to achieve such immense knowledge without direct experience. Their response speaks to their genuine curiosity toward the world, and their desire to expand their horizons. Which is,” he concludes, “not at all unlike the mariners about whom Melville wrote.”
