New Chair of the Lobel Core Curriculum Dr. Ido Hevroni on the Future of Studying the Past
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, scholar of Western and rabbinic literature Dr. Ido Hevroni was set to begin teaching The Iliad to Shalem’s incoming freshmen the following day. Months later, when many of those students returned from Gaza and Lebanon, he worried that Homer’s epic about the Trojan War was the wrong text for such a sensitive time. “The Iliad relates in painful detail Achilles’ reaction to the death of his beloved companion Patroclus, for example,” explains Hevroni. “For some of our students, this kind of loss didn’t require a leap of imagination: Close friends had fallen alongside them in battle. How would they feel about book’s descriptions of the psychological impact of combat?”
The answer, he quickly discovered, was deeply appreciative. Again and again, he says, students told him that The Iliad gave them “the language in which to express their experience, both in and since the war,” says Hevroni, whose students’ new reality coincided, this past October, with his own new role as chair of the David and Judith Lobel Core Curriculum. “One student even told me that although the army held multiple sessions with professionals to help soldiers deal with what they’d been through, he hadn’t been able to speak at a single one. He said that our class discussions about The Iliad were the first time he felt able to put words to what happened.”
For Hevroni, this insight—that an ancient Greek text spoke to today’s Israeli soldier in a way that nothing else had—was proof of the abiding value of a curriculum that facilitates direct encounters with the great texts of our civilization. Especially in times of existential crisis—and even, Hevroni insists, in the age of AI. “If I have learned anything as an educator of future leaders in wartime,” concludes Hevroni, “it is the importance of cultivating the intellectual and cultural equipment they carry with them to the front lines and beyond. As the new head of the Lobel Core, it is my challenge and privilege to do just that.”
What do you see as the aims of the Lobel Core, both for the students and the State of Israel?
There’s a metaphor articulated by Jewish legal scholar Ronald Dworkin that, to my mind, does an excellent job of expressing what makes the Lobel Core unique and what it was created to achieve. Dworkin proposes thinking of the legal tradition as a “chain novel,” or a grand narrative written by a succession of authors that reads as if it were written by just one. This is because, in the best jurisprudence, each writer crafts his or her chapter as a continuation of those that came before, as well as a foundation for all the chapters to come. In this context, the criteria for a successful chapter are very specific: it needs to connect to the overall storyline, characters, and spirit of the narrative, while simultaneously advancing the plot. The Lobel Core, by grounding students with the previous chapters in our people’s history, helping them understand the challenges of the present, and encouraging them to take responsibility for their decisions’ impact on future generations, enables tomorrow’s Israeli leaders to write the next great chapter of our narrative as a nation.
You’re taking over as chair of the Lobel Core at a time when knowledge itself is undergoing rapid change. How do you see the curriculum responding to the age of AI?
For starters, we designed a course that brings lecturers from brain science and philosophy together to explore what it will mean to be human in a world increasingly defined by AI. I say “explore” both because that’s the Shalem approach—emphasizing the asking of genuine questions, rather than arriving quickly at the “right” answers—and because, if anything, the AI revolution demands that we ask ourselves what’s truly valuable about humanity.
As to how AI will affect our approach to teaching and learning, just as we’re called upon to define the value of being human, so, too, do we need to determine the value of sustained engagement with the great ideas of the past. For this reason, most of the Lobel Core courses are text-based, many are taught in small seminars, and all are designed to elicit discussion. Our starting point is that the shared pursuit of knowledge—which is the very opposite of the traditional, frontal lecture format—is the best means of attaining wisdom, and if anything, I want to protect this approach from the pressures exerted by today’s information access. For example, if a course requires a baseline of prior knowledge, I’ll advise faculty to have students listen to a podcast or read an essay before class. It can be tempting to bring information-sharing into seminars, but that’s a one-way interaction. My aim is to preserve the sacred spaces we’ve created for intellectual, cultural, and moral formation.
Even before the outbreak of war and the collapse of long-held conceptions, Israel experienced a period of upheaval surrounding the proposed judicial reforms. What do you see as the role of the Lobel Core in moments of national division and uncertainty?
So many of the problems we face here in Israel—as in democracies around the world—stem from our inability to have a real conversation: a mutually respectful exchange of informed ideas on the issues that matter most. Our approach to teaching the Lobel Core models that kind of conversation, with students encouraged to engage in dialogue and even debate in a spirit of openness, curiosity, and, above all, civility. If we can develop the skills of civil discourse in our students, we as a college will position the country to weather moments of unavoidable national discord in a much healthier and stronger way.
To which texts have you turned for insight since October 7th?
I often look to poetry in times of crisis, and one of the things I was surprised to learn after October 7th was just how many Israeli poets used The Iliad and The Odyssey as frameworks for their own creative expression. Haim Gouri, Natan Yonatan, and many others who fought in Israel’s War of Independence looked to Homer’s epics to provide the foundation for their own war-inspired verse. We modern Israelis are part of a long tradition that has struggled to come to terms with the horrors and necessities of war, and like my students, I found this connection both comforting and affirming.
