Dante, Jewish Thought, and the Return of Great Books

Reading as a Path to “Responsible Freedom”

How will human beings be judged after death? Jewish literature, from Tanakh to philosophical and poetic writings over the centuries, contains a range of answers. The Torah posits a system of divine reward for following mitzvot and punishment for sin, though there is little agreement in rabbinic sources about precisely how that system works. Its existence, however, cannot be doubted; for the Rambam, belief in reward and punishment constitutes one of the thirteen foundational principles of faith.¹

A dramatization of the divine reckoning, brief but moving, appears in the Talmud in the form of a series of seemingly simple questions about how each person has lived:

Rava said: When a person is brought to judgment, they say to him, “Did you conduct business faithfully? Did you designate times for Torah study? Did you engage in procreation? Did you anticipate salvation? Did you engage in the study of wisdom? Did you understand one matter from another?” And, nevertheless, if “the fear of the Lord is his treasure,” yes [he is judged favorably], and if not, no.²

Within these seemingly simple questions lie multitudes of details. Nevertheless, the Talmud’s impulse to distill the value of a person’s life into a series of foundational questions underscores that we can attain virtue through everyday life. Honesty in business, setting aside time for Torah study, building a family, becoming educated, and, above all, believing in God and His promise of redemption—these are the hallmarks of a life lived well.

A very different image appears in the vision of judgment in the Inferno, the first of three parts of the Divine Comedy, written in Italianby the fourteenth-century Christian poet Dante Alighieri. In the Inferno, Dante imagines himself descending into hell in search of an understanding of divine justice. With the ancient Roman poet Virgil as his fictionalized guide, Dante envisions perpetrators of every manner of sin suffering through terrifying punishments, each commensurate with the nature of the sin. Each circle of hell is populated by real people whose names Dante’s readers would have recognized. Their sins range from uncontrolled appetites to violence, with the deepest circle of hell reserved for those guilty of the crime of betrayal. Their punishments are described in gory, almost cartoonish detail—a feature that has contributed to force of the Inferno and its longevity as part of the canon of European literature. Dante’s vision makes little space for divine mercy or compassion, as the inscription over the gates of hell proclaims: “Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore”—“Justice,” and justice alone, “moved my high Maker.”³

Illustration of Dante at work, from the manuscript alfa.u.05.19, Biblioteca Estense (1409), https://edl.cultura.gov.it/item/qdjy38drl9.

Dante’s Divine Comedy has long been considered among the “great books” of Western literature, a hotly contested concept. No matter where else it is taught, given the stark differences between Dante’s vision of divine judgment and Jewish literature on the subject, it might seem strange to walk the halls of Yeshiva College and hear discussions of the Inferno. Yet, for the two professors teaching a course on Dante’s work in Spring 2026 and the students enrolled in it, the process of reading and interpreting the Inferno shed light on Jewish questions. As Sruli Friedman, a student in the course who has now graduated, explained,

While Dante is a Catholic writer, and he disagrees with Jewish theological principles on a range of issues, he grapples with religious problems that face Jews and Christians in the same way. A very important part of Judaism is the belief in reward and punishment. And I think Dante grapples deeply with the implications of that belief. What does it mean to be punished for what you’ve done? How does a punishment suit a crime? What are the worst crimes a person can commit? … The poem is really a narrative about achieving human perfection, which is sometimes a painful process. It requires that we see what others have done, how others have failed, and learn from their experiences. That’s ultimately what will lead us to redemption.

Rabbi Dr. Dov Lerner, one of the co-teachers, made the case for reading the Inferno at Yeshiva University after he taught the poem for the first time in 2020: “For Dante himself, the Inferno is indeed only the first step to [Christian] paradise, but for those who do not share his faith and do not seek to ascend his heaven, there is still much to be gleaned from his hell.”⁴ Perhaps the chief example lies in Dante’s depiction of people who refused to take a moral stand when evil reared its head. Among these is Pope Celestine V—yes, Dante envisioned a pope in hell!—who served for only five months in 1294. Overwhelmed by the corruption of the church, Celestine gave up. He stepped down to lead a secluded life, rather than remaining engaged in the fight for good in the world, and he suffers eternal punishment for that abandonment of responsibility. As Lerner explains, for Dante, “walking away from a fight with evil is not an option. It is a vice disconnected from dogma and unrelated to creed,” one therefore accessible and necessary for people of any faith, “an unalloyed evil that fails to grasp the purpose of humanity.”

While Lerner first taught the Inferno on his own, in this second iteration, he co-taught the course with his former-professor-turned-colleague Dr. David Lavinsky. For Lavinsky, too, the process of reading the Inferno in an Orthodox Jewish environment was illuminating:

The poem is a Christian allegory, a work of Christian poetic thought about the soul’s progression to salvation. One of the most exciting things about the course was asking where the Christian allegory applies and where it doesn’t, where we can accept the poem’s allegory while also finding space within that structure to understand something on a psychological and human level.

In Lavinsky’s understanding, engagement with Dante’s work allows readers to sharpen their own beliefs while also taking seriously the poem’s messages to humanity at large. In this respect, it is significant that aspects of the Inferno echo themes from the Hebrew Bible. One example is the notion that moral education cannot be achieved in an instant. The poet’s long journey through hell is an educational process that echoes the Exodus story. Dante himself claimed as much when he explained the Divine Comedy as an analogy to Psalm 113: “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion.” In the poem, the journey through hell serves as an analogy for the redemption from slavery.⁵

Lerner was born and raised in England, where students must, as early as high school, select increasingly narrow areas of education in anticipation of their future profession. His high school studies focused almost exclusively on math, physics, and biblical Hebrew; as he said, “I didn’t write an essay or read a book for years.” After three years of study at Yeshivat Har Etzion in Israel, Lerner enrolled as an undergraduate student at Yeshiva College. It was there that he first gained access to a “liberal education,” a scheme stemming from classical sources such as Plato’s Republic. In Plato’s understanding, free people—those who experience libertas—attain a broad education that allows them to develop wisdom, live well, and contribute to civic life.

As an Orthodox Jew, a community rabbi, and a professor, Lerner keeps these goals of education in mind: “A liberal arts education has always been, for me, about demystifying the otherwise intimidating—about giving access to the text, showing the foibles of the author, and how we can all absorb and assimilate what they were teaching.” In addition, Lerner tries to help students “get under the hood. How is the text working? What is the author doing? Why is this work so effective?” The fact that at least some of Dante’s ideas “rhyme with universal values that speak to YU’s mission” is also significant—values such as “patience, self-restraint, humility, self-awareness, aspiration, a commitment to the material world.”

Listening to Lerner and Lavinsky discuss their work together, I caught a glimpse of what it must have been like to be a student in their course. Brilliant, eloquent, and humble in equal measure, they convey an approach to literature that is curious and open. Lavinsky characterized his role in the class as “both student and professor.” He continued, “It was really wonderful for me to be in the room with someone,” namely Lerner, “who had not only read the poem before and thought about it carefully, but who brought to the experience a whole range of methods and approaches and ideas that I would not have had access to otherwise.” Lerner reciprocated: “I took classes with Dr. Lavinsky as a student at YU, and he left the deepest impression of a pedagogue who is attentive to students and inclusive of every voice in the room. His sobriety, seriousness, and generosity elevate the text and experience.” The collaborative spirit and humility with which Lerner and Lavinsky approach their role clearly affected the class as a whole, as student Noam Schechter explained: “The course was a completely open dialogue. There was a real and genuine interest in what the students had to say. Each class conveyed that we were sitting at the feet of a great work—one that has been studied throughout history and in which people have found meaning throughout the generations.” Through the discussion format of the class, Schechter explained, “we found that we could also analyze it ourselves and find meaning in it.”

Schechter’s description of the Inferno as a “great work” evoked a wider debate: What is a great book? Are there clear, objective characteristics that define the category of great books? Who decides on those characteristics? And does it matter anyway, given the widespread belief that students are not interested in or capable of reading? (I reject this assumption, as discussed in Chapter 12.) Since Mortimer Adler pioneered the Great Books curriculum at the University of Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century and disseminated his pedagogical ideas in How to Read a Book, the role of colleges and universities in preserving and transmitting a canon of great books has been hotly debated, with some critics arguing that the very idea of great books is elitist and therefore something to be jettisoned.⁶

Lavinsky placed these contemporary debates in context by pointing out that Dante worried about the same issues seven hundred years ago:

Dante himself was very much alert to his own status as a poet—in relation to the classical world, to the authority of Virgil and [his poem] the Aeneid. In the Inferno, Dante incorporates Virgil as a kind of supplementary center of perception, forcing the question of what the classics are in relation to Dante’s own poetic work. In other words, he lived at a time when the consolidation of an intellectual tradition under the sign of Aristotle and other authoritative classical figures was extremely pertinent. So much of the poem is working out that question, just as I think we are trying to work out a version of the same question for ourselves.

For Orthodox Jewish students, these debates occupy an ambiguous status. On one hand, the work of Dante and other non-Jewish writers—especially those writing from an explicitly Christian perspective—is not “our” work. There are certainly aspects of that work that must be adopted only with care, while other aspects are clearly incompatible with a Jewish worldview. On the other hand, the notion of a canon is also a Jewish notion; close reading of texts is a deeply Jewish act; and the seminar format of great books classes mirrors that of shiurim in yeshiva. Jewish writers and thinkers helped to constitute the canon of Western literature, and Jewish readers can often find a religious worldview that (to use Lerner’s word) “rhymes” with Jewish ideals. As such, Jews have much of a stake in the great books debates as anyone else, and Jews would do well to claim a seat at the table where those debates are happening.

The engagement of such texts works best when both teachers and students evince the kind of open dialogue and humility that Lerner, Lavinsky, Friedman, and Schechter all described. Lerner and Lavinsky’s areas of research and scholarly publication lie outside the study of Dante, but they teach Dante because of their conviction that it has something important to say—something they want to learn and something they want to help their students learn. Friedman, who is now in his first year at Yale Law School, and Schechter, who plans a career as a psychologist, view great books as vehicles to becoming wise, discerning people who think about big questions. The seminar room becomes a laboratory for the airing and discussion of such questions.

Toward the end of our conversation, Lerner pointed me to a 1975 article by his graduate school mentor, Dr. Michael Fishbane, that considers the role of a teacher who studies a text with his students. On one level, Fishbane explains, teaching a text leads to “an expansion of imagination, a heightening of sensibility, and a mimetic penetration into the life-core of the text. In the process there is an enrichment of one’s ability to share in the creations of the symbolic imagination.” Beyond this, however, is “another moral consideration”:

By providing a model of the homologous understanding of a text, a teacher presents himself to his students as a living being who engages his studies within the framework of value and decision. By focusing on the textual phenomena as realities within the history of consciousness and culture, one cannot factor-out the life-choices and situations embedded in the text. Moreover, by such a role, the teacher also reveals how what he has interpreted has affected him. The student perceives all this and is forced to be similarly engaged. Such a transmission of knowledge is more than a transmission of information. In the ultimate sense, in addition to demonstrating the common purposes and sharings which interconnect both teacher and student, such a teaching bestows the grace of responsible freedom.⁷

This last phrase, “responsible freedom,” is rich in import. Just as the Exodus from Egypt produced a nation ready to bear the yoke of God’s commandments, a true liberal education promotes responsibility toward family, community, society. And liberal education begins with reading.

1. Rambam, introduction to Perek Helek, Mishna Sanhedrin 10:1. See also the survey of views in Baruch Brody, “Jewish Reflections on the Resurrection of the Dead,” Torah U-Madda Journal 17 (2016–17): 93–122; and David Shatz, Judaism and the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026), 172–200.

2. BT Shabbat 31a, quoting the vision of Zion’s glory in Isaiah 33:6.

3. Dante, The Inferno, 3:4.

4. Dov Lerner, “Dante’s Hell and Our Humanity,” Public Discourse (September 13, 2021), https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2021/09/77849/.

5. Dante Alighieri, Letter to Cangrande della Scala, letter 13, in Dante Alighieri, Epistole, I–XIII, ed. Arsenio Frugoni and Giorgio Brugnoli (Milan and Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1996), digitized at Dante Online, https://www.danteonline.it/italiano/opere2.asp. Contrasting views of Dante’s attitude toward Jews can be found in, for example, Jay Ruud, “Dante and the Jews,” in Jews in Medieval Christendom, ed. Kristine T. Utterback and Merrall L. Price, special issue of Études sur le Judaisme medieval (2013): 147–62; and Sylvia Tomasch, “Judecca, Dante’s Satan, and the Dis-Placed Jew,” in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 247–67.

6. Adler’s ideas were first disseminated in Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940). Recent defense of great books that nevertheless acknowledge the problematic nature of the category include Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021) and Naomi Kanakia, What’s So Great About the Great Books? Why You Should Read Classica Literature (Even Though it Might Destroy You) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2026). See also Jennifer Frey, “This Is Who’s Really Driving the Decline in Interest in Liberal Arts Education.” The New York Times (July 17, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opinion/liberal-arts-college-students-administration.html.

7. Michael Fishbane, “The Teacher and the Hermeneutical Task: A Reinterpretation of Medieval Exegesis,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (December 1975): 719–20.