Forgiving My Advisor (Part I)

In the previous post, I discussed some of my mistakes in how I approached pursuing a doctorate. Now I would like to turn to what my advisor did to me. Graduate students in their 20s can be expected to not know what they are doing precisely because this is something unlike anything they have done before. This is why graduate students are supposed to have advisors who know what they are doing as they have done this before. Ideally, they should have already guided other doctoral candidates through the process. At the very least, they should have written a dissertation themselves. Advisors are not supposed to make things worse for students than if they had been allowed to proceed on their own. 

I chose to come study with my advisor because he was a specialist in Jewish History. I wanted to work on an Abarbanel dissertation (either on his views on Kabbalah or Messianism) and my advisor initially said he could work with me on that. (He would later lie about this fact even though I had the email in which he said this.) I did not concern myself with the fact that I was going to be his first doctoral student. The university he taught at offered me funding, so he clearly wanted to work with me.

I should add that there were several non-academic factors as well that appealed to me and ended up taking on more weight than they should have. We had a number of friends in common and people I respected told me to go study with him. I honestly liked him and thought we would get along in addition to working on my dissertation. Considering these things, it seemed only reasonable that I should take the path forward and start working with my advisor. I would do the coursework, write the dissertation, and embark on my academic career. It did not occur to me to wait a few years, while doing something else, in the hope that a better option might come around.

It was only after I committed myself to come work with him that my advisor pulled a surprise on me. While he initially had told me that I could do a project on Abarbanel, he now informed me that he would not agree to something that narrowly focused on Abarbanel. For that matter, he was not going to let me write anything that was simply about Jewish thought. He insisted that I write on some sort of grand topic that would appeal to people outside of the field of Jewish History. He also told me to write my dissertation and then he would put together a dissertation committee. Being young and inexperienced, I had no idea that both of his instructions were the exact opposite of what one is supposed to do.

My advisor recommended Norman Cohn’s Pursuit the Millenium to me, which still is one of my favorite works of history. Cohn wrote about medieval Christian peasants using millenarian ideology to rebel against the Feudal order. His goal was to undermine the Whiggish notion of the Middle Ages where peasants meekly accepted the hierarchal order of their day and it was only during the Enlightenment that people developed a political consciousness. What I took from Cohn is the idea that messianism is not just a religious doctrine but also a political ideology. This gave me the idea of writing about Jewish Messianism as something political. This would be going against Gershom Scholem and most Jewish Historians who have seen Judaism from the Destruction of the Second Temple to the rise of Zionism as lacking politics.

My advisor liked my idea for a dissertation but insisted that even this was too narrow and that I needed to also write about parallel examples within Christianity and Islam. Fairly quickly, I found myself trapped in a project that I was not qualified to handle. Furthermore, I was socially isolated where I was living with few dating opportunities. This led me to depression, which in turn, made it difficult to work on the dissertation, which only furthered my depression. My main relief from depression was writing this blog, which most certainly did not mean making progress with the dissertation.  

To be fair to my advisor, he is an excellent teacher and I learned a lot from him. In addition to introducing me to the work of Norman Cohn, he gave me a copy of Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic. I still cherish the memories of sitting in his office doing a private study session on Christian mysticism, reading people like St. Teresa de Avila, St. John of the Cross, and Jacob Bohme. I think it was because I held my advisor in such high esteem, that I did not initially blame him for my difficulties, even though I realized after a year or so that I should not have been given a dissertation project like the one he gave me. I simply accepted that he had made an honest mistake and it was my job to plow through and make the best of it.