A few weeks ago, I wrote about a class trip to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish students moved easily through a shared historical space, speaking from within their traditions without defensiveness or performance. What made that possible, I suggested, was narrative capacity: the confidence that one can enter a story without being erased by it.

I became myself through the language of someone who wouldn’t have had anything to do with me. If the poet John Milton had a minyan in his house, he would not include, me, a Jew, in it. Yet largely on account of Milton, I am now an Orthodox Jew living in Israel.

I read Paradise Lost before I read Genesis. I learned Christian theology before I knew anything about Jewish tradition or the Jewish Bible. Only later did I come to understand my own place in a story I first encountered in Milton’s epic, and how that story – once foreign to me – became something i could claim and make my own.

It could have been otherwise. I might have canceled Milton—and the Bible along with him. Milton may have been a Hebraist, but there is scarcely a figure in the Hebrew Bible he does not refashion into a precursor of Jesus. For him, as for Augustine and Luther, the Hebrew Bible becomes a prelude—almost a footnote—to the New. If there were a statue of Milton somewhere in Israel, I might feel tempted to knock it down.

But ultimately, I wouldn’t.

Milton introduced me to my tradition. I was underwhelmed by the post-holocaust Judaism taught in my Reform Temple in the 1970s, so I came into Judaism through the backdoor, learning about prophesy, faith, and revelation through a Puritan revolutionary. While colleagues canceled Milton and every other white male, I discovered I could learn from someone with whom I disagree. Dante in Inferno bows down to Virgil who he calls his ‘master and teacher,’ but he eventually abandons Virgil, the righteous pagan, in Purgatory. Like Dante, I leave my Christian guide, with gratitude, awe, and, reverence, as I try to write my own story.

A Jew can study Paul. A Muslim can interpret the Hebrew Bible. A Christian can enter classical literature. Reading across difference does not require surrender. It requires receptivity, yes, but also the courage to read as yourself. I tell my Jewish and Muslim students: you are going to read the Christian poet, and get out alive. Cancellation, it turns out, comes less from conviction than from fear.

In the cancellation climate, great works are selected only when they align with immediate political priorities. Voice gives way to allegiance. Great works are flattened into moral pamphlets or slogans.

The Hebrew Bible offers another model. It is not a book that resolves questions once and for all, but it multiplies them through argument, interpretation, and competing voices. The Oral Torah, and the poetry, music, and art it inspires, do not close the story. They extend it.

Thomas Mann, whose Joseph and his Brothers, can be read as a 1500 page midrash on Genesis, belongs to the traditions that extend from Sinai. Mann calls the Torah the Great Book – or better, the Infinite Book – because it accommodates many stories without exhausting itself.

This is what I mean by narrative capacity: the ability of a story to hold many voices, resisting both domination and dissolution into critique. It allows people to become themselves through the language of others, without canceling that same possibility for anyone else.

Being the “last professor” does not mean defending an institution or a syllabus. It means holding on to this practice of reading: treating the past as usable, arguing with it without erasing it, and allowing it to change who we become. That is not nostalgia. It is a discipline—and one we can no longer afford to lose.