A Midrash Demanding the Fifth Son

This paper is concerned with the question of how to educate novices, student‐teachers in particular, so that the world (of schools, of tradition) can be revitalized against the mortality of its inhabitants. To address this concern, an intertextual composition is woven of strands from the biblical books of Genesis and Deuteronomy, from the world of fact (student‐teaching) and fiction (a novel), and from diverse interpretive traditions, to make and support a plea for letting the new in attentively. A hermeneutic approach ‘toward the fact of natality’ entails assuming particular responsibility for the renewal of a common world and for preparing the young for this task.