This is an excellent piece. Having received the blessing of a couple of years of Yeshiva University education, I freely admit to bias. It is a brilliant institution out of which the individual gets what they want. The beauty is in the availability.

But I had wonderful rabbis from different quarters express their distaste when I mentioned that I went to YU. Why? What prompts this response?

… There is an argument to say that the insular ultra-orthodox might set their children up to come crashing down and out of observant Judaism. Contact with the outside world is almost inevitable. And when, in adolescence, they stray outside the shtetl neighbourhood, their new gentile friend asks them what they think about evolution, and then has to explain it, and further down the track they discuss biblical criticism (note – this contact is all without having to attend university. The workplace, the park, sports teams etc), they will be flummoxed and confused. The slightest chink in the armour – and it will happen, somewhere, somehow, sometime - boom, the child (G-d forbid) is lost. The current response from the reactionary ultra-orthodox is to keep increasing the facade and intensifying the shield – grow the thick smokescreen-shell around your children and protect their minds from exposure at all costs. Children’s books and DVDs (if allowed) are published containing subtle reinforcements that the real outside world doesn’t exist – or if it does, it’s out to get them.

I truly believe the reactionary behaviour comes from an honest and noble desire to protect themselves and their families, and their students. Plus, we all do it to some degree. 

I recently listened to a shiur in the car on the way home from work. The rabbi, by way of example for something I can’t recall, assured us that we will lie to our kids. Naturally, this stuck in my mind. He said as much as we want to impart our knowledge to our kids so that they can take the baton from right where we stand and start running, from the moment the child is born, we will be faced with the realisation that the child is not immediately equipped to be able to do that. If you try, you will harm it. If you try to teach nuclear physics to a four year old, if she can even remain still and seated the whole time, you will succeed in confusing her, and will have done more hurt than good. So we will lie to them. And it will be good for them. We will tell them first that if they cross the road, then they won’t be here anymore, that mummy and daddy will be very sad, and that they will never see each other again. When she’s older, you will say that if they cross when a car is there, they will die. Then, when they are still older, that when the car is heading towards them, they could die. And so on and so forth. So we see that we teach our children gradually. We acclimatise them to the realities of this world in the same way as we turn up the light slowly to dispell darkness – we want to avoid blinding them.

The problem is that in some quarters, it is increasingly a facade – the ‘lies’ such as they are, the deceit, pile on top of each other until you have your nice wall. In more and more parts of the ultra orthodox world, as each generation becomes woefully unable to explain what the outside world resembles, each subsequent generation, when they mature, find that the only way to protect their own kids is to become more and more insular. Especially since the world around them keeps finding new ways to penetrate deeper into their lives. The internet is a perfect example. Banning computers in the home is the typical response. And so the downward spiral of ignorance and the blunting of our intellectual tools and consequently our ability to help the world around us. And any good we have from Torah is necessarily never shared with the gentile nations. I cite as an example the statement allegedly made by the rabbi of the Breuers community in Washington Heights at I believe the 200th anniversary of the birth or passing of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsh a’h. He suggested, in response to one of Rav Hirsch’s descendents, that the way of Hirsch is no longer open to us. Saying that only Hirsch and perhaps his generation were on the level able to handle the intensity of a life bridging both worlds, he says that Torah im Derech Eretz – Torah study coupled with the ways of the world as understood by Hirsh, is no longer an option for us in a society as open and pervasive as America. He believes we must stick only to Torah study and limit or forget the ways of the world. Forget working.  

One could argue citing the popular stories that the Chazon Ish was able (and willing) to advise on surgeries from his studying tractate Hullin. I will answer with the question that even if this was the case, why is this not said of any other scholar? If true, then it’s attainable by the minority.

So the danger is such that as soon as the child realises that one major fact they were told was and is a lie, they will see that the entire metaphoric wall doesn’t actually exist. They will percieve the intellectual cost of their being sheltered, and, they will throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they reject any demarcation separating them from the rest of humankind. To their detriment as both humans and as Jews.

The first hurdle to overcome is to reinforce the primacy of the notion that to be a light to other nations they have to understand you. Which means you have to know how to communicate to them, in a way they will not misunderstand. This means, initially, that a language other than Yiddish might be helpful.

In order to understand you, you will have to come into contact with them – either via the internet, via work water-cooler discussions, or any other forum or opportunity. And these should be eagerly desired meetings (however daunting). Each is a chance to change the perception of the Jew from money-loving, horn-endowed, sexually corrupt aliens who also happen to all be excellent tailors and lawyers – to people-and-Earth-loving, responsibility endowed, sexually sensitive, private and caring cousins who happen to be interested in growing and nurturing you, your family unit, your society in any positive way possible, including materially. And we just happen to be obsessed and fixated with the law, yes – the proper paths of thought, speech and movement on this physical plane.

The concomittant step is to be the ones to gradually expose our children to the ideas, ideals and social mores of other nations. This is one of the heaviest, and time-expensive responsibilities (in an ever time-poor society) we have been largely shirking for hundreds of years, with some exceptions.

To return to my question: why is Yeshiva University maligned in certain Orthodox circles? Some say it’s jealousy, at their being able to bridge both worlds. I think that many see the produce of YU and are worried. And there is some truth to their concern. It is a very, very difficult challenge to live a fully-fledged, halachically sound life in the real world of work and technology and foreign cultural values and influences. But it is the challenge we have to attempt to meet. To go too far one way (secular, assimilated, essentially disappear and cease being Jewish – see R’ Shmuley’s piece) or the other (extreme insulation, denial of reality, etc) are not options. The sacrifices either way for a life of relative simplicity are in their own ways intellectually dishonest, and a betrayal of our heritage and of our purpose.

But one must admit to the sheer impressiveness of the challenge. As soon as a modern orthodox Jew thinks it’s a piece of cake, he’s heading for trouble. We have to be switched on. And in the game. And dedicated to learning. In Tractate Baba Bathra early on there is a discussion on the correct exposition of a particular sentence in Song of Songs. Reish Lakish expounds it according to Rava and says that being Jewish and belonging to the nation is an initial wall separating us from becoming just like everyone else. I’d imagine he did not mean just a secular Jew – he meant a committed, observant Jew. Further, he expounds the guardtowers of Judaism as being the synagogues and study halls we faithfully attend. I feel to my core that were it not for the Torah knowledge I’ve been literally blessed with, I might have surrendered to the challenge long ago. Without dedication to and a genuine love and yearning for knowledge and the experience of learning Halachah and Gemara etc, you cannot expect to achieve real Judaism. This is alluded to in the bunch of first questions we are asked when souls pass on – ‘did you fix time to study Torah?’ Not, did you dedicate every minute to Torah. Did you lock in a time with a study buddy? This is essential. For men and women.

We have to live in both worlds, tricky and demanding as it is. Anything else is crude and artificial. I can’t live that life. And whether we call it modern orthodoxy or something else, that’s the only life to live. As many a great sage did.

And I thank my teachers, my family and my friends and especially Yeshiva University, for helping me clarify this realisation. Enjoy this piece from Rabbi Boteach.

No Holds Barred: Modern Orthodoxy offers alternatives to reactionary Judaism

Aug. 10, 2009
Shmuley Boteach , THE JERUSALEM POST
This past Shabbat a Jerusalem parking lot just across the road from where I was staying, and which was open on the holy day, drew approximately 500 haredi demonstrators. One of the people caught in the demonstration was a secular Israeli friend who drove to see me with his wife and children. The demonstrators called his wife a shikseh.

Little did they realize that this former student of mine from Oxford gave up lucrative opportunities to make aliya, and contributes mightily to the Jewish state. I was not surprised, therefore, when some of the eight Israeli soldiers embedded in the Mayanot-Birthright group I am leading voiced distaste for Judaism and hostility to Orthodox Jews.

Haredi Jews who call a Jewish mother a shikseh in the presence of her two tender children are religious frauds, and an abomination to Judaism.

Which is why I am increasingly turning to Modern Orthodoxy. This year I will have three children studying at Yeshiva University in New York. The institution is a miracle, a place of academic learning committed to Jewish life, observance, and influence.

So why do so many Orthodox Jewish students not even consider YU?

TO BE sure, I have always been a Jewish universalist. We Jews ought to be immersed in the world, spreading our values and influencing its cultures. But that can’t happen if we don’t first internalize an impregnable Jewish identity, and this in turn only comes with total immersion in a Jewish environment in our formative years. In essence, to be a universalist you must begin as a provincial. No man or woman who plans to impact the world as a Jew can do so quite as effectively as when obtaining a top education in a holistic Jewish environment.

I am blessed to serve as a rabbi to both Jews and non-Jews, spreading Jewish values to a world at twilight. But I could never do what I do had I not first spent many years immersed in Jewish academies of higher education, in my case Chabad Yeshiva.

My children will choose their own paths, but I wish for them to remain observant and committed ambassadors of their people. And that’s why I send them to Yeshiva University, to obtain a Jewish education that is uncompromisingly Torah-based, yet forward-looking.

So why do so many bright, committed, even Orthodox Jews reject places like YU and pursue Harvard, Yale or Princeton instead? The majority would argue that the Ivy League is second to none. But a university is only as good as the students who attend. If the top Jewish students did not immediately dismiss a Jewish institution, it too would be in the very highest ranks. And Yeshiva University is already widely respected.

I suspect there is something else at work – one of our foremost failings – the unending search for non-Jewish legitimacy.

Whatever issues we have with our own identity are curiously compounded when it comes to academic life. Sigmund Freud famously told his Jewish disciples in Vienna that he had to make Carl Jung his successor or psychoanalysis would be dismissed as “a Jewish science.” Einstein may have helped establish the Hebrew University in Palestine, but he resisted all entreaties to leave Princeton and teach in Jerusalem instead.

I remember a strange conversation that took place between me and Yitzchak Rabin, of blessed memory, a year before his assassination. I had travelled to Israel to book him as a speaker for our Oxford L’Chaim Society. He asked me who was inviting him, the mainstream Oxford students or the Jewish students? It was a question I had not been asked by the countless non-Jewish luminaries honored to be my speakers, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Professor Stephen Hawking to Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

THE JEWISH community subdivides, in general, to three camps. There is the assimilated-secular, the insular-observant, and the modern-committed. The vast majority of those halachic Jews who comprise the third camp call themselves Modern-Orthodox – Jews who thrive in secular society. But the only way the model can work is if it is grounded not only in Jewish commitment, but in Jewish self-respect.

When I was the rabbi at Oxford there were many passionately observant Modern Orthodox American students. Yet a great many took off their yarmulkes after just a few weeks. They felt marked, different. So what was the big deal about removing an identifying symbol as long as they kept kosher, came to shul, and studied Torah? But they were wrong. The removal of the symbol was invariably followed by a weakening of observance. What they discovered is that while their Jewish heart beat passionately, their Jewish spine was still rickety. A considerable number went on to become world famous, but are no longer involved in Jewish life. Had these students simply been given a few more years in a Jewish environment, they would have been ready to go into the world without being compromised by it.

Rabbi Boteach is in Israel for Mayanot-Birthright, leading 50 young American Jews on their first visit. His upcoming book, The Blessing of Enough, will be published on September 8. www.shmuley.com