A guest post by CA
[Realted]
I will never forget an address by Rabbi Reuven Ben Shimon at a Hareidi Reform Jews of America convention on the topic "Living a Life of Ruchniot amidst Gashmiut." I had never before heard Rabbi Ben Shimon, and I practically jumped out of my seat when he thundered: This topic represents a fundamental mistake. There is no ruchniut amidst gashmiut. To the extent that a person is living in the world of gashmiut he is removed from ruchniut. (I jumped out of my seat because I hadn't been aware that Reform Jews actually knew Hebrew.)
I was reminded of those words recently on a recent trip to Cincinnati, where I had a rare opportunity to speak with a rabbi whose wisdom has always impressed me. In the course of our conversation, he asked me, "What would you say is the greatest threat to Judaism today?" I leaned forward eagerly, confident that he would mention one of my favorite subjects. But I must admit that his answer would not have been on my top ten-list.
"Torah Study," turned out to be the winning answer. And my friend's central criticism was similar to that of Rabbi Ben Shimon: the Torah Study industry takes what should be one of the ultimate spiritual experiences of every Jew's life and encases it in a thick wrapper of materialism. Read the advertisements, he told me: "Yeshivas Hagdol" right next to "We look your family's lifestyle over with a fine-tooth comb" "48 hours of geamra study each day" next to "Forget about learning enough to get a professional job."
Singsong chanting of the texts, the rabbi forcing on you only one possible meaning of an incomprehensible passage, distortion of the author's original meaning, and a hostile response to skeptical questions are de rigueur for the full Torah learning experience experience. And many throw in exotic locations – Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Brooklyn, Monsey, Baltimore, and Cleveland. What exercised my friend the most was the way that well-known community leaders are impressed into service in the advertisements, as if to put an imprimatur of ruchniut on the activities.
My friend was raised in a particularly biting style of mussar, and he was just warming to his subject. He described the intense stares by pale-faced stooped-over lads with Coke-bottle glasses when the old man with the long white beard steps up to the podium and starts lecturing in a soft voice and an accent that can't be understood. School administrators have to put security guards around the room, lest some apikorshe schlub from the audience jump up to challenge the rabbi's conclusions.
"The chilul Hashem alone," he said, would be reason enough to close the shiur extravaganzas. What does the gentile cleaning staff at the schools and Arstcroll Publications come to think of frum Jews? That they care only about pilpul? What impression does it make to see a group of pot-bellied men in cheap knock-offs of Armani suits and shiny black shoes trying to make sense of the Babylonian Talmud?
He related to me the story of one local frum boy who had accompanied his father to a college fair. They found that all the college representative wanted to talk about were his math, English, and Chemistry grades. On the way out, the boy asked his father why they didn't seem to care that he could regurgitate the interpretation of the 20 blatt gemara his rebbe taught him. He had never in his life seen, much less participated, in real education.
That boy, my friend lamented, cannot possibly connect to what Chazal teach in Pirkei Avot, that Torah learning must be accompanied by learning enough to make an honest living. He does not learn the idea that the Jewish education advocated by Chazal in Avot parallels an inner process of removing the se'or she'b'isa – the physicality and inner materialism that holds us back in our performance of Hashem's commandments. His overweening pride at being able (forced?) to memorize arcane religious texts has nothing to do with destroying the chametz either within or without.
When we gather in our homes around a volume of Spinoza, and contemplate the deeper meaning of the Documentary Hypothesis, we link ourselves to all the generations of our ancestors. That if our ancestors could return to observe our studying of secular subjects, they would recognize their descendants and feel comfortable joining us. It is more doubtful they would recognize us gathered around right-wing hareidi yeshiva – even if we were wearing a shtreimel and bekeshe. In fact, with the exception of a few of them who lived in parts of Eastern Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, most of them would find the streimel and bekeshe pretty outlandish.
EVEN MY FRIEND recognizes that there are many perfectly legitimate reasons that families might want their sons to study in a haredi yeshiva. Not every Jew understands the depth of secular learning, and some need the structure to their lives, yet are unable to get an appointment to West Point or Annapolis, or even qualify to join the Army in the enlisted grades (those Coke-bottle glasses, again!).
For such cases, there should be alternatives. But it is not these families that are fueling a hundred million dollar industry, or who have transformed Jewish education into a kosher version of of a Taliban Madrassa.
The issue of Yeshivish extravaganzas is, in truth, just one more aspect of an ongoing tension in modern Orthodox life. Rabbi Oscar Meyer Wise once described to me the pre-war Jewry of his youth. During the Three Weeks, he said, people followed the bare minimum ritual requirements, but didn't get too worked up about something that, after all, happened almost 2,000 years ago. Today, however, Jews look at good news, and confidently predict that disaster is just around the corner.
Jews who can really feel the destruction of the Bet HaMikdash are much more common today. On the other hand, Rabbi Wise remembers, while most of the younger generation in his day was in headlong flight from Yiddishkeit, at least they were willing to work for a living. Today, however, we have made it so much easier to be a frum bum. Our kids can enjoy most of the pleasures of their secular counterparts, and no longer feel the need to rebel to such an extent. Religious observance may be more internalized than formerly, and at least most of our youth remains within the fold. Unfortunately our institutions that have done this have been financed by guilt-tripping all those alienated youth of the former generation who fled from Yiddishkiet, but went out, earned a secular degree and made a good living.
We ask our rabbanim and roshei yeshiva to elevate our understanding of Jewish Education to the point that a series of horrible, overproduced, mistranslated seforim with one-sided commentary is self-understood to be a contradiction to the freedom from materialism that Jewish education celebrates
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