It was so off-Broadway that you would have needed the Hubble Telescope to locate Times Square. There were no glossy playbills, no names in lights. But the student-written play, presented last semester as part of the Yeshiva College Arts Festival, had packed the auditorium at Stern College’s Beren Campus. The two-week student-run festival is a yearly event, anticipated each spring as a chance for student artists to showcase their work.
I was pleased: I had helped to organize the festival, and that night we had a full house. The lights went up; the narrator took the stage and began to read. The actors made their first entrances. But then, in time with the developing scene, the Assistant Dean rose from her seat and walked deliberately toward the two event planners in charge of the production. And before anyone could say “censorship,” the play was prematurely over.
I was outraged. Later, I would jeopardize the future of the entire festival through my vocal complaints to the dean’s office. What had happened to warrant such abrupt intervention? The Assistant Dean objected to the immodest situation presented by the production: male and female actors onstage at the same time. In interceding, she acted on the authority of YU policy. She also stepped on one of the many fault lines that currently threatens to split YU apart.
The drama is over, but there is plenty more to see–and I’ll be your guide. As a senior at Yeshiva College and an alumnus of the Modern Orthodox Maimonides High School in Boston, I am a veteran of the Modern Orthodox world. And from this vantage point, I will guide you on a tour of YU: an institution that is standing at a critical crossroads –and with it, the next generation of Modern Orthodoxy.
Founded in 1915, Yeshiva University is the largest Modern Orthodox institution in the world. It includes an undergraduate program divided between an uptown men’s school and a midtown women’s school, and several graduate programs, including the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, the Wurzweiler School of Social Work and several schools of advanced Jewish study and smicha– rabbinic ordination.
YU’s unique philosophy, known as Torah U’Madda—equal devotion to Toraic and secular study–was conceived in large part by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, affectionately called the Rav, who also nearly single-handedly founded Modern Orthodoxy itself. A prolific writer and educator who received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Berlin, the Rav was one of the twentieth century’s dominant Jewish theologians. He was the Chief Rabbi of Boston from the early 1930’s until 1993, and the rosh yeshiva (Dean) of YU’s rabbinic school from the early 1940’s until 1985. Torah U’Madda was a controversial philosophy during his time, but the Rav lived the life he preached. He drew on a deep arsenal of “sacred” and “profane” sources in all of his speeches, fostering a happy matrimony between the secular and the religious.
Today, YU is still nominally the flagship of Modern Orthodoxy and the prime educational institution for the best and the brightest of that movement’s youth. But since the Rav’s death in 1993, a small group of his students have claimed the Modern Orthodox legacy–the same group that is now the most powerful religious faculty at YU. These rabbis still cite the Rav’s authority–but for purposes that often have little to do with his original vision.
Instead, YU’s rabbinate is increasingly haredi–religiously observant or right-wing–and they justify their own teachings by claiming insider knowledge of the Rav’s true intentions. During the Rav’s time, the explanation goes, the Jewish community was simply too assimilated to be won over by a strict philosophy of religious observance. As a first step, the Rav therefore advocated a dual embrace of the secular and the sacred–to be observed only until a truly religious lifestyle was feasible. Rabbi Norman Lamm, the YU Chancellor, recently employed this logic in critiquing the Maimonides School–intended to serve as a model Modern Orthodox high school–for being coeducational. According to Lamm, the Rav acted “out of necessity” in making the school coed; the move was actually “a concession” to an insufficiently devout community. These arguments abound at YU. Claiming to speak for the Rav, YU’s rabbinate is driving an ever-greater wedge between the secular and the religious–and may soon split off from the secular altogether.
Uptown, in Washington Heights near Manhattan’s northern tip, is YU’s men’s campus. There, on Amsterdam Avenue and 185th Street, is the YU cafeteria. Venturing inside, the first thing you’ll see is a student body that appears to attend two different schools entirely. The crowd is all-male, but half are wearing jeans and shorts, while the other half sport dress shirts, dark pants, and suit jackets. This difference is not just superficial: the YU student body is divided more or less down the middle. For about half of its students, YU is the most secular institution they could convince their parents to fund; for the rest, it is the most religious institution their parents will tolerate. Factor in YU’s prominent reputation in the collegiate world, and you account for the smattering of students who enrolled on the merits of its U.S. News ranking. The result of this combination? Few YU students value–or even consider–the Torah U’Madda philosophy at all.
“Unfortunately, too many YU students consider college merely a means to an end, and not an opportunity for intellectual pursuit for its own sake,” says Alexander Chester, an undergraduate who transferred out of YU a year ago and now attends the University of Pennsylvania. “The quality of [YU’s] liberal arts academia—with a few strong exceptions—is lacking.” And it’s not just for lack of student interest that the university’s humanities departments leave something to be desired. YU has no major in the arts at all, and even in the humanities subjects that do offer majors, the strain of taking both secular and religious courseloads means that most students have little time to devote to their secular studies.
Religious studies, on the other hand, are a much more integral part of life at YU. Based on a pre-admission test of their Talmudic prowess, students are placed in the Mazer Yeshiva Program (MYP), the Beis Midrash Program (BMP), the Isaac Breuer College (IBC), and the James Striar School (JSS), in descending order of textual grasp. These programs often define a student’s identity in and out of the classroom, and once they’ve been assigned to one, students are able to transfer only if they are willing to face a blizzard of bureaucracy. Not surprisingly, inter-program migration is rare.
More importantly, many students take only one side of their courseload seriously. Though there are core requirements in both religious and secular studies, one can easily circumvent either: the secular departments offer a variety of “joke” courses, while the religious program runs daily from 9am to 3pm and is non-credit–which many take as license to sleep until 4.
Yeshiva University has three main dormitories: Rubin Hall, Muss Hall–where most of the religious students live–and Morgenstern Hall, affectionately known as the Morgue. Security guards stand watch at all three, and women are banned from entering.
The student body housed in those residence halls is diverging into two social groups that are increasingly alienated from each other. While those in MYP, who represent about three quarters of YU undergraduates, are becoming increasingly haredi, those
in the other programs are shifting to the left. This latter change means that YU, whose rule-books call for the expulsion of students who violate Shabbat from the dorms, is suddenly being forced to grapple with a sizable minority that does not observe Shabbat or keep kosher.
More significantly, for the growing majority of students, the “Modern” in Modern Orthodoxy is becoming meaningless. YU sophomore Josh Harrison sees this development as directly linked to a shift away from the Rav’s philosophy: “With more and more of its student body shifting to the right,” he says, “one wonders whether the YU ideology matters at all. Whatever one thinks of Torah U’Madda, its merits mean little if it isn’t a system that is in play, a live option.”
This widening gap became dramatically apparent during the spring of 2004, when a group of students attempted to organize a concert at a local restaurant. Upon learning of the upcoming event, the rabbi who had given kosher certification to the restaurant threatened to revoke his stamp of approval if the “secular” concert was not canceled posthaste. The performers in question were Jewish, but because their lyrics were not verses from the Bible, the concert was considered secular and therefore unacceptable. A senior YU rabbi was quoted in YU’s student newspaper, the Commentator, defending the cancellation by asserting that as part of the university, the restaurant was under the rabbinate’s auspices–despite the fact that its only connection to YU was geographic proximity. If the students who had planned the concert, he went on, had been “students of the yeshiva,” he would have been glad to work with them. The student organizers were YU students–but they were not from MYP, and therefore in the rabbi’s mind, not true students.
Outside, in front of Muss Hall, Amsterdam Avenue is abuzz with black hats and pastel peach ties. Overpriced, heavily polished loafers snap in lockstep at the entrance to the building next door: Zysman Hall, home to the famous beis midrash, YU’s lecture hall. These students are off to a shiur–a study session–and if you follow them in you will find yourself in a poorly ventilated room packed with sweaty yeshiva bochurs (males only, of course) eager to consume the rabbi’s every word.
It isn’t technically class time, but you wouldn’t know it from the hundreds of students herding into the room at 10pm. In fact, it is not unusual to see the beis midrash full of students engaged in extra-curricular study until the early morning. These rabbis must have engrossing lectures, you would think, to enjoy such large audiences at such an hour.
In fact, YU rabbis have been raising eyebrows lately with some of their groundbreaking theories. One rabbi’s implication that in some Jewish rituals, women’s standing is equivalent to that of a monkey or a parrot, and his assertion that Jews are inherently superior to non-Jews–claiming that Jews and gentiles have different “genes, DNA and instincts”–have given the press plenty to work with. Another YU rabbi published a pamphlet “proving” that according to halachah (Jewish law) it is less reprehensible to kill a non-Jew than a Jew. And a third referred to Far Eastern people as “yellow” during a public lecture. The YU rabbinate also tells its students that good yeshiva bochurs should not date girls who go to college, because it makes them “more like men” and therefore unfit to be housewives. And it assures its disciples that secular studies courses are bitul zman–a waste of time that should be devoted to religious study–and that it’s therefore less than urgent to complete homework for their humanities courses.
Why would students flock to rabbis who make such provocative pronouncements? And why would haredi rabbis lecture to audiences less observant than themselves? To be fair, most of these late-night lectures concern technical Talmudic law–like what happens when my ox gores your lamb–and do not get political. But the student body and the YU rabbinate are also entwined in a symbiotic relationship of sorts. Many of the rabbis capitalize on their tremendous flocks of students, using on-campus reputations to cultivate off-campus celebrity status. This translates into an interest in maintaining large class sizes, and appealing to students’ desire for absolute religious guidance makes this possible.
Meanwhile, students–encouraged to approach their rabbis for everything from religious guidance to psychological counseling–use YU’s religious faculty to satisfy their craving for a pipeline to absolute truth. I often argue with peers who believe their rabbi has provided them with the ultimate theological trump card. One friend returned from a shiur telling me proudly that his rabbi had successfully proven God’s absolute existence. He proceeded to outline a simple argument that I recognized–from my secular philosophy class. I told him politely that it had been refuted–and by as well-respected a name as Nietzsche, no less. But because we are not rabbis, my friend dismissed both Friedrich and myself with a wave of his hand. “I think Rabbi X would know better,” he informed me. And this attitude is not the exception, but the rule.
There are many non-Orthodox and non-Jewish professors and administrators at YU who hold important positions without feeling religious pressure. But those with true influence over students, policy, and curricula are the rabbis who claim the legacy of the Rav. And while the rabbinate has no formal right of review over the secular curriculum, at YU–as in many Jewish communities–the informal rabbinic voice wields disproportionate power. When asked why the school does not offer any Bible-as-literature courses, YU’s English professors are overwhelmingly sympathetic to the idea. Many of them agree that YU, more than many other schools, could capitalize on the biblical scholarship of its students. But these professors are resigned to the fact that the rabbis would never allow a course like that–to them, there is no value in considering the Bible as anything but objective truth. Even if tenured professors have no reason to worry about being fired, fear of crossing the rabbis is often enough to keep them in line.
One block downtown from the dormitories, on 185th Street, is Furst Hall–home to YU’s public relations office. Those employed there are responsible for YU’s relations with the outside world–particularly with the Jewish and the academic communities. And these relations appear harmonious. Indeed, YU’s brochures boast that the university “embraces the heritage of the best of Western civilization, along with the ancient traditions of Jewish law and life.”
But of course, those with real influence over YU’s community relations are the rabbis. And though the Rav sought to keep religious Judaism in stride with advancements in science, civil rights, and other aspects of contemporary society, the current leaders of YU tend toward reluctance in embracing the world around them.
Last January, a delegation of Roman Catholic cardinals visited YU to learn about its educational techniques—and unintentionally sparked a campus-wide controversy. Many rabbis denounced the intrusion of clerics of another faith. Rabbi Hershel Reichman, a rosh yeshiva (dean), recommended that YU shy away from interfaith dialogue altogether. “The fact is that our timeless faith has no need for the Catholic Church’s approval and acceptance,” he explained in a letter to the Commentator. And YU Rabbinical School Dean Rabbi Abba Bronspiegel agreed, “This is one big outrageous Chillul Ha-Shem” (a desecration of God’s name). He called the visit &ld
quo;a distortion of the teachings of our Rebbe, the Rav.”
Not everyone feels that interfaith dialogue is out of line with Torah U’Madda. Eugene Korn, formerly of the ADL and a graduate of Yeshiva College, responded to Bronspiegel, saying “I too had the privilege of studying with the Rav,” and that he saw “the visit as a positive event in complete consonance with the teachings of Rav Soloveitchik.” But Korn’s perspective is increasingly marginalized at YU.
Students of the Rav invoke his name even as they alienate groups he likely would have supported. YU’s refusal to acknowledge the recent emergence of an Orthodox feminist movement is a prime example. In an interview I conducted this spring for the Commentator, Dr. Tamar Ross, professor of philosophy at Bar Ilan University and unofficial spokeswoman for Orthodox feminism, said, “I believe that the deliberate distancing [at YU] of rabbinic figures of authority from Orthodox feminism stems from the hope that if such challenges are ignored, they can be trivialized and made to disappear.”
At the spring 2004 conference of JOFA–the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, an organization that seeks to empower women as leaders within the framework of Orthodox Judaism–Ross was a keynote speaker. YU’s representation, on the other hand, was conspicuously poor. With the exception of two rabbis who attended only because they were invited to address sexual abuse in the religious community, YU sent no delegation to the conference. Without YU’s endorsement, JOFA has yet to gain much-needed mainstream support.
Ross assured me that despite the efforts of some at YU, “feminism and the deeper questions it raises are not going to disappear.” But to my mind, a refusal to acknowledge feminist perspectives does not align the institution with its public relations department’s claims to “embrace the heritage of the best of Western civilization.”
Let’s end the tour back at the heart of YU’s campus: Zysman Hall. A historic site for YU, it was here that members of the YU rabbinate gathered in December 2002 with a group of about 125 students for a tehillim rally. Tehillim are proverbs recited in an appeal to God to intercede in the case of a deathly illness or hopelessly desperate situation. The desperate situation at hand that day was Richard Joel’s candidacy for president of Yeshiva University, and the rabbis were there with their followers to pray that his appointment fall through.
Joel has credentials that should be tough to beat. The former president of Hillel, he led the organization through its mid-nineties rise from a loose configuration of Jewish campus centers to a multinational institution with a near-monopoly over Jewish campus life. But Joel holds no rabbinic ordination–and, worse, he’s been associated with egalitarian and interdenominational institutions. In fact, one of his major accomplishments at Hillel was to make the organization highly inclusive of all points on the religious spectrum. The potential of Joel at the helm of YU would therefore be, in the eyes of the university rabbinate, occasion for sackcloth and ashes.
Tehillim notwithstanding, the YU Board of Directors appointed Joel –a seasoned leader and a savvy fundraiser–president of the university. And with his presidency, a new YU may be on the horizon. Though he has produced no tangible changes for YU students to date, Joel’s stance toward the rabbinate is new. He displays a genuine dedication to students’ needs, is engaged in concerted outreach efforts to a variety of Jewish institutions, and exhibits an open-mindedness increasingly rare among students or faculty at YU. There are still strides to be made: Joel told me that YU does not attend the JOFA conference because “YU has nothing to do with JOFA.” But if Joel chooses to stand his ground in the face of pressure from the rabbinical right, YU might well return to embrace the principles on which it was founded.
Also forcing YU to reevaluate is the advent of a rival. Located on the upper west side of Manhattan, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School was founded in 1999. Its mission, in the best of Modern Orthodox tradition, is to “professionally train open Orthodox rabbis who will lead the Jewish community, and shape its spiritual and intellectual character in consonance with modern and open Orthodox values.” And it has begun to make a name for itself–particularly this year, when it was featured in an April, 2004 New York Times profile. Yeshivat Chovevei Torah has yet to place its rabbinical students in the already-tight job market, making it too early to tell whether it will become a real threat to YU’s dominance. But the new seminary readily engages with feminism and many other current issues on which YU’s rabbinate turns its back–making it truer to the Rav’s vision than the version of Modern Orthodoxy his students ascribe to him.
For now, YU is still the nerve center of the Modern Orthodox movement. The rabbinate holds court and the yeshiva bochurs line up for late-night shiur. But with Richard Joel on the scene, encroaching competition from Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, and its student body finding its philosophy increasingly irrelevant, YU stands at a crossroads. Whether it will change or calcify, embrace its original vision or veer off irrevocably, remains to be seen. Either way, it may well take the Modern Orthodox future with it.
