Yeshivas: A place where you sit!
What is a Yeshivah? A place where you sit, literally. Of course, you can do many things when you sit. From meditation to wasting time!
Jeremy Rosen
In the USA, a Yeshivah can be a Jewish school, which may include secular and Jewish studies. But in most other places, it is an academy for intensive Talmudic study which may last a few years or a whole lifetime. And like any academic institution, there are serious students, some who shouldn’t be there and layabouts marking time.
The story goes that the High Priest Simon the Righteous met Alexander the Great and came away impressed by his description of the Greek academies. He realized that the only way to combat Greek culture was to adapt the Academy to Jewish learning. But the first evidence of Jewish academies begins in the land of Israel with the emergence of the schools of Hillel and Shamai and the large numbers of students who sat at the feet of the great rabbinic teachers during the first three centuries of the common era.
Great Babylonian academies flourished in the 3rd century for nearly 1000 years at Sura, Pumbedita, Nehardea, and Machoza in Mesopotamia. And then spread across the Mediterranean. But most Talmudic studies around the Jewish world took place in small gatherings of pupils around distinguished rabbis. It was in Eastern Europe during the 19th century that large, organized academies called Yeshivot were established and flourished.
During the Second World War, Hitler, and Stalin between them, destroyed the Eastern European communities and all the yeshivot. Some survivors, including from Mir Yeshiva in Lithuania where my father had studied, managed to get to Shanghai where they continued to study for the duration until they were able to move to Jerusalem or New York.
I was sent as an unruly fifteen-year-old to yeshiva in Israel. My father thought it would have a profound impact on me, and he was right. I experienced four very different Yeshivas in my career. Kol Torah Yeshivah in Jerusalem, and then thanks to the late much lamented Rabbi Aviezer Wolfson, I switched to a small new yeshiva called Be’er Yaakov run by two contemporaries of my father from Mir, R.Moshe Shapiro and R. Shlomo Wolbe. It was small and I was captivated and transformed by its spiritual warmth and intense study.
In those days, there were not many major Yeshivot in Israel. Mir, Chevron, and Brisk in Jerusalem, Ponevez and Slabodka in Bnei Brak (where my brother Mickey went) that were the Crème de la Crème, and smaller ones dotted around the country, Lithuanian, Chassidic, and Zionist. But given the financial austerity of the times and the constant threats of invasion, there were very few foreign students. The yeshivot were all struggling going from hand to mouth and under pressure from the very secular, and anti-religious government that ruled Israel then.
I returned to Beer Yaakov after school and then moved to Jerusalem to a more Zionist Mercaz Harav Kook. There, I benefitted from a different range of lectures and study groups from brilliant minds. After university I went back as a “mature student” to Jerusalem, to Mir because it was intensive and small, 100 mainly married men.
After the Six Day War, a more spiritual dimension entered Israeli society together with the idealistic drive to re-settle traditional Israelite territory. This also affected the cultural climate. And secular Israelis who used to see themselves as the elite and entitled founders of Israel resented the overthrow of the old regime when Menachem Begin gave more power to both the Sefardi and the Religious communities. And this aggravated the deep rift in Israeli society over what kind of state it should be. Since then, the religious world has increased exponentially. Partially as a response to the Holocaust and the determination to produce large families to restore the lost academies and communities of Eastern Europe.
Yeshivas have flourished like Sparta and Athens; they vary in atmosphere and intellectual approach. Not just as academies but as ways of life. Now almost every town in Israel and significant Jewish community has its yeshivah. Mir yeshivah now has over 9,000 married and single men spread over different campuses. Thanks both to government support and wealthy donors around the world. There are Yeshivot of all kinds, from those that combine study with serving in the army, for women as well as men, secular, and the whole range of the different Charedi sects.
A Yeshiva is supposed to be more than a place of study. It is supposed to be a spiritual inspiration. It should be a deeply religious place of morality and spirituality. As with all academic and religious sects, indeed most human institutions, as they grow, they become cliquish, divided and often violent. Just read about the current saga of rival gangs fighting over dead bodies in Ponevez Yeshiva in Bnei Brak.
After top rabbi dies, power struggle blazes at elite Haredi …
As a result of political haggling in the early days of the state it was agreed to allow religious yeshivah students to postpone military conscription ( and serious secular academics). Sherut LeUmi, non-military service was also an option. At that time exemption applied to a handful of students.
The number of those demanding exemption has swollen to thousands, and the Yeshiva communities have been massively subsidized by the state without any reciprocal commitment. And above all because so many of them (not all by any means) are not contributing to the country’s defence. But one should not ignore the sad fact is that the numbers of secular Jews avoiding the army is also on the rise.
For all their problems, internal and external Yeshivas were and are the driving power behind the revival of orthodoxy from near extinction and the growth of religious study and religious creativity. But the system that developed defensively to protect Jewish learning now suffers from political infighting over, amongst other things, military service.
It is reassuring, and in many ways comforting and proof of our resilience that we as a people of the book are growing in numbers and confidence as proud knowledgeable and committed Jews alongside those who may not be at all religious but still committed and are giving their lives for the country shared by all. Yeshivas today, as thousands of years ago, are the cornerstone of Judaism and its guarantee of its religious survival. But both sides of the religious and political divides, within and without, need to be more tolerant of each other and ready to compromise, lest we tear each other apart.
