Editor's Column: Opening Our Eyes

Walking down the street at 4 AM last year during finals, I recall seeing a student walk out of the library, trudge several steps with his head down, and come to a sharp halt.  He stood like a statue, and then stumbled in circles for several minutes like a drunk, until he picked up his head with a start, appeared to notice his surroundings, and walked towards what I can only hope was his dorm.

While this is common behavior on campuses during finals, at Yeshiva University this is often the norm for the entire semester. From the moment YU students wake up in the morning, they are deluged with a demanding dual curriculum.  Add in any extracurricular activities and a semblance of a social life, and by their last class, final few minutes of night seder or the 2 A.M. cram session in the library, you often find students having a difficult time keeping their eyes from closing.

This intensity and commitment is impressive, and in some ways, remarkable; while many face difficulty in reaching their ideal balance, it is inspiring to see this striving towards that goal among friends and classmates. Yet it is important to remain aware of the costs of that schedule, which impact us in more ways than just the bags under our eyes or a dazed walk home.

As we narrow our focus to our activities for the day, and consume our schedule with learning, assignments, and readings (OK, maybe not so many of the readings), we close our eyes to the world, both inside and outside of YU.

Many run right by students they don’t recognize and copies of the Wall Street Journal bearing unfamiliar headlines with equal speed.  And often, when we read the newspaper, we relate to it as students using the business or news knowledge for a class, not as interested members of society.

We are understandably focused on our specific world, our daily bread.  But if we focus on the two spheres of Torah u-Madda without thinking about them in a broader sense, we can unfortunately become two-dimensional, and to a certain extent, acquire fullest extent of neither Torah nor Madda.  We don’t realize what’s going on outside the daled amot of either the beit medrash or our dorm room. We focus on the details of the page to the exclusion of the book of the outside world, and we then miss out on crucial context and undermine the larger goal of a yeshiva and liberal arts education.

Certainly, everyone needs to strike their balance between the two poles of breadth of knowledge and a narrow focus.  Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, Rosh Yeshiva of RIETS and Gush, wrote in “A Consideration of General Studies from a Torah Point of View” that “knowledge is attained by degrees – nay, minutes and seconds,” and within the context of the broader sustenance we draw from our religious and general studies.

Here at The Commentator this year, we hope to help YU students see a bit more of the world around us – to imbue our minutes and seconds with some of that broader sustenance.  We will continue to report the news at YU, yet we will color our analysis with more depth, add context from our past history and examine YU stories in comparison with our surrounding environment.

We will also look more directly into Jewish issues occurring outside our campus.  In ‘News Brief,’ we will include stories which relate to the lives of YU students, even if they’re not particular to YU, such as the latest in the kosher meat controversy.  We will at times go deeper, analyzing the Jewish world as we did last year in our coverage of the National Council of Young Israel.  We will also introduce a Campaign ’08 feature, including analysis of the political world as it relates to Orthodox Jews.  There’s no Lieberman on the ticket this time, but the campaign has stimulated tremendous interest among Jews as well as the country, and we will study trends of Orthodox Jewish voting patterns (see Elie Friedman’s article on page 7), as well as raise broader questions such as which issues should be priorities for Orthodox Jews and what it means to be pro-Israel.

While Yeshiva University is obviously sui generis, there are several colleges dealing with many similar issues.  The University of Notre Dame teaches philosophical and biological schools of thought that some fear conflict with their Catholic tradition – how do they approach debates between priests and professors?  King’s College is an evangelical school whose leadership visited YU, and which will be visited by Richard Joel at some point – what happens there when a student refuses to take a class due to religious convictions?  We are the only Torah u-Madda university in the word, but we are not the only university balancing religious and secular studies.  There’s no need to adopt everything done by other universities, but it can certainly stimulate fresh perspectives and interesting conversations.

If we are to truly utilize the banks of information and knowledge we gain in class and develop real wisdom, we will need to incorporate our abstract knowledge into the real world.  Being students, we should at least first know about it, unless we want to stumble around in circles.

The first step, though, is to try to open our eyes to our own university.  We look forward to covering the Honors Program’s plans to move forward, the impact of the new CFO and the successes and failures of the Richard Joel administration over the past five years.

But for now, just get some sleep.  You’ll need it come finals time.