The Commentator

Dear Boys:

Over the years, you have often asked me why I've raised you in a way that's somewhat out of synch with the approaches you have encountered over the course of your yeshiva educations. I've explained to you that I grew up in a different era. This is my opportunity to go into some detail, to explain how and why.

In the 1960s, strange as it may sound, there were a good many Orthodox young men committed to Jewish life and the study of its texts, and also insatiably curious about the world, its culture, its history, and its literature - not for the purpose of "parnassah," but to understand the truth and beauty inherent in God's Creation.

Orthodoxy, at the time, seemed poised to throw off its earlier defensiveness and engage intellectually with modern culture. The primary avenue of the transformation was the printed word. The Rabbinical Council of America's fledgling Tradition magazine, each issue eagerly awaited and quickly devoured by us, contained many articles exploring the implications that Torah and modernity posed for each other; I suggest you browse through some of them to get a sense of what I mean. The OU's magazine Jewish Life, now defunct, also featured material along these lines, and Orthodox thinkers were beginning to contribute significant pieces to non-Orthodox periodicals, such as Judaism - a sure sign that Orthodoxy was shedding its parochialism and starting to get a hearing in the broader Jewish community. On prestigious campuses across the country, a new Orthodox Jewish student organization, Yavneh, ran programs geared specifically to address the intellectual interface between Torah and the secular disciplines.

But Yeshiva was ground zero for Torah u-Madda, a marketing slogan that became (almost) palpable reality during the decade. First, Yeshiva's dual program - including serious social science and humanities requirements - strongly encouraged the inquisitive student to relate the disparate curricular components to each other. And even more important, its faculty included a wide variety of Orthodox role models who proved that the term "Orthodox intellectual" was not necessarily an oxymoron.

The overarching figure, of course, was Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the "Rav," prime exemplar of the possibility of combining Torah and Madda (he had a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Berlin). His shiurim (delivered in professorial English) were pure Brisker analysis, so that anyone experiencing this extraordinary man solely in the classroom, or, today, through the selective memory of some of his students, would have no idea of the breadth of his mind. Suffice it to say that it was in the 60's that his dazzling combination of encyclopedic knowledge and shrewd understanding of the real world and of human nature became known to a wide public: Ish Hahalakhah, virtually ignored when first published in the 1940s, became de rigueur reading for the intellectually sophisticated Yeshiva student; Tradition published his two primary English-language essays, "The Lonely Man of Faith" and "Confrontation"; and his regular talks in New York and Boston on Jewish texts and issues, open to the public, drew large crowds that included people far removed from Orthodoxy. Ironically, this great exponent of "Halakhic" Judaism consistently eschewed the use of Halakhic arguments to decide public-policy issues, declaring, for example, that the question of whether to demonstrate against the Soviet Union over its treatment of Jews was best left to the sovietologists, and that territorial decisions after the Six-Day War were not to be made by rabbis, but by the Israeli government.

Two of the Rav's close relatives also had a major impact on students. His younger brother, Rav Aharon, who, like the Rav, taught Brisker Torah in English (he had a law degree from NYU), was so convinced of the need for Orthodoxy to confront modernity that he devoted one shiur weekly to hashkafa, Jewish perspectives on contemporary issues. The Rav's son-in-law, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, starting giving shiur in 1963, armed with a Harvard Ph.D. in English literature. It was from him, way back then, that I first heard that the methods of textual analysis used by literary scholars could be fruitfully applied to the Bible, a notion that Robert Alter and others have since brought into the cultural mainstream. When he headed the RIETS Kollel, Rabbi Lichtenstein would host monthly get-togethers for the members at his apartment, where a previously announced contemporary issue - poverty, the Vietnam War, civil rights, etc. - would be discussed from a Halakhic perspective. (I can recall one somewhat otherworldly kollel boy asking me, in a panic, just a few hours before the monthly session, to fill him in on Biafra.)

The college faculty included several memorable figures who demonstrated, in their disparate fields, the confluence of Torah and Madda. There was Emanuel Rackman, embodiment of a species now extinct, the pulpit rabbi/Jewish communal leader/academic, successful in all three fields. In his course on political theory, he analyzed the thought of Maimonides along with that of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the other great theorists (I will never forget this class, since the great blackout of 1965 occurred while I was sitting in it). And there was the late Rabbi Dr. Meyer Feldblum, a great talmid haham who showed us how to analyze rabbinic texts critically, with an understanding of their historical development. I once told him that, having been exposed to his methodology, it would be hard to go back to the traditional way of learning. He replied that I would quickly revert, but that "something will remain." He was right.

I have left for the end the two men who most profoundly influenced my life: Irving "Yitz" Greenberg, and Charles Liebman. Both were barely 30 years old when I was their student at Yeshiva. Virtually everyone has heard of Greenberg, largely through what he did after leaving Yeshiva - his work at CLAL, pioneering Jewish-Christian dialogue, or presiding over the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. But few, beyond those directly involved, know what he meant to the intellectually inquisitive YC students of the 60s. Greenberg swept us up in the excitement of intellectual history, providing a broad perspective for understanding the Jewish experience. He was the first, as far as I know, to frankly pinpoint the ways that the shock of modernity challenged Orthodox Judaism to its core, raising serious problems especially for young Jews on college campuses. His articles from that era resonate today with their original freshness, since the problems have not disappeared. Greenberg's subsequent estrangement from Yeshiva University circles has been unfortunate for American Orthodoxy and, I believe, for him.

Charles Liebman was a fascinating character. He came to Yeshiva in 1963 to teach political science, but he hated teaching and was in the process of changing his field of interest to the sociology of religion. He loved to schmooze in his office (he had a wicked sense of humor), where he had a wonderful collection of books. I remember Liebman taking down Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy, handing it to me and saying, "I think you'll enjoy this." I did, and my appreciation of religion's embeddedness in historical and social reality dates from that moment. Liebman was then working on "Orthodoxy in American Jewish Life," the first of his pathbreaking studies of American Judaism, which appeared in the 1965 American Jewish Year Book; this year, as editor of the Year Book, I wrote his obituary. After leaving Yeshiva he taught at Bar-Ilan for many years, and wrote several important books and articles on U.S. and Israeli Jewry. He died just months after receiving the 2003 Israel Prize, the country's most prestigious award.

For a host of reasons related to shifts in American cultural values and developments within the Jewish community, Yeshiva of the 60's collapsed like a house of cards. As early as 1972, when I returned to join the faculty, the institution had changed drastically. Lichtenstein, Greenberg, and Liebman were gone, and Rackman, fated not to become the next president of the university, would soon follow. All would achieve great success within other institutional frameworks. The prevalent mood among the students was pre-professional. Pressure was mounting for loosening the liberal arts course requirements and instituting majors in business, accounting, and computers. A year of study in an Israeli yeshiva was becoming increasingly popular; the college credit given for it further cut down on exposure to liberal arts, and a yeshivishe mindset took root among many of the students. American-born men who had studied at Yeshiva were being appointed roshei yeshiva, and, unlike their European, Yiddish-speaking predecessors, they could tell their students, in good faith, that they had gone to college and therefore knew that it was of little value beyond "parnassah." Yeshiva College, it appeared, was no longer competing for students with Columbia, but with Ner Israel and Telz.

But the legacy of the 60's has not disappeared. A highly disproportionate number of YC students of that era - far more, I dare say, than among older or younger alumni - chose careers in academic Jewish studies or as Jewish communal professionals, reflecting the overarching ethos of that time and place - that the "real" world and the Jewish world form a seamless whole. We, the dinosaurs, still think of ourselves as embodiments of what Yeshiva was intended to be.

And so, my children, I hope you now understand my alienation from the Orthodoxy in which you have been educated - it's a generational thing. But I have exposed you to a different path, one that Yeshiva College blazed for me. Will you, like Robert Frost's walker in the snowy wood, take the path "less traveled by?" For me, at least, "that has made all the difference."

Dr. Lawrence Grossman, YC '66, RIETS '69, edits the American Jewish Year Book and is associate director of research at the American Jewish Committee. Dr. Grossman taught history at YC and Stern from 1972 through 1982.