My immediate family's involvement with Yeshiva began in the 1920s and ended in the 1980s. It is a story of idealism, achievement, love, and heartbreak. I share it with the Yeshiva community for the sake of memory, and telling the truth, and healing. This essay is dedicated to all the people, remembered and forgotten, who literally gave their lives for the idea that Yeshiva, however imperfectly, represents.
Our story begins in 1927 with the arrival at Yeshiva of my grandfather, R. Samuel Kalman Mirsky. An iluy, he grew up in Jerusalem and received semikha at age thirteen. After the first World War he embraced religious Zionism, acquired a secular education and a law degree and became a disciple of R. Abraham Isaac Kook, chief rabbi of Palestine. When family circumstances made him relocate to the United States, Dr. Bernard Revel, who had warm correspondence with R. Kook and followed the activities of his circle, recruited my grandfather for the faculty of the newly-founded Yeshiva College.
My grandfather taught at Yeshiva for some forty years, chiefly in what was then called the Teachers' Institute (the now-ironically named Isaac Breuer College) and at the Bernard Revel Graduate School for Jewish Studies. During this time he also served as rabbi of the Young Israel of Boro Park, where, among other things, he taught the first daf yomi class ever on American shores. Those were the days when, unbelievable as it sounds, Boro Park was a bastion of cultural Hebraism and Mizrachi-style Zionism, part of the Hebraist culture that once thrived here. He served, as later my father did, as president of the Histadruth Ivrith of America, and was involved in a host of communal activities.
He authored, inter alia, a series of pioneering essays on the history of Babylonian yeshivot; biographical studies of Rishonim and Achronim; a number of leading articles on Midrash and its relationship to halakha; major early essays on Mishpat Ivri; and scholarly editions of a number of medieval halakhic works. He edited a massive Yizkor book for the great European yeshivot, and included in it a pioneering historical study of Volozhin; and he wrote literally hundreds of essays, book reviews, profiles, encyclopedia articles, political and cultural commentaries and belletristic pieces, mainly in Hebrew but also in English and Yiddish.
His major scholarly achievement was a critical edition of, and commentary to, the Sheiltot de-Rav Ahai Gaon, a project he initiated in the 1920s at the suggestion of R. Kook, and which took him to the Vatican and other great libraries in search of manuscripts.
My grandfather also founded a number of projects and foundations, most notably the journals Talpiot and Sura.
Talpiot, which came out regularly between 1944 and 1970, exhibited a diversity nearly unimaginable today, reflective of my grandfather's ecumenical personality; in its pages one could find articles by Chief Rabbis Ben Zion Uziel and Isaac Herzog, R. Moshe Feinstein and R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, R. Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, alongside academic scholarship by the likes of Professor Saul Lieberman. The best-known piece to appear in its pages was R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik's Ish Ha-Halakha, on whose Hebrew my grandfather expended great effort. Sura, founded to facilitate scholarly exchange between Israel and America, featured a range of scholars, bringing their work to bear on contemporary issues, in graceful Hebrew.
My grandfather passed away in 1967, finishing his decades-long work on the Sheiltot literally on his deathbed.
His son, my father, David, entered MTA in the fall of 1934; among his classmates was Gerson Cohen, later to become chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), and his lifelong friend Sidney Furst, who became a leading figure in postwar psychoanalysis. They, like my father, were products of the very rich Hebraist culture that once thrived in America and is now a distant memory.
After MTA my father went on to Yeshiva College and graduated in 1942, along with his future brother-in-law, my uncle Joseph Sokolow, still today an active alumnus, whose son Moshe has enjoyed a distinguished scholarly and teaching career of his own at Yeshiva and whose grandson Shalom is graduating MTA this Spring. My father had been preceded at Yeshiva by another future brother-in-law, my uncle Rabbi Dr. Gersion Appel, class of 1938 and one of Dr. Revel's last pupils, who went on to an exemplary career as both pulpit rabbi and scholar, becoming professor of philosophy at Stern College for Women. His children and grandchildren also attended YU in their time. Another of my uncles, Meir Havazelet, would in his time also become a professor at Stern College.
But all that came later. The 1930s and 1940s found my father in Washington Heights, learning in the beit midrash, studying English and Hebrew literature, and, along with several friends, founding in 1938 the Yeshiva College Dramatics Society (YCDS), advised by longtime English professor Irving Lin. Chief among my father's theatrical collaborators was his lifelong friend Morris Epstein, whose sparkling wit hung lightly over great erudition, and went on to become professor of English at Stern College, before dying all too young in 1973. YCDS productions in those days were reviewed by theater critics of major newspapers.
After graduation my father stayed at Yeshiva to learn for semikha at RIETS, and drew continually closer to Dr. Samuel Belkin, who in those days was still giving a regular shiur and would eventually come to refer to my father in public as "my son David."
After finishing semikha, my father studied English literature at Columbia and edited Jewish Horizon magazine of the Mizrachi before returning to Yeshiva in 1948. His scholarly work chiefly focused on Milton, and on the place of Jews and Judaism in modern English literature, and he was tenured as professor of English and Hebrew literature. He also began to work at Dr. Belkin's side during the years of Yeshiva's transformation from a liberal arts college and seminary to a far-flung university.
Those were the heady postwar years, when the federal government poured monies into higher education, and traditional Judaism began to emerge from the shadows onto the American scene. Dr. Belkin and those who, like my father, shared his vision, seized the moment not only to build Yeshiva as such, but, in emphasizing the humanities and sciences, sought to make it a source of moral and intellectual leadership in society at large.
My father was one of those who worked with Dr. Belkin on the myriad details of building these institutions, for example, the creation of Einstein at a time when Jewish professors were still stymied by discrimination and quotas. Over the years, Dr. Belkin had my father take on projects in virtually every niche of Yeshiva to, as he said, give him exposure to all its workings.
At the same time, Dr. Belkin called on my father to serve as a liaison to the outside world. My father regularly represented Yeshiva University in Washington, Albany, the Middle States Association, and at other bodies of higher education, general, Jewish and Christian. He represented Yeshiva at UN and embassy functions, and my mother Sarrah (nee Appel) regularly served as hostess for official gatherings. My father was also responsible for the various lecture series that brought to Yeshiva figures like Isaiah Berlin, Bernard Lewis, Jacob Talmon, Philip Roth and Irving Howe.
This reaching outward was complemented by working for the Orthodox world. Dr. Belkin encouraged his people to help Haredi institutions struggling to build themselves (notwithstanding the public scorn with which they were repaid). My father negotiated SATs on Sundays for shomer Shabbos students, accreditation for yeshivot and even, with Dr. Belkin's approval, gave free technical advice to the then-newborn Touro College, out of the belief that the world needs as much Jewish education as possible.
In 1963 my father became University Dean of Admissions and, in 1968, Dean of Stern College. It was during his years at Stern that the beit midrash for women first opened, and I will never forget his proud recounting of hearing young women talk in learning. In 1975 he was appointed University Vice-President (acting) for Academic Affairs.
My father's years in YCDS also left their mark when, in the 1960s, years before PBS, he developed several educational TV series on minorities in American literature, under Yeshiva's auspices.
Beyond Yeshiva, my father was chairman of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East; president of Histadruth Ivrith; and secretary of the Council of Higher Education Institutions for New York State, and active in other Jewish and non-Jewish organizations.
These were very good years, of growth and achievement. We were very much a YU family. Relatives on both my mother and father's sides of the family were students and faculty; my sister - Zipporah Aviva - attended Central (and went on to her own career in Television news); my brother - Moshe Zvi - attended MTA and YC, and eventually was in Cardozo Law School's second graduating class; I attended MTA and YC in turn. And we truly believed in Yeshiva's mission.
My father was a rare mix of talmid hakham, literary humanist, ironist and, with his gentle mix of altruism, grace and wisdom, a genuine tzaddik. He was human of course, but we all should be so human. He also had a passion for building educational institutions, without caring who got the credit. In the expansive, broad-minded Yeshiva of those years he found his métier and calling.
All that abruptly changed in the mid-70s with ascendancy of Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm to Yeshiva's presidency. My father's closeness to Dr. Belkin, his support, as a member of the university's search committee, for the candidacy of R. Emanuel Rackman, along with his considered dissents to a number of Dr. Lamm's early administrative decisions, made him persona non-grata under the new administration. His responsibilities were progressively trimmed; more painfully, colleagues, including those whose own careers he had fostered, began to keep their distance, disinvited him from their simchas and more, amid a general climate of fear. His salary was reduced under the pretext that he was insufficiently credentialed. One Sunday morning, without any warning, he saw a want ad for his own position in the Sunday New York Times.
This was, to put it mildly, a terribly painful time. My father bore it with great dignity and never lost his gentle way. But it hurt. He returned to the classroom after some years' absence and discovered, he told me, that the academic level of the College had declined far more than he had known.
With time my father recouped some of these losses; the university's reorganization came to the attention of the Middle States Association and Yeshiva's very accreditation was called into question and my father's services were sorely needed. The university turned to him for help and he was able to rejoin the upper echelons of the university administration with the title of Special Assistant to the President, but I saw that the pain of these events never really left him.
He kept teaching his classes, resumed long-neglected scholarly projects, and began to write in new directions. He spent some time at Oxford's Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies. And then, in 1982, he suffered a heart attack and died.
I graduated YC several months after my father's death. I left Yeshiva deeply estranged and embittered by all that had happened to him. I watched from afar as Yeshiva seemed steadily to drift farther to the religious right and deeper into mediocrity. I saw my father's name steadily vanish from institutional memory and the university's commissioned histories. I kept my distance; I never visited, never answered mail from the Alumni Association and left my BA off my resume. I went to Yale Law School, and eventually to Washington to work in government. I tried to put as much distance as I could between myself and Yeshiva, and to learn the ways of the powerful, so that what had happened to my father would never happen to me.
With time, a different realization took hold; a dozen years after graduation, working in the State Department by day and learning and teaching Torah by night, I came to see that the ideals of Yeshiva had indeed struck deep roots in me after all, the institution's best efforts at poisoning those commitments notwithstanding. A number of years down the road, before making aliyah, I taught at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and there, in an electric beit midrash atmosphere generated by some twenty students and a handful of rebbeim in a converted basement, I felt I had finally come home to what YU was supposed to have been. For noble ideals, I realized, it really never is too late.
Today Yeshiva is under new and deeply promising management. Who knows what the future may bring, but hope springs eternal and I truly wish President Richard M. Joel every success, with all my heart.
Writing in these pages in 1981, after and despite his tribulations, my father said: "Torah...can meet whatever challenges history may throw up to it...the Jew need not fear to move out and meet the challenge of history." That faith is bigger than any institution, or person, bigger than us all, and still a source of strength.
Once, several years ago, I poured out my heart to an old friend about how it seemed that all that my father had worked for, the great humanist vision of Yeshiva University, was crumbling, and with it all he left behind. "No," my friend said, "what he left behind was you." And I thought: "not only me." I realized that the real legacy of my father and the great people he worked with over the years - the final measure of that devotion - is us, the students of Yeshiva past, present and future. Who we are and what we do with our lives, the Torah we write in - and with - our lives.
Rabbi Yehudah Mirsky, MTA '78, YC '82, is a Research Fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem and a Fellow in Religion at Harvard University, where he is writing a dissertation on the ethical teachings of Rav Kook. Ordained by Rabbi Zalman Nechemia Goldberg of Jerusalem, Rabbi Mirsky is a graduate of Yale Law School and served as Special Advisor in the U.S. State Department's Human Rights Bureau.
2008 Woodie Awards
