The Commentator

As a student in Yeshiva College, I never wondered if Starbucks is kosher, though the question often faces me now as the rabbi at the Hillel at NYU. I never drank coffee as an untucked YC undergrad, let alone saw the forbidden décor of a coffeehouse. In fact, Yeshiva's campus stands two-thirds of a mile from the nearest Starbucks, further than any other college in New York City.

It's no accident. Everyone needs something to hold in their hands when they "communicate" to excuse themselves for being honest. Most college students use coffee. (NYU even opened its own franchise of Starbucks on the ground level of one of its residence halls.) But the culture of conversation at Yeshiva is different: we don't need coffee mugs because we have seforim. Yeshiva students don't talk, we "batel." We generate "battalah," mistakenly translated as wasted conversation, by allowing personal meditations - and feelings - to penetrate the objective discourse of Torah study.

Battalah interests me because to feel the pulse of any community, you need to go to where people decide to be most honest or "real" with each other. While the academic repertoire reflects the mind of the university, the lifeblood of the culture lies in the practical articulation of idealism, specifically, for college men, regarding friends, females, and careers.

In reflecting on my experiences of Yeshiva conversational culture, I have to discount several social hotspots. No hallway hi-byes or elevator grunts changed the course of my life. No time-outs in Time-Out now generate any memories, except the front door swinging open in concert with the pizza oven, as the warm wind battles the chill of Amsterdam Avenue. The library, the site of many email monologues (not dialogues), greeted me warmly with "Eat, drink, and make merry - but not in the library!" At Yeshiva, I was born on the pages of peer heart-to-hearts. But where did the real conversations happen?

In the beit midrash, of course. In the spaces between the letters.

Since conversations of the real reserve a seat in the beit midrash, we sanctify them, dedicating a halakhic category to their honor: battalah. Whereas talking in the library is a crime unforgivable by courteous librarians, battalah in the beit midrash is a necessary sin desired by compassionate friends. And it should be. This wasted space between the letters holds the cocoon for emerging aviators propelled by ambition, family and community values, and the love of Torah. It's a space for self-definition on a page of Talmud.

Battalah comes in different species, serving different roles. The politics which typify the most extreme form of battalah reflect the negotiations of finding an appropriate social group, determining, for example, who is a kofer for saying what and who isn't, even though he said the same thing. In my day, the political battalah carried the latest on the Royal Rumble between the Nasi and alternating Roshei Yeshiva, the nascent institutions competitive to Yeshiva, heter kiruv, The Jewish Week, and unofficial shiurim in the Annex. These conversations often determine where you sit, how you dress, what you major in - they become conversations of belonging in the world of Torah.

The point is that at other colleges, social groups are determined by dorm situations, ethnicity, or club involvement; at Yeshiva, real social groups are decided by religious ideology on campus issues. The decision of where to belong takes place in the beit midrash, becoming a matter of truth and religious authenticity, not merely social preference or comfort level. These are not wasteful conversations, but are self-defining and sacred.

A similar sort of sanctification governs the natural processing of dating experiences the morning after. There's little time to compute the phone conversations which occur between 12 and 3 am - except during morning seder. I recall my chavrusa dating a girl well into the fifth month, unsure how to proceed. He wished girls were like a sugya he could scientifically and Briskly analyze. We couldn't just go back to the gemara. Who could learn straight when the future of your family's yiras shamayim hangs in the balance? What would the value of this Bava be if I take the next step with a woman who is too materialistic, too intellectual, or too career-driven? These conversations are so inevitable, so pressing, and so sacred, chavrusas slip in and out of them as if they were footnotes on the bottom of every daf. I never left the beit midrash to batel - it's not mundane talk, it's sacred battalah.

The 'Chinuch - or' career question best exemplifies what it means that conversations about people's real lives happen in the beit midrash. Chavrusas have to respect each other's right to feel that a chinuch lifestyle "just doesn't suit me" or that it once again does after too many unfair verbals on the GRE's. Deliberations over how to overcome your parents' arguments to keep you away from the Mir, Rabbanus, or Judaic Studies occur under the glare of Rashi and his grandchildren. So these recurring discussions too become Torah.

It's a beautiful existence in the Garden of Amsterdam Avenue, where all conversations are sacred. True, some students discipline themselves strictly to minimize battalah, constantly weeding the Garden to focus their attention on the Holy Orchard, but they are the few who already know their place. I respected and envied them, especially those whose life questions of friends, females and career were easily answered.

For me, though, learning a lot sometimes meant learning too little. I needed to explore my uncertainty as an aliyah-only Zionist who felt a responsibility towards North American Jewry, an intellectually-oriented political activist, and as a idealist who loved the idea of an ascetic kollel lifestyle but knew that he needed a normal bourgeois life.

But even the biggest batlan feels pressure not to batel. The culture of the beit midrash creates a unique tension between chavrusas: mutual interest, concern, and investment in the Other rival a commitment to achieve a common goal in learning. You can never do too much of each, and a healthy chavrusa is one which keeps the letters and the spaces in check.

In the landscape of American college life, that tension, I've come to realize, is a blessing. I recently compared notes with a colleague, Tom Ellett, who heads up the Residence Life office at NYU. Tom spent a good part of his career at a Catholic university and understands well how a religious environment creates a more serious and more motivated student body overall. There's less to play with since life is more focused. There's no time to waste. The props of conversation, sacred texts, serve as constant reminders that conversation cannot go on forever.

But the prop of conversation in a coffeehouse, that celebrated space of most college campuses, celebrates near eternal conversation. It keeps you up. It keeps you talking. Here, the question is not whether life will make space for itself on the pages of the Talmud, but whether the Talmud can make space for itself in the pages of life. 'Does religion rank?' is affirmatively answered if God's Name makes its way into the din of collegiate chatter about shoes, unfair professors and broken hearts.

A year ago, I started making coffee dates with students whom I wanted to get to know better. With the first student I took out, I spent an hour talking about football. That was a waste. The next student spent twenty minutes talking about his boring major before he started telling me about his perspectives on religion. He wanted an opportunity to talk about it since his everyday environment wasn't conducive to God talk. As my comfort level increases with each student, I've come to understand that just because the people I pursue aren't coming to my shiurim doesn't mean that religion isn't important to them - it is, only the beit midrash is not their expression of it.

Only a quarter of Orthodox students attend my shiurim. Most Orthodox students, I've learned in Starbucks, espouse the following religious attitudes: communal pride and responsibility, family values, love and support of Israel, and seeing God in their everyday life. These priorities don't need to find their way into the beit midrash to mean something - in fact, they mean more in the coffeehouse than they do in the beit midrash. Granted, there's little textual grounding, intense piety or Talmudic reasoning in these conversations, but their realness is no less tangible than the battalah of the beit midrash. Both venues work for bringing life and Torah together. I had to leave Yeshiva to understand that for much of college Orthodoxy, the truest articulation of religious priorities happens in lounge chairs under dim lights.

As a Yeshiva alumnus who now goes to NYU for a college experience, I ask myself whether the dearth of public conversational spaces allows the non- beit midrash segment of its student body to articulate its religious priorities on Yeshiva's campus, or do they have to leave to do that. Lounges with TV's blaring and bright lights do not inspire discourses that matter. For Yeshiva students who do not feel at home in the beit midrash, is there another Torah on Amsterdam Avenue which speaks the language of the coffeehouse? On a secular campus, Orthodox Jews feel different and take pride in their religious anchor, making religion an oft-cited footnote in the reams of coffee talk. Does Yeshiva offer more or less? Because unless you're one of those college students whose got everything figured out, everyone needs a beit midrash, or a Kosher Starbucks.

Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, YC '01, BRGS '03, RIETS '03, is the Manager of Religious Life at The Edgar M. Bronfman Center for Jewish Life/Hillel at NYU.

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