2008 Woodie Awards
My Experience at Yeshiva
B. Barry Levy
Issue date: 3/8/05 Section: YUdaica
- Page 1 of 1
In September 1963, after graduating from Haddonfield Memorial High School in New Jersey, I attended my first class at Yeshiva College (YC), as it happened, a course entitled Poetry in the Torah in what was then called the Teachers Institute for Men (TI; later Erna Michael College, EMC; even later Isaac Breuer College, IBC). Able to function in both biblical and modern Hebrew but poorly prepared in talmudic and medieval rabbinic texts, I was shocked when told that the assignment for the next meeting of that two-hour per week course was Parashat Ha'azinu with the commentaries of Rashi, Rashbam, Ibn Ezra, Ramban and Seforno. While I had some experience with Rashi, the rest of these writers were essentially unknown to me, and I had never heard of Mikra'ot Gedolot, the seemingly magical volumes that contained them.
Hours of preparation every night left me totally baffled (in those days, almost none of the commentaries existed in translation, and no honorable student would use one anyway), and when the professor called on me the following week to answer specific questions about the material, I could contribute nothing worthwhile. Sensing that a lack of knowledge indicated a failure to prepare, he wrote "zero, unprepared" in his record book, and called on me the subsequent week, with essentially the same results. This continued well into the semester until in desperation I went to see him and explained the situation. "If you must, you can give me a zero for not knowing the answers," I said. "But please stop writing 'unprepared.' I spend at least two hours every night on the homework for this one class." In fact, I had spent so much time doing this work that, when I returned home and was asked to read the Torah without preparation because the hazan was sick, I found I had inadvertently committed the trop to memory.
That was during the 1963-64 academic year. By September five years later, that teacher was my close associate, and I was a member of the faculty, teaching Bible and how to use those commentaries, and lecturing on the history of Bible interpretation and related subjects. I had completed an MA in the Bernard Revel Graduate School (BRGS), begun as a senior at YC, but it was really the four undergraduate years that changed my life and prepared me for my academic career.
As a student of Jewish Education in TI and a Hebrew major in YC, I had the option of taking every Judaica course offered in both schools and in BRGS, but I could not be a Bible major, because the concept did not exist; Bible was simply not deemed a topic worthy of undergraduate specialization. In those days, almost no Yeshiva Bible professor had a degree in Biblical Studies! Most had semikha and a doctorate in history or some other field, and that was the preferred path for anyone so misguided as to want to follow in their footsteps. Indeed during my junior year I went to discuss my career plans with one of my Bible professors, Dr. Menachem Brayer, but before gaining entrance to his office, I had to provide information on my health, relations with my parents and brother, and similar matters, because he was also the Yeshiva psychologist, and neither he nor anyone in his office had ever encountered a student who wanted to talk about being a Bible professor.
In any case, Hebrew became my college major, because it seemed the closest and most flexible option, and it enabled me to devote myself fully in both YC and TI to Bible and Jewish Studies. This brought me into constant contact with rabbis, professors, and teachers named Michael Bernstein, Menachem Brayer, Moshe Carmilly, Mayer Feldblum, Mayer Hershkovics, Arthur Hyman, Aron Kreiser, Norman Lamm, Hayyim Leaf, Shimon Romm, Aaron Skaist, Israel Wohlgelernter, Abraham Zimels, Eric Zimmer, and many others who trained me in the fine points of Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Bible, Talmud, Jewish history, classical parshanut, talmudic criticism, philosophy, and the like. Contrary to other models of study at Yeshiva, these men taught both texts and how to think about them, which, even if inadequate by some standards, provided a much broader form of education than received at the time in either RIETS or JSS. Thanks to the teaching of these men, a lot of independent reading (based on their advise and my future wife's syllabi from religion courses at Barnard), and the wonderful environment they all helped create, by the end of my senior year I had accomplished four things.
The first was largely personal and a function of Yeshiva's relatively small size, which gave me numerous opportunities to participate in student life and to grow. I was a four-year varsity wrestler and captain of the team; I played intramural volleyball. I was involved in student government and helped create the first EMC curriculum evaluation. I continued to develop the religious lifestyle that had brought me to Yeshiva in the first place (receiving semikha from RIETS in 1971). I was engaged to my wife a few months after graduation from college, and we have been blessed with three sons, three daughters-in-law, and four grandchildren. Except for the lingering death of my father during my final semester, the four years at Yeshiva were simply wonderful. Hebrew major or not, I never went to study in Israel, because I did not want to miss what would have been left behind.
Second, I mastered the textual skills needed to work with the ancient and medieval primary sources on which my studies were based. This happened largely by the second half of my freshman year, when, while taking an open book exam, I suddenly realized that I could make sense of almost any new text I was asked to read. When groups of yeshiva high school graduates gathered at exam time to listen to me recite Gemara as learned in my remedial class so they could take exams in the more advanced courses, I knew I had arrived. Aramaic remained a nuisance for a while longer, but years of studying it with Professor Michael Bernstein and a subsequent PhD in Aramaic at NYU put the handicap to rest permanently.
A lot of effort had been invested in my philological training but not as applied to medieval rabbinic texts. Then Professor Isadore Twersky of Harvard flew in to lecture every second week, and he taught me exactly that. During those years, for a brief time Professor William Foxwell Albright lectured at BRGS, and, after being injured in a fall, he was replaced by Professor Moshe Held from Columbia. As a member of the faculty, I was forbidden by the BRGS administration to attend the last mentioned classes. Albright did not object to my participating; Held actually helped me avoid the pusillanimous administrator who hunted weekly for unauthorized auditors.
Third, I prepared for a career in teaching. As my own level of education rose, so did my aspirations, so what began as interest in informal work with teenagers concluded with the goal of teaching in graduate school. I had been teaching continually since age 16 (and have been ever since), but formal preparation was designed to give me the credentials to teach, in case my graduate studies were ended prematurely and I needed to support myself. I never did hold a full-time job as a day school teacher, but I did serve as a principal for two years, and I have been a consultant for schools in Canada, the US, and Israel for 30 years. I write Judaica curricula, and I served as director of the McGill program that trains Jewish Studies teachers for well over a decade. Perhaps the most rewarding outcome of this early training was the pride in teaching that I developed, which has led to two teaching awards, one from McGill and one from a synagogue in the US.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, my undergraduate years gave me the opportunity to develop a personal modus vivendi for negotiating the legendary synthesis of Torah u-Madda. This was the ideological issue uppermost in most people's minds in those days, but the range of traditional and modern-critical courses I attended allowed for their approaches to be integrated into my intellectual, professional, and spiritual makeup in a very natural way. Together they helped me understand that optimally Torah u-Madda differs from the sum of Torah plus Madda as water differs from hydrogen plus oxygen. This seemed obvious then; now many critics wish to reverse the process and separate the elements.
After four undergraduate years, I had my BA, BRE, and teacher's diploma; I was an experienced Ba'al Koreh (of inestimable value for a Bible professor); and I was ready to study for semikha, to do talmudic criticism, to teach the Bible and the ancient Near East, and to take all of these things very seriously as part of my life. As well, I had studied Latin (in high school), Greek, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Arabic, French, German, and more Hebrew than anyone might have thought possible. And what did we read in Hebrew? Everything imaginable, not just sacred texts. While we were learning Gittin in Talmud class, Dr. Hayyim Leaf had us reading Yehuda Leib Gordon's Kotzo Shel Yod. This seemed perfectly natural at the time; only in retrospect do I chuckle at what Leaf was up to.
The four years I spent teaching at EMC before leaving to teach at Brown and subsequently at McGill (where I have spent the last thirty years) were as much a part of my education as my undergraduate experience. The opportunity to share what I had learned and the pressure to teach what I wanted to teach how I believed it should be taught, in short, to strike out on my own - even as the youngest EMC faculty member by a generation - was invaluable. I owe a huge debt to the former Dean, Rabbi Jacob Rabinowitz, who gambled on a young and enthusiastic but essentially untried teacher and gave me my first academic job. No less responsible was the other (for now unnamed) senior administrator who, against all odds but not all precedents, admitted that the value of what I was doing by teaching outweighed the need to be in the beit midrash in the morning and permitted me to teach then and to prepare for semikha shiurim in the afternoon. (And now as a Dean at McGill I do everything possible to insure that graduate students start teaching as soon as they are ready.) With it all, undoubtedly the most challenging part of my experience was the 45 seconds when I had to walk from my faculty office on the second floor of Furst Hall up the stairs to the semikha classroom on the third floor. For several years at exactly 12:59 PM, I underwent a daily metamorphosis from young, exciting, creative teacher to quiet, passive, and often bored semikha student.
I often wonder how differently my life could have turned out had those initial and final experiences soured me on learning instead of challenging and helping educate me, but I had so many positive experiences along the way that nothing could divert me from my goal. All students become what they do partly because of and partly despite their teachers, and I am no different. But perhaps others were not so fortunate, and amidst the pressure to prepare for a career in some other area or the inability to cope with the often impersonal system of teaching that confronted them, they allowed their Jewish Studies to stagnate, or they abandoned them altogether. I was inspired, challenged, and motivated primarily by the sanctity and the inherent greatness of the texts themselves and secondarily by the virtually limitless but largely under-valued (if sometimes still inadequate and discouraging) resources YU had dedicated to them. While I often complained about what we were taught and what we were not taught - and as a teacher I tried to correct these errors -as an undergraduate I did not yet understand the reality fully. As incomplete as my education was in some respects, particularly at the graduate level (which began while I was in college), it helped prepare me textually, intellectually, and professionally for what I would need to launch a successful academic career outside Yeshiva's orbit, though at the time I never imagined leaving it.
Fluency in languages and mastery of lots of text are not enough to produce a professor; one also needs various teaching, administrative, and research skills, as well as creative drive, the ability to think critically, and the commitment to continue growing. And one can count the many ways in which taking a double or triple academic program seriously for years prepares one for working, surviving, and succeeding under pressure outside the yeshiva world. Still, without the basics, it is impossible to advance, and my undergraduate education served me very, very well. A line modeled on a commercial for Salem cigarettes that was popular during my student days and that one still hears from time to time quips, "You can take the boy out of the yeshiva, you can't take the yeshiva out of the boy." While it is often applied to the childish or improper behavior for which some yeshiva students are notorious, in my personal case it has a very different meaning. In response, all I can say is, "Thank God."
Rabbi Dr. B. Barry Levy, YC '67, BRGS '71, RIETS '71, is professor of Biblical Studies and Dean the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University.
Hours of preparation every night left me totally baffled (in those days, almost none of the commentaries existed in translation, and no honorable student would use one anyway), and when the professor called on me the following week to answer specific questions about the material, I could contribute nothing worthwhile. Sensing that a lack of knowledge indicated a failure to prepare, he wrote "zero, unprepared" in his record book, and called on me the subsequent week, with essentially the same results. This continued well into the semester until in desperation I went to see him and explained the situation. "If you must, you can give me a zero for not knowing the answers," I said. "But please stop writing 'unprepared.' I spend at least two hours every night on the homework for this one class." In fact, I had spent so much time doing this work that, when I returned home and was asked to read the Torah without preparation because the hazan was sick, I found I had inadvertently committed the trop to memory.
That was during the 1963-64 academic year. By September five years later, that teacher was my close associate, and I was a member of the faculty, teaching Bible and how to use those commentaries, and lecturing on the history of Bible interpretation and related subjects. I had completed an MA in the Bernard Revel Graduate School (BRGS), begun as a senior at YC, but it was really the four undergraduate years that changed my life and prepared me for my academic career.
As a student of Jewish Education in TI and a Hebrew major in YC, I had the option of taking every Judaica course offered in both schools and in BRGS, but I could not be a Bible major, because the concept did not exist; Bible was simply not deemed a topic worthy of undergraduate specialization. In those days, almost no Yeshiva Bible professor had a degree in Biblical Studies! Most had semikha and a doctorate in history or some other field, and that was the preferred path for anyone so misguided as to want to follow in their footsteps. Indeed during my junior year I went to discuss my career plans with one of my Bible professors, Dr. Menachem Brayer, but before gaining entrance to his office, I had to provide information on my health, relations with my parents and brother, and similar matters, because he was also the Yeshiva psychologist, and neither he nor anyone in his office had ever encountered a student who wanted to talk about being a Bible professor.
In any case, Hebrew became my college major, because it seemed the closest and most flexible option, and it enabled me to devote myself fully in both YC and TI to Bible and Jewish Studies. This brought me into constant contact with rabbis, professors, and teachers named Michael Bernstein, Menachem Brayer, Moshe Carmilly, Mayer Feldblum, Mayer Hershkovics, Arthur Hyman, Aron Kreiser, Norman Lamm, Hayyim Leaf, Shimon Romm, Aaron Skaist, Israel Wohlgelernter, Abraham Zimels, Eric Zimmer, and many others who trained me in the fine points of Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Bible, Talmud, Jewish history, classical parshanut, talmudic criticism, philosophy, and the like. Contrary to other models of study at Yeshiva, these men taught both texts and how to think about them, which, even if inadequate by some standards, provided a much broader form of education than received at the time in either RIETS or JSS. Thanks to the teaching of these men, a lot of independent reading (based on their advise and my future wife's syllabi from religion courses at Barnard), and the wonderful environment they all helped create, by the end of my senior year I had accomplished four things.
The first was largely personal and a function of Yeshiva's relatively small size, which gave me numerous opportunities to participate in student life and to grow. I was a four-year varsity wrestler and captain of the team; I played intramural volleyball. I was involved in student government and helped create the first EMC curriculum evaluation. I continued to develop the religious lifestyle that had brought me to Yeshiva in the first place (receiving semikha from RIETS in 1971). I was engaged to my wife a few months after graduation from college, and we have been blessed with three sons, three daughters-in-law, and four grandchildren. Except for the lingering death of my father during my final semester, the four years at Yeshiva were simply wonderful. Hebrew major or not, I never went to study in Israel, because I did not want to miss what would have been left behind.
Second, I mastered the textual skills needed to work with the ancient and medieval primary sources on which my studies were based. This happened largely by the second half of my freshman year, when, while taking an open book exam, I suddenly realized that I could make sense of almost any new text I was asked to read. When groups of yeshiva high school graduates gathered at exam time to listen to me recite Gemara as learned in my remedial class so they could take exams in the more advanced courses, I knew I had arrived. Aramaic remained a nuisance for a while longer, but years of studying it with Professor Michael Bernstein and a subsequent PhD in Aramaic at NYU put the handicap to rest permanently.
A lot of effort had been invested in my philological training but not as applied to medieval rabbinic texts. Then Professor Isadore Twersky of Harvard flew in to lecture every second week, and he taught me exactly that. During those years, for a brief time Professor William Foxwell Albright lectured at BRGS, and, after being injured in a fall, he was replaced by Professor Moshe Held from Columbia. As a member of the faculty, I was forbidden by the BRGS administration to attend the last mentioned classes. Albright did not object to my participating; Held actually helped me avoid the pusillanimous administrator who hunted weekly for unauthorized auditors.
Third, I prepared for a career in teaching. As my own level of education rose, so did my aspirations, so what began as interest in informal work with teenagers concluded with the goal of teaching in graduate school. I had been teaching continually since age 16 (and have been ever since), but formal preparation was designed to give me the credentials to teach, in case my graduate studies were ended prematurely and I needed to support myself. I never did hold a full-time job as a day school teacher, but I did serve as a principal for two years, and I have been a consultant for schools in Canada, the US, and Israel for 30 years. I write Judaica curricula, and I served as director of the McGill program that trains Jewish Studies teachers for well over a decade. Perhaps the most rewarding outcome of this early training was the pride in teaching that I developed, which has led to two teaching awards, one from McGill and one from a synagogue in the US.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, my undergraduate years gave me the opportunity to develop a personal modus vivendi for negotiating the legendary synthesis of Torah u-Madda. This was the ideological issue uppermost in most people's minds in those days, but the range of traditional and modern-critical courses I attended allowed for their approaches to be integrated into my intellectual, professional, and spiritual makeup in a very natural way. Together they helped me understand that optimally Torah u-Madda differs from the sum of Torah plus Madda as water differs from hydrogen plus oxygen. This seemed obvious then; now many critics wish to reverse the process and separate the elements.
After four undergraduate years, I had my BA, BRE, and teacher's diploma; I was an experienced Ba'al Koreh (of inestimable value for a Bible professor); and I was ready to study for semikha, to do talmudic criticism, to teach the Bible and the ancient Near East, and to take all of these things very seriously as part of my life. As well, I had studied Latin (in high school), Greek, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Arabic, French, German, and more Hebrew than anyone might have thought possible. And what did we read in Hebrew? Everything imaginable, not just sacred texts. While we were learning Gittin in Talmud class, Dr. Hayyim Leaf had us reading Yehuda Leib Gordon's Kotzo Shel Yod. This seemed perfectly natural at the time; only in retrospect do I chuckle at what Leaf was up to.
The four years I spent teaching at EMC before leaving to teach at Brown and subsequently at McGill (where I have spent the last thirty years) were as much a part of my education as my undergraduate experience. The opportunity to share what I had learned and the pressure to teach what I wanted to teach how I believed it should be taught, in short, to strike out on my own - even as the youngest EMC faculty member by a generation - was invaluable. I owe a huge debt to the former Dean, Rabbi Jacob Rabinowitz, who gambled on a young and enthusiastic but essentially untried teacher and gave me my first academic job. No less responsible was the other (for now unnamed) senior administrator who, against all odds but not all precedents, admitted that the value of what I was doing by teaching outweighed the need to be in the beit midrash in the morning and permitted me to teach then and to prepare for semikha shiurim in the afternoon. (And now as a Dean at McGill I do everything possible to insure that graduate students start teaching as soon as they are ready.) With it all, undoubtedly the most challenging part of my experience was the 45 seconds when I had to walk from my faculty office on the second floor of Furst Hall up the stairs to the semikha classroom on the third floor. For several years at exactly 12:59 PM, I underwent a daily metamorphosis from young, exciting, creative teacher to quiet, passive, and often bored semikha student.
I often wonder how differently my life could have turned out had those initial and final experiences soured me on learning instead of challenging and helping educate me, but I had so many positive experiences along the way that nothing could divert me from my goal. All students become what they do partly because of and partly despite their teachers, and I am no different. But perhaps others were not so fortunate, and amidst the pressure to prepare for a career in some other area or the inability to cope with the often impersonal system of teaching that confronted them, they allowed their Jewish Studies to stagnate, or they abandoned them altogether. I was inspired, challenged, and motivated primarily by the sanctity and the inherent greatness of the texts themselves and secondarily by the virtually limitless but largely under-valued (if sometimes still inadequate and discouraging) resources YU had dedicated to them. While I often complained about what we were taught and what we were not taught - and as a teacher I tried to correct these errors -as an undergraduate I did not yet understand the reality fully. As incomplete as my education was in some respects, particularly at the graduate level (which began while I was in college), it helped prepare me textually, intellectually, and professionally for what I would need to launch a successful academic career outside Yeshiva's orbit, though at the time I never imagined leaving it.
Fluency in languages and mastery of lots of text are not enough to produce a professor; one also needs various teaching, administrative, and research skills, as well as creative drive, the ability to think critically, and the commitment to continue growing. And one can count the many ways in which taking a double or triple academic program seriously for years prepares one for working, surviving, and succeeding under pressure outside the yeshiva world. Still, without the basics, it is impossible to advance, and my undergraduate education served me very, very well. A line modeled on a commercial for Salem cigarettes that was popular during my student days and that one still hears from time to time quips, "You can take the boy out of the yeshiva, you can't take the yeshiva out of the boy." While it is often applied to the childish or improper behavior for which some yeshiva students are notorious, in my personal case it has a very different meaning. In response, all I can say is, "Thank God."
Rabbi Dr. B. Barry Levy, YC '67, BRGS '71, RIETS '71, is professor of Biblical Studies and Dean the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University.