2008 Woodie Awards
A Torah u-Madda Intellectual Autobiography
Jack Bieler
Issue date: 4/18/05 Section: YUdaica
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When I think back to my Yeshiva College experience (1964-69), I realize that these undergraduate years were chiefly responsible for the development of the Torah u-Madda perspective with which I have approached my career in Jewish education and the rabbinate. As a veteran educator with an interest in the philosophy of Jewish education, I am accustomed to reflecting upon concise educational strategies that can contribute to advancing particular perspectives and orientations in students. Since of late there has been much discussion regarding the increasing paucity of self-conscious and proactive educational contexts within which the interdisciplinary and integrated approach championed by Dr. Bernard Revel is unabashedly advanced, I have decided in this essay to focus upon my own experience and consider how my personal Hashkafa evolved, in the interests of possibly providing implicit recommendations to those interested in assuring that Torah u-Madda remain a viable option for students of Judaism in Yeshiva and elsewhere.
Nothing prior to my arriving on the Washington Heights campus in the fall of 1964 provided me with even an inkling of the Hashkafa that is so intrinsic to the Modern Orthodoxy that I have espoused. My late parents had immigrated to the United States from Europe and never so much as completed high school. Shabbat and Yom Tov services, as well as my memories of the Talmud Torah in the Conservative synagogue which my family attended, can hardly be credited with offering a sophisticated intellectual approach. As for the bulk of my formative education, I am a product of the public schools of Queens, NY which, while offering me a solid Madda background, certainly was hardly a source of Torah.
My first encounters with Torah U-Madda was not so much in terms of a concept or abstract idea, but rather in the embodiment of such an outlook and lifestyle in many of the instructors of the Shiurim and classes that I participated in at Yeshiva. A general observation that struck me deeply early on was how many of my teachers in both general as well as Judaic studies were also congregational rabbis. While in some cases, this may have been the result of an individual needing to increase the relatively inadequate financial compensation that he was receiving from his synagogue community, or even vice versa, i.e., meager payment for teaching part-time on the college level had to be augmented, and this could be done by serving as a part-time congregational Rabbi, nevertheless I was impressed that a person would bridge the worlds of academics and communal service, and serve in both domains with distinction.
Nothing prior to my arriving on the Washington Heights campus in the fall of 1964 provided me with even an inkling of the Hashkafa that is so intrinsic to the Modern Orthodoxy that I have espoused. My late parents had immigrated to the United States from Europe and never so much as completed high school. Shabbat and Yom Tov services, as well as my memories of the Talmud Torah in the Conservative synagogue which my family attended, can hardly be credited with offering a sophisticated intellectual approach. As for the bulk of my formative education, I am a product of the public schools of Queens, NY which, while offering me a solid Madda background, certainly was hardly a source of Torah.
My first encounters with Torah U-Madda was not so much in terms of a concept or abstract idea, but rather in the embodiment of such an outlook and lifestyle in many of the instructors of the Shiurim and classes that I participated in at Yeshiva. A general observation that struck me deeply early on was how many of my teachers in both general as well as Judaic studies were also congregational rabbis. While in some cases, this may have been the result of an individual needing to increase the relatively inadequate financial compensation that he was receiving from his synagogue community, or even vice versa, i.e., meager payment for teaching part-time on the college level had to be augmented, and this could be done by serving as a part-time congregational Rabbi, nevertheless I was impressed that a person would bridge the worlds of academics and communal service, and serve in both domains with distinction.