The Commentator

Every Elul, a few thousand young men and women get used to a new way of life as they settle in to yeshivot and seminaries in Israel.  By the end of the year, many of them will return home different people.  Those close to them will be taken by surprise.  There will exist among some a drive to view such changes derisively.  "Oh, he totally flipped."  Like any social pejorative, the very use of the term “flipping out” conjures up the most negative associations in reach, in this case, a detachment from relative normalcy.  This might very well include taking forever to daven, sitting in a beit midrash for hours on end, and distance from cultural, even familial, interests and activities.  Oh, and then there's the dour uniform, unpolished lexicon, and denial of another gender's existence.  All of this might describe one who has, supposedly, flipped out.  But does such a caricature really do justice to the experience just had?

This stereotype, not uncommon in our communities, is misguided and represents a gross misunderstanding of modern young adults' spiritual development.  While there are a number of instances in which disappointment is based on a fundamental inability to understand the individual’s development and on the other side, his or her failure to find acceptance, many others are not.  Disdain for "flipping out" instead frequently stems from an absence of sensitivity to what the goals of Torah study are and sensibility in relating to those goals' achievement.  Lately, it is hard to tell if either is improving.

Last month the leader of a major American Orthodox organization adopted terminology that labels the enlightened state in which some young men and women return from Israel a "syndrome."  In a widely syndicated article, the leader, a rabbi in good standing with many in the Yeshiva University student body and staff, offered strategies to "combat" the Flipping Out Syndrome (FOS).  "The more communication between educators and parents and between students and parents, the better the odds are for an easy and pleasant transition back home after the year," he wrote.  He further suggested parents set up weekly phone chavrutot and keep in touch with rabbis and teachers; yeshivot and seminaries should encourage students to relate feelings back home to keep the folks aware of any changes, maybe scheduling time for letter-writing; and schools should urge parents to take a week off to come to Israel and learn with their children during the year.  Though surely well intended, the diagnosis and suggested remedies missed the mark.

Though there certainly are some cases of tension between returnees and their parents, the suggestion that this is predominantly the case is speculative and counterproductive.  The primary accomplishment of this kind of claim is to further discourage some parents from allowing their children to go to Israel altogether - effectively putting at greater risk their children's Jewish identity.  Moreover, widespread FOS diagnosis is unfortunate in that it heaps straw onto the indefatigable scarecrow of the right-wing maniacs suffocating Modern Orthodoxy.  Exaggerating the number of flip outs adds to the population of this imaginary crowd and strains the tensions between various streams of Orthodoxy.

Leaving aside students from totally unaffiliated families and those coming from non-Jewish high schools, the matter of post-Israel conflicts has little to do with parents ill-prepared for their children's return or even a lack of communication between the two in the interim. There is no lack of communication between the average first-year student and his or her parents.  In fact, increased contact would pose a new challenge, as time learning in Israel has already been hampered by the ubiquity and inexpensiveness of personal technology. Text-messaging, phone games, and sometimes daily calls to America fight for a share of the short days which should be spent getting used to serious Torah learning. Also, while some parents who visit and spend a good chunk of time in the yeshiva or seminary are impressed and have a positive experience, oftentimes parents come in and three, four days, sometimes a week is lost to visiting or touring, while shiur, chavrusas, and night seder are left behind. The problem nowadays is not that parents are not aware of how their children are doing in Israel. They are over-connected.   

ATTITUDES & REACTIONS

In truth, much of the attitude toward those returning to America from yeshiva or seminary study is already determined by the approach taken to going in the first place.  If one views the opportunity to take a year off to serve G-d and position themselves for greater commitment to Jewish observance with admiration or even envy, then any growth can hardly disappoint.  But if time learning in Israel is seen as a luxury, a possibility to study intensively and uninterrupted, but with a proviso of returning with similar life goals and interests identifying with modern American ideals, then the greater the change the higher the ensuing disappointment. University of Pennsylvania turning into Stern College, and Wall Street dreams giving way to nine-to-five accounting, for example, are prone to be less than satisfying.

Many parents, not having been privileged to even a day school education, are perforce in the latter position. Reactions to their children definitely vary, but the onus of cordial relations with parents of this type is certainly not on the parents themselves. They often do not have the background to relate, much less appreciate, the change their children will undergo to begin with. The responsibility is on the returnees to be careful and smart about their ways, and the yeshivas and seminaries to not just advise this, but also implore their students to do so. 

Parents with stronger backgrounds, however, should know better.  That members of the Modern Orthodox community are willing to lend hands to wallop with scorn those retuning with new passion for Jewish learning and observance is not just sad, it is hypocritical.  Perhaps the greatest weakness of some of the most fervent wavers of the Modern Orthodoxy flag whom I have encountered among American laypersons is a lack of real desire to toe the line personally in essential areas: dedicated, regular Torah learning and mussar study, concern for exactitude in following halacha, and carefulness in choices of entertainment containing halachically problematic content. It would make sense then, that when their children return heavily invested in these very areas, some cognitive dissonance may set it in.

The sentiment of such reactions can be presumed to have prompted a tom-foolish song devised a few years ago about the nature of many returnees from learning in Israel. Though the singers ridiculed an array of attitudes across the spectrum of these students, perhaps its most offensive lyrics were: "I just heard a half hour halacha shiur/And decided to change the way I’ve lived for 18 years." The implication is that one should not adjust their actions to meet the Torah’s expectations.  Is this the ideology of a G-d-fearing Jew?

CULTURE SHOCK

To be sure, there are some who stand in disservice to the truly committed by opting to masquerade as such, hollow of any character refinement or supernal motives. Pretension can disguise itself in pious garb, and even lurk behind a Gemara,. But imposters are usually easy to identify.  Within a few short years, sometimes months, little is left of even the costume. 

Meanwhile, the lion's share of those returning after serious learning suffers deep culture shock. Aside from the sudden dearth of freely available kosher food and traffic running at full throttle Shabbat morning, the given Jewish and greater local communities now differ from the student’s newfound social religious values. Even secular Israeli Jews are more spiritually curious than ordinary Americans, it may seem, and the Orthodox community now is somehow much less sophisticated than it was a year ago. Newfound adherence to a Jewish lifestyle as defined by halacha – at the heart of so-called Flipping Out Syndrome – becomes complicated, as those returning from being immersed in an environment highly sensitive to religious practice are challenged by one that can seem by and large apathetic. The respect that those around returnees have for halacha sets the tone of interaction with them. Again, those with less background or sensitivity are at the most extreme disadvantage.

Yeshivot and seminaries have probably neglected addressing this reality in proper fashion. Indeed, the answer to back-home fights over beach vacations, or even the state of the family kitchen, is less likely to be found in weekly phone chavrutas or expensive visits to check in, than in mindful approaches in teaching and learning. Specifically, what's in order is greater sensitization of students to the realities they will confront upon their return. Teachers and heads of yeshivot and midrashot need to adopt a greater ken for those who might be challenged by less inspired lifestyles and communities.  And, yes, parents should be involved. The idea of phone chavrutot is still a good one in many cases, in that it may show parents in "real-time" their children's developing interest and growth in learning and expose them to Torah study they might not otherwise be involved in. Visiting can also be valuable insomuch as it does not cause significant interruption to learning.

But all of this is still not enough. Synagogues and other rabbinic leadership within the Modern Orthodox community need to build serious commitment to Modern Orthodoxy in its genuine form, meaning intense involvement in learning and careful observance of halacha. The place to start might be expending less energy on the need to engage the broader world and more on reinforcing concrete spiritual commitments. Then there would be greater understanding of what goes on during the year in Israel, and how beautiful it is.

Binyamin Ehrenkranz, YC 09'

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