Orthodox Judaism and the Liberal Arts

Yeshiva University’s undergraduate colleges search for a way to balance devotion to Torah study with the demands of a serious liberal arts education

By Shalom Carmy

Yeshiva College and Stern College for Women are the undergraduate colleges of Yeshiva University and the focus of this article. The university’s other components include graduate schools in medicine, law, social work, and clinical psychology as well as high schools and an affiliated rabbinical school (yeshiva) at which most male students take part of their Jewish studies program. The colleges’ motto, Torah uMadda (Torah and wisdom), proclaims them bastions both of Jewish religious learning and of the disciplines taught at other liberal arts institutions.

In addition to pursuing a conventional curriculum, students at Yeshiva College, all of whom are men, devote several hours each day to Torah study, which is only partially credited for the bachelor’s degree. The most popular track at the college entails several hours of daily Talmud study. Almost all the students have experienced this "dual curriculum" earlier in their education, and most have spent a year or two after high school at Israeli yeshivas, where they studied Torah full time. The same is true for Stern College students, with the difference that the Talmud is less central to the standard curriculum.

Yeshiva’s Torah uMadda is not the only option for combining Torah study and college. Many young men and women divide their day between a religious seminary and a college program at a separate institution; others try to find time in their college schedules to continue their Torah study. Often, though not always, the outcome is compartmentalization. Torah study may be ghettoized, so that it does not consistently inform the student’s "secular" consciousness or benefit from the insights and methods of liberal arts study. Frequently, it is the college career that is treated dismissively as an economically necessary distraction from Torah. For students who want to attend college and study Torah, Yeshiva may be attractive, because it houses a world-class, multitrack yeshiva on the same campus as a liberal arts program whose best components attain excellence.

For our ideal student, Yeshiva is an invitation to participate in a community of inquiry that generates a theological and cultural energy greater than the sum of its parts. Milton wrote that "truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain," from which he concluded that "if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition." The Yeshiva community accepts this challenge; it tries to marshal the critical mass and achieve the intellectual traction necessary to swim vigorously in the river of truth, against the current if need be.

There is no unanimity about Torah uMadda’s scope and application. In his book on the subject, Norman Lamm, president of Yeshiva University, experiments with no fewer than six models. Readers of H. R. Niebuhr’s classic Christ and Culture will be familiar with Niebuhr’s useful account of the varied relationships between culture and revealed truth. So it is not uncommon for religious thinkers to differ in their assessment of a field of interest, depending on theological outlook and personal agenda.

Perhaps the most decisive clash within modern Orthodoxy is between the champions of Torah uMadda who see it as a means to reconcile the tensions between traditional Judaism and mainstream American society, and those who believe that a genuine engagement with the liberal arts is as likely to sharpen the inevitable conflicts between the service of God and the values of man as to smooth them over. Both groups are equally committed to liberal arts study, and the latter may even be more willing to undertake the study of disturbing material. But their orientations are different: where the former seek harmony, for the latter, Torah uMadda does not bring peace but, so to speak, the intellectual sword.

Fundamental Questions

Instead of asking whether we, as individuals, should accept a proposition or an argument, the academy often discusses whether a person playing a particular professional role is supposed to subscribe to it. When students learn to think of themselves as role players, they gain insight into the process of communication, which contributes to effective expression and self-analysis. But focusing on such self-perception distracts us from the inner-directed questions: what do I say to myself? What are the truths worth living and dying for? To sidestep these ultimate concerns will disappoint students who need a good reason to sacrifice golden years of money making. The Torah in Torah uMadda posits the value of truth, providing a framework in which the "wisdom of the world" can carve out its own domain of significance.

The more we promote social diversity, the more uncomfortable we may become about acknowledging, let alone confronting, radical disagreement. We move from the civilized and (with qualifications) attractive principle that my ideas and traditions and yours are interesting because they are ours to the uncritical assertion that they are true for that reason. To maintain artificial civility by enforcing an air-conditioned impartiality, and by studiously avoiding the decisiveness of fundamental commitment, is to put one’s credibility at risk.

Torah uMadda, by contrast, with its unabashedly countercultural message—that seeking truth matters, even though the religious individual finds that her commitments and convictions place her at odds with the outlook prevalent in American society—promotes the significance of genuine intellectual striving. By accentuating the self-conscious loneliness of the cultural "resident alien," it becomes relatively immune to the anesthetizing notion that these concerns don’t really amount to much.

At this point, you might object that the shared cultural background and aims of Yeshiva students engender a more conspicuous uniformity and conformity than the blandness I deplore. Am I not straining at the politically correct gnat while swallowing the parochial camel? To this I would respond that the gnat is bigger and more insidious than many of us allow. Independent thinking does not flourish simply because professors offer it lip service and are echoed by students who know what we want to hear. As to the parochial camel, the very fact that Yeshiva’s relative homogeneity cannot be concealed makes it impossible to ignore in the classroom. Soon enough our students will go out into the world. Hence it would be shortsighted, if not intellectually suicidal, to shelter them from the society that awaits them just outside our gates.

Of course, despite these considerations, the satisfactions of intellectual conformism are as evident at Yeshiva as elsewhere. The appetite for voices and arguments alien to the "official" culture is an acquired taste. To whet that appetite, and hold in check our countervailing inclinations, is a vital and unending task of the liberal arts teacher and student. I will illustrate some aspects of this effort, as it is waged at Yeshiva, later on.

Most painfully for me, American academic culture marginalizes the intellectual core of religion. The high wall separating religion from thought, and thus from much of life, in the United States, confirms the arrogant secularism of the secularist, even as it robs the religious believer of opportunities for intellectual growth and self-examination. It confounds our grasp of the present as it corrupts our understanding of the past. Sentimental appeal to religious values and symbols coexists with an abysmal ignorance of, and dismissal of, the content of religious belief.

One outgrowth of the sentimentalism about religion that fills the intellectual vacuum is a fuzzy affirmation of the religious community’s feelings and self-image. Ethnic or communal self-celebration can no more be assessed intellectually than can an incantation be true or false. Torah uMadda, by contrast, propounds a robust integration of thought and religious life, although the current retreat into ethnicity can impede balanced truth seeking at Yeshiva as well.

Yeshiva and Stern are liberal arts colleges. Orthodox Jews are conspicuous among the faculty; quite a few of the professors in fields other than Jewish studies are Jewishly learned; a couple of Jewish studies professors regularly teach in other areas as well. Most of us, however, are not Orthodox, including some Jews and non-Jews whose intellectual and pedagogical excellence makes them key participants in the ideal interaction I described above.

Once upon a time, it was common to see nonreligious male Jewish instructors wearing the kippa (skullcap) at work. The manifestation of an optional sign of piety by individuals whose way of life and beliefs were far from Orthodoxy may have helped project a "Jewish" atmosphere in the corridors, but treating the campus as if it were a synagogue and faculty members as if they were politicians fishing for the ethnic vote did nothing to make them, or the administration that presumably encouraged the practice, better partners in our intellectual quest. In recent decades, this unwritten dress code seems to have become defunct, along with the insecurity that inspired it.

If academic freedom is to pervade an institution of higher learning as a broad ideal, and if the tenure system that protects it is not to be seen merely as a legal guarantor of job security, all members of the university community must feel that they can come before the students as themselves, in the full complexity of their personalities and experience. How well this modest standard is met depends less on formal safeguards than on competence, wisdom, and good will on the part of the individual and the rest of the college community.

The college years are often a period of searching. For some, the search entails not the questioning of Torah, but a hostile skepticism about the study of non-Torah culture. The strains in Jewish thought that disdain higher general education deserve a respectful hearing in our classrooms, even as Yeshiva espouses the rabbinic definition of wisdom as the ability to learn from all human beings. Of course, the rejectionist view cannot dictate our curriculum. But even staunch adherence to the Torah uMadda outlook does not eliminate points of tension between the standard college curriculum and the demands of Torah.

The two main areas of conflict are exposure to sexual content and the fine line between being properly informed about other religions, on the one hand, and celebrating them, on the other. Reasonable, knowledgeable scholars who are otherwise proponents of Torah uMadda disagree about the educational value of such studies and the extent of the halakhic constraints on them. Some reject these controversial subjects totally. Others, focusing on the context of the Yeshiva curriculum, regard at least some aspects of them as halakhically permissible, perhaps even desirable for the formation of a thoughtful contemporary religious mind.

Art history usually includes generous servings of nudity and Christian art. If one adopts the most restrictive view, that halakha clearly prohibits these elements, then it is pointless to throw them at Orthodox students. If these elements are indispensable to the teaching of art history, which is the considered opinion of our faculty, then removing the offending material would not be a solution. The gutted course would fail to be an honest to goodness course in art history, just as substituting tuna for shrimp would not make the resulting concoction a genuine shrimp cocktail. If the controversial elements are clearly permitted, then no problem arises. But, as I have said, we have students who sincerely regard this material as forbidden, for whom it is as much out of the question as shrimp or pork. Yet they want to learn about the history of art. Can this group be accommodated within the Yeshiva framework?

A proposal adopted in recent years entails offering a survey that concentrates on the modern period. This section does not remove all controversial material, because the faculty cannot, in good academic conscience, sponsor an art history survey without nudity. But the narrower focus of the course keeps the amount of objectionable material to a minimum. Students who want the course, but not the content they deem nonkosher, may absent themselves from lectures to which they object. Naturally, this may put them at a slight grading disadvantage, but the risk of getting a B rather than a B+ is a small price to pay in order to preserve the student’s religious integrity and the institution’s intellectual integrity.

There are many contexts in which a Yeshiva student may confront the New Testament. At Yeshiva College, the acquaintance is most likely to occur if a student takes the second of our two "masterpiece" literature courses. Some students requested that we move the problematic sessions to the end of the first course, which is devoted to Greek and Roman literature. They argued that having the New Testament early in the term deterred many from registering. If it were the tail end of the first course, students could put off their decision about doing the reading or skipping meetings until the last week of the semester.

This proposal was sensible, yet the faculty did not recommend a change. As we envision the curriculum, the New Testament provides fundamental background to the readings that follow, not a final chapter to the story of the ancient Greco-Roman world—a perspective better suited to intellectual history than to world literature. Here the academic structure was maintained at the cost of continued discomfort for some students.

Outside the Classroom

The most notable case was a speaking invitation extended by the Political Science Club, some fifteen years ago, to a leading representative of the Arab League. As I recall, the speaker would not have been allowed in the United States, in that "pre-peace-process" era, were it not for his United Nations status. Quite apart from the strong and understandable reactions that many students felt against a militant antagonist, many of us feared that the appearance of this individual, in his official capacity, would cause harmful misunderstanding outside our walls.

Yeshiva has a reputation as a citadel of Zionism, and the distinction dear to champions of academic freedom, between learning about your enemy and endorsing him, could not overcome the perception that we were taking an implicit political position.

The ivory tower cannot always be disengaged from the very real shadow it casts. Having this speaker as our guest, moreover, would defeat our purpose. He could most authentically be experienced by our students away from our campus, in a place where he could speak his mind unhindered by diplomatic sensitivity to the temper of his audience.

Nonetheless, many of us who were unhappy about the invitation were alarmed at the prospect of its being rescinded. Taking it back would set an intolerable precedent and lead to further embarrassment were the speaker to publicize the fact that his invitation had been canceled under pressure. The prolonged uproar led to much discussion on all sides regarding the factors that must be weighed in such cases. Subsequent educational contacts with Arab speakers have maintained a low profile with no accompanying unpleasantness. If rapid change in the international climate makes these debates sound like ancient history, there is perhaps a lesson in that, too.

It is difficult for me to speak about Yeshiva without referring to my revered mentor Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–93), known simply as "the Rav," whose stature in our community paralleled his worldwide prestige as the century’s foremost Talmudist and Jewish philosopher. His classroom was far from egalitarian: he was clearly the teacher and we were there to learn from him. But the most urgent lesson he pressed upon us was to think for ourselves. For "muddy pools" of unearned, parrot-like Talmudic analysis he displayed contempt. Nor did he believe that personal or communal dilemmas could be resolved vicariously, by being passed upward to the heroic master. A teacher’s role, he often said, is to create the frame of reference for the student’s own thought.

The situation with the Arab League speaker came up after the Rav’s withdrawal from public activity. I would like to end with an incident from the time when he was still with us. His example, I think, represents the combination of righteousness and restraint that should govern the relationship between divine Torah and human culture at an institution like Yeshiva, for those who are committed to the primacy of the former and the significance of the latter.

In the 1980s a militant politician from Israel visited the United States to hawk his wares. Years later, this man was banned from candidacy for the Israeli Knesset because his anti-Arab harangues violated Israel’s antiracism law (which had been passed with him in mind). Already, the Rav regarded this man’s selective citation of Jewish sources as a distortion and desecration of Torah. He told people close to him that the individual should not be given a platform. But certain students desired the controversial speaker’s presence in our midst. Some, when they learned of the Rav’s displeasure, proceeded to cast aspersions on his Zionism. He, for his part, was not disposed to impose his opinion. The charismatic speaker made his way through the civilized but unambiguous demonstration that greeted him, ascended the rostrum, and allowed himself remarks about the Rav’s religious authenticity that would probably have provoked violence in a conventional yeshiva.

Academic freedom, in the broadest sense, was served in this case. By which I mean that under ordinary conditions, and even under great strain, students and faculty are entitled to their own mistakes. So long as we can live with such challenges, Yeshiva’s existential atmosphere will continue to differ, subtly but crucially, from that of other yeshivas as it surely must differ from that of other universities.

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