Last year, I started a journal to express my anxieties and dillemas as a religious Jew learning in a university. Now that the new academic year is coming around, I have decided to try and renew this journal with the hope of expanding on the points I made in the introductory post. I made mention in the introduction of my conversation with my RM (teacher) in yeshiva. There I complained of adjustment difficulties and keeping myself busy all the time. Finding hevrutas was very difficult, and I just did not succeed in filling up every seder with activity. Even more frustrating was what I felt to be a lag in my learning abilities. Try though I might, I rarely succeeded in finishing all the sources in the mar'e mekomot, and I always felt that everyone else understood everything and could keep up, while I was forever behind. My RM wisely suggested that I start studying some courses at University, a path that I would begin to take a year later. Still, my failure to be able to last more than a year really smarted. My attempts to study in the BIU kollel were similiarly doomed to failure. In the easy class I was bored; in the challenging classes I couldn't make any headway. In the end, I just gave up, a veritable reject. It turns out I'm not the only one. From what I have heard, yeshiva students who decide to go to university rather than stay on were seen for many years, and saw themselves, as failures. Even though this perception is beginning to change, the amount of prepapration of yeshiva students for university is still lacking. Nothing resembling the corpus of the 'Torah U-Madda' ethos in America exists here. So here I am, a guy who couldn't cut it in yeshiva now plowing his way through the dangerous minefield of Academic Judaism (more on that in the next post). The real question is, am I a failure, a grade-B Jew? Am I doomed to be considered inferior in two worlds - the yehsivish for not being able to learn, and in the academic for being frum? If anyone has any answers, I'm all ears.
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2 comments:
Fascinating! And pray tell what makes you think that Yeshivish learning is the correct derech? I come from the same world and I have come to realize that they true the yeshivot have grown since the great Churban, only a very select and few Talmidim have grown into real talmidei Chachamim. That means people who are able to go down to the Umka dedina rather than just kvetching some diyuk and based on it come up with a krum sevara. It is the reason people like you who probably (guessing from your writing) have a sechel hayashar and cannot follow the yeshivish derech. If you stay with the academic studies and apply what you pick up there of how to discipline one's thinking and follow a path all the way to its source and conclusion, you will find a new ta'am in learning when you come back to it.
Thank you very much for your kind words of encouragement. They mean a lot to me.
Chag Sameach
QED
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