The Post-Yeshiva Yeshivaman

Anybody who went to yeshiva and has internalized its ideals, feels it’s important to maintain those ideals throughout life. Many people have remarked that, in an important sense, no one ever leaves the yeshiva; a yeshiva education is permanently embedded in one’s consciousness. I want to address the question of how can a post- yeshiva yeshivaman (the ‘an’ is pronounced like the ‘on’ in Ludwig von Beethoven), away from the actual yeshiva and in the world, maintain yeshivish values? I want to concentrate on the value of life-long learning and education.

The problem is of interest only to a minority of Orthodox Jews. Many Orthodox Jews don’t have time to breathe, let alone to be confronted with questions about what to read and what to study. As a background condition, I’m assuming a person has the good fortune to be able to fulfill all of his duties and obligations and still have time left over to learn. My question is when a yeshivaman faces a long life ahead, post-yeshiva, how is he to organize his intellectual studies? Since we’re talking about yeshiva educated people, one fixed point will obviously be the study of Torah, and here, I think, there’s a general consensus that there are three main books in Jewish life, the Bible, the Talmud, and the Zohar. A person who doesn’t study any of these books, especially the Talmud, can not be described as yeshivish.

There are three other potential libraries that might have to be integrated into Torah study. The first is Jewish studies, which include both books about the history and culture of Jewish life and other books that may be relevant to the understanding of the three core texts. If you have a “Torah, Torah, Torah!” view, the question doesn’t come up because all the time will be spent in Talmudic study and the like. Nevertheless, it is true that many yeshiva people, as they get older, take an interest in Jewish Studies, and the question arises how they should go about their reading.

There’s also a library of secular knowledge that is interesting for its own sake, beginning with art history and ending with zoology. Each of these disciplines could take a lifetime to master. What is one to do? Next, there are areas of studies that are relevant to one’s special duties in life. Lawyers have to keep up with the law. Doctors have to study developments in medicine and so on. There are also bodies of knowledge that are associated with one’s particular existential situation. A family in which somebody is sick will eventually learn all there is to know about the illness.

So here is the grown-up yeshivaman potentially faced with four almost endless libraries: a Torah library, Jewish Studies, interesting secular knowledge, and practical secular knowledge. Can anything be said about how one is to go about integrating all of this? I want to offer two principles; not rules, principles. The first is that curiosity is the surest guide of what to read. There can be no better motivator than natural interest. Learning should not be like taking cod liver oil. It should be more like licking the honey off a page. A study program devoted to material that a reader finds uninteresting will not endure for any substantial period of time. Everything else equal, a yeshivahman should allow his natural curiosity and desire to know more to organize his studies.

The second principle is coherence that leads to depth. At the end of a life, all this study should amount to something. The person would have found a way to connect the various subjects and interests. The studies should reinforce each other and enable the person to get past the exterior level to something deeper. In yeshiva jargon, it is a bkeius that leads to an amkus, an encyclopedic knowledge of many different subjects that leads to a deeper knowledge that is so integrated that the whole is more than the parts. At the end of a life a person should be able to say, “I now understand, in a deep way, what I did not understand but very much wanted to know when I set out on my intellectual journey.”

The view I’m offering is in contrast to an idea popular in secular Jewish life. People frequently say a person ought to be a “Renaissance man.” They say it’s important to know a little bit about everything, so that at a cocktail or dinner party, one can always speak up and offer an intelligent opinion. Too detailed knowledge of any particular subject makes for a geek or a nerd, but not for an attractive dinner party companion. I don’t like this view because it frequently leads to a sort of “culture vulture” type of consumerism. Did you see? Did you read? Did you go to? I loved it, I hated it, so-so. At the end of life, all this vulturing doesn’t add up to an organic, unified whole, and frequently doesn’t push the person to greater depth and wisdom. I am not opposed to participating in a culture. I am opposed to a sampling ‘wine tasting’ approach to culture.

On my view, what is true for a yeshiva bochur post-yeshiva also holds true for the general issue of Jewish literacy that affects all Jewish denominations and groups. I say the fixed point is Torah, followed by Jewish Studies and secular knowledge and special knowledge, in some combination, governed by curiosity and coherence. As to the exact way to travel down the road from curiosity to depth, the answer differs for each of us. We have different interests, life experiences and therefore different lessons to learn and roads to travel. There is no guarantee of success, and it is easy enough to go down a path that lead to nowhere. The possibility of failure and the promise of success are all part of the excitement and glamour of being a yeshivahman.