A Jewish University?

As I leaf through this semester's course catalogue, I am not dismayed when I see only five Political Science classes. I do not get upset when my friends down at NYU mistake my thin yellow catalogue for some kind of restaurant menu. I give them the standard response: Yeshiva College is a small school and therefore can only have a limited variety of classes, but our school offers the kind of Jewish education that will not be found in any other university. We've got that Torah U'Madda stuff happening uptown, I say.

Yeshiva University's banner proudly proclaims the motto of Torah U'Madda, the much spoken of yet rarely seen synthesis of our ancient religion and modern disciplines. In layman's terms, Torah U'Madda means that we are a Jewish university which strives to unite the secular world with our religion. Yet as I leaf, once again, through the course catalogue I realize that sometimes that is not necessarily the case.

In this world there are plenty of instances of the religious hybrid that we pay lip service to but for some strange reason they are absent from the little yellow but not so different course book. For example, the Holocaust is a field of study which naturally lends itself to both historical and theological analysis. Theoretically, there is no one more equipped to deal with the Holocaust than Yeshiva University, and there is no school that should care more about it. (Course catalogue says: one Holocaust class.) The Holocaust issue should be tackled as an interdisciplinary class, taught by a team of a professor and a rabbi, creating a class in which the history of the event and its theological implications will unite.

Hallways in Rubin are decorated with signs proudly proclaiming that the nation of Israel is with the Golan, and that Hebron is eternally ours. Hold on, hold on, I think I'm getting a revelation here: Israel is yet another one of those rare occurrences where Torah meets Madda without some ill fitting shidduch. (Course book says: zero classes on the Middle East.) Israel is an essential Jewish issue that is on everyone's mind, but shunned from the classroom. If any school should pioneer this study it should be YU.

What about the Bible codes? You know, those pesky people who believe that the Torah contains codes in it that can only be broken by a computer. Torah and computers, sound familiar? Yet Yeshiva University professors and rabbis are complacent in their fear/hate relationship with this topic, and choose to relegate this work to other schools. Instead of being an uninformed and opinionated peanut gallery composed of professors and rabbis relying on their friends at Harvard to do the work, we should be at the forefront of this discipline. Prove it or disprove it. That's Torah U'Madda.

Yeshiva University should make a concerted effort to reunite the failing marriage of Torah U'Madda and bring the Yeshiva back into the University. The first step towards this goal should be to tackle those issues that lend themselves best to this concept no matter how politically charged or sensitive they are, such as the Holocaust and the Middle East. The next step after that should be to introduce Jewish art classes, comparative law classes, and add Jewish philosophy classes (course book says: one Jewish philosophy class).

For many people in this school the greatest synthesis of Torah U'Madda is Dougie's and football. However, if we believe in this concept of Torah U'Madda, then let's stop watering it down with yiddishisms and thumb movements. We are a Jewish university and we must embrace our identity. Our very name demands it.