yucommentator.com: A Look Back

Ben Sandler, Outgoing Webmaster

People often ask me, "Why should The Commentator be online?" After all, this is a YU paper, written by and for YU students. What purpose is there in making it accessible to the entire world? And furthermore, should we be, as people say, "airing our dirty laundry in front of the world?" These are important questions, and ones I would like to answer as I and my colleague, Josh Yuter, prepare to leave the helm of yucommentator.com and watch The Commentator enter the third millennium.

The Commentator is a newspaper, of, by, and for the students of Yeshiva College. It aims to represent the views, concerns, and interests of the students of this great institution. Even if there are people reading this paper halfway around the world, the content of the paper is directed entirely towards the student body. However, despite this, people around the world are reading the paper online every issue. And the reason is that people want to know what is going on here. It's sounds pretty simple, but it goes much deeper.

Yeshiva University, and Yeshiva College in particular, represent the ideals of Torah Umadda and Modern Orthodoxy. Leaving out the debate as to whether this is still the case, it is incontrovertible that YU students go on to leadership positions in Jewish communities around the world, and decisions that YU makes affect the community at large. Witness the recent controversy surrounding the proposed closing of MTA to see how central YU is to the greater Jewish community. And not only do people want to know what the school is doing, but people want to know what YU students are doing. When a so-called "South Park Minyan" was featured on the front page of the site, The Jewish Week quickly picked up the story. Whether or not this was for the better, the point is that the eyes of the world are upon us.

If this is so, people suggest, we should really be much more careful about what we print. After all, we don't want people to know what we at YU are really like, do we? I have always asked, why not? If we are ashamed of who we are, what is the proper recourse? To hide ourselves from the public eye, and only allow the public to see a carefully screened variation of ourselves, a la YU Today? Rather, we should accept the fact that people are watching, and yes, looking up to the students of Yeshiva College, and try to live up the lofty expectations of our brothers and sisters around the world.

Many have suggested that a major problem in the Haredi world is that due to their self-imposed enclosure and ghettoization, they do not feel the pressure to maintain a moral society which the peering eyes of the world encourage. Modern Orthodox Jews generally see themselves as part of the society at large, and are therefore more conscious of how they appear to others. In YU, although we subscribe to Modern Orthodox ideas, we are nonetheless secluded from the eyes of our non-Jewish peers, much unlike our coreligionists at other institutions. But in this digital age, we cannot shirk away from our ennobling position in the global Jewish community, nor should we be ashamed for the world to see who we are and why we are what we are.

Since Josh and I put The Commentator online last year, we have been privileged to participate in the process of bringing YU to the world. We have received lots of feedback from people who only since the paper went online were able to keep up with the latest happenings at this school, and we found that many people who would otherwise have no contact with YU now took an intense interest in the well-being of our school. I believe that this has greatly benefitted both us and the community at large, and I am proud to have been a part of it. I wish the best of luck to our successors as they prepare to take over the job of not only coding HTML and uploading files, but representing the future leaders of Modern Orthodoxy to the communities which continue to look up to them.