From the Editor's Desk

By Pinky Shapiro

As I strolled past Time Out on Tuesday, I saw two MTA students wrestling on the sidewalk.  The closer that I walked, the clearer my view of the students became and the more real the punches delivered by the burlier of the two seemed.  Before I could intervene, the student receiving the pummeling released his grip and sprinted to safety, ignoring the spate of insults and catcalls hurled in his direction from the aggressor and a number of adolescent spectators.

I crossed 186th Street, never breaking my stride, realizing that in witnessing a classic case of high school bullying, there was no “good Samaritan” who stepped in and spared that ninth grader the physical and mental scars that his bully provided.

Almost weekly, our friends scour the globe in search of Jews in need.  NCSY, Counterpoint, HASC, and dozens of other programs benefit from our students’ participation as they reach out to people with acute attention and care.  The absence of such efforts on campus must be attributed to the lack of pretty co-counselors or teenage girls in tight outfits.  Certainly, their thinking goes, the wayward high school basketball star deserves more assistance and consideration than someone living next-door.

Truthfully, something far more important must be the reason for this exclusivity.  We cannot operate benevolently on campus in exchange for our organizationally-sanctioned altruistic endeavors because then the shaddchan will be lacking a critical item when compiling the report on the shtark bochur’s attributes for potential eidle meidles.  How do you put “stopped my neighbor from ruining his life” on a resume?

If, by nature, we are so good and devoted to ensuring the continuity of our mesorah and the love of all our people, then why not actualize it here?  Is the overused, trite platitude, “Kiruv begins at home,” ever practiced?  Surely for our MTA student, not a single individual was willing to step out of their own world for a moment and do right for someone else.  One could claim that my concerns are bizarre; after all, they were only fighting teenagers.  To understand the eventual consequences of such moral equivalency let us revisit the question relative to the horrible incident that recently occurred on campus.

While I firmly believe that Dean Himber, Dr. Nissel and anyone else involved in the interrogation, investigation and dismissal of the students associated with that incident should be immediately dismissed from this institution and prevented from gaining future employment in education, I find the collective actions and inactions of the students involved in the incident, that means all of us in Yeshiva’s community, morally repugnant.

That we respond with absolute indifference to the various objectionable goings-on in our fellow students’ residences is grotesque.  To accept that we have created, nurtured, and bred a generation of people, myself included, who do not care what happens to others, responding only with the occasional communal recitation of Tehillim, is shameful.  Of course it is easy for me to speak from the cheap seats, having not been directly involved in the incident at all.  But with the hubbub surrounding the qualifications for a presidential candidate it seems like we all have a lot to say about taking the principled and moral high-ground.

Sadly, the institution continues to do little to correct this societal deficiency.  At the same time that a number of students were wrongfully – and perhaps illegally – dismissed from Yeshiva last Thursday, the Faculty/Student Senate unanimously rejected a proposal that, if enacted, would have required students who witness cheating to report the incident to the proper authorities.  The senate sent a firm message: We cannot and should not expect students to report on others in order to foster a more moral society.

The complete hypocrisy and two-faced duality of the senate – specifically of Chaim Nissel, who sat idle as the senate voted against the measure just hours after he expelled a student from the university for failing to report the use of marijuana by other students, is unconscionable.

It need not require an incensed editor to point out the ridiculousness and the moral equivalency practiced in this morally-rudderless institution.  Nissel did not stand up and make an impassioned plea for requiring students to report cheating.  If he had, one could at least believe his claims of moral rectitude, which is, apparently, so strong that he could not bear to have those students who witnessed marijuana use and neglected to report it continue to participate in our saintly Torah U’maddah-certified, Yeshiva society.  However, in failing to speak up, Nissel only further disqualified himself as a fair and impartial human, implicitly agreeing with those who insist that he was working, with Himber’s approval, in the most expedient fashion to make a difficult and unclear situation disappear when he ejected ten students without proper investigation and trial.

I do not subscribe to the delusional argument that we will receive our moral leadership from Dean Himber and Dr. Nissel.  We are not even going to get it from the Senate, one of the most successfully deliberative bodies on campus.  In the absence of proper stewardship we must realize that without morally-guided principles, the Yeshiva community stands no different than any other.  Nothing separates the holy ones who walk the halls of our sacred, indivisible institution from members of the degenerate societies that have been wiped by G-d from the face of the Earth.

The only people who are going to infuse principled action into our campus, our society, and the future communities in which we will live, are us.  We can and we must ask our rebbeim, professors, role models, and anyone from whom we seek guidance to stand firm for principles and not allow them to bend for the convenience of the moment.  We must demand that they lead by example. 

For the time being, we know that we are not provided that example by the strong-armed, illegal, and ludicrous tactics of the Office of Student Services, the Faculty/Student Senate’s flaccid approach to cheating, or the Yeshiva community’s desire to pretend that its moral riddles will get up and walk away.

So, the next time you walk by Time Out and see a reenactment of WWF Smackdown, don’t be the “good Samaritan;” be the good human and break it up.  Maybe you will learn something from it, and teach someone else a little something, too.