MIT vs. YU: The Search for Community

by Avi Robinson

 The temple of science looms before me as I step out of the car each morning. Joining the crowds, I purposefully ascend its marble staircase and pass through its Ionic colonnade into a domed, sky-lit atrium. I glance briefly at the inscription encircling the walls, three stories above, which identifies the ritual of worship for this majestic edifice: “Established for Advancement and Development of Science, its Application to Industry, the Arts, Agriculture, and Commerce. Charter MDCCCLXI.” Thousands of students and professors walk through this main entrance to MIT each day. Yet I am the only one who does so while clutching a gemara.        

Never had I felt so irrelevant as a Jew as when I began to work at MIT this summer. The university’s international culture had rendered my familiar claims to uniqueness pitifully bland. My colleagues in the NSF-sponsored program in materials science and engineering hailed from West Virginia and Puerto Rico, from Madison and Ann Arbor, and from Oklahoma and Los Angeles. I shared lab space with three Koreans, one Japanese, one Indian, and one Swiss. So what if I wore a yarmulke, then, or moonlighted as a talmid chacham? The social calculus at MIT had one simple rule: if you are a scientist, you are one of us; if not, get out and go to Harvard.

The Jews, however, did not play by the outside culture’s rules. Seeking to build a community, they located and welcomed even the most anonymous of their members.

“Hi!” The young man sitting across from me at lunch was wearing a t-shirt, shorts, sandals, a scraggly beard, and an earring. I smiled back and returned to the sefer in which I had been absorbed. After ten minutes of eating together in silence, he asked me, “Do you know where the Hillel is? I might want to study a few books.” I gave him directions, then inquired whether he was Jewish. Ale, short for Alejandro, had come to MIT from Chile to study for a PhD in bioengineering. Upon becoming a baal teshuva five years ago, he had acquired an impressive Jewish education. He was now questioning his commitment to Orthodoxy, however, and needed some books to study and people with whom to talk. We conversed about Judaism right there for about an hour and eventually became good friends.

Even the socially rooted Jews displayed an electric excitement upon meeting me.  “Oh, hi!” The girl sitting next to me in the computer lab was wearing a t-shirt with a Jewish star on it, blue jeans, and a huge smile. After a pause, she frowned for a second, and queried: “Don’t I know you? I know everyone Jewish on campus. . .” Jenny, a graduate of the modern orthodox high school in West Hartford and Midreshet Lindenbaum, was spending the summer in Boston working for her professor in materials engineering. In a subsequent conversation, I asked her whether the atheistic atmosphere on campus bothered her as much as it bothered me. She replied that the small Jewish population present during the school year served her needs for community, and that she spent most of her free time with them.

Yet even as I functioned as a community for Ale, Jenny, and others this summer, they could not do so for me.  I yearned for the spirituality that suffuses our campus and penetrates the consciousness of each of its students. So I turned for companionship to an inanimate but familiar friend - my gemara. Like a child clinging to his security blanket, I carried my gemara close wherever I went, knowing full well that I would open it again only on the subway ride home. Pouring my soul into its pages, I fused myself and my book into a unified weapon, a ray of religion in the dungeons of academia.

A gemara is not a person, however, and its companionship ultimately could not satisfy my social needs. As the summer drew to a close, I finally began to understand the secret that binds together MIT’s collection of disparate Jews. Each Jewish person treasures the presence of another Jew and considers his or her friend’s very existence to be a gift from God. As a result, any time two Jewish MIT students pass each other, their faces light up and they greet each other warmly, basking in their moment of celebration. Thus, on my second-to-last day, a ninety-five degree August scorcher, when young woman dressed in a tzenius way wandered into my department, I knew what I had to do . . . . “Hi!”, I greeted her warmly, surprised at how instinctively I did so. Aviva, now a senior at UCLA, is very possibly the only frum female chemical engineer in the country. Visiting MIT before applying to graduate school, she had not met any Jewish people there before me, and was very grateful for the time I spent taking her around campus. I doubt I will ever see Aviva again, but I take pride in the fact that I managed to transmit to her the secret of  MIT’s special community.

I thus return to YU with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I trade a community in which each individual Jew commands inestimable worth for a community which boasts the densest concentration of Modern Orthodox collegiates in the diaspora. People like Ale may eat lunch in the Furman cafeteria, but I will never meet them, for, lacking the social necessity to meet strangers, we become friends only with those in the narrowest of ideological circles.  The lunch conversations have become frivolous and decadent, for, after three years of eating with the same fifteen people, we have nothing of value to share anymore (unless Rabbi Carmy sits down at our table and reawakens our minds). 

I trade a community in which men and women depend on each other for support and advice for a petrified social scene in which, unless a matchmaker momentarily blesses their interaction, men and women make every effort to ignore each other. Bound on one hand by the demands of tzenius that prohibit flirting, and on the other hand by the insane expectation that all the women find their husbands by the tender age of 22, we adopt an all-or-nothing approach to coed interaction. The next woman next to whom I sit in the library computer lab will merely contain her disappointment that I could not find another seat. Whereas Aviva, a Beis Yaakov style girl, conversed with me for half an hour, many of my close friends at Stern College prefer not to speak to me at all, both in spite of and because of our friendship.

Yet I return: to a university where hundreds of students carry their gemaras through the doorways; to a chemistry department where my lab partner and I can discuss Torah during our experiment; to a campus whose architectural crown jewel opens not to laboratory buildings, but to a house of spiritual learning. I return to the only top-tier university in the country whose motto contains “Torah.” Hence, on the deepest emotional level, I return home. The next time that I see an unfamiliar Jewish face, however, I still will walk over with a warm smile and say, “Hi!” Will you respond in kind?