Volume 67, Issue 8

“Itton, bevakasha? Would you like a newspaper?”

I could not resist the offer from the El Al flight attendant. The day before my flight to Israel, after all, a pair of horrific suicide attacks had ripped up the Naveh Sha’anan neighborhood of Tel Aviv, killing 23 people. I knew that the Israeli tabloids, in their characteristic gruesomeness, would satiate my voyeuristic appetite with full-color spreads of the disaster scene. Staring at the images, imbibing the feeling of hopeless dread, I prepared myself once more to adopt the posture of the pursued. When the plane finally passed over the lit-up city of Tel Aviv, still intact despite the attack, I could not help but marvel, “This place is a blinking miracle.”

Over the course of my stay, however, I learned - as I do every time that I visit Israel - that the Israeli miracle lies not in its physical existence, but in its people’s indomitable spirit. Despite dangers and pitfalls, both political and physical, Israelis have never lost touch with their dreams and have never stopped adjusting in order to fulfill them. This pliant idealism expressed itself vividly in the changed atmosphere at my own yeshiva, Har Etzion, and in the surrounding yishuv of Alon Shevut.

The yeshiva remained a bastion of analytical learning and continued to foster intellectual engagement with the divine on the deepest level.  Yet the terrorist attack two weeks before at the yeshiva in Otniel had provoked unprecedented security measures. Over half the entrances to the dormitories and the Yeshiva building were now permanently locked, accessible only to students with keys. Those smart-alecky Israeli teenagers with whom I had entered yeshiva 5 ½ years ago had become, as expected, mature army veterans and impressive talmidei chachamim. During my visit, however, they also functioned as a commando unit, toting rifles around the beis medrash and conducting drills on how best to defend the yeshiva compound from a surprise attack.

As I basked in Alon Shevut’s glowing sunlight, beautiful landscaping, and unparalleled vistas, I felt my spirits rising out of the doldrums of city life. Yet I also encountered unfamiliar, incongruous sights. The young man leading the morning services now inserted a special paragraph beseeching God for protection from terrorists. In an attempt to encourage travel in bulletproof vehicles, the bus drivers now charged half price for rides in Gush Etzion. I once espied a middle-aged mother playing with her toddler in the park, a submachine gun nonchalantly slung over her shoulder.

These poignant examples of Israeli perseverance have granted me new insight concerning recent political events on our Yeshiva campus. Residents of Alon Shevut heard about our infamous “tehillim rally.” Actually, since the Jerusalem Post reported it, all of Israel heard about it. Many Israelis also deplored the event as a shocking trivialization of our sacred prayers. They also expressed outrage at the implied equation of our institution’s political woes to Israel’s life-and-death emergencies.  

While popular, this critique addresses neither the fact nor the spirit of what transpired that fateful afternoon. In truth, nothing occurred that could have evoked serious comparison to our yeshiva’s response to an actual calamity. Consider last spring’s yom kippur kattan, when Rabbi Lamm and Rav Willig led 1,000 students in inspirational divrei torah and heartfelt prayer. Recall the bus rides to the Washington rally, during which each Rosh Yeshiva traveled with his students and taught Torah relevant to the momentous occasion. Even if called specifically for the occasion, a low-key mincha with the standard one chapter of tehillim afterwards cannot possibly compare to those outpourings of emotion and solidarity. Any person who insists on perpetuating this distortion needs to engage in some soul-searching of his own.

Moreover, Jews consider tehillim the timeless Jewish response to religious crisis. The poems of tehillim give voice to ethereal joy, to crises of faith, and to spiritual yearnings. Israel tragedies cannot command a monopoly over tehillim. Even more pernicious than the misuse of tehillim for political purposes is the denial of their relevance to spontaneous situations. A person wishes to critique the tehillim rally, then, can explore only its premises, not its methods.

On an institutional level, the rally declared that religious commitment at Yeshiva can flourish only in a sacred political environment.  Yet, I wonder, where would Israel be had its religious citizens adopted such a utopian attitude? Israelis learned long ago that religious values derive neither vitality nor validity from political realization. Israelis, unlike Yeshiva students, can say “reishit tzemichat geulateinu” when reciting the prayer for the state of Israel, because Israelis, unlike Yeshiva students, can conceive of a future that is more religiously fulfilled than the present. Their willingness to endanger their lives to protect their land testifies to their confidence in that future.

In truth, our new political structure has roots in the Torah’s conception of government. Recognizing the complex needs of a religious society, God separated the political power of the Melech from the religious power of the Sanhedrin. The Melech enjoys unparalleled license – he is authorized to legislate outside the norms of halakha, while the Sanhedrin is not (See Drashot Haran, Drasha 11, although Abarbanel in Devarim 17 and others argue). Yet since the Melech is appointed by the Sanhedrin, and depends on the Sanhedrin to approve declarations of war, and carries a Sefer Torah wherever he goes, he will exercise that license sparingly and only as an expression of his commitment to Torah values. It is a fortuitous coincidence that our Yeshiva will be studying Masechet Sanhedrin next year, enabling us to study halakha’s approach to this unique symbiotic relationship in greater depth.

On a private level, the rally voiced fears of ideological abandonment. Overwhelmed by the multiplicity of valid hashkafot within the Torah U’Madda spectrum, we elevate our Roshei Yeshiva to the status of ideological paradigms who grant halakhic credence to personal lifestyle choices. It comes as no surprise, then, that the choice of the ultimate public faces of Yeshiva, the President and Rosh HaYeshiva, should have carried such symbolic weight. My own activist efforts last year towards keeping the positions unified also reflected this desperate search for an enduring ideological symbol.  

We have lost a precious jewel, and we must mourn for it. Within the cloud of our loss, however, appears a shining silver lining. As our community grows accustomed to a President who refuses to serve as its philosophical fig leaf, it is becoming increasingly self-conscious of its vibrant diversity. We can now finally shatter the myth that exactly one hashkafa fits all 2400 of our undergraduates. We can now finally celebrate the versatility of an institution that, while firmly committed to Torah, empowers young Jews to forge personal syntheses of the Torah and secular worlds.  True commitment can finally replace symbolism as the barometer of our religious well-being.

If the upshot of the Joel appointment is ideological diffuseness, then the proper “beis medrash” reaction to the Joel appointment must extend far beyond a transient afternoon prayer.  It should pulsate daily through our study halls and in our college classrooms, in the form of a renewed dedication to the discipline of the beis medrash and an assertion of its centrality within our Yeshiva community. We must commit to our principles with the same vigor that Israelis defend theirs. Although he may not have intended the words in precisely this way, Rabbi Yitzchok Cohen exactly hit the point, when, on the Friday night after the board vote, he shouted in his usual animated style, “Hislahavus! Hislahavus in our learning is what we need to combat our insititution’s problems!”

We must express this dedication not only within the confines of our batei medrash, but especially within our institution’s print media.  I applaud the students who wrote letters defending the Yeshiva’s response to the Joel election and encourage others to follow suit. By injecting Israeli idealism into the humdrum of the Yeshiva routine, we can elevate this newspaper from a carrier of salacious tidbits into an expression of our student body’s deepest dreams.¨

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