Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman among Books

Preface

ix Preface W hen I was a child in the 1970s, I always imagined that I went to school twice as long as the other children on my block. By the time I was a teenager, my school day extended from eight in the morning until five-thirty in the afternoon. In the harsh Chicago winters, I arrived in the dark and left in the dark. Living in school, as my friends and I did, made a strange kind of sense because our private school was meant to educate us for life. In the morning, we prayed and spoke in Hebrew as we studied Torah, Mishnah, Midrash, Jewish law, and history. In the afternoon and into the early evening, we spoke English as we studied math, science, literature, and world history. This was our ‘‘double curriculum,’’ the fare of Jewish day school students across the United States. And the hope of parents and teachers: that a traditionally educated American Jewish child would come to see that she could live in both worlds—Jewish and secular—happily, healthily, without (much) compromise. Yet as I turned sixteen or so and our daily household mail delivery became heavy with college brochures and applications , I recognized that the ever-extending school day, seemingly capacious enough for all things, would reach its limits. Parents and teachers could decide to extend school by an hour or even two but not by years, decades, or a lifetime. Soon we would leave home. Our training as young Jews, in home and school, would come to its end, and we would no longer come and go constrained, gifted by the demands and abundances of the ‘‘double curriculum.’’ Then the true test of our childhood educations would arrive as we left home to live in that world x p r e f a c e for which we had been doubly prepared—that world with paradoxically fewer divisions but many more choices. No one thought our educations would be complete at age eighteen. Both my parents had gone to yeshiva day school in the 1950s and then college and graduate school in the 1960s and 1970s; both my paternal grandparents had completed graduate degrees by the end of the first third of the twentieth century. Over two generations, my family had found itself in universities from New York to Boston to Michigan: ccny, nyu, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Columbia; bu, mit, and Harvard; the University of Michigan, Eastern Michigan . Clearly I too would go to college. I hoped to study literature. As graduation from yeshiva high school grew nearer, questions arose: for those of us who planned to attend a secular institution rather than a Jewish university such as Yeshiva University or Stern College for Women, how would we continue to build from both sides? Had all our mornings devoted to Hebrew , Torah, and Jewish thought and law been spent without a future of learning in mind? Was Jewish learning just a practice of childhood, to be left behind when one ‘‘grew up’’? In the late 1980s (as still today) common practice provided an answer. We, Orthodox high school graduates, boys and girls both, were encouraged to spend a year of study in intensive, single-sex yeshivas in Israel before returning to America to attend university. In these yeshivas Jewish texts would be both bread and water of life. In these houses of study there would be no afternoon periods of math, science, literature, or social studies. Instead, there would be Torah in all its many manifestations , in the widest sense of the term: Jewish learning from the span of centuries, a rich spectrum of rabbinic voices, morning to night, Sabbath to Sabbath, every season of the year. This school would never end. When our parents and teachers evoked this world for us, in most cases it was not because they envisioned it as su≈cient p r e f a c e xi for a lifetime—not our lifetimes in any case. The men and women who taught in such yeshivas, who lived in Israel, had made choices other than the ones we were to make. Most of them had never and would never spend four years at Columbia University or the University of Pennsylvania. Many had university degrees, but it was always remarkable, always worth mentioning, when those degrees came from secular institutions and were granted in fields thoroughly distinct from Jewish study. As I...