Sheli Hi? Reflections on Talmud Torah at Stern
To me, YU has always meant something specific. Namely, the opportunity to have my formative years guided by the religious leadership of my community and mesorah.
In many ways, Stern delivered more than I had hoped.
The beit midrash is beautiful, the classes and educators remarkable. Still, an unease persists. A curious sense that the entire enterprise is being held at arm’s length. That something meaningful is happening here, but has yet to be fully received, or trusted.
The result is a pattern of mixed signals. An atmosphere of hesitation. Hesitation to enroll in Torah SheBa’al Peh courses that demand constant qualifiers. Hesitation to signal investment in learning, lest it be mistaken for performance or ideology. Hesitation about whom to turn to for guidance. Hesitation to take the invitation into the beit midrash too seriously, when accepting it fully — allowing Talmud Torah to shape one’s schedule, instincts and sense of self — threatens to form a woman the community has not yet decided how to receive.
Students become well-versed in what kinds of learning are “pure” and which are performative. Teachers are expected to manage optics. Uptown, boys absorb the tone from their rebbeim and the wider culture: the raised eyebrow, the knowing joke, what is taken seriously and what is not.
Women who “learn” preface their seriousness with disclaimers: I can’t vouch for those other girls, but I’m frum, I promise. Those who don’t spend time in the beit midrash anticipate judgment from those who do.
It becomes a hall of mirrors, everyone reacting to reflections of someone else’s gaze.
Yet I write from a place of optimism and gratitude as I began to do what I should have done much earlier: I stopped guessing. I stopped narrating whole groups of people from a distance.
Instead, I spoke to roshei yeshiva and teachers at Stern. I spoke to men and women who weren’t sure what to make of it, but had strong feelings anyway.
Each conceded that the problem was real. Still, as individuals, they were encouraging and generous with their time and respect, far more aware and less rigid than I anticipated.
From that place of encouragement, I seek to issue a few invitations:
To the roshei yeshiva: Much here bears your imprint — the shabbatonim with Rav Schachter and Rav Simon, Rav Willig’s chabura and shiurim, Rav Goldwicht and Rav Willig’s presence on campus. We are deeply grateful for all that has been invested and offered.
Yet, for many of us, the relationship still feels out of reach.
You are the rabbinic leadership that shaped our homes long before we arrived here. You invest your careers in the education of young adults, as their outlooks and commitments are still developing. With notable exceptions, we feel that this shaping hand does not often reach us.
We are not asking for parity of time or identical programming. Baruch Hashem, our campus is filled with exceptional educators. But we do ask to be seen as your talmidot.
“I always knew YU was the engine of my community,” a Stern senior told me. “Its Torah, psakim, and talmidei chachamim shape my life.” She grew up waiting for her turn to experience it firsthand.
Only when she arrived did she realize that “YU” meant “Yeshiva College,” and she was still, somehow, on the outside. Like any good Jewish girl, she fields her shailos [questions] to her rabbis from seminary, feeling increasingly awkward and imposing. Years later, they remain the last rabbonim to really get to know her. In three years, not a single rosh yeshiva has gotten the chance to learn her name.
In your absence, students make their own calculations. Many opt out of learning opportunities, fearing social or spiritual costs. Others write off the roshei yeshiva to learn by those who invite them without hesitation.
In many ways, the doors to women’s Torah education have been opened wide. Yet many remain frozen, holding a practice that feels perpetually on probation; authorized in theory, but contested in tone.
We are not asking for another Gemara shiur. We are inviting visible, ordinary access to hadracha [guidance] from the rabbinic leadership that shapes the broader community we inhabit. We are asking to be addressed in the moral and halachic conversations of this institution by default, instead of by way of special inclusion.
To the community: We have built an extraordinary infrastructure to ensure that men love learning. It is rewarded socially, celebrated publicly and invested in financially.
Women who seek to apply themselves similarly in Talmud Torah have largely grown up without this scaffolding. Then, their motives are interrogated, their sincerity questioned and their accomplishments treated as evidence against them in a bewildering prosecution.
Women learn to be defensive when they could be curious, apologetic when they could be growing and self-conscious when they could be inspired.
But the costs are much more than personal. When women sense the communal center is uneasy with them, they naturally seek direction and inspiration from where they are believed in. When women’s learning is kept in the periphery, it develops without access to the community’s guiding rabbinic conversations and relationships. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: It is treated as suspect because it is marginal, and it remains marginal because it is treated as suspect.
This cycle asks women to choose: either minimize a real part of their spiritual lives or build it somewhere else. We risk creating two parallel religious worlds; men and women in the same community are formed by different Torah instincts and centers of gravity.
If you have concerns, take them seriously. But take seriously, too, the cost of making women feel that their love of Torah is inherently suspect. Consider carefully the raised eyebrow, the joke or the backhanded compliment.
We can create a communal posture in which distinctions remain intact, and halachic seriousness is preserved, but where a woman’s desire to learn is met as a natural indicator of a healthy religious life instead of embarrassing, unfeminine, or a threat to her frumkeit [religiosity] or future home.
When it is treated lichatchila [a priori] as a cause for alarm, women’s learning will surely turn into exactly what is feared: detached from the center, and therefore perpetually foreign to the holy aspirations of the community.
To the women: Don’t disqualify yourselves from your own mesorah.
I know the pressure. The texts that start up every registration cycle: “easy Judaics?” “Which Judaics give A’s?” I know the feeling of looking at a course description that would demand a little more of me and thinking, Not this semester. Not with my GPA.
I understand the fear of suddenly needing a whole apologetics package: I’m not trying to be a man or make a statement. Of course Tanakh is enough, I just —
Believe me, I understand the million and one reasons to stay the familiar course.
But be honest about what it costs. Don’t outsource your Jewish seriousness to someone else. Don’t let social calculations or GPA anxiety be the final word on how much Torah you learn while you have the chance.
Stern is blessed with eminently qualified educators who have chosen to invest their Torah scholarship in you. Seize the opportunity while you can. Take advantage of the new beit midrash program. It invites Torah to become your domain instead of something you visit twice a week. Let Torah become what you reach for when you’re afraid, what you trust when you’re confused, what you do when you don’t know what to do.
Join the conversation your ancestors left behind precisely for you. Not for “people like you.” For you. You are not improvising your way through Jewish life. You stand on the shoulders of thousands of years of accumulated moral wisdom, spiritual seriousness and honesty.
We cannot devote hours to mastering our general studies, take Torah only when it is easy or rewards us with grades, and then act surprised when we feel spiritually unsteady. We condemn ourselves to a lifetime of dissonance: saying Torah matters most, while structuring our actual seriousness around everything else.
The point of this piece is to reflect that on a campus overflowing with Torah, women can still find themselves seriously searching for a place to stand and a path to follow. If nothing else, I hope to puncture the hall of mirrors. I reiterate my tremendous gratitude to the roshei yeshiva who have sat with me, the deans who have encouraged me and especially to all who have dedicated their lives to teaching me.
As the Rav ended Stern’s inaugural Gemara shiur all those years ago, “I wish you success, brakhah ve-hatzlahah. I hope that next year you’ll know a lot, lot more.”
Photo Caption: Beren Campus Beit Midrash
Photo Credit: Yeshiva University
