Madda Matters Too
It’s a familiar tension. A Yeshiva University student can spend three hours buried in a Tosafos in the Glueck beis medrash, eagerly transcribe every word of his Rebbi’s shiur and then walk into class having not read the assigned material. He may approach his Torah learning with remarkable enthusiasm while treating his secular education as a tribulation rather than a privilege.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with spending three hours on a Tosafos. In fact, it is quite admirable. What is strange, however, is when the seriousness we bring to our Torah learning seems to disappear the second we walk into any given secular class. In an institution that touts a highbrow, serious Torah learning program, we should ask why this mindset doesn’t always extend to the rest of its student body’s education.
The problem is not that we value Torah too highly. It is that we sometimes fail to let our commitment to Torah shape our approach to everything else we learn.
There can’t be a double standard.
Before anyone lashes out and criticizes me for allegedly devaluing our religion or overstating the worth of a secular education within an Orthodox lifestyle, please allow me to explain my perspective.
I dropped out of a prestigious university eighteen months ago in search of a religiously stimulating environment that would foster my growth in limud haTorah, even if it came at the expense of the quality of my secular education. It was a sacrifice that I still don’t regret, not just because my Torah learning here has been impactful, but because I’m still trying to chase knowledge, regardless of where it takes me. I traded one intellectual environment for another, but I never intended to trade away my curiosity.
I’m not here to claim academic superiority over my peers, many of whom are more intelligent than I am. I’m here to share a principle that can, and must, be put into practice: The seriousness with which we approach Torah should inform all our learning. Academic rigor doesn’t need to come at the expense of our morning seder, nor should our commitment to our morning seder preclude us from bringing the same seriousness to our intellectual pursuits.
What does this look like in practice?
The beis medrash shouldn’t be the only place where we sweat the small things. The habits we develop through our Torah learning should carry over into every academic discipline. In learning Torah, we debate individual words, ask why two commentaries disagree with one another, challenge assumptions and stay with difficult questions for hours or days on end. Who is to say that we can’t apply the same curiosity to academia?
Our academics could become more than an irrelevant case study, a tedious lab or an unnecessary math problem. Instead, they could involve analyzing the purposeful word choice in the Constitution, questioning the assumptions underlying an economic model or debating competing interpretations of a historical event. This would not only enhance our engagement with the subject but also cultivate a sense of intellectual seriousness and depth in all facets of life, even beyond the beis medrash.
I am not suggesting that every academic discipline should be approached like a sugya in Gemara. Nor am I proposing that academics carry the same significance as Torah; they clearly don’t. I am suggesting that the intellectual values that we cultivate in the beis medrash should not disappear when we leave it.
In many instances, people view their academics through the negative lens that their peers have helped create, overlooking the tremendous gift of the opportunity itself.
We have the privilege of sitting in a room with someone who knows significantly more than we do and receiving intellectual gold on a silver platter. Over the span of one hour, we can conceivably leave the classroom noticeably smarter than when we entered it. There is something humbling about recognizing how little we know. A professor may spend decades studying a subject that we encounter for the first time on a Wednesday afternoon. To dismiss the class because the material doesn’t immediately interest us is to confuse unfamiliarity with irrelevance.
Many of us pass up that opportunity simply because it isn’t presented in a way that demands our attention. And often, the teacher could be cartwheeling at the front of the classroom, and the student would still show zero interest. At some point we have to ask whether the problem is really the professor or whether we have lost the ability to be curious about a subject that doesn’t initially interest us.
Sure, sometimes the problem really is the professor. But we should be careful not to blame every encounter with “uninteresting” material on the person standing at the front of the room. A student can dislike chemistry, mathematics or Shakespeare while still maintaining a standard of intellectual hunger. These two realities can healthily coexist. We don’t have to enjoy every subject we study, but we should approach each one with the assumption that it contains something worth studying.
A serious Jewish intellectual shouldn’t merely be someone who knows a lot of Torah. They should be someone who approaches knowledge itself seriously. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l argued in “The Great Partnership,” if academics are the “what,” then religion provides us with the “why.” But perhaps the relationship runs in both directions: The intellectual discipline we develop in pursuing the “what” can ultimately deepen our understanding of the “why.”
The beis medrash shouldn’t be where our curiosity starts and ends. It should be the place where we learn how to carry that curiosity into the rest of the world.
Photo caption: “Torah Umadda,” as seen in the Yeshiva University logo
Photo credit: Yeshiva University
