Like all great stories, this one started serendipitously. I was on line at a bar mitzvah buffet behind two Yeshiva board members and overheard the conversation about the decision to close BRGS. Through persistent questioning, we managed to get the story confirmed by other board members and then we printed The Commentatorissue one day early in an attempt to beat the administration to the announcement. We caught the faculty, students, and administration by surprise. Again, to our amazement, it mattered.
Students began organizing and my phone was ringing off the hook from concerned faculty members.Protests ensued almost immediately, including the first student emonstration I had seen at Yeshiva, which blocked the entrance to Furst Hall with a sit-in for hours. The protest then marched with a beating drum up to President Norman Lamm’s office. I still remember the look on R. Lamm’s secretary’s face as the students entered the office. Frankly, the protests were a mix of angry students who had labored for degrees and thought the carpet was being pulled out from under them and high-minded Jewish academics for whom closing Revel violated their core beliefs about what a Jewish university should be.
College and Yeshiva
My own contribution to the series concerned a 1993-4 debate in the school newspaper between two very different faculty members – respected rosh yeshiva and rosh kollel Rav Aharon Kahn and popular English professor Dr. Will Lee. They debated the role of secular studies in Yeshiva, with Dr. Lee espousing the importance of secular studies and Rav Kahn arguing that Torah, and Torah alone, should be the primary focus of the students. As an introduction to this essay, I quoted a passage from a speech of R. Bernard Revel, the first president of Yeshiva, in which he implied that the purpose of the college in Yeshiva was to allow the students learning Torah an opportunity to gain a secular education. In other words, secular studies is only ancillary to learning Torah.
Shortly afterward, Dr. Lee published his own contribution to the YUdaica series – a careful analysis of R. Revel’s speeches and writings:
Among the explicit “aims” for the new college, Revel underlined perhaps his most profound motivation: “the synthesis of the Jewish personality, bringing into harmony the mind of the Torah-true student youth and the modern mind.” Revel wanted “an atmosphere where the age-old verities and the fruits of modern knowledge may be coordinated and compatibly absorbed.” He wanted “a harmonization of spirit and culture, of faith and knowledge.” A few years after YC opened, he proudly claimed that the college and the yeshiva together were already “blending the age-old faith and learning together with the tested knowledge of the world today.” Jewish culture and religion represented an “integral phase” in the moral and spiritual development of mankind. The non-Jewish aspects of the “wisdom of the ages” therefore complemented Jewish wisdom. Revel’s confident founding of a genuine college reflected both his visionary idealism and his practical conclusions about the needs of traditional Jews, but it also reflected his own intellectual journey and his level of comfort with the pursuit of knowledge of all kinds.
While I like to flatter myself in thinking that this article was written in response to mine, it more likely took months of painstaking research and had nothing to do with me. Regardless, I now concede that my single quote is less reflective of R. Revel’s full range of thought than Dr. Lee’s extensive analysis.
The Combined Story
The many different stories in this series, and its resulting book, demonstrate the many different people who shaped Yeshiva and its students. Yeshiv University President Richard Joel writes in his introduction to the book:
