Orthodox Judaism and the liberal arts

Academe, Jan/Feb 2001 by Carmy, Shalom

Yeshiva University's undergraduate colleges search for a way to balance devotion to Torah study with the demands of a serious liberal arts education.

LIKE WITTGENSTEIN, I CANNOT HELP LOOKING at every question from a religious point of view. But my perspective, unlike Wittgenstein's, derives from, and aims to conform itself to, the teachings of Orthodox Judaism. These teachings reside in a vast literature, starting with the Hebrew Bible and the Talmudic corpus and continuing through over a thousand years of legal and theological commentary, works of jurisprudence, and philosophical creativity. In principle, the Torah has something to say about all subjects under the sun and above the sun. Its orientation is formative, its legal conclusions (halakha) normative. Moreover, Torah study is an overriding religious imperative pursued for its own sake; it would be difficult for an outsider to overestimate its importance in the life of the committed Jew.

Yeshiva College and Stern College for Women are the undergraduate colleges of Yeshiva University and the focus of this article. The university's other components include graduate schools in medicine, law, social work, and clinical psychology as well as high schools and an affiliated rabbinical school (yeshiva) at which most male students take part of their Jewish studies program. The colleges' motto, Torah uMadda (Torah and wisdom), proclaims them bastions both of Jewish religious learning and of the disciplines taught at other liberal arts institutions.

In addition to pursuing a conventional curriculum, students at Yeshiva College, all of whom are men, devote several hours each day to Torah study, which is only partially credited for the bachelor's degree. The most popular track at the college entails several hours of daily Talmud study. Almost all the students have experienced this "dual curriculum" earlier in their education, and most have spent a year or two after high school at Israeli yeshivas, where they studied Torah full time. The same is true for Stern College students, with the difference that the Talmud is less central to the standard curriculum.

Yeshiva's Torah uMadda is not the only option for combining Torah study and college. Many young men and women divide their day between a religious seminary and a college program at a separate institution; others try to find time in their college schedules to continue their Torah study. Often, though not always, the outcome is compartmentalization. Torah study may be ghettoized, so that it does not consistently inform the student's "secular" consciousness or benefit from the insights and methods of liberal arts study. Frequently, it is the college career that is treated dismissively as an economically necessary distraction from Torah. For students who want to attend college and study Torah, Yeshiva may be attractive, because it houses a world-class, multitrack yeshiva on the same campus as a liberal arts program whose best components attain excellence.

For our ideal student, Yeshiva is an invitation to participate in a community of inquiry that generates a theological and cultural energy greater than the sum of its parts. Milton wrote that "truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain," from which he concluded that "if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition." The Yeshiva community accepts this challenge; it tries to marshal the critical mass and achieve the intellectual traction necessary to swim vigorously in the river of truth, against the current if need be.

There is no unanimity about Torah uMadda's scope and application. In his book on the subject, Norman Lamm, president of Yeshiva University, experiments with no fewer than six models. Readers of H. R. Niebuhr's classic Christ and Culture will be familiar with Niebuhr's useful account of the varied relationships between culture and revealed truth. So it is not uncommon for religious thinkers to differ in their assessment of a field of interest, depending on theological outlook and personal agenda.

Perhaps the most decisive clash within modern Orthodoxy is between the champions of Torah u.Madda who see it as a means to reconcile the tensions between traditional Judaism and mainstream American society, and those who believe that a genuine engagement with the liberal arts is as likely to sharpen the inevitable conflicts between the service of God and the values of man as to smooth them over. Both groups are equally committed to liberal arts study, and the latter may even be more willing to undertake the study of disturbing material. But their orientations are different: where the former seek harmony, for the latter, Torah uMadda does not bring peace but, so to speak, the intellectual sword.

Fundamental Questions

Liberal arts educators often complain that contemporary shallowness, impatience, and materialism threaten our entire enterprise. It seems to me and perhaps to a few of my colleagues that, in contending with these forces, a school like Yeshiva may have some advantages.