Home Home / The Crisis in Contemporary Hebrew Liter…

Speech

February 17, 1950

The Crisis in Contemporary Hebrew Literature (1950)

Torah Umadda Zionism
View The Text

This content is currently available in its original PDF format. As we expand the library, we plan to add a text version as well.

RELATED CONTENT

Article

A Time To Speak: A Diagnosis of the Lack of Good Literature in English on Orthodoxy, and a Prescription for the Future (1960)

“Is there anything you can recommend for me to read on Judaism?” This question, in many and varied forms, comes to us with greater and greater frequency these days. People are looking for books, magazines, and articles on Jewish traditions, Orthodox ideology, the “how-to” of Jewish observances, and a host of other allied subjects. The new interest in religion, rightly downgraded by the cognoscenti as a mere social phenomenon, has nevertheless encouraged a serious concern with religion on the part of many intelligent Jews. They want to know what it is all about. Where do we refer them? What do we recommend to them? There is the parent of the Day School child, anxious to discover the broader background, on an adult level, of what his child is now learning and bringing home to him. Where shall we direct him? Can we use the written word to bestir the indifferent, and to counter the arguments of the non-Orthodox? More often than not, we are at a loss, and our answer is mostly an embarrassed silence. Not that there is a dearth of books in the Jewish field – there are anthologies and books on Jewish humor, assorted apologia on Jews in sports and the army and science, the story of modern Israel and American Jewish history. But there is unfortunately very little that pretends to deal with serious issues and that is both acceptable in content and attractive in presentation and format. There is, of course, a small number of works on Judaism as such. Some of the material by the non-Orthodox is of patently poor quality. Some of it is only average. A good part of what they produce is first-rate, written well, cogently presented, and handsomely produced. We Orthodox have not had much luck in this area. While we have issued some excellent material – and this will be discussed shortly – we have by and large made a poor showing. Where the writing is passable, the author often adopts the posture of an elementary school teacher, assuming that his readers – some of them with higher uni…
Torah Umadda

Speech

Do Not Let the Center Collapse (1986)

Yeshiva University is exceedingly proud of its alumni, both men and women, in Israel: their idealism, their personal deportment, their families, their professional achievements, and their varied contributions to the State of Israel. I have met our graduates in every part of this country and they are engaged in a dizzying variety of professions and businesses. In all cases, they have given us cause for pride and “nachas.”But these accomplishments are, for the most part, personal, the result of individual efforts and successes. What has been missing is the collective voice of the Yeshiva University graduates in the State of Israel.The time has come for Yeshiva University, through its alumni, to become a clear and articulate moral force in this country. Our alumni must become a cohesive group united not only by a common alma mater, but by a comprehensive Torah outlook which, without keeping to any party line, will be idealistic yet realistic, both youthfully energetic and mature, assertive but balanced, and combining enthu­siasm with sanity.A wave of extremism is sweeping the world, and America and the American Jewish com­munity have not remained unaffected by it. But the negative results are far more palpable and consequential in Israel for a number of obvious reasons: it is a smaller country; this is a highly politicized and informal society; people here suffer from a low threshold of frustration because of the accumulated military, political, and economic pressures; and the country lacksan established tradition of civility in public discourse.Yet, these are only explanations, not excuses. The situation is too serious to ignore when it sometimes seems, at least to this observer, that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.At times of this sort, we all stand under a holy imperative: do not let the center collapse!What Yeshiva has taught us, both in theory and in practice—the joining of Torah learning and Western culture under the rubric of Torah U’Mada; openness to …
Vayetze Torah Umadda Passionate Moderation Zionism

Article

The Jewish Jew and Western Culture: Fallible Predictions for the Turn of the Century (1994)

Rather than addressing directly and exclusively the theme of Jewish identities in the new Europe, I shall concentrate instead on what I surmise is the future course of those Jews who are intensely committed to Torah and the Jewish tradition, and at the same time do not wish to segregate from other Jews, do not want to ignore worldly culture, and who do believe—as a matter of principle and not merely convenience—that critical engagement with the environing culture and a profound feeling of fraternity with fellow Jews regardless of their own differing convictions is what, to borrow the prophetic style, ‘the Lord doth require of us’. My intention is that because such a group undoubtedly exists, in greater or lesser measure, in Europe, my words will be germane to the situation in the new Europe as well, and that my American experience will not prove irrelevant to the subject of this volume.I speak as one of this self-same group: as a religious, Orthodox Jew, who believes that without Torah there is no future for am yisrael, but who wants all Jews, no matter what their religious or ideological orientations, to survive and thrive; whose firm commitment to his own vision of Judaism and Jewishness sometimes makes him impatient but never intolerant of competing views; and whose outlook is best summed up in the words torah umadda, the integration or confluence of religious commitment and worldly learning. Hence my title: ‘The Jewish Jew and Western Culture’.The Polarization of the Jewish Community: The polarization of the Jewish community is by now a truism. On the one side, a high mobility rate and the displacements of war have produced a situation whereby, as one scholar estimated a number of years ago, perhaps one in a thousand of us speaks the same language and lives in the same place as did his or her grandparents. Sergio DellaPergola’s figures and graphs presented elsewhere in this volume confirm that impression. In the diaspora, assimilation and intermarriage are deci…
Torah Umadda