Very little of what students learn in Talmud class has direct bearing on contemporary religious practice—as noted, this is not rabbinical training, and current religious practice is substantially different from the simple reading of the Talmud text—rather, it is a complex academic endeavor that has profound religious significance as an act of study itself.
This academic endeavor revolves around argumentation skills such as reasoning from evidence, resolving multiple perspectives, and contextualization among many others. Skills that fall under the rubric of argumentation are central to nearly every secular domain, and the Talmud text significantly develops these skills. In Talmud study, students must follow extensive arguments, often presented in elaborate labyrinthine textual constructions.
For example, the text might pursue an argument far into one direction just to see how far it will go, before reversing course and rejecting the premise altogether.
Different versions of the same argument between two interlocutors might be presented, and the differences analyzed in light of the opinions of yet another pair of interlocutors. And the entire thread of the discussion may be interpreted very differently by later commentaries, further complicating things. During a recent visit to one of the Hasidic schools in Brooklyn that Yaffed has criticized, I saw sixth-grade students parsing a complex argument in which two legal opinions drew on four different, but related, multi-step proofs, using subtleties in the biblical passages that served as proof-texts to make each argument.
When they parse these arguments, students must key in not only to the answers provided by the text, but also to the rationale of the questions themselves, in order to make sense of the underlying disputes. Talmud students quickly realize that if the question seems too obvious, they are likely missing the point.
Students are socialized into both the practices of Talmud study and the skills necessary to engage in those practices. For students in these yeshivas, Talmud instruction starts with the development of basic familiarity with the language Aramaic , the ability to understand the legal arguments, and the approaches taken by Jewish legal authorities over time. As students progress into upper middle school and high school, they are expected to work on their own in pairs called chavrusas to decipher the text, make sense of the commentaries, and to generate their own arguments using evidence and logic.
Students have a great deal of agency and autonomy over their learning, with lectures and other forms of teacher support fading away as they get older. By the time they are post high school, nearly all Talmud study is completely self-driven.
There are clear differences between a yeshiva education and a public school education. But how significant are these gaps? Are yeshiva students being denied a basic education? Does this educational program hamstring their ability to be constructive members of society?
The mission of Yeshiva University is to enrich the moral, intellectual and spiritual development of each of our students, empowering them with the knowledge and abilities to become people of impact and leaders of tomorrow. Character is formed and developed in times of deep adversity. This is the kind of teachable moment that Yeshiva University was made for.
As such, we have developed an educational plan for next year that features a high-quality student experience and prioritizes personal growth during this Coronavirus era. Our students will be able to work through the difficulties, issues and opportunities posed by our COVID era with our stellar rabbis and faculty, as well as their close friends and peers at Yeshiva. To develop our plans for the fall, we have convened a Scenario Planning Task Force made up of representatives across the major areas of our campus.
Their planning has been guided by the latest medical information, government directives, direct input from our rabbis, faculty and students, and best practices from industry and university leaders across the country. I am deeply thankful to our task force members and all who supported them for their tireless work in addressing the myriad details involved in bringing students back to campus and restarting our educational enterprise.
In concert with the recommendations from our task force, I am announcing today that our fall semester will reflect a hybrid model. It will allow many students to return in a careful way by incorporating online and virtual learning with on-campus classroom instruction. It also enables students who prefer to not be on campus to have a rich student experience by continuing their studies online and benefitting from a full range of online student services and extracurricular programs.
In bringing our students back to campus, safety is our first priority. Many aspects of campus life will change for this coming semester. Gatherings will be limited, larger courses will move completely online. Throughout campus everyone will need to adhere to our medical guidelines, including social distancing, wearing facemasks, and our testing and contact tracing policies. In the upper grades the boys study Judaics full-time, graduating with math and English skills of roughly a third- or fourth-grader, and with no science, history, geography, civics or other secular education at all.
In the six years since Yaffed began advocating for better secular education, charedi leaders have rarely spoken to the press, although in they created their own advocacy group to defend yeshiva curricula, PEARLS Parents for Educational and Religious Liberty in Schools. Don't miss our top stories. Get The Jewish Week in your inbox. The organization has already given away most of the 10, posters and bumper stickers it had printed for the campaign, a PEARLS spokeswoman said.
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