By Joshua Halberstam

 

"Yes, Rabbi Wolf was gargantuan," I tell my children. "A giant of a man, fearsome-looking with more hair protruding from his knuckles than I had on my head even back then when it was covered with thick curls. He was the one we were sent to for serious disciplining. But he wasn't the mightiest Rebbe in our yeshiva." No, in this all-important debate that raged for years in the halls of my school, I stood with those who favored Rabbi Chafkin. "The man could rip right through a Brooklyn telephone book... saw him do it with my own eyes. Saw him, too, with one hand crush a pushka filled with pennies and nickels we'd collected on the street to help poor scholars in Israel."

 

My kids offer a polite, glazed half-nod. They've heard these recollections before, the thinly veiled comparisons of my yeshiva escapades with their own more temperate school experiences. At the time of this telling, they are both students in a modern, pluralistic day-school in enlightened Manhattan, where the teachers flourish degrees in education, study subjects with names like "classroom management," and can trade names of current celebrities with the hippest of their students. The more reflective part of me is relieved they aren't able to fathom the stern, nervous authority of my teachers.

 

Only years after graduating did I fully appreciate the real drama hovering in the background of my early yeshiva days of the 1950s. Rabbis Wolf and Chafkin loomed large to us not only for their physical prowess but because, to our amazement, they spoke accentless English. Nearly all are rebbes, our teachers of Talmud and Bible, were immigrants. Many were Survivors. Some from the camps. And to us Brooklyn boys, it was these Europeans who were most familiar—shell-shocked, bewildered Jews like our parents, gingerly learning to be at home in their new American home. We were amused when our rebbe went on and on about the Howard Johnson "28-flavors" sign he'd seen that morning and the strange luxuries of this land of ice-cream cones. But it took years before we could make sense of the darker past that explained his far-away stares and sudden bursts of fury.

 

"Oh yes," I continued holding forth, "your teachers wouldn't dare, and well they shouldn't, but my rebbes had no compunctions about slapping us. Talk during davening could win you two hard ones across the face." It was those violent lunges that some of my former classmates angrily recall most about our yeshiva days; my own memories, however, track to the even more frequent unabashed hugs and approving pinches of the cheek. For in the ragged suitcases they brought from the old country, my rebbes also packed an ancient pedagogy foreign to contemporary sensibilities.

 

Jewish tradition does not celebrate the post-enlightenment concept of rights. Judaism's focus is, rather, on responsibilities. Children don't have a right to learn; their parents, teachers and community have an obligation to teach. (Much follows from this, including, I'd argue, a key explanation for the inordinately high rates of literacy among Jews throughout the centuries.) Our Jewish futures were my rebbes' responsibility. Our souls were their charges. Such accountability entails a license of familiarity no less than any parent's.

 

This custodial intimacy is deemed inappropriate in the day school of my children, even in the modern co-ed yeshiva high school my daughter attended across the bridge in Brooklyn. But, then, it wouldn't have been hers in any case. Only boys were accorded this depth of mentoring. On the other hand, her modern day school bequeathed to her a rich Jewish knowledge and Jewish skills never afforded to the yeshiva girls who paralleled my own traditional schooling: an ability to navigate complex passages of Talmud, a fluency in modern Hebrew, a steeped study of Jewish (and Zionist) history, and, not least, a nonjudgmental embrace of all Jews and their various takes on Judaism. All told, in my book anyway, a worthwhile trade-off.

 

Other trade-offs in our respective educations, and there are many, come at steeper prices. I sometimes wonder, for example, if my children are the better—or worse off—not having experienced the assuredness my cohorts and I enjoyed in our youth. We had no doubts about our special status. We were certain, absolutely certain, that we, and we alone, accessed the truth.

 

"You have a direct line," my rebbe repeats, tugging on his black beard now beginning to salt on the sides.

 

"A what? To where?"

 

"A chain to the truth," he says. "To the pure and unspoiled reality... from me, from my rebbes, and their rebbes, straight back to Moshe Rabbenu. Ours is not the muddied morality of the rest of the world. We alone can proclaim this connection to the Source."

 

Heady conviction for an 11-year-old. A self-assurance that lingered for years. When my charedi nephews and nieces echo this same confidence, I can immediately hear my own voice, but my kids shuffle uneasily in response, too aware that it's not quite that simple. They'd learned the value of questioning. They'd studied too many other imperturbable claims and read too many contrary views, even within Judaism.

 

But I caution my children against a too-easy smugness on their part. Don't we all resort to our own brand of comfortable sureties?

 

For when it comes to religious and political beliefs, everyone, always, everywhere, considers himself or herself "moderate." In college, a Leninist acquaintance of mine wouldn't talk to a Maoist classmate he considered a closed-minded radical. The Bobover Chassidim I speak with are at pains to assure me that they don't share the anti-Zionist rancor of those Satmar fanatics. Wherever we stand is always the precise, well-considered center. And so while my classmates and I possessed the trunk line to the truth, we never, of course, considered ourselves extremists. Over on our right were the strict Chassidic yeshivas emerging in Williamsburg whose students, unlike us, never studied biology or delighted in a Hawthorne short story. And, there, far over to our left, were rumors of unintelligible Jewish schools where boys wore tiny, knitted yarmulkes and sat next to girls even in their Torah classes. We were the normal ones... and the same designation is what my children are taught in their day schools as it is taught no less in the cheders of my Chassidic relatives. Just ask any of them.

 

That said, I'd add this. While the discomfort my day-school-educated children feel when exchanging ideas with their "black-hat" yeshiva cousins is palatable, they also know they share something far more important. They are among the small group of American Jews who are Jewishly literate, who can pace their days in an ongoing Jewish calendar, who've absorbed Jewish learning into their fiber, who understand what really mattered to Jews in their long past, and to whom it matters momentously what happens in the Jewish future.

 

Goethe remarked that those who speak but one language, speak none. Restricted to one culture, you have no way of stepping outside your perspective to judge it from another. Judaism offers that alternative sensibility to contemporary Americans. And the hard fact is that you can't simply declare ownership of that Jewish worldview. There is a barrier-to-entry that requires long hours of Jewish learning and Jewish experience. Jewish day schools, of whatever stripe, whatever their other merits and demerits, instill this alternative, Jewish perspective and their graduates are always the richer for it.