The Rabbis Went Crazy
I keep writing to all of you about Yeshiva University, a place that you probably never heard of before. It’s my personal contribution to inside baseball, where you go to the place behind the plate and see how a certain Jewish game is played. Not the most important game in the world, but one that reveals the behavior of a team that may never have intruded on your consciousness before.
That team has now concluded its season. For a brief moment this spring, Yeshiva University made its peace with modernity. It credentialed a group of L:GBTQ students who wanted the official support of their university. This was, in its way, a remarkable achievement. Yeshiva is one of the flagship institutions that make up the community of American Jewish Orthodoxy. Despite the criticism of everyone to its right, it holds itself up as trustworthy and authentic, a loyal defender of the one true faith. Over time, this facade has developed notable cracks. The motto of Yeshiva is Torah u-Mada: Traditional Learning and Secular Enlightenment. As the right rightly said, you can be one or their other, but secularity inevitably compromises Torah.
Things came to a head over the last several years around the powder-keg issue of sexuality. Students sued for the right to form an organization, and the university resisted on the perfectly predictable grounds that Leviticus both opens and closes the issue: homosexual behavior is an “abomination” and cannot be squared with the tenets of the tradition. There’s a lot to say about the grinchiness of Leviticus, but I hope that we can save that for another day. The students confronted the refusal with a suit which gradually moved through the American courts. Yeshiva is not a perfectly private institution. It accepts government support and thus cannot discriminate. The students felt strongly that they had a case.
Came the spring, and they declared their victory. On the very eve of a Supreme Court proceeding, Yeshiva withdrew its opposition. It allowed for the creation of something called Hareni, which students regarded as an incarnation of their hopes and the university hoped would operate beneath the radar. What the ground rules were is now a matter of dispute, but the students said that it would not be a sham, but rather an out and proud expression of sexual confidence.
What complicated the matter was a revolt from within; the students were muscled aside by the adults. The complex of schools that make up Yeshiva includes the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. That is to say, it is Yeshiva’s yeshivah. No to put too fine a point on things, the rabbinical hierarchy went bat-shit crazy. They threatened to immedidately desert the Father Ship and find teaching positions at other schools. If Yeshiva was ready to concede ground on Jewish Law, it would destroy the core of the university’s brand.
Enter Rabbi Ari Berman, the Trump-loving president of the whole shebang. It was Berman who pulled the university out of conflict with Hareni, but in the face of the rabbis—his spitting-mad colleagues—he decided to renege on his capitulation to the students. All of this happened just a few weeks ago. Yeshiva is now back to the very beginning. My guess is that it has cut some nefarious deal in which the Trumpists have promised to protect the university. In the transactional world of our tyrannical president, delivering a verdict by Chief Justice Roberts is probably not as difficult as it might look.
And so ends a brief but glorious chapter. For one fleeting moment, Yeshiva students could claim that their university had taken a Great Leap Forward. It now looks more like a stumbling shuffle, a sad little dance of forward and back. How could I have imagined that it would turn out differently?