May 28 2009
How I Got Here-Part 12: Shavuot, Jewish Education, and the Mighty Yeshiva
Tonight is a very special night on the Jewish calendar.
Tonight is Shavuot.
There is a Jewish tradition to spend the whole night studying Torah, engrossed in educating oneself all night long in all the many aspects of Jewish knowledge.
Who do you think spends this night studying Torah?
The elite scholars of the Jewish people? A select few institutions of higher learning in places like Israel and New York?
Yeah, them too.
But this holiday is for EVERY JEW.
Tonight tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Jews are going to go to synagogues around the world to spend the night learning. Men, women, children, scholars, and not-yet scholars. This holiday is for all of us.
The famed scholar, Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, said it best when he described Judaism as perhaps the only religion in the world that seeks to render its clergy superfluous. As bizarre as it might seem after well over 1,000 years of Catholic clergy preventing the masses from gaining knowledge, or from just watching the millions of people around us who have no interest in knowing the first thing about their own religions, it was a breath of fresh air to know that Judaism wants every Jew, without exception, to gain all available knowledge about Judaism.
This impressed me so much.
But also intimidated me.
As quickly as I learned that I was being encouraged to learn everything there is to know about Judaism, I learned how little I knew, and the endless sea of how much there was to learn.
Luckily for me, there was a solution to my newfound problem.
Yeshiva.
Yeshivas are institutions of Jewish education where students spend the entire day studying the ancient texts of the Jewish people. I had never heard of such a place, but recoginzed how much I wanted to know, and how little of a chance I had of knowing it if I didn’t find my way to a yeshiva immediately.
This was at the beginning of my second year of college. I was committed in every way to finding my way into a yeshiva in Israel.
How? I didn’t know. When? I also didn’t know. Which one? I didn’t even know where to start.
But I knew that I was ready, and that it had to happen.
The next chapter for me would be finding my way to Israel, and figuring out exactly what type of Jew I wanted to be.
