The Question Of Studying Judaic Studies At University: Not Just Academic

Dixie Yid has a post about Rabbi Zvi Leshem, Assistant Dean at Nishmata, and author of Between Messianism and Prophecy: Hasidism According to the Piaseczner Rebbe, [download here; 316 pages in Hebrew] a doctoral disseration on the Rav Klonymous Kalmish Shapiro. Dixie Yid emailed Rabbi Leshem the following question:

Can I ask you what moved you to get a masters and a doctorate? You already have all of the qualifications you will ever need in your teaching career and as the Rav of a Shul. And if you just wanted a reason to write about the Piaseczna, then you could have simply written a regular sefer about him.

Here is part of Rabbi Leshem's response. He readily admits that studying Judaic Studies is not for everyone, and explains the advantage:

At the university I found certain scholars with great knowledge of Kabbalah[2] who were able to teach me in a systematic way. I believe it is crucial to understand the historical underpinnings and interrelationships between the various schools of thoughts and books. My previously disorganized information was organized and sharpened. I was empowered to study works that were previously inaccessible to me. My teachers also pushed me constantly to do better. Had I merely written a book I would have had an editor correcting grammatical errors, but I would not have had a gaon in Kabbalah (my advisor, Prof. Moshe Halamish) constantly forcing me to check every reference, to learn more, to compare new things and to make sure that I understood everything and expressed it clearly. Nor would I have gained the breadth of knowledge that is expressed in my work. The depth of my understanding of these holy works is also incomparable to where it was four years ago. I thus have no doubt that my teaching of Chassidut has also improved dramatically as a result of this process. Perhaps it is just me, but I also needed the framework of a program that would constantly force me to progress and set deadlines that I needed to meet (especially since I did this work while working full time in education and having my own shul). I also learned a language that will better equip me to convey the truth of Chassidut to a much wider audience.

I would go one step further and posit that without my university training I don’t think I would have been able to properly understand certain aspects of the Piaseczner’s writings.

So how does one deal with the potential and real pitfalls of studying Jewish topics and texts in a university? The key to the issue is in footnote 2:

I would like to point out as well, that the professors that I studied with (I was quite picky), were, in my opinion, quite objective. I never felt that they were trying to convince me of something that was not in the text they were trying to explicate. (I did see this in other professors that I avoided. The presence or absence of a kipa on the professor’s head was not at all an indication of his likelihood to have a personal religious agenda to read into the text). On the other hand, as a yeshiva teacher, I am well aware of the tensions that may result when one is educating for yirat shemayim and dealing with a hashkafically difficult text.

Obviously Rabbi Leshem would not recommend the same route he took to everyone. By the same token, someone considering university may very well just look at Rabbi Leshem as a role model and try to copy the role without consideration of the model he is emulating. He implies that there were professors whose classes he sat in on before deciding to drop their class--that, and the ability to accurately evaluate the teacher are not things that everyone is capable of doing.

Read the whole thing--and contribute to the comments.

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