Most Americans who go to yeshiva in Israel do so after high school. They spend a year in a beit midrash grappling with Talmudic debates and digressions. I went to public school. No one from my graduating class did a gap year, let alone yeshiva. I didn’t know what a yeshiva was.
People ask me now why I went after college. The truth is, I wanted to learn how to learn. I wanted to gain literacy to understand the rich corpus of text that is the living lifeblood of the Jewish people.
In college, I started learning with some friends and rabbis. One rabbi in particular pursued me doggedly. We met every week. There was no structure, no curriculum. He would never start the conversation. To begin, I always had to ask a question. He wanted me to chase my curiosity.
At the beginning, my questions were sociological. For example, I asked him if Jews with tattoos were really forbidden to be buried in cemeteries. He never answered immediately, but rather pulled a few books down from the shelf first. Of thousands of pages, he always identified the 2-3 most relevant paragraphs. It was magic.
Along with literacy grew my curiosity and appetite for debate. Often we encountered topics that clashed with my modern sensitivities. He was intellectually honest with me always, never concealing any hard truths. I knew this to be true viscerally because I never walked away satisfied. Never did all the stars align. There was always something gnawing.
Looking back, the learning was more about literacy and identity than religious observance. And with this unique kind of learning I fell in love. Never were all the questions answered, so I kept coming back for more. It was different. It wasn’t academic. I had been enamored by ideas before, but this learning was intellectual and emotional and spiritual and, I was coming to sense, divine.
Around junior year, I began to consider dedicating a set amount of time to learning before starting a career. The truth is, much of the impetus to explore options for yeshiva came not from my desire to learn for its own benefit, but rather a growing understanding of the responsibility a father has to teach his children. Pursuing a personal interest wasn’t enough to push me off the career bandwagon, or give me the courage to jump. No, only my future children were enough to do that.
I had three criteria for a post-college yeshiva:
Very Israeli with lots of Hebrew. I sensed that learning the text in our language was more authentic than in one belonging to another people. I also wanted to better communicate with my family in Israel.
A place that was serious but also intellectually open, i.e. affording the possibility for knowledge and truth outside Torah.
Not just 18 year-olds. I didn’t want to be the weird old guy.
In the end, I chose Yeshivat Har Etzion. It was basically the only place that fit the bill.