I recently read a copy of Noah Feldman's Orthodox Paradox article in the New York Times's Magazine section. For those of you unfamiliar with it, you can read it at this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/magazine/22yeshiva-t.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1185229056-Y2YozeEGE7olejbHwQXrnQ
In Orthodox Paradox, Feldman mentions how the author found himself and his girlfriend edited out of a class reunion picture because his girlfriend was Korean. He had attended Maimonides School, an Orthodox Jewish school in the Boston area, and the interfaith relationship violated one of the major aspects of Jewish tradition. He then goes on to mention how one of Maimonides's guiding principles has been to teach students to be outstanding members of both the Jewish and secular communities with a firm grounding in tradition, culture, and morality.
Clearly, both Feldman and Maimonides have valid arguments for their actions. I am not opening up that can of worms. Most of my comments will relate to the fact that I
understand where he is coming from. Why is that?
I am also an alumnus of Maimonides. Most of my comments will involve my own experiences at the school.
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I graduated two years after Feldman, in the same class as Simon Feldman (Noah Feldman's brother)
and Sarah Bronson (the authorof the chayyeisarah.blogspot.com blog). I arrived at Maimonides in ninth grade, after spending eight years at Solomon Schechter.
My family attended an Orthodox synagogue in Newton, where I would go with my father every Saturday. This, combined with my years at Schechter, exposed me to both Orthodox and Conservative traditions during the formative years of my life. It should not come as a surprise to you that I consider myself Conservadox today, somewhere on the border between Orthodox and Conservative.
When I first visited Maimonides, I found the strict Orthodox customs relatively intimidating. Many of the customs practiced by the students and teachers were unfamiliar. Had Boston's New Jewish High School (now called the Gann Academy, I believe) existed in those days, it is a virtual certainty that I would have gone there. However, Maimonides was the only option for a Jewish high school at the time.
It came down to a choice between the strict atmosphere at Maimonides and finding myself bullied at public school as a nerd. Although my ideologies were more of a match for Newton South High School than Maimonides, my parents and I were convinced that I would have been eaten alive at public school. I didn't like the idea all that much, but I figured I had no choice. It had to be Maimonides. One would have expected religious people to be more ethical and caring than secular people.
Two other people came to Maimonides with me from Schechter. One of them was a bright girl from a traditional Maimonides family who eventually would attend Harvard. The other was my closest childhood friend, a truly saintly young man who had recently found religion and eventually became a devout Orthodox rabbi.
You can already in this sampling of two people Maimonides's ability to produce bright people capable of leading both the secular and religious communities.
Life at Maimonides was often difficult, especially for those without a strong religious background. The day began at 8:00 with morning prayers and did not end
until roughly 6:00 PM. Yes, that is a long day, but good double-curriculum education means lots of time in the classroom. There was a strict dress code (modest skirts for the girls and a prohibition against jeans and T-shirts for the boys). Judaica classes in the high school were generally led by fully-ordained Orthodox rabbis who clearly knew the religious texts. Mixed dancing was prohibited (as is often the case in religious communities), turning the experience into
something close to a real-life version of Footloose.
As far as secular education was concerned, we had history courses, science, foreign languages in addition to Hebrew, social studies, computer programming, and several other courses which prepared us for living in a secular world. Maimonides was also known for its excellent math team,
a team which consistently won the New England Small School Championships despite an overall enrollment of maybe half of their competitors. My class alone had two of the four students in New England to score 40 out of 40 on a major New England competition. One of them eventually became a chemistry professor at Yale.
I can't remember what happened to the other one, but I vaguely remember that he has a blog.
Study of the Talmud -- in effect, the minutes of the debates of the classical Jewish theological senate (the Sanhedrin) was one of the hallmarks of Maimonides. And for good reason.
The ability to think through a particular rabbi's argument for or against a certain custom taught the students deductive reasoning while simultaneously teaching them Jewish tradition.
The Talmud teacher also made it a point to give pop quizzes, a strategy which we hated as students but which, in retrospect, made him an excellent teacher because it forced us to study the material more thoroughly in preparation for a possible quiz the next day. You'd be surprised how often the teachers you hate turn out to be the best teachers in the end.
As my parents had hoped, the students proved to be caring, bright, and friendly. There was no bullying whatsoever, as far as I could tell. However, I had to keep my guard up against violating some of the Orthodox customs. A few weeks after I arrived, I gave a girl a hug, an act commonplace at Schechter but considered inappropriate in some Orthodox communities (not that I knew at the time). The girl told her mother and I was eventually called on it. Not knowing who was religious and who was not, I began to assume that everyone was religious
and began putting on a relatively religious facade as to not offend them (and to avoid possible problems with the teachers).
As I'm writing this, I'm concerned that some of my classmates might see this and think ill of me. However, as I was writing the previous sentence, I figured that it's unlikely given the sense of ethics that school
must have instilled in people. Besides, who knows if there were other less observant people in my class and hid it the same way I did?
Although the students were nice for the most part, the administration did not seem to be
particularly supportive of relatively unorthodox (or Conservative) views of religion. To their credit, a tradition must work to restrain unbridled creativity if it is to maintain itself through years.
Having been seeded with a significant amount of Conservative background through my Schechter experience, I often resented the administration's tendencies to assume that there was only one right way to do things. Yet
I am not a particularly avid risk taker and as a result did not try to express my own views at
the school.
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Unfortunately, strong adherence to tradition and attempts to block out new ideas took its toll as well. There were several instances where the closed-mindedness of the authorities manifested itself, some of which could have very well been on the level of erasing Feldman's image from the class picture.
I was in a Judaic studies class once when a certain rabbi (whom I will call X for the time being) claimed that the 1987 earthquake in California was God's punishment for the gays in San Francisco. He said this in a matter-of-fact voice and no one commented on it. However, I was deeply troubled by this and talked to my parents. My mother was livid, and she relayed the incident to a friend of the family who was the rabbi of a prominent
Conservative synagogue. A year or so later, I was praying at the Conservative rabbi's synagogue when the rabbi actually preached against X from the pulpit! Although in general I dislike it -- GREATLY -- when one of the branch of Judaism argues with another (everyone worships the same God), I figured that X deserved it. Even though homosexuality is theoretically prohibited, what
other people do (especially non-Jews) is none of our business.
An equally troubling incident involved the comperative religion lecture. Supposedly there was to be a two hour class on Christianity. The lecturer (whom I will call Y) spent two minutes describing Christianity and 118 minutes saying why it was all hogwash. I was absolutely incensed. Saying Judaism is valid is one thing. Saying Christianity is *invalid* is something entirely different. Technically, from the halachic (Jewish law) standpoint, the rabbi would have been correct. But what he should have done, in my opinion, is spend one hour on introducing Christianity and one hour on how it differed from Judaism. Sometimes, candid factual discussion can be just too blunt.
I can go on further, but I don't want this blog entry to focus on the negative. Suffice it to say that despite a reputation for rigidity and closed-mindedness, the school has produced a disproportionate number of bright, successful, moral, and well-rounded people who are devoted to Judaism in its religious and/or cultural forms. And you can take that to the bank.
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Which brings me back to Noah Feldman. As far as I'm concerned, organized religion serves several purposes. It gives worshipers something to believe in when times are tough, a sense of community, and a sense of morality. When practiced properly, it can make a person someone to look up to as a paragon of virtue and leadership. Granted, not everybody in the religious community may agree with Feldman's assessment. But I have several very close friends who have experienced a lifestyle similar to that at Maimonides and I am convinced that they would agree with it.
I may have more to say later.
NOTE: Tonight is the Ninth of Av, a day in the Jewish calendar traditionally associated with mourning and
remembrance of catastrophes which have befallen the Jewish people. These catastrophes include the destruction of the Temple and subsequent exile of the Jewish people from Israel, events which many writers and prophets have attributed to the sins of the ancient Jewish community. I hope that this blog entry does not produce a flame war, where the denominations of Judaism start arguing with and antagonizing each other even though God loves them all. Remember the warnings of the writers and the prophets. You don't want to
lose Israel if it's going to take 1800 years for a new Jewish state to re-emerge.
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