The Anthropologists Go to Yeshiva

The anthropologist Jonathan Boyarin, in his recent book Yeshiva Days, recounts and analyzes his experience studying at Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem, a prestigious orthodox yeshiva on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Reviewing the book, Shai Secunda details a few of its observations:

Some of Boyarin’s best insights into the texture of Jewish learning examine what he calls the “unmaking of time at the yeshiva.” The learners regularly spend ten hours a day struggling to make sense of intricate rabbinic texts, but they do not seem to be driven by a desire for the kind of mastery that is sought in terms of four-year degrees or 10,000 hours of practice. We hear little of tests or study goals, and while a few students are there to work toward rabbinic ordination, it is largely beside the point. Life in the yeshiva is a bewildering combination of scholastic determination and inertia that advances, tarries, and doubles back. Boyarin provocatively, and I believe correctly, identifies this “noninstrumentality.”

An academic colleague of Boyarin’s goes so far as to compare regular Torah learning to the beautiful sand mandalas that Tibetan Buddhist monks create, contemplate, and then destroy annually. And yet, learning in yeshiva also includes a regular practice of ḥazarah (review), whose aspiration is, indeed, a permanent mastery of the material. In ethnography, such contradictions are not problems to be solved but antitheses that reveal the glorious complexity of culture.

In this same review, Secunda considers a more ambitious and systematic Hebrew-language book by the ethnographer Shlomo Guzmen-Carmeli, who studied Israeli places of learning, each very different from the others:

Apart from the apparent differences in method and scope, what ultimately distinguishes these ethnographies is their orientation. Guzmen-Carmeli works in the modern state of Israel, a religiously dynamic place where new forms of Judaism are constantly bubbling to the surface. His personal vignettes and energetic writing communicate genuine excitement about what comes next. Boyarin, on the other hand, toils in the Diaspora. As he puts it, “the impulse of my work is to repair the breach of memory.” His beloved Lower East Side, once the most vibrant and densely Jewish neighborhood in the world, has been, for a century, vanishing. Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem is also going through a long and slow decline. Indeed, as I was writing this review, Boyarin’s beloved rosh yeshiva [or dean], Rabbi Dovid Feinstein, passed away.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: American Judaism, Judaism in Israel, Yeshiva

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF