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 on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-life/10241/life-in-learning/