So I’ve been here at The Yeshiva for about a year. I’m going home for a couple of weeks in June and I’m starting to really worry about what it will be like in the “outside world.”

Here’s the thing about the Yeshiva/Outside world dynamic: a couple of weeks ago, there was a young woman who came to check out the Yeshiva because she was thinking of studying here in the summer. She ended up studying with me in the 2nd level talmud class. As we went through a sugya about certain mitzvot potentially superseding Shabbat, and I tried to explain what was going on, she kept asking me what the relevance was. Why do we care what Rabbi Eliezer thought about shaking a lulav on shabbat, especially since that’s not what we do anyway? And why would he think that you could when everyone else thought otherwise? And why do we care? How can this matter if it’s not about saving someone’s life or about the community or the sorts of things that are, you know, really important? Why would something as trivial as shaking a lulav supersede Shabbat? And what’s so important about Shabbat anyway??

These are the sorts of questions I can hear people asking all the time in the “outside world.” And they are reasonable questions. Why does any of this matter to people who live in a real world with a surrounding culture that tells them what is important and where those things don’t, on the surface, seem to bear any similarity to the sorts of things we get so embroiled in at Yeshiva? And what troubled me was that I didn’t know how to answer those questions. I knew, deeply, structurally, why these things were important… at least why I thought they were important. But I didn’t know how to communicate any of it because it is built on the entirety of my learning, on the way that the structure, the deep structure of the tradition and the text are put together, how things fit, how reasons and symbols grow out of each other and build our practice. It is built on my understanding of what I have just begun to have a bit of understanding of after a year of intense study. How can you communicate that to a person impatient for answers, for meaning, for relevance?? It’s perfectly relevant for my life, but only because I found reason to tie my life to this tradition and to the study of it, and in order to do that I made a conscious decision to try my best to release as many of my preconceptions about what is “important” or “relevant” as I could before trying to learn, because I knew that if I held to them I would blind myself to what the Yeshiva could give me. I’m just not sure how to translate that. I’m not sure how to communicate to someone why they shouldn’t marry a non-Jew. I don’t know how to communicate to someone why they should come to shul or keep kosher. I don’t know how to communicate to someone that they shouldn’t drive or go shopping on shabbat. If I can’t learn how to communicate such things, then I’m going to have some significant difficulties in a relatively short while.

I talked to Reb Shmuel about this and he told me he thought was the way to address my concern about losing my sense of how to communicate what I’ve gained in Yeshiva to the Jewish “outside world” was not, chas v’shalom, to withdraw from Yeshiva but davka to go even deeper and learn more, and God willing that will give me more security in my learning and more of a sense of how to transmit, how to share my learning. I hope so. So like Shimon Bar Yochai (lehavdil) I go back into the cave for another 12 months.