What Kind Of Yeshiva Education Is Best?I've never really identified as modern Orthodox, and if I ever identified as charedi, I ceased doing so years ago.
My approach in my religious observance and religious ideology is to try to adopt what I see as the best of all observant Jewish sectors, and reject what I see as the negatives or erroneous positions of those respective sectors.
I therefore am a Zionist who does not say hallel on Yom Haatzmaut, a person who rejects religious pluralism but embraces pluralism in civil society. I reject overly broad interpretations of daas Torah, but accept that rabbis do have the final say on issues of halacha and hashkafa. I'm a big sports fan, but believe that much of modernity is inherently antithetical to traditional Judaism and that modernity and Judaism often cannot be reconciled. I'm not comfortable with Orthodox feminism, but I believe that women should be encouraged to actively participate in Torah study and in communal life.
I'm comfortable picking and choosing from within divergent Orthodox positions and practices.
However, now that I've started to think about what kind of school to send my son, I realize that I may be forced to make a choice between the respective ideologies of the charedim and the modern Orthodox.
On one hand, my instinct is to err on the side of sending my children to schools that are too religiously right-wing rather than too left-wing. The hope is that if children rebel, they'll become more modern than I may like but remain observant Jews.
I'm not saying that this instinct is correct. But it is one that many have.
On the other hand, I would not want to send my children to a charedi school in which the rebbis rail against television and the Internet, demonstrate a lack of respect for the modern Orthodox or the less observant, and/or refuse to teach basic science. I certainly would never ask my children to lie about things like whether there is a TV in my house so that they can enroll (or remain enrolled) in a charedi school. Nor would I want the principal of my son's school to say in a school forum that parents who have televisions in their homes are "either hypocrites or idiots," as my high school principal did.
Ultimately, my own experience in charedi schools causes me to have both comfortable familiarity with those schools, along with discomfort about their rigidity and intolerance.
Fortunately, there is still some time for me to sort all of this out.
posted on 6/19/2006
