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The reason I thought a Lithuanian kind of yeshiva was a great place was based on experience and also on reading. [Lithuanian means learning Talmud with along Reb Israel Salanter's Musar approach. That is some time during the day is devoted towards learning ethics.]
The background leading up was something I wrote about in some previous blog entry. I was curious about world view issues from a very early age. So in high school I spent time reading a lot of stuff that was not on the curriculum. Dante, Marx, Spinoza, Plato, Herman Hess, Buddha. Besides that I created a kind of philosophy seminar for my fellow students where we discussed all this, plus philosophers you have never heard of. E.g. many schools of Chinese philosophy.
My point being that I saw the Lithuanian yeshiva as a kind of global answer. That is not just my own searching for answers, but also I saw it as a kind of answer for the Earth. That is I saw it was learning objective morality, and also creating a kind of community that the central meme (unit of social information) was that of an objective moral system. Not person based, but Torah based.
That is I saw a Lithuanian yeshiva as harmonic motion bouncing between two ends--the individual and the community.
[That is I was not just looking at what was being learned, but the whole picture--the community surrounding the yeshiva.]
Whether any particular place lives up to this ideal picture is not the issue right now. The point is this is how I saw it.
I was not aware of Kant's approach at the time. So I was judging things based on a small sample of society that I saw, and a small sample of world view thinkers. (I had to pass my courses and my time was limited by other factors.) Still I think my conclusions were largely correct.
It is hard to go back in time recall exactly what I was thinking. You have to understand the context to some degree. The world was on fire. People were searching for the "Truth." Many found Eastern religions to have some kernel of what they were looking for. There was tremendous turmoil in the air, but also unbelievable optimism. There was no limit to how high Man could go-- if only we found the right System. That is to throw of the present "System," and replace it with some higher vision. The world was nothing like it is now. The world is also on fire, but not from optimism, but pessimism. We have seen how our supposedly better systems turned out. Still I hold with my original conclusion that there is something in legitimate Torah which contains the root and source of the higher reality.
What I think a lot of disappointment comes from is non-authentic Torah. Pseudo-Torah. So my general emphasis is to stress the real thing. The cults should be thrown out. It is not just that they are bad, but they give Torah a bad name.
I have also tried to bring up the Bell Curve for why some yeshivas fail to live up to this high ideal,
Maybe I could go into some of this in more detail. But the main point would be bureaucracy. At some point "yeshiva" got to be big business, and the "for the sake of heaven" got thrown out. And that brings us up to date. What could be done today to rekindle that old flame?
In any case what I found remarkable in yeshiva was a kind of answer to Socrates. What is the right life?
Yeshiva combines several areas of concern to me: numinous reality, community, meaning of life, right living, objective morality. That is it appealed to me because it seemed to combine a proper approach to different areas of metaphysical and human concern. It was not too much up in the clouds, nor was it separate from higher reality.
Learning Torah gave me inspiration to go to the Promised Land. [That was mainly Nachmanides (the Ramban) who counts settling in the Land of Israel as one of the 613 mitzvot.] So I took my family and settled there. It was much more than I could have dreamed of for seven years. But at some point I left it, and since then I have not been able to get back. The door closed. I went back to visit but the window of settling had closed. My learning partner suggested that the reason being was that I had not been learning Gemara, Rashi, and Tosphot while there the first time. To me what he said makes sense. I think I needed a kind of merit to be able to stay there and lacking this aspect of learning Torah might very well have been the reason for my exile.
