This past weekend was the Annual Torah Umesorah Convention, a star-studded event to celebrate the heights and successes of Orthodox Jewish education.
Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendelowitz founded Torah Umesorah in the 1940s. An astoundingly prescient individual, Rabbi Mendelowitz had the foresight to recognize that the future of Torah Judaism was in the United States. As the first reports of the true depth of Nazi horrors and the destruction of European Jewry began filtering across the ocean, Rabbi Mendelowitz made the bold declaration in newspaper ads that ''Torah-true'' Judaism would survive, and it would have to take place in America. Alas, he believed, American Jewry must quickly step over the graves and smoking embers of European Jewry to begin spreading the concept of full-day, hence 'Day School,' Orthodox education to the four corners of the United States.
Rabbi Mendelowitz (who actually insisted he be called "Mr.," and NOT "Rabbi," though he was certainly deserving of the honorific) founded an organization called Torah Umesorah, which dedicated itself to establishing Day Schools across the length and breadth of the United States. The idea was to establish a Day School in every American city and town with over 500 Jewish families. Several indefatigable individuals, who long after Rabbi Mendelowitz's death devoted their own lives to carrying out his dream, assisted Rabbi Mendelowitz. Today, over 50 years later since its establishment, it is clear that Rabbi Mendelowitz's vision was correct and his idea lives on.
To celebrate this success over impossible odds, each year at the Torah Umesorah convention, the best and brightest of Orthodoxy's pedagogic circles meet, mingle, and celebrate their achievements with an eye toward a future. This year was no different. However, as some of the highlights of this event filter across airwaves and email, it seems clear that if he could have been there for the weekend, Rabbi Mendelowitz, the one man who foresaw the Yeshiva as the redemptive force of Torah Judaism, would likely have been very uncomfortable.
In fact, this was not a particularly comfortable week for Yeshivas in general; having been in the cross-hairs of thinking Jews and the secular media after a bombshell revelation surfaced last Monday in a New York Magazine article. The article revealed sexual atrocities committed by a yeshiva rebbe against his students and the sheer evil of a yeshiva administrator intent on hiding the perversion.
And yet, with all this swirling about, not a word of this was uttered by any one presenter throughout the weekend. Not an official statement of shame, complicity, regret, or even vague acknowledgment for having harbored and abetted a wanton child molester and his protector for a quarter century. Not a mention about the untold psychological damage, damaged faith, and damaged trust of countless Jewish boys and their subsequent generations.
Not a word of displeasure was hurled or even lobbed toward those who make a mockery of Torah, of Torah learning, and of Orthodox Jewry. Not a sound about the cynicism and disregard demonstrated by who blatantly defiled the very concept of a Yeshiva -- a sanctuary of purity, intellectual honesty, and the core ideal of Rabbi Mendelowitz and Torah Umesorah -- by violating and tearing down the very youths who Yeshivas were created to protect and build up. Not a blessed word.
Rather, the participants in this annual farce spent their weekend in the comforting embrace of gratuitous grandstanding by overwrought, under-informed rabbinic ''leaders,'' and reveling in undeserved backslapping and self-serving congratulatory huzzahs from empty black hats crowing about their victory over the Nazis when, in fact, the storm-troopers of willful neglect, mindless faith, and callous disregard for the lives and futures of Jewish youth who teeter on the edge of self-destruction march along the ostentatiously appointed homes of our communities and cold, uninviting shuls and schools of our neighborhoods.
Instead, a so-called godol had the audacity to insist that Rebbeim should not stoop to the level of their students by playing ball with them; a bizayon for those who teach Torah is Pasht Nisht, he feels. Trips are bittul Torah, he, too, feels…maybe once a year, but just to be yoitze.
And for a mindless mouthpiece of small-minded chinuch and divisiveness, an irritating midget of a mind who nevertheless had the gall to lambaste his handlers' dissenters in a crowd of 100,000, happily endorses this bandwagon of insanity and unrealistic expectations for our youths.
Ironically, this weekend of mass delusion coincided with a tragic moment of massive disillusion, when a 16-year-old Jewish boy, long ago labeled a miserable failure by the yeshiva system, but actually a simple Jewish child miserably failed by the yeshiva system, jumped to his death. He leapt to escape the depression he suffered, to elude the misery and emptiness of a system that worshiped rigidity, conformity, and distance from anyone different. In actuality, long before he jumped, he had been spit out and left for dead.
No ball with students? No trips? No truth? No self-examination? No desire to consider possible culpability? Expect no less during these last days of the bloated Roman empire of the Mainstream Yeshiva movement. In the throes of psychotic self-deception and unvarnished self-interest, the very ones who pervert the sacred duty of Jewish education, instead turning it into a sacred cow never to be objectively viewed and constructively improved, will suffer their own painful slaughter on an alter of their making.
The day is coming when no one will trust or believe a word uttered by those charged with educating our youth. They are digging their graves and crafting their day of irrelevance. Unsustainable tuition, ungodly student expectations, and merciless retribution meted on regular parents who cannot keep up with tuition payments and on regular students who cannot keep up with so-called spiritual standards will lead the call to disassemble the system.
Willfully ignoring sexual abuse is the first nail. Long-neglected, willfully ignored youths who jump to their deaths is the second. It won't take many more. Change is coming, less because it is wanted, rather as it is needed.
The inopportune timing of this year's Torah Umesorah convention, with its shocking displays of pomposity and cluelessness, is no coincidence. Rather, it is amusingly reminiscent of God's heavenly sense of humor and the cycle of revolt against systemic rot that has recurred over and again since the beginning of time.
