Why it is so important that there should be knowledgeable, Torah-observant Jews on college campuses

Recently, I was speaking to a young man who is currently learning at one of the local baal teshuvah yeshivos. I asked him about the impact of his religious journey on his siblings, and he told me that one of his younger brothers had begun exploring his Judaism a bit.

At least until he went to speak to one of his campus “rabbis,” that is. He told the rabbi that he was seeking a personal relationship with G-d. To which the rabbi replied, “Jews don’t believe in a personal relationship with G-d. And it is presumptuous to think that you could have such a relationship.”

That younger brother is now exploring Christianity.

Could that so-called rabbi really have believed that? I wondered. I could not help thinking of a woman about whom I heard some years back from a close friend. She did not even know that she was Jewish until she was in her early twenties, and she passed away, I believe, before she was 40, leaving a number of still young children behind.

In her last days, she told a visitor that she was trying to work on yiras Hashem, but it was very difficult because she was so overwhelmed by Hashem’s love for her. So much for Jews not believing in a personal relationship with G-d.

Has that campus rabbi never learned Shir Hashirim? Or Tehillim? Why did she not open up the siddur and suggest that they learn Ahavah Rabbah together? Or enter into a discussion based on the Ramchal’s Derech Hashem of how through the study of Torah we access the Divine Mind? And when we develop our middos and emulate Hashem, we become more G-d-like and thus better able to enter into a relationship with Him.

Perhaps she is not familiar with these ideas or texts. But even if I could forgive her ignorance, what I cannot forgive is her lack of responsibility — her failure to look more deeply into traditional Jewish sources to try to respond to the college student’s needs and to use his search as a means of connection.

And if learning those Jewish sources was beyond her capabilities, why not send the student to a Torah-observant Jew, who could have spoken to him from both an experiential and textual point of view? My guess is that the “rabbi” never even considered that possibility: For her, the young man becoming an Orthodox Jew was likely an even more horrifying possibility than his thinking of himself as a Christian.

That story captures why it is so important that there should be knowledgeable, Torah-observant Jews on college campuses. Only they possess the passion to introduce their fellow Jews to the wisdom of the Torah as applied to their lives, and to help them develop a relationship with Hashem and with their fellow Jews. Only someone who believes in the Torah as the ultimate source of wisdom will put all their effort into helping young, seeking Jews along their path of discovery.

BUT CAMPUS OUTREACH is not just a matter of preventing tragedies like the one mentioned above, though I would not for a moment give up on my friend’s younger brother. Since last Simchas Torah, there is an unprecedented moment of opportunity to reach unlearned and unaffiliated Jews on college campuses.

That opportunity starts with the trauma suffered by Jewish students since last Simchas Torah. They have been subjected to unanticipated physical threats and social ostracism. Many young Jews have found themselves ghosted, at best, by those whom they thought were their friends, and denounced, at worst, as Zionist colonialists and supporters of genocide. Many feel themselves to be under siege, afraid even to identify themselves as Jewish.

Ynet ran a long article on September 25, based on interviews with twenty or so US college students visiting Israel. Not only have they been under attack for the last year, but they have received little support from campus administrators. When Yasmeen Ohebsion, a student at Tulane University, reported a woman running at her shouting, “[Expletive deleted] you, Jew,” she was told that her attacker’s words were political speech and there was nothing the administration could do. She knew, however, that if s similar tirade had been directed at a member of a favored identity group, the offending student would likely have been expelled.

MIT’s Talya Kahan gave another example of the double standards applied to Jews. During orientation, every incoming MIT student goes through a session on forbidden harassment. For instance, using the former name of a student who announces that they are now of a different gender — “deadnaming” — is harassment. Yet MIT president Sally Kornbluth, when asked in a congressional hearing whether calling for the genocide of Jews would constitute harassment at MIT could do no better than “it depends on context.”

Nor apparently was it harassment when a friend of Kahan’s was told by her study partner in a writing class, “I just want to make it clear that the assaults on women that occurred on October 7 are justified because Israel oppresses Palestinians.” (By progressive standards, then, any assaults on white women in America are justified by America’s racism.)

Daniella Ludmir, whose uncle was killed at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, received a message from a fellow student at the University of Michigan, “I hope you get gassed in the basement of [a Jewish fraternity]. What’s your Auschwitz number? [signed] Adolf.”

At both MIT and Stanford, the administration paid for alternative housing for Jewish students too threatened to live in their assigned dorms, but did nothing to prevent the threats themselves.

Nor does it appear that the situation of Jewish students is likely to improve dramatically in the coming year. Columbia University’s task force on anti-Semitism determined that Jewish and Israeli students were subjected to “crushing discrimination” on campus and that pervasive anti-Semitism has “affected the entire university community.” Yet the university’s new interim president, Dr. Katrina Armstrong, hastened to apologize, in an interview with the student paper, for her predecessor’s decision to call in the NYPD to clear anti-Israel protestors from the main administration building.

That apology signals that Columbia will likely continue to be what current student Eli Getz calls a “post-apocalyptic” environment for Jewish students. He describes how every inch of the street adjacent to the campus is covered either with torn hostage photos defaced by swastikas, or signs denouncing Israel and calling for the liberation of Palestine. And the campus itself is filled with people wearing keffiyehs, “with heat in their eyes.”

YET THAT SEA OF HOSTILITY — and this is the crucial point —has awakened something very deep in the Jewish souls of many students. That awakening is part of a more general trend among American Jews documented by Rachel Schwartzberg in the current issue of the OU’s Jewish Action (“The Great Jewish Awakening”). A recent survey by the Jewish Federations of North America found, for instance, that 38 percent of the parents of children in secular private schools are considering moving them to Jewish schools. Of the 83 percent of the overall community members who describe themselves as “only somewhat,” “not at all,” or “not very” engaged with the Jewish community, two-fifths are now involved in some more tangible way.

Five thousand Jews a month are reaching out to Aish.com’s live chat. Inquiries to NCSY about establishing public school chapters used to average about one per month. Over the last year, there have been 120 requests to start new chapters. And there has been a large jump in those attending out-of-school programming, such as a 7 a.m. Mesillas Yesharim chaburah.

Yet college students have borne the brunt of the anti-Semitic hostility, and it is on college campuses that the reaction has been most powerful. More than one MEOR campus director has hailed the campus encampments as the most effective recruiting agents possible, making it hard to keep up with number of new students flooding the programs. Students who would formerly never have thought of speaking to an Orthodox rabbi or outreach professional have come to view them as a source of support and refuge.

Grant Ghaemi, for instance, met Rabbi Aaron Eisenmann, the director MEOR-NYU, in front of the NYU library one day. The latter approached him with a big smile and asked him. “Are you Jewish?” In the past, Grant told Schwartzberg, he would have answered no and walked away. But after October 7, he thought to himself, “If there was ever a time to embrace being Jewish, it’s now,” and he answered “Yes, I am.”

He committed to once-a-week learning, and soon found himself in Passaic on a shabbaton, even though he did not know what Shabbos was and could not even read Hebrew. He was blown away by the warmth of the community and the way the entire community seemed to embrace him as part of an extended family. He started coming to Passaic regularly for Shabbos, eventually bringing his mother along as well. After graduation, he worked remotely so he could attend a six-week MEOR fellowship in Lakewood.

So far, his Torah learning has caused him to seek to be better every day and provided him with concrete steps for doing so. And he wants to bring the beauty of Shabbos into his life.

When Gracie Greenberg arrived as a freshman at Pace University, she had pretty much decided to put Jewish things behind her. But after October 7, she was spurred to accept an invitation to a MEOR Shabbos meal at NYU. Little did she imagine, however, that would lead to trips to both Poland and Israel over the past year. Today, she is committed to marrying another Jew; speaks to G-d at least once a day; has taken on various mitzvos; and feels, “What I’m doing for Hashem really matters.”

Though a safe social environment is one draw of campus outreach programs, there is much more going on. Rabbi Aaron Eisenmann captured the underlying attitude behind the explosion of interest in Jewish learning and practice: “There’s got to be more to Judaism than bagels and lox if they hate us so much.” And that realization has sparked an interest in what Judaism is really about.

Not only are more young Jews showing up at MEOR and other campus programs, but the rabbis are able to teach at a much deeper level, because that is what students are seeking, says Eisenmann. And in addition, many are taking on mitzvah observance to more fully identify as Jews in the face of hatred directed at them.

The surge of anti-Semitic hatred on America’s campuses is not likely to go away anytime soon. And neither will the question that it has spurred in so many young Jews: What is it about me that is so unique that they hate me so much?

Helping them find the answer to that question by investing in campus kiruv should be one of the priorities for the American Torah community in the years to come.

A Corrective

Last week, I wrote about the “cost,” in terms of commitment and excitement, when long-term, full-time Torah learning becomes a social norm rather than an individual choice of a small, self-selected elite. That does not mean, however, that I don’t think there is a vast difference between the attitude yeshivah bochurim bring to their learning and that of the average college student.

I will never forget my amazement in my early days in the Mir when the young chavrusas in front of me suddenly jumped to their feet and started shouting at each other. Fisticuffs appeared imminent. My chavrusa and I, who had both spent years in university libraries where silence was strictly enforced, stared at each other in amazement at the intense involvement of the young men in front of us with their learning.

Shai Goldman, who spent three years in Yeshivat Har Etzion after high school, before going on to receive his BA from Columbia, contrasts the two in “A Tale of Two Academies” (Tablet Magazine, September 20, 2024.) Both are considered elite institutions.

In the requisite Great Books courses at Columbia, he soon sensed that he was one of the few actually doing the readings. The rest of the students seemed to be waiting for finals week to actually read some of the great works of the Western canon.

By contrast, he and his fellow talmidim at Har Etzion spent hours prior to shiur analyzing the relevant Gemaras and commentaries, knowing that if they did not do so, they would be completely unable to follow shiur. And after shiur, they would continue to discuss the topic and their maggid shiur’s resolution for hours, despite the fact that in yeshivah, there were few external incentives — e.g., grades, future employment.

The essential difference was that yeshivah learning was viewed as the “ultimate sacred endeavor.” The talmidim in yeshivah were confident that “the sages whose words we would painstakingly pore over were among the greatest geniuses and most pious men who ever walked the earth.”

When they first arrived at Har Etzion, their rebbi, a fourth-generation descendant of Rav Chaim Brisker, explained, “The Torah is the revealed word of the living G-d. We study it, and the Talmud which extends from it, not only because it is a singular wellspring of eternal truth, but also because it connects us to a higher power and a higher purpose.”

But in the Great Books courses at Columbia, even the faculty often expressed doubts about the value of the canon, comprised almost exclusively of the works of long-dead, white European males. Faculty members complained that they were forced to teach the Western canon, and not African art and Eastern philosophy, to satisfy “prejudiced alumni and agenda-based donors.”

Rather than pride in their inherited intellectual tradition, the Columbia students primarily felt shame. “[T]he great thinkers and artists of our syllabi were put on trial, and they were always convicted.” Athenian democracy was fatally flawed because women did not vote; Rembrandt benefitted from the colonialist ambitions of the Netherlands of his day.

No wonder Goldman’s fellow students did not “spend their days diligently searching for the truth and beauty contained in the texts they had been assigned to read,” as he had once done in yeshivah.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1032. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)