The Lockers.net

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The Article Below was written by a teen from Congregation Bnai Yeshurun, in Teaneck, NJ, upon his graduation from Yeshiva High School. He has requested to remain anonymous. * * * * * The modern day yeshiva high schools are breeding apikorsus. For students crossing the threshold from eighth grade to ninth, every effort is made to enhance the level of secular studies and create a more mature environment for their undertaking. The college preparatory departments appreciate the process of growth and development that a fourteen or fifteen year old mind undergoes, and adapts to it. Yet when it comes to limudei kodesh, the students are, for the most part, provided with the exact same elementary level of education they have been exposed to their whole lives. The incredible leap in sophistication that the human brain takes at this age is completely ignored. Teenagers begin to think, to challenge their previous assumptions and the conventions they’ve been taught. No source of Torah rises to meet these challenges, to answer the questions that begin to fester, while at the same time these children are presented with a whole new experience of secular knowledge – an adult experience. This maturity and sophistication attracts their young minds, and pulls them away from the childish religious stories and songs of their past. Completely unaware of the surpassing beauty and depth of Torah, they continually drift away from Yahadut, until they barely tolerate what goes on in their homes and dream of living on their own, free of their parents’ backwardness. The year in Israel is an incredible opportunity, it can and has changed the course of many young lives, but to a limited extent. Many of the students who “flip out” over their year do not genuinely change, whether they stay for one year or even two. They may continue being shomrei mitzvot and may learn a little, but they become a shell, a robot, a shadow of their shana alef self, sucked dry of any fervor, passion, and love. Just as equally, though, especially for those who go on afterward to secular universities but not limited to them, they may abandon all observance completely. The vast majority of the ones who continue to grow stronger in Yahadut beyond their yeshiva experience are those who are serious, or at least semi-serious, before they get there. These students are in such a minority that it is impossible to attribute their attitude to their yeshiva high school. These few talmidim had the impetus to progress beyond elementary school on their own from some other source which, for whatever reason, most students do not have. This is not a task for a teenager to undertake alone, and most don’t even try. It is like putting him or her in a vast library and telling them to pick a book. If they reach for something, and if they actually open in up, it will of course be Torah, but it will have no framework, no instruction booklet on how to, or why they even should, implement what they have learned into their lives. Those who do decide to change, do it by feel. It is not an intellectual decision. Young minds require guidance, not just to explain the how to’s, but even more importantly the “why should I?”’s.

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