Musings on YU...
Sep. 10th, 2002 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aribBeing a recent graduate, I still keep tabs on the student newspaper at my old college.
Avi R, a former high school classmate and current rabbinical student at YU, wrote an article contrasting his summer at MIT with his tenure at YU, and he wrote the following two paragraphs:
I thus return to YU with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I trade a community in which each individual Jew commands inestimable worth for a community which boasts the densest concentration of Modern Orthodox collegiates in the diaspora. People like Ale may eat lunch in the Furman cafeteria, but I will never meet them, for, lacking the social necessity to meet strangers, we become friends only with those in the narrowest of ideological circles. The lunch conversations have become frivolous and decadent, for, after three years of eating with the same fifteen people, we have nothing of value to share anymore (unless Rabbi Carmy sits down at our table and reawakens our minds).
I trade a community in which men and women depend on each other for support and advice for a petrified social scene in which, unless a matchmaker momentarily blesses their interaction, men and women make every effort to ignore each other. Bound on one hand by the demands of tzenius (Religious modesty laws -ab) that prohibit flirting, and on the other hand by the insane expectation that all the women find their husbands by the tender age of 22, we adopt an all-or-nothing approach to coed interaction. The next woman next to whom I sit in the library computer lab will merely contain her disappointment that I could not find another seat. Whereas Aviva, a Beis Yaakov style girl, conversed with me for half an hour, many of my close friends at Stern College prefer not to speak to me at all, both in spite of and because of our friendship.
Thank you Avi. This is what I've been trying to say for years, but couldn't find the words.
Avi R, a former high school classmate and current rabbinical student at YU, wrote an article contrasting his summer at MIT with his tenure at YU, and he wrote the following two paragraphs:
I thus return to YU with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I trade a community in which each individual Jew commands inestimable worth for a community which boasts the densest concentration of Modern Orthodox collegiates in the diaspora. People like Ale may eat lunch in the Furman cafeteria, but I will never meet them, for, lacking the social necessity to meet strangers, we become friends only with those in the narrowest of ideological circles. The lunch conversations have become frivolous and decadent, for, after three years of eating with the same fifteen people, we have nothing of value to share anymore (unless Rabbi Carmy sits down at our table and reawakens our minds).
I trade a community in which men and women depend on each other for support and advice for a petrified social scene in which, unless a matchmaker momentarily blesses their interaction, men and women make every effort to ignore each other. Bound on one hand by the demands of tzenius (Religious modesty laws -ab) that prohibit flirting, and on the other hand by the insane expectation that all the women find their husbands by the tender age of 22, we adopt an all-or-nothing approach to coed interaction. The next woman next to whom I sit in the library computer lab will merely contain her disappointment that I could not find another seat. Whereas Aviva, a Beis Yaakov style girl, conversed with me for half an hour, many of my close friends at Stern College prefer not to speak to me at all, both in spite of and because of our friendship.
Thank you Avi. This is what I've been trying to say for years, but couldn't find the words.