Our 5th issue, dealing with the subject of Torah U’Madda, is now available in pdf format, here.
Mar 132008
Issue 5, Torah U’Madda, featured an abridged article from Jaimie Fogel entitled “Between the Apple Tree: A Romance between Torah and English Literature. This is the complete article…
People think they’re asking a polite question when they ask me about my major. It’s one of those questions frequently discussed within the first three minutes of meeting any college student and viewed by most as an easy way to gain insight into the personal interests of the stranger they have just met. But every time I am forced to repeat this small piece of personal information, I am thrown into a world of confusion; into a world of undefined phrases, unclear boundaries, and a choice fraught with guilt. I feel that I am at once in an intimate relationship with Judaic Studies and simultaneously on a self-explorative journey into the world of creative writing. This sometimes leaves me feeling as if I am involved in an illicit affair; cheating on one partner to find favor in the eyes of another.
I am far from the first individual to raise this issue and to try and grapple with the synthesis of Judaic and secular studies. Although I have found it puzzling that, while the phrase Torah U-Madda is a familiar and often clichéd one in the Yeshiva University student’s vocabulary, it is a concept which is rarely discussed or delineated for the contemporary student. It seems to be taken for granted that the average student on campus understands this notion and most certainly agrees with it, since that student has chosen to spend three or four years studying here. But upon asking students about the definition of Torah U-Madda, I think one might find that most students would not be able to answer anything deeper about the nuances of that ideology than “it values an integration of secular studies with the religious.” Dr Norman Lamm stressed this point in his address to the Yeshiva University alumni at the university’s 50th anniversary dinner. On May 20, 1979, he observed that, “ …we as an institution have to do more direction-giving. We must give our students more effective guidance, so that this confrontation between the Jewish and the general world will take place for them in a more well defined way1.”
