The conversation took place in my office last September. “I am beginning to realize that if I commit myself to Torah observance, my parents will be upset,” began the new student at our first meeting, “and if I don’t commit myself to Torah observance, you will be upset.” Since I only knew this young woman for three weeks, it was flattering she wanted to please me, but I knew it was not a healthy way for her to choose a way of life. I asked her, “What do you want?

You can’t choose your life to please your parents, nor to please me. What do you want?” She thought and quietly answered, “I want both.” I wasn’t sure if the “both” she wanted was to please her parents and me, or to be committed and not be committed at the same time.  I pushed further, “You can’t have both. Let me ask you this: Why did you come here? What was missing from your life that you decided to leave it, come to Israel and study Torah?” The answer came quickly, without hesitation, “Direction. I came looking for direction. I met a Rabbi on campus who showed me the direction of Torah…..but if I’d met a Buddhist, maybe I’d be a Buddhist.” I looked into her eyes and said, “This year, you need to figure out what you want. This is the most important mitzvah you can do – figure out who you are, what you want, and what direction you choose – because you can’t live your life to please someone else.” That would be dangerous.

After years of students arguing about feminism, and other popular philosophies of the last fifty years of outreach, we are encountering a new interaction with students. “Tell me what the Torah says and I’ll do it.”

While this is refreshing, it presents a different kind of challenge. When people are changing their lives, we want them to do it from within, and not to satisfy others. In the past, we spent hours debating and challenging the ideas of the marketplace with people who knew themselves but had pressing issues and questions. Today’s students are different. Because they have had so much freedom to do as they wish, they often do not have a clear sense of themselves. We must push them to think hard about what they want, before they make changes. 

Additionally, we’ve noticed that our students, raised on technology, think differently.  Hours spent on Internet have trained them to scan for information, find the relevant facts and move to another site to glean more information. Their ability to extract and process information is phenomenal, but it does not require in depth analysis. In a recent meeting of our tutors, a few of them lamented the fact that the students aren’t reading the Hebrew properly and that while they will work hard on translations, they don’t seem to be able to put the sentence together. “Scanning – they are scanning the words,” I realized, “because that is how they have been trained.” Since one of our goals at She’arim is to teach textual skills, including analyzing each word and verse for nuances of meaning,  our job now includes teaching them new skills – to read carefully, to look for detail, to analyze and dissect a sentence and then to put it back together. Only when they do that, can they learn in the way that Jews have learned for millennia.

One of the delightful differences we see in these avid students is that they enjoy hearing truth directly. There is no need for dressing up or underplaying what the Torah says.  They appreciate honesty, and they are drawn to the Torah for the integrity that it offers. They unswervingly want to know what the right thing is and why it is right. And their ability and desire to absorb and integrate that information is astounding.

The same Torah is being taught in new ways, ways that address the pressing needs of the generation. One of the most exciting and energizing parts of the educator’s job is making education fresh and rejuvenating for the students. In that process, we are not just educating the millennials, but we're educating ourselves all over again!

In a world where everything is a temporary file, delete-able, updated and disposable, they are awed to see the Torah standing immutable, solid and eternal

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Rebbetzin Pavlov