…Feldman has performed one valuable service: His piece serves as a warning against the easy assumption that the best in secular learning can be readily reconciled with passionate Torah study. When equal emphasis is placed on the curriculum of the dominant secular society and Torah learning, the former will trump the latter. Maimonides has produced hundreds of Ivy League graduates, but few distinguished Torah scholars.
No doubt Feldman is being disingenuous when he complains that his alma mater and former classmates should be able to make peace with his intermarriage and his “desire to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously and to defy contradiction with coexistence.” But when secular knowledge and Torah learning are proclaimed to be fully compatible, even complementary visions of Truth, it is not surprising that some will treat them as a smorgasbord from which one can select the savory bits, as Feldman has done.
Tellingly (and wrongly), this “best and brightest” product of the combination of a New England prep school and a Lithuanian yeshiva characterizes modern Orthodoxy by Moses Mendelssohn’s dictum: “Be a Jew at home and a man abroad.” That is a recipe for a bifurcated life rather than one lived at all times and all places in the presence of G-d. Following that dictum, virtually all of Mendelssohn’s descendants and disciples had found their way to the baptismal fount within two generations.
I take personal offense at this because my rebbe in yeshiva — R. Mayer Twersky — went to Maimonides! So did his brother, R. Moshe Twersky, a rebbe in Yeshiva Toras Moshe in Jerusalem.
In my time in yeshiva I learned with three different graduates of Maimonides, all of whom were serious learners. One eventually went into business and is a model of a successful businessman with one leg in serious lomdus, one into Jewish organizational life after a stint in high tech, and the third became a pulpit rabbi and Jewish librarian. That last one is, in my opinion, a brilliant talmid chakham who is known to many readers of this blog.
…But, in R. Rosenblum’s defense, he did write "few": "Maimonides has produced hundreds of Ivy League graduates, but few distinguished Torah scholars." Since most yeshivas produce only a few DISTINGUISHED Torah scholars, he might have actually been praising the school rather than insulting it. In that case, I am pleasantly surprised that he is now advocating Torah U-Madda.
