// features //
May 18, 2015
Bekishe to Butler:
A GS Student's Journey Across Worlds
Leeza Hirt
When Srully Stein, a first-year student in the Columbia University School of General Studies, explains that he is from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, few are surprised. With his slightly disheveled, short, black hair, trendy (but not conspicuous) clothing, and perpetual scruff, Srully easily fits in on its quaint streets lined with inventive restaurants, stylish bars and eclectic shops. But Srully’s Williamsburg, located just a few blocks away, is quite different from this burgeoning capital of hipsterdom. You see, Srully’s Williamsburg is an enclave of Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jews, a community more fitting of 19th century rural Eastern Europe than 21st century New York City. It is here, in this bubbled-off Brooklyn, that Srully’s story begins.
When Srully thinks back to his childhood, he remembers his early days in elementary school, which, as he remembers it, was “structured very similarly to standard public schools.” In truth, I’m not entirely sure what exactly Srully means by this, because as he begins to describe his schooling to me it becomes quite clear that Srully’s school is worlds away from any “standard public school” I’ve ever heard of.
Although his school was technically required by law to teach all of the secular subjects taught in public elementary schools, the faculty hardly tried to fulfill this mandate. In the classroom, the teachers and students speak Yiddish and learn only Judaic subjects but for a single short class in math or English. Srully remembers that by the time he finished the eighth grade, “All I knew in English were the ABCs, to spell my name, and my address. I never learned how to spell. The highest math I was taught is long division.”
Srully seems upset when reflecting upon his education. He is frustrated that all of his years of schooling did not adequately prepare him to be self-sufficient in general society. So, along with a few other former-Hasids with similar experiences to his own, Srully is now participating in a lawsuit against the New York City Department of Education seeking to hold the city government accountable for the incompetent education of Hasidic children. Before I spoke with Srully, I thought it strange that this group is targeting the city government, which I imagine would rather see the Hasidic world educated, as opposed to the Hasidic institutions that deprived them of a secular education. I ask Srully about this decision, and he explains that it is the city’s responsibility to ensure that all of its children receive an education, and that surely they know what is going on in these Hasidic schools, but politicians, because of some political motive or another, choose to look the other way. Srully is confident that his lawsuit will succeed. “We just have to take an inspector and send him to these schools. I can guarantee that the kids will fail any test he gives them. He can ask them to read for him, to name the 50 states, to name the President of the United States. They will not be able to do so.” It appears that Srully’s experience at Columbia, where, for the first time in his life he is formally receiving a secular education, inspired him to improve the educational system that deprived him of this experience for so many years.
After eighth grade, Srully went to a yeshiva high school in the Catskill Mountains near the town of South Fallsburg. While Hasidim flock to the region to escape the New York City heat in the summer months, the winter provides for a more secluded experience. And that’s just what Srully got: he describes his time in the Catskills as lonely. But Srully’s unshakable loneliness, he now knows, stemmed from something much deeper than mere physical isolation; Srully began to feel an intellectual and spiritual estrangement from his Hasidic community and worldview. From an early age, Srully was ambivalent about his own religiosity, unsure of his beliefs. “I guess I was bipolar to some extent. I would go days without putting on tefillin (phylacteries), followed by days of being really intense about religion. But it wasn’t like I was faking when I was doing it. I literally had days where I felt it and I was into it, and days when I would question everything and think that it’s all bullshit.” Around the age of 16, Srully began to think through more fundamental challenges to his Hasidism. He couldn’t shirk the feeling that something was just off. And so he began to search for answers. This search began with the medieval commentators on the Bible, an acceptable if not altogether common area of study in the Orthodox world, before he ultimately moved on to modern biblical scholarship.
Ironically, Srully’s exodus from the Hasidic community began with the study of Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra, a medieval biblical commentator who is (generally) accepted in Orthodox circles, and whose commentary is often included in Orthodox publications of the Torah. “We didn’t study Ibn Ezra so much in yeshiva—we had a problem with him. He thinks that there are four parts of the Torah that were not written by Moses.” This is indicative of the obsessive insularity of many Hasidic communities—even biblical commentaries that are generally regarded as “kosher” are censored. Srully explains the rationale behind this: “The whole community exists only by sheltering themselves in a box that they cannot let anything fracture. If anything hits it, everything collapses. We were always told that God wrote the Torah and that everything was transcribed by Moshe. Period. The moment anyone questions this, they’re labeled a heretic, an apikoros.”
In the end, though, Bible study provided few answers and, in fact, posed only more questions, and so Srully moved on to study Kabbalah, an esoteric, mystical school of Jewish thought, which he hoped might contain the answers he was looking for. “To a certain extent, this saved me for a while. Kabbalah has answers for everything, from biblical criticism to evolution.” In a way, Kabbalah answered his questions by cleverly circumventing them. Srully’s favorite example of this is the Kabbalistic reading of the two creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, which, in more secular circles, are often taken as evidence that the Bible is the work of multiple, human authors. Instead of trying to reconcile the two different narratives into one cohesive creation story (as many Orthodox biblical commentators try to do), Kabbalah holds that there is more than one creation story because there has been more than one act of creation: God created and destroyed many worlds before ours. I can understand why Srully found this approach to be attractive: it effectively dispels the question of multiple authorship by coming up with a creative reason for the inconsistencies in the text. However, I can also predict the possible problems with this approach, ones Srully undoubtedly grappled with later in his intellectual journey.
Traditionally, the study of Kabbalah is reserved for very advanced Torah scholars. The Shulkhan Arukh (a 16th century codex of Jewish law, and often seen as the ultimate decisor of Halakha in Orthodox circles) states that one should not begin studying Kabbalah until the age of 40, by which time he will have a developed a deep sense of maturity and perspective. Srully, on the other hand, was totally immersed in the study of Kabbalah by the age of 18. “It was crazy. I was looking at tables and seeing god, at blades of grass and seeing how they talk.” Although 18 is not generally old enough for Kabbalah study, it is the perfect age for marriage. This wasn’t exactly a huge, thought-out decision for Srully: he always figured that he would get married at 18 and that his family would take care of everything for him. All he had to do was meet his future wife for 20 minutes before the engagement and show up to the ceremony. Srully’s wedding ceremony went as planned and, less than a year later, his wife gave birth to their first child—a son. At the age of 19, Srully had adopted a status that most people do not attain even when they are twice his age: he was a father, a husband, and a Kabbalist.
But soon Srully’s affinity towards Kabbalah began to wear off and his questioning resumed. “In order for Kabbalah to work, one has to believe in the principles. But when I started questioning them, there was nowhere to go. I questioned where the Zohar [the central text of Kabbalah] is coming from, and there was nowhere to go.” And with the foundation crumbling, it wasn’t much longer until it all came crashing down. Within a few days of the first cracks appearing, Srully’s faith had crumpled. “To me it all collapsed in a few days. The moment I started digging, I found nothing. I was done. I declared myself an atheist and dropped Judaism completely for almost two years.
Srully was alone in his universe, but he couldn’t leave, not with a wife and young son to take care of; that wouldn’t be fair. So he faked it, everything. He stayed put in Williamsburg, appearing, to most everyone else including his wife, to be your run-of-the-mill Hasid, praying and learning day-in and day-out. His rebellion extended only as far as his mind. And this was his plan—Hasid on the outside, atheist on the inside. Until his wife’s family started to realize what was going on and demanded a divorce. At first, his wife’s family tried to pressure him to accept a quick agreement and to give up custody of his son. His in-laws feared that Srully’s secular lifestyle would corrupt their grandson; in short, they did not want Srully to fracture the bubble in which they wanted their grandson to grow up. But Srully would not give in, and, although it took almost two years, he ultimately took control of the situation, hired a lawyer, and worked out a split custody agreement. In the meantime, with his communal anchor lifted, Srully set off to travel, to leave Williamsburg and see what else the world had to offer. Srully’s search was moving faster than ever, and he began to realize what it was he was searching for: “My goal was education—college. But at that point I just explored and had a lot of fun. I took road trips in the Western U.S. and also studied a lot.”
Srully, who grew up only speaking Yiddish, took English classes online and decided to read books only in English for a whole year, despite the fact that this proved quite challenging. Indeed, for a long time Srully could hardly get through a sentence without a dictionary by his side. Now, Srully is an avid reader in English and has almost perfect comprehension. But his speech, Srully is the first to admit, is still not perfect, a symptom of learning mostly from reading and not from practicing speaking. Throughout our conversations, it is clear that Srully has a very advanced vocabulary but is self-conscious about his ability to utilize it in conversation.
After spending a few months attending Community Impact’s College Road at Columbia, Srully earned his GED and applied to colleges. In spending so much time on campus, he learned about the School of General Studies, Columbia’s liberal arts college for returning and nontraditional students. Srully’s story certainly qualifies as untraditional, and he decided that the program would be a perfect fit. He studied for the GS placement test for two months and, at the age of 22, Srully matriculated into the Class of 2018.
Srully anticipated many, but not all, of the challenges that college would present. “I think my expectations before starting college were realistic because I met a lot of students last year. My transition was a little harder than I anticipated, but I had a good experience.” To help with this transition, Srully made a point to meet with every single one of his professors during the first few weeks of school to tell them his story, the same story he told me. He explained to them that he barely received a secular education and that he is very self-conscious about his English because he only started learning the language a couple of years ago. These meetings ended up being crucial to Srully’s experience during his first semester on campus; his professors were extraordinarily supportive, guiding him through every step of his transition.
Of all of his classes, Srully especially enjoyed his introductory philosophy class, Methods and Problems in Philosophical Thought with Professor David Albert. His previous personal philosophy readings prepared him well, and he felt like he was one of the most well-read students in the class, an unexpected feeling, given where he came from. When I asked him why he was particularly drawn to philosophy, Srully concedes, “I don’t like to admit it, but I got a lot of the philosophical way of thought from studying Talmud. In philosophy lecture, the professor calls on people and literally tears apart their arguments. They have to be able to defend their logic to a crazy extent. It is the same thing in Talmud class. The difference is that when arguing about Talmud, there is an underlying assumption that the Mishna is accurate.” The Mishna is a written body of Jewish Oral Law that was redacted prior to the Talmud, and its rulings therefore take precedence over those written later. “The arguments are proposed in order to justify why it is true. In philosophy, you don’t have to defend logic of the philosopher you are studying. You can disagree and even prove him wrong!” Because of this approach, Srully had a lot of trouble with his first philosophy paper. “I should have attacked Hume’s approach!” he said, “but I was hesitant because of my background in Talmud.”
Although Srully’s academic transition to college was mostly smooth, his social adjustment continues to present unique challenges of their own. While his loneliness in high school was mostly due to intellectual differences between him and his peers, now his loneliness stems from the fact that it is very hard for him to find friends at Columbia who can relate to his past. Out of all his peers, Srully feels especially disconnected from first-year students at CC and SEAS. Not only is his background so dramatically different from most of theirs, but he also feels like the fact that he has a child makes him even more alien to them. “They look at me and just place me as being in a different stage than them. I wanted to have a normal college experience—to be like everyone else. But I’m not like everyone else.” No matter how hard Srully might want to live a new a totally new life, there is no escaping his past, his ex-wife, and his son.
By contrast, Srully says that he feels most comfortable in GS. “Social life at GS is amazing. Everyone is so approachable. It is the first time since the early days of my yeshiva education that I don’t feel like an outcast.” “At GS,” says Srully, “you are unique if you are not unique. No one is the same but that makes us the same.” In Srully’s small Contemporary Civilizations class alone, to take an illustrative example, there is former Mormon missionary, a small business owner, and a manager of a bank. And, what’s more, he is not the only father in the group. He feels as though he can relate to these peers in ways he will never be able to relate to 18-year-old college first-year students. This is exactly what GS was made for: students who wish to receive a Columbia education but do not fit in with the regular 18-year-old first-years—and in this way, Srully is a posterboy.
Romantically, Srully is even less settled. “In my life, I never asked anybody out. I dated three people in my entire life: my wife (if that can even counts as dating) and two others. But I didn’t actually ask them. Those relationships evolved.” Srully theorizes that this is partially because of his own psychological complex, but also because he is looking for a partner who fulfills very specific criteria. He will only date a Jew—mostly because he maintains a strong Jewish identity, but also because his parents will never speak to him again if he doesn’t—and only one to whom he can intellectually relate. But an Orthodox Jew, Srully is quick to point out, wouldn’t work for him since he left that world; and, on the opposite side, neither would a completely secular Jew, who comes from a world with which he can’t identify. Essentially, he wants to be with someone who can both understand where he is coming from and also accept where he is now: someone who, like him, is not observant, but will come with him to services on Friday night. “Now that I think of it,” Srully says, “I can actually now think of a whole list of women who can fit these criteria—I just haven’t even tried to ask them out.”
I asked Srully how he feels about the campus hook-up culture, which is undoubtedly very different from the Hasidic world he left behind. Srully responds, “Honestly, I was kind of shocked. Everyone discusses hook-ups, not dating. It is like people hate dating and only hook- up. It’s like a movie!” He qualifies his earlier remarks: “It’s not that I have anything against this culture. There is nothing purely wrong with it. But because of my upbringing it disgusts me. It is just too intimate, too fast. I don’t think that sex necessarily has to be intimate—it can be like food! But it doesn’t work for me. Maybe it is because I’ve been married, and once you get married, the glory of sex diminishes. It is no longer the center of your life! It’s different.” It is interesting to watch Srully try so hard to justify very progressive cultural values even though he is personally uncomfortable with them. I do not think he does this because he wants to fit in—he has already abandoned that goal. Rather, it seems that after living in such an insular community for so long, he wants to be open to anything and everything.
And yet, despite his bitter past and his hectic present, Srully stills defends Jewish philosophy and ideals. Srully strongly believes that Judaism is more about lifestyle than it is about God. “I believe that the main Jewish value is to push the world to be one step ahead in everything; whether it is social justice or morality.” He also attracted to cyclical nature of the Jewish calendar. “I don’t do homework on Shabbat. It is my day of rest—it helps me psychologically. I also try to go to services every week.”
What sort of services, though, fit a Former-Hasid-Atheist-Ivy-League Student? This question, as it turns out, has an answer: for Srully, it is the Friday night services at Romemu, a progressive, fully egalitarian prayer community that meets on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings in the basement of a church—of all places!—on the Upper West Side. Romemu is affiliated with the Jewish Renewal movement, a recent movement in Judaism, which endeavors to reinvigorate Judaism with Kabbalistic, Hasidic, and musical practices. Specifically, it seeks to reintroduce the “ancient Judaic traditions of mysticism and meditation, gender equality and ecstatic prayer” to Judaism. It is not a return to Orthodox Judaism but to Jewish spirituality, and it is perfect for Srully, who does not subscribe to Orthodox doctrine but yearns for the spirituality of his Hasidic roots. Although the eclectic community of Romemu is incredibly different from the Vizhnitz community from which Srully hails, the Hasidic undertones of Romemu resonate with Srully and help him feel at home. Srully does not feel lonely at Romemu, and as someone who has felt alone for as long as he can remember, this is a very wonderful feeling.
Srully may have only crossed the city, but his new life is so dramatically different from the one he left behind that it feels like he has travelled much farther. His journey may have been more intellectual than physical, but it has taken him to places and introduced him to methods of thought he did not even know existed. It took a little bit of wandering and a whole lot of loneliness, but, on 116th and Broadway, Srully has finally found a home.
When Srully thinks back to his childhood, he remembers his early days in elementary school, which, as he remembers it, was “structured very similarly to standard public schools.” In truth, I’m not entirely sure what exactly Srully means by this, because as he begins to describe his schooling to me it becomes quite clear that Srully’s school is worlds away from any “standard public school” I’ve ever heard of.
Although his school was technically required by law to teach all of the secular subjects taught in public elementary schools, the faculty hardly tried to fulfill this mandate. In the classroom, the teachers and students speak Yiddish and learn only Judaic subjects but for a single short class in math or English. Srully remembers that by the time he finished the eighth grade, “All I knew in English were the ABCs, to spell my name, and my address. I never learned how to spell. The highest math I was taught is long division.”
Srully seems upset when reflecting upon his education. He is frustrated that all of his years of schooling did not adequately prepare him to be self-sufficient in general society. So, along with a few other former-Hasids with similar experiences to his own, Srully is now participating in a lawsuit against the New York City Department of Education seeking to hold the city government accountable for the incompetent education of Hasidic children. Before I spoke with Srully, I thought it strange that this group is targeting the city government, which I imagine would rather see the Hasidic world educated, as opposed to the Hasidic institutions that deprived them of a secular education. I ask Srully about this decision, and he explains that it is the city’s responsibility to ensure that all of its children receive an education, and that surely they know what is going on in these Hasidic schools, but politicians, because of some political motive or another, choose to look the other way. Srully is confident that his lawsuit will succeed. “We just have to take an inspector and send him to these schools. I can guarantee that the kids will fail any test he gives them. He can ask them to read for him, to name the 50 states, to name the President of the United States. They will not be able to do so.” It appears that Srully’s experience at Columbia, where, for the first time in his life he is formally receiving a secular education, inspired him to improve the educational system that deprived him of this experience for so many years.
After eighth grade, Srully went to a yeshiva high school in the Catskill Mountains near the town of South Fallsburg. While Hasidim flock to the region to escape the New York City heat in the summer months, the winter provides for a more secluded experience. And that’s just what Srully got: he describes his time in the Catskills as lonely. But Srully’s unshakable loneliness, he now knows, stemmed from something much deeper than mere physical isolation; Srully began to feel an intellectual and spiritual estrangement from his Hasidic community and worldview. From an early age, Srully was ambivalent about his own religiosity, unsure of his beliefs. “I guess I was bipolar to some extent. I would go days without putting on tefillin (phylacteries), followed by days of being really intense about religion. But it wasn’t like I was faking when I was doing it. I literally had days where I felt it and I was into it, and days when I would question everything and think that it’s all bullshit.” Around the age of 16, Srully began to think through more fundamental challenges to his Hasidism. He couldn’t shirk the feeling that something was just off. And so he began to search for answers. This search began with the medieval commentators on the Bible, an acceptable if not altogether common area of study in the Orthodox world, before he ultimately moved on to modern biblical scholarship.
Ironically, Srully’s exodus from the Hasidic community began with the study of Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra, a medieval biblical commentator who is (generally) accepted in Orthodox circles, and whose commentary is often included in Orthodox publications of the Torah. “We didn’t study Ibn Ezra so much in yeshiva—we had a problem with him. He thinks that there are four parts of the Torah that were not written by Moses.” This is indicative of the obsessive insularity of many Hasidic communities—even biblical commentaries that are generally regarded as “kosher” are censored. Srully explains the rationale behind this: “The whole community exists only by sheltering themselves in a box that they cannot let anything fracture. If anything hits it, everything collapses. We were always told that God wrote the Torah and that everything was transcribed by Moshe. Period. The moment anyone questions this, they’re labeled a heretic, an apikoros.”
In the end, though, Bible study provided few answers and, in fact, posed only more questions, and so Srully moved on to study Kabbalah, an esoteric, mystical school of Jewish thought, which he hoped might contain the answers he was looking for. “To a certain extent, this saved me for a while. Kabbalah has answers for everything, from biblical criticism to evolution.” In a way, Kabbalah answered his questions by cleverly circumventing them. Srully’s favorite example of this is the Kabbalistic reading of the two creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, which, in more secular circles, are often taken as evidence that the Bible is the work of multiple, human authors. Instead of trying to reconcile the two different narratives into one cohesive creation story (as many Orthodox biblical commentators try to do), Kabbalah holds that there is more than one creation story because there has been more than one act of creation: God created and destroyed many worlds before ours. I can understand why Srully found this approach to be attractive: it effectively dispels the question of multiple authorship by coming up with a creative reason for the inconsistencies in the text. However, I can also predict the possible problems with this approach, ones Srully undoubtedly grappled with later in his intellectual journey.
Traditionally, the study of Kabbalah is reserved for very advanced Torah scholars. The Shulkhan Arukh (a 16th century codex of Jewish law, and often seen as the ultimate decisor of Halakha in Orthodox circles) states that one should not begin studying Kabbalah until the age of 40, by which time he will have a developed a deep sense of maturity and perspective. Srully, on the other hand, was totally immersed in the study of Kabbalah by the age of 18. “It was crazy. I was looking at tables and seeing god, at blades of grass and seeing how they talk.” Although 18 is not generally old enough for Kabbalah study, it is the perfect age for marriage. This wasn’t exactly a huge, thought-out decision for Srully: he always figured that he would get married at 18 and that his family would take care of everything for him. All he had to do was meet his future wife for 20 minutes before the engagement and show up to the ceremony. Srully’s wedding ceremony went as planned and, less than a year later, his wife gave birth to their first child—a son. At the age of 19, Srully had adopted a status that most people do not attain even when they are twice his age: he was a father, a husband, and a Kabbalist.
But soon Srully’s affinity towards Kabbalah began to wear off and his questioning resumed. “In order for Kabbalah to work, one has to believe in the principles. But when I started questioning them, there was nowhere to go. I questioned where the Zohar [the central text of Kabbalah] is coming from, and there was nowhere to go.” And with the foundation crumbling, it wasn’t much longer until it all came crashing down. Within a few days of the first cracks appearing, Srully’s faith had crumpled. “To me it all collapsed in a few days. The moment I started digging, I found nothing. I was done. I declared myself an atheist and dropped Judaism completely for almost two years.
Srully was alone in his universe, but he couldn’t leave, not with a wife and young son to take care of; that wouldn’t be fair. So he faked it, everything. He stayed put in Williamsburg, appearing, to most everyone else including his wife, to be your run-of-the-mill Hasid, praying and learning day-in and day-out. His rebellion extended only as far as his mind. And this was his plan—Hasid on the outside, atheist on the inside. Until his wife’s family started to realize what was going on and demanded a divorce. At first, his wife’s family tried to pressure him to accept a quick agreement and to give up custody of his son. His in-laws feared that Srully’s secular lifestyle would corrupt their grandson; in short, they did not want Srully to fracture the bubble in which they wanted their grandson to grow up. But Srully would not give in, and, although it took almost two years, he ultimately took control of the situation, hired a lawyer, and worked out a split custody agreement. In the meantime, with his communal anchor lifted, Srully set off to travel, to leave Williamsburg and see what else the world had to offer. Srully’s search was moving faster than ever, and he began to realize what it was he was searching for: “My goal was education—college. But at that point I just explored and had a lot of fun. I took road trips in the Western U.S. and also studied a lot.”
Srully, who grew up only speaking Yiddish, took English classes online and decided to read books only in English for a whole year, despite the fact that this proved quite challenging. Indeed, for a long time Srully could hardly get through a sentence without a dictionary by his side. Now, Srully is an avid reader in English and has almost perfect comprehension. But his speech, Srully is the first to admit, is still not perfect, a symptom of learning mostly from reading and not from practicing speaking. Throughout our conversations, it is clear that Srully has a very advanced vocabulary but is self-conscious about his ability to utilize it in conversation.
After spending a few months attending Community Impact’s College Road at Columbia, Srully earned his GED and applied to colleges. In spending so much time on campus, he learned about the School of General Studies, Columbia’s liberal arts college for returning and nontraditional students. Srully’s story certainly qualifies as untraditional, and he decided that the program would be a perfect fit. He studied for the GS placement test for two months and, at the age of 22, Srully matriculated into the Class of 2018.
Srully anticipated many, but not all, of the challenges that college would present. “I think my expectations before starting college were realistic because I met a lot of students last year. My transition was a little harder than I anticipated, but I had a good experience.” To help with this transition, Srully made a point to meet with every single one of his professors during the first few weeks of school to tell them his story, the same story he told me. He explained to them that he barely received a secular education and that he is very self-conscious about his English because he only started learning the language a couple of years ago. These meetings ended up being crucial to Srully’s experience during his first semester on campus; his professors were extraordinarily supportive, guiding him through every step of his transition.
Of all of his classes, Srully especially enjoyed his introductory philosophy class, Methods and Problems in Philosophical Thought with Professor David Albert. His previous personal philosophy readings prepared him well, and he felt like he was one of the most well-read students in the class, an unexpected feeling, given where he came from. When I asked him why he was particularly drawn to philosophy, Srully concedes, “I don’t like to admit it, but I got a lot of the philosophical way of thought from studying Talmud. In philosophy lecture, the professor calls on people and literally tears apart their arguments. They have to be able to defend their logic to a crazy extent. It is the same thing in Talmud class. The difference is that when arguing about Talmud, there is an underlying assumption that the Mishna is accurate.” The Mishna is a written body of Jewish Oral Law that was redacted prior to the Talmud, and its rulings therefore take precedence over those written later. “The arguments are proposed in order to justify why it is true. In philosophy, you don’t have to defend logic of the philosopher you are studying. You can disagree and even prove him wrong!” Because of this approach, Srully had a lot of trouble with his first philosophy paper. “I should have attacked Hume’s approach!” he said, “but I was hesitant because of my background in Talmud.”
Although Srully’s academic transition to college was mostly smooth, his social adjustment continues to present unique challenges of their own. While his loneliness in high school was mostly due to intellectual differences between him and his peers, now his loneliness stems from the fact that it is very hard for him to find friends at Columbia who can relate to his past. Out of all his peers, Srully feels especially disconnected from first-year students at CC and SEAS. Not only is his background so dramatically different from most of theirs, but he also feels like the fact that he has a child makes him even more alien to them. “They look at me and just place me as being in a different stage than them. I wanted to have a normal college experience—to be like everyone else. But I’m not like everyone else.” No matter how hard Srully might want to live a new a totally new life, there is no escaping his past, his ex-wife, and his son.
By contrast, Srully says that he feels most comfortable in GS. “Social life at GS is amazing. Everyone is so approachable. It is the first time since the early days of my yeshiva education that I don’t feel like an outcast.” “At GS,” says Srully, “you are unique if you are not unique. No one is the same but that makes us the same.” In Srully’s small Contemporary Civilizations class alone, to take an illustrative example, there is former Mormon missionary, a small business owner, and a manager of a bank. And, what’s more, he is not the only father in the group. He feels as though he can relate to these peers in ways he will never be able to relate to 18-year-old college first-year students. This is exactly what GS was made for: students who wish to receive a Columbia education but do not fit in with the regular 18-year-old first-years—and in this way, Srully is a posterboy.
Romantically, Srully is even less settled. “In my life, I never asked anybody out. I dated three people in my entire life: my wife (if that can even counts as dating) and two others. But I didn’t actually ask them. Those relationships evolved.” Srully theorizes that this is partially because of his own psychological complex, but also because he is looking for a partner who fulfills very specific criteria. He will only date a Jew—mostly because he maintains a strong Jewish identity, but also because his parents will never speak to him again if he doesn’t—and only one to whom he can intellectually relate. But an Orthodox Jew, Srully is quick to point out, wouldn’t work for him since he left that world; and, on the opposite side, neither would a completely secular Jew, who comes from a world with which he can’t identify. Essentially, he wants to be with someone who can both understand where he is coming from and also accept where he is now: someone who, like him, is not observant, but will come with him to services on Friday night. “Now that I think of it,” Srully says, “I can actually now think of a whole list of women who can fit these criteria—I just haven’t even tried to ask them out.”
I asked Srully how he feels about the campus hook-up culture, which is undoubtedly very different from the Hasidic world he left behind. Srully responds, “Honestly, I was kind of shocked. Everyone discusses hook-ups, not dating. It is like people hate dating and only hook- up. It’s like a movie!” He qualifies his earlier remarks: “It’s not that I have anything against this culture. There is nothing purely wrong with it. But because of my upbringing it disgusts me. It is just too intimate, too fast. I don’t think that sex necessarily has to be intimate—it can be like food! But it doesn’t work for me. Maybe it is because I’ve been married, and once you get married, the glory of sex diminishes. It is no longer the center of your life! It’s different.” It is interesting to watch Srully try so hard to justify very progressive cultural values even though he is personally uncomfortable with them. I do not think he does this because he wants to fit in—he has already abandoned that goal. Rather, it seems that after living in such an insular community for so long, he wants to be open to anything and everything.
And yet, despite his bitter past and his hectic present, Srully stills defends Jewish philosophy and ideals. Srully strongly believes that Judaism is more about lifestyle than it is about God. “I believe that the main Jewish value is to push the world to be one step ahead in everything; whether it is social justice or morality.” He also attracted to cyclical nature of the Jewish calendar. “I don’t do homework on Shabbat. It is my day of rest—it helps me psychologically. I also try to go to services every week.”
What sort of services, though, fit a Former-Hasid-Atheist-Ivy-League Student? This question, as it turns out, has an answer: for Srully, it is the Friday night services at Romemu, a progressive, fully egalitarian prayer community that meets on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings in the basement of a church—of all places!—on the Upper West Side. Romemu is affiliated with the Jewish Renewal movement, a recent movement in Judaism, which endeavors to reinvigorate Judaism with Kabbalistic, Hasidic, and musical practices. Specifically, it seeks to reintroduce the “ancient Judaic traditions of mysticism and meditation, gender equality and ecstatic prayer” to Judaism. It is not a return to Orthodox Judaism but to Jewish spirituality, and it is perfect for Srully, who does not subscribe to Orthodox doctrine but yearns for the spirituality of his Hasidic roots. Although the eclectic community of Romemu is incredibly different from the Vizhnitz community from which Srully hails, the Hasidic undertones of Romemu resonate with Srully and help him feel at home. Srully does not feel lonely at Romemu, and as someone who has felt alone for as long as he can remember, this is a very wonderful feeling.
Srully may have only crossed the city, but his new life is so dramatically different from the one he left behind that it feels like he has travelled much farther. His journey may have been more intellectual than physical, but it has taken him to places and introduced him to methods of thought he did not even know existed. It took a little bit of wandering and a whole lot of loneliness, but, on 116th and Broadway, Srully has finally found a home.
// LEEZA HIRT is a First-year in Columbia College. She can be reached at lh2717@columbia.edu. Photo courtesy of Avi Schwarzschild.