Darkha Shel Torah: A Singular Educational Manifesto

In 1902, a number of outstanding early 20^th century rashei yeshiva (e.g., Eliezer Gordon, Hayyim Berlin, Hayyim Ozer Grodzinsky, Yitzhak Blazer, Raphael Shapiro, Hayyim Soloveitchik, and Yosef Rozen) and hasidic admorim (e.g., Gur, Radomsk, Radzhin), signed on to an educational proclamation that emphasized the customary focus on Talmud and Halakhah while making allowance for such unconventional disciplines as Tanakh and Jewish history, and all the while reflecting a palpable fear of Enlightenment and Zionist heresies. The call was renewed on several subsequent occasions (first, in 1923) and the pamphlet underwent its 6^th printing in 1975, with numerous addenda (e.g., a passage from R. Eliyahu Dessler’s Mikhtav Me’Eliyahu), and scores of additional rabbis endorsing it.

Comparisons will be made with pedagogical and curricular practices of earlier eras and with current practice, in an attempt to distinguish between principles and practices that are nigh invariable and indispensable, and those that may be sacrificed on the altar of expediency. The emphasis will be on the pedagogical assumptions that it makes about the educational commonplaces.

• Children: what motivates or alienates them;
• Teachers: their capacities and proclivities;
• The milieu: social, political, ethnological;
• Subject matter: emphasis, indifference, and antipathy

The anti-Enlightenment and anti-Zionist coefficients in the manifesto take on additional significance due to the prominent role played in its original publication by Yaakov Liphschitz of Kovno, secretary to R. Isaac Elchanan Spector, who was also the prime motivator in early coordinated Hareidi attacks on Zionism.