Is seminary in some ways the frum manifestation of the gap year?
This comes in response to “In Defense of Seminary” by Shmuel Winiarz. I have the privilege of knowing Mr. Winiarz very well. By way of full disclosure, he is the beloved and devoted husband of our daughter and father of our grandchildren. He is passionate about his Yiddishkeit and clearly articulate about his feelings for Eretz Yisrael. And as he knows from our years of discussion, in my humble opinion, he is wrong on this topic. I do agree with his choice of title, because the topic does beg for a defense.
While he is a self-described “amateur historian” (and he is very knowledgeable; I describe myself as more of a professional nudnik), his essay ignored the historical context of the seminary phenomenon. Specifically, its startling recency and rapid progression. The introduction of the now ubiquitous year in Eretz Yisrael was not a 1940s-era development like that of Rebbetzin Kaplan’s Bais Yaakov of Williamsburg, which spared people like my mother a”h from having to go to public high school. Nor is it akin to other dramatic improvements in frum life from those decades like, for example, the advances in organized kashrus.
The seminary year in Eretz Yisrael was a development that emerged quite suddenly between 1980 and 2000, before which it was a relatively uncommon route taken by a few idealistic young ladies willing to put their young adult lives on hold for a year. My older sisters — baby boomers themselves — report that virtually none of their classmates chose this. It then progressed with almost linear mathematical precision to being an option pursued by perhaps half of new high school graduates by 1990 (my wife’s era), and then nearly 100 percent by the early 2000s.
We had already produced two generations of Bais Yaakov high school graduates, pillars of our community who became the well-respected mothers and grandmothers of today’s students, and who would likely be amused by the suggestion that their chinuch and commitment to Yiddishkeit were in any way lacking because they were not afforded this opportunity. The seminary year in Eretz Yisrael was simply not a development that emerged from any sense of urgency from our Torah leadership.
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