How to Build an Education

On Nov. 7, 49 years ago, Rabbi Norman Lamm delivered his Investiture Address, marking the beginning of his term as the president of Yeshiva University. Though the speech, available on the newly launched Rabbi Norman Lamm Library website (lammlegacy.org), is nearly five decades old, it offers educational and ethical guideposts that couldn’t be more timely.

“It is undeniable that depression and gloom and foreboding seem to be the hallmarks of our particular time. We are the generation of Vietnam and Watergate …” Rabbi Lamm began. “At a time of such justifiable pessimism, there is much unhappiness too in the world of education.”

Society, he lamented, “seems to be spinning, and institutions seem to be tumbling, and the world seems to have become unstuck and university presidents are reeling.” 

But, he resolved, “I shall do the only human and honorable thing: I shall try, I shall persevere — and, with the help of God, we shall together prevail. We can, because we must.” 

Though his seminal book “Torah Umadda: The Encounter of Religious Learning and Worldly Knowledge in the Jewish Tradition” would not be published for another 14 years, the philosophically-trained scholar was already a passionate advocate of seeking academic excellence in both Jewish and general studies. “The theme of learning for its own sake remains a sacred goal — indeed, the preeminent value in all of the tradition,” he declared. “Whereas in the sources, this theme of torah lishmah [Torah study for its own sake] refers exclusively to the study of the sacred literature, it becomes our duty to expand this concept from Torah to hokhmah [secular knowledge], in the spirit of Saadia Gaon and Maimonides, so that the concept of learning for its own sake embraces not only sacred but worldly wisdom as well. For ultimately, as that profound sage and gentle mystic-poet, Rav Kook, taught, ‘the Holy of Holies comprehends both the holy and the profane.’” Universities, not only Jewish ones, should, he believed, “even while providing for career training, return to the original purpose of education, which is the transmission of culture and the advancement of knowledge for its own sake.”

Long before encampments of Jew-haters would pockmark college campuses, and professors in America’s finest universities with their multi-billion-dollar endowments swapped out academic integrity for bias, Rabbi Lamm cautioned that “contrary to what Socrates taught, the knowledge of the good does not by itself lead to its implementation. Education alone is not the answer to the world’s ills.” 

Rather, “our crucial problem today is not the absence of education but, on the contrary, its growth without spiritual directions and ethical dimensions. The disparity between, on the one hand, man’s technological progress, made possible by his accelerated accumulation of knowledge and, on the other hand, his moral stagnation, goes back to the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, those primitive builders who knew everything about bricks and mortars but nothing about heart and sensitivity and people.”

Half a century before technological advancements like ChatGPT sucked the soul out of critical thinking and creativity, the newly-minted YU president sensed a “disjunctiveness between technology and morality, between know-how and know what, between education and ethical deterrence, is reflected in an agonizing existential paradox of contemporary man: a tremendous feeling of self-sufficiency and power, accompanied by a growing awareness of his own triviality, his marginality, his insignificance … The more he takes things in his own hands, the more he comes to believe that he possesses nothing but ‘things’ and he is nothing but hands. Man becomes his own tools — heartless, soulless, pitiless and, ultimately, even mindless.”

True education, Rabbi Lamm therefore concluded, “is more than learning, it is human experience and neighborly love and elemental compassion as well. True intellect leads to more than concepts, it leads to reverence. The mind in its furthest reaches must transcend the cognitive and lead to a humble sense of wonder.”

In an observation that rings as if it is in response to today’s headlines, he continued to draw from the book of Genesis in diagnosing society’s ills. “Our generation has repeated the mistake of Adam and Eve,” he warned. “We have learned nothing from our primordial forbears. We have blithely ignored the Tree of Life, and passionately bitten into the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. But the fruit is poisoned with the taste of death. Within the contours of the Tree of Knowledge — science and technology and even philosophy and art and literature — there has taken shape the dreaded Tree of Death, with its variety of deadly fruit: nuclear disaster, ecological cataclysm, genetic manipulation for sinister purposes, art and literature at the service of pornography and propaganda.”

What is needed, then, is an educational direction that “must always strive for more than an arrogantly unresponsive quest for information or facts or knowledge alone. It must be concerned with the quality and dignity of human life.” This spiritually-minded scholarly endeavor should be “not corrupted by base motivation and cheap commercialization.” Rather, it should be covenantal and communally focused, “striving for excellence and compassion even in the face of political cynicism.”

Like so many of the late Rabbi Lamm’s sermons and writings, his Investiture Address offered lessons that we would be wise to learn once more. If American education is to persevere in the current moment, it will be because it rededicates itself to the human and honorable path of true learning – balancing neighborly love with reverence for the divine.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include the newly released “Jewish Roots of American Liberty,” “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”