When you walk in, the first thing that hits you is the noise. Young
men speak loudly, pointing to books, waving their arms, even shouting at
each other. They seem close to violence. Because this noise is
happening in several languages, a first-time visitor has an even harder time
guessing what they are fighting about.
What you are seeing here is not a bar full of football-fans arguing
the merits of their respective teams, but rather the Amsterdam Kolel.
These men are analyzing passages in the Talmud together. The Kolel is an
institution whose members devote their lives to the minute study of
Jewish law, custom, and thought. The noisy chaos is in fact an expression
of spiritual devotion and intellectual creativity on the highest level.
After you get used to the noise, look around the room. The Kolel has
no pictures on its walls; books line it instead. These books are sets
of the Talmud, Bibles, Kabala literature of various kinds, philosophy
written centuries ago, and commentaries on it all. These books have a
remarkable appearance. Their lively bindings sparkle with gold-leaf
patterns of flowers and abstract shapes. These beautiful books give the
room color, just as the people who chant them provide its music. They
stand at the very heart and soul of the Jewish religion, and their
readers believe them to be written under divine inspiration - in the case of
the Tora, dictated directly by G-d. These books are the subject of the
lively arguments you hear when you enter.
The traditional Jewish system of studying differs from studying in a
university library in ways more basic than the obvious contrast between
noise and silence. The ten members of the Kolel fall into five pairs,
or "hevrusas". These pairs read the Talmud together, in a kind of
chant, and they puzzle out its meaning. The members of each hevrusa turn
to commentaries printed along the sides of each page, other commentaries
in the back of the enormous book, other volumes of the twenty-volume
Talmud, and some of the hundreds of commentaries written during the past
thousand years. Which they choose depends on the "learning-style" each
has developed over the years. There is an infinite number of ways to
analyze a page of Talmud. An advanced student of the Talmud invents his
own.
This process of exploration lies at the heart of the Kolel, and even
at the heart of Judaism itself. The hevrusa system of study has proved
itself over thousands of years; the Mishna, written 1800 years ago,
mentions pairs of scholars. Every Talmud page details arguments rabbis
had centuries ago. Rashi, whose commentary appears on every Talmud page,
explains a word; his grandsons, who wrote the Tosfos commentary on the
oposite side of the same page, respond, "Lo nira li": "It doesn't look
that way to me".
"One sharpens the other", the Mishna says of two students who learn
together. Today, Amsterdam Kolel minds continue in the same spirit. The
chain of argument continues over the generations. It is a living
tradition. It lives in the mouths of those who sing it and discuss it,
rather than read it silently and in isolation on the printed page. Modern
Talmudists cite contradictory commentaries, or they interpret the text
independently. One agrees with Rashi; his hevrusa takes sides with
Tosfos. They fight it out all day. This process puts so much attention
into detail and precision that a hevrusa is viewed as fast if it covers
a page in one day; it is not uncommon to spend a week working on one
page. The noise that greets you upon entering is this mental sharpening.
From opposition of these styles comes creativity. The process is the
goal. The Kolel does not prepare people for a profession; its aim is to
explore the divine word for its own sake.
The people who study in the Kolel are young married men, mostly
between the ages of twenty-five and forty. They come from England, Israel,
the United States, and France. All have previously studied in yeshivas.
A yeshiva is for unmarried men who generally live in it. In the Jewish
religion, everyone is supposed to marry and have children, in
accordance with the first commandment G-d gave to Adam and Eve: "Go forth and
multiply". Most Kolel students had already become advanced Talmudists by
their early 'twenties, when they married. A Kolel is more advanced
than a yeshiva, because its students have been studying for more years,
and its students are emotionally more mature, because they have had the
life-enriching experience of raising a family.
These students study for about eight hours each day, and in the
evenings they typically put in a few more hours after dinner at home. Ten
hours of study-time seems about average. Those Kolel-members who studied
in a university before they became religious sometimes mention how lazy
they were in those days.
The subject matter on which the Kolel works so hard is mostly the
Talmud and associated texts. Members commonly set themselves extra time
here and there to work on a particular Bible commentary or philosophy
book of their own choosing. Conspicuously absent is modern scholarship on
comparative religion or Bible criticism of the kind developed in
universities. That approach is utterly alien
to the orthodox Jewish manner of analyzing religious texts. The two
intellectual traditions differ so fundamentally as to be mutually
incomprehensible.
The room in which the Kolel studies is in the Lekstraat Synagogue.
Kolel and synagogue share their building with the Verzetmuseumn. The ten
students live in ten little flats in the neighborhood around Lekstraat.
Almost all of them have children; the biggest family has six little
girls. The Kolel supports them on meager wages. This money consists of
donations given by the Amsterdam Jewish community. Because anyone smart
enough to study in such a place could have become a doctor or a lawyer
(one is an engineering graduate of a major American university), making
a commitment to spend his life arguing Talmudic minutiae is doing so at
great financial sacrifice.
The head of the Kolel is Rabbi Yankele Schatz. Rav Schatz, as he is
called, was born in New York. He trained in the Lakewood Yeshiva of New
Jersey for several years. Rav Schatz then moved to Israel, where he
studied in a kolel for a number of years. He taught in yeshivas, kolels,
schools for children of different ages, and adult education. A
particularly rewarding period in Rav Schatz's life was when he taught at Or
Samech Yeshiva in Jerusalem. That Yeshiva directs its attention to Jews
from non-religious backgrounds. Rav Schatz speaks with great
satisfaction of young peopld whom he first met as backpackers in jeans who have
today become heads of kolels. The rabbi now lives here in Amsterdam
with his French-born, Sorbonne-educated wife and those of his ten
children who are not studying in Israeli yeshivas. His eldest son married in
Jerusalem in December of last year.
The head of a kolel is a busy man. He must match up his students into
hevrusas in a way that they will be capable of working together
productively. He must be a good psychologist to do so, for the emotional and
intellectual relationship between those two men is a complex one. Rav
Schatz chose nine of the ten Kolel-members himself from among his wide
circle of contacts in the yeshiva world. He is at the kolel all day to
answer questions that arise and to discuss difficult passages with his
students. Most of his teaching is done in face-to-face conference with
one or both members of a hevrusa; he hardly ever lectures. The most
important part of his job is something I cannot define, but it involves
giving leadership, direction, and inspiration. Rav Schatz is a
charismatic personality, a born leader, a man who inspires people to love the
Tora and to teach it to others.
The Kolel interacts with the larger world through its outreach
program. Its members tutor any Jew who is interested between 6:30 and 7:30
every evening except Friday, and Sunday between ten and one. It is also
common to arrange other times for people whose schedules do not permit
them to come at those hours, or to suit those Kolel-members whose
regular tutoring hours are filled. I, for example, study Talmud Sunday
nights between 9:30 and midnight in the home of one of the rabbis, and
weekday mornings at 6:45. That is to say, that a man with children to take
care of is faithful enough to his values to get out of a warm bed an
hour earlier than he needs to and cycle through the dark streets of a
rainy Amsterdam morning in order to deliver a university-level
Talmud-lesson to one groggy student. Among Kolel-members there is no hint of the
attitude I so frequently find among their university counterparts of
doubt or cynicism about their careers.
The people who come for these lessons are ordinary "baale batim", or
"people with houses", as Kolel-members call civilians. Some of these
external students are quite advanced Talmudists themselves; others are
absolute beginners, who want to learn the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
There is every level in between. Many of them are not religious, but
are rather exploring the Jewish religion and themselves. Because the
members of the Kolel come from so many countries, instruction can be in
English, Hebrew, Yiddish, or French. The tutoring is entirely
individual. The "people with homes" sit down with their tutors and talk about
what they know and what they want to learn. Tutor and student work out
a program together. They can read the Bible, various books of law and
custom, religious philosophy, or they can ask questions about any
aspect of the Jewish religion. There is no charge. Everyone is welcome.
Those who are interested can call Rav Schatz at home and schedule a
meeting. His number is 679-4916.
Last Sunday, when everybody had gone home, Rav Schatz looked around
the recently noisy room at the tables cluttered with books and said,
"This is what I like to see. It's not just a mess; it shows that people
have been learning here. That is why we are here!"