Mark Weiss wrote:

> Right, Reconstructionist, not Liberal.
>
> I attended a yeshiva that considered itself orthodox. Classes were coed,
> however, and the political content was kibbutz socialist--the hope was
> that
> we would end up on kibbutzim carrying rifles.

We're about the same age.  I went to an afternoon school, not a day
school.  Nobody want to be identified as Jewish in my family.  Kenneth
is their version of Kalman, my paternal grandfather who died while my
other was carrying me.  The school never told us about the Shoa (maybe
not a bad omission when the kids are 8), just about going to Israel,
"making the desert bloom," and shooting camel-jockeys.  I knew the words
(in Hebrew) to Hatikvah right about the same time as the Star Spangled
Banner.  The Bible wasn't taught, but we were fed Bible stories which
were watered down to the point of no formative value whatsover.

> When I mention my yeshiva in
> most orthodox circles the reaction is usually a sneer--too liberal by
> far.
> There were synagogue services at the school--those weren't coed.

You might just as well have attended St. Francis Xavier High School, run
by Jesuits:-).

> The torah
> and the historical books of the bible were our primer during the hebrew
> part of the day.

The historical books were kept away from us because you'd have to
sidestep around nasty stuff like King Saul was a homicidal maniac and
King David couldn't keep his pants up.  How do you explain David,
Bathsheba, and Uriah to a class of impressionable 8 year olds?  "Jeez,
y'mean the King got this guy killed so he could cover up that he knocked
up the guy's wife?"  The oft-told tale of Samson and Dalila was kept
from us.  Obvious why.  The taking of Jericho was sanitized because
Rahab was a whore.  Who wants to present a hooker as God's instrument to
save the Hebrews?

God's banning of Moses from Canaan we learned--as in "see what's gonna
happen if you lose your temper???"  This may reduce the history of my
people to 2nd Avenue Yiddish theater in 1920, but sometimes that's what
it seems like now from 50+ years removed.

> In the english part of the day the curriculum was
> thoroughly secular. There was little discussion, in hebrew or english, of
> the literal truth of the Genesis account(s) of creation beyond a
> questioning of what "day" meant--was each day a million years? a billion
> years?

Oddly, none of this was given to us in the original text, but in reduced
versions in a little book purporting to be our history.  It was years
before I learned the alternative, that the world was not created in 7
literal days.

> There was a lot of discussion of difficult-to-swallow Biblical
> events--David's collection of foreskins, various decimations, etc. Nobody
> had any problem with the magical stuff--we were little kids. And I
> have no
> idea how the sciences were handled in the higher grades, tho the
> school did
> produce a fair number of  physicists.

The one that got me came years later, and I learned about it via Thomas
Mann's Joseph saga, which I then checked on with the Bible itself: the
rape of Tamar, the willingly-undertaken circumcisions of her lover and
his male family and retinue so he could marry her and do the right
thing, and the treacherous butchery of the whole male household while
they were recuperating.  In the meantime, as a kid I bought the parting
of the Red Sea at face value.  And the fall of Jericho's walls.  And a
whole bunch of stuff from the earlier books that today strike me as
"oughta be trues" but are most likely fables invented on the road out of
Egypt to invent history and peoplehood.

> There's a saying that where there are two jews there are three opinions.
> Jews love to argue. Except me.

I do that far too often though less than I used to.  Truth is I hate
it.  I'd have made a sucky lawyer.

ken

--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538