Rabbi Yosef Blau, 86, had been talking to JNS for about an hour when he admitted, with a chuckle, that there’s “a bit of Don Quixote in me.”
“I tend to tilt at windmills,” he said, as he sat in his office in Manhattan on March 25, the day before he and his wife made aliyah. “I haven’t changed the world yet, but I hope I’ve made a little bit of an impact on the world here. So I’m going to try to make a little impact on the world in Israel, too.”
The longtime spiritual adviser—mashgiach ruchani—at Yeshiva University in Manhattan, who first came to the school as a high schooler in 1951, has seen sweeping changes at the Modern Orthodox institution over the decades.
As an undergraduate at Yeshiva, his lectures were in Yiddish. “At that point, no one would have run a school in English,” he told JNS. “You didn’t teach Torah in English.”
But by the time he returned to Yeshiva in 1977 to be spiritual adviser, things were very different. The position had been vacant for two years since the death of the previous office holder, Rabbi Moshe Lessin, who was European and who had trained in the prominent yeshiva in Slabodka, in what is now Lithuania, that was at the center of the mussar movement, which emphasizes Jewish ethics.
“He represented that world, and therefore, it was absurd for an American kid to think he should become mashgiach in the Yeshiva—with a different world, different mentality, different everything,” Blau told JNS.
He decided to redefine the position, because it was clear he couldn’t ease into the shoes of his late predecessor.
“A teacher, whether a rebbe or a professor in a secular class, has a defined job. They come in a certain number of hours. They teach so many hours,” Blau said. “What I did with my time and how I interacted with students was very vague.”
The rabbi opted to immerse himself in the rhythm of student life, rather than presenting as an authority on a hill, and he developed a reputation for roaming the study hall (beit midrash) and initiating conversations with students and building their trust. Not only could students ask him questions about their religious studies, but “I was someone they could talk to about whatever was on their mind,” including personal matters, he said.
Much of what students and faculty focus on is heady and intellectual. “But where’s the lev?” Blau asked, using the Hebrew word for “heart,” in contrast to the brain (moach).
“Where does the lev come in? It’s all moach, right?” he told JNS. “I sort of invented my version of the job, and I’ve been here for 48 years. So I guess, to some level, it worked.”
‘The pendulum swings’
Although making aliyah has long been Blau’s dream, he told JNS that he does so with “very mixed emotions.”
“I’ve been looking forward to moving to Israel, looking forward to having a little more space. You know, 86—it’s not old, but I suspect most people retire at a younger age,” he said. “But at the same time, I feel bad about all the students I’m leaving.”
The warmth and positivity he has received from students “makes me feel a little bit guilty that I’m deserting them,” he told JNS. “If they feel that I’m helpful to them, and I’m leaving them, that’s not such a good thing.”
He intends to return stateside four months a year. “We haven’t fully dropped being in America as well,” he said.
In his conversation with JNS, Blau reflected on seven decades of experience in Jewish education and the quiet, empathetic approach he has brought to mentoring generations of students at both Yeshiva’s undergraduate colleges for men and women.
When Blau studied at Yeshiva’s high school starting in 1951, it was located in Brooklyn, N.Y., not Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan, where it is now located. At the time, Orthodox Judaism in America “was somewhat struggling to maintain itself,” he told JNS.
“Most people were moving away from observance,” he said. “The yeshiva movement was not very big.”
After finishing college, receiving rabbinic ordination and earning a master’s degree in math, Blau taught and led schools in Brookline (Massachusetts), Chicago and Elizabeth (New Jersey) for 12 years. When he came to Yeshiva, he made his mark in several ways that impacted students directly.
He was one of the first to recognize the need for a stronger rabbinic presence at Stern College, the campus for women, in midtown Manhattan. He spent two days each week on that campus and became known for his routine “good morning” walk through the study hall there, which he figured would “establish instant rapport” with the students.
As the public became more aware of sexual abuse within Jewish educational settings, he also developed a reputation as a rabbinic and university authority that students and others could seek out and find a ready listener. He was also one of the most prominent advocates for victims in the Orthodox community.
Over the years, Blau saw major changes both within the university and Modern Orthodoxy, he told JNS.
One such change, he said, has been a decline in student activism and political engagement. When he was an undergraduate, many devoted significant time to volunteering or activist work. “We were very intellectually involved in the issues of the world,” he said. But today, he thinks, the issues that motivated that activism have faded.
“Schools no longer gave exams on Shabbat and Yom Tov. Many colleges had kosher kitchens. Being an Orthodox Jew wasn’t strange,” he said. “After a certain number of years, people get to know you. They get to know you’re there.”
It’s not that students are lazier today, according to Blau. “It’s so rooted in this country,” he said. “It’s already been four generations. It’s very rooted. It’s very conscious. It’s accepted a lot of American materialism.”
“If students, the minute school ends, go to have an internship with a company, with a law firm, their whole time is caught up in this very practical world of getting ahead and getting a job and being able to afford certain things,” he said. “The improvement of expectations is completely different.”
He wouldn’t venture a guess at what the next decade holds. “I hope I’m around to see,” he said. “The pendulum swings, and it swings back and forth. Every action produces a reaction.”
He has seen the level of religious study at Yeshiva decline over the years.
When he was a student, rabbis invariably called on students to read texts in the original Hebrew or Aramaic.
“People were petrified of the rebbe when he called on them to read,” he said. “But he didn’t just ask them to read. He asked them how they understood it.”
Today, rabbis tend to lecture and students take notes. “They study the notes,” Blau said. “That is a loss of intellectualism, which concerns me.”
‘Not going to fool anybody’
Blau told JNS that he hopes his aliyah affords him the chance to advocate for “a more ethical, values-based religious Zionism.”
The early religious Zionist parties, like Mizrachi and Poalei Mizrachi, represented a wide range of political views—left, right and center—because the central concern wasn’t economics or foreign policy but how Jewish the Jewish state would be, according to Blau.
That changed after the Six Day War, when religious Zionism became increasingly defined by territorial maximalism and a politics of Jewish power.
The notion of the “whole” Israel “became the dominant theme,” Blau said. “The ethical ramifications of any of this became less significant. It’s not where people were thinking.”
“If the Israeli army has a code of ethics, you’d expect the rabbinate would be its biggest proponent,” he said. “Today, it’s not true. Many of the Religious Zionist rabbanim say, ‘This code of ethics is too narrow. It’s not Jewish enough. It doesn’t talk about victory enough.’”
Blau sees himself as “part of an older world” and sees the shift as a loss. Ethics in Judaism means more than how others treat Jews, to him. It also means how Jews treat others. “That’s my notion of ethical issues,” he told JNS.
“I’m not going to fool anybody,” he said. “There are reasons people feel otherwise. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong. They might be right to disagree with me, but I’d like to broaden the horizons of the group.”