Too often, as a public, we are like train passengers. The train moves quickly, the landscapes change, the destinations change, and even the train passengers are not the same as those who were with us at the beginning. And we do not move from that last car, pressed as tightly as possible against the back wall, all in order to arrive as late as possible at the same place where the train will arrive in a few seconds, to postpone for a while the sight of the changing landscape, to delay as much as possible the encounter with change.
One of the main examples of the lack of coping and preparation for what is to come is the massive exodus to academia.
In recent years, our public has undergone significant change, and visions that a few years ago seemed like a hallucination have become a reality. Thousands of our sons and daughters are filling the institutions of higher education, and the numbers are increasing every year. It is enough to look at the data from the funds supporting academic studies for graduates of the Haredi education system to understand at least a little about the breadth and depth of the phenomenon.
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The turn of yeshiva and seminary graduates to academic studies has broad and profound implications that should not be underestimated or dismissed lightly. It is an unequivocal change in the landscape reflected in our public transportation system.
New subjects, new forms of learning and thinking, learning foreign languages, and exposure to alternative educational ideals outside the Torah world are the bread and butter of every student, whether studying in an ultra-Orthodox setting or not.
In addition, the encounter with secular lecturers, with different ideologies, some of them rural, and in mixed institutions even with a highly secular society, and sometimes even with a mixed society, all of these constitute a very significant challenge for the Haredi student, a challenge for which he was not trained, was not intended, and was not given any tools to deal with. The landscapes he was accustomed to seeing have changed, and he, she, they, do not know how to read the new landscape in the language they learned somewhere in the last car of the train.
We can, as passengers, stand up and shout, "It's impossible, it's unthinkable, it won't happen and it won't happen," threaten, curse, boycott, cry, and stamp our feet, but none of this will help. We are on the train of reality, and it's moving. The landscapes change whether we like it or not, and if we close our eyes, there in the last carriage, it won't change the course of the tracks.
The choice is ours, whether to anticipate the phenomenon by preparing appropriate tools, with proper support, with intensive and meaningful accompaniment, or to cry bitterly that once again the train is not listening to us, once again we arrive at a destination we did not set out for.
And this is just one example of that very widespread perception, which sometimes is separated by only semantics from the disastrous Israeli "nearby" method. We trust that the trend will stop, we trust that reality will not change, we trust that in the end a few shouts and a few screams will be stronger than all the forces of life. We trust that turning a blind eye as if it has the power to stop the difficulty of coping.
But in the end, the train moves on, the landscapes change, the destinations change, and the passengers who were there before have been replaced by others, and only a fool would prefer to stick to the last carriage, when he could stand at the wheel and influence the route and destination of the journey. And being a fool, our sages taught us, is the most serious no in the Torah.
