The House of Isaac

            Around this time last year, I was tapped to serve as an editor for Beis Yitzchak, YU's only consistently published Torah journal.  Though each year's editor brings with him a slightly different vision, for over forty years the journal has provided a creative outlet for our many Torah scholars – both budding and full-fledged – to publish the profound fruits of their studies.  The articles sent to me usually fit into one of several models – two prominent examples being the “hakira followed by fitting in machloksim” and the “question on X (Mishnah, Gemara, Rishon, etc.) from Y, but we see from Z that X really understood Y differently than we do” models – but I was nonetheless impressed by the many time-impoverished undergraduates, alumni, and faculty who submitted full-length, well-researched pieces of Torah scholarship despite the absence of any obligation or this-worldly reward.

            Reading through these articles was an enriching experience, and it exposed me to some ideas and sugyot that I may never have encountered on my own; the few times that I had previously perused an edition of Beis Yitzchak, I had skipped over the articles by my peers and headed straight for the Rosh Yeshiva section.  An immense amount of work goes into writing, collecting, editing, and publishing this journal, most of which will never be given the full attention that it deserves.  This past year, 1000 copies were printed, and of these around forty were sold, with twice that number being handed out as gifts.  Even the recent efforts of YUTorah to put the journal online have only added a couple hundred people to the distribution of our publication.  What can be done to build up the Beis Yitzchak?

            As I was editing the first drafts sent to me, I was struck by the sheer number of grammatical, stylistic, and syntactical errors that I came across in the Hebrew; “Anglicisms,” gender and number disagreement, mistranslations, and tense issues abounded.  While the official style guidelines note that articles may be written in any “dialect or stratum of Hebrew or Aramaic,” many of the submissions I received eluded classification in any dialect or stratum of...well, anything.  Put simply, most of us have no idea how to write in any language but English.  Additionally, but for a small group of foreigners and veterans, most of us can read faster and understand better in English.  It's practically criminal to forcibly obfuscate our talmud Torah by making us work in a distant-second language.

            Would changing the language to English, or even just including an English section, be a bediavad concession to increasingly weak basic skills, or – even worse – an admission of a widening rift between YU and “the frum world?”  I would argue that the change I've suggested would, ironically, both improve the level of Talmudic scholarship and make Beis Yitzchak more popularly consumable.  The American Jewish community is showered with mussar and parashah literature in their native tongue, but they have little to no exposure to high-level Talmudic scholarship.  An English Beis Yitzchak – assuming the writers properly avoided excessive use of yeshivishe jargon (another aspect of our writing that English translation would improve) could be sent to YU affiliated shuls around the continent, spreading our Torah beyond the forty yeshiva guys who bought copies.

            Some other ideas to keep the Beis Yitzchak relevant: despite published remarks to the contrary from some of our Roshei Yeshiva, ours is an institution which supports high-level Talmud study for women; Gemara classes are taught at Stern, Beren Campus students are invited north for shiurim and lectures, and – most notably – YU has a Graduate Program for Women in Advanced Talmudic Studies (GPATS).  This last group consists of a small cadre of capable women who devote a full-time schedule to the study of Shas and poskim (Talmud and codes), the perfect incubator for works of Torah scholarship.  Why not include them in Beis Yitzchak?  Those who would prefer not to learn Torah from a woman can skip or cut out those articles, but I see no reason to exclude GPATS women from sharing their insights with the rest of us.  And if one of them publishes something good, it might do something to dispel the rumors that women can't learn.  Women have broken into some other high-level Torah publications, such as Tehumin and Yeshivat Har Etzion's Virtual Beit Midrash, and they are equally included in our own YUTorah and Kol Hamevaser.  Why should we keep them out of Beis Yitzchak, especially when they have no parallel journal of their own?

            Finally, we can and should take advantage of the manifold twentieth and twenty-first century advances in information dissemination.  Our talmud Torah should be treated at least as seriously as our amateur journalism: like The Commentator, Beis Yitzchak should have its own website, on which comments and responses should be encouraged.  Though it would still be a far cry from my friend Ben Greenfield's utopian dreams of a universally-edited “WikiTorah” (see his article by that name in Kol Hamevaser 1:5), adding an online forum would be a great way to ensure that Beis Yitzchak isn't just another thick, hard-cover volume gathering dust on the shelves of the Beit Midrash. 

Opinions Editor Julian Horowitz served as an editor of last year's Beis Yitzchak