Flipping presence

August 31, 2008 - 7:21 AM by Harry

Flipping Out As of today, the Jewish month of Elul has begun, which means that thousands of post-high school American yeshiva and seminary students are beginning to arrive in Jerusalem in droves. Just as the main international tourism season has wound down, and a few weeks before the autumn holidays bring a new batch of American family pilgrims, the influx of teenagers who have left their parents’ homes for the first time ever, here on a spiritual quest, can be felt everywhere. More English is spoken on buses and on streets, and the pubs are packed with young people getting sloshed in public for the first time.

The influx of yeshiva kids is a bona fide phenomenon when it comes to the Jerusalem leisure and urban atmospheric scenes, but it’s even more of an attention grabber when it comes to the sociological impact that such years of study have on the individual Jews involved as well as on the communities who spawn and send them.

Published by Yashar Books together with Yeshiva University, Modern Orthodoxy’s seminal institution, Flipping Out? Myth or Fact: The Impact of the ‘Year in Israel’ tackles these very issues. Named after a song by Blue Fringe that self-mockingly recounts the experience of becoming observant to the extreme in Jerusalem, the book meditates on the experience of yeshiva study as a rite of passage that changes the student’s outlook on religious life, and it also questions the impact of this phenomenon on American Orthodox Judaism, which is said to be moving steadily towards the Right.

In its review, The Observer, the YU student paper, asserts that “This book is a brave attempt to begin answering the plethora of questions that students, parents and observers raise about the seeming dramatic effects of the experience.”

But Miriam Shaviv over at The Forward disagrees, focusing on how the empirical backbone of the study betrays its moniker:

But you cannot properly discuss “flipping out” by looking at how many halachic stringencies students, on average, adopt. “Flipping out” is a minority sport that has as much to do with emotional and psychological factors as with halachic ones. Students who are affected may have trouble relating to their family; become obsessive and dogmatic about some aspects of religion, and shed central parts of their old personality. These are all harder to measure, but without addressing these issues substantially, the book cannot be said to be about “flipping out” at all.

So is the “year in Israel” experience essentially one of measurable spiritual acculturation or is it an ephemeral rite of passage? It doesn’t matter. They’re on their way regardless. Flipping aye.

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