5 - The Student Body

Summary

The Decision to Study at Volozhin

A variety of reasons and considerations led young men to travel to Volozhin to study at the yeshiva. Not all were equally conscious of the factors that had influenced their decision, but even so one may try to classify the reasons cited in memoirs and to identify trends. The most common reason given is simply the desire to study Torah and to make progress as a scholar. This is obvious. The practical advantages of study in Volozhin were rarely mentioned. Although these descriptions were usually written many years after leaving home, it seems that these were accurate descriptions of what they felt at the time they actually made their decisions. In fact, very little was written about the decision to study, since in some circles it was self-evident that, at the appropriate age, a bright young man would leave home to study Torah. However, there were occasionally other reasons. As might be expected, ‘among the students were the sons of wealthy men, who only came to Volozhin to acquire a scholarly reputation’, while some students came in order to escape from an arranged marriage that had failed. Of course, even the students who came simply out of a desire for quality study were aware that distinction in Torah scholarship opened the way to a goodmatch and brought rewards. A young man who studied at Volozhin in the 1860s gives a very cynical description of this point:

Most of the young men who came to Volozhin to draw up the pure waters from the well of its yeshiva did not study there for the sake of Heaven, but hoped to gain the reputation of being scholars, so that theymight find a beautiful wife with a beautiful dowry and beautiful maintenance at a rich father-in-law's table. How true were the words of one of these clowns, who once remarked at a student gathering: ‘We, the sons of the Volozhin yeshiva, will be able to take pride in saying that we learn Torah for her own sake, in other words, for the sake of the bride we imagine in our hearts … it was also my family's aim, in sending me to the yeshivas of Mir and Volozhin, to acquire “the reputation of a scholarly young man” for me, so that many people would leap [at the chance of having me as a son-in-law]’.