Though the neighborhood surrounding it has deteriorated, and the outside world has exerted some influence on the school, the heart of Yeshiva Toras Chaim Talmudical Seminary/Denver hasn’t changed much in the 40 years that it has instructed young Jewish men in sacred and secular learning.
But the heart of this Orthodox seminary isn’t in the neighborhood off of West Colfax Avenue that surrounds the school, where 52 high school and college students live and breathe Jewish life.
It is through a pair of swinging doors in the dining room, until recently unremarkable, that open into the beis midrash, or “house of learning.”
In honor of the yeshiva’s 40th anniversary, a group of alumni pitched in to build an ornate lintel to surround the doors leading to the place where students and teachers spend most of their days interpreting and arguing about the meaning of the Torah, which is the first five books of the Bible, and commentaries written over millennia by the great rabbis.
This form of instruction, where students and sages study and debate the Torah together, has always been the model for teaching Jewish law. But the teachers at the yeshiva also consider secular study for ninth- through 12th- graders an essential element of Jewish education.
“There has always been a stronger emphasis than (at) your typical East Coast yeshiva about the secular program,” says Rabbi Aaron Kagan, the 10th-grade teacher and a son of one of the school’s two founders, Rabbi Israel Kagan.
Six college students and 47 high-schoolers from the U.S., Canada and Mexico are enrolled at the boarding school. They all live in an apartment building at Colfax and Perry Street that has been converted to dorm rooms. It’s across the street from a McDonald’s restaurant, where the students will never eat because they keep kosher and take all of their meals in the campus dining hall.
A few blocks away, at the former Hebrew Alliance campus, students spend mornings and most of the afternoon studying and discussing the sacred texts, but reserve the late afternoon for education in more quotidian subjects, like English, science and math.
Studying the arcane meanings of ancient writings isn’t a prosaic exercise. The rabbis believe that understanding Torah leads to being a better person in the world.
“The goal is to produce a young man who would be very knowledgeable, very able to pursue his career of Jewish life according to the Torah laws,” says Rabbi Isaac Wasserman, who founded the school with Israel Kagan in 1967.
Torah study in the beis midrash is a noisy, chaotic affair.
The room, small, lined with bookshelves, short lecterns and wooden chairs scattered in no apparent order, hums as young students and wise rabbis work in groups to tease out understanding of the Torah and its applications to the world around them.
Verbal sparring has been the keystone of Torah studies for thousands of years. The beis midrash at Toras Chaim a living connection to that vibrant past, and even the rabbis, who’ve been studying the same texts for decades, don’t always agree with one another.
Moshe Robinson, 20, a student in the college program, says he is awestruck when watching Israel Kagan debating with the other rabbis.
“You know that right after that conversation, they’re the best of buddies, and they have the utmost respect for each other,” he observes. “But when they’re fighting, and they go back and forth, you just don’t know what’s going to happen. The whole room just lights up when that happens. And afterwards, you go, Wow, I wish I could talk like that.”
Founders’ sacrifice
In the late 1960s, when they brought their wives and families from the heart of the yeshiva system in New Jersey to Denver to start the school, Wasserman and Israel Kagan had already established themselves to be young men of wisdom.
“They both could have easily gotten very respectable positions on the East Coast, with many more students to pick from, and they could have had a much bigger yeshiva,” Aaron Kagan says. “But there was a world out there that needed exposure to a yeshiva system, and so, at great sacrifice to themselves and their families; they just went out and did it.”
At the time, Denver’s west side was a thriving Jewish enclave, and the school, the only yeshiva between Chicago and the West Coast, became a hub for Jewish learning.
Today, the yeshiva is an accredited high school. Students in the college program typically complete a degree that prepares them to become rabbis, or spend a year in beis midrash study before moving on to a larger school on the East Coast.
The rabbis have high expectations for their students’ involvement in Jewish life, no matter what path they take after completing their formal studies.
“Whatever they do, they carry with them basic Torah values: to lead, to be an example to others of what God expects of us, to be honest in business dealings, and to be exemplary in their character development. And to realize that Torah learning is never-ending,” Kagan says.
In spite of competition from yeshivas that have cropped up around the U.S. in the last 40 years, the school has built a solid reputation for being a place where learning is combined with warm, familylike relationships between students and teachers.
“That’s created by the fact that they’re all away from home – even the local students have to stay in the dorms,” Aaron Kagan says.
One of the primary reasons parents from across North America send their sons to study under these rabbis is that reputation for kindness.
“Our rebbeim are people who are here not just to earn a living, but to fulfill a life’s mission – a mission to be able to transmit, to teach younger students that which they believe in,” Wasserman says. “And the environment here has been such that there’s been a close and warm relationship both inter-staff, and in terms of staff and students.”
“(The rebbeim) have a much more friendly manner; you enjoy learning with them,” Robinson says. “You can talk to them outside, so inside you can learn with them.”
In recent years, the yeshiva has created ways to bring the beis midrash alive for the Denver Jewish community in general. The school’s outreach program, The Jewish Experience, is dedicated to this purpose.
Building community
“The yeshiva’s goal was to allow their talented rabbis and educators to be available to the larger community, to offer sophisticated learning opportunities, and to be more active in building the Jewish community at large,” says Rabbi Raphael Leban, director of outreach at The Jewish Experience. The program offers classes, hosts events and runs a Sunday school for children.
For the rabbis and students at Yeshiva Toras Chaim, bringing the values of learning and study and a considered life to the greater community is an essential element of being Jewish.
As Robinson says: “You’re only making a living out there. The Torah way of life is what you’re living.”
Eric Elkins is a freelance writer and vice president of marketing at FEED. You can find his blog at datingdad.com.
