Like all things that were abruptly interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, the year in Israel for Midreshet AMIT students ended in March. The students left Israel and went back home. But their learning didn’t stop. The students continued studying with their rabbis and teachers via Zoom from thousands of miles away. The distance didn’t shake the warm connection they developed for one another or the profound impact Midreshet AMIT had on their lives.
In this four-part blog series, Midreshet AMIT student Rosalie Sohn shares her Reflections on Learning.
By Rosalie Sohn
When I first told my dad, I wanted to go to seminary he asked me, “Why do you want to go?” I answered him the same way I answered Rav G. during my interview. I said, “I want to be able to learn on my own and grow as a person.” My dad did not like my answer as much as Rav Goldstein did, or at least pretended to since he asked me to write out a “serious” answer for him.
Entering our gap year, I think all of our mantras were “to learn and to grow.” In high school, I think for most of us, we had multiple periods of limudei kodesh built into our schedules, but we rarely went beyond the bare minimum. We usually just learned for the grade, and after the test most of the material would be forgotten in order to prepare for the next test.
When I first got to Midreshet AMIT I was very intimidated by the prospect of filling every Beit Midrash period. I probably spent the first week or so talking at my “beis table” and opening and skimming a Sefer for five minutes before deciding I wasn’t interested.
It definitely took me a while to find topics that interested me. But every teacher took time to help me fill my schedule and decide upon topics that I would enjoy learning – just for the sake of learning the material itself. It felt so freeing to be able to learn with no other motive. I knew everything that I learned would be because I wanted to learn it, not because it was something that was prescribed to me by my high school teacher.
As someone who asks a million questions about everything, being at Midreshet AMIT helped me learn how to ask the right questions and allowed me to try and answer them on my own, which is something that I have never done before.
The point when I realized that I was able to learn on my own was when I went home for my sister’s bat mitzvah and I brought home a Sefer. I think that’s when I realized I was starting to develop the skills to continue learning on my own without anyone helping me.
I also want to share something that I learned this year that really changed my perspective: There is a classic idea in the world that everything is either right or wrong. Instead of looking at it as right versus wrong, we should look at all our choices as being either right or easy. I know that all of us would make the right decision, the question is whether it will be easy. Oftentimes, the right decision isn’t necessarily the easy one, and that’s a hard thing to deal with. It is human nature to want to take the easy way out. It wasn’t easy to leave my house and family for a year, or to live in the dorms and to learn Torah every day. But looking back, I know that it was the right decision, and I wouldn’t trade away even a second of it. All of the Torah and values that we learned during this amazing year helped to shape all of us and allowed all of us to grow.
Even though we all said how we came to Midreshet AMIT to “learn on our own and grow as a person,” I genuinely believe that we all did develop the skills to learn on our own. More importantly, this year we also grew in tremendous ways and made friendships and relationships that will last a lifetime.
