Seminary Rejection What’s Wrong With Me

In the olden days, no, I mean in the really olden days, when I was in twelfth grade and we drove our horses to school and the only phones that existed were those weird types that were attached to the wall and you never had any privacy when you needed to talk so importantly to your friends with whom you had just spent eight hours in school—in those olden days—I decided I wanted to spend my year of seminary in Israel.

Those days were so olden, that even though there were officially some seminaries in Israel, there were only two (yes TWO!) seminaries for the mainstream Bais Yaakov girl. And because in my days Flatbush was on a different continent than Borough Park, for a Boro Parker, there was actually only one choice of seminary.

Nobody in my family had ever gone to seminary in Israel. Nobody even knew there was a seminary in Israel. As a matter of fact, nobody even cared if I went to seminary or not. Not my parents. Not my teachers. Not my friends. Not even Mishpacha Magazine—because it did not even exist yet in my days.

But I liked adventure. I loved the idea of being in Israel for a whole year and learning only limudei kodesh. It seemed like a natural extension of the learning I was doing on my own, my Sichos Mussar or Michtav Me’Eliyahu my favorite friends since tenth grade, inspired by my teachers.

The idea of being steeped in an atmosphere of kedusha, of walking the streets of Yerushalayim as if I belonged there, of being wrapped up in a dormitory with the best and brightest minds and hearts of schools around the country and even world, excited me beyond belief.

If I sounded like a slightly weird kid, I was.

Because the weirder part about me was that despite slowly but surely adding sefarim to my personal library, I was not seminary material. Not even my bright, hot pink winter jacket with large and colorful paisley print, was seminary material. My marks were sporadic; I failed baking (for inappropriate classroom behavior) and Trigonometry (for inappropriate math brain) while getting a 98 on my History Regent (loved Miss Halberstam!) and a  99 on my Chumash final (nobody like Reb Zimmerman to bring Chumash Bereishis alive!).

I did not belong to right family. My father was not in chinuch (gasp!). My mother was not either in chinuch (gasp! Choke! Gasp!).

I did not belong to the right money (it was living in someone else’s house at that time and we couldn’t find it).

I didn’t even belong to the right school. The kind that cared if their students went to seminary or not. Because they didn’t.  My school was that kind of school that thought that whatever a girl decided to do after school, working or seminary, or getting married was probably the best thing for her. Very old-fashioned school. Imagine a school thinking that a girl—or her parents—actually can make other choices besides for seminary.

So there was no pressure about seminary. Except the pressure inside my heart. There was nothing in my life I ever wanted as badly as going to seminary. And to do that, I needed to get accepted to the only seminary in Yerushalayim, beating out about another million girls to get in there.

And in a grade of about fifty billion girls (I came from a very large school), only 9 girls applied to the seminary of my choice (because, as you recall, there was no other seminary choices in the olden days). And only seven girls got in. Yours truly did not.

If you want to know why I did not get in, I can only quote what was overheard in the teacher’s room the day we got our acceptance letters.

“Malka didn’t get into seminary,” one teacher announced.

“She didn’t deserve to,” said another teacher, summing up the opinion of the seminary that rejected me.

My world came crashing down. Not by my  teacher’s comment, because obviously that sentiment had reached the seminary and affected their decision to be accepted; but by the crushing of my dream to live in Eretz Yisroel and grow as a person, as a frum Jew, to have fun (I was normal after all!).

So what did I do?

I could have moped. And been devastated. And broken. And embarrassed. And miserable. And furious and hurt and frustrated. (If those choices had been on a multiple choice test, the correct answer  for me then would have been ALL OF THE ABOVE.)

But I wanted to go to seminary most of all. So I moved onto to my second choice. An Israeli seminary in another part of Eretz Yisroel. Not so glamorous. Not so intense. Not so American or English-speaking. But still. A year of learning. A year of seminary. A year in Eretz Yisroel.

I swallowed my pride, I put on a smile, and I made plans.

In August, two weeks before my plane would be flying me to the year of my shattered dreams, a slot miraculously opened up in that seminary. Someone’s parent had died. Someone knew someone who knew someone who knew how much I wanted to go there and I was offered that slot over the other girls on the waiting list. I didn’t necessarily deserve it more than anyone else on that waiting list; it’s more that I finally had some pull. It’s more that on someone else’s death, my life could take flight.

I took that slot and landed up in Very Important Seminary.

And here is what I want to tell you.

I had a fabulous year. A miserable, exhilarating, exhausting, challenging, mind-blowing, terrible year. And it would not have mattered which seminary I went to in order to have that experience. I know that because today I meet those seminary classmates and the seminary impact had more to do with girl individually than the seminary itself.

Eretz Yisroel is Eretz Yisroel.

Seminary is about the learning and the people and the friends and the traveling and the experiences and the Shabbosim and the freedom to grow. It’s not about the seminary.

Seminary is the house you need to hang up your stuff and keep your toothbrush. The rest of Eretz Yisroel is your school.

You will become who you are meant to become; you are not limited by which seminary accepts you.

So you can open that letter now. The eight letters of rejection and the one of acceptance. Or the nine letters of rejection and then you go figure out how to make your seminary year happen anyway.

You will know how to make your life happen. Anywhere.

Originally published in Mishpacha’s Teen Magazine