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Scyllaberg & Charybditsky. Proud as they are of their university, U.S. Jews are still unsure of what Brandeis is fundamentally supposed to be in the religious sense. When first broached, the idea of a secular Jewish school caused headshaking among Jewry's three basic factions. "For the Orthodox, we weren't Jewish enough," recalls Dean Berger. "For the Reformed, we were too Jewish. Just to get the support of the Conservatives, we had to steer a course between Scyllaberg and Charybditsky."
President Sachar opts for a secular school "no more Jewish than Princeton is Presbyterian." He well knows that his students "bring a bias with them. It's not exactly anti-God. It's anticlerical." In fact, the Hillel Foundation at Brandeis has only 50 or 60 members, and only the Catholic chapel gets much attendance. Says one senior: "Most students feel that religion is—well, somehow beneath them."
Nonetheless, says Sachar, "it is the responsibility of this school to make kids show the credentials for their assumptions." The same goes for religion: "Here at Brandeis you must not only prove an affirmative conviction but also a rejection." To keep religious debate alive. Sachar has continually plunged into "our intellectual Gulf Stream" such diverse theologians as Martin Buber, Jacques Maritain and Paul Tillich.
The Challenge Habit. In the intellectual sense, Brandeis knows just what it is: "the challenge habit of mind" makes its classrooms crackle. Delighted with his students' "seriousness," one former Princeton professor hardly misses "the elaborate military deference found at Princeton, where the men would address you as 'sir' with an undertone of contempt." Engagement with issues in turn makes the students eager for social action and dissent. In the 21-campus Boston area, it often seems that every peace march or civil rights rally is led by Brandeis students. The student paper, The Justice, is perhaps the most caustically anti-administration campus newspaper in the country. "It's hard not to censor them," sighs Sachar. "But we don't want to run the risk of closing their minds. We practice an affectionate kind of fratricide." What Brandeis has in fact produced is a mirror of the liberal, learned, humane tone of Justice Brandeis himself. For just this reason, it is likely to go on being a kettle of highly individualistic fish. Says Sachar: "You've heard about the two castaway Jews on a desert island? When they're rescued, they're asked why they built three temples. It's because every Jew must have one temple he wouldn't be caught dead in."
* Manhattan's Yeshiva University was founded (1886) to train rabbis, now also offers liberal arts.