On March 4, 2022, Yeshiva University’s men’s basketball team lost to Johns Hopkins University in the NCAA Division III tournament. Though that particular result was disappointing, the Yeshiva Maccabees had made a tremendous accomplishment over the last four seasons “in which the team representing an Orthodox Jewish institution grabbed national and international headlines and inspired the Jewish people at a time of growing antisemitism and a relentless pandemic.” During those years, the team won three conference championships, reached a 50-game winning streak in December 2021, and was ranked first in its division for the first time.

Relating this story during a forum address at Brigham Young University last month, Yeshiva University president Rabbi Ari Berman pointed out some details that made this story even more remarkable. The basketball players accomplished all that they did athletically while still keeping to the rigorous educational and religious demands made on students of the university. The latter include hours of daily Torah study and, for most, wearing the kippah skullcap during games.

What could contribute to this kind of commitment by students?

In his BYU speech, Rabbi Berman explained that the type of education offered at Yeshiva differed in fundamental ways from the current culture’s approach to higher education. That distinction is represented by two contrasting concepts – consumerism and covenant.

The covenantal approach to education that is the aspiration of Yeshiva and other religious schools creates fundamentally different premises. From the perspective of covenant, education is intended not as a transaction but as an opportunity for transformation.

A covenant education “helps develop your whole personality. … [A] values-driven education creates opportunities for one to develop the different aspects of the self – to discover purpose and experience divine pleasure in self-expression.” A higher education “exclusively focused on information and research for utility … will be outpaced by technological change.” By contrast: “Faith nourishes, strengthens, and enriches life. It guides one beyond acquisition of information towards an earnest quest to truth.” An “educational institution with a covenantal framework … prizes faith, empathy, commitment, loyalty, curiosity, resilience and discovery, while highlighting the importance of being thankful with what one has, and looking for opportunities to help others. Where there is less focus on the I, and more on the ‘we.’”

This is more than simply a personal issue. Younger generations are reporting decreasing levels of happiness, whereas behaviors like practicing thankfulness are linked not only to higher levels of personal happiness but also to positive effects on others’ behaviors, according to scholars like Harvard’s Arthur Brooks. In other words, the thankfulness encouraged by religious universities is a boon not only to religious students but to the broader society in which they interact.

Unfortunately, religious universities pursuing this type of mission are increasingly coming into conflict with different secular priorities advanced in government regulations. Yeshiva University itself is involved in a lawsuit that may soon be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court because it declined to recognize a student group that promotes teachings at odds with the religious identity of the university.

In Australia, the nation’s attorney general has issued a recommendation suggesting a major shift away from accommodation of the identity of religious schools. The recommendation is intended to remove religious exemptions from discrimination laws in the areas of sexuality. Religious schools do not have a concern about allowing LGBT students to enroll in the schools, but the recommendation goes much further.

Australian law professor Neil Foster describes the implications of the recommendations:

• “Religious schools and colleges can no longer apply conduct rules relating to student behaviour in the area of sexual activity or gender identity, except for theological colleges training clergy for formal ordination.”
• “Religious schools and colleges can no longer apply conduct or speech rules to their staff in the areas of sexual activity or gender identity, except for theological colleges training clergy for formal ordination.”
• “Religious schools and colleges can require staff to share the religious outlook of the body, or preference such staff in appointments, but only where participation in teaching religion is a ‘genuine requirement’ of the position and the differential treatment is ‘proportionate.’ In making these decisions, however, no consideration may be given to staff behaviour, views or identity relating to sexual activity, or orientation, or gender identity.”
• “Staff at a religious school or college can be required not to ‘actively undermine’ the ethos of their employer, but no criteria relating to sexual activity or orientation or gender identity can be imposed.”

Even where the proposals allow for schools to “teach their religiously based views on appropriate sexual behaviour,” the proposal allows the state to assess whether these teachings are consistent with a “duty of care to students and staff” and other curriculum requirements, presumably established by the government. Schools would also have to allow staff teaching the religion’s beliefs to be “permitted to objectively discuss the existence of alternative views about other lifestyles, relationships or sexuality.”

In a diverse society, differences about these issues is inevitable, but the answer cannot be to homogenize them. As the example of Yeshiva University demonstrates, schools with different foundational premises make contributions that would be lost if those premises were overridden by majority preferences. The cost of that loss would be paid with less happiness among younger generations and lower well-being among society as a whole.