Preventing the Next Esav With Executive Director Rabbi Josh Ross

Rav Hirsch has a hard read on why Esav became Esav: not because he was born wrong, but because Yitzchak and Rivka got passive about his education, sending him to the same yeshiva as Yaakov and hoping for the best. Rabbi Josh Ross thinks that failure is still happening, quietly, in living rooms everywhere.

Rabbi Ross was one of JLIC's original campus couples, back when Rav Schrader's idea for the organization wasn't yet called JLIC. Now, as executive director, his diagnosis is blunt: "for far too many years we've outsourced Judaism." We hand our children's Judaism to schools and youth groups, then wonder why Shabbat feels like a formality once they hit campus. His fix isn't more spirituality or more singing and dancing, and it isn't a label like modern Orthodoxy either, which he won't define. His term is Torah true Judaism: either you hold by the Torah or you don't. You teach it by living it, in front of students who notice.

The antidote, Rabbi Ross says, is proactivity: acting instead of waiting for someone else to. His proof is Rav Schrader, a talmid chacham with nothing in his background to suggest he'd start an organization, who saw a problem nobody else was solving and built one. Years later, Rabbi Ross still carries that instinct onto campus.

We close on the stakes: students going back to whatever Judaism they saw modeled at home.