I had known three rosh yeshivas (yeshiva heads) before in my life. I was awestruck by the first, Rabbi Chait. I addressed him exclusively in the third person ("Would the rabbi like us to begin the lesson?"; "When will the rabbi come to the prayer service?"). For the second one, Rabbi Zuckerberg, I stood up. Each time he entered or exited the beit midrash (study hall), I rose from my seat to show respect. And the name of the third, Rabbi Eisenstein, was never uttered by us, his students. When addressing him or just speaking about him, we always referred to him as "The Rosh Yeshiva."

Therefore, this week, even though I knew full well where I was headed, after all the courtesies and shows of honor and respect to which I'd grown accustomed, I was somewhat taken aback when the head of the Secular Yeshiva, Tal Shaked, 34, greeted me with, "Hey, Yedidia, how's it going?"

The Secular Yeshiva began operating at the start of the school year. It is a bold attempt by secular Jewish groups, which have been gaining momentum in recent years, to go one step further. Not just more panel discussions on the future of secularism, or more familiarization with texts, or more seminars on the Memorial Day for Yitzhak Rabin, but the real thing: a yeshiva. Young men and women, pre- and post-army, invited to abandon the rat race for the sake of intensive and in-depth Torah study. To make the Torah their profession.

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Now I'm here. At the entrance to the beit midrash, located near the Tel Aviv central bus station. For some reason - maybe because of the laid-back personality of the rosh yeshiva, maybe because of her blue jeans - I allowed myself to speak to her in a way I never would have spoken to any of the yeshiva types I'd known before: "Ahlan, Tal, nice to meet you. We'll talk later. First I'd like to go in and see a class. I'll SMS you when I come out."

Eleven bareheaded students (male and female) are sitting crowded around Ari Elon, drinking in his lecture. Elon is 'the son of' and 'the brother of.' His father, Menachem Elon, was the vice president of the Supreme Court; his brothers are the prominent National Religious Rabbi Motti Elon and the head of the National Union faction, MK Benny Elon. Ari Elon may have taken off his skullcap as a teenager, but the family charisma is still there.

"The whole preoccupation of Israeli society with trivia, like what's the capital city of some country, is irrelevant," he explains to the students in his weekly Gemara class. "The Gemara is a totally different model. Not a model of questions and answers, but of dilemmas and taking things apart. There's no 'phone friend' to ring for help, that's only on 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' Here there are kushiyot, difficult problems, as in the word mokesh ('mine'). You have to dismantle them. You can't just read the text, you have to wear yourself out."

Searching for Rabbi Yohanan

In today's lesson, Elon is teaching about an issue in Tractate Baba Kama. His style is loose and associative, and he's brimming with all kinds of ideas. Before long, he has moved from the text to the story of the life of Rabbi Yohanan: "Rabbi Yohanan's father died the moment Rabbi Yohanan was formed in his mother's womb. His mother died the moment she gave birth to him. In other words, both left this world the second they ceased being relevant to bringing him into the world. They concluded their role as far as he was concerned. He had 10 sons and they, too, all died during his lifetime. When the last son died, he took one of his bones and kept it with him. Whenever anyone came to him to lament his troubles - My wages were cut, My tooth hurts - he showed them the bone and told them his story. Rabbi Yohanan is the Job of the Talmud. Wherever he goes, there is death."

The students are mesmerized. Elon goes on to talk about the encounter between Rabbi Yohanan and Rabbi Kahana, in which the former received a lesson in humility: "Rabbi Yohanan was condescending to others, and in the course of a very long process he learned that he is not always the teacher. The culmination of the story comes when he is able to call someone else rabbi and to call himself a student. This is the remedy for everything, his success in diminishing himself before someone else. We have to search for the Rabbi Yohanan in us."

The lesson ends, but the students remain in the classroom, continuing to discuss Rabbi Yohanan and how he connects with them. "There's something here that I can't quite explain," Tal Wolfson, a 23-year-old Tel Avivian, tells me. "I'm drawn to these texts. I feel like they belong to me and I belong to them more than to any Greek mythology, for example. I took courses in Judaism at university, too, but there the perspective was entirely academic and informative. Here it's different."

Unlike Wolfson, Sarit Ozeri, 23, comes from a religious background. She grew up in one of the Gush Etzion communities, but eventually gave up religious observance. She's the only one here for whom these texts are not new: "In Ulpana (religious girls' high school) I did five units on the matriculation exams in Bible and Oral Law. When I left and went to Tel Aviv, I thought all that had lost its meaning for me. And then, after three years in the city, I missed it. Here, I've reconnected. In classes in the university, I was always looking at my watch to see when the lesson would be over. Here three and a half hours can go by like nothing. It's all open. Our mode of interpretation is just like that of the teacher, we're in a process of joint thinking without obligations."

Her classmate, Yadin Alef, 24, who grew up on Kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar and was recently discharged from the Nahal brigade, corrects her: "On the contrary: We have many obligations. From the standpoint of the seriousness of the study and the relationship to the text, this is definitely a yeshiva. We're not doing this as a hobby. We have a sense of mission toward the studies."

Mission, responsibility, Zionism, leadership - all these non-trendy words are very present here. At times it makes the students sound a little self-righteous, but the intentions are pure. Fact: For all their studies here they do not receive a certificate, a degree, any honor or financial reward. The group of young people who are studying here before their army service pay (or, more likely, their parents pay) NIS 500 a month. The older students, in the post-army track, do not pay; they receive an NIS 1,350 stipend a month, for two days of study per week. They were originally supposed to receive NIS 1,500 per month, but the group agreed to reduce the amount for each person so that there would be enough money left over to bring in another student.

By midday, I realize that my preconceptions were all wrong. Something about the brilliant, copyright-worthy phrase "the Secular Yeshiva" had made me think I would be coming to a place where the atmosphere was brashly anti-religious. In my mind I pictured all kinds of Yisrael Segal types sitting around the study hall, ham sandwiches in hand, using the texts to prove in all kinds of clever ways that the patriarch Abraham was really a no-good crook. The scene that greeted me didn't fit that picture at all: a collection of well-behaved, studious sorts who struck me as probably having been the star students in their classes. Volunteering, helping out, putting effort into their work and, above all - not rebelling.

At the start of the previous century, upon the emergence of Zionism, its leaders made a painful split from religion and tradition. But here there is no trace of "anti," neither among the students nor in the administration.

"I want to consider the word hiloni (secular) and find in it the word halon (window)," says Eran Baruch, 40, head of the Bina Center for Jewish Studies, which initiated the Secular Yeshiva. "At first, when we thought about the idea, some suggested that we call it 'the Israeli yeshiva' or 'the Hebrew yeshiva,' but we deliberately chose to call it 'the Secular Yeshiva.' Not in order to be opposed to the religious, but in order to fill this term with content. To many people, the term 'secular' is perceived as something empty, vacant. We want to give content to the Jewish identity of secular people who live in Israel."

"To give content to secular people?" You sound like a recruiter from the Ohr Sameach yeshiva.

"Perhaps. I don't have to argue with them. Maybe there is a similarity between us. But I relate to the Torah, to the 'Jewish bookshelf,' as a source of inspiration and not as a source of authority. And I add to this other sources that are not only religious: the poems of Rachel and of Alterman, Amos Oz, Marx, Tchernikovsky, Agnon, Haim Be'er. I don't require the students to observe mitzvot (commandments), but I do require them to relate to their Judaism. For example, to ask what Shabbat means to them. The mitzvot are an option. If some of the people in the group start to keep the mitzvot, it won't be a failure for the Secular Yeshiva. Not at all."

But still, Rabbi Uri Zohar [a popular Israeli director and comic actor who abandoned the secular world and became ultra-Orthodox] isn't the ideal that this yeshiva wishes to produce.

"Look, we want to build a generation of male and female scholars who know the texts. To make them desire Torah study for its own sake. So we can say of them that 'the Torah is their profession.' Maybe I'm a romantic, but I relate very strongly to the idea that for the past 2,000 years, the Jewish lifestyle has been based upon learning. Wagon drivers in the villages were a part of this circle. And it still existed in the kibbutz movement in which I grew up. I'd come out from the morning milking and see the dairy workers reading the Davar literary supplement [referring to a now-defunct Histadrut-owned newspaper]. In the milking shed we could talk about Buber and Rosenzweig. Learning was something exalted, even there in the cowshed."

Texts and social activism

The Secular Yeshiva dwells among the gentiles. You hardly see any Israelis around here on the scruffy edge of South Tel Aviv. Only Filipinos and Romanians and Indians and Sri Lankans and other foreign laborers who live here in dim hovels. The students, who only return home once every other week, stand out. They wear shirts printed with the slogan: "The Secular Yeshiva, because Judaism isn't a dirty word." Every morning, they make their way on foot from their rented apartments to the yeshiva.

Yeshiva? Ponevezh looks better. The Tel Aviv municipality allotted them the abandoned Kupat Holim building at the corner of Yesod Hama'alah and Levinsky Streets, and the students made a concerted effort to spruce the place up to make it possible to learn there. The empty examination rooms became classrooms, the old pharmacy was transformed into the (non-kosher) dining room and the small nurse's station at the entrance became the office of the rosh yeshiva.

"I was educated in a Jerusalem high school. I was an officer in the air force and I studied law and business administration at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya," says Shaked.

"And in all these frameworks, I never encountered the 'Jewish bookshelf.' I worked for six years in the Tel Aviv district attorney's office, in the criminal division, and a friend persuaded me to come to one of the secular study groups. For the first time in my life I saw a page of Talmud. It was the first time I realized that Judaism could relate to my life. Orthodoxy wasn't an option, I didn't want the faith-based or halakhic direction, but I became more and more excited about the texts. As a lawyer, I understood that in court, you meet people after a line has been crossed, and I wanted to meet them one step before. It's a punitive system and not a therapeutic one, and I was searching for something more social and educational.

"My dream is that someone who comes out of here, when he finds himself with a free evening, will choose to go ahead and open up a book and study Torah. Not turn on the television, or even go out to an educational lecture, but to study on his own. For learning Torah to be 'cool,' to be worth something. Among the religious public, people are glad to have it known that they studied for several years in a yeshiva, and I'd like to see the same thing among the secular public. Just to illustrate how deep the ignorance goes - someone here once asked if Leibowitz and Maimonides knew each other. This is what we want to change and, of course - the learning should be connected with practice, connected to dealing with social distress."

There is certainly no lack of social distress in South Tel Aviv. Twice a week the students close their books and go out to conduct activities for neighborhood children. A brochure that the Secular Yeshiva distributes in 12th-grade classes throughout the country quotes student Noam Meinrat: "I stand on the balcony and feel like Herzl, only he gazed out on a river and I'm gazing out on a desert of poverty, distress and neglect. This is South Tel Aviv, the place where I've chosen to take up residence, at least for one year. I see a boy crossing the street, returning from school. He's a child of the migrants, our hewers of wood and drawers of water. I think that we, Israeli society, like very much to think that they live here, in this part of the city, out of desire. But maybe it's also our society that pushes them here, to this desert, so they won't be seen. It's not just them. Every social element that we have sought to distance from ourselves, we've sent them all to this desert, to this hell."

Back to class. To what the curriculum calls "current events class." The teacher is Budeh (full name: Aryeh Budenheimer), a pillar of the kibbutz movement. Later on, Dov Elboim will tell me: "In a Haredi yeshiva there's a mashgiah. A person who oversees the personal education of the students. I see Budeh as the mashgiah. He's a special moral and educational figure."

Budeh distributes to the students an enlarged copy of Meir Shalev's article from the Yedioth Ahronoth weekend supplement about the sale of Tnuva. "You know," he begins, "last Friday, Yedioth Ahronoth gave the divorce of Datz and Datza (Moshe and Orna Datz) a whole page! It's not funny. And the same week, not a single writer or serious actor or scientist or Israel Prize laureate was invited to Gaydamak's party."

Three students ask in all seriousness: "What party?" And Budeh moves on to the next issue that has been disturbing his peace of mind: ostentatious high school graduation parties. The girl sitting next to me comments aloud: "Excuse me, but our party cost no more than 400 shekels."

"Aviv Tabenkin," Budeh thunders back, "Your great-grandfather would have been appalled." Yes, she is from Ein Harod, and is the great-granddaughter of Yitzhak Tabenkin (a major figure in the early kibbutz movement).

"In today's society, a name like Tabenkin doesn't arouse much interest," she tells me during the break. "I don't get a big response because of it. With a name like Gaydamak I'd get a lot more attention."

What brought you to the yeshiva?

"My counselor on the kibbutz told me about the initiative and I was very excited by the idea. I deferred the army for a year and came here, like everyone else, to change the country and ourselves. To find values and identity." Her friend Moran Ben-Zvi (no relation to Israel's second president) adds: "I constantly have to explain that I'm not becoming religiously observant. If I just wear a skirt, everybody on the kibbutz gets nervous. My parents were also wary in the beginning. Now they're very pleased. I bring home stories about Shabbat and about the weekly Torah portion and tell everyone."

I take a peek at Ben-Zvi's notebook. "In Judaism there are two concepts of teshuva [repentance]," it says in her round handwriting. "Repentance that makes sin marginal and ignores it, and repentance that takes sin and uses it as a springboard for moving up on a moral level. Homework: Think about something that I must repent for and write a Maimonides-style confession...."

A few pages later, a lesson on the meaning of Shabbat: "The Shabbat is made up of three weddings: 1. The wedding of God and the seventh day, in which the human being is invited every Shabbat to be present in their home at the renewal of their marriage; 2. The wedding of God and the Jewish People. The covenant between God and Israel is renewed each week and the Shabbat is akin to the ketuba [marriage contract] or the ring; 3. The wedding of the Jewish People and the Shabbat. God is the matchmaker and presides over the marriage."

I close the notebook feeling very confused. What is secular here, for God's sake? Whether the Shabbat is the wedding of the Jews and God, or the wedding of God and the seventh day or the wedding of the Jews and Shabbat - however you look at it, it's not a day to be spent at the movies or on the beach, not to mention at a shopping mall. It seems like someone here ought to write a little Maimonides-style confession and admit that this name - "the Secular Yeshiva" - is a gimmick.

The holidays are observed with alternative ceremonies. On Yom Kippur, instead of the Kol Nidrei prayer, there was a study session on the meaning of vows in various contexts. The Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony was performed here, for some reason, last Sunday - i.e., two days after the holiday had ended and Jews everywhere had already put away their menorahs.

"We don't equate ourselves all the time with the religious, with what they do," student Tal Wolfson tells me. "Whoever takes upon himself the burden of the 'Kingdom of Heaven,' that's great, if it suits him. But we're secular. And a secular person who says about Judasim - 'This isn't mine' - not only loses out, but exempts himself from grappling with it. We've chosen to be constantly questioning."

But if one is to judge by the last Yom Kippur, then perhaps the organizations that are seeking to make Jews religious ought to start supporting the Secular Yeshiva: Three of its students decided, for the first time in their lives, to fast on the holy day.

One of them, Yadin Alef, explains: "As Yom Kippur approached, we underwent a long and meaningful process about the concept of repentance. I decided to try to take it to a personal and internal place in my life, and not to just leave it in the air. In general, what we learn here does not remain purely theoretical. It's an inner type of learning; we put ourselves into the learning and it's a fantastic experience. And part of it then was to fast and not to smoke. Since then, by the way, I've stopped smoking altogether. I came to the conclusion that I had to change that, and I just did."

When I come back to the rosh yeshiva with my "incriminating" findings, she smiles. "It doesn't scare me. They studied and were exposed to the depth that's behind the idea of the fast, and tried to examine it themselves. It's totally fine." She, by the way, did not fast.

Historical turning point

Tiferet, yesod, malhut, hod, hesed, keter, gevura. These are just some of the ancient words laden with kabbalistic meaning written on the board by Dov Elboim, the energetic Hasidism teacher, at the start of the lesson. I wonder what young people who don't know how to recite Shema Yisrael could understand about the kabbalistic spheres and upper worlds, but Elboim feels no need to simplify things.

On the contrary: "In my opinion, kabbala should be taught from the first grade," he says. "Because the kabbalistic theories are the closest to natural intuition. The traditional method is to start with humash (Bible), then go on to Mishna, Gemara, Rishonim and Pilpulim, and only then, at age 45, to get to a little kabbala. It's an approach whose goal is to prevent freedom. Because by the time the person gets to kabbala, he's already burdened with obligations and children and so on. One should be exposed to these ideas much earlier."

As it turns out, the class taught by Elboim, a graduate of a Haredi yeshiva, helps me to really define the difference between the yeshivas where I studied and this place. Here it's interesting, challenging, horizon-broadening, enriching. There it's holy. Once, Rabbi Eisenstein, the one whose name we never dared speak, explained to us the Gemara that says: "Why was the land laid waste? Because they didn't recite the blessing over the Torah first." In other words, the reason for the destruction of the Temple and the ruin of the land was not that people were not learning Torah. They were learning - quite a bit, in fact. But they were not reciting the blessing for Torah study beforehand. Not showing due recognition that this Torah is not just another book of general knowledge, but something God-given, obligating, holy.

Elboim understood what I meant: "Certainly, to a person who comes from a Haredi yeshiva this looks very disappointing. In a good Haredi yeshiva, the good students are truly immersed in Torah study all the time. It's absolutely their whole world. True, here it is not their whole world. Here we're not going to produce Torah scholars who will be immersed in Torah study all the time, every day, all year round. For that you have to pay a big price. So it's the art of compromise.

"Personally, I wanted to recreate here a youthful experience that apparently cannot be reconstructed outside of the Haredi world. Because it's impossible, so here the agenda is to produce a secular 'ben-Torah' who is connected to this world and to social action. I want the secular to take Judaism back. This is the salvation of Israeli culture, which is in a very problematic vacuum, with its fixation on pop stars and movie stars. As an editor at the Yedioth Ahronoth publishing house, I can tell you that 99 percent of the manuscripts that I receive contain no echo whatsoever of the Jewish world. It's as if they were written in Berlin, but happen to be in Hebrew."

Elboim says that in his personal life, he does put on tefillin (phylacteries) and pray, but "not because it's written in the Shulkhan Arukh, not because it's an obligation, but because it connects me with my ancestors. And this is just the kind of Jewish existence that we're seeking to create here in the yeshiva. Look, a guy like Tommy Lapid should have closed down the place because God forbid that Jews might connect with Jewish tradition, and then what will be?

"Once we were interviewed together on Amnon Levy's program, and I said that I put on tefillin, and he shouted at me that I was a primitive who put on animal skins. Ben-Gurion was against these things, too. He was wise and clever, and wanted to return everyone to the Bible and wipe out the 2,000 years of Jewish creativity that came after the Bible, so that we'd go back to being a race of warriors from the House of David. And here we're saying that we want a different kind of Jewish identity. And we're not just saying it, we're opening a real yeshiva to create it. Which is why even this physically pathetic building we're in is one of the most amazing turning points in the history of the Jewish People. No exaggeration."

Historical turning point or no, by nine in the evening, I'm not interested in redefining my Jewish identity, I don't want to recharge it with cultural-spiritual content and I have no desire to examine where I connect to it and where I don't. I leave the Secular Yeshiva and quickly go to find a South Tel Aviv minyan for a simple arvit (evening prayer) service.