There is a very special night on the Jewish calendar. That is the night of the Jewish holiday we call Shavuot. There is a tradition to spend the whole night studying Torah, engrossed in educating oneself all night long in all the many aspects of Jewish knowledge. Who do you think spends this night studying Torah?

The elite scholars of the Jewish people? A select few institutions of higher learning in places like Israel and New York? Yeah, them too. But this holiday is for EVERY JEW. On the night of Shavuot tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Jews are going to go to synagogues around the world to spend the night learning. Men, women, children, scholars, and not-yet scholars. This holiday is for all of us.

The famed scholar, Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, said it best when he described Judaism as perhaps the only religion in the world that seeks to render its clergy superfluous. As bizarre as it might seem after well over 1,000 years of some clergy preventing the masses from gaining knowledge, or from just watching the millions of people around us who have no interest in knowing the first thing about their own religions, it was a breath of fresh air to know that Judaism wants every Jew, without exception, to gain all available knowledge about Judaism.

This has always impressed me so much. But also intimidates me. As quickly as I one learns that the Jewish faith encourages you to learn everything there is to know about Judaism, you learned how little you knew, and the endless sea of how much there is to learn. Luckily for all of us, there is a solution to this "problem". Yeshiva.

Yeshivas are institutions of Jewish education where students spend the entire day studying the ancient texts of the Jewish people. There are scores of them scattered throughout the world, with thousands of Jewish students gaining knowledge in a way totally contrary to the way we Americans have come to think of education. There are no tests, no grades. There's no piece of paper to receive when the day is done. You plunge your face in the books and you hope and pray that when all the smoke clears, you're more knowledgeable than you were beforehand.

Many have never heard of such a places, but when one comes to the realization of how little they know, they inevitably realize how little of a chance they'll ever have of knowing if they don't find their way to a yeshiva immediately.