October 27, 2026
Around the world today, students are taking to the streets en masse. In India, mass protests this summer over leaked examination papers forced the resignation of the Education Minister and won compensation for the families of students who died by suicide. Now they are coming for the Chief Election Commissioner after 130 million were purged from Indian voter rolls. In Serbia, a student list just defeated the authoritarian Vucic regime in parliamentary elections behind a populist, working class platform. In France, high school students are blockading their own schools to protest poor funding and overcrowding, and they are calling back to the May 1968 student protests that launched a general strike and nearly toppled Charles de Gaulle.
In every case, these students are fighting not only for themselves but for a more just equal society. Their demands are expansive and transformative. Their courage echoes a great student movement of our tradition.
Raban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehoshua disagreed on which day Yom Kippur fell and whether the evening prayer is optional or mandatory. As head of the beit midrash Raban Gamliel was not pleased to have a pupil contradict him and went out of his to belittle Rabbi Yehoshua as punishment. Seeing Yehoshua’s humiliation, the students of the beit midrash decided something must be done. They organized against Gamliel, their Nasi, deposing and replacing him. Along with Raban Gamliel, the students also threw out his rule that nobody could enter the beit midrash if their inside was not like their outside. Instead, they threw open the doors for all who wanted to learn and thousands of new students poured in. When Gamliel saw how many students he had kept from study, he cried out “chas v’shalom manati torah miyisrael – God forbid, I have withheld Torah from Israel.”
After this, Rabban Gamliel went to Rabbi Yehoshua hat in hand to apologize. But when he arrived at Yehoshua’s home, he was taken aback that the walls were black. ‘How could it be,’ Gamliel must have thought to himself, ‘that a Torah scholar whose opinion can overrule my own could spend his days toiling as a blacksmith?’ Gamliel was astonished that Yehoshua’s ‘inside’ livelihood as a laborer did not match his ‘outside’ presentation as a learned and respected Torah scholar. Yehousha did not share in this astonishment. He said “oy lo lador she’atah parnaso – woe unto a generation that you are its leader, as you are unaware of how Torah scholars make a living.”
This conversation between Raban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehoshua offers a new reading of Gamliel’s reaction to seeing new students flood the beit midrash. A straightforward interpretation suggests that Gamliel believed he had withheld Torah from Israel by preventing so many students from studying it, but students do more than just study. Students see the text in news ways and ask questions no one had thought of yet. Yehoshua turned out to be the exact kind of student that Gamliel’s rule sought to exclude – his inside was not like his outside. Yet this dissonance, Yehoshua’s distance from the relative wealth and leisure of the rabbinic elite, was not a hindrance to his learning, it was an opportunity for his teachers to learn.
How many students like Yehoshua were stopped at the doors of the beit midrash by Raban Gamliel’s guards? How many were unable to conceal that they spent their days tilling the soil or swinging a hammer? By keeping the working class from the beit midrash, Raban Gamliel not only deprived those workers of the opportunity to learn but also the entire Jewish people of the chiddushim, the innovative interpretations they would bring. Israel could not even begin to know the fullness of Torah until the students threw open the doors for all to learn.
Like Raban Gamliel’s study hall in the second century, the halls of power today need desperately to be cracked open for the working class to come in. Let us hope that the courageous students of India, Serbia, and France achieve exactly that, because then we might begin to know the fullness of human flourishing.
