Tzadok Wienberg finished yeshiva the same way most of his classmates did, with strong opinions about Talmudic disputes that had occupied scholars for centuries and limited practical skills for earning a living. His brothers continued to advanced yeshivot, pursuing rabbinic ordination and deeper immersion in religious texts. Tzadok told his parents he wanted to study electrical engineering at City College.

The conversation happened on a Thursday evening after dinner. His father listened without interrupting, then asked what electrical engineering actually meant. Tzadok explained that it involved designing systems that control electrical power and signals. His father nodded slowly and said they would discuss it on Shabbat. His mother started crying before Tzadok finished his second sentence.

Yeshiva education centers on the study of rabbinic literature, particularly the Talmud and Jewish law. Study takes place in chavruta, paired learning where students prepare texts together and debate interpretations before hearing lectures from senior rabbis. The method develops specific intellectual skills. Students learn to parse dense arguments, identify logical inconsistencies, reference vast networks of connected texts, and construct defenses for positions across multiple layers of commentary.

Tzadok spent 12 years learning this way. The questioning was rigorous but operated within boundaries. You could challenge an interpretation of a passage or propose a novel reading that reconciled apparently contradictory sources. You did not challenge the fundamental premise that the texts themselves represented authoritative wisdom worth spending years to master.

Different Questions, Different Answers

City College opened its doors to students regardless of background, offering both academic and practical training without charging tuition. Tzadok enrolled in 2006, one of several hundred students entering the engineering programs that year. The first semester required calculus, physics, chemistry, and an introduction to engineering course.

The intellectual environment differed from yeshiva in ways Tzadok had not anticipated. Professors lectured on material from textbooks, but the textbooks were not treated as final authorities. They represented current understanding, subject to revision as new evidence emerged. The physics professor spent an entire class explaining how Newtonian mechanics, while perfectly adequate for most engineering applications, was incomplete. Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics corrected Newton’s framework without making Newton wrong about the things he actually studied.

This struck Tzadok as strange. At yeshiva, if two interpretations contradicted each other, scholars worked to resolve the contradiction or determine which interpretation was correct. Both could not be simultaneously valid in different contexts. But physics apparently operated differently. Newton’s equations worked for objects moving slowly compared to light speed. Einstein’s equations worked at all speeds. Both were correct within their domains of applicability.

Engineering education emphasizes critical thinking as essential for problem-solving. Students learn to define problems clearly, search for solutions, evaluate options, and iterate based on results. The process shares features with scientific methodology but focuses specifically on creating things that work rather than purely understanding how nature operates.

Tzadok’s circuits class required building actual circuits and measuring their behavior. The theoretical calculations predicted certain voltages and currents. The measurements showed what actually happened. Sometimes the numbers matched. Sometimes they did not, and figuring out why taught more than when everything worked perfectly. Bad connections, component tolerances, and parasitic effects all mattered. You could not argue your way to a working circuit. It either functioned or it failed.

Authority Based on Evidence Rather Than Lineage

The biggest adjustment involved how knowledge gained authority. Yeshiva study operates through structured learning called shiur, where senior rabbis provide discursive lectures with pre-specified sources. Students prepare these sources in chavruta before the lecture, then hear the rabbi’s analysis. The rabbi’s interpretation carries weight based on his scholarship and position in a lineage tracing back centuries.

Tzadok’s engineering professors had credentials and publications, but their authority came from different sources. A claim’s validity depended on whether it matched experimental data and could predict new observations accurately. A professor could be wrong. Students could find errors in derivations. The error mattered more than who made it.

This created an uncomfortable intellectual position. Tzadok had been trained to respect teachers and accept that greater scholars understood things he did not yet grasp. When a passage in Talmud seemed contradictory, the problem lay in his understanding, not the text. Senior rabbis had spent decades studying these sources and resolved apparent contradictions through careful analysis. Proper study meant learning to see what they saw.

Engineering problems sometimes had definitive answers you could verify through measurement or testing. Build a circuit that should output five volts. Measure the actual output. If you get 3.2 volts, something is wrong with either the design or the implementation. No amount of clever argument changes the measurement.

Engineering students must develop analytical thinking and problem-solving abilities as core competencies. Projects require identifying root causes, testing hypotheses, and iterating based on results. Success depends on solutions that work in practice, not just in theory.

Tzadok’s senior project involved designing a building automation controller that optimized HVAC systems based on occupancy sensors. The theoretical model predicted 30 percent energy savings. The prototype achieved 18 percent. The discrepancy came from factors the model overlooked. Real buildings had thermal mass, air leaks, and occupancy patterns that did not match idealized assumptions. The project succeeded not by defending the theoretical model but by revising it to match observed behavior.

What Stays and What Changes

His father eventually accepted the decision, though it took months. The turning point came when Tzadok showed him a circuit board and explained how traces carrying signals functioned like tiny wires, routed in patterns to avoid interference. His father held the board close, examining the traces through his watchmaker’s loupe. He pointed out that the routing required the same spatial reasoning he used when fitting watch components into limited case space. Perhaps engineering was not so different from precision mechanical work.

The comparison helped but missed something important. Watch repair preserved and restored existing mechanisms. Engineering created new systems that had never existed. The mindset differed. A watchmaker worked within constraints established by the original designer. An engineer chose which constraints to accept and which to challenge.

Tzadok still attended shul on Shabbat and kept kosher. The religious observance continued without conflict. What changed was his relationship to certain kinds of questions. Yeshiva study develops strong skills in textual analysis, reading comprehension, and logical argumentation. These transferred well to technical reading and problem decomposition. But yeshiva did not train students to question whether the entire framework might need revision based on new evidence.

Engineering required that willingness constantly. The fact that previous engineers designed systems a certain way did not make that approach optimal. Better methods existed. Finding them meant questioning assumptions that might have been unchallenged for years. Improvement came from identifying what previous solutions got wrong and fixing those problems.

His brothers noticed the shift when Tzadok came home for holidays. Conversations about Jewish law took on different character. Tzadok found himself asking why certain practices developed historically rather than accepting them as given. What problem was this rule solving? Did that problem still exist? The questions made his brothers uncomfortable. That was not how you studied halacha.

Two Ways of Knowing

Tzadok graduated in 2010 with a degree in electrical engineering. City College engineering programs emphasize preparing students to be technically capable and intellectually motivated, with communication skills and understanding of societal impacts needed for modern challenges. Graduates entered fields where questioning assumptions was professional obligation rather than disrespect.

Looking back, Tzadok sees the yeshiva education as valuable training in a specific kind of rigor. Talmudic argument requires close reading, logical consistency, and ability to track complex chains of reasoning. Those skills matter in engineering too. But yeshiva stops before certain questions. Engineering begins with them.

The difference shows up in how he approaches his work now. When a building automation system fails to perform as expected, Tzadok does not search for cleverer interpretation of the control logic that makes the failure make sense. He identifies what assumption was wrong and fixes it. The system either works or it does not. No amount of sophisticated argument changes that.

His father’s watch tools sit in the basement workshop where Tzadok occasionally repairs watches for family members. His engineering textbooks occupy the bookshelf in his home office, dog-eared and marked with notes from when concepts finally clicked. Both represent ways of understanding how systems work and fixing them when they break. The tools address different scales and different problems, but the fundamental question is the same. What actually happens when you do this? And if what happens is not what you want, what needs to change?