JERUSALEM, Israel — When Toronto native Daniel Friedman arrived at Aish Jerusalem for his gap year, he carried with him an assumption about yeshiva that had taken shape years earlier.
He thought it was primarily a place for people who already knew they wanted to become rabbis or who had grown up in deeply religious families.
A year later, Friedman was preparing to leave Jerusalem with a markedly different understanding of Jewish learning and religious life. He had also built an Instagram following of more than 6,000, launched a podcast on YouTube and developed an unexpected platform for sharing what he was learning with other young Jews.
“I thought Yeshiva was a place where you just learned how to follow rules,” Friedman said. “The people who go are sons of rabbis, people who want to be a rabbi. I didn’t know there was anything else.”
His experience at Aish challenged that assumption.
From Toronto to Jerusalem
Friedman first seriously encountered the possibility of attending yeshiva through conversations with people around him.
While studying at the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, commonly known as CHAT, a teacher discussed several post-secondary possibilities, including university, college and a gap year.
It was Rabbi Elie Karfunkel, Friedman’s synagogue rabbi, who specifically encouraged him to consider studying in Israel after noticing how frequently the teenager asked questions about Judaism.
“He said Yeshiva was a place where you could ask any question and genuinely search for answers,” Friedman recalled. “There’s no pressure of tests, no pressure of deadlines.”
Rabbi Bernie Goldberg, a youth program director at Friedman’s synagogue in Toronto, also encouraged him to explore yeshiva study.
The idea was not entirely unfamiliar.
Friedman had already encountered Aish through its digital presence, particularly its Instagram and YouTube content.
“The first time I heard of Aish was from the online content, videos, Instagram,” Friedman said.
That familiarity became important when Friedman traveled to Israel through Olami Launch. He credits Rachelli Krongold, who was involved with both Aish and the program, with helping him make the trip and eventually enter yeshiva.
“She’s one of the main influences behind my being here,” he said.
During the visit, Friedman toured several yeshivas. He repeatedly found himself drawn back to Aish.
One particular Shabbat experience helped change his perception of religious study. A rabbi spoke unexpectedly about his past playing basketball.
For Friedman, the story carried a larger message.
“It showed me you didn’t have to give up your personality to grow in Torah,” he said. “You can have both, and I think to myself, that’s exactly what I am looking for.”
Taking Torah to Social Media
Once Friedman began studying in Jerusalem, another unexpected development followed.
He wanted to talk about what he was learning.
“I found it hard to keep what I was learning to myself,” he said. “I had this urge to let it out.”
He created an Instagram account called “Rebbe Said No,” a playful reference to stereotypes surrounding yeshiva life.
At first, relatively few people watched.
Friedman considered abandoning the project after several weeks. His father encouraged him to continue, telling him that his family enjoyed watching the videos.
He kept posting.
The breakthrough eventually came through an unlikely series of videos filmed during a visit to Auschwitz.
Friedman posted three brief videos accompanied by captions reflecting on Jewish resilience. Each received hundreds of thousands of views. One approached 650,000 views, he said.
“I was not even speaking in these videos,” Friedman recalled. “I just did a ten-second video with a caption, and it took off.”
His audience continued growing. Friedman subsequently launched a YouTube podcast, while his Instagram following climbed above 6,000.
Yet he said the numbers were not what ultimately defined his year.
Finding Jewish Community in Israel
Friedman pointed instead to relationships with teachers, including Rabbi Yehuda Werblowski and Rabbi Binyomin Wolff, and experiences that changed his understanding of Jewish communal life.
Among them was joining tens of thousands of people celebrating Yom Yerushalayim in Jerusalem.
The High Holy Days also proved unexpectedly meaningful.
Friedman said he once assumed that spending hours praying on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur would be something to endure rather than embrace. Experiencing the holidays within the yeshiva environment changed that perception.
“You can’t get that from people telling you,” he said. “You have to go experience it.”
For a young Canadian Jew spending a formative year in Israel, those experiences also connected religious study to something broader: participation in Jewish life in Jerusalem and the opportunity to experience Israel not simply as a visitor, but as part of a community.
Rethinking Freedom
The central idea Friedman said he took from the year was a new understanding of freedom.
“Freedom isn’t doing whatever you feel like,” he said. “Freedom is having self-control over doing what you want to do. If you feel like you can do anything, that freedom turns into boredom, and that can turn into sadness.”
The structure of religious Jewish life, which he once viewed primarily as a collection of restrictions, increasingly came to represent deliberate choice.
Friedman cited a teaching from Aish Rabbi Motty Berger in explaining his changing approach to religious observance.
“You’re not doing it for God,” Friedman said. “You’re keeping Shabbat because it’s objectively right, and living according to truth brings a deeper and more lasting kind of happiness.”
For Friedman, freedom therefore became less about the absence of limits and more about developing the ability to make purposeful choices rather than simply following immediate desires or prevailing social expectations.
A Message to the Next Student
As his year in Jerusalem came to an end, Friedman said he wanted other young Jews who were uncertain about spending a year in yeshiva to understand that hesitation was normal.
“If there is a kid out there who is thinking about going to yeshiva, but is hesitating, you feel intimidated about the religiosity, or perhaps you are the only one from your school going, or in your community, then reach out to me, or anyone you know who has come to Aish, or any other yeshiva and they will help you out,” Friedman said.
His second recommendation was simpler.
Try it.
“The worst-case scenario is you don’t like it, and you leave,” Friedman said. “Very few decisions at this stage of life are truly irreversible, but the opportunities you don’t take can stay with you much longer.”
The potential reward, he said, was far greater.
“The best-case scenario is that the experience will be the beginning of living a life closer to God, the truth, and receiving the most amount of pleasure and meaning you’ve ever lived with.”
For Friedman, a year that began with uncertainty about whether yeshiva was a place for someone like him ended with an answer.
It also left him trying to make sure that the next young Jew asking the same question has someone to talk to.
Friedman invited students considering yeshiva study to contact him through his Rebbe Said No Instagram account.
