DY, I’m not sure you’re reading what I say. I’m saying that financial security can help shalom bayis and financial insecurity can hurt it. That’s not rocket science. What people choose to do with that information, and whether or not that is mitigated by other factors, is each family’s business. The fact is that I know many families where, either as supporters or supportees, they are indeed adversely affected. Many, such as some of my cousins, are not.
If you look at the discussion points in the frum community now, you can see that many of them are related, some more or less directly than others, to the kollel system: shidduchim (girls not finding shidduchim without clear statements of support), entitledness (among many peer-pressure kollel couples), tuition (in a community where, as I said in my last post, people are losing valuable years and percentages of income by entering the workforce later), huge amounts of money expected to be spent by parents on their own kollel children. I’d say that these are the cracks in the facade of the kollel system- a phenomenon which I thought I took pains to separate from the institution of kollel itself, which I think is a wonderful thing. The kollel system is only 15-20 years old, and around now is its moment of reckoning. It is a system where what you do depends on what yenem does to an absurd degree. It is a system where nobody will change anything unless there is a community-wide move- if you can’t afford a fancy chasunah, don’t go shouting from the rooftops for takanos or gvirim to support, make a cheaper chasunah.
I’ll be thrilled if I marry the kind of man who would want to learn in kollel. I refuse, however, to buy into a system which suppresses individual choice and which is drowning the community under the force of its own demands.