Reply To: Work vs. Kollel

Hi everyone. Thank-you for all your replies, I appreciate all your thoughts.

I found a lot of your posts interesting, but I wanna focus on the thought poster “mybrother” brought up. That is, at work you are held responsible for your performance, whereas in learning you are on your own accord, and no one (except Hashem) is going to hold you accountable. A person who learns in kollel should work at least as hard as the people who work to provide for them. THAT is the standard in determining whether a person learning in kollel full time truly belongs to stay there. To give it a slightly different twist, the standard for learning full time in kollel should be that one’s love and committal to torah should be so great that they are both fully committed to AND happy to learn it all day. We can all go back and forth arguing percentages of full time kollel guys who meet that standard, but it is simply not even close to where it should be.

As the poster “just my hapence” pointed out, there’s a huge variety of ways that someone could entertain themselves during seder without learning (shmoozing, coffee-drinking, smoking, stam spacing out, putting heads down for a quick snooze, checking phones, texting, making phone calls, playing games on phones, etc.). The list can go on and on. The point is, with 8 or however many hours of seder everyday, it’s very hard to keep ‘cheshbon’ of your time and realize just how much you’ve wasted. Those breaks from learning are often prolonged, partially due to the fact (as noted above) that kollel guys learn on their own accord and are not held responsible for their production.

Honestly, just to give a small example from when I learned in bais medresh post high school: I loved my Rosh HaYeshiva’s shiurim so in every shiur I would listen very closely to everything he said, then after I would review the shiur and type it all up. At the end of the day, when I finished bais medresh I had typed up over 700 of his shiurim on a wide variety of topics–gemara, parsha, chagim, etc. (maybe I’ll fix them up a bit and make them into a sefer, I don’t know).

The point of the above paragraph is that even though bais medresh and kollel guys are not “required” to write up and review every point from every shiur they hear–that is what they SHOULD do…

IF YOU GO TO A SHIUR, YOU SHOULD COME OUT OF THE SHIUR BEING ABLE TO TYPE UP EVERYTHING THAT WAS SAID IN SUCH A COHERENT FORM THAT A PERSON WHO DIDN’T GO TO THE SHIUR WOULD BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING THAT WAS SAID BY READING WHAT YOU WROTE.

If you do that, THEN you’re taking shiur seriously (though of coarse there’s still seder). If you can’t do that, then you should work until you CAN do that. I’m not gonna make a big deal out of post high school bais medresh guys who just space out in seder/shiur and often don’t know what’s going on–but if you’re in full time kollel and being supported by someone who either works/or worked for their money to support you–then you SHOULD be taking shiur (and seder) so seriously that you can know every single thing that was said in a shiur. Seriously. Everything you do–you should take it seriously.

Personally, I haven’t been fully exposed to the working world yet as I am just in my second year of law school…But I can tell you that I thought I worked hard when I was in bais medresh after high school, but after going through first year of law school I realized that I could have worked so much harder and taken my torah learning even more serious. There are a lot of Jewish lawyers out there, so I think we’re all aware that the legal profession is very tough, and I just don’t see many full time kollel guys honestly working even close to as serious and hard as one has to in law school and in practicing (american) law.

And going back to the shidduch aspect of this discussion, a seemingly large amount of BY girls want full time learners (maybe because they are specifically told they should marry full time learners in school?) and they fail to realize that many guys who work part time/learn part time have as much or even more love for learning, and take their learning as serious or even more serious, than some guys who learn in kollel full time. That also makes sense to me, because a person who works part time/learns part time realizes that they only have a “limited” amount of time they could learn every day, so that makes them take their torah learning time more seriously and also causes them to love learning torah because they can look forward to it after (or before) working everyday.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say for now. If you read this whole post, I hope you enjoyed it.

Continue discussing.