Reply To: Kollel – Talmud Torah Kneged Kulam

WHAT TO EXPECT OF YOUR HUSBAND

Please note: You are not going to marry Reb Chaim Shmuelevitz. You are going to marry a guy. He may be a Kollel guy, but a guy nonetheless. 22, 23 years old guys are not finished products. He will not talk, walk, think, or behave like Reb Chaim Shmuelevitz. He may come late to shachris. That is not a sign that he is “not cut out for Kollel”, nor is it a sign that he is a “faker”. Your Kollel husband may be a struggling human being just like you or anybody else. The Shiva yipol tzdik v’kam principal will apply to him to. Your job is to give this raw diamond the encouragement, support, and help him grow into the great person that he can be.

You are not his Mashgiach. You are his helper. There is no third role. It’s either “ezer” – a helper, or “kenegdo” – an opponent. You are one or the other. Guys need wives to help them grow, to get them through their struggles, to pick them up when they fall, to encourage them and believe in them. Not to be their mothers or mashgichim or supervisors.

If every yeshiva guy that came late to davening, or shmoozed with his chavrusa now and then in the middle of seder, or wasn’t the biggest masmid in the world was made to leave Yeshiva, you would have many of today’s Roshei Yeshiva, Rabbanim, Rebbeim, and Talmidei Chachamim, doing computers or something. You cannot predict the final outcome of a person based on a minute-to-minute assessment of how precise he is about being where hes supposed to be on time or the length of time he spends in Yeshiva without going to the coffee room.

There are other yardsticks, which are much more meaningful when judging the odds of a young man becoming great. These go more in the direction of the intensity of his thirst for learning, his desire to become great, his valuing of greatness and his commitment to pursue it. His values and dreams and desires are, at that point in his life, more telling than his attendance records.

Girls tend to assess their husbands in terms of discipline; the husbands assess themselves based on their growth, which may or may not be proportionate to their discipline.

And the husbands were taught all their life to assess themselves like that, because that is how their Rebbeim assessed them – in terms of potential and commitment and desire.

The goal of a Kolel man is to grow and become the biggest Talmid Chacham he can. Often, husbands and wives are not on the same page regarding what is considered vital to that endeavor, at least while someone is in his growing stages.

Girls often think that (a) their husbands are already complete products when they are just married and (b) they assess their husband’s value as a Ben Torah by their discipline, which is just one small ingredient in the recipe.

The first thing to know is, you are not marrying Reb Chaim Shmuelevitz. The second thing is, even Rebitzen Shmuelevitz didn’t marry Reb Chaim Shmuelevitz. It takes many many years to become R. Chaim Shmuelevitz. He struggled too. We all do.

Rav Hutner’s letter describing how it is sad that we don’t realize how much our Gedolim struggled to become Gedolim, and in how many battles the Yetzer Horah defeated the Chofetz chaim, for instance, before he became the Chofetz Chaim, also applies to young men in Kollel. Or, more accurately, young guys in Kollel.

One of the reasons for this disconnect between the girls’ ideas of what Bnei Torah should be versus the Bnei Torahs’ ideas, is that girls go to school where they have role models, and they tend to think that the boys’ role models are kind of male versions of their own. So for instance, they figure they know of a big rebitzen, and they figure a Rosh Yeshiva is a male version of their rebitzens. But it’s not so. The Rebitzen, no matter how old and wise and talented she is, received her formal Judaic training in high school and a year or 2 of seminary. Full time education for women does not go beyond that. And that is altogether not a problem – women have the responsibility of raising a family and learning is not their full time job. Fine. But we must understand that creating a role model for Yeshiva guys — a Rosh Yeshiva — takes years and years and years of hard work, in Yeshiva, going to Shiurim, learning b’chavrusa, full time, and more.

So when a girl is married to a guy with a few years Bais Medrash experience under his belt, she sometimes thinks that he’s already supposed to be a big role model, like her rebitzens. But it doesn’t work that way. The trajectory that guys follow to greatness is sooooo different than that of girls. And if you want to be able to understand where your guy is coming from, you need to know his path to growth.

Guys use completely different benchmarks of success and growth than girls do. And if you’re using a girls standards on a guy, its like measuring a liquid in inches or distance by the pound. Sadly so many guys are being labeled as “fakers” or “not cut out for learning” by their wives simply because they did not know how to assess what it takes to be “cut out for learning”.