IF you look at the frum community from the outside, what you would notice is a community in which learning Torah and doing mitsvos is the overwhelming activity (to the detriment of such activities as hobbies, the arts, recreations the goyim love that we don’t talk about here, sports, secular studies and making a parnassah beyond what is needed to maintain an ever-changing “respectable” standard of living). The fact that a person in modern day America or Eretz Yisrael can learn close to full time and still have a standard of living that 200 years ago would have been considered to be very bourgeois at the least (in terms of housing, medical care, food, transportation, etc.) helps explain why “kollel” people are perceived today to be willing to spend more time learning than in the past. What Yidden like best has always been learning, and there never has been such a good time for it as in the early 21st century.
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