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One of the things that I struggle with is that Yeshivas today just aren’t like the way you want them. When I think of Yeshiva, I think of people studying Germara and Chumash for the whole day without any secular studies. I know that we have to keep up with the modern world, and therefore some people say that we have to be active participants in it, but why haven’t we kept that old shtetl way of life? You guys might give an obvious answer, but I feel that is the way back to a life of just Judaisms, with no distractions. Please tell me your opinion on this subject, all responses are appreciated.
When you are in a little town in Poland with no electricity or running water, fewer social interactions and obligations, and no non-Jews to deal with, it is easier to go back to shtetl life.
Today, it just doesn’t work the same way, for many reasons:
1) Earning a living today requires us to be involved in secular society. This, in turns, affects the yeshiva system.
2)Niskatnu Hadoros
3) Back in the old shtetl days, nobody had “secular” studies. If you were good at chopping wood, you became a woodcutter. If you had deft hands, you could be a tailor. If you were ambitious, you were a merchant. Today, you must know proper English in order to pass a driving test, serve in jury duty, register to vote, and a host of other things that are vital to today’s life.
4) There were no cars back then, which made it easier to and learn all day, because there was nothing else to do and no other place to go to.
And a host of other reasons.
Back in the shtetl, you were too busy trying to make a living to spend much time in the beis medrash. The reality of shtetl life doesn’t shtim with your romantic vision. For the vast majority of Jews in the Russian empire, formal Jewish education ended at bar mitzvah. Only the very few who either had wealth or were from rabbinic families were able to continue learning into young adulthood. Of course, informal learning continued. There were chaburos for Mishna, Gemorah, etc. but the idea that the the shtetl was some kind of idyllic Jewish refuge is nonsense. To paraphrase Dickens, life in the shtetl was “Like an English winter day. Dirty, dark and short.”
FIF – Don’t fool yourself, Jews in the shtetl in Poland dealt aplenty with the goyim. Your other reasons might have validity, but don’t delude yourself to think that we lived separate from the goyim with little to no contact. It simply wasn’t that way.
In the words of my Bubbby “the Nazis took that world from us”. Instead, we have to understand what our job is now and how we can be ehrlich yiddin.
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that response is legend..wait for it…dary!!
by the way, that mitzvah can be fufilled by teaching your son to fill out forms for public aid nowadays.
In Europe, the yeshivas were not intended for everyone. Today they are, at least nominally.
Also, in Europe, the yeshivas had secular studies. Not only Volozhin, which was known for opposition to secular studies despite having them; but some lesser known yeshivas were not even opposed to secular studies in principle. I have a niggling semi-memory that Telz had secular studies and that R’ Leizer Gordon supported it, but I can’t back that up.
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