Tweet of the Day: the failure of the kollel system

Friends realizing after 10+ years of marriage, many children, and no money, that they've been brainwashed and kollel system is broken. Oy.

Twitter name is not being revealed, because the author keeps the account protected. I will just say the tweet was published by someone "yeshivish" in the US - it was not published out of hatred of kollels or haredim.

This made Tweet of the Day because I find it to be a very important issue. I have met many such people over the years. This issue is far more common a problem in Israel than in the US, but in the past 10 or 15 years it has grown increasingly in the US as well.

In the US most people are still at least getting a basic general education, but in the frum community it is most common to then go to a yeshiva High School, where even the most intense general education is just a bit more than basic. After that, most yeshiva guys will learn for a few years in beis Medrash, a couple years in Israel at some point, get married and go to kollel. And then at some point, the content of the above tweet becomes fairly common. The yeshiva/kollel system does not train or prepare most people for even careers in education or the rabbinate, let alone anything else.

In Israel it is even worse, for three reasons:
1. the lack of even a rudimentary general educational background
2. the army issue
3. the even more polarized issue against general education and career planning/training in the haredi yeshiva system

So, as the kollel couple gets older with more children, he gets more stuck in the system with no way out. Yes, there are vocational schools designed for such people who at 30 or 35 are suddenly finding themselves on the way out of kollel but with nowhere to go. These vocational schools generally do a fabulous job with those they can help. They spend 6 months to a year giving basic education, training the student to pass his bagrut exams, and then 2 to 4 years of training for a vocation or degree.

The problem is that these vocational schools are too often too little too late for too many people. Again, for some people these schools are great. For many they don't help at all. Someone leaving kollel at 35 years of age, for example, is often in a situation where he does not have the money to pay for so much schooling, and even more difficult is that he is leaving kollel because he has recognized that he needs to leave kollel and get a job to support his family. He generally is not in a situation to live 3 to 5 more years with no income. So now he has his own tuition to pay for, some of which might be covered by grants, in addition to tuitions for his kids that are increasing with age as private schools in the haredi system get more expensive once the kids are high school age.

The argument for the current system is that when people are young they should be completely dedicated to learning  to absorbing the Torah and giving them the chance to become great talmidei chachomim, even if the odds are very small for each individual person that he will become someone great in Torah. Why waste time and brain power when they are young, expecting each person to fail and require that education, when that time and brain power can be used to grow in torah and give the best possible chance, even if only small, to succeed in a long-term yeshiva career. And there is the additional argument that to mold one great Torah scholar we must sacrifice even a thousand other students.

There is something to that argument. Nobody wants to harm their own kids chance at success in Torah learning. And while it is nice to say that we must sacrifice a thousand in order to achieve the one, that is only when it is not you or your child among those being sacrificed. if the yeshiva/kollel system is going to continue, there must be some changes made to it. perhaps it should take on more of a direction of figuring out who is destined to make a career out of learning Torah, and which kollel guys are not going to make it. those guys, who by now have little in the way of choices, should perhaps be trained in teaching Torah, in the rabbinate, as shochtim or sofrim, if not in general education and general career tracks. At least then they will have been involved in Torah all those extra years but will come out of it with a potential career or at least some skill with which to earn a parnassa. Too many people are being forced out of kollel, by age and finances, and find themselves at a nearly unemployable age with no skills that are marketable, no parnassa options, and nothing to do.

And that is if the kollel system is to continue as is. I still think it is better if everyone would be given at least a basic education, as well as evaluating students at a much younger age. Students evaluated as not having a successful future in the yeshiva, should be pushed at some point - maybe after 3-5 years in yeshiva/kollel, or maybe by a specific age, to prepare for a career outside of the yeshiva, whether it is in education, or computer programming, or engineering, plumbing or law or whatever - each person at that point can figure it out, perhaps with guidance. Obviously some might want to stay in yeshiva so badly that even after recognizing their lack of potential they choose to remain, and that will be their right. but it should not just happen because the person is offered no choices, as society pushes him onward on a path that is not right for him, and he only recognizes it too late.

I don't have the answers, but the kollel system is failing too many people. As long as it is someone else, most people haven't cared. Something needs to change, because it is becoming our own problem more and more as the yeshiva and kollel systems continue to grow and our kids become these future problems.

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