Showing posts with label working for a living. Show all posts
Showing posts with label working for a living. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Yeshivos Have A Duty To Teach Secular Studies To Our Kids

Rabbi Horowitz has a new article in Mishpacha Magazine touting the value of secular education in our community. While most yeshivos in the United States offer a program of secular studies, the attitude in many of them is that secular studies are a waste of time and not important. The kids pick up on this idea to the extent that when the school administration pays lip service to the importance of secular studies, the kids know it's a joke and, for the most part, learn next to nothing over the course of twelve years. In many schools, I'm positive that yeshivos would completely abandon secular studies in a heartbeat if they could get away with it.

Of course, if secular studies were something that could be easily dispensed with in today's society, then it might not be such a tragedy.* However, in today's society, in order to make yourself attractive to employers, you simply have to have certain skills, chief among them being a decent command of the English language, mathematics and basic computer skills. If you do not have those basic skills, you are going to find your options on the job market are very limited. Limited job options lead to limited pay and a greater likelihood that even when you are fully employed, you may still find yourself near or below the poverty line. And while being near or below the poverty line is bad for anyone, for an Orthodox Jews, it's far worse -- just imagine trying to pay yeshiva tuition for multiple kids on a salary of under $30,000.**

A significant part of the problem, in my estimation, comes from the fact that work, itself, is discouraged and looked down upon. Who cares if basic skills are needed for the job market if you never intend on looking for a job to begin with? I've commented in the past on how the very idea of working for a living is denigrated in our yeshivos (sometimes to the point where working fathers are denigrated in front of their children). So, since working for a living is deemed "unworthy" for a ben torah and life skills such as English, math, etc. are needed only for that purpose, the kids very quickly get the idea that the English classes are unimportant.

On top of this, you have to add the fact that computer skills are needed in today's environment as well. However, the hysteria over the (very real) dangers of the internet have caused some schools to shy away from computer studies at all -- even in an off-line environment. I don't have any definite examples, but it would not surprise me to find schools that restrict comptuer use, even off-line, in people's homes. As a result, some kids may try to enter the workforce without the slightest idea of what a word processor or a spreadsheet is. In fact, Rabbi Horowitz makes that point in this article:

A close friend of mine owns a business in an area with a large charedi population and is always looking to provide avrechim with jobs. His ‘entrance exam’ is rather simple. He gives prospective applicants a pad and paper and asks them to write two paragraphs in English expressing the reasons they would like to land a job in his company, and then to turn on a computer and type those lines. His thinking is that if an applicant cannot perform those two tasks, they are useless to him in his business.

That's it. Turn on the computer and write two paragraphs in English about why you want the job. Lest you think that this is not a difficult task, Rabbi Horowitz tells us about the results:

Suffice it to say that this would probably be my last column in Mishpacha if I shared with you the percentage of applicants he turns away because they cannot do that.

Unfortunately, the "learning only" model of the Jewish community is on the verge of bursting. Thousands upon thousands of people are learning and not working, and the signs have been apparent for a while now that this is a situation that cannot be sustained indefinitely. At some point, many of those people currently sitting in kollel are going to have to go to work. The real tragedy isn't the fact that they have to go to work (although, from a religious point of view, that is bad). The real tragedy is that many people are being thrown into the job market with few or no marketable skills. They've been told by their yeshivos (either explicitly or implictly) that obtaining job skills is a waste of time, and now they are paying the price for listening to authority figures they trusted.

People need to understand that yeshivos today are not the same as they were back in the shtetl. Yeshivos today need to serve a dual purpose. The first and foremost purpose is to teach Torah and instill Torah values in our children.*** But the second purpose is to provide a basic secular education for our children, to enable them to be able to enter the job market or puruse higher education when and if they choose (or are forced) to do so. If a yeshiva does not provide this basic education (and make sure that the students are sufficiently motivated to acquire these skills) then they are condemning the vast majority of them to a lifetime of poverty and struggle. And that, in my estimation, is probably a greater spiritual danger to them than anything they might encounter in a book, magazine, blog or college course.

The Wolf


* I, personally, believe that secular knowledge does has value in and of itself, but that can certainly be put up for debate.

** Poverty level for a family of 6 in 2008 is $28,400 in the contiguous 48 states.

*** When we went looking for an elementary school for Walter many years ago, there was one school that seemed good and seemed to fit us in a number of areas. However, for the younger grades, they had secular studies in the morning and Judaic studies in the afternoon. It was purely a scheduling matter, not a statement on the relative importance of the subjects. Nonetheless, we felt that it was important that Walter understand that Judaic studies were more important, and so we did not send him to that school for fear that the schedule would inadvertently send him the wrong message.

Sunday, August 31, 2008

The Answer is Nine To Five

Jonathan Rosenblum has a new article on Cross Currents entitled "Can We Talk Seriously About Poverty?" He describes how the chareidi community in Israel is suffering from terrible poverty -- about how families are now receiving only between a quarter to a third of what they were receiving from the government earlier and are now facing even further cuts.

He also goes on to discuss that aside from the obvious consequence of not having enough to pay the bills/put food on the table/put clothing on the family's backs, he also describes the less-than-obvious consequences of the crushing poverty -- the disruption of shalom bayis, the fact that poverty increases the incidence of "at-risk" teens, presenting severe challenges to people who want to live their lives in honesty, etc.

After outlining the problem, he lists three possible solutions:

  • increased government aid
  • increased charitable contributions from Jews living outside of Israel
  • adopting a simpler lifestyle
Esther, over at Debt and Life in Ohio, notes that Jonathan Rosenbloom seems to have left out the most obvious solution of all -- get jobs. As she states:

Then I get to the end, to the part where it is supposed to say that it's time for everyone to get jobs, right? I mean, that's the whole point of saying that we need to get out of poverty and stop relying on others.

Shockingly, he doesn't even say one sentence about getting jobs! His conclusion is "What the solutions might be I do not know. But it is clear that we cannot afford to hide our heads in the sand and not address the issue."

Um...How does not getting jobs address the issue????

While Esther managed to hit the nail right on the head, she has, at the same time, missed one very simple point. I don't think that Jonathan Rosenblum is looking for a real solution to the problem of poverty among Israeli chareidim. What I think he's looking for is a solution to the problem of poverty among Israeli chareidim while keeping the current system in place. In other words, if chareidim went out to get jobs, then they wouldn't be chareidim (at least not in the same sense, anyway). If they didn't spend all day learning, then the raison d'etre of the entire system would be destroyed. Of course if they went out and got jobs that would solve the poverty problem, but they would lose who they were.

The problem, in my estimation, is that the chareidim that currently exist never before existed in Jewish history. At no other time since the generation of the Wilderness has an entire community had their needs provided for in such a way that no one had to work. No Jewish government before the current state of Israel -- not under Joshua, David, Solomon, etc. provided for an entire community to be able to sit and learn and do no work -- and certainly no non-Jewish government did either. Throughout all of Jewish history you either had gedolim and communal leaders who worked for a living as did everyone else, or else you had a select few who were supported by the community so that they could continue their studies and, in turn, become the future leaders of K'lal Yisroel. Never did you have a situation where the government simply handed out money to so many people so that they could sit and learn all day.

The problem is that such a situation is simply unsustainable. In discussing the possibility of securing increased government funding for chareidim, Jonathan Rosenblum writes:

Even representing a crucial bloc in the fragile government coalition, Shas has been unable to make any headway on its number one legislative goal: increasing child allowances. And Shas’s demands are exceedingly modest – no more than 30 shekels per month per child, or 240 shekels for a family with eight children. That does not even cover the (reduced) tuition for one son in yeshiva.

And that's the end of the matter. Not once does he discuss the propriety of having the taxpayers (since, in the end, the "government" isn't some magical entity with the ability to create money -- every shekel that it gives out has to come from a taxpayer) fund the chareidi lifestyle. I always wondered (in a morbid sort of way) if the chareidim took control of the government and imposed massive tax hikes to allow chareidim to have decent incomes while not having to work, how long it would be before the chilonim and non-chareidi Orthodox Jews either (a) left the country in droves, eliminating the tax base or (b) started a massive tax-revolt.

Putting aside the issue of the propriety of forcing working Jews to pay for the chareidi lifestyle, let's assume for a moment that they can get the votes and increase the child allowance. At some point, the bubble has to burst, because the chareidi population growth is faster than the working population growth. The situation is, in some ways, analogous to Social Security here in the United States, where the population collecting Social Security is growing at a much faster rate than the population that is paying for it. So, even if they could get the votes for an increase in the child allowance, it is simply a short term solution. In the long run, government aid is simply not the answer to running a system that is unsustainable.

So, what is to be done? Personally, I agree with Jonathan Rosenblum in that we cannot stick our heads in the sand and pretend that the problem does not exist. The problem has to be addressed now, before the system crashes (although, based on some of the descriptions in his article, I'm beginning to wonder if the system hasn't begun to crash). The real solution is simple -- it's not throwing more money into the system. The real solution is to change the system into something that is more sustainable. The real solution is to realize that we are not in the Wilderness, that it wasn't ever intended in Jewish history that the entire community should learn and not work, and that we have to identify who should be learning all day and who should be working and learning on a part-time basis. The real solution begins with identifying the real problem. The real problem isn't the poverty -- that's just a symptom. The real problem is the system itself.

The Wolf

Monday, November 05, 2007

What Is Happening To Us?

There have been several news stories over the past few months (and general trends that are observable over the last few years) that have me wondering where we are going as a people.

Of course, everyone knows about the violence on the buses in Israel. Last year, Miriam Shear was beaten on a bus for refusing to leave a seat that she was legally entitled to keep. This year, we have another story of a woman who was beaten for not leaving a seat (I don't know if this was a "mehadrin" [separate seating] bus for not, but even if it was, there is no excuse for beating someone up over this anyway), and an Israeli soldier was beaten for coming to her aid.

We have stories of vigilantes who go around destroying clothing they find offensive and torching people's businesses for selling items that they find offensive.

We have stories about ever-more extreme steps being taken to separate the sexes to the point where concerts are banned even when they have separate sex seating. We take away almost every opportunity for adult singles to meet each other and then we complain that there is a "shidduch crisis." In some circles, adult singles aren't even allowed to meet until the prospective date is vetted out for every possible detail from the truly legitimate avenues of inquiry to the downright silly questions of tablecloths and loafers versus laces.

We have stories where boys are told to extort large sums of money from their future fathers-in-law, even when they can't afford it, because the yeshiva's prestige is more important than the father-in-law's finances and shalom bayis.

Whereas once we were a people proud to be educated in all areas of endeavor, we now seek to become a people who shun all knowledge outside the daled amos (four cubits) of Torah. Women's education programs were banned in Israel (where, in Chareidi circles, women are the main breadwinners of the household) and those who already completed the program have found themselves blacklisted from employment in their chosen field of teaching. Instead of recognizing that there are matters that can be disputed within Judaism, we now seek to outright ban anyone who doesn't toe the official party line.

We've become a people who are so afraid of anything that isn't 100% Jewish in origin that we seek to ban pizza shops or mobile restaurants who dare to operate in our neighborhoods.

We've fostered an environment where not only is it not acceptable to simply "stay out of trouble," but we've defined "trouble" as not actively learning Torah at any given moment. Sporting activities, day trips and the like are now ruled out in many communities because the boys should be learning Torah and not wasting their time with recreation. My Rav recently refelcted on the fact that when he was a boy, there were Saturday night "fun programs" of sports and the like to keep boys out of trouble; now it's all learning programs, when, in fact, young boys (for the most part) are not really capable of keeping up such a schedule. In his words "they should be playing, not learning."

We've set up a society where everyone scrupulously follows all the rules, not because they want to, or because they think the rules are correct; but because they know that if they don't, it will be held against their children when it comes time for shidduchim. Everyone struggles to keep up with the chumra (stringency) -of-the-month club so that they shouldn't seem like second rate Jews.

We've created an environment where people are no longer trusted to be able to police and think for themselves. Cell phones with text messaging has been ruled assur (forbidden) because people might use it to contact others of the opposite gender. Schools have tried to institute policies where parents cannot have Internet access in their house on pain of expulsion on the pretense that they are protecting the children (which, if it were truly the case, then they should just ban the children's use of the Internet). I'm kind of surprised that no one has tried to say that it's forbidden to sleep in the same house with one's wife when she's a niddah.

We have set up a world where "work" has become a dirty word. For thousands of years, from the time of the entry into Eretz Yisroel until recently, the vast majority of our people earned their living while learning part-time, while the truly exceptional scholars among us were supported by the community in full-time learning. Now, it seems that everyone is *expected* to learn full-time and that people who work because they have to either face an economic reality or because they have the maturity to recognize that they aren't capable of full-time learning are looked down on and discriminated against in shidduchim.

We have a community that judges you more by the material that your yarmulke is composed of than the contents of your neshama (soul) and where the material that your skirt is made out of is more determinant of your observance than how well you actually observe the mitzvos (commandments).

With all this currently happening in our midst right now, I shudder to think at where we'll be in twenty to thirty years if nothing changes.

We need to stop leaning always to the right and return to a centrist position. In the sea, a ship that lists too far to the right or the left will eventually sink. Only a ship that is even and upright can survive the voyage. If we don't, the challenges we face in the next generation will be far worse than those we face now. The "teens-at-risk" and "adults-at-risk" situations didn't happen in a vacuum -- they came about at least partly because people have found that Orthodox Judaism has gone so far to the right that they no longer have a place in it. The further we go to the right, the larger these problems will become as more and more people will feel alienated in their own religion.

The Wolf

Monday, May 14, 2007

What, Exactly, Is Expected Of Us?

Over at WildTumor, Moshe shows us an email conversation between a well-known rabbi (his identity hidden behind the label "Rabbi B.") and a friend of his ("AL") regarding the merits of learning vs. working in the "shidduch market." The rabbi's opinion in this conversation is that if one is not learning full time, he's not doing what God wants him to do.

Here are some excerpts:

Rabbi B: ...However, there is no question in my mind that you are NOT doing that which HaShem wants you to do. He didn't give us the Torah so that a person would spend 40 prime years of his life learning one hour a day!!

and

AL: There is nothing more that I want than to build a torah home based on yiras shomayim with someone who is commited to those same ideals. I don't consider myself tainted because I'm out in the working world.

Rabbi B: "Tainted"? Why tainted? However, you cannot honestly believe that this is what HaShem had in mind when he gave us the Torah.
Come on now!

and

Rabbi B: Anyone who really believes that he is a true Oved HaShem when he spends only one hour a day in the BM is really very very confused.

Now, I'm certainly no scholar, and I'm certainly no tzaddik. But what I can do is read... I can open up a chumash and take a look at several sections. Specifically, the Torah gives us all sorts of laws that apply to farmers. Why? If everyone is to spend all of our time learning, then why give us laws that apply to farmers? There are laws that delineate how one is to behave in business dealings. Why? Who is going to go into business? There are laws covering all sorts of professional and personal activities that shouldn't be necessary if we are expected to learn all day long.

Many of our gedolim throughout the years supported themselves by taking jobs. Were they not doing what God expected of them? My son's Rebbe (fifth grade) doesn't learn as he could for several hours a day because he's busy teaching elementary gemara and chumash. If he learned full time, I have no doubt that he could answer many more difficult ktzosim (see the original exchange) than he can teaching little kids. Is he not living up to his potential? Is he a disappointment in God's eyes as well?

Ultimately, however, I think that the there is a much more basic point to make here. The point is that we, as people, live in this world. God created us as we are, with our physical needs for food, clothing and shelter. God, in His wisdom, decreed that man must work for his living. God provides for us, but only indirectly. It's with His help and guidance that I earn a living, but, in the end, I still have to show up at work every day. I suppose that if I didn't want to work and God wanted me to have a living, He could cause a winning lottery ticket to show up in my wallet one day... but generally, He does not work like that. The way of the world is that one needs to earn a living (or be supported by others).

To my knowledge, there are very few cases where people have been miraculously sustained and therefore free to pursue Torah learning with absolutely no encumbrances. The most famous example was probably the Generation in the Wilderness. God provided manna from heaven, their clothing did not wear out and their shoes did not decay. As such most, if not all, of the Jews were able to pursue learning full-time. Once that ended (upon the entry into Eretz Yisroel), did people generally learn full time? No - they became farmers, vintners, metalsmithes, scribes and any of the dozens of other occupations that were needed to create a functioning nation. Were there people who learned full time? Certainly - but certainly it wasn't a majority or even a significant minority.

Another famous example concerns Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son Rabbi Elazar, who were sustained by God in a cave for over a dozen years while in hiding from the Roman authorities. During the dozen years that they were in hiding, they did nothing but learn, as God provided for their needs miraculously. Indeed, what happened upon their exit from the cave? Their world-view was so out of step with everyone else's that God had to remind them that working for a living was not wrong or evil. In other words, God explicitly told them that man was meant to work - and sent them back to their cave for another year until they could learn that lesson.

So, what does it all boil down to? When Rabbi B says that a working person is "NOT doing what HaShem wants him to," he is clearly wrong. After all, if God didn't want us to earn a living, why did he send R. Shimon and his son back to the cave? He should have instructed them to convince all of K'lal Yisroel to put down their tools and learn all day. But that's not what He did.

Does this mean that full-time learning is wrong and contrary to God's will? No, I don't believe it is. The Jewish nation has need of professionals in every time period -- whether they be farmers and vintners in the ancient agragiran society of Israel of old, or doctors, lawyers and computer professionals in today's world. But they also need people who are experts in Torah -- in every age. We need people who learn full-time so that we can have poskim and rabbis and teachers. But we can't be a nation of exclusively learners. And those who work full-time and learn when they are not working are doing just as much to help further society.

If God truly wanted all the Jews to learn Torah full-time and not engage in professional activities, then He'd provide for us in the manner that He did in the Wilderness. The fact that He does not, and that he gave laws regarding our professional conduct, clearly indicates that it is permitted and worthy for us to enter into such activities.

The Wolf

Hat tip: Ezzie

Monday, December 25, 2006

Helping Singles

I saw a sign in shul on Shabbos, indicating how we could all help solve the "shidduch crisis." The sign indicated that one can help all the desparate Jewish singles in the world to find their mates by... learning the laws of Shmiras HaLashon! They even started a Yahoo! group SegulahForSingles for this. As it states on the group's homepage:

The power of shmiras halashon is awesome. By learning just two lessons a day of shmiras halashon via e-mail, we can b'ezras Hashem do our part in helping singles throughout klal yisroel.

Now, I'm certainly in favor of people learning Hilchos Shmiras HaLashon. Learning Torah is always a good thing. But somehow, if we, as a community, want to do something to help solve the "shidduch crisis," there are other steps that we can take that would prove far more productive than learning Hilchos Shmiras HaLashon:

  • We could reduce some of the societal barriers that prevent young men and young women from meeting each other. As it is, in many parts of our community, young men and women have only option to meet through "official" channels -- the shadchan. By increasing the chances that young men and women have to meet each other, you are almost certain to increase the marriage rate.

  • We could go back to judging prospective grooms and brides on their strength and content of their character, instead ofwho their parents, grandparents and uncles are, how long one parent will support the young couple and instead of what political gains the marriage will gain for the family of the bride or groom.

  • We could educate young men and women about the things that are important in the search for a spouse. We could educate them that things such as what type of shoes he wears, what tablecloth her mother uses on the Shabbos table and so on are not important at all. We could teach them to focus on the things that *are* important -- Is he a good kind person? Does she share the same outlook on life that I do? Will he make me happy? Am I physically attracted to her? (Yes, it's important.) Does he make me feel special? Does she have any important character defects? Does he want the same things in life that I do? -- Those are the important things in the search for a spouse. Most of the rest is nonsense.

  • We could teach our young women that learning full-time isn't for everyone and that working for a living is not a b'dieved. We could teach young men that marriage isn't only about finding a father-in-law who will support your learning for ten years. There are certainly those who can, and should be encouraged to learn full-time after marriage - but we, as a community, have to realize that it isn't for everyone and should not include everyone.

Driving these points home to our young men and women will do far more to end the shidduch crisis than learning Hilchos Shmiras HaLashon.

The Wolf