Harotzehbilumshmo – If in my job I was to regularly put my head down for a quick rest or play on my phone for a few minutes or go out every hour or so for a coffee/cigarette I think I could rightly be accused of not taking the job seriously. Your definition of toroscho keva (which, by the way, is not a mitzva nor a chiyuv nor even a halocho – merely a piece of advice, granted it is advice from a tannah and should be taken seriously but nevertheless nothing more than advice; providing a parnassah for your family is a mitzvas aseh d’oraisah according to R’ Yehuda [who we pasken like]) would not seem to apply to those who behave the same way in the beis hamedrash. Like it or not, this is the vast majority. Sure when they learn, they learn shtark. Sure they may be ‘involved’ but what they are involved in is the system, not the torah per se that they are learning. Sure there are some very special kollel guys but they are by no means at all anywhere near the majority. Most are just jobniks and that’s the honest truth of it. They turn up, they put in the hours (more or less), they go home. Learning is just what they happen to do.
As for your last gripe, I believe the reason for that is that working people are so looked down upon in yeshivish circles that it wouldn’t matter one jot if the working people learned harder, they’d still get flak for simply being working guys. If the argument against you is that you left yeshiva and shut your gemoro forever then it is enough to defend yourself by saying that you do learn at all. Of course everyone has room for improvement and many people both learning and working could put more into their learning but the current false dichotomy of you either sit in kollel and are pure and holy or go to work and are second-class is what the OP and the rest of us are trying to show up for its wrongness.
ihear – Well thank you for your classic reductio ad absurdum. First of all, halevai it was 9:30 – more like any time between 9:30 and 10:30; it kind of fills up slowly, y’know as people come when they come. And most guys open their gemoros and have a quick “how are you today?” shmooze before they get into the actual learning. A great deal do come in and go straight for the coffee, have a drink for a few minutes, before going back to the beis (often still with the coffee that they proceed to take occasional drinks from over the course of the next 15-20 minutes). You try getting away with that in a workplace.
And to answer your question:
have you ever even stepped foot into a yeshiva? into the mir?
Yup. Learned in the mir for 3 years. After learning in another very well-known yeshiva for a number of years. So all my information comes direct from the source, not (as your baseless accusation suggests) from ignorance.
FriendInFlatbush –
Men are so much more adversely affected by this culture due to their raging yetzer horas.
Oh dear. This again. Ok, so lets start from the beginning. In terms of subjective feelings there is no way to compare male and female yetzer horahs – no guy has ever experienced a girl’s and no girl a guy’s. In terms of looking at the mechanisms through which male and female desires work biologically and neurologically speaking they are identical. Both are based on the release of testosterone and dopamine, both are mediated by limbic system (which is the system in the brain primarily concerned with emotional processing) and the medial preoptic area (concerned with satisfaction of desire). In other words, both males and females find people attractive based on both physical and emotional conditions. The strength of activation in these brain areas is absolutely equal, i.e. when a male or female is confronted with someone that they find attractive and who induces desires in them the amount of brain activity is exactly the same in exactly the same areas and controlled by exactly the same hormones and neurotransmitters. In fact, some researchers suggest that in addition female desire can also be regulated by estrogen implying that at certain times of the month female desires may be stronger than male ones, though this has not been universally accepted. So please stop with the male yetzer horah vs female yetzer horah business, it’s simply untrue.