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I’m not sure what it means, but the purpose is for the brother who has a decent voice to get his singing out of the way, to make room for the truly atrocious cousin to sing at dinner.
I think that philosophers have pointed out that words are useful insofar as we use them to describe different things in common ways that we all understand, and although words appear to describe the essence of things, they do not do that.
I think the word you’re looking for is chemistry.
Syag, I assume that there is some correlation between the number of girls and the number of slots, and I also assume that people tend to apply to enough schools to give themselves a shot at getting into one. Otherwise, according to your math, only 13% of girls would go to seminary.
Based on those assumptions, it would make sense to apply to six or seven seminaries, but at the very least three. If all of your ideal seminaries agree that you’re not for them, then maybe it’s time to find some new ideals.
IMHO, it requires a balancing test, like a decision whether to go walking on the boardwalk in late spring, or to go to an amusement park in the summer. Although I think that under normal circumstances in my situation the answer would usually be not to do it, especially for a class.
I’m sorry that you feel you have to conform to someone else’s idea of what your type is. This is not what people want to hear, but you most likely weren’t excluded by mistake. You were most likely excluded because in fact you don’t meet the shallow and narrowly defined criteria of acceptance, which are set arbitrarily and don’t bear any resemblance to what objective goodness is. Don’t be upset that they mistakenly misjudged you, be upset that you judge yourself by someone else’s idea of quality.
Nimnu v’gamru: The gedolim instituted this system of chinuch from the ground up, except the parts that we don’t like, in which people who run schools refuse to listen to the gedolim.
As an intelligent person who has many intelligent friends, I would not want my children to go to a school where intelligence is frowned upon; nor to associate with children of the type of families that promote that (joking about the associating part). I was in such a school only for high school and it took me years to recover. Unfortunately, many schools in the NY/NJ area seem to be that way these days.
There are two issues here – whether inclusion is a good thing, and how to address the situation if it’s not. If I had the time, (and I still dream I will some day) I would like to start a school for families that are ultra-frum but do not wish to promote mediocrity in every area other than learning.
I could never respect a gadol who went to Brooklyn College. At least Dr. Hutner-David went to Columbia. And PBA, that’s what it means to not have female rabbis – she can be the smartest person in the world, but because she’s a woman, she is lower on the totem pole than someone who went to Brooklyn College.
T613T, I can’t believe you would ignore her proper title in favor of some random honorific based on her husband’s position. She earned a doctorate; she deserves to be called Doctor.
On the topic of people being modern having gone to college, I believe that Dr. Bruria Hutner-David went to several elite colleges and went on to found perhaps the most yeshivish institution in the world.
T613T, Divorced women are not generally any kind of employee. Like the rest of the population, some are better employees, and some are worse.
I could rather easily imagine that a lot of the externalities of getting divorced in a homogeneous, close knit community could result in finding it harder to get a job, but it doesn’t mean that something nefarious is afoot.
I haven’t been to all Orthodox schools. All the schools that I have been to did not tolerate conflicting opinions from students. The only frum institution with which I have any personal knowledge of a different attitude is Ner Yisrael in Baltimore, which has some divergence among the rebbeim. I imagine that YU is like that as well.
LOL On the inside you look like every other frum yid too.
For me it’s still very intuitive. So for now, I’ll attempt to class the arguments and hopefully I’ll be able to express some of what I feel along the way.
1. The class of arguments which protest basic human psychology:
“All men want the best women” – Any man with reasonable self-esteem wants the best woman he can get. Same goes for women with men. This is healthy.
“All men want the most beautiful woman” Hashem made them that way.
“Women are better than men”. On IQ measures, for example, female IQs tend towards the mean, while male IQs tend to fall at the higher and lower ends of the spectrum. Same goes for beauty measures and psychological disorders (this is my personal meta-analysis of all the studies I ever read)
In other words, it’s not that women are better than men, but women are more uniform than men. I believe this applies to frumkeit as well. In general, women are more likely to be close to average, and men to either be way above average or way below average. So it’s not that women are better than men but women are more average than men. And that’s fine.
“Girls only want long-term learners” Not exactly, normal women want a man who they can trust to lead them through life. They also want him to be respected and learned. If being in learning symbolizes that that’s what they are going to want.
“It’s all about the money” It’s shocking, but humans like money, even frum humans. And life is expensive. And if you have six kids and a regular salary and didn’t save up any money for each of their futures’, that was irresponsible.
“Mother-in-laws are picky” She wants the best woman for her beloved son, as she should.
“Shadchanim only want to work with the rich / powerful / beautiful / talented” So does everyone.
And finally, “older men want to marry younger women” this makes sense not only psychologically, but biologically!
2. The class of arguments that uses misleading statistics:
“There is a shidduch crisis”
Prove it.
– “age gap pyramid” need I explain more.
Men have always married younger women. There is nothing new under the sun and there is absolutely no data to support this.
– “many girls won’t get married”
Based on age gap pyramid in most cases. Who won’t get married? Only poor girls? When won’t will they get married? Between the ages of 18 and 21? How can we help them? By throwing money at shadchanim?
– “It’s a numbers game, just make yourself attractive to most people”.
Some say that 90% of people can marry the other 90% of people. This is not true. Looks, personal issues, background, and geography do limit the people we are going to date and marry. And that’s fine – if no one had hakpados, we’d have an even harder time deciding who to marry!
-“There are 100s of good women for every good man.”
I don’t know men. But I do know women. I am involved with hidden people at risk, and women are great actresses. There’s a lot of truth to the boys = garlic, girls = onions analogy. also see women are more average above.
3. The class of arguments that uses emotional blackmail.
– Frumkeit fear-mongering.
The message that the frummer a woman is, the harder it is to get married, unless your father is a Rosh Yeshiva, is a dangerous one. I’ve heard this propagated by friends of mine whose parents are extremely chashuv, and was not impressed.
– Women are desperate to get married.
Men and women, we are ALL supposed to serve Hashem, that’s our goal in life, and unlike men, we can do that without marriage. We just WANT to serve Hashem with everything he gave us, physically and spiritually, so we want to get married. But men NEED to get married. They have the mitzva of Pru Ur’vu.
– Segulos
Lotteries and Segulos are a tax on the numerically challenged. Obviously, if you don’t participate, you don’t really care about getting married.
– If you were perfect, you’d have found your bashert by now.
This argument attempts to convince girls that they’re not married because they didn’t go to BJJ or have a crooked nose or their father wears blue shirts. I won’t bother responding.
– Comparing single women to agunos
That’s a really horrible comparison. I don’t even have the words to argue with it, but really?? An aguna suffers tremendously. Being single is just NOT COMPARABLE.
Let’s just focus on doing what we should be doing, growing and serving Hashem. All the rest is commentary.
The OP was to show not that the system is messed up, but our attitude is messed up, and NASI only reflects this devaluation of women, which is not actually true as in practice, nearly everyone does get married eventually.
This is a great post. I don’t know how I missed it the first time around.
Ty, ty, T613T
As someone who has taken “courses” in a secular institution (and who just today attended a panel on diversity among university faculty), I think there’s a substantial difference between the Jewish school experience and the college experience.
College deals with adults rather than children. Their identities are more fully formed and independent, and therefore their opinions are less subject to manipulation.
Furthermore, in college, the ideas are pretty easily separated from the purpose of the education. You (almost always) don’t learn geometry to be a triangle, or government history to become a politician or constitutional law to become an abortion provider.
Contrast that with the frum education system, where knowledge and orthodoxy are one and the same with accomplishment, embodiment, and success. Just as an illustration, if you went to college because you wanted to be an economist so that you could design markets to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, you would be really, really upset if the top professor in the field for that school spent class talking about how all decent economists believe there should be an active baby market, and organ market, and cocaine market and that restrictions against child labor are depriving families of a rightful source of income for no purpose, and that corporate tax is the greatest injustice since WWII.
Well, frum classes are all like that. The teachers are presented as role models, the goals are embodiment as well as learning information, and viewpoints other than those of the teacher are not tolerated.
If there were a point that could be made here that would be the exact opposite of relevant, it would be Pascal’s Wager. OP is struggling with Emunah, not with choosing to act a certain way. But belief (as opposed to action) is the very thing that Pascal’s Wager doesn’t address.
Gamanit, according to that viewpoint, the developmental delay would simply be synonymous with “developing at a different rate”. Making it pathological is just a matter of semantics – i.e. where on the curve do you draw a line and say, “this is a disorder that needs medication”. There might be a benefit in doing that, just to set a guideline that can be calibrated to help the most people the most often with the lowest incidence of negative effects, but OTOH, there might be a benefit to doing it case by case.
1. The OP is correct to a point. You would still need a certain threshold to be able to connect all the connectable people.
2. The age gap theory might have merit, but if it does, the merit is small enough that it should not be something that is addressed by encouraging boys to get married earlier. Here are some reasons why the age gap is misleading:
a. More boys are born than girls. This is a scientific fact. Arguably, this is why men marry younger women in the first place.
b. In the US as a whole, men marry older than women do, by about two years. There is no shidduch crisis in the secular world. And since you are about to say that it’s because people don’t care if they stay single, I will point out that
c. More men don’t marry than women. (This is not really conclusive, I concede, since divorce is far more prevalent among secular society.)
d. Even if it were true that there would be a numbers gap if the numbers didn’t move from the birth rates, the advertisements touting the age gap solution don’t address dozens of factors that are highly relevant and could present solutions that are more beneficial. For example:
i. Not all the people who are born end up using the shidduch system as the movement perceives. Since boys and girls are subject to completely different social and educational environments, there is no reason to assume that twenty years after they are born, they opt into the system at equal rates. If only a few percent more girls opt out of the system than boys, the age gap would turn out to be a myth. Conversely, if a few percent more boys opted out, we would find a solution more easily by correcting that than by marrying people off at twenty. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars raising awareness for the “age gap”, push more money into addressing early learning problems and you will gain more. Or, spend a bit more money on richuk for girls – that would work too.
ii. Even if it’s true that the age gap is the most pressing and solvable issue, the easiest way to solve it would be through creating an efficient market, rather than through proclamations in the Yated. If the market were efficient, i.e. more people had access to more people, more information were available about the state of the market, etc. then the situation would right itself within a few years. Since most frum people are anti-regulation Republicans, my solution would be far superior to them.
1. There is a vast difference between debating whether children should be taking these medications and whether adults should.
1a. This is true for several reasons. One is the existence and definition of ADHD. A strong case can be made that there is no such thing as ADHD in a qualitative sense, rather, people possess the ability to concentrate in different quantities. If that were true, then society owes it to children to reform the school system and childhood environment to address the needs of more children more regularly. Also, the effects might be significantly different when administered to a non-consenting child with a still-developing brain than when administered to a fully informed and consenting adult with a fully developed brain (and less time, frankly, for long term side effects to develop and present).
2. Regarding adults, I fully agree with OP. The name or existence of your diagnosis makes no difference and you don’t have to justify it to anyone except your doctor and your shadchan. If taking medication allows you to accomplish the things that you need to accomplish, which you would not have otherwise been able to do, then you cannot be criticized for using it. In fact, choosing to use it is in itself a step that you should give yourself credit for.
Saysme, it’s pretty endemic to the frum education system that teachers either don’t know or are afraid to answer legitimate questions (and with the history of backlash, I don’t blame them for being afraid…) The reality is that lots of people say similar things about bais yakovs and yeshivas. The people running them (and their defenders) are free to ignore the complaints – after all, the OTD kids don’t care and this is the system that the gedolim instituted so it can’t have any flaws and if it appears to that is because the observers are mistaken.
But the option is also there to listen to the complaints, think through them open-mindedly and critically, and perhaps achieve some meaningful improvement that way.
Protip: If you ask a rov, tell him it’s an exercise you do that works with music. Don’t use the word dance or game.
I absolutely agree that frum educational institutions cultivate low self esteem, if not actively then at least passively and implicitly.
K’gon Popa bar Abba.
Having the belief they can succeed at what? Is this an objectively verifiable line of inquiry? If a 21 year old seminary graduate said that I can’t make it as a doctor, I wouldn’t mind the lack of faith, but if the 21 year old seminary graduates teaching in my bais yaakov all did, I might complain about the oppressive environment and stupid teachers.
What does “struggle with Emunah” mean? Do you think there is, lo aleinu, no God? Do you think that the world is not < 6000 years old? Do you think that some chassidic rebbes cannot revive the dead? If you are more specific, we can tailor our advice. Or just buy you a ham sandwich, if you’re beyond hope.
Why are people telling you to go? For some it’s a positive life changing experience (like for me and my older sister) but for others it’s just a year long slumber party.
I feel like this is supposed to be a dichotomy but isn’t one.
Only goyim wear their tzitzis tucked in.
If only there were people who are paid to review these things, or a community of consumers who would buy these things for themselves and contribute reviews to some sort of digital archive that could later be tapped by other interested consumers! And if only there was some tool that could be used to search the entire digital archive of the whole world for things that people have written on this very topic!
If there was such a “searching” app, they could put it on a website and attract billions of users, I bet. This would give them such a strong market position that they could venture into other areas of web-based commerce and push potential competitors out of the market.
Is it just me, or is this topic annoyingly full of undefined words and getting worse?
Cults, “believing in yourself” brainwashing, chaos. It would be easier to understand what people are posting if they would say what they mean instead of using buzzwords.
I thought this would have something to do with the yetzer hara, more specifically, the internet.
It would be amazing if we first agree on what “brainwashing” means so that we can figure out whether it’s good or bad and whether it takes place or not.
I believe that the world is billions of years old. I also go around touching people’s wine without them knowing. Am I your cousin who was at your house for the seder? Did I sneak into your wine closet and substitute non-mevushal wine for the mevushal? You’ll never know…
147, as far as I know, the Yeshiva doesn’t actually manufacture men or boys. Whichever ones are there came from somewhere.
Health, I’m referring to the fact that for a particular subset of girls in a community, the only possible shidduchim will be in Lakewood, whereas if there were lots of small yeshivas in other places, there would be more people who would be able to redt shidduchim to more men and women.
It’s too late, Health. Once the cat is out of the bag, there’s no putting all the feathers back in the pillowcase. But they should bear this in mind next time they want to assur something. Do it like the OK did with TJ Chocolate chips, which, after people finally figured out what was going on, turned out to be less cholov stam than previously imagined and yet people apparently are noheg that they’re cholov stam.
Lakewood is the source of whatever problem there is, since there is a bottleneck in getting to the shidduch age boys, 90% of whom are in Lakewood. But if anyone would point that out, then instead of ridiculous notions like boys dating younger, we might have people supporting other yeshivas, which can’t happen.
2cents: According to Consumer Reports (which I read a while ago, so I don’t know if it still holds) cars tend to be higher quality later in the life cycle since they’ve been fine tuning the various capabilities and fixing little mistakes for six years. It might be worse for your street cred to be driving a car that looks just like the ’08, but it might be better value.
Health: Their mistake was that they gave the whole megillah behind their psak about coffee and it didn’t make any sense. If they had just said that they investigated and it was a problem, everyone would listen.
I don’t know if you know this or even if I have it right, but it seems that Rabbi Blumenkrantz’s book is just listing the particular manufacturers of the generic. Is there any way for you to find out which manufacturer made the particular generic pills that you have? If it’s not on the pill, you can probably call the pharmacist and ask. Otherwise, ask a Rov. I would be surprised if there’s any reason not to take them since it’s obvious that the actual chemical doesn’t involve chometz, since Rabbi Blumenkrantz certifies it from another manufacturer.
ETA: TL;DR – what everyone else said, but less comprehensible.
All people have a right to be upset all the time. There is no limit on the right to be upset.
On the one hand, the Sienna is cheaper. On the other hand, it also gets better reviews. So it can be a tough choice.
What does a mixes audience mean? Mixes dancing, featuring Lipa? Which organization has any reason to hire Lipa to provide the music for their mixed dancing?
I assume that you mean either a mixed concert, which lets be honest, is perfectly fine to any adult who’s ever been to a frum concert; or weddings that have mixed dancing (but among those baalei simcha, the majority probably at least start with separate dancing.) Neither of those is that big a deal, especially not from the perspective of the performer. Even if he once decided to refrain from singing at mixed concerts.
No, but you shouldn’t criticize them that much or they might leave. Tread carefully is all I’m saying.
ETA: I also wonder how much they are actually “untznius” and how much is just Gateshead being Gateshead.
WIY, I have watched his videos and I stand by my point. Some people have become so used to just accepting that any time someone says “Oi, gevald, it’s chukas hagoyim” it becomes assur d’oraysah. His videos are a perfect example of what I said when I compared it to sushi. On his last one, people were kvetching because there was a woman in it for about two seconds, who was dressed completely tznius.
2Cents: I don’t know where the issur is to sing in front of mixed dancing audiences, if it’s even true that it something that he “does”. He gets paid to sing, he sings. You might have a point if he advertised himself as a singer for mixed audiences. But if he’s a wedding singer and he turns up at a wedding, and sometime during the second dance, the mechitza starts to sag, that doesn’t make him a bad guy or “a lunatic”.
A friend of mine used to have one of those carriers where you would leave the greeting, and then the prerecorded voice would say, “please leave a message after the tone.” So his message was, “Hi, I can’t take your call right now, but if you hold on one minute, my secretary will take a message.”
My voicemail used to say “Please leave a message after the yell….
YAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!”
You can substitute other sound effects as well, like “Please leave a message after the crunch” or “the yodel” or “the breaking glass.”
Sam, why is giving money to a Yeshiva tzedaka? Because the Yeshivas said so?
If not for American Jews, the Jews in England and Israel would have needed to be institutionalized years ago.
I’m not sure I even understand the question. Tzedaka is one of the Taryag mitzvos. Giving money to yeshivas is not.