smile: those and ALL the other sems? Tall order… 🙂

Judging by the ones you mentioned, I don’t think that describing my seminary would help you very much, so sorry. But I’ve been talking to (and visited) my friends in Seminar and Machon Raaya and they seem to love it there, if that helps at all.

Having been in this parsha last year I’m sure it doesn’t, so all I can really say is good luck and chill! You’re really early, and everything will work out in the end whether you get loads of answers on these threads or not.

In the meantime, if it’s absolutely essential to your peace of mind, go ahead and search the site for the sem names and see what people have written in the past. If you want really current info, remember that all of us here this year are still getting used to it- I honestly wouldn’t feel comfortable yet giving advice or details about my sem. After all, I’ve only been here three weeks.

Lior: That is out-of-townism. I see (quite naturally) dead animals all the time where I live (out in the sticks, in the ancient territory of the Munsee Indians). Then again, some of them do die in their sleep in their nests, presumably, which would put them out of sight.

I do see a lot of extremely depressing roadkill, though; baruch Hashem though I’ve yet to have caused one myself.

edited

HaKatan: Perhaps in an ideal world, but we’re not living in one. Seminary is technically not a necessity and therefore they rely on the packaging to sell it.

Lior: Nobody is talking about “valid” reasons. I’m personally talking about reasons stam. Each person decides whether or not they are valid. I know that here in sem so far, as much as I like the seminary itself, I’m growing to love love love Eretz Yisrael even more- even after only a week and a half. For me, let’s say, I’d say that my reason for coming would be more ahavat Eretz Yisrael than “exoticism,” and I’d say that that’s probably true for many/most girls, but then again people also want to try something different than they had before in high school. My friend went to seminary at her high school’s seminary and hated it because she felt like she was still in high school.

Nobody’s saying anything about necessity. They’re talking about supply/demand and free choice.

And I said nothing about seeing other people’s austerity or anything of the sort. In fact, one of the things I dislike about sem is the whole “essen tug” concept as far as Shabbos placement is concerned. It makes me really uncomfortable to ask people to put me up or to be placed, and I have no interest in eating some kollel family’s last piece of chicken. Let them eat it, or not buy it and save it for spending on something more important.

PAA: Wow. Are you stalking me? 🙂 I’d barely remembered writing that, but I still hold that opinion. (I haven’t either ruled out marrying a guy in kollel, anyway; but it’s definitely not a fait accompli.)

It actually reminds me of a pet peeve that I have here in sem. A lot of classes talk about their focus on building skills in learning, which I think is great, because trust me, mine can only get better. Then girls start raising their hands (no bushah!) and asking why they need to build skills, because when will they ever need them after seminary anyway. Sorry? Learning stops only after seminary? No, really, major attitude adjustment needed here.

My family is very into English names because my mom grew up with her whole family called only by their English names. My dad’s side is all Hebrew names so we compromised. While I’m technically called by my Hebrew name, until this year I was basically called 50/50 by my Hebrew and English names as my Hebrew name is difficult for Americans to pronounce. (I love Israel! Everyone can pronounce my name!) One sister with a similarly annoying name is also basically called 50/50, a third sister has only one name because it’s a very typical name, and my brother has a really random English name that nobody uses (his Hebrew name was after somebody but his English name was after somebody else- it went out of fashion about thirty years ago).

My dad works with a lot of Indian people and while most of them do go by their regular (unusual, long, and ethnic) names legally, 99% of them go by nicknames IRL (Saravanakumar is Sar, for example). The Jewish people all go by English names, though.

I would go totally by my Hebrew name if it were less prone to mangling by the average American. (If I move to Israel though… Reason #23047.)

I agree with golfer.

Full body armor while huddled in a miklat.

PAA: Popa’s already told me that I’m notin a real seminary. Apparently, real seminaries are awful and fake seminaries, like mine, rock this world.

Just to, in all seriousness, address DY:

A) My home is not dysfunctional. (I don’t know why I felt the need to reply to this except in case someone in my family happens to read it, Idunno. It just felt worth saying.)

B) In actual seriousness this time, I can see seminary being a waste of time for some people. To be really honest, if I weren’t getting a full year’s worth of college credits at the same time I’m not sure I’d be here at all.

That said, anything can be used for the positive and anything can be used for the negative. To be sure, there are girls here who have already started cutting classes to go to Ben Yehuda. There are girls who are makpid to ask which classes don’t have homework and tests in order to make sure that they have the easiest workload possible and don’t even care what the topic is. There are girls who are taking the exact minimum number of classes.

But those who want something more can find it very easily here, and that’s something that I wouldn’t give up for the world. Living in Eretz Yisrael is one thing (and a really big thing- going to the kotel Friday afternoon, on a whim, is not the sort of thing I’d be able to do while attending college in New York); learning Torah, from really knowledgeable and fantastic teachers, is another thing that shouldn’t be underestimated. For many of the girls here, this will be their last year (technically, really only year) dedicated to full-time Torah study, and that’s not something to be cheapened. Not everyone is here in order to goof off- some people do, in actuality, come to grow and learn.

Being against seminary as a DEFAULT is for sure a valid point. I don’t think I’d be here if my parents didn’t want me to be (almost more than I initially wanted to go myself, to be honest- if you’ll remember, I had a thread up a while back asking people to convince me to go at all). That said, if the whole institution of seminary didn’t exist, I would honestly doubt how useful or wise it would be. Now that it’s here, I can see it- to an extent.

Personally, I think of seminary as being like kollel- great as a concept, or something for an individual to decide to do, but pretty bad as a full lifestyle and supposedly necessary part of life. I love my seminary and I’m glad I came, but I don’t necessarily think it should have to be a default, either. In that I agree with you, DY. I just don’t think that the baby should be thrown out with the bathwater. Seminary can be a wonderful place.

?!?!?!?!?!?

No, sorry- I’m really bad at being clear.

I was sort of channeling my inner texting-obsessed teen (which was hard as she doesn’t really exist) and making it seem like I thought that the pound key was the “hashtag key.” Then, of course, making that seem “obvious” like the fact that you should know (duh) the difference between a colon and a semicolon in an emoticon.

(The Anatomy of a Bad Joke.)

DY: Yes, sorry GAW.

I think that my conclusion (to what I admit was a wall of text) was that a lot of the issues that singles have are caused in some way by the family- and child-centric values and infrastructure of Judaism, which we can’t really do much about. All we can try to do is promote person-by-person awareness.

My personal crusade is to stop the use of the world “girl” above the age of (at MAXIMUM) 25 or graduated from college. Married or single. At least men have an age-neutral term (“guy”) to use- I’ve heard people tak about eighteen-year-old (married) “women” and thirty-five-year-old (single) “girls.”

“At the same time, I am recognizing that I, and others who through chasdei Hashem have been blessed with our own families, should do our best to make singles feel like important, valued members of klal Yisroel.”

GAW: I think that the use of the words “make singles FEEL like…” shows the attitude, even unconscious, about single people. I don’t mean to imply that you meant anything negative by it, my point merely being that this shouldn’t be something we have to try to do or hope to convince them of because it’s not true. It is by default, in fact.

And yes, I agree with PAA and believe it’s society. I’m not talking about mean or even thoughtless comments- I’m talking about the way that society is set up. It’s like that letterwriter in Mishpacha said about how if people believe Mr Rechnitz’s statistics (I don’t, but whatever) then they should stop teaching about marriage so much, because of all of the focus and pressure on people who may never get married at all. Perhaps it’s something built into frum culture- I guess that due to the importance of children and families in frum culture, it’s harder for people who aren’t part of it. But it’s DEFINITELY part of the culture, if only because there simply is not a lot of infrastructure for singles. I repeat, I’m NOT talking about careless insults- I’m talking about structural issues. The hyper-focus on marriage (even well-meaning) can certainly hurt those who are not married.

PAA: The thing is, she could have said that this doesn’t apply to nonmarried women (which I admit would simply have caused more questions, but when you’re a teacher that’s what you’re stuck with). Trying to get creative doesn’t really help.

PAA: No no no. Semicolons are for WINKY faces. Colons are for smileys. It’s obvious, just like the hashtag key on my phone.

Michlalah. (If there is anyone who does want the whole story behind it, I’ve got a bunch of threads… 🙂 )

Excited and freaking out at the same time, obviously. And barely packed.

PAA: Obviously, obviously, obviously.

(Though I thought that realizing that we were sayin two different things meant that there was no argument to win… what I said in my last post was that I think we’re both right in different ways, unless we’re in a contest to help the OP.)

🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

Just to annoy you.

(Happens to be, I used to be SO against them, but then I had a lot of trouble with texting, emailing, etc with the kind of friends I get sarcastic with- I actually had some pretty serious misunderstandings popping up- so I capitulated. The problem is that, like Lay’s potato chips, you can’t use just one, and as you may have figured out from my other posts, emoticons are now my secondary form of punctuation to the point that I had to consciously stop myself from using one on my SAT essay. Then again, as a teenage girl, I guess I was just a catastrophe waiting to happen in that regard.)

oyyoyyoy and Sam2: Her parents are the ones with the money (a very large percentage of which they can still recoup at this stage if her seminary is anything like my seminary).

Sam2: In the case you mentioned, do you mean that the kid can force the parents to pay for his preferred yeshiva or that if the kid can get scholarships and pay independently then he can ignore his parents?

I’m actually thinking a little about that story in Mishpacha this week with the rebbi who encouraged his talmid to ignore his parents who wanted him to go home from yeshiva and go to college. (Though in the case of the story, even if the talmid should have stayed lefi Torah, it was not the rebbi’s place to convince him to defy his parents IMHO.)

PAA: I obviously agree with you. The point of my post is not to say that her parents are crazy for thinking what they think and feeling what they feel- it’s just what (to be honest here) helped me get used to the idea that I’m going to a war torn country. For me, thinking about it intellectually helped, and I merely presented those intellectual and logical arguments if she wanted to use them on her parents. Obviously they didn’t work.

Everyone’s just arguing about this from two different ends. I’ll pick two random posters who have vociferously argued their sides: Lior and PAA. (000646 is taking an entirely different tack on his side, so I won’t use him.)

Lior is saying that we can justify ourselves because we have the truth, and that’s what makes us different from them. Torah-true Jews would all agree.

PAA is saying that we can say that all we like, but the world at large, or even we in some uneasy corner of ourselves, can’t always justify it that way. After all, ISIS (seems to) think that they’re right and they’re divinely ordained, in which case to an objective outsider, we are basically identical, and, in a way, each side is hypocritical if it criticizes the other.

Neither of your views would seem to be contradictory. On Lior’s side, the only way they would contradict each other is if Lior then went out into the world and argued his case secure in his knowledge that he was right and they were wrong, he would end up against PAA’s roadblock that nobody would believe him and nobody would care. On PAA’s side, the only way they would contradict each other is if PAA took his argument to 000646’s conclusion which is that (or so it seems to me) that in this day and age, what we USED to do is no longer moral- a slippery slope that one could use to apply to many things that can end up being a bit dangerous.

yie: I’m not DaMoshe, but there’s definitely a large, large difference between showing appreciation to someone of a different religion who helps or saves you and converting to their religion out of gratitude. There were, in fact, many Jewish children who grew up in convents and monasteries during the Holocaust who afterward left, lived Jewish lives, but still had the utmost hakaras hatov to those who had risked their lives to help, whether that involved writing letters, visiting, gifts, etc.

There’s a big difference between rewriting history/maligning an organization which saved you and actually joining that organization. I mean, I take that back, there are some shades of gray in this world- pride should not mean that you can’t thank and appreciate the help of a group with whom you disagree!

PAA: What all of those basically come down to is what people FEEL, not what’s actually true. Worry makes sense on a visceral level, but it doesn’t on a logical one. While the OP’s parents don’t need my permission to make this decision on a visceral level, I’m simply pointing out that if she wants to make a case, there is plenty of material for her.

Just an addendum about one of your points- yes, people do get used to the rockets. I was in camp with several Israeli girls who (obviously) kept in constant contact with their families in rocket-prone areas in Israel. Hearing about the constancy of the rockets in such a casual way both kind of freaked me out and helped me see the whole thing as less of a big deal. While you’re right that the panic of the situation is hard, seeing how so many people are simply living normal lives- the same way that iyH I will be in sem- helped me realize that I had to start seeing these things a different way. Of course, a situation where rocket attacks are so routine that people are immune is a sick and twisted one, but the point still stands.

I do, however, agree with your point about the panic and fear of the unknown. People do not dwell on whether there will be a car accident at any given moment, while they do have specific moments- like sirens- in which there is a fear. At the end of the day, though, the material risk is quite low.

I almost posted the same thing, except that I have no hesitations about going.

My dad pointed out that statistically, I’m more likely to have something happen to me in NYC than in Yerushalayim and that driving home from our family vacation last night was more dangerous than my flight to Israel will be. Statistics are, of course, not infallible and these things do have common characteristics and clusters which make statistics unreliable, but his point still stands. I don’t believe that I’m that much less safe in Israel. There is less SECURITY, there is more DOUBT, but there is no less safety in terms of mortality. There’s an availability bias as far as terrorism is concerned, but technically, the odds of a person being harmed in a terrorism attack in Israel are lower than the odds of being harmed in a car accident there, and the odds of being harmed in a car accident there are very similar to the odds of the same thing happening here.

Eretz Yisrael is an amazing place and sem is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Of course, as the ones paying (presumably) it is your parents’ prerogative as far as what to do, but as long as your seminary has been in contact as far as the safety measures that they have put in place for the coming year, I think that it is more than reasonable to allow you to go to sem with a feeling of security.

My brother’s counselors have arranged pool parties after camp hours for their bunks. I don’t think that’s problematic, especially when parents confirm that the counselor’s parents will be present.

If, after camp ends, counselors want to arrange things for the whole bunk, I don’t think that’s a problem either.

If a counselor for a whole bunk wants to take ONE KID out for pizza, I think that’s a bit off.

I think that the way that this post was written makes the whole question sound even creepier.

I personally only went to schools where I could with a clear conscience keep any rules I signed on to.

My sister is now going to a school with a no internet rule. My mother told the school that it’s not happening. They told her that they know that everyone’s on the internet anyway and that she should sign it and keep on as she was already.

YP: I can’t speak for 60 year olds, but through my parents, I know of many 55 year old older singles. (Ironically enough, they are all men, and to be fair, I can see why they’re still single.)

A factor may be that there’s now more of a “yeshivish system” as opposed to back then when there was somewhat less of a whole process in shidduchim. Also less (MUCH less) kollel.

As far as Mr Rechnitz’s whole statistics thing, that’s what really got my family roiled up. It seemed dangerously like pulling statistics out of a hat- it’s impossible to say how many people “will never get married”- it’s pure extrapolation (of dubious statistics in the first place) when really each person is different and there is no way of knowing.

Take one Bais Yaakov high school class. By Mr Rechnitz’s magical cut-off date of 25, only 70% of the class was married. By the time they hit their 25th reunion, there was a 100% marriage success rate (actually, 110%, but that’s not the point).

Shooting out numbers like that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It only resigns people to their bad-as-death fate without cause. (The whole “bad-as-death” thing is another problem, but I’m late for work so I’ll leave it for now.)

Descartes was sitting in a bar when the bartender asked him if he’d like another drink. He said “I think not” and immediately vanished.

Girls’ machshava classes are of dramatically varying quality and really depend on the teacher (not even the school- throughout my four years of high school, I had four different teachers at various points who attempted to teach a class they called machshava with wildly varying results).

Not entirely sure whether the best ones were really good or the worst ones were really bad simply because I don’t know what machshava is actually supposed to be ideally.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Yazidi religion “combines Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Jewish, Nestorian Christian, and Islamic elements.”

If you check the article, you’ll see that they seem to have their very own personalized thing going that can’t really be put in much of a box.

It seems that you’re being hypersensitive and at the same time (possibly for that reason) being very dismissive of your maybe-kallah’s feelings. (It’s so hard to find a good term for this kind of relationship…) If I were her, I wouldn’t appreciate having my concerns being made so light in your eyes. You can sympathize and say that even so he is an important person to you, but completely dismissing them is a bit cold.

If she said “him or me” and you picked him then that would be interesting in itself, but the fact that she’s NOT making an ultimatum and you STILL want to pick the rav is even more so.

PAA: True. I intend that the person I marry will learn for more than a few years, no matter when he decides to go to work. I value Torah and am looking for someone who is the same.

But that obviously doesn’t have to mean kollel and/or learning Torah exclusively for a period of time. Maybe or maybe not.

Where did this thread even come from? Wow, blast from the past.