Author Archive for aaron
Bein Hazmanim Advice to Kollel Yungeleit
Dear Kollel Yungerman, As a former kollel guy, I know how tough life can be. Money is tight, and you have to live off your parents/in-laws/wife’s generosity to support you while you spend your days and nights learning. Now is bein hazmanim, and you are “busy” getting everything together so you can go for Yom [...]
Support Your Kids at Whose Expense?
When parents support their married children in kollel, even if they can afford it, there are others who are hurt by their choice. Since they are supporting their children, they have less money to give to tzedaka, and those institutions suffer. Every community needs basic infrastructure in order to maintain frum life – shuls, yeshivas, [...]
Adding Stress to Shidduchim
In our ongoing series of posts listing the negative side effects of supporting children in kollel, this one is painfully obvious. The suffering of thousands – yes thousands – of single girls waiting for a shidduch is unbearable. And yet, we as a society are doing absolutely nothing about it. Everyone knows of an older [...]
Support Your Son in Law so he Should Hate You
Parents support their children in kollel with the dreams that their money is going to good use, and that their children will feel a tremendous sense of gratitude and respect for their sacrifice on their behalf. But the reality is, this dream rarely happens. The sad truth is that supporting your children in kollel increases [...]
Every Girl Needs a Good Degree
In addition to providing support for their kollel son-in-laws, parents must also give their daughters a degree so they can have the ability to bring in parnossa for the family. This is the opposite of what chazal instruct us to teach one’s son a trade – instead we are teaching the daughters and not teaching [...]
Harming Your Childrens’ Future by Supporting Them in Kollel
It was only 70 years ago that our nation went through the torturous holocaust, and the scars will remain in our spirit for a long time. The survivors were mostly young and had no one to care for them. When the came out, they were determined to build families and start life anew. With the [...]
Tisha B’av – Lack of Vision
The destruction of the beis hamikdash is not just what we lost on this day. We also lost our connection to Hashem. Prior to this day, when we were confused or unsure about things, the nevi’im sent us messages – sometimes in great detail – which described what we were doing wrong, and how we [...]
Working Longer & Harder to Support the Family
To provide for their family’s needs, a woman whose husband is learning in kollel almost always needs to work outside the home, even if they are being supported. Unless they are fabulously wealthy, even the most generous parents cannot afford to contribute more than $10-15,000 a year. Assuming the husband can bring home a kollel [...]
(Belated) Thoughts on the Tragedy
What does the Leiby Kletsky tragedy have to do with the topic of this blog? Absolutely nothing. Nevertheless, there is not a Jewish blog out there that has not wrote something about this senseless and heartbreaking story. Why this happened to us, we cannot know, and there is no point in speculating. But one interesting [...]
How a 20 Yr. Old Yeshiva Guy Gets $100k Job With No Education
I was recently speaking to a friend of mine who is does very well in the various businesses he oversees. He told me how he got started in business at the young age of 20. At the time, he was working in a yeshiva doing odd jobs, never having been the biggest masmid. He was [...]
