false promises

 I don't know exactly who reads this blog, but of late the emails have come fast and furious. People have stories to tell. Here's one of them:

I experienced my first Shabbos in the fancy house of a corporate attorney in Westchester. He lived in a cul de sac on a street lined with what I realize now are million-dollar homes. The synagogue was the kind of modern suburban building that people who lived in million-dollar homes would demand. At the time, I was living in a rat-infested tenement with two roommates on 8^th Avenue in Manhattan so I was very impressed. The host didn’t expose me to any Torah. Rather he showed me books on the topic of self-esteem by the psychologist Nathaniel Branden, who was the former lover of famous atheist Ayn Rand. He also discussed conservative political thought with references to people like Irving Kristol. It all seemed so educated.  

My second Shabbos was on Concord Lane in Monsey in an even bigger house. It might have been the largest house I had ever been inside of with the exception of tourist mansions like Sagamore Hill. Strangely, they didn’t give me a bed. They had me sleep on a couch under bright ceiling lights. That was a red flag that I took note of, but I was overwhelmed by the palpable sensation of wealth. On the wall were family photos with grim-faced clean-shaven men all in identical black suits and black hats. I found their appearance odd, another red flag that I noted but let pass. This is common for people who get drawn into follies, including cults – ignoring red flags. Then I started studying with a guy whose brother-in-law was so wealthy that he was listed in the Forbes 400. His assets at the time were the equivalent in today’s money of 1 billion dollars. Again, the feeling of wealth was in the air and on the tongues of the people I was dealing with. This man lived in a million-dollar house in Borough Park. It had a piano in it, which seemed classy. A few months after that, I spend two weeks at the Torah Institute in Connecticut on the 22.5 acre property of a former resort that was used as a recruitment vehicle for a BT yeshiva in Israel. The place was so nice that today weddings are held there. Again, wealth. 

It wasn’t even 2 years later – time spent in a yeshiva in Israel that was housed in an apartment that we never left – that I found myself broke, having spent all my savings on yeshiva tuition, sleeping on a basement floor, in a mildew room, where I used the mattress as a blanket because I didn’t have a blanket. This was in Monsey where the winters are brutally cold. While the Shabbos meals at the fancy homes and the resort were borderline lavish – at least by my standards – the yeshiva didn’t feed us more than cornflakes for breakfast and leftover chassunah food for dinner- on the nights it was donated. Usually, we ate the leftovers of the leftovers. I was rail thin. This was all for the sake of Torah. We were warned of eternal damnation for ceasing in our study of the Torah. When I proposed getting a job the rabbis shot me down with talk of the dangers of the working world. When I told them of a job offer cleaning a shul next door to the yeshiva for just a half-hour a day, they shot me down again saying it would interfere with my Torah study. Clearly, they weren’t watching me very closely because between the hunger pains, other kinds of frustration, and my inability to really study Torah – by which they meant pilpul on a few pages of yeshivishe mesectas – I wasn’t able to sit at a shtender for long. My two yeshivas both refused to teach Hebrew or to give a proper introduction to Gemara study. They just told us to go out and buy a mesechta Kiddushin and “break our teeth on it.” Certainly, I had a half-hour a day to spare.  

So you want to talk about false advertising, bait and switch, and deceptive recruiting, this was as bad as anything that you’ll find anywhere in the world. I was lured with the following into the following: 

The Lure	The Reality
Wealth. Fancy homes, super-rich people, a resort.	Poverty. The guy who pushed me to go to yeshiva, pushed me to go to a yeshiva that allegedly promoted a year of learning and then going back to work. (It didn’t actually do that.) Then when I returned from Israel, he talked me out of getting a job as did nearly every other rabbi I talked to. When you finally get a job, they hit you up constantly for money and you spend ½ your salary on yeshiva tuition for your children if you manage to get married. Tuition is high in part because rabbis and avreichem don’t pay tuition, so the baal habayis is paying for them. As for that piano in the house in Borough Park, I realized eventually that the owner never played it. Nobody in the house knew how to play it.
Secular studies. Well-written English-language secular prose. References to Ivy League schools. The lawyer went to Columbia.	Confusing, jumbled foreign language, foreign lettered coded material that was rarely explained. The language was never taught. Disparagement of all secular studies (aka narishkite). The huge Torah that was supposed to replace secular studies is ignored. We studied only small pieces of the Talmud, a few pages of it over and over again.
Psychological health. Intelligent books on the topic of self-esteem.	Psychological harm. A barrage of verbal abuse, insults, and self-esteem destruction through unhealthy living.
Rich family life. You sit at these Shabbos tables with big families.	Loneliness, particularly on Shabbos and Yom Tov, as the yeshiva didn’t help us with dating, discouraged dating, and left us too poor to really date. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have a dime.
Spirituality via mitzvos that enrich all of life.	Life = Brisker Lomdus on 1% of the Gemara. Nothing else matters, nothing else counts. Even Chumash is regarded as bitul Torah. Mitzvos are just something you gotta do.
Promises of wise leaders	Lunatics. I didn’t talk about this, but the leaders didn’t turn out to be very wise or loving. I’d say the typical experience with any one of them was abuse and stupidity.

 

There were lots of other false promises, but you get the point.