"Elaine, bald men with no jobs and no money who live with their parents don't approach strange women."
George Costanza, Seinfeld
Elaine had suggested that George go up and talk to an attractive woman who had looked at him. George explains that he is in no position to do that because essentially he lacks the qualifications of being a man.
Did George just describe an adult male who is in yeshiva? Let's think about this. The rabbis at the yeshiva forbid going out and earning a living, even part-time, or even getting job training. They forbid going out on shiduchim. So, you have no job and no woman. Yet, on Shabbosim you will go out to a stranger's house and be seated across from his wife for a three-hour Shabbos meal. You feel ashamed for feeling jealousy and lust.
You are living not on your own but at the yeshiva, which is worse than living with your parents. At yeshiva, you are in somebody else's house, a stranger's house bound by their rules, rules that you are not used to. You are not sleeping in your bedroom where you grew up with your mementoes around you but in a broken-down room with three strangers, sleeping on cots. And unlike with your parents, the yeshiva rabbis have no compunctions about throwing you out on the street, and they enjoy threatening to do so. Most of the rabbis don't care if you live or die. Come back in twenty years to say hello and see if they even ask one question about your life. They don't even know that you are alive. Parents usually have some love for their children.
But there's more. In yeshiva, you are regularly humiliated and insulted, taught to hate the world, hate yourself, and to feel stupid. How are you going to survive in a horrible world if you are stupid?
Even more emasculating, decision making ability even about your own life is taken away in yeshiva. The rabbi who knows nothing about you or the world and doesn't care about you will decide without contemplation or research what you will do with your life.
George is bald, and you are out of shape because there's no exercise in yeshiva. That's bitul Torah and goyish. Your muscles have withered away. You eat white flour and sugar. Your clothes are wrinkled. In a sense, you are bald all over.
George Costanza is telling us that he is not a man and therefore he can't approach a woman. And the yeshiva guy is even less than George because George does have a sense of humour, and yeshiva guys have none usually. That's beaten out of them as well. How many rabbis do you know who have a sense of humour that consists of anything other than derision of others?
It's even worse for baalei teshuvah who have been told to stay away from their families and old friends. They have nothing but the yeshiva which is depriving them of any vestige of masculinity. Since they once had a sex life, being celibate now is far more painful than it is for FFB yeshiva guys. Since they were raised with dreams of careers, the prospect of never being able to earn a parnassah or do work that they like is particularly emasculating.
Let's say that by chance you do run into a rabbi who has a sliver of sense and suggests that you go on shiduchim. Now the real fun begins as you are forced to humiliate yourself on dates, doing all the work, the calling, driving, thinking of things to do, paying, and proving yourself according to rules that are set by rabbis and stuck in the heads of young women who rarely question how one-sided it all is. There will be no kiss goodnight at the end of the date. Your date has been taught that she is superior to you, more spiritual, on a higher plane (it's nonsense but that's what she has been taught), and she buys it happilly. How's that for emasculation?
If you question any of this you go on the bad list, and then there's no shiduchim for you since you need references from rabbis who control this entire game and sit at the top of the pyramid. So, forget everything that I have written here. Pretend we never had this conversation. Stay in yeshiva until you are broken, schlep to shiduchim and prove yourself with what’s left of you. Then get married and find some way of coming up with $200,000 a year, which is what you'll need to support a family in the Orthodox world (in New York), to pay for expensive housing, fancy clothes for the wife, yeshiva tuition (at subpar schools) whose price is elevated because of all the kollel families who don't pay tuition, and for all the nedavah requests that come to you from the very same rabbis who wouldn't let you get job training. If you get a notion to move to Israel to spare yourself the tuition costs prepare to spend 6x the price for housing and to be completely crushed by the military and that's before they send you or your sons, heaven forbid, into death traps to get revenge for their failure to guard a fence from hooligans with hang gliders.
Or, buck the system and start thinking for yourself, get job training, leave yeshiva, study on your own, live in a part of the country that you can afford, and marry a nice woman who uses her brain and isn't looking for a slave. That option is available if you summons the courage to take it.
I introduce you now to the Honey Badger. It is one of the fiercest creatures on earth. "The honey badger is a solitary animal that can be active at any time of day, depending on the location. It is primarily a carnivorous species and has few natural predators because of its thick skin, strength and ferocious defensive abilities." (Wiki) It is not large, but it is not to be messed with.
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