"Every reactionary period ends with a failure to restore the past it glorifies."
— Adapted from Eric Hobsbawm’s observations on conservative backlashes in The Age of Extremes.
This post is a response to both
’s post: “Overklalified” and a more radical solution than ’s "Underklalified". Naturally, I am calling this “Post-Klalified”.Avigdor is correct about many of the symptoms plaguing the Yeshiva World (YW). Avigdor lays out the problems he sees and offers the standard fixes that people give:
For example:
Too much Gashmiyus? Get our priorities straight. Call out Private Jets from Podiums.
Too much Keeping up with the Jones’? We need to live more simply. EG Chasuna Takanos.
Lack of Ruchniyus for a Balebus? Join a Chabura learning the Daf (Weekly or Yomi), Oraysah, Kinyan, or Neo-Chassidishe Shteeble.
Women not feeling fulfilled? Career Consulting and women’s enrichment programs.
Too few teachers? Raise salaries. Promote the value of Chinuch through Chasdei Lev.
Shidduch Crisis? Wring our hands and change the system.
Kids not getting into schools? More schools.
Kids at Risk? More variety of schools.
Yungeleit needing something more? Adirei HaTorah, smaller Kollelim, and Talmudo B’Yado.
And then his theory:
After much thought I believe the answer isn’t because of anything we did wrong. It’s because of what we did right.
The problem isn’t that we’re not driven. The problem isn't even that at our core we want the wrong things. It’s a function of our success as a community and a need to now gain individual identities and goals now that we’ve achieved our collective ones.
I believe it comes down to living in a generation of individual achievement while still maintaining a Klal identity.
To me, this is a deflection from engaging with what I believe are the fundamental issues in the YW worldview, which lead to the very symptoms he’s noticing.
The Yeshiva World is an unstable reactionary movement.
The YW is best understood as a reaction, not a natural evolution of Judaism. First to the Haskalah/Enlightenment, then, even more intensely, to the wholesale destruction of European Orthodoxy and postwar religious fragility. It was originally built to keep smart, curious shtetl boys from joining universities in Berlin or Vienna; later, it was rebuilt to resuscitate Orthodoxy in America and Israel. In a roundabout way, Spinoza, the father of the Enlightenment, had as much to do with the need for the modern yeshiva as Rav Chaim of Volozhin, the father of yeshivos, had to do with its form.
Communally, as Avigdor says, the YW is stronger than ever, far more people learning Talmud at a high level than at any point in Jewish history; robust schools, shuls, and kollelim; fundraising numbers that would have sounded fantastical to Rav Aharon Kotler. But movements built for wartime don’t always govern peacetime well. The YW calcified around a single ideal (Talmud study above all else) and kept doubling down even as the world around us, and our inner lives, shifted.
During the postwar era, the mission was external and collective, as Avigdor wrote:
Twenty years ago, when a yeshiva man hung a picture of Rav Aharon Kotler on his wall, it wasn’t a statement that “I will be Rav Aharon,” but that “I am a soldier in Rav Aharon’s army,” and my sense of mission, purpose, and worth was found in my role in the communal cause of “building Torah in America.” It was an external mission. We were building communal infrastructure—communities, yeshivos, schools, shuls, and the financial structure to support it all. We toiled, we sweated, we worked, and we succeeded together. We were all grains of sand on the seashore collectively holding back the mighty waves.
He is correct, postwar YW crowned a single ideal: full‑time Talmud study as the only true lechatchilah derech (best way to live your life), and it organized status and honor around the institutions that needed that ideal to survive. But the world has changed. The YW is (relatively) affluent and stable, and there is no longer a meaningful threat to the community. On the contrary, Orthodox Jews are by far the fastest‑growing group within both American and Israeli Jewry.
Enter the status games. If there is only one real crown and almost nobody can wear it, everyone else has to signal proximity. So, we lengthen Kollel years as social proof, because working early reads as capitulation. We shift income onto wives and in‑laws because that signals adherence to the postwar mission. We build “learning programs” for the working man - Daf Yomi, night chaburahs, kumzitzes. But these are paper‑thin replacements for an all‑consuming lechatchilah life of a being a full‑time learner. And when the spirit feels thin, status slides into its easiest proxy: money and spectacle.
That is how materialism explodes inside a world that talks nonstop about the perils of “gashmiyus”. You can rebuke from the amud until you’re hoarse; if the ladder only truly honors one path, people will buy status wherever they can. Simchah arms races. Insane school admissions games. Donor culture as theater. Adirei HaTorah tigers1. If only one life is crowned, the rest must purchase proximity to the crown. Spectacle is how you prove you’re close.
So, the “symptoms” above will intensify. Gashmiyus rebukes are optics, not changes to incentives or identity. Women’s roles and real contributions to family life expand relative to the past, while religious status for women lags behind. You can try to pay the frum math teacher more, but in a society that fundamentally believes math is a waste of time, fewer and fewer people will step forward for these positions.
You can say, “We did too well; now we need personal goals.” I don’t buy it. The problem isn’t that we’ve been so successful as a community that we’re now facing success’s problems. It’s that the founding logic of the YW is flawed. Past eras of Judaism knew how to honor multiple end‑states without dissolving communal standards. For example, 19th‑century German Orthodoxy and 14th‑century Spanish Jewry upheld rich, multilayered Jewish culture that honored poets, statesmen, philosophers, scientists, and businessmen alongside the traditional rabbinic elite. Until we expand what the ladder crowns, all‑too‑human status games will keep driving systemic issues. And the people inside the system will keep feeling spiritually defeated and underfed - even as the “klal” looks strong.
Orwell wrote:
“The attempt to freeze history always ends in violence or absurdity.”
The Yeshiva World is ending in absurdity.
Overheard that at a private fundraiser for Adirei HaTorah there was a live Tiger on exhibit, R’ Malkiel’s Gaboim had to arrange for it to be hidden before his entrance to the event. It was promptly put back on show after his departure.
I will offer what thoughts I can. I come to this not as a ben Torah, nor as someone who left that world behind. My grandparents converted to Anglicanism after the Anschluss and settled in small-town North Carolina. They did not convert back. I was raised secular in the American South. The Judaism I inherited was ruptured, assimilated, and geographically displaced.
I have only encountered the Talmud through a historical lens, not in a beis medrash. Its recursive logic, juridical imagination, and unresolved sugyot I studied in the context of their formation. The Bavli was composed under imperial constraint, structured by plural legal reasoning, and resistant to doctrinal closure. I recognize its language, but I have never lived its daily speech.
The “Yeshiva World” is as alien to me as the Amish—yet it carries a haunting familiarity. I do not know its rabbis, its schools, or its marriage markets. I am not in a position to write ethnography, let alone prescription. But what I can see—precisely because of this distance—is the rupture between the Bavli’s open-ended juridical polyphony and the monocultural crown now built atop it.
I do not write to correct that world. I write to name the historical divergence between what it claims and what it preserves. And you are naming it from within.
Thank you for the publicity. I’m glad I’m getting people talking about this issue.
You correctly point that any movement that starts off lean and purposeful will ultimately be a victim of its success and swell into even the absurd.
The real question is, what is the central point around which to build a society.
Nuance can be layered on after, but movements can’t have rallying calls that read like essays.
As far as being reactionary, yes and no.
The what and how are certainly reactionary to the times, but the notion that the Jewish people’s lifeblood is Torah is hardly anything new.
Times will change, and societies will rise and fall, but there will never be a Jewish community that will endure without Torah firmly at its core.