Letter: A Response

bsD.

I read the letter by A Yid yesterday and I said to myself- here we go again. Not inventing the wheel per se, but again pointing a finger.  I am personally not comfortable touching on Rabbonim and Rabbeim.

Here are some observations born from years of bleeding for my own in this crisis and trying to help others.

The writer mentioned that the severity of crisis fallout is less in the Chassidish world. If we delve a bit into why, we will realize that the majority of Chassidish girls and boys know that their parents will VET the shidduchim and then they will have the Beshau / Dates.  That is the system! Parents keep their finger on the PULSE of the process, which is a life-altering one. Children trust their parents and parents daven and are connected to their Rebbes/Daas Torah. There is accountability and it’s closest to the shidduch system of old.  Parental input! And partner investment!

Lacking sorely as years go by is the understanding that marriage means assuming responsibility with a partner. Every Moisad needs to incorporate some marital preparation lectures and classes. It is not just a transition from dorming in Yeshiva and Mom doing the laundry to moving into one’s own apartment and Wife cooking and doing the laundry- and money miraculously coming in. It sounds trite- but professional daters know there is an expectation and can’t step up to the plate. We have hundreds of young men looking at 40, who have dated, every type and stripe created by the Aibishter, and read tens of thousands of profiles of the best and brightest Nshei Chayil.

Which leads to the next comment, which is: where is accountability for Yeshiva boys that keep accepting profiles and taking girls out? Who is listening to why they say no? Who is evaluating their criteria and priorities and trying to steer them back onto the more auspicious path? And by the way- let’s lose the treif lounge dating. How can a Yeshiva boy even step into a place with much less than tznius clientele patronizing for non-kosher purposes!

Lastly for this piece- the author of the original article blames the high divorce rate on girls’ desperation to get married without checking if the young man is suitable. Low Blow-
Yes, when girls hear that two-year dry spells in dating are not uncommon- they become anxious. HOWEVER, there are many reasons why marriages are failing. In the age of entitlement and click/click easy and zero accountability- how can a marriage that is built on time, vatronus, caring, investing and owning ones’ behavior thrive and make it?

There’s much food for thought and everyone – parent/educator/coach/mentor/Rebbe/dater – can and must do work in these arenas.

The metzius is there are thousands of neshamos not being created. There are bleeding hearts of women who so wish to be married and build a Torahdig home and are stymied.

Everyone STEP UP.

P.S.

Chassidish method, parents function as parents with the responsibility to do their best for their children. In other circles, confusion reigns. Parents are not their children’s FRIENDS!

“The picture” can be traced to the worsening of the scope and severity in the crisis. The decision whether to date a girl predicated on a three-second snapshot of her violates many Torah sensitivities. The decision to ignore any idea without a picture shouldn’t be countenanced.

Thank you.

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19 COMMENTS

  1. I appreciate that you are not comfortable touching on Rabbanim and Rabbeim. I think most of us are. Yet the Gedolei HaDor who get all the broken souls coming to them saw a need to write a clear letter which is not open for interpretation. Do you not agree that if the Gedolim wrote an UNPRECEDENTED LETTER seeing that the system is broken that it should be heeded to??? They had more viable and practical solutions than you. Sorry. Changes gotta be made to our system FAST.

  2. Don’t you realize that there is a real problem with thousands of Litvish Girls in our midst who will statistically have a hard time to find their Bashert?? Your wonderful dating solutions while well meaning does ZERO to address the discrepancy of thousands more girls on the market than Bochurim. Besides the dating difference which has no relevance here, did you consider that the lack of a Shidduch crises by the Chassidim is they start the Bochurim younger in age, don’t put them in a FREEZER for half a year???

    • Where do u keep getting this number called thousands. What are you talking about? That’s a made up number. There are many, and far too many at that, older single girls but what’s with the word thousands?

    • Enough of these statistical issues, when will people realize that whether or not there are enough boys, when you have hundreds of boys sitting around you obviously don’t have a statistical issue maybe if they all got married or at least most of them then you start scraping the bottom of the barrel but as it is now there is a matching issue. Not enough interest to tie the knot people are being too picky etc. The letter is not claiming that we should take on the Hasidic model but rather we should learn from it.

  3. Please don’t have the scoop change their initiative!!!! It was a Mesirus Nefesh that they did to help the Bochurim listen to our Gedolim and start younger. Dating coaches, Marital coaches, Life coaches are all to be encouraged. It doesn’t address what is going on in Lakewood and beyond that we are HURTING OUR GIRLS. Sorry to say this nothing that you wrote addresses the Shidduch Crises.

  4. Seriously?? We are dealing with life and death and the letters of the Gedolim and your response is parental involvement and coaches. We have a raging Agunah fire burning. We need structural changes a lot in addition to your suggestions. Change isn’t easy. But these last 25 years we created a crises which we must fix for the future of Klal Yisrael.

  5. Great points but there is a FIRE burning. The Chofetz Chaim writes that when a fire burns you must pour even unclean water on it. This fire can only be extinguished if we pour any type of water on it. Even if it is difficult we have to extract ourselves from this man made mess which the Litvish community created for itself…. Time for real changes which will produce outcomes to help Klal Yisrael!!

  6. Lets talk about “what color is “in” for kids loafers this summer”. Mothers look for shidduchim for their sons like they can pick what they can get; money, yichus, a size 0 and the girls look over at what their friends got. Everyone wants what everyone has and that system won’t sustain just like any other area of life. The comparing and shame is detrimental.

  7. I find it interesting these last few days reading all the letters and comments. What I find troubling is that probably none of these letters or comments or suggestions are coming from Rabbonim, Rabbeim and possibly even more telling not from the single girls or their parents.

    Why don’t we ask THEM what they think. These single girls are infuriated with all this redderick. They don’t want or need coaches of any type, they are not looking for the younger boys, they are sick of being the pawns in these conversations and certainly not interested in being everyone’s chesed case.

    How about we start to listen to the people actually going through this. Most (not all of course but most of them) will tell you that all they want is for you to think of them, redt them shidduchim and allow them the ability to choose a spouse without being told they are picky, looking for the wrong guy, have messed up priorities, don’t understand what they are doing to themselves and all the other heartless comments freely thrown around.

    Our single girls and their parents just want you to let them live and send them suggestions with no strings or comments attached. Ask them. You will see that’s all they want

  8. You can’t just copy and paste the traditions of hasidim into the litvishe community… it won’t fit.

    In general, hasidim have different expectations from spouses in terms of emotional support etc. due to different sociatal norms and culture… so the way they approach dating is very different from the yeshivish world.

  9. This response is no response at all. Aside from being all over the point and not laying out the salient points in a very clear and concise manner the main issue is that no one is saying that there are not hundreds of other issues to address as well. The point of this initiative is to address a very simple statistical/mathematical issue with boys returning back from e”y at such an advanced age. The point is to encourage yeshivos here to send them there earlier so they can start dating here at a younger age, period. All your points do not truly address that. You mainly just raise additional issues which don’t really even begin to scratch the surface of the myriads of problems that prevent shidduchim from happening. However, if we can at least address one issue which doesn’t involve anyone having to work on themselves and their chisronos and just deal with a math challenge that imposes a universal restriction for everyone then it seems worth it. Maybe 50 more girls will get married this way maybe 100 maybe 500 who never would have just because those guys would never have been around when these girls entered the parsha and the boys exit the parsha quickly when the next year’s group of girls enter the parsha. Think of all the things the gedolim have put themselves through emotionally and physically and kulos they relied on to facilitate a woman to get married. After this initiative is in place then you can work on the thousands and thousands of other foolish and misguided maakvim of shidduchim coming to fruition.

  10. This is 1000% true. We need to restructure in order to have guys dating earlier. Btw the problems will not be solved on forums. This is something that needs a conference of all the rabbinim and all the Rosh Yeshivas and Rosh homstodos. And then the khal has to follow what they say. Otherwise nobody is interested in being the different one. Have their son date before he takes all the “necessary steps” in life. Forget about the girls “the guy is so young, he didn’t go to E”Y. And so on. Until we all stop looking at each other as the problem and start working on ourselves change will not happen.

    • The Lakewood Scoop letter is the tip of the iceberg. As someone who has several relatives in Shidduchim I can tell you that the anger and resentment on this topic will soon erupt like a volcano. People are starting to understand what the Gedolim have said for many years that the Litvish community made many colossal errors which we have ourselves to blame. It’s not the letter to the scoop that will make the change. It is the letter of the Gedoli HaDor imploring for change and the unfortunate occurrence which happened in the USA where people said they “know the American system better than Israeli Gedoli HaDor”. We have done ourselves an injustice not to follow Daas Torah and we are paying a terrible consequence for it.

  11. Very simply put if you daven early you don’t get in to shailos about zman kiryas shema even if you said shema very quickly but if you wait until later even if you feel like you said it so perfectly emphassized you may have missed the time the Torah gave to have it said, so too if you go into marriage early you are skipping the stage where you can hit problems, whereas if you wait you are running into a risk about getting the whole mitzvah at all.

    It is just that simple and anyone who has rushed to do a mitzvah has this feeling. Sure there are problems but zrizus can prevent them. Mitzvah haba liyadcha al tachmitzena.

    Shidduchim is not a shopping experience, or anything similar. You don’t “compare” one suggestion to another, and you don’t “share” with another friend. The whole tznius about this needs to be reinforced. In the old world even in Litvishe circles it was not common to “go out” to a public recreation area. You may need a public area because of yichud, but not recreational, unless directed by a Rav.

    There will always be situations which warrant certain adjustments but what has become the norm in the US is really frankly put not well understood nor better explained and certainly not sustainable.

  12. Enough of these claims of statistical issues, when will people realize that whether or not there are enough boys, when you have hundreds of boys sitting around 26 + you obviously don’t have a statistical issue maybe if they all got married or at least most of them then you start scraping the bottom of the barrel but as it is now there is a matching issue. Not enough interest to tie the knot people are being too picky etc. The letter is not claiming that we should take on the Hasidic model but rather we should learn from it.

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