A Father's Faher

Maybe leaving Yeshiva is not the biggest challenge?

With schools and kindergartens on vacation, parents and kids get more time together. More time means more fun memories. It also, often, just means more time. Here are a few reflections on fatherhood from the last couple of weeks.

The Unspoken Transition

We talk a lot about the transition from being in yeshiva to being post-yeshiva. There are good reasons for that. It’s a big change.

But there’s another transition that ofetn times happens around the same time: becoming a father. Most guys in our community learn in yeshiva while single, and maybe for a bit while married. But generally, the shift from learning full time to working happens around the same time as the shift from being single to being a father.

One nafka mina is someone who learns for many years after marriage. That’s what happened to me.

I was blessed to spend my first seven years of marriage in kollel. My oldest was six when we left. Having that extended stretch where I was both learning and a father showed me something: a lot of what people attribute to the pre-yeshiva to post-yeshiva transition might actually be more about the transition from single to father. I felt many of those same challenges while I was still in full-time learning.

Here’s a small example.

There used to be a vatikin minyan at Kerem B’Yavneh on Shabbos morning. I davened there through Shana Aleph, Shana Bet, and even Shana Gimel, when I was in the army and spent a lot of Shabbatot back at yeshiva. Shabbos morning started with early davening. I loved the slow, beautiful Pesukei D’Zimra. After that, a quick kiddush, a piece of cake, a coffee, and then chazara time. Those long mornings in the Kerem B’Yavneh library were some of the best of my life. The calm, the quiet, the focus, the Torah.

Fast forward a few years, and I had a couple little kids at home. Shabbos morning looked different. Often it meant running in late to do a quick shortened Pesukei D’Zimra at the later minyan, tired and not especially focused. Sometimes that was because the kids had been up through the night. Or because I’d been up with a kid who wanted to be up for neitz, so that my wife could get some extra rest on the day that’s literally called the day of rest.

That was followed by time in the park, lunch, cleanup, playtime, cleanup, an accident, more cleanup. You get the idea.

It’s a small example, but it showed me something. One of the big challenges of growing up isn’t leaving the yeshiva environment. It’s the shift from having no responsibilities, no kids, no wife to take care of, to taking responsibility for the wellbeing of your family.

Influencer Videos

This isn’t only a frum conversation. You see the secular version of it too, with the influencer types who post their five-hour morning routines: the cold plunge, the two-hour gym session, the meal prep, all of it pristine and regimented. Critics keep pointing out the obvious. These guys don’t have kids. That level of self-optimization is only available to someone whose morning belongs to nobody but himself. A father doesn’t get that kind of morning back. His day isn’t only his anymore.

Not a New Problem

This isn’t new. At the very beginning of Creation, when the Torah lists the generations from Adam to Noach to Avraham, it says a person lived so many years, then had a child, then lived so many more years. Life, according to these pesukim, is divided in two: before you have a child, and after.

A Tense Meeting

The fact that we learn in yeshiva without kids isn’t just an accidental bug. There are real challenges baked into the yeshiva approach when it comes to fatherhood, and it was never a secret. It was explicit to everyone learning in the Kerem B’Yavneh kollel.

There was once a tense meeting between the avreichim and the yeshiva leadership. The leadership felt the avreichim weren’t present enough in the beit midrash, not doing their part in terms of being in seder with proper hasmada.

One senior Rav told the room that in his many years in kollel, he’d missed seder only a handful of times. Yes, he had a bunch of kids. Yes, they sometimes got sick. But that was his wife’s job. She took care of the kids, he learned. That was the expectation for everyone in the room. (Forget that most of the guys needed their wives’ income just to sustain themselves in kollel in the first place.)

Needless to say, I wasn’t happy about this, and neither were a lot of my friends.

I want to be careful here. This was one meeting, one kollel, one rebbe’s hashkafa. There was even another Rebbe at that meeting who confided to me later that he has a different approach. I loved my time in Yeshiva overall and I’m not trying to indict anyone based on a single conversation, I’m sharing what I saw and how it shaped my thinking.

No Easy Answers

I don’t think there’s an easy answer here. The balance between family responsibilities and religious responsibilities (or anything else like work, hobbies, chessed etc.) is real. But my point is that in the corner of the yeshiva world I experienced, the mentality was structured around the individual learner, and family often got treated as a nuisance.

To be fair, there’s real machshava behind this model, not just inertia. The idea that a wife’s mesirus nefesh to support her husband’s learning is itself a zechus, that the Torah he learns reaches the whole family even when he isn’t physically present, that his hasmada now shapes what he can give them later. I don’t think that machshava is wrong. I just think it gets stretched further than it should, and the family ends up absorbing the stretch.

The Pandemic Question

Here’s a related thought, not formally tied to everything above, just something that’s been sitting in the same part of my head.

I’ve been thinking back to the pandemic. My oldest was one at the time, cute, couldn’t run too far, didn’t know how to misbehave yet. For us it wasn’t a very hard stretch. But I know for a lot of families it was a real challenge, and a big piece of that challenge was figuring out how to work if the kids were home instead of in school.

That got me thinking about the relationship between our careers and our kids’ education. When people were begging for schools to reopen, was it because they felt their kids were genuinely growing and thriving there more than at home? Or because they needed to work, and the education system was functioning, in part, as industrial-scale babysitting to free parents up to do that?

If there’s some truth to the second answer, the question becomes uncomfortable. These are our children. This is our future. Are we okay having built an outsourced system to raise them so we can work? I’m not denying that work matters, that parnasa is real. But I can’t stop asking myself if this is really the best way to go.

Would kids benefit from more focused educational time from their parents, compared to the current reality? I don’t know the answer, and I don’t have a concrete suggestion for how to improve the situation.

In our special shiur this week with Rav Hershel Schachter (recording coming to the podcast feed on Monday), he twice spoke, with real passion, about the importance of investing in our kids and in youth education. They’re the future of our nation. We need to make sure we’re giving them our best.