As I sat down to my morning cup of coffee I had a thought. In general Judaism is against substance abuse. Yes I know that there are some new varieties of people calling themselves Chassidim that make use of various substance to "experience the divine" however, in the overall greater reality of Judaism substance abuse is looked down upon. But what about caffeine? That's right caffeine, it is by nature a stimulant and stimulants are by nature mood and perception altering substances.

R' Mordechai Sharabi Z"L felt very strongly about this, so much so that he banned certain brands of instant coffee from his Yeshiva(a ban which is still in force today) because they had caffeine unnaturally added to them. Even with regular coffee he apparently urged his students to drink only one or two cups a day and then to splice it 50/50 with milk. He felt that the altered state of perception hindered one from properly learning Torah, even at the most basic level.

I asked one of his chief students about this once, most specifically dealing with stories of the GR"A and such who would hardly sleep and simply study. His answer was, "that is all they are... stories. If one wants to be a Tzadik and a Talmid Chacham one needs to sleep a regular amount." He then referenced me to various halachic works which essentially stated that a person should sleep 8hrs a day, and if they truly want to make the sacrifice for Torah they can reduce that to 6hrs without danger of harm, but not less.

This is in such contrast to what I have heard in many other Yeshivot which have often taught that their students should not sleep more than six hours in a day. So this leaves me to wonder are we creating a generation of substance abusers? Surely for anyone to go week on week sleeping so little they have to essentially live off of caffeine. Considering that caffeine takes a minimum of 16hrs to metabolize and vacate the body, they are never not wired. Essentially they are going from one caffeine fix to another. Is this healthy? Is it wise? Does it in essence contradict the message of Torah?

There are many reasons for joining any particular Yeshiva. The Torah, of course should be the number one, and preferably only reason. However, especially in Israeli religious society, there are others. The prestige that a Yeshiva affords can help in many areas of life, from enrolling one's children into good schools to helping shidduch prospects. There is even the possibility of forming a relationship with the Rabbis to in order to coerce them into giving one aid on a particular venture.

Some of you may remember the two Americans that don't speak Hebrew real well that showed up at our Yeshiva, and I thought it odd that they would want to sit through hours of shiurim that they simply didn't understand. Well as it stands the verdict on one of them is in. He was attending in order for it to help his shidduch possibilities. That's right, he(an Ashkenazi boy... well near 40) wanted to marry a Sephardic girl, and our Yeshiva, with its prestige will help get one's shidduch resume put onto the short list.

He was married(I am going to leave a few details out here in order to protect anonymity) and has since mostly disappeared. We all expected to see very little of him during the Sheva Brachot(though were amazed that a guy who lives two blocks away couldn't even make it for minyan). However, after that, except to stop by and talk about the possibility of a get(less than a month in) he simply does not come around. He is American and I am American so from time to time the Rosh Yeshiva talks to me to get my read on the situation.

Final analysis by both of us is not so good. The R"Y is essentially convinced that he was a shidduch student. He says we get them from time to time, usually he can weed them out, but the language and cultural barriers made it harder with this one. Now we are left with a Khallah who expected to be marrying a top learner, an AWOL Chatan who is being somewhat verbally abusive, and the very real possibility of a Get, long before the "honey moon" period is supposed to have worn off.

I wonder if other big name Yeshivot attract the same sorts of things. Beside being disturbed by the seeming dishonesty of it all. What really catches me is the incredibly self-destructive nature of it. Why throw up such a facade to get married only to tear it down immediately after the wedding? Is common sense such a scarce commodity that one would not see that there is no way to come away clean from such behavior?

Finally I have my megillah back. The checker and I kept getting our wires crossed. Finally I was able to meet with him to go over the megillah. The megillah was not as bad as I had expected it to be. There are plenty of corrections to be made, however it is not overwhelming. Most are minor, there are some bigger ones, but those don't scare me. Essentially on my first section there were something like 48 errors(which is a lot). On my last section there were only two, and those were laughably minor(I forgot to put crowns on letters, something that can even be fixed on Tefillin and Mezzuzot). It was really nice to see my progress. The checker also continually exclaimed how nice it was for a first megillah. Considering the source that was great praise.

He made sure that I was going to continue writing, and when I told him that I would very soon have two Mezzuzot and two more megillot for him to check, he was excited and also began sharing with me various tips and techniques. Which again considering the source was an amazing experience. He is one of the best checkers in the country with over 35years experience just checking. It is also a Sofer of some reknown. His tefillin start in price(just the klaf) at $6400. So definitely one of those people that when he tells you "do this" it is best to probably do it.

My new Shiur is going great. It has caused no small amount of upheaval in my schedule but that is fine considering what I am getting in the exchange. I am once again at the bottom(the very bottom). Aside from one other person in the shiur I am probably the youngest there by a decade, and most have been learning in that Shiur that long. It is a very high level iyun shiur, so essentially I have to run just to keep up and do a ton of review to get the fullness out of it. However in the end it is great in that I see how learning b'iyun in one area affects all others. Aside from learning the subject matter, I also learn how to learn. Specifically how learn in great depth. So when I pick up the Gemarra on a halacha book, my mind starts churning with the questions and kashas necessary to iyun.

It is hard to believe that two years of my daughter's life has passed already. I am thankful that I merited to have such a wonderful child and I cherish every moment... usually.

Zephod(the one discussed in thoughts on teshuva and being a baalei teshuva post) has an interesting story. Twenty years ago he was a baraman in Hamburg Germany. Not just in any bar, but a sailor's bar. For those of you who may have grown up a little more religious and think of bars as the nice places in a Marriot lounge, let this South Jersey boy inform you that there is nothing quite at seedy as a sailor's bar. Trust me on this.

So he was a barman in a sailor's bar in Hamburg Germany tending bar one night when someone let's out a blood curdling scream and slams a knife into a table(btw these sorts of things are normal in sailor bars). The screaming man then says, " I am a Jew, and I am proud to be a Jew, if I see even a hint of antisemitism in anyone's eyes I will kill him here tonight." So Zephod thinks to himself, that this drunken insane man has more Jewish feeling then he himself has ever had. If there enough to this Jewish thing to get a person to call out antisemites in a sailor's bar in Hamburg Germany than perhaps it bears some investigation. Until this point in his life, Zephod has simply never considered it. So he pulls together the requisite paperwork, makes Aliyah, and upon his arrival to Israel promptly walks into a Yeshiva, my Yeshiva. Fifteen years later he is becomming a Rosh Yeshiva of another Yeshiva and writing what are one of the most thorough works on halacha of Kabbalistic customs to ever be written(Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef has called it the Mishnah Berura for Mekubalim). The funny thing is that Zephod's progress is not unique, it is actually quite average.

As I sat and spoke with my Rosh Yeshiva today, one of the things that came up was the incident that I discussed earlier about a magid shiur of a Yeshiva that I used to attend. We discussed this in part because it reflects upon my own maturity and growth. At one point my Rosh Yeshiva said, "Within a short couple of years you will far surpass him in learning, however if that is your goal you will have gained nothing and lost the world." Meaning that since it would not be lishma, but to be better than someone else, my only reward for the learning would be that I am better than someone else... quite sad really. Anyway, as he went on to explain, I would not surpass him on the strength of my own abilities so much as the method of learning employed.

In 1803 Chaim of Volozhin came up with an interesting concept on how to re-structure the Yeshiva enviroment. Until that point Yeshivot were Rabbi intensive, a person's primary learning took place in Shiur not with a Chavruta. Thus limiting the number of students a Yeshiva could carry, as a any Rav could only successfully impart knowledge to a relatively small number individuals and a Yeshiva could only carry so many Rabbanim. The typical ratio was about 10 to 1. Leaving enrollment at very small numbers. This simply became insufficient for proper inculcation of Jewish learning in Europe and so Rav Chaim came up with a new system, the Chavrutta system. Two people who are on approximately the same learning level are placed together and the majority of their learning is done together. With limited contact with a Rav who guides them. The downside is that you essentially have people teaching themselves, and the learning progresses at a slower rate, especially at the higher levels. However there were only three Yeshivot in all of Europe so something needed to be done. Today this is how most Yeshivot do things... but it has only been the system for the last 200yrs, not the last 2000. Sephardi Yeshivot only switched over in the last century.

Most Kabbalistic Yeshivot maintain the old style. For instance if a person was student in Beit E-l in the 1940s the Rabbanim there at the time included R' Ovadiah Hadayya, R' Ezra Hadayya, R' Mordechai Sharabi(who also had his own Yeshiva at the time), R' Kaduri, R' Darzi, R' Shayyo R' Adis, R' Attia and a few others. The Yeshiva boasted at the time of just under 70 students. At the same time(again before the swtich over) Porat Yosef boated of 12 such Gedolim, and just over 200 students. Whereas in a Volozhin style Yeshiva a student will typically have no more than one shiur a day lasting between an half hour to an hour, in an old style Yeshiva one would expect to have two Shiurim a day lasting from 1-3 hours in duration. The rest of the time was spent with one's chavruttot(usually two, one on a much higher level and one on a lower level so as to learn to teach as well), or simply reviewing the material until one could duplicate the method of the Rav in attaining his understanding of the Sugiya. The results though are apparent. My own Yeshiva(one of the few known for taking Ba'alei Teshuva on any level) has a reputation for turning out Gedolim.

There are a couple of other Yeshivot who hold by the same system and also turn out Gedolim at an amazing rate. The question I have is why, with the modern state of Israel and blooming of Jewish education do we persist with a model that was at best an emergency measure, with reduced results? Yes it may be the way things are done, but only for the last 200 years, there are thousands of years before that in which they were done differently with arguably better results.

So the Megillah didn't come through. The checker never showed up. Considering that he is normally very regular at the Yeshiva I am supposing that something important came up. Oh well. I have until Purim anyway. In the Rav who is teaching me Safrut considers me to be fully trained and certified. Apparently he has spoken with the checker about the problems and they are all very minor. That is a good thing.

That brings us to the next part... the talk with the Rosh Yeshiva. It was quite a talk, and it took quite some time. We discussed what I had learned in the past few years. Where I thought I was holding. The reports he got back from my Chavrutta. We also discussed the issue that I talked about in the post you are not good enough... and never will be... which lead to an interesting Jewish history lesson and a frank discussion of the positive and negative attributes of the differing Yeshiva systems. Overall it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I was expecting...

Or maybe it was worse. Essentially he saw that I had diligently applied myself and that I seemed to have a good grasp for the material, so he moved me into his own shiur. Essentially I have gone from the top person in my shiur to probably miles below the bottom person in my new shiur. Which is quite intimidating. Though overall I am happy for the change. I will miss my old magid shiur, but considering that they are at different times, there is nothing to stop me from dropping in. It does mean that I have to rework my schedule, and just when I was finally starting to get into the rhythm of it. I guess the moral of this story is that I don't like change, which is probably why I stayed in the one shiur as long as I did.

Today is the day. Today I get my megillah back with all the corrections that need to be made(yes there are some as I expected, it was my first). Also today I talk to the Rosh Yeshiva about graduating up to a higher level Shiur. After nearly three years it is time. Actually it was probably time long before this, but when my current maggid shiur essentially told me that the current shiur isn't really for me anymore, that was the point that pushed it over the edge. I will still be able to attend the current shiur if I wish, but overall... it is time to move on. This means sitting down with the Rosh Yeshiva for an honest assesment of my abilities. A little nerve racking... as I know he will set aside some of his normal chesed and unconditional acceptance to tell me what I really need to hear.