@ bright, Just for the record, I'd like to share a point about something you said
I wasn't in the Yeshivois in Europe, so I don't know what it was like
I had the zechus of having a conversation with Reb Shaul Bruss Zatzal, Rosh Yeshivas Beis HaTalmud a person who learned in Kaminetz by Reb Baruch Ber. He shared a point that by now I'm sure many of you know, how anti-Yeshiva the prevalent culture in many parts of Europe was. He told me that it was so bad, that when a Yeshiva bachur was redt a shidduch the first question was "what's wrong with her that she is maskim to marry a yeshiva bachur?". He told me of bachurim that wouldn't leave their homes the whole bein Hazmanim because they would be so denigrated by the general populace in their hometown. He said that the Mirrer Mashgiach worked very hard to build up the concept of shtultz for this reason, because otherwise the bachurim would think of themselves like a lot of the people around them did, as nebechs, etc. 
So, perhaps the bachurim worked hard and achieved the feeling of being special, but it definitely didn't come easy.

Another point.
He told me that they learned maseches kesubois in the winter zman, and they were a few months into the zman, and they were holding somewhere in the עs, and Reb Reuven was upset why they are learning so slow. I heard this with my own ears from Reb Brus, who learned probably slower than anyone out there, k'yedua the jokes about beis hatalmud. I didn't dare ask him the obvious question, but my theory is that the Yeshivas in Europe were takeh catering to metzuyonim, so they learned like they did, and learned whole masechtas, while our yeshivois are not styled to teach only metzuyonim

Agreed. that was also why the Alter stopped the idea of esen teg... I once asked a talmid of Reb Ahron, why is it that so many of your friends became such great talmidei chachamim? I went to a very good yeshiva and their track record is nowhere near BMGs from the talmidei Rav Ahron? He told me that it was because the only reason someone went to BMG was to learn. He went even though the whole world was going to college, or best-case scenario, taking Rabbinic courses. He did it because all he wanted was to learn. Such an environment fosters talmidei chachamim of the highest caliber. I apologize if I ever inferred it was easy. My point simply is that that being the case, what was good for BMG in the 40s lav davka is good for the modern-day bachur. If you disagree with that or anything about the way I said what I said, please lmk.

ראיתי בני עליי' והם מועטין
In my days that meant that they were the few that actually went to yeshiva, in todays days it means they are the few from within the yeshiva.......

My dear, dear friend, you don't have to apologize for anything! And yes, that point is definitely true, when the whole world was anti-yeshivas, then a person who went to yeshiva anyway was somebody who was very dedicated and devoted to growing in it.

BTW, thanks for this whole thread. There's a lot of good stuff here

bright wrote on 13 Jul 2025 19:44:

I will go against my recent reputation here and post something positive for a change. I saw this in a new book I read over Shabbos. 

It’s kedai to read till the end:

There is a stunning scene near the beginning of the book of Exodus. (It is so familiar that we often miss just how remarkable it is.) God hears the moans of the Israelites suffering in Egyptian bondage, remembers God’s covenant with their ancestors, and resolves to liberate them. God, it seems, is finally ready to charge into history and put an end to the horrific oppression of God’s people. And then God reveals the concrete divine plan. Addressing Moses, God says: “Come, therefore, I will send you to Pharaoh, and you shall free My people, the Israelites, from Egypt” (Exodus 3:10). God intends to free the Israelites and radically alter the course of Jewish, and human, history. How will God accomplish God’s goals? By summoning a homeless shepherd and enlisting him to be God’s emissary. As a modern Bible scholar explains, “In one brief utterance, the grand intention of God has become a specific human responsibility, human obligation, and human vocation… After the massive intrusion of God, the exodus has suddenly become a human enterprise…

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903–1993) boldly insists that in this amazing encounter, Moses serves as a paradigm for what is true of every human being: to be created in the image of God is to be assigned a specific task by God. Playing with the Jewish legal idea that “an agent is likened to the sender,” R. Soloveitchik argues that one who is similar to his sender thereby becomes his agent—in other words, being created in the image of God entails becoming God’s agent and emissary.

According to R. Soloveitchik, each of us is given a distinctive mission, and the moment into which we are born is reflective of the assignment God has in mind for us: “The fact that someone lives in a particular time and a particular place, and not in some other time, under different circumstances, can only be understood if we accept the idea of the human being having a distinctive mission. Providence knows how and where each individual, with her capacities and weaknesses, can best fulfill her mission,” and we are created accordingly. (A question I am not at all sure how to answer: Can one hold this as an existential orientation without affirming it as a metaphysical truth? I think so, but I am honestly not sure.) It is crucial to understand, R. Soloveitchik adds, that, normatively at least, we are not free to accept or decline our mission. Sometimes we are called to a task that is overwhelming or exhausting, or that seems like a fool’s errand—and yet we are not free to walk away. This, I am suggesting, is the lesson Jonah found it so difficult to learn. We read his story because to some extent it is also our own.

But we are not prophets, and in some ways, that makes our task even harder: unlike Moses, we first have to discern our mission, and then decide whether to heed the call. And yet we do sometimes feel a call. If all this sounds too daunting or grandiose to contemplate, think about a moment in your life when you knew—we can bracket the question of precisely how you knew; sometimes you just know—you had to fulfill a particular task in the world. Perhaps you didn’t want to—maybe it would have cost you socially, or professionally, or economically; or maybe you were just feeling lazy—and you ran away, pretending not to hear, obfuscating matters until you rationalized your way out of performing the unwanted task. Reading Jonah on Yom Kippur, we remind ourselves that although we have the ability to turn away, religiously speaking we do not have the right to do so.

R. Soloveitchik captures this insight beautifully by suggesting that this is why both human beings and angels can be referred to in biblical Hebrew as mal’akhim, which we usually take to mean “angels,” but which in fact refers to messengers more broadly. What is the difference, according to classical Jewish sources, between an earthly messenger and a heavenly one? Whereas the latter has no choice but to fulfill the divine mission, the former is free to disobey. Again and again, we are asked:

Are you Jonah? And are you willing to start being something else?

IN WHAT SENSE WAS THE WORLD CREATED FOR ME?

I mentioned earlier that some of my students were troubled by the idea of declaring—of being required to declare—that the world was created for their sake. I confess that for years I shared their unease—the last thing the world needs, I thought, is for religion to bolster our already overdeveloped sense of entitlement—until one day it occurred to me that perhaps our unease said more about our culture than it does about the text itself. We hear the phrase “for my sake was the world created” and immediately assume that those words must be a statement of privilege, an affirmation of what we are entitled to. But what if the text means something else entirely? Our mishnah teaches that each of us is obligated to believe that the world was created for our sake because there is some distinct way that each of us is called upon to serve. The world being created for me isn’t a statement of how much I’m entitled to, but rather a declaration of how much is asked and expected of me.

One of the many ways the kind of self-worth we have been exploring differs from many pop-psychological approaches is in its insistence that self-worth is bound up with expectation and obligation.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) weaves this idea—about each of us having a task (or tasks) that we all too often resist—into his interpretation of the Yom Kippur liturgy. At the end of the Amidah prayer on Yom Kippur, we declare, “My God, before I was formed, I was of no worth, and now that I have been formed, I am as if I had not been formed.” On the surface, the prayer reads like a declaration of our ongoing worthlessness. As it goes on to say, “I am but dust in my life, all the more so after I die.” But R. Kook spins the text around, yielding something radically different:

“Before I was created, I was of no worth.” Before I was born, in that unlimited expanse from the beginning of time until I was created, there was nothing in this world that needed me. Because if I had been needed for some purpose or completion, I would have been created then. But since I was not created until this time, that is a sign that at that time, I was “of no worth” [or: it would not have been worthwhile to create me]. There was no need of me. But now, at this very moment that I have been created, the time has come when I need to participate in some aspect of completing the world.

“Were I to dedicate my life toward fulfilling the purpose for which I was created, I would indeed now be worthy. But since my actions are not in accordance with my true goal, I am not accomplishing my life’s mission, and I am still not worthy. Things have changed; I am now needed. And yet I go on living as if nothing had changed and I were not needed.”

Can you please email me the book you saw this in?

Wow my inbox has really been popping recently! After a lot of thought, there are some things that just don't belong in a public forum, only in private communication where I am able to make sure that the message accomplishes its intended benefits without causing any harm. So, if you have had religious pain and you associate some of that with the time you were in yeshiva, please email me Captaingye613@gmail.com. (You can email me even if you are reading this years from now.) I can send you the piece I have not posted here, and we can discuss, and you will be talking to someone who can understand- to someone who also felt doomed as if the negativity is the truth and there are no answers, and then went and found real ones. (Also PLEASE read Appendix A of The Battle of the Generation. It's a gold-mine for this topic.)
For everyone else, count your blessings that you don't face this pain, and don't need to deal with this. And if someone comes to you with this pain, even if he has anger at the system or whatever, please don't belittle him or send him flying. Instead, please get him help with someone who can understand him and who has real answers to his questions.

bennyh wrote on 28 Jul 2025 02:49:

GOLD. A lot of my [attempted, slowly succeeding] re-chinuch by my incredible therapist, has been around this inyan. 
Living with the feeling of בשבילי נברא העולם is a product of acting upon אין הדבר תלוי אלא בי. 
Please do tell us in what sefer this treasure is found.