@ 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.

Hi everyone. I wanted to give everyone a quick update on what I have learned. I’ve spoken with people from many fields, mental health, education, rabbanim, and everyone has their own perspective on this issue. There is so much I don't know and need to learn. But no matter what angle you come from, the religious piece is crucial. Our relationship with Hashem isn’t just a part of who we are; it’s our very core. It’s the framework of our whole day and the foundation of who we strive to become.

That’s what makes these struggles so complex. Getting rid of negative beliefs is never simple, but in this area it feels almost treif. Part of us still hears our fifteen-year-old self pounding away at Torah lishma. Or the intense rebbi who taught that a person’s worth is measured only by shmiras eynayim or by the hours we put into learning. These beliefs form when we are young, shaping how we see ourselves and how we see Hashem, and they cut differently than the usual childhood messages of “I’m not good enough.” Because here, it comes wrapped in leshem Shamayim. Of course I’m not good enough, doesn’t it say that mefurash in seforim?

That’s why so many people get stuck. To let go of these beliefs feels like throwing in the towel on religion entirely. And unfortunately, many have done exactly that. The triggers are endless: Elul, Yom Kippur, a mussar shmuess, a comment in yeshiva. And in our society, there really are people in chinuch and learning who hold similar views. For some, that works—they either never questioned it, or they have the resilience to absorb the positive without it destroying their self-worth. But for many others, it only reinforces the old wound.

Even when someone gets healthy advice, it can feel like a cop-out. Deep down, there’s a sense that the real Torah perspective must be harsher. And perhaps there’s a spiritual element here too, not only do the emotions need to heal, but the neshama itself has to reconnect to Hashem after being separated for so long by distorted images of Him.

Part of the problem is structural. We no longer have mashgichim in most yeshivos—people whose job was to guide each bochur personally, to meet him at his level. Instead, roshei yeshiva are expected to fill both roles. But a rosh yeshiva, by definition, must remain above. He represents the pinnacle of success in our world. Naturally, a struggling bochur hears his words of comfort and thinks: “He doesn’t really mean it. He built this huge yeshiva, he obviously thinks he’s better than me.” That’s true even when the rosh yeshiva genuinely does care and does empathize.

So we’re left with this gap: a generation of bochurim and adults carrying distorted images of Hashem, often reinforced year after year, without the guidance and presence of someone to help rebuild the relationship. And until that happens, until a person can see Hashem as He truly is, not as the harsh rebbi in his head, he’ll always feel torn between staying frum and staying sane.
I still don't know a concrete path forward, but Ill try to trust in Hashem, Who wants more than anything to bring His children close, to shine a light in this area of darkness and distance.

This is wonderful. I think this ties well into the famous maamar of Reb Simcha Bunim (sorry if this has already been quoted) “carry two notes in your pockets. In your right ‘for me the world was created,’ and in your left ‘I am but dust and ashes.” I think this is really important. These two statements do not in any way contradict each other, and rather are necessary for everyone to remember at all times. The latter is not at all untrue: relative to Hashem, I am nothing. Yet by the same token, Hashem, in his infinitude, created the world, and this great world was, in some sense, created for me.

sprather wrote on 20 Aug 2025 23:12:

I don't want to take away from the important topics being discussed. And that was an incredible spot-on assessment by Bright of the struggles of a not-insignificant minority (at the very least). But I wanted to comment on this story mentioned here, because for me it was a microcosm of why I always struggled with religious pain.
The way I always saw the story brought in print, including by some pretty famous rabbis and therapists, was that I just has to know when to take out which piece of paper from which pocket. If I'm up, let me take this piece out of my pocket. If I'm down, I better take the other piece out of my pocket. Almost as if the truth is completely irrelevant - if I'm up, think this, if I'm down, think this. (This is unlike the more acceptable to me grip that Sprather gave here.) But for some people, it doesn't work to think of something with no idea whether it's true or not just to make them feel good. Some people are too honest for that and they want the truth. It's precisely those people that are extra susceptible to religious pain.
Real Judaism is not like this at all. It's an understanding based on truth, that both ideas fit together and don't contradict (as Sprather said), and putting things together yields TRUTH. (Putting maamar chazals together, etc, yields a complete perspective.) And then, yes, maybe sometimes I veer too far from the truth in one way or the other, and I must remind myself of the concept, the "note in the pocket," that I have not focused on and thus left that fine line that is truth.
This is one of the reasons some people don't respond well to some of the "solutions" to religious pain. They will not accept people saying things to make them feel good. It needs to clearly be the truth. But in Judaism it's hard to find the correct balance on some of these points. It requires a lot of knowledge of a lot of different sources, and the ability to put them together and reach proper conclusions, which both are advanced skills. But please know, there are people who have traveled this journey before, and please reach out until you find someone with the answer to whatever you are dealing with.

Interestingly, Chazal themselves seem to support this more nuanced way of looking at the “two notes.” The Gemara tells us that the Amoraim would whisper pesukim to themselves about the lowliness of man when they feared gaavah. This shows us that a healthy person can focus on one aspect of truth at a given time. The key is that they knew it was only part of the truth.

That, I think, is the crucial distinction. There’s nothing unhealthy about focusing on the “dust and ashes” note when facing arrogance, or on “the world was created for me” when facing despair. We can and should focus on the part that is necessary to motivate us in the moment. The problem only arises when one is taught, or comes to believe, that their current perspective is the whole truth, and there is no other truth.

The deeper Jewish perspective is that a person’s body is indeed lowly, but their soul is infinitely lofty. Both are true, and the challenge is knowing which facet of truth to emphasize in each situation. When a person struggles with ego, it won’t help to think about the loftiness of the neshama; the focus needs to be on the frailty of the guf. On the other hand, when someone feels worthless, anxious about their religiosity, or crushed because, nebach, they had to “cop out” and go to work, focusing on man’s lowliness won’t help. At that moment, we need to speak about the greatness of each individual’s tafkid.

But many of us grew up absorbing the perception that there is only one “true” way of serving Hashem, a single narrow path. That’s why it often takes not just a paper, but an entire shiur klali to undo that damage and show the fuller, more balanced truth

bright wrote on 21 Aug 2025 05:14:

Rabbi Bright. 
A shud i didnt read your posts in my formative years. I am exactly the type of kid that you are describing. I was and always will be sensitive. I always felt that the world is asking too much from me. And I was never good enough. Oh, the bad things i heard growing up! my rabbis would always find the most intense pieces to teach us! Like its expected from us to reach that madriga in one minute..... I still remember some of them an they still haunt me. 
One overused vort is why Vidu Maaser is called Vidu when its basically us telling Hashem that we did all those mitzvas? So the answer they gave is that as a yid, we are "supposed" to FORGET our mitzvas and only remember our avierus. So we are saying vidu for remembering our mitzvas! 
Now, im sure a very holy tzaddik wrote this and its true on some level. But for the vast majority of us? That is literally a recipe for depression! Anyway im rambling here. But you get the point, I agree with you. And I am trying my best to fix this within my own sphere of influence. If we all do that, we can have a big impact on the next generation of yiden. 

Sorry you had to go through (and maybe still are going through) that. Honestly,  I never heard that one.... I did hear that even in our mitzvos we had bad intentions, so we need to repent, yeah, same idea. On that note, I wanted to ask everyone about their elul experience. I think most people here are trying as hard as they can, or have unfortunately given up trying because it's so hard. Has anyone felt that adding in an element of "eimas hadin" really ever helped them grow or come closer to Hashem? Has it done the opposite? Has anyone come out of these 40 days feeling good about their accomplishments (aside from feeling "ah, I survived")? Has anyone made any significant change because of the "eimas hadin" and seen it last and become a healthy part of their lives and identity? If not what do you think is going wrong? And if yes, please tell us how:)

Not sure if this answers your question directly, but this is how I relate to days like Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Tisha B'Av.

The intensity does give me connection to Hashem.

Even a Yomim Noraim full of al cheits, and feeling like life has been mostly al cheits, davka these times I need eimas hadin, cuz otherwise I'd have close to nothing. If not eima, then what feeling could I feel that would bring me to be vulnerable and honest enough to really show up? Not love. Halevai love, but I'm not on a madreiga that it alone would penetrate deep enough to bring out the connection that I need for it to be real.

When I am afraid, and I show up to bare myself while feeling the fear, then I'm being real. I'm exposing myself. I'm open in a way that is much harder for me to access without eima. I'm worried about missing out, of letting the day come and go without really touching me the way it should. Maybe it's just me, but I have a much harder time with Purim and with Simchas Torah. I have to dig really deep just to temporarily access some true feeling of joy. But on Yomim Noraim, eima is already cutting deep, and the other feelings, like love, are much easier to access once the excavation has already exposed my inner emotions. 

I'm afraid, but I'm not running away, hiding, or pretending. I'm afraid but here, because I care about You. And the more I care about You, the more I can feel that You care about me too. 

Yes, I feel relieved afterwards. It's very intense. But I would never really want to skip it. For all the discomfort, what I gain is something that I do not get any other time. These are my most genuine moments with Hashem. Avadeh for me it is a healthy part of my life and relationship with HaKadosh Baruch Hu. For a few days of the year, it is clear beyond any doubt that I want so badly, that I need to be close to Him, and that He indeed loves me too.