The Ignored Crisis in Our Yeshivos

By a Worried Bochur

Every year, hundreds of Lubavitche bochrim finish three years of Mesivta and move on to Yeshivah Gedola. It’s supposed to be a major step forward. Yeshivah Gedolah is where a bochur is expected to start learning how to really think—how to analyze a sugya, break down a ma’amar, and think deeply on his own.

But there’s a massive problem standing in the way, and almost no one is talking about it.

A shocking number of bochrim enter Yeshivah Gedola without basic Hebrew reading skills or the ability to read a blatt Gemara. They struggle with basic kriyah, get stuck on standard Aramaic words, and can’t decode an unpointed text or a simple Rashi without constant stumbling.

Try to put yourself in their shoes. Imagine sitting in the zal for eight to ten hours a day, staring at a sefer you literally cannot read.

It’s completely exhausting. While the bochur next to him glides through the sefer, a struggling bochur is in a constant state of stress. Just finding the place on the page takes work. Being asked to read out loud fills him with panic, dreading the moment his chavrusa or classmates realize he’s tripping over simple words.

How in the world can we expect a bochur to learn how to think when he’s still struggling just to read?

You can’t. Deep thinking and real analysis only happen once reading becomes automatic. When a bochur uses up all his mental energy just trying to sound out the words, there’s nothing left over to process the actual logic of the Gemara. Instead of feeling the excitement and warmth of Torah, he sits there feeling stupid, hopeless, and totally out of place.

When a bochur goes through that kind of frustration day after day, it completely ruins his relationship with learning. Torah isn’t meant to feel like an endless, painful struggle. But when every single line is a fight, there’s just no way for him to enjoy it or feel any real connection to what he’s doing. If opening a sefer only reminds him that he’s failing, he’s going to hate going to seder. And honestly, you can’t expect a boy to love Yiddishkeit when the main thing he does all day just makes him feel bad about himself. Eventually, that frustration spreads to everything else—his davening, his Chassidishkeit, and his whole outlook. When the main focus of his life feels like a burden he can’t handle, it’s only a matter of time before he starts checking out, leaving him to struggle with his Yiddishkeit in ways that are hard to predict.

And instead of fixing this, many Mesivtas end up enabling the issue.

Rather than addressing reading skills head-on, schools quietly let bochrim rely on ArtScrolls or translated sefarim as a permanent crutch. When they test Bochrim, the hanhalah tests whether a student memorized the translation, not whether he can actually open a Gemara and read the text on his own. As long as a bochur can repeat back the explanation, he gets a good mark—even if he couldn’t read three words of the actual text by himself.

So for three full years in Yeshivah Ketana, the issue gets swept under the rug. The focus is strictly on keeping up with the sedorim and covering pages. Then he moves on to Yeshivah Gedolah, and everyone acts surprised when he isn’t thriving or when he completely tunes out.

This isn’t the bochrim’s fault. They want to learn. But we are setting them up to fail by dropping them into the zal without the absolute most basic tool they need.

Something has to change here. We can’t keep looking the other way and passing the buck while our boys sit there suffering in silence.

How much longer are we going to let this slide, and how are we finally going to fix this problem?