Shidduch Takana DOA
Sorry about the hype. But if you are an older single girl, you can take comfort that the tzuras hayeshiva is unharmed.
Remember when they were finally doing something about the Shidduch crisis?
Well, that is over for now. The following is an unattributed voicemail that was sent to many (including me).1
While, of course, this voicemail is of questionable reliability, the facts on the ground and what is being told to seminary girls coming back show that the takana is being abandoned.
I have personally heard conflicting reports as to why it is so. Some say the rosh yeshivos suddenly realized the math was wrong (unlikely, IMO. Seems more like apologetics). The other two reasons I heard were this:
The BMG Roshei Yeshivos were opposed to the initiative
Many of the Roshei Yeshivos disagreed with eliminating fourth year beis medrash, saying it will harm the tzuras hayeshiva.
Unfortunately, these sound more likely.
The words “tzuras hayeshiva” have caused unspeakable harm in klal yisrael, where a modern day invention has been retrojected into the past, as if Yehuda’s yeshiva in Goshen looked like a beis medrash in Lakewood, rendering it an untouchable part of the mesorah while it is in fact less than two hundred years old (and fourth year BM maybe fifty). And BMG does not want to support anything that would take away its freezer. (It’s also bad economics - a single bochur pays tuition while a kolel yungerman gets paid money. The longer they are the former the better.)
It’s a pity one of the first major initiatives for positive change has collapsed so quickly. Some would say this is predictable. We really don’t care about ourselves.
I am having difficulty transcribing it. If anyone has a way to do it, please PM me.
We went from "the gedolim have spoken" to calling it a "dangerous experiment"
Thanks to Yehoshua for showing me the site. I just crunched some numbers.
I tallied all the births in Lakewood township between 1990 and 2005. I selected mothers that are White-Non-Hispanic and Married to serve as a proxy for the frum community.
The boy-to-girl ratio was slightly lower than the 107:100 advertised. It was 106.34:100. Far more important, however, was the birth rate, which averaged an increase of just over 7%, year over year. The average is just that as the numbers veer wildly, with a range from -2.49% (1994-95) to 23.34% (2000-01) (aka, the COVID boom). Also, the first period (1990-1997) of this study had a 2.54% birth rate increase; while the second period (1998-2015) had a whopping 11% YoY increase, on average.
So, if indeed the Boy/Girl ratio is 7% more boys and the birth rate is 7%, then in a mathematically perfect world we would have 1:1 ratio of boys to girls, when the boys are exactly a year older. However, if we stretch out the shidduch timetable to two years, now there are seven more girls per boy! The following year there are another 7 more girls, 14 girls total. Et Cetera,
Using the actual Lakewood Township/Married/WNH numbers, born between 1990 and 2005, there are actually 180 more girls than boys a year older; 773 more girls than boys two years older, and an astronomical 1,335 more girls that boys three years older. This is out of just under 10,000 girls born in that sixteen-year period. So it's a huge and alarming percentage.
To be fair, the number soar in the second half of the study (after 1998) as the birth rate far exceeded the B/G ratio. Prior to that it was more or less under control.
As far as I'm concerned the Age Gap is real and incontrovertible. It will get much worse if not brought under control. The number of women increases exponentially with each and every passing year. Empirical evidence shows that there are far more frum women on the sideline than men. What is the response?