Q:
If a man is learning in the kollel, isn’t he transgressing the commandment בזעת אפך תאכל לחם — that with the sweat of your brow you should eat bread?
A:
And the answer is, he is sweating plenty.
If a man works at a job but he is a loafer, isn’t he loafing? The mere fact that you are nominally employed, does it mean that you are sweating for your living? Plenty of people are sitting in their offices and loafing. They are deceiving their employers; they are getting paid for nothing.
So if a man is in a kollel and he is really learning, so he is a servant of Hashem and he is doing important services for the Am Yisroel. And that’s בזעת אפך תאכל לחם; the world has to support him. And he deserves support even more than a man who works.
Now those people who sit in a kollel and come in let’s say 10 o’clock in the morning, while their wives go, half past eight, or half past six, to go to work for them, and this loafer comes 10 o’clock after reading the entire newspaper at breakfast, that’s not a kollel man. He’s like any faker who sits at his job and doesn’t do the work.
But if he comes early to the kollel and he is there all the time and works hard—you won’t see him standing on the street in front of the yeshiva in the middle of seder—he is inside laboring over the Gemara, so he is a hard worker. Like one rosh yeshiva said, אגירא דיומא אנן – “We are hired workers by the day. We are being paid for our work.”
January 1986
