Illustration by Dov Ber Cohen

T

hey had it all planned out. Matis and Tzippora Brecher happily shared the outlook that limud haTorah would be the foundation and fiber of the home they would build. They agreed that Matis would eventually work, when family circumstances, finances, or Matis’s interests would warrant the change. Seven years later, their life seemed to be following the script perfectly, as Matis accepted his first job. But Tzippora was completely blindsided by many of the elements of their transition from kollel to the workforce. What she had once seen as a natural transition was, in fact, a murky and rocky process with physical, emotional, and spiritual components that forced her to confront her deepest values and very identity.

Even when husband, wife, and their advisers all agree that the time has come to leave kollel, many couples feel a range of disappointment from mild to devastating, with recurrent themes of what causes this letdown. Topping the list is regret over losing a life stage chosen with love and still very integral to who they are and what their aspirations are. But along with that, women spoke of feeling stress, worry, peer pressure, and personal failure in their duty to Hashem vis-à-vis their partnership with their husbands, or, more personally, in their roles as Jewish women.

Naomi Hoffman’s greatest challenge in transitioning to her husband’s new role was her empathy for his palpable sadness. Until he went to work, Naomi had been happily holding down two-plus jobs, which were not enough to meet the expenses of their growing family. They all agreed that logically speaking, the right thing was for her husband to take a job. But emotions don’t always obey logic.

“That first Elul zeman came,” she remembers, “with yungeleit stepping into the beis medrash, while my husband was exhausting himself in his new job. There was no way to blind myself to my husband’s sadness and his sense of personal loss. I tried to keep up a positive front when my husband was home, but deep down I knew we were both pretending, in order to spare each other further pain. I think we both cried ourselves to sleep most nights that first year. Unreasonable as my brain knew it was, my feeling was one of enormous failure — I felt as if I had brought this sadness on my husband. I had failed him.”

Tzippora Brecher, on the other hand, was at peace with the decisions that lead to Matis’s first job, but she could never have predicted just how difficult the emotional upheaval would be for him. “I expected financial adjustments, maybe some logistical chaos, but Matis is so down that I’m not even sure what my role is regarding being there for him. We see this as our only option right now, but he is experiencing a real and intimate loss…”

(Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 750)