“I can tell you one thing: My wife doesn’t know how well I learned today, but she absolutely knows if I took out the trash”

About a week after my wedding, I overheard an odd phone conversation.

My new husband, Yochanan, received a call from a woman who was making shidduch inquiries into one of his friends, and apparently, the woman was pestering him about how good a learner the boy in question was. Yochanan kept repeating that his friend was a tremendous masmid, had an incredible memory, and so on, but at some point he became a bit exasperated.

“I was considered a top guy in my yeshivah,” he told the mother. “It’s uncomfortable to say that, but it’s true. And I can tell you one thing: My wife doesn’t know how well I learned today, but she absolutely knows if I took out the trash.”

I was raised in a home where people who learned in kollel were referred to as “benchwarmers.” When my tenth-grade teacher brought my class on a trip from Brooklyn to Lakewood, my reaction was, “Who’s going to pay for all these benchwarmers?”

In 12th grade, when my friends and I were discussing which seminaries we wanted to attend, the name of a certain very yeshivish seminary came up. “Gila, you’d never in a million years be accepted to that school,” one of the girls remarked.

“Oh, really?” I piped up. “You just watch!”

I applied to that seminary just to show my friends that I could get in. Once I was accepted — I was a good girl with good grades, and they took me — I decided to shock my friends by going there. So I basically went to seminary on a dare.

I was a total mismatch for the seminary. I was the only girl there whose father was a professional. I was the only girl there who came from a family with three or fewer children. I was the only girl there who had no plans of marrying a long-term learner.

In fact, in this seminary, the topic of kollel was never even discussed, so self-evident was it that every girl would want to marry a husband who was learning full-time.

Over the course of my seminary year, my attitude toward Torah learning changed dramatically, to the point that I decided that I, too, wanted to marry someone who was learning. My shift in attitude was not the result of any lesson, any private schmooze from a teacher, or any debate with my peers. Rather, after observing the behavior and character of the girls in the seminary, I decided that I wanted to build the kind of home that could produce children like these. Most of these girls came from large families with little in the way of gashmiyus, and were refined, unspoiled, hardworking, and sensitive to others.

My parents generally allowed their children to make their own decisions — hence their willingness to send me to an uber-yeshivish seminary — and when I told them I wanted to marry a boy who was learning, they voiced no opposition. My father even offered to help support me in kollel.

Knowing, however, that my parents did not believe in the institution of kollel, I resolved to be self-supporting from day one of my marriage.