This week I concluded a set of ruminations on the various ways in which the quality of a country’s citizenry often proves more important in the long-run than great events or even traditional measures of power with a boilerplate cheer for making sure that we are maximizing the potential of the individuals comprising our own community.

How ridiculous. How many individuals can ever be said to reach their full potential? And certainly no society in history has ever come close to maximizing the innate potential of most of its members so why judge Torah society by such a standard.

In short that last paragraph as written was virtually meaningless as no reader could possibly have any idea of what I was talking about. At most the paragraph reads like a desperate attempt to give Mishpacha-relevancy to thoughts on another topic.

But to tell the truth I did have something in mind. Because I do have a sense that there are too many people in our community who are being denied the chance to ever succeed in anything by societal norms that may be very different from Torah values. One example is the flurry of “collectors” who pour through every minyan in every halfway solvent community in America. While some of them have been propelled by circumstances beyond their control for many collecting for children’s chasanos was the game plan from the beginning. As a mechutenster from London once pointed out “When did you ever see a national religious person begging? Surely they have some poor people too.” Being a nitzrach min habrios should not be any Torah Jew’s preferred life plan.

Another example. Let’s take a 23-year-old yeshiva bochur who doesn’t have the zitsfleish to sit 10-12 hours a day learning. He is a boy with many fine middos and often a good head as well who would happily set fixed times for Torah learning if he were working. But because he cannot learn according to the ideal he feels like a complete loser and does not even get the maximum out of a single seder.

But he is unwilling to pursue any vocational training to prepare himself to earn a living for fear that no girl will want a working boy. As a consequence he is largely wasting his time as he reaches an age when people are assuming adult responsibilities. Nor does pretending to be a full-time yeshiva student help his marital chances much since the Dun and Bradstreet type checking performed in Israel will usually uncover his true status in learning. If his parents lack resources to contribute to an apartment somewhere he will find himself offered only girls who themselves are considered “less successful” in one way or another.

Yet if instead of pretending to be what he is not he had prepared himself to take responsibility for a family he would have had a better chance of finding a girl who is in her heart of hearts looking for a husband who will allow her to be a mother and not the primary breadwinner. Unfortunately this hypothetical young man can be found in the hundreds in Israeli yeshivos.

Just as more attention must be paid to the boy who is not cut out for long-term kollel learning more has to be done to develop the potential of the most talented bochurim as well. Take another hypothetical 23-year-old bochur who has the potential to be a fine maggid shiur perhaps even a true gadol b’Torah. He is both a deep thinker and a masmid. He learns in one of the large elite yeshivos. Though his rosh yeshiva likes him very much his guidance is largely confined to helping his “star” find a rich shidduch from among the fathers who come to talk to him. Neither he nor anyone else in the yeshiva is actively guiding this bochur to a future as a maggid shiur – for example making sure that he is giving chaburos or writing out his chiddushim or working on establishing concrete goals and milestones in learning. Now there are not hundreds if not thousands of such boys as in the case above simply because the very gifted are rarer but each such bochur is precious and badly needs guidance from someone capable of providing it to maximize his potential contribution to Torah and Klal Yisrael.

These were a few of the examples of lost potential that worry me.