I was thinking in high school that I did not want to join the rat race and instead wanted to seek for the truth. I am grateful that I was in two very wonderful Lithuanian yeshivas, Shar Yashuv and the Mir in NY. I am eternally grateful to God for guiding my steps towards authentic Torah.
Here are some ideas [not my own] that I saw on a blog called Amerika and actually reflect closely my own thoughts on jobs and work.
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Often jobs are not actually work and produce nothing of value and often produce the opposite of value e.g. psychologists generally ruin people's sanity and get paid for doing so.
In jobs, little of worth is done. This occurs because most of the assigned activities are pro forma or make believe -work. Most business activities are ill-advised or irrelevant, through the creation of regulatory law.
In traditional work, the individual learns how the world works and applies himself or herself to tasks and achieving mastery.
Jobs do the opposite. Jobs reward appearance, not actuality, except in a few rare cases. Even in professional fields, the goal is to keep abreast of what others have done and do the same in a certain specific case, and accountability occurs only when one deviates from the commonly accepted practice, even if results are bad. Doctors lose patients, lawyers loses cases, and architects design junk all the time but so long as these are competitive with what others have established as “safe” minimums, no consequences attach.
_______Here are my thought about this: So what I recommend instead is Torah with Derech Eretz. That is to learn the Oral and Written Law {Old Testament and Gemara and Musar} and that one's work should not be to make money but rather to make something of value and learn somethings of intrinsic value.
Many in the the Modern religious world value jobs for the sake of money, and that makes no sense to me. Others value Torah only if they can make money from it and that makes even less sense to me. [I have actually heard this from people that were in a kollel. That showed me that there are people that really use the holy Torah as a means to make money. This to me is really shocking. Even many years later I find this attitude to be extremely vile. ]
Here are some ideas [not my own] that I saw on a blog called Amerika and actually reflect closely my own thoughts on jobs and work.
___________________________________________________________________________
Often jobs are not actually work and produce nothing of value and often produce the opposite of value e.g. psychologists generally ruin people's sanity and get paid for doing so.
In jobs, little of worth is done. This occurs because most of the assigned activities are pro forma or make believe -work. Most business activities are ill-advised or irrelevant, through the creation of regulatory law.
In traditional work, the individual learns how the world works and applies himself or herself to tasks and achieving mastery.
Jobs do the opposite. Jobs reward appearance, not actuality, except in a few rare cases. Even in professional fields, the goal is to keep abreast of what others have done and do the same in a certain specific case, and accountability occurs only when one deviates from the commonly accepted practice, even if results are bad. Doctors lose patients, lawyers loses cases, and architects design junk all the time but so long as these are competitive with what others have established as “safe” minimums, no consequences attach.
_______Here are my thought about this: So what I recommend instead is Torah with Derech Eretz. That is to learn the Oral and Written Law {Old Testament and Gemara and Musar} and that one's work should not be to make money but rather to make something of value and learn somethings of intrinsic value.
Many in the the Modern religious world value jobs for the sake of money, and that makes no sense to me. Others value Torah only if they can make money from it and that makes even less sense to me. [I have actually heard this from people that were in a kollel. That showed me that there are people that really use the holy Torah as a means to make money. This to me is really shocking. Even many years later I find this attitude to be extremely vile. ]
