Fake ID’s For High School Rebbeim?

In one recent incident at a prominent out-of-town Yeshiva, a high school bochur complained, “I don’t want a zeidy for a Rebbe.  I want someone younger!”  Parents influenced the hanhallah to let the older Rebbe go.

Across the tristate area, more and more mosdos are quietly installing a number into their employment policies — 62 in some, 65 or 67 in others — and that number now decides a Rebbi’s fate more surely than his shiur, his middos, or the forty years of talmidim who still call him to wish him a gut Yom Yov. Reach the number, and the conversation is no longer whether you teach well. It is whether you teach at all.

And while the yeshivah world drifts toward shoving its veteran Rebbeim out the door, the secular world is sprinting in the opposite direction. This spring, Governor Hochul and the New York Legislature passed a budget that lowers the age at which a teacher with thirty years of service can collect a full pension from 63 to 58 — a roughly $557 million change affecting over 830,000 public employees. 

It is ironic that the public school teacher, with a defined-benefit pension waiting for him, is being handed the keys to an earlier exit and calling it justice. The Rebbi — who took a fraction of that salary precisely because he saw the work as a mission and not a job — is being handed a number and told his time is up. One man fights to leave sooner. The other would give anything to stay.

Why the gap? Money, for one.

The retiring public school teacher walks into a pension that lets him keep his lifestyle. The retiring Rebbi, in the lower and middle tier of mosdos, often walks into nothing resembling that. The old standard — chodesh l’shanah, one month’s salary for each year taught — means a Rebbi who gave thirty-six years to a yeshivah receives the grand total of three years’ pay, and that only if he never switched mosdos along the way. If he switch institutions- the clock resets; the new yeshivah owes him only for the years under its own roof. A man can teach for four and a half decades and retire with a severance that would embarrass a mid-level office.

The deeper question — the one the policy never quite answers — is whether age was ever the right measure to begin with.

The Torah’s instinct runs the other way. “Zekeinecha v’yomru lach — your elders, and they will tell you” (Devarim 32:7). The passuk’s intent is not to treat zekeinim as “problems to manage.” It rather treats them as “sources to consult.” “V’hadarta pnei zakein” commands us to rise before the aged, not to escort them out. Gray hairbeing viwed as a liability in a melamed is, frankly, a foreign concept.

It is also foreign to the Gedolim who were actually asked. A Menahel with a long white beard once approached Harav Aharon Leib Shteinman, zt”l, and asked what should be done with Rebbeim who were getting on in years. Rav Aharon Leib’s answer was four words: “And Menahalim don’t get old?”

In one stroke, the whole sleight of hand was exposed. The cutoff almost always lands on the man in the classroom and almost never on the man who wrote the policy. If age genuinely disqualifies a person from chinuch, it should retire the administrator as fast as the melamed. That it does not tells you the principle was never really about age.

Harav Chaim Kanievsky, zt”l, was asked directly whether older Rebbeim should be swapped out for younger, more energetic ones. His answer, recorded in Kol Mishalosecha (p. 365), was that the older Rebbeim are better for the children — and that when a school is choosing between two candidates, it should hire the older one. The same view has been attributed to Harav Shteinman.

 There are, of course, Rebbeim who, with age, lose the energy, the patience, or the classroom control that the job demands.  That is a real concern, and a child’s chinuch is too precious to sacrifice on the altar of seniority. But a Rebbi can lose his touch at 45, and plenty of sixty-five-year-olds still light a room on fire — there are Maggidei Shiur past seventy who are truly fire – and who double as living bridges to the Gedolei Torah of yester-year. The instrument for sorting the two is evaluation — successful learning, classroom management, the atmosphere of the room — not a number stamped on a card.

There is, finally, a question of basic kavod that the spreadsheet never captures. When an accountant is let go, he joins another firm, takes private clients, pivots to a related field. When a Rebbi is let go, his career is simply over; the very decision to give his life to chinuch was, in most cases, a decision not to train in anything else. So when the hanhalah moves to remove him, is the Rebbi himself ever in the room? Or is his fate settled over his head, in a negotiation between an administration and one well-connected parent, with the dozens of grateful families never consulted?

So what is the honest alternative to the forged ID? The alternative is to judge the man, not the birth certificate. Where a Rebbi can no longer hold a classroom, there is dignified work that still draws on his strengths — a roaming mashgiach giving boys a geshmak in Yiddishkeit, a fixture in the yeshivah’s kollel, a mentor to the young Rebbeim still learning. And where a Rebbi is still teaching brilliantly at seventy, the burden should fall on those who want him gone, not on the man who already gave everything.

THE SEFER HACHINUCH

The Sefer HaChinuch in Mitzvah #482 rules that the concept of providing for an employee after he was in your employ for a significant length of time is an obligation even in modern times.  The Sefer HaChinuch is understood by most meforshim to be referring to the Gemorah’s understanding of a pasuk in Mishlei (2:2) in Bava Metziah 51b of acting over and above the minimum halacha (lifnim mishuras hadin).

RAV MOSHE FEINSTEIN’S PROTOCOL

The Posek HaDor Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l had established a norm, or protocol for the Torah institutions of this country, if and when the institution does  – that the hanakah – be one month’s salary for every year of employment.  Rav Moshe Feinstein’s rulings on three such cases are cited on page 15 of a Sefer written on this topic by Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Frankel on the topic entitled, “Chodesh LaShana.” The first case was dated 5711 and was also signed by Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky zt”l and Rav mendel Zaks zt”l.  Another case was dated 5724, and two more cases were mentioned as well.

TORAH uMESORAH

Subsequent to Rav Feinstein’s establishment of the protocols, the Torah uMesorah organization adopted them as the norm for the resolution of such disputes in all such cases.  This author reconfirmed that that this has been their position and received a letter to that effect dated August of 2020.  In response to someone’s suggestion that the Chodesh laShana protocol was only stated in regard to men and NOT WOMEN – Rabbi Nayowitz, the head of Torah uMesorah responded in an email to this author that there is no distinction between the two.

OTHER AUTHORITIES

Rabbi Frankel’s sefer also cites Rav Dovid Feinstein shlita in a letter dated on the 16^th of Adar (I) 5763.  Rav Feinstein writes that his father’s position was “vadai tzarich” that a firm must certainly provide its employees with a ha’anakah of one month’s salary for every year of employment.  In a footnote he added that this was for every employee – even those that worked in the office.   In a further clarification, dated 3 Kislev 5772, Rav Dovid Feinstein stated that it was not limited to Mechanchim but all types of Kli Kodesh.

Rav Yisroel Belsky zt”l also wrote that Rav Moshe’s opinion was that it applied to all Kli Kodesh – not just mechanchim – this was in a letter dated 17 Shvat 5772.

Rabbi Frankel’s sefer also prints a letter from Rabbi Gedaliah Schwartz the Av Beis Din of the CRC in Chicago as saying that Chodesh LaShana is the established norm in the United States in a letter dated November 17^th, 2011.  Rabbi Frankel has printed letters from many dozens of established Poskim and Batei Dinim across America, that Chodesh laShana has become an established and accepted norm.  He further prints letters from poskim in Eretz Yisroel and throughout Europe.

RAV ELYASHIV ZT”L

Rav Elyashiv’s position as explained by his secretary, Rav Yoseph Efrati, (p. 28 in Rav Frankel’s sefer) was unequivocal that the Chodesh laShana of Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l must be followed.  Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky shlita signed onto the same letter with the words, “It is clear that we are obligated to follow the custom of the Posaik haDor Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l.

The day will come, for every Rebbi, when stepping back is fitting and even a relief. But that day belongs to his ability and his dignity — not to a number printed on a laminated card.  If we cannot devise something more honest and more humane than that, it had better brace for the question waiting at the end of the road: who, exactly, will agree to be our children’s Rebbeim?

The author is indebted to Rabbi Binyomin Zev Karmin who first brought this topic to the author’s attention in an article in HaModiah’s Inyan Magazine.  The quotes of past Gedolim were the products of his research.

The author can be reached at [email protected]