After all these years, I’m a little bit tired of trying to get my sons into yeshivas. I’ve been doing this at the rate of at least one child a year for like seven years now.

I mean yes, you should be in a school that’s geared toward you. But you don’t necessarily end up in a school that’s geared toward you; you end up in a school that accepts you.

Girls’ high schools have their own difficulties, but in some ways that situation is easier. There are like three girls’ schools in your town on your radar, and you know about all of them. There’s the one you want to send to, the one you specifically don’t and the one that will take anyone who doesn’t get into the others.

With mesivtas, there are a million yeshivas and you have to consider all of them. And you’re always hearing about new mesivtas because new ones open every year. They don’t even need a name. Sure, they have a name for legal purposes but they start off largely being called the name of the rebbi who started it.

And you’re thinking, “If there are a lot of mesivtas, that’s great! So many options! If he doesn’t get into School A or B, then…”

Yeah, then he won’t necessarily get into School C either. The menahel of School C doesn’t say, “Well, if A didn’t take him, and B didn’t take him, I guess we should.” They’re not working together. Your son isn’t even doing better on the Gemara he’s prepared with each successive farher. You know this because you ask your son every time how he did and, as it turns out, he thinks he did a spectacular job. In fact, my wife and I spoke to a menahel once right afterward, while our son was meeting with the rosh yeshiva, and the menahel said that our son made certain mistakes on the Rashis, and our son told us afterward in the car that he did great and wasn’t corrected once. What, did the menahel look it up after he left?

“Wow, we got all the Rashis wrong!”

And they feel like they have to be picky. Because the mesivtas are so small, they don’t have the infrastructure to deal with anyone who’s not exactly like the other boys they’ve accepted. “Go to that other yeshiva. That would be better for him.”

“Thanks, that’s helpful. That place didn’t want us. They said they’re full. There are too many people like him at that yeshiva.”

“Yeah, but here there’s no one like him.”

“Yes, but you have an empty bed. They don’t. Maybe switch buildings?”

Beis midrash is harder. First of all, there are infinitely more batei midrash than mesivtas. There are even secret ones that no one knows about because there are literally no legal requirements to be a beis midrash. My brother has a yeshiva across the street from his house with like nine guys and a rosh. The bochurim all dorm in that house. If an inspector comes, they can just say, “Yeah, we’re just nine adult roommates whose parents pay our rent! And our landlord drops by every day!”

But with beis midrash, it’s pretty clear why there have to be so many: It’s because everyone has to be the top bochur somewhere, for the purposes of shidduchim. If there are more yeshivas, there are more top bochurim.

It’s even harder to find a yeshiva in a different country. (Well, really just the one country.) Everything is hearsay; you have no idea what the yeshiva is really like. Yeah, you see the pictures they decide you can see, chosen from the thousands of pictures they took.

“All the bochurim have beards!”

Yeah, it was taken during Sefirah.

“All the bochurim squint!”

Yeah, it was taken outside.

Seminary actually has this issue too. If the seminary is in Israel, you don’t know anything about it. The mother and daughter go to an open house, return home and tell the father a price, and he has a heart attack. Then the life insurance money is used to send her to seminary.

And you want a seminary with a good name because it’s all for shidduchim. Something that’s just a single Hebrew adjective, like Ateres, or Tiferes, or B’nos. There are no seminaries named “Rebbetzin Baila.”

Whereas if you say the name of a yeshiva your son went to, and the person has never heard of it, there are so many yeshivas out there that the person just says, “Okay.” You don’t even have to go to a yeshiva. You can just get a chavrusa and tell people you learn by Reb (insert name of your chavrusa here), and when people ask, “Where is that?” you say, “It’s very small. A lot of one-on-one. They cater it to the specific person. I’m the top guy.” Meanwhile, he’s telling people he’s the top guy in your yeshiva.

This brings us back to our original topic, which is mesivtas: Basically, it’s like the shidduch crisis. You want to match up kids with the right mesivtas, but there are way more kids than mesivtas and all the mesivtas sound basically the same despite each claiming to be unique. And you meet for one date—in the mesivta usually—with the parents in the other room.

And if the yeshiva decides early on that they aren’t interested, they spend the whole interview talking about themselves.

In fact, there’s a certain logic that if we’re applying, you should take our kid. There are way more types of boys than types of yeshivas, and we know more about you than you know about us. The only reason we called you is because we were told this is a good idea by someone who knows our son. We had a shadchan. At least let’s try going out again. Let’s get together for a second farher—maybe next time you come to us, or we meet at a bowling alley—and eventually, we can make a l’chaim and decide who’s paying for what.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].