An 1839 critique of the ability of yeshivas to train and produce rabbis.

Here is an interesting caustic comment concerning yeshivas in R. Hirsch Fassel's Choreb be-zayon, his critical "Letters of a Jewish rabbi and scholar" on R. Samson Raphael Hirsch's Choreb.



The gist of this comment by Fassel, who had studied at the Chasam Sofer's yeshiva in Pressburg and became a moderate reformer, is that nowadays there was no way to produce rabbis, who have to teach themselves. Yeshivas are useless:

"Today, although this problem is gradually being lessened, young man will have to form themselves into rabbis. But where shall this be done? In Yeshivos? There is there one thing taught which actually pertains to the rabbinate? Everything there has a polemical tendency, and the most one can get out of it is perfecting Dialectic - but what else? Not even Casuistics (i.e., the study of responsa) or practical halacha, let alone exegesis and hermenutics, homiletics and rhetoric. A youth spends many years in the Yeshiva and all he has to show for it to belong to the rabbinate is to teach himself everything, becoming an autodidact."