I. Introduction

In the previous installment, I wrote about the weak yet anthropologically valuable arguments advanced in favor of making Aliyah on the condition of making Israel more palatable to Ultra-Orthodox Americans. 3,600 words later you, might have come to the conclusion that I did not think that these were very good arguments.

However, no matter how bad these arguments were, the pro-Aliyah ones were somehow… worse? Before we address what exactly made Mr. Turx’s detractors so silly and unhinged, there is an extremely important term that needs to be defined: Zionism.

What is Zionism? To paraphrase the old joke, two Zionists, three Zionisms. There’s been Labor Zionism. Revisionist Zionism. Religious Zionism. Anti-religious Zionism. Communist Zionism. Futurist Zionism. Colonial Zionism. Decolonial Zionism. Postcolonial Zionism. Post Zionism. Transhumanist Zionism. Trans Zionism. Queer Zionism. Anarcho-monarchist Zionism. Steampunk Zionism. Anti-Zionist Zionism. You get the point.

This constellation of ideologies converges on a key commonality: support for the establishment of a Jewish state (however that is defined). Beyond that point, anything and everything is open to disagreement. The thing is, there is currently a Jewish state. Zionism, in some form, has objectively succeeded. So why do we still use the term for people who broadly support Israel if the ideology has succeeded in achieving its goals? First, because it’s linguistically and conventionally easier to retain the same moniker. Second, to claim to be something different is to mark a clean cultural and ideological break with the founding ideology of the state. The most important element for our discussion is as follows: Zionism is a type of nationalism. Nationalism as we know it is famously a product of 19th century romanticism: it is not necessarily bound by a coherent ideology but rather a feeling, or a sentiment. An emotional temperament. Do you feel something when you hear Hatikvah? You’re probably, on some level, a Zionist. Emotions easily defy the neat boundaries of ideology, and the set of emotional responses that we can call Zionism are no exception.

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II. I can’t Forgive Americans for being Babies

In response to Mr. Turx’s series of posts on the barriers preventing mass American Ultra-Orthodox Aliyah, “Zionism as an emotion” was on full display. There were too many replies to fully sort through but one that went semi-viral1 was the following video:

If you couldn’t bring yourself to watch, let me assure you: this one is a shtinker par excellence. From the opening soundbite, you already know exactly where this whole thing is gonna go. The creator of this video, Shoshana Keats Jastoll (SKJ) leads off by presuming that Mr. Turx’s hesitation in making Aliyah was ultimately due to the fact that Israel is its own society with its own set of norms and that the good Jews of America would be better off staying home if they weren’t willing to deal with Israel as Israel. A reasonable enough point. One that someone I know rather well made recently.

Yet in other tweets, Ms. SKJ and others, harped on Amazon Prime in various as the epitome of the Galut experience. The ability to buy whatever you want, when you want, delivered directly to your doorstep. The underlying thrust of the argument is that Mr. Turx and American Jews are too beholden to their material comforts and standard of living to make Aliyah. This to me is a strange critique on a number of levels. First, there is the assumption that all Jews naturally want to make Aliyah but there is some sort of false consciousness holding them back from doing so, in our case the allures of American consumerism. Second, Aliyah from first world countries is perhaps a unique case of people voluntarily surrendering a higher QOL for a lower one for purely ideological reasons.2 Third, there is a really good chance Ms. SKJ, as an English-speaking immigrant, naturally gravitates towards other English speaking immigrants, who have done quite a nice job in insulating themselves from the lower material standards of their neighbors. When Americans move to Israel, they rarely move to places like Afula or Netivot. Fourth, the argument is not rooted in anything other than performed outrage at the audacity of American Jews who are not ideologically or religiously motivated to make Aliyah.

I could point to what the Gemara says about making a living outside the land of Israel or if I were to get really testy I could cite from Jeremiah’s letter to the Babylonian exiles, but lets address this argument head on: it is an expression of jealousy and insecurity that someone else did not feel the same need to make similar life choices as you did. Any conversations about Amazon, trader Joes, the relative strength of the dollar or whatever the hell distract from that point. As Ms. SKJ free admits later in the video, living in Israel is hard. That’s even before you get to the fact that the country is constantly embroiled in conflict with the murderous psychopaths on its borders.

As I mentioned in part one of this series, being an immigrant sucks. Most people would prefer to not do. And it can seriously suck to be an immigrant in Israel. As someone who lived in the country, I can tell you firsthand. I went in speaking close to fluent Modern Hebrew,3 but even that doesn’t prepare you for the onslaught of bureaucratic nonsense. There’s no comparable feeling to trying to sign a lease in your second language for the first time. Or being stuck in a culture that you both know and feel at home with yet is also fundamentally alien in so many ways. A stranger in a strange land. This is not to knock or belittle the people who have pulled it off. Good for them and I hope that they live long, happy, meaningful lives. But like all decisions, especially one so major and fundamental as ‘where will I live’ it is not easily reducible to something as banal as Costco access.

The video in question is a strange sort of self-contradiction. There is a lot of frustration with American Jews for not making Aliyah despite the fact that Ms. SKJ would rather them not come as is? That because they are somehow unwilling to deal with life in Israel as she understands it, they should stay in America? Why is anyone angry at this arrangement?

Ms. SKJ makes extensive references to running from rocket fire and the challenges of living in a country that is always one apocalyptic war away from the brink as a sort of badge of honor. It argues that American Jews are essentially cowards who are unwilling to live the rugged life in the trenches of Ramat Bet Shemesh.4 There are a lot of reasons this line of argumentation are dumb, but let’s choose three. First, not wanting to live under rocket fire and the threat of marauding psychos potentially killing you and your loved ones has been the end goal that has driven the engines of civilization forwards for millennia. In other words, wanting to live in safety is really quite normal. Second, if you want people to consider immigrating somewhere (despite your belief that they should ideally stay home), marketing the experience in their new homeland as life in a war-torn hellhole seems like a counterintuitive marketing strategy. Third, while Israel’s wars are a crucial part of its history and mythology and the IDF is the state’s central culturally unifying5 institution, to turn living into Israel some sort of participatory Purple Heart is to flatten and insult the complexity of Israeli society into another matter of survival. Ironically, this treats Israel as yet another chapter in the traditional reading of Jewish history as endless unmitigated persecution at all times. But Israel has developed all the foundational elements of a modern culture; it’s own literature, music, intellectuals, films, sports, sports hooligans, pick-up-artists, multi-level marketing schemes, single-level marketing schemes, anime conventions,6 and a myriad of other elements that signify a flourishing civilization. As a mediocre man of God, I can’t in good faith condone every direction this culture has gone, but at the very least it is a culture.7

An undertone of this whole exchange is a sense of resentment that a certain subset of American Olim have towards other American Jews who don’t share their ideological commitments or at least aren’t willing to act on them. There’s a certain anger that is expressed towards those who don’t want to make Aliyah because it would be “too difficult.” Yet the fetishization of the Aliyah experience by some is directly tied into how much you have suffered at the hands of Israeli bureaucracies and society. Israel is, in essence, an ארץ אוכלת יושביה that needs to spit your fragmented self onto the pavement outside a Pazomat before you can be made fully Israeli. However self-evident this may seem to certain Aliyah pushers, it also betrays a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the life choices one has made. Just as you have become God’s suffering servant, so too should all who follow in your footsteps suffer. If they have not suffered enough, they lack what makes you quintessentially Israeli. In other words, Aliyah is not the mechanism for encouraging Jews abroad to contribute to Israel’s vision of Jewish civilization but instead a tool to ensure that anyone who moves to shore up the country’s demographic issues is deeply miserable and regretful by the time they die. There is of course an irony hearing this sort of thing from Americans and other first-world Olim who have moved to Israel within the last 30 years. I think there are a lot Jews, whether from the Arab world, from the former Soviet Union who suffered considerably more during their time as immigrants, but it’s not a competition. To the credit of many Olim, they actively work hard to ensure that anyone who comes to Israel should have to suffer less than they did and that is valuable work. It is a view that accepts that things have sucked and can be bettered rather than viewing things sucking as an essential part of the process. Complaining about how much you’ve suffered, at least in an ideologically targeted way serves two functions: a display of ideological commitment which only convinces your co-ideologues and ultimately a means of justifying choices that you doubt in private but are unwilling to confront. In this view, Aliyah is meant to create anti-Zionists.

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III. Religious Zionists Yearn for the 50s

There’s a different dimension to this whole conversation that I initially considered writing as a separate article but is worth mentioning here in response to the following tweet.

This is one of many tired retreads of old Zionist talking points. In this case, we’re dealing with what is called in English the “Negation of the Diaspora.” The early Zionist pioneers, believing that they were on the road to building a Jewish utopia in Ottoman Palestine, wanted to mark a break with the embarrassing Jewish past and declare the supremacy of the Hebrew future. The most famous implementation of this policy was the switch from Yiddish (cringe, exilic) to Hebrew (based, powerful). Part of this larger ideology was to argue that the very face of diaspora life was an existential threat to Jews in all places and at its core was an illegitimate mode of Jewish life in light of what was happening in Palestine.

It is worth pointing out that the descendants of the secular Zionists who championed these ideas have largely abandoned them: they find the study of Yiddish and Yiddish literature fascinating and would rather adopt a holistic view of Jewish history. For reasons that are beyond the scope of an already wordy piece, the beliefs in the denigration of the exilic mostly exist in the Religious Zionist world.

They will talk about the Klipa of Galut, cite the Ramban’s8 adage about Misvot outside the Land of Israel being a trial run for the real deal, and whatever sources they can find to emotionally strongarm and shame their audience is into making Aliyah, personal consequences be damned. The above tweet is a more pleasantly worded encapsulation of that ideology. Jewish life in Israel is the A plot of Jewish history and everything that happens every else is maybe the C plot, depending on the size of the community.

As Professor Malka Simkovich has noted, the diaspora is one of the oldest institutions we have. A diaspora is a marker of a group that is “us” but “elsewhere” rather than an entirely separate thing. Already in Sefer Bemidbar two and a half tribes ask Moshe to allow them to live outside the land of Canaan proper. Even earlier than that, Yosef is brought to Egypt, where he rises through the ranks and becomes the country‘s Viceroy. Something that would have been impossible. Had he remained in Canaan. So too Daniel and Esther are only able to achieve the height. They did by virtue of living outside the land of Israel. This is not to say that each of those characters lived ideal lives. The Tanakh, like contemporary Jews today, understands that living in foreign lands puts us at the mercy of at times benevolent rulers, such as Cyrus, wicked ones, such as Nebuchadnezzar, and ???? ones, such as Ahashverosh. Yet there is no reasonable way to argue that Jews in certain respects benefit from the privileges that come with being a successful middleman minority. The strength of Jewish diasporas has provided other groups refuge and wealth, to say nothing of the literary and cultural output. The diaspora, ironically, has allowed more Jews to achieve well above their station than is possible in a purely Jewish society.

Consider that between the years 200 and 1948, the centers of Jewish life were always outside the Land of Israel. Whether they be Babylon, Spain, Poland, Turkey, or anywhere else, Jews, following the advice of Jeremiah, set down roots and built flourishing cultures. Did many of them suffer tremendously on their way out? Without a doubt. Has it ended in tragedy many times? Of course. Does this make Jewish life in the diaspora somehow a footnote in history? My position is that we can’t know for certain: that knowledge belongs only to God and Him alone. Maybe this is why I’m a bad Religious Zionist,9 but I don’t have the theological confidence to proclaim the end of history before history has actually ended.10

The reality is that mass migration from the diaspora is not imminent, barring a tremendous catastrophe. I’m not going to pretend that life in the diaspora is perfect because it’s not and to claim otherwise is contrary to 2,000 years of Jewish literature and history on the subject. Writing off millions as simply historically relevant crushes all of Jewish life into the boundaries of the State of Israel. It might feel that way sometimes, but consider the fact that Bibi, in his populist genius, has quite literally campaigned on being Zohran Mamdani’s personal nemesis. In other words, this notion that what happens to Jews outside of Israel does not matter is not even a narrative that the people arguing that Jewish life outside the State don’t buy themselves. Of course we care about each other. That is part of being an Am. As a people, we are stronger for being able to live in accordance with God’s will in a variety of places. The realpolitik argument, even from the most strident Zionists, is that having Jews elsewhere grants Israel potential influence and access to capital that Israelis might otherwise not have. Even if that argument is dissatisfactory, Jews outside of Israel are leading God-fearing lives and are able to stay loyal to our shared tradition and to our fellow Jews.

As I said above, Zionism is a feeling, one that I have experienced. It is the belief in the realm of possibility what Israel might be, bitterly expressed by twitter ideologues.11 It marks the first sovereign Jewish civilization in a long time, built on the back of what it imagined to be its own ingenuity, but in reality on the past 3,500 years of Jewish history. The fact that this insufferable ethnoreligion known as the Jews was able to achieve such a thing is mind-boggling. It is hard not to feel something even as I type these words. That all being said, I can say with confidence that the only time all Jews will live in the Land of Israel is when Mashiach comes. Once he dies, some of us might want same day delivery.

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This past weekend, a new firestorm engulfed Anglophone1 Jewish Twitter after Ami Magazine White House correspondent Jake Turx enlightened us with non-Bayit Shelishi related thoughts on the possibility of American Jews making Aliyah in a series of tweets. For the sake of fairness, Mr. Turx vocalized a series of sentiments that are probably decently popular amongst American Yeshivish and Chassidic2 communities about the possibility of making Aliyah. The crucial mistake Mr. Turx made of course was vocalizing his own honest-to-God opinions under his own name on Xitter dot com.

This whole saga started innocuously and melodramatically enough as Mr. Turx tweeted on 8/16 the following:

This tweet, which is regurgitated in some form or another on the daily, caught fire on Jewish twitter and generated discussion about the feasibility and reality of mass Aliyah on a scale Israel hasn’t seen in a very long time. This led to some appropriately and at times inappropriately cynical replies to the prospect.3 In response to some of these tweets, Mr. Turx opened the gates to hell first in short form then in long form.

I. The Vagueposts

First, the the short:

Oh boy. You know things are off to a smoldering start when a potential immigrant asks his highly hypothetical future homeland if it is willing to cater to the hyper-specific needs of an already niche demographic. But rest assured, dear reader. Just as I have suffered, you shall suffer sevenfold.

The next tweet in Mr. Turx’s series of musings is a bit longer. I apologize for embedding what is essentially another essay inside an essay you already have marginal interest in reading, but it is the most information dense form of what follows:4

“Suppose I’m not interested in “making aliyah.” Suppose I’m interested in moving to Eretz Yisroel, the sacred Jewish homeland my family prayed to return to throughout the long centuries of galus, and settling in a community where I can live among the same kind of Jews I’ve lived among my entire life.

There are roughly 1.5 million Orthodox Jews in America. Who is actually reaching out to us? Who is building communities where we would feel at home? Who is making the case that there is a place for us in Eretz Yisroel; not by asking us to reinvent ourselves, but by welcoming us as we are? Why do I keep hearing that if we want to move we should expect to suffer and sacrifice like the olim of past generations?

Why is it so hard for anyone to develop a single community with American Jews in mind?”

First and foremost, ceding the term “Aliyah” as a marker of Zionism is an unintentional own-goal that needs little further elaboration. Second of all, is Mr. Turx tacit acceptance of the traditional Zionist narrative that the founding of the state of Israel and its continued existence marks the negation of Galut, a declaration that the majority of Chassidim officially condemn as heretical. However, I can’t in good faith mock the sense of religious yearning (too much) that leads Mr. Turx to consider moving to Israel whenever he deems that antisemitism stateside is beyond the point of no return. But the last sentence raises a question, who exactly are these Jews that Mr. Turx feels like the state of Israel does not appropriately accommodate? If you’ve checked the news in the past half decade you would know that there are a wide variety of Chassidic groups in Israel, many of which have branches or are even based in the United States. I’ve taken enough El-Al flights to note that a good portion of the passengers are of the South East Polish/Hungarian extraction. So what is Mr. Turx referring to? Hell, the state of Israel is currently the world’s largest funder of Yeshivot and Torah study today! If I were more of a hack then I already am, I couldn’t help but say that last sentence is a dog whistle for something.

Mr. Turx then goes on to claim that there are 1.5 million Orthodox Jews in America. While that number is obviously untrue, I commend the man for sticking to his guns and insisting on it all the way through several days of ragged twitter fights. He raises an important question: who is willing to cater to the highly specific material and cultural needs of American Y/C Jews? I assume he’s asking why the Israeli government isn’t willing to overdevelop land and routinely plop four families in single family lots, but even with that charitable read, it’s still hard to get to the core of what he’s asking.

I think his question of “who is reaching out to the 1.5 million frumme yidden of America” is one that displays rank ignorance. There’s relatively unknown organization called Nefesh B’Nefesh that helps Anglophone immigrants move to Israel and interestingly enough helps find demographically appropriate communities. This is not meant as an ad for Nefesh B’Nefesh, but more an observation that Mr. Turx did not bother to run a google search before 43.1k people saw this tweet. Or if he did, he ignored it for rhetorical efficacy, which I would then have to admire.

As evidenced by the final sentence, the fact that many Modern Orthodox Olim have not just moved to Israel but built vibrant institutions and communities seems to suggest that building these things is possible, if you are willing. However, he correctly highlights that many Olim have a certain complex about how much you need to suffer in order to have “fully made it” as an Israeli, a subgenre which I will discuss in the follow up to this article.

Before I move to Mr. Turx’s (marginally) more substantive complaints against the Medinah, this tweet reveals something very important about the general collective psychology of American orthodoxy in 2026. Mr. Turx, by his own admission, is President Trump’s favorite Jewish reporter. Like many orthodox Jews, he is presumably a staunch MAGA republican. Yet as he contemplates emigrating to a foreign country, he decries the fact that living in a foreign country might force him to changes his tastes, his culture, his expectations etc. How could the Medina expect him to assimilate and shed his cultural baggage in becoming part of the broader fabric of his host society? How dare the Israelis, who can’t even be bothered to build neighborhoods full of duplexes made from cardboard, suggest that he somehow integrate, no, assimilate into Israeli society?

This line of thought demonstrates once and for all5 that in a core functional sense, even Orthodox American jews are white, the same way that Italians, Irish, Polish, Germans, and Swedes, all became white at some point or another. Us orthodox Jews, with our long memories of impermanence, have now forgotten that we have all been immigrants. This is not a plea for open borders or infinity migration, but it is an acknowledgement of something that many of us have lost. We speak of the early twentieth century and the Jews who came to America as almost mythical creatures who were fired every week for not working on Saturdays, who sacrificed everything for the sake of Yiddishkeit.

Now, when we elect to move to Israel, a process that takes a fraction of the time and energy that it has for the past two thousand years, we complain that the society there doesn’t meet our exact hyper specific material and cultural needs? Have we assimilated that much that we’ve forgotten basic truths of the world? Being an immigrant sucks. I say this as someone who lived in Israel for three years as a sensitive young man before COVID wreaked havoc on us all. Even if you speak the language, it is still not easy. You are forced to navigate a foreign culture, new nuances, new institutions, new insanity and inanity. But lamenting that this new country is forcing you to acculturate if not assimilate, learn its norms, language, and culture is an irony so wretched coming out of a supporter of the most explicitly anti-immigration administration in perhaps 60 years. Sure, why not.

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II. The Funny Part

Over the course of subsequent tweets it becomes clear that the reference to “the same kind of Jews” is about American Ultra-orthodoxy specifically, to the exclusion of their Israeli counterparts. One area of difference he mentions is the fact that many Israeli policy wonks tout in political debates, is that American Y/C Jews work. As in: full-time jobs! The industry isn’t relevant:6 they clock in at 9 and leave at 5 just like you and me! Mr. Turx politely explains that having a job and doing something other than pretending to learn in Kollel is a uniquely American Y/C value that has no real counterpart in amongst Israeli Haredim. Is that the sound of Avigdor Lieberman swooning?

Similarly, Mr. Turx cites the need for a separate education system. As a Chassid, this is curious, given that the Chassidic school system in the US, Israel, and everywhere else Chassidim call home, is run primarily, if not exclusively, in Yiddish.7 But sending your kids to an Israeli Haredi institution? Heaven forbid! Everyone in Israel agrees that the Haredi education ultimately succeeds in one key metric and in no others: keeping the children of Haredim Haredi. Who knows what they learn over there? Do they learn anything before the age of 13? Ever?

While American Y/C institutions have faced scrutiny for their lack of secular education, the situation in Israel is considerably more dire. In the US, there’s at least a formal attempt made to bring people in to teach something for a few hours a week. In Israel that attempt is rarely, if ever, made. While under Israeli law, all state-funded schools are required to teach the basics (Hebrew, Math, Science, and English), but Haredi institutions famously ignore those regulations with minimal consequences. In other words, no matter how bad you think things are over here, in the internal calculus of American Y/C’s, they’re considerably worse over there.

While Mr. Turx does not pretend that he, or anyone of his sector, would ever serve in the IDF, they cannot help but be disturbed by what they see and hear happening in Eretz Yisroel. Not by the IDF arresting draft-dodgers, though that’s disturbing too. No, the part that’s disturbing is the mass psychosis amongst Israeli Haredim, fomented by leadership comparing the Israeli government to Pharaoh, Amaleq, Haman, Antiochus, the Crusaders, the Spanish, the Czar, the Nazis, the Soviets, and their mother-in-laws. These deranged hyperboles fostered and encouraged the rampant hooliganism amongst Haredi protestors. Tire burnings, trash burnings, fighting police officers, fighting each other… this is not how B’nei Torah ought to act!8 Truthfully, in light of the evidence, I can’t fault Mr. Turx for wanting his own tribe to live separately from their Israeli counterparts.

However, through subsequent tweets, Mr. Turx makes it clear that he somehow views Israeli Haredism as insufficiently reactionary and traditional, a fascinating opinion if there ever was one. He does not specify what particular shortcomings he has in mind. From an armchair anthropologist’s perspective, it is interesting that he is publicly willing to buck the romanticization of Israeli Haredi life that exists outside of Israel. That being said, the notion that Israeli Haredi society is somehow less fanatical than any community stateside is a bit silly, but marks a clear willingness to treat them as an other, for reasons that I will pretentiously speculate about in the next section.

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III. Goyification

After a day or two of people angrily tweeting at Mr. Turx, he finally agreed to reveal the key concern that makes him Aliyah adverse: the fear that his children might go Off The Derech.

This is a serious concern that deserves a sort of serious response. The concern that Jewish kids might one day stop being Jewish and give you astoundingly gentilic grandchildren is ancient. Consider that Avraham and Yishaq both did everything in their power to prevent their children from marrying Canaanite shiksas. Miriam and Aharon whisper behind their brother’s back, incredulous that he would marry outside the Israelites. The Torah formalizes strict laws against exogamy, some of which prevent people who are descendants of certain nationalities from ever joining the Israelites.

The reason that this fear is so deep seated is because it is an explicit rejection of our covenantal relationship with God. It’s a declaration of: “I’m done! Up yours, dad!” Both in the sense of our Father in Heaven and a rejection of our own family’s religion. If you, as a God-fearing Jew, who believes that the Misvot are not just a “nice thing to do” but are the foundation of your life and relationship with God, it’s a tough pill to swallow when your children who you raised to follow in your footsteps do the exact opposite.

I am not sure where Mr. Turx draws the conclusion that more people go OTD in Israel than in the US and I cannot think of any source whatsoever that backs up such an assertion.9 That being said, there is a famous Sugya in Eruvinthat deals with the issue of going OTD:

תָּנוּ רַבָּנַן שְׁתֵּי שָׁנִים וּמֶחֱצָה נֶחְלְקוּ בֵּית שַׁמַּאי וּבֵית הִלֵּל הַלָּלוּ אוֹמְרִים נוֹחַ לוֹ לְאָדָם שֶׁלֹּא נִבְרָא יוֹתֵר מִשֶּׁנִּבְרָא וְהַלָּלוּ אוֹמְרִים נוֹחַ לוֹ לְאָדָם שֶׁנִּבְרָא יוֹתֵר מִשֶּׁלֹּא נִבְרָא נִמְנוּ וְגָמְרוּ נוֹחַ לוֹ לְאָדָם שֶׁלֹּא נִבְרָא יוֹתֵר מִשֶּׁנִּבְרָא עַכְשָׁיו שֶׁנִּבְרָא יְפַשְׁפֵּשׁ בְּמַעֲשָׂיו וְאָמְרִי לַהּ יְמַשְׁמֵשׁ בְּמַעֲשָׂיו.

Our rabbis taught: For two and a half years Bet Shammai and Bet Hillel disagreed. These (Bet Shammai) say: Better for man to have not been created than it is for to have been created and these (Bet Hillel) say: Better for man to have been created than for him to have not been created. They counted and concluded: It would have been better had man not been created than to have been created. Now that he has been created he should examine his actions. And some say: examine [his future] actions.

Bet Shammai teaches us an important lesson: The only way to not go OTD is to never been born. Consequentially, the only foolproof way to prevent your children from going OTD is to never have them. As long as we are all alive, there remains a chance, no matter how small, that any and all of us can decide that this whole Torah thing is no longer worth it. People, by virtue of not being locked in pit, encounter other people, whether they be friends, family, teachers, or strangers, ideas both Jewish and Gentile, and places of tremendous variety. In other words, from the most rigidly frum perspective, life is an endless series of probabilities and possibilities that could lead to someone abandoning Torah.

That being the case, what does going OTD look like in Israel versus in America? In the US it means a full and total break from tradition. Your son goes out and marries a gentile of some kind. Their kids? Not Jewish. They might go to a reconstructionist Temple and/or Episcopalian church here and there and do a blended Christmas/Hanukkah thing which leaves the kids deeply religiously confused and with a ton of extra presents. They might never learn their Alef-Bet, never experience any of the things that you love and make you stay committed. Their kids? Their Jewishness will be reduced to Seinfeld reruns and maybe, if you’re really lucky, a passive interest in Yiddish vocabulary. In Israel the situation is a bit different. Your son would seriously have to go out of his way to find a girl that’s not Jewish. The odds are at least 85% that your kids will be Jewish, worst case scenario. They will all speak Modern Hebrew, which is by no means identical with the language of Tanakh and the Mishnah, it is, at its core, a dialect that makes those written texts largely intelligible to a modern non-religious Hebrew speaker. Their supremely secular school in Pardes Hanna will have off school for Jewish holidays because that’s just how Israeli society functions. Your grandkids will be, on some level, exposed to traditional Jewish holidays and rituals. They will marry Jews.

It is also worth noting that religiosity exists on a continuum. This is famously the case in Israel, where you can meet men covered in tattoos who put on Tefillin every day, or women who light Shabbat candles before driving to meet their friends at a bar Friday nights. Orthodoxy, especially in its current diasporic varieties, rarely allows for these explicit extreme gradations of observance, since we have deliberately set ourselves as a people apart. We are not like them. Given that Israel is a country largely populated with Jews, these barriers are much more porous. But in orthodox psychology, the fact that Israelis, no matter how secular, are still Halakhically Jewish, is actually a far greater problem than real purebred goyim. Why? Because when faced with the non-Jewish other, the boundaries between what’s “chutz lamachane” becomes much clearer. Large numbers of Jews who either practice differently or not at all complicates that picture considerably.10 In other words, building a Judasim focused on keeping the other out is much easier to build in the presence of gentiles and other Jews who have the same idea of what “in” is.

IV. Conclusion

Mr. Turx should not make Aliyah, at least not for the foreseeable future. Put aside the question of material comfort and standards,11 his attitude is one that is particularly representative of broader contemporary Orthodox society. By his own vague metrics, Israeli society is insufficiently religious and could potentially lead to a decrease in their own religious observance. But that’s only part of the issue. Mr. Turx, like many Orthodox Jews, need the Gentile as a frame of reference. They are an obvious, distinct other.12 Israel, as a society blurs many of those boundaries. In the US and elsewhere, the dominant liberal political paradigm has allowed for Orthodoxy to create a parallel civilization that is both engaged with the larger world, but as a means of generating capital to strengthen Jewish institutions. The goal is to maintain and preserve what we like to imagine traditional Jewish life was like wherever we were last before coming to America. In that sense, American Orthodoxy has fully and totally succeeded in preserving its own way of life in a broad sense.

There is a tendency amongst certain Jewish demographics to view Israel as a sort of cultural nature reserve for different types of Jews. The assumption is that life over here can be perfectly recreated over there is the fallacy that underlies much of Orthodox thinking about history. There are ways in which a culture can preserve certain things, but when confronted with other cultures, a new type of interaction takes place and whether we like it or not, most American Jews have acculturated to American norms and culture. This is not a good or bad thing in and of itself, it just is.

One can say many things about Israel but it is safe to say that it has its own culture or at least its own set of cultures. The Israeli government, as a cold, heartless machine, owes its citizenry just enough to prevent them from outright revolt, as do many regimes. Why on earth would that machine care about the hyper-specific needs of any one given diaspora community? Especially one who sees Israel as a suboptimal place to live, a concession to the realities of antisemitism? Whether you like the results or have issues with the process, the reality is that the Zionists built more than a culture or a society but instead a civilization. And if civilization-building robs you of the mirror by which you can neatly define yourself then there is no reason to inconvenience anyone involved.

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When I lived in Israel, an indispensable part of my time was the lessons and knowledge I gained from many taxi rides. For those unfamiliar, taxi drivers in Israel are a sort of folktale archetype. They’re painfully blunt, honest, invasive, and offensive. In other words, they’re stereotypically Israeli by Israeli standards but as in all groups, there is a range.

In the United States, the expectation when you order an Uber is you politely exchange a few words with your driver at the beginning and the end of the trip without any conversation in the middle. To be fair, the odds of nice Jewish boy like me getting tossed on the side of the highway by Abdulaziz only go up if I open my mouth, but even if I did, it would be considered a foundational breach of etiquette. Like most rules we associate with Western civilization, this one goes out the window in Israel. For starters, drivers often will invite you to ride shotgun, an experience considered so intimate in American Ubers that it feels more appropriate by comparison to flash the driver. Furthermore, Israeli cab drivers make sure that if you’re willing to listen, you’ll learn all about everything they’ve ever thought about anything, every woman they’ve ever loved, and every bastard who tried to bankrupt them.

The ride in question was nothing like that. My driver was a stoic Russian fellow named Alexei. There was very little conversation over the course of our 40 minute trip together. The only main point of discussion arose when we drove past Tel Aviv.

“That’s Tel Aviv,” Alexei said in Russian-accented Hebrew.

I nodded with a typical awkward nod and said, “I’ve been there many times.” Smooth as ice I was.

“Let me ask you a question,” began Alexei, leaving me entirely unprepared for what was about to come out of his mouth. “What percentage of Tel Aviv’s population is gay?”

I was lucky that I was only in the passenger seat when he asked that. He was trying to make a friendly wager built around how many Tel-Avivans prefer the company of the same sex.

I knew Tel Aviv was famous for being gay. Or at least having a lot of gay people. From a young age I was exposed to the sad products of Israeli hasbara, one of which was reminding all of Israel’s Evangelical supporters that the country is home to the largest Pride Parade in the Middle East. In fact, the first time I ever got hit on was by a gay guy in Tel Aviv. I seem to do a lot better with gay men than straight women across the board for reasons that are probably extremely obvious to everyone I know but will remain eternally mysterious on my end.

Regardless, there’s a good number of gay people in Tel Aviv. It’s a matter of word association. It’s probably one of the first five words I associate with the city after expensive, unaffordable, pricey, and extortionary. So I knew full well that there were gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people in Tel Aviv. The queer stuff wouldn’t get big in Israel until much later. But how many were there? I had no idea. Not the foggiest clue. The sensitive young man within wanted to jokingly suggest half but that would be absurd and I would appear as an uneducated boor to someone I was never going to see again. I decided that I would play it safe.

“Ten percent?” I guessed, obviously unsure of my answer.

“No,” Alexei answered sternly. “Official city statistics say the number is thirty-three percent.”

I was shocked. I wasn’t sure I had heard correctly. THIRTY-THREE PERCENT?! Tel Aviv is gayer than Israel’s population is Arab?! I remembered that at the time official statistics for the U.S. said around three to five percent of the general public was LGBT. What made Tel Aviv so gay? Or what made Israelis so gay? Why are Jews so much gayer? Didn’t we invent the taboo on homosexuality? How do gay people create a sustainable demographic mass in one city given the, uh, demographic and biomechanical challenges. How does—

“You should know,” Alexei cautioned me as though he was about to let me in on top secret information. “Official city statistics are liars. Eighty percent too low.”1

I finished my ride in stunned, uncomfortable silence, left to wonder what other astounding statistical realities the Israeli government had hidden from me.

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If you live or have ever lived in Israel, you already know the gravity of our error. Regardless of the relative quality of the internet, HOT is infamous for being impossible to get rid of, a fact I painfully learned over the course of the year I spent trying to banish the charges from my credit card bills. After much begging and proving that I no longer lived in Israel, they relented and stopped charging me for their godawful internet.

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This is not that story. If anything, that one is painfully boring and repetitive. This is how I tried and unfortunately succeeded in buying internet access from HOT.

Once my roommates and I finalized which provider would receive our I’ll-earned Shekels, I logged on to their website and typed in my address, 39 Ben Bag-Bag, Jerusalem, to see if I was eligible. Given that I lived in Israel’s largest city, I assumed I would be. As luck would have it, I was not. In fact, my address did not appear whatsoever on HOT’s website. 37 Ben Bag-Bag was there. So was 41 Ben Bag-Bag. But in HOT’s primitive world, 39 Ben Bag-Bag might as well have been in Narnia.

Rather than accept this as some sort of sign to buy Bezeq, I persisted and made my next mistake. I called up the customer service number and hoped that this might lead to a resolution, deluded, naive idiot I was.

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“Hey, this is Noam. I’m from HOT. What do you want?’

“Hey,” I began in that classically uncomfortable Anglo tone that comes from being bred in a society with manners, “I am looking to buy wi-fi access from HOT, yet I am having an issue registering on the website.”

Noam paused, reluctant to have to seriously entertain the concerns of yet another English speaker who can’t read Hebrew printed anywhere outside of a Siddur, curtly asked “What’s the problem?”

“Well, the thing is, when I go on to your website—”

“Yes, you go there to purchase.”

“—and I can’t find my address.”

“You can’t find your address?” Noam asked in disbelief.

“I can’t find it on the website,” I clarified. Noam muttered something indecipherable that was hopefully not directed towards me.

“Let me take a look,” he said. “What’s you adddress?”

“39 Ben Bag-Bag, Jerusalem.”

“39 Ben Bag-Bag, Jerusalem?”

“Yes.” I heard the clack of a keyboard for a few seconds before the call drifted into momentary silence.

“You said 39 Ben Bag-Bag, yes?”

“I did.”

“Not 37?”

“Nor 41.” I could almost hear Noam biting his lip in perplexity over the phone. The sound of rapid-fire typing came through the speaker.

“Huh. You’re right. There is no 39 Ben Bag-Bag on the website.”

“That’s why I am calling,” I said as politely as I could.

“Did you refresh the page?”

It took all of my willpower to not groan. Of course I refreshed the damn page! You think I chose to call HOT’s customer service because I was bored?!

“I did.”

“And you are sure you have the right address?” Noam sincerely asked. At the point my calm veneer began to crumble away, revealing a man so distraught by the stupidity of paying for a basic utility in a nominally first-world-adjacent country, that he considered whether Zionism might have been a bad idea.

“I’ve been living here for two months. I know the address,” I said flatly.

“Okay, okay, but we need to make sure. You said it is 37 Ben Bag-Bag?”

“39,” I corrected him through gritted teeth.

“Yes,” he began in a confused, dispassionate tone. “I found it on google maps. I know you have been living there for two months now, but I need you to do me a favor.”

Only in Israel does the customer service rep ask the customer to do him a favor. Whatever this favor was, it was bound to be a doozy.

“I need you to go outside.” A strange request but an easy one to fulfill.

“Why?”

Noam paused. “Well… eh… you should go outside?”

I couldn’t figure out what made Noam so evasive all of a sudden, but I was determined to find out. “Why?”

“Eh… are you sure that your building exists? That it is there?”

I felt my body weight sink into my couch, defeated. I glanced first at the tile flooring of my common area. The window overlooking the street. The light fixture above. The wallpaper. All of it. I was pretty sure that my building existed. What sort of demented bureaucratic disease could not accept that my building, the one I was sitting in at that very moment, actually exists? What kind of absurd questioning was that? Did I make up my address too? For all I knew, this entire phone call was the product of a fever dream! Hell, who was I to say that even I existed under those circumstances? Maybe me and Noam alike were both figments of a cosmic higher consciousness forced like marionettes to dance in unknowing celebration of our shared non-existence! How could really say whether or not I, my building, my apartment, or the very conversation I was engaged in actually “existed” in any clear, defined manner?

“Hello?” asked Noam. “Are you still there? Can you see if your building exists?”

That request snapped me out of my existential doom spiral and forced me out the door and outside, where I begrudgingly confirmed for Noam that 39 Ben Bag-Bag exists. This left him without further answers.

“Okay, I’ll have someone check it out tomorrow,” he said, giving me the answer I could have received a half hour ago and spared me a crisis of being. “I will send him to 37—”

“39.”

“—39 Ben Bag-Bag. Okay, thank you.” Click. The phone call ended, leaving me alone to sit in dumbfounded silence.

The postscript to this whole thing was that three days later, when the technician from HOT showed up, he said he’d have to come back next week in order to get everything installed properly. To his credit, he believed with all of his heart that my building did, in fact, exist.

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Yossi Farro:

Truthfully, I don’t know a tremendous amount about Yossi personally,1 but what I can gather is that he’s a Gen-Z Chabad Shaliach(?)/influencer who’s big thing is primarily getting rich and famous Jews (and Jake Paul) to put on Tefillin publicly. Many have accused him of being a clout chaser of the highest order, but in my sporadic exposure and interactions with Farro, I would rate that charge as partially true. While he seems earnestly engaged in spreading Chabad teachings and getting otherwise disaffected Jews to do a Mitzvah here and there, there is something obviously peculiar about someone who guns to be the guy who gets Bill Ackman to put on Tefillin. I am not an expert in the Rebbe’s sichos, much less the ones on specific Mivtzoim, but my gut tells me that nowhere in there does he say anything about how many Twitter followers a Yid should have for him to be worth putting Tefillin on.2 That might sound too cynical, especially about a guy as uncynical as Farro is, but it’s something that jumps out pretty quickly considering the trends. With Shmuley Boteach embarrassing himself into increasing oblivion, Farro identified a new opportunity for himself: to be the Chabad Shaliach for wayward Goyim looking to patch up their public image.3 In Clavicular, Yossi may have found exactly what he needed.

Clavicular:

Full disclosure: I love Clavicular (henceforth “Clav”) for reasons that will become apparent shortly. Clav is a tragic figure, a walking thought experiment whose real name is only ever relevant to the officers who arrest and process him. In Clav’s theory of the universe, which he inherited from pickup artists and mirroring incel thinking, the only thing that truly matters in a man’s life is their physical appearance. Being at the peak of your physical attractiveness opens up a world of possibilities, whether in terms of how much money you make, the jobs available to you, and last, but certainly not least, the women willing to debase themselves by sleeping with you. But some people, as he would posit, are tragically born ugly. For them, or for any man who wants to have sex (or a good job), the only way out is through “looksmaxxing,” or the art of improving one’s appearance, is key. Innocently, you might think that means encouraging men to go to the gym or promoting proper hygiene, but you would be dead wrong. In order to spend his time more efficiently, Clav uses steriods to maintain muscle mass to the point where he is now sterile, uses skincare products and makeup to a degree that would disgust a K-pop star, and periodically hits his face with a hammer in an act known as “bonesmashing” on the theory that this causes mircrofractures in his jawbone that will give him a better jawline. He also nurses a bit of a methamphetamine addiction, nominally in pursuit of bio-optimization.4

Clav’s attitude towards women is akin to Yosef Mizrachi’s attitude towards gentiles: they are largely stupid animals who don’t know what’s good for them and left to their own devices, they would be indistinguishable from cattle. He explicitly objectifies women. He is very open and forward about being a shameless hedonist who thinks women don’t have the capacity for autonomy. Yet a certain subset of deeply sad women find this attractive. These practices and attitudes, combined with the legal troubles, make Clav a frequent subject of public mockery. Yet the way in which this mockery tends to play out is deeply ironic. The attacks are always that Clav is ugly, not that his ideas are the abhorrent corollary to pushing for self-improvement without moral restraint. He is always laughed at for being uglier than the man arresting him or presiding over his hearing or that the ASU frat leader mogged him.5 The entire cycle of mockery is built on the foundation of Clav’s worldview. He probably knows this and enjoys his success in provoking others to reveal their true philosophical positions, but is so contemptible that he can never achieve this goal in full, hence the tragedy.

So how did he end up in Israel?

In January of this year, Clav, along with lowlifes such as Nick Fuentes, Sneako, Andrew Tate, Myron Gaines, and others went to a Miami nightclub and had the DJ play Kanye West’s single “N*gga Heil Hitler", an episode which earned widespread condemnation. Clav was now pigeonholed into Right Wing Neo-Nazi loserdom, which was extremely bad for his cortisol. At some point, to rehabilitate his public image, Clav agreed to go to Israel under the guidance of Yossi Farro. The fact that Clav was guided by a rabbi and received a lot of media attention over his visit generate much controversy given his history, which also includes running over a man in his cybertruck. Though the primary point of controversy was, of course, his affiliation with Islamabad's most beloved the internet’s most notorious Jew haters. The response can be largely divided into two camps as they can on an issue: pro and anti.

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In Defense of Clav

Argument 1: Teshuvah is possible for anyone

A common argument I have seen is that Clav coming to Israel has shown that he’s willing to break with the antisemites he’s surrounded himself with as of late and open to learning more about what Jews are really like.6 Sure, he danced with a bunch of Hitler fans to a song about loving Hitler, but nobody who loves Hitler could ever be evil! That being the case, Judaism does traditionally believe in people’s capacity to change their ways and attone for their wrongdoings. Consider the rabbi Avraham Sinai, who at one point was a Hezbollah member. People can change! The problem is that the belief in the human capacity for change can only be externally verified based on what people say and do. To Clav’s credit, he has been extremely transparent about his motives for accepting Farro’s offer: more clicks. More clicks means more money more money means more time to looksmaxx and more looksmaxxing means more women. Not exactly the thought process of a devotional penitent.

Argument 2: Israel needs all the friends it can get

Typing this one out physically hurt me. It is an infinitely degenerated expression of what Republicans have traditionally called ‘The Ted Nugent Problem.’ That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with Ted Nugent. But for DNC rallies, the entire Billboard Top 40 is ready to perform to boost the campaign of whoever the Dem nominee is. Republicans cannot match the Democrats for star power so all they’re left with is… Ted Nugent. Sheesh. Clavicular is a considerably worse human being than Ted Nugent is, so this argument already betrays a lack of conviction in terms of morality. Certain things are off limits, except for when they’re not. The hour is so dire, the need so great, that we now need degenerate streamers to boost Israel’s image. Clavicular is a niche figure who is extremely polarizing and morally abhorrent. To those of you who have advanced this argument: please take a moment to consider what your standards are, assuming they exist altogether.

Argument 3: Young people like Clav

Young people are morons. Next.

Argument 4: Traditional Hasbarah has failed, therefore Clav

This argument is largely a synthesis of arguments 3 and 4. Young people are increasingly against Israel, therefore a young person who is popular can help Israel’s image. The problem is, again, Clav is a niche figure and is naturally polarizing. This argument also absolves Big Hasbarah of all its spurious arguments, childish tactics, and generally ineffectiveness without actually analyzing why or how public opinion has shifted. This looks different across different demographics and political affiliations, but at least try to have a coherent theory7 for what changed. Things are challenging at the moment, but Clav being paraded around Israel by a Chabadnik on day-long livestreams is no substitute for coherent Hasbarah or really anything of value.

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Against Clav

Argument 1: Clav is a Nazi and Israel shouldn’t let Nazis in

Viscerally, I feel some sort of resonance with this argument. Clav has undoubtedly made a decision to associate with some of today’s most prominent Right Wing antisemites, such as Nick Fuentes, and of course was filmed singing along to that one Kanye song. However, Clav, by his own admission, knows very little about anything that isn’t looksmaxxing. He has no coherent political theory beyond anything that reinforces the centrality of looksmaxxing. He has no understanding of history, unless its to judge who mogged who. In other words, he’s an apolitical nihilist, like most stupid twenty-somethings. He has no coherent political ideology to speak of. He is certainly not a Nazi, just a schmuck who has spent more time with Nazis than anyone should.

Argument 2: Jewish women aren’t whores!

This argument is a bit self-defeating. On Clav’s livestream, several secular Israeli women threw themselves at him, including one genius from the IDF spokesperson unit who was removed from her post from showing Clav her access to the official IDF TikTok account.8 The argument that Jewish women shouldn’t be used as strategic whores has merit, but like Clav, it denies the women involved their agency to be as whorish as they so please. These are not innocent maidels who need Chezki to protect them from the Goyim. These are women who have largely assimilated Western liberal norms around sexuality and don’t especially care if religious men appeal to a sense of traditional piety they don’t adhere to. If anything, that pushback might encourage more of it. It is a form of white knighting that presumes that “victims” ought to operate by the white knight’s moral code, leaving the men making this argument look silly and envious.9 Still, I can’t help but wonder what proud Chabak Yossi Farro made of his very Nefesh Beheimisdik guest trying to sleep with every Jewish woman he could. Only God knows for sure.

Argument 3: Clav is a danger to women

Of all the arguments evaluated so far, this is the one that is probably the truest. Clav largely views women as barely sentient organisms who happen to be aesthetically pleasing like a flower is. This in turn means he’s less likely to respect women’s personhood, especially in seedy nightclubs. I can’t in good faith call myself a feminist by contemporary definitions of the term, but I can say that I agree that most well-adjusted women would feel uneasy being around Clavicular. Then again, Israel harbored Malka Leifer for 13 years. Make of that what you will.

Conclusion

My conclusion is that none of these arguments really matter beyond think pieces like the one you just read or moral posturing on the internet. Instead, I would like to highlight part of this story that is concerning at best and depressing at worse. In Farro’s understanding of the world, the best way to show that an antisemite did Tesuhvah is to take them to Israel. To show them that Jews are people too. What this does in practice is repeat all the old errors of the Anti-antisemitism Industrial Complex. When an otherwise upstanding citizen would casually say something about the Jews controlling the banks, inflated Holocaust death totals, or something nice about Nazis, the ADL and co. would sit them down and take them to the Holocaust Museum or make them watch Schindler’s List. Instead, Farro has unintentionally signaled to antisemites that if they’re successful enough at getting people to hate Jews, not only will they be given a free trip to a foreign country; they’ll also get to livestream the whole thing.

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Many moons ago, at the ripe old age of nineteen, I did what every American gap year yeshiva student does: spend a Shabbat in Tzfat. Tzfat itself isn’t especially nice but it is undeniably important in modern (post-Gerush) Jewish history. Erev Shabbat, there is a nice tour through the main graveyard where all the who’s who of 16th century Judaism is buried with a neat pathway to the top of the cliffside where the Old City of Tzfat is located. As a Kohen, I did not enjoy this luxury, well designed pathway. With two other Kohanim in tow, I scaled the hill which was definitely not meant to be scaled, but safety is a secondary concern in these programs in practice, as long as the right rabbis are (un)involved.

After this trek, it was recommended that we all take a quick dunk in the Mikvah of Isaac Luria (the Ari), the most important Kabbalist this side of Moses De Leon. Tryhard that I was, I decided to go because “why not?” Presumably a lot of important, holy people had used the same Mikvah over the centuries. Maybe I would get something out of it? Some sort of Zekhut that would turn me into the next magic Arak peddler. Nobody can ever know these things for sure. My only real hope was that the Ari’s Neshamah would remember to change the water across his many Gilgulim.

Me, a rabbi, and one of the other staff all go to the Mikvah and do the traditional thing of getting buck naked. That wasn’t too bad in its own right, but unusual for me. The real drama begins when we get to the actual Mikvah, that smallish pool of water that was probably quite the impressive feat of construction in the 16th century. The water looked relatively clean, or at least clean for what I imagined men’s Mikvah water looks like.

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There was not a tremendous line, maybe three or four other people but amongst the loiterers were two Chassidish kids who stared at me in terror. For the record, I did nothing to acknowledge their presence, they just stared at me wide-eyed. I wasn’t going to ask them what about my physique scared them for obvious reasons. Then they began whispering to one another, holding up their hands so I wouldn’t overhear their conversation. Unfortunately for them, they were children, which meant that they spoke in a sort of stage whisper, rather than an actual whisper. My Yiddish is very limited, especially when I’m trying to convey that I have no interest in the conversation of nude children whatsoever. But there was one word I did understand: “Shvartze.” Ah. Truthfully, I wasn’t even offended. More confused than anything else. I’m not that dark. At the time, my skin tone was somewhere between Josh Hart and Jalen Brunson. Not very dark at all! Maybe these children were so sheltered that they had never seen Sephardim before! Or maybe they had and had been taught they were all a bunch of Shvartzes. Who knows.

Before I go in, an elderly Israeli gentleman of some Middle Eastern extraction barges in and demands to go straight in. He pulls off his shorts for emphasis. It is worth noting that the two Chassidish children who had pointed and stared at me were strangely silent this time around. The Israeli gentleman is clearly a regular as he goes around, in the nude, shaking people’s hands and high-fiving all around. Or maybe he was just like that. Either way, after makings his rounds, the guy lowers himself into the Mikvah using the handlebars designed just for that very thing. Yet when he got into the water, he didn’t let go of the handlebars. He rattled off 10 pull-ups in and out of the Mikvah, his head plopping in and out of the water. The rabbi I was with, the assorted Chassidim loitering (presumably the family members of the two kids), and whoever else was in there went into a panic. This guy wasn’t dunking his hands in the Mikvah! If he didn’t do that then the whole thing was pointless! Everyone kept pointing and repeating “HaYadayim Shelkha!” to which the Israeli guy replied with a dismissive hand wave and assured everyone that he always did things this way. By the time he got out, the protests died down, leaving the Mikvah open for yours truly.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went in. Would it be something spiritually transformative? A moment of mystical clarity? I went into the pool and submerged. None of the above happened. Instead I felt what any reasonable person would have expected to feel: wet. And cold. But mostly wet. I wasn’t sure how many times I was supposed to dunk myself, so I erred on the safe side and went seven times. Seven is a famously good and important number in Judaism. When I was done, I found myself a bit out of breath, just as wet when I first started, but quite a bit colder. Once I stepped out I somehow felt even more cold and could only think of one thing: getting my clothes on and getting the hell out of there.

Maybe I had gone to the wrong Mikvah. Maybe I needed one that was less tied up in a lofty mystical legacy or one that was more private. Maybe not being stared at by two mini Tuna Beigels would have helped. Or maybe I just needed a different sort of ritual, one that’s less wet and less cold.

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While I understand that this may ruffle the feathers of secularists and establishment clause absolutists, it has been my belief for as long as I can recall that even the public school system should teach Samuel as part of the curricula of great world literature. Beyond the importance of Biblical literacy in navigating the Western canon, Samuel is on its own terms a fantastic piece of literature. It contains everything from tragedy to elation, romance and enmity, loyalty and betrayal, mediations on the nature of power and its relationship to God’s sovereignty and the questions that necessarily arise from nascent sovereignty. In two words: “unparalleled banger”.

After reading Samuel again, I decided to review and synthesize what I had read and picked up on with the help of Hebrew University’s Professor of Bible, Yair Zakovitch, and his book of all of 244 pages, David: MeRo’eh LaMashiaḥ (1995). The book itself is split into three sections. The first is Zakovitch’s main contribution, a review of the life of David. The second is a short essay by Avigdor Shinan, whose longtime specialty and expertise in Aggada shines through in his overview of rabbinic attitudes towards David. Lastly is another brief essay by Shalom Tzabar on Jewish visual depictions of David through the ages.

In his introduction, Zakovitch makes something very clear to the reader: this book seeks to evaluate the portrayal of David in Samuel and Kings. It is not interested in attempting to recreate the archaeological record or evaluate the historicity of the narrative. Zakovitch himself is largely agnostic on this point, though he highlights the standard archeological evidence shown to support the possibility of a historical David. Reading this work, it becomes apparent through Zakovitch’s deep love of the narrative that on some level, he may very well wish that it is real. He explicitly states that he is not looking to write a biography of David; our notions of biography and historiography are too foreign to the Bible and its writers for them to be meaningfully applied in a way that yields intellectually honest or coherent results. Rather, Zakovitch explores the major aspects of David’s life in order to fully understand and flesh out his character.

Zakovitch begins with the end: his opening chapter focuses on David’s demise. In Zakovitch’s reading, David, the once great warrior, has now been reduced to a weak, dying husk of the man he used to be. He holds vestigial power in his own court as his handlers call the shots. The notion of him needing yet another woman to attend to his needs given David’s prolific and many times tragic record in attempt to “reignite” the king’s dormant vitality, is one that may very well be the courtly conventions of that day. However, there may be an undertone of mockery of the king’s frailty and long-gone virility as the court jockeys to create an absurd dynamic of a young virgin girl, Avishag, with the older King David. An age gap relationship that is so problematic, what sentences Adoniah to death is his love/lust for Avishag and the throne (though perhaps not in that order). David’s wives no longer pay him any heed. While Zakovitch presumes that Bat-Sheva did not take advantage of David’s fading wit and invent a promise he had made to crown Solomon. Nonetheless, the old warrior is powerless on his own throne. His wives, many of whom he met in moments of passion, have distanced themselves from him. He knows little of what transpires outside his own palace, as Adoniah claims the throne. His final act as king before death is to reawaken from his elderly stupor and affirm Solomon as his one true heir. Zakovitch begins with the end to raise the following question: how does the Bible’s most multifaceted, colorful, emotionally, personally complex character, whose actions span the gamut of the human experience go from the man we see in Samuel to the isolated shell of Kings?

Zakovitch presents each chapter of the book as dealing with another theme. These range from his childhood (or lack thereof), his early years in Saul’s court, the latter’s pursuit of him, David’s relationship with his various wives, Yoav and his siblings, his role as the Psalter and his relationship with God, amongst others. Zakovitch leaves few stones unturned in trying to capture the range of David’s life.

Zakovitch’s textual approach is one that is eminently familiar to someone who has studied from or with any of the “Gushnik” Tanakh types (though they may be less inclined to reference the LXX for textual variants): much of his work is dedicated to elucidating the Davidic narrative through intertextual comparison. To illustrate this point, I will highlight one examples:

In 1 Samuel 19:11-17, we read about a plot by Saul to kill David under the guise of protecting him and his wife, Michal, Saul’s daughter. Zakovitch highlights several parallels that run between this narrative and Laban’s pursuit of Jacob (some my own).

1. Both describe a son-in-law’s attempt to flee from an angry, zealous father-in-law. Without a doubt the considerations are different for each of the pursuers (politics vs personal gain), but Saul is described as actively seeking David’s death and Jacob operates on the assumption that ultimately, Laban will try and kill him. This notion finds support that it takes God revealing himself to Laban in order for him to stay his hand.

2. Michal replaces David with idols called תְּרָפִים, the same term used in Genesis 31 to describe the statuettes stolen by Rachel.

3. As an added bonus, Michal is a descendant of the son born out of Jacob’s unintentional curse on Rachel

4. Michal’s excuse for David being bedridden to mask his escape (illness) is somewhat similar to Rachel’s explanation for why her possessions cannot be searched (menstruation)

There are of course points of divergence:

1. David successfully flees, Jacob does not

2. Rachel seeks to hide the Terafim, Michal uses them to hide David.

3. In Genesis the entire interaction is between the father-in-law and the son-in-law, while in Samuel it’s the father and daughter.

4. Michal is not punished for this act of rebellion by Saul, whereas Jacob inadvertently sentences Rachel to die.

5. Michal protects David out of love, Jacob protects Rachel unknowingly and out of defending his own honor and reputation after being labeled a thief by Laban.

There is more to discuss, but you understand the point. What Zakovitch does with these parallels and differences is beyond the scope of this review but this is but one example of how he dissects any narrative portion. Instead, I will leave the reader to determine the relationship between the two stories (feel free to hash it out in the comments), but this emphasis on intertextuality and reading the Bible through itself as a self-contained literary prism are a core part of Zakovtich’s writing.

A potential challenge to the neatness of Zakovitch’s analysis, is the existence of Chronicles. For those unfamiliar, Chronicles is the grand retelling of all Jewish history form the the start until Cyrus’ famous decree (there is in fact a debate as to whether Ezra-Nehemiah should actually follow Chronicles as the immediate continuation of the grand narrative). Chronicles’ retelling of David’s life is rather dry to put it mildly. In Chronicles, David is the saintly leader whose righteousness is unassailable, planting the seed for the roots of the vast Midrashic tradition around him. This naturally irons out the drama and tension of David’s life, making Chronicles the aesthetic opposite of Samuel.

Zakovitch entertains the possibility that the author of Chronicles sought to displace Samuel with a more “pious” narrative, but ultimately comes to reject this notion, in part due to the fact that it is unfalsifiable and we have both accounts. In fact, he views it as somewhat complimentary of Samuel, in that it accentuates the spiritual life of David, an element that is often forgotten when revisiting his story.

Zakovitch, rightly feels that it is hard to David justice in broad terms. It is easy to focus on him as the Psalter, beloved and anointed by God, or as a fierce warrior whose partnership with and faith in his God grants him consistent victories over all of his foes. Or maybe it is better to view him through his deeply troubled and tragic relationship with Saul, once his patron, then sworn enemy, broken by a “Spirit of Evil,” who watches as the hearts of his people and his very own family are drawn after the rapidly rising David, further deepening his torment. What of David’s own messy family? The three marriages we know most about are:

1. Michal, whose father demanded an outrageous dowry of 100 Philistine foreskins intended to kill David and has no children of her own in the aftermath of a dramatic and vicious argument.

1. Bathsheba, one of the most infamously egregious sins of a Biblical hero in committing adultery and orchestrating the death of her husband, Uriah, to cover up the evidence.

2. Abigail, who only marries David after he comes close to killing her husband, who dies anyhow

And these are just his wives! Amongst his children there is his eldest, Amnon, who rapes his half-sister, which sparks little tangible response from David, echoing the silence of Jacob in light of Dinah’s capture. Absalom is the one who holds the grudge instead, killing his half-brother for his heinous crime, before leading an open rebellion against his father, ending in his death. Adoniah has similar designs but is quickly thwarted by Bathsheba who ensures her son, Solomon, takes the throne. The irony is that Solomon plays no role in the drama in Samuel. He manages to come out on top by largely doing nothing.

Even with all that turmoil, David’s lament for Absalom, a son who could have been so easily spurned, haunts the heart and soul:

בְּנִ֤י אַבְשָׁלוֹם֙ בְּנִ֣י בְנִ֣י אַבְשָׁל֔וֹם מִֽי־יִתֵּ֤ן מוּתִי֙ אֲנִ֣י תַחְתֶּ֔יךָ אַבְשָׁל֖וֹם בְּנִ֥י בְנִֽי׃

“My son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you, Absalom, my son, my son.” - 2 Sam 19:1

In reading Samuel, a common theme emerges, and not one that is conventionally highlighted emerges: David, first and foremost, is a lover (that Leonard Cohen fellow might’ve been onto something). He loves his family, his mentors, his friends, his wives, his children, and last but not least, his God. David’s inclination seems to be towards unconditional love, both from the standpoint of what others do to him and untethered to circumstance. This is both one of his greatest strengths but also his ultimate undoing. As he continues to love, he seems willfully oblivious to the way the threads that connect all of his loved ones quickly become tangled and impossible to untie.

David, 3000 years later, has held a central position in Jewish imagination and culture. More than any other single figure, he is mentioned by name the most in the Bible and in Jewish liturgy. His legacy is complicated. His life marks. some of the highest highs and lowest lows achievable. He is at times courageous , faithful, and deeply passionate. At others he is petty, conniving, and overly-emotional. As Zakovitch himself concludes, there is one point beyond dispute:

דָּוִד מֶלֶךְ יִשׂרָאֵל חַי וְקַיָּם

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Where does this notion come from?

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In Shemoth 12:38 we read:

וְגַם־עֵ֥רֶב רַ֖ב עָלָ֣ה אִתָּ֑ם וְצֹ֣אן וּבָקָ֔ר מִקְנֶ֖ה כָּבֵ֥ד מְאֹֽד׃

And an Erev Rav went with them, and sheep and cattle, a great amount of livestock.

The word Rav is easy enough to explain, meaning “great, many, numerous etc.” and the word Erev is from the root meaning “to mix, mixture”, giving us the wonderfully alliterative English “mixed multitude”. This mixed multitude of people left Egypt with the Israelites, bringing their animals with them. All of the traditional commentaries1 interpret the phrase rather plainly, explaining that the Erev Rav was some collection of gentiles who decided to tie their destinies with the collective lot of Israel. The Tannaitic Midrashim2 are only interested in the size of the Erev Rav and what types of people participated, but make no moral judgments whatsoever and does .

This verse is the only time in the course of the entire Tora where this Erev Rav is explicitly mentioned, though later references to groups such as the Asafsuf are often read as being identical with the Erev Rav.3 That being the case, the Erev Rav appears to relatively benign. They accompany the Israelites through their greatest triumphs post-Exodus and suffer alongside them in the aftermath their greatest failures. In basically all respects, they are presumed to be Israelites.4

Given their bland, uninteresting track record, how then, did the Erev Rav take on such a negative connotation, especially in a polemic context? The earliest negative framing of the Erev Rav appears in Midrash Tanhuma, on Ki Tissa:

לֶךְ רֵד כִּי שִׁחֵת עַמְּךָ. הָעָם לֹא נֶאֱמַר אֶלָּא עַמְּךָ. אָמַר לוֹ הַקָּדוֹש בָּרוּךְ הוּא לְמֹשֶׁה: עַמְּךָ עָשׂוּ אֶת הָעֵגֶל. שֶׁאֲנִי אָמַרְתִּי לְךָ, וְהוֹצֵאתִי אֶת צִבְאֹתַי אֶת עַמִּי בְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל (שמות ז, ד). וְאַתָּה הָיִיתָ גּוֹרֵם וְקִבַּלְתָּ הָעֵרֶב רַב וְאָמַרְתָּ מוּטָב לְקַבֵּל אֶת הַשָּׁבִים. וַאֲנִי הָיִיתִי רוֹאֶה מָה הֵם עֲתִידִים לַעֲשׂוֹת, וְהֵם שֶׁעָשׂוּ אֶת הָעֵגֶל, שֶׁהָיוּ עוֹבְדֵי עֲבוֹדָה זָרָה וְגָרְמוּ לְעַמִּי לַחֲטֹא עִמָּהֶם.

“Go and descend, for your people have been corrupted.” “The people” was not said [in the verse] rather, “your people.” Said the Holy One Blessed is He to Moshe: “Your people have made the [golden] calf. As I have said to you, ‘I have taken my hosts, my people, the Children of Israel.’ And you have caused [them to leave] and you, and you accepted the Erev Rav, and you said: ‘It is good accept those who are repentant.’ I had seen what they were destined to do, and they are the ones that made the calf, that were idolaters and caused my people to sin with them.

This Midrash is interesting for a number of reasons: The author is of the view that the term עַמְּךָ shows a certain degree of culpability on the part of Moshe for the Golden Calf(!), it was Moshe’s people specifically who were responsible. This is an odd grammatical point to highlight, as this formulation is pretty common throughout the Tora. Yet the Tanhuma not only assigns the blame to the Erev Rav as the primary drivers of the whole calf fiasco, but that Moshe’s naivete was responsible for allowing them to get to Har Sinai in the first place. It is Moshe’s fault for being a sucker about the Erev Rav, a group of people gathered from various idolatrous nations, in the earnest belief that they were penitent. However, God knows better and knew full well what they would eventually do.

Besides the Tanhuma’s odd castigation of Moshe, it is worth noting that the Derasha doesn’t work super cleanly. If the Pasuq were to have read העם instead of עמך, the author of the Midrash would note that rather than assigning the blame to “your people” God blames “the people” i.e. the anonymous mob of non-Israelites who are decidedly not of Moshe’s heritage. That being the case, let us highlight some key ideas from this Midrash:

1. The road to hell (or to mass idolatry) is paved with good intentions. Moshe accepted the Erev Rav as people who had truly seen the truth of God and wanted nothing more than to join His people in the desert and follow Him.

2. Moshe’s attempt to integrate the Erev Rav was in good faith, but ultimately God is knows the hearts of man and is able to see beyond what ever well-intentioned designs man has for other men.

3. You can take the man out of Egypt, but not the Egypt out of the man. People who spend their entire lives living in a pagan society do not magically lose all the cultural and mental baggage that comes with that in the span of a few months, if ever.

This Midrash does not portray the Erev Rav as uniquely evil, much less that they were a deliberate sense. If anything, the Tanhuma does not ascribe any particular malicious motivation to the Erev Rav. They were idolaters therefore they did idolatry. If anything, this Midrash is looking for a way to say that it wasn’t the Israelites themselves, fresh off a highlight reel of miracles, that did this own their own. Rather, it was Moshe’s optimism about their fellow travelers that led the Israelites to sin. The Israelites chose to ape the cultic form of the people in their midst who had a much longer history of that sort of thing.

This Midrashic current is ultimately copied into the broadly more popular Shemoth Rabba, and from there it becomes popular for the same reason that most Midrashim that Orthodox Jews can recall immediately do: it was included by Rashi in his Perush on the Tora. From there the popular conception stuck: the Erev Rav came up with the Egel HaZahav and now we’re left holding the bag for the rest of time. Seems pretty negative, but as we have seen, the Tanhuma doesn’t treat this as a deliberate attempt at sabotage by the Erev Rav and definitely does not carry any metaphysical implications and had no weight as a polemical term. What changed?

The Zohar. How could it not be? To be fair to the primary Zoharic corpus, the most damning portrayal of the Erev Rav appears in the Zohar Hadash which is sort of a separate unit, but also not. Just like the Re’aya Mehamena. And the Tiqqunei HaZohar. The composition of the Zohar’s parts and those that have been slapped onto it is the subject of several PhD dissertations, not a substack article.5

In the Zohar Hadash6 (ZH) on Yitro, the text has an elaborate discourse on the dangers of looking at wicked indivudals. In ZH Yitro 42, we read:

כְמָה דְיוֹנָה צְרִיכַת נְטִירוּ מִנֵּץ, כְּגַוְּונָא דָּא צְרִיכִין נְטִירוּ, עֵינַיִךְ יוֹנִים דְּצַדִּיקִים, מֵעַיְינִין דְּרַשִּׁיעַיָּא, דְּאִינוּן עֵרֶב רַב, בְּנוֹי דְּלִילִית רַשִּׁיעָתָא, דְּאִינוּן קָשִׁין לְמֶעְבַּד טִיבוּ עִם עֲנִיֵּי בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל. וְאִינוּן עֲקִימִין בְּכָל אוֹרְחַיְיהוּ, בְּנוֹי דְּנָחָשׁ הַקַּדְמוֹנִי, דְּאִלֵּין אִינוּן זוּהֲמָא דְּהִטִיל חִוְּיָא בְּחַוָּה.

Just as a dove requires protection from an eagle, so too this [the eyes of the righteous] require protection. The “dove-like”7 eyes of the righteous, [need protection] from the eyes of the wicked, which are the Erev Rav, the sons of the wicked Lilith, who are difficult in doing good8 with the poor people among Benei Yisrael. And they are crooked in all their ways, the sons of the primordial serpent,9 who are the pollution (corruption) that the snake put on Hava.10

The ZH describes the Erev Rav as far more than a bunch of well-intentioned sinners, they are now a cosmic force, the literal spawn of Lilith and Satan. The Erev Rav is transformed into a band of demons of an exceptionally evil pedigree whose gaze has the capacity to corrupt even the righteous.

Later on, in a discussion of the importance of keeping Shabbath as a means of warding off Lilith, the ZH writes:

דְּלִילִית מָרָה אוּכְמָא, צִמָּאוֹן דְּלֵית בֵּיהּ מַיִם, דְּאִיהוּ "הַבּוֹר רֵק אֵין בּוֹ מַיִם, אֲבָל נְחָשִׁים וְעַקְרַבִּים יֵשׁ בּוֹ." וּנְחָשִׁין וְעַקְרַבִּין דִּילָהּ אִינוּן עֵרַב רַב. יוֹסֵף דְּאִיהוּ בְּגוֹבָא, דָּא יִשְׂרָאֵל דְּאִינוּן בְּגָלוּתָא דִּילָהּ, בְּהַהוּא בּוֹר.

For Lilith is the mistress of darkness, a thirst without water, which is “the pit was empty; there was no water in it, but there were snakes and scorpions inside it.” And these snakes and scorpions are the Erev Rav. Just as Yosef was in the pit, so too Israel is in their exile, in that very pit.

Not only are the Erev Rav condemned for their Satanic lineage, they are portrayed as active agents of Lilith, the mistress of darkness. Yosef was thrown into infested pit crawling with snakes and scorpions angling to poison him and corrupt his essence. This event is analogized to the languishing of Israel in exile, beset by the venomous schemes of the Erev Rav who seek to trap them in that very pit, prolonging their exile and delaying the ultimate redemption.11

In case this imagery was too subtle, the Re’aya Mehamena on Parashat Pinehas says:

וּבְגִין דְּעֵרֶב רַב אִינּוּן שְׂאוֹר שֶׁבָּעִיסָה, וְאִינּוּן אוּמִין דְּעָלְמָא דַּמְיָין לְמוֹץ, יַתִּיר מְעַכְּבִין בְּגָלוּתָא עֵרֶב רַב לְיִשְׂרָאֵל, מֵאוּמִין עוֹבְדֵי כּוֹכָבִים וּמַזָּלוֹת.

Just as the Erev Rav is the leaven in the dough, and the nations of the world are similar to chaff, the Erev Rav cause Israel to tarry in Exile more than the nations of idolaters.

Not looking great for the Erev Rav.

The Zoharic corpus characterizes the Erev Rav as metaphysically evil. They are the descendants of Satan and Lilith. They poison the well. And far worse than any idolater, they delay the final redemption from within, trapping Israel and the Shekhina in a state of permanent exile in service of their masters.12

Even with all of this being the case, in the immediate centuries following the publication of the Zohar, this term was not commonly used to attack others. This is not to suggest that rabbinic discourse and debate was somehow tamer, but it was presumably an unspoken assumption that declaring your rival “the spawn of Satan and Lilith,” “subverting Israel from within,” and “worse than any idolater” would do nobody involved any favors, whether it be the man accused of being evil in essence or the accuser who would in turn appear to the public as a deranged malcontent. Even among the most prominent of the Kabbalists, such as the Ar”i, this terminology was viewed as strictly metaphorical, describing a metaphysical threat and the harshness of exile rather than a specific group of people.

This changes dramatically in the mid 17th century with the rise of Shabbetai Zevi, messiah-apparent. His followers used the term in its strictly Zoharic context in the most literal way possible: “Any and all opponents of the true King Messiah Shabbetai Zevi13 are the Erev Rav, those who delay the final Redemption etc.” with the idea that Shabbetai’s opposition were marked as legitimate targets, at times the victims of mob violence and persecution.14 It was the way that a fanatical movement that ironically sought to rewrite the foundations and essence of Judaism into a grotesque freak show centered around the incoherent whims of a 105 IQ schizophrenic who had many dreams from a young age about demons setting his penis on fire. Granted, Nathan of Gaza would earn some sort of lifetime achievement award in telecommunications in our day and he would certainly be hailed as a PR mastermind who would go on to work for Jeffery Epstein after the whole evangelism business didn’t work out. But I digress.

The use of the term Erev Rav as a pejorative was pioneered by the Sabbateans as an authoritarian measure of crushing legitimate dissent under the tyranny of the insane. To point out that the emperor has no clothes15 is to risk your life in the land of oblivious nudists. Drawing on the language of the most embarrassing episode in Jewish history as a way to accuse your opponents of being “subversive” or “the enemy within” is to subconsciously integrate the paranoia and cultishness of the Sabbateans. At least they thought they were defending their putz Moshiach. And besides, the actual Erev Rav did nothing to have their name used as a slur by people to eager to do anything other than defend their own ideas.

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If you are reading this review, you may be familiar with the following phenomenon: a rabbi offers profound insights into the very structure of the Hebrew language whether in a book or a series of Shiurim and once you actually get around to reading or listening, they are usually short on insights, and on the occasion where there are any, they are almost never profound.1 In light of the above, I am generally skeptical whenever a “frum” publisher releases anything on the subject of the Hebrew language.

However, even a cursory glance at the cover of the books indicates to the reader that the book in your hands does no such thing. The fact that the book is called Unlocking Leshon HaKodesh, in the proper Semikhuth as opposed to the popular bastardization of “Lashon HaKodesh”2 is a very strong indicator of the author’s background and commitment to relating accurate grammatical information and a practical guide to Hebrew.

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For those of you looking for a strictly academic grammar of Biblical Hebrew, Gilbert’s book is not for you on several counts. It makes no claims of being exhaustive and freely acknowledges that some issues and topics are well beyond the scope of the book.3 Issues of diachronic (historical) linguistics are relegated to throwaway sentences here and there. In fact, the scope of the book is not strictly limited to Biblical Hebrew. Glinert, writing for Mosaica’s audience, also addresses shifts from Biblical Hebrew to Mishnaic Hebrew, as well as further changes that occasionally crop up in Jewish liturgy in its faux-Biblical Hebrew prose. Additionally, certain facets may seem a bit more alien to the academic reader, given the lack of contemporary citations and that most references are to classical Jewish grammars and Biblical commentators.4 Especially alien to readers of academics books will be the consistent use of Ashkenazi transliteration for Hebrew words, though this is of course a function of 1) the publisher and 2) the intended audience.

That all being said, Glinert’s Unlocking Leshon HaKodesh is a phenomenonal resource for anyone looking to build their understanding of classical Hebrew grammar, or even curious to review. Each of the chapters is written in plain English and where more technical terms arise, Glinert explains them easily and with accessible examples. On the matter of accessibility, Unlocking Leshon HaKodesh is remarkable in its goal of teaching anyone and everyone the language. The chapters are short and break every facet of the language (parts of speech, Binyanim, Mishqalim, etc) into its own separate unit. While these chapters are by no means exhaustive, they provide more than ample information on whatever subject they address.

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There are also several other features that make the book especially interesting and useful. Each chapter includes an additional three things beyond the main body of the book: the first is labeled as “Did you know?”, which includes miscellaneous trivia facts on the history of a given grammatical feature or how classic Jewish grammarians understood it. The second are sections for the reader to test themselves on the material of a given chapter, in order to reinforce the information provided. Lastly, Glinert provides a list of citations from well-known Biblical verses,5 Rabbinic literature, and Jewish liturgy.6 I cannot speak to the authors intent nor is it likely that he will read this review, I believe that the lists of quotations aren’t just meant to demonstrate the grammatical feature Glinert describes. They also serve to demonstrate to the reader that no matter how confounding or novel the information presented may be, they already are familiar with it in a practical sense.7

Glinert’s work is driven by a certain romance combined with a lack of sentimentality that yields a heartfelt but deeply rooted work on Hebrew Grammar. Unlike the somewhat hypothetical books described above, Glinert does not view the shapes of the letters, their sounds, or combinations as anything beyond what they are: units of meaning or features of Hebrew. He describes Biblical Hebrew based on what it is rather than what he wishes it would be. Glinert highlights differences and shifts between different eras of Hebrew as products of different eras. He does what many academics writing for frum audiences do: introduce ideas that while not from “kosher” sources per se, are entirely unproblematic and legitimates them in the eyes of an audience that otherwise would ignore them.

Whether you are looking to improve your Hebrew, get a better grasp of the language as its core, or even as a learned student of the language looking for a refresher, Unlocking Leshon HaKodesh is a more than welcome addition to anyone’s library. It addresses a tragically overlooked area of Jewish study and does so in a way that is readable, accessible, and broken into digestible units. It is designed to be studied, reviewed, and referenced time and time again as a foundation for unlocking the mechanisms of the Hebrew language thereby unlocking Miqra and rabbinic literature.

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The implication of the good pastor’s xweet is clear: Joel Berry’s proposed ban on Muslim immigration is necessary but not sufficient.1 The objective is not merely to disqualify Muslims but also Jews from being American citizens. That this tweet got 80k likes is not insignificant, but a quick read through the pastor’s tweets seems to indicate that outside of the New Testament he is not an intellectual heavyweight: as most people know, at least 80% of American Jews would have no problem eating a bacon double cheeseburger.

This post (amongst other things) got me thinking about questions of Kashruth and Americaness. The dietary restrictions laid out in the Tora and expanded upon by Hazal are unique to Judaism. Even Islam, which has some of those restrictions, is considerably more permissive on the food front than Judaism.

Food is one of the most basic human needs. Materially, it is arguably the most important. There is a reason that cuisine is a dominant part of what we tend to consider as “cultural heritage”. Different cuisines are informed by what resources the people developing them had access to, a fact which is further amplified in traditional Jewish circles given the role of Halakha.

As American Jew or a Jewish American, these limitations are glaring. In my late teens, when I first started making gentile friends online, many were mystified that they had greater familiarity with American fast food than I did, given that they lived across the globe and that I had grown up in the states. Once I pointed out that none of this mattered in light of Jewish Law, it made considerably more sense, but even so I felt somewhat self-conscious about the fact that I would not pass the proposed citizenship test in the above tweet.

It feels weird thinking of myself as an American with an asterisk or with any kind of qualifier. I was born here, as were both my parents. Both my grandfathers served in the United States Armed Forces. I grew up with a great appreciation of American history, literature, media,2 and even more crucially, with a great appreciation of the uniqueness of the American project, our system of government, and our way of life. The more I learn about this insane country the more enamored with it I am. In keeping with local tradition, every Sunday, usually from 1-11pm I find myself, along with millions of other Americans, glued to my TV, watching the greatest sport ever created: American Football.3 But as I watch each game I’m bombarded with endless ads for cars I won’t drive, medications I hope I’ll never need, beer too crappy to drink, and most crucially, food that I cannot eat. Given the cost of keeping Kosher, the notion of a bucket of fried chicken costing anything less than twenty dollars is nothing short of mind-blowing. I can’t speak to whether KFC, Popeyes, Burger King, McDonalds, Arby’s, IHOP, Subway, Five Guys, White Castle, Applebee’s, Chipotle, or whatever of the seemingly endless options paraded before me on my screen are actually any decent. But the food looks good. It probably tastes good. But I can’t. After all, God said so.4 And if God’s word isn’t enough, three thousand years of history is more than enough to make me refrain.

A non-trivial difference between the observant Jew and the average American is of course travel. When anyone travels, food is an important consideration. For observant Jews, you are either going to a destination with an established Jewish community and lots of kosher restaurants or you are preparing to spend however much time away living off of canned and dried foods. To the average American, the notion of traveling in the richest country to ever exist and having to limit yourself to military style rations is nothing short of absurd because quite frankly, on some level it is.

When traveling to Israel however, paradoxically, allowed me as a child to feel more conventionally American. How so? Not because of any language or cultural barriers but because there I could do what I couldn’t back home: eat a Big Mac.5 This of course sounds superficially rather silly, but as we’ve established above, food is an integral part of culture. There’s something obviously absurd about needing to travel across an ocean in order to feel more American, but for much of my childhood that was my essential American childhood experience.

For those of you who study the Daf Yomi, these issues should be broadly familiar. Massekheth Avoda Zara is full of discussions about various rabbinic prohibitions that are designed to create cultural distance between Jews and Gentiles. By design, Kashruth is meant to keep us separate from others by creating a sort of parallel economy which demands full Jewish participation at every step from the slaughter of an animal all the way through cooking it. Throughout our various diasporas, Jews readily accepted the burden of being kept separate. In some places this was more strictly enforced than others and Jews quite easily thought of themselves as a distinct population. In America, we do as well, but not nearly to the same extent.6 The English speaking Jewish diaspora marks the first major instance of Jewish creoles being written in the local script and without a doubt many of our lifestyle preferences (especially the culinary ones) reflect a deep degree of Americanization.

I am an American. There are those who would undoubtedly put an asterisk on that, on the basis of me being Jewish. Even when I’ve been in Israel or elsewhere abroad, I have always felt American. Not just in an abstract sense, but also as someone who genuinely loves this country. I know however, that to be meaningfully Jewish is to avoid partaking in everything American. Some will insist that one isn’t meant to feel American to begin with, such an attitude is a product of being too enmeshed in Gentile culture etc. Whatever the case may be, I know that those making such critiques eat the exact same Kosher pizza I do.

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I’d like to fast forward to an issue that arises when studying a text that came about two and a half millennia later. In his Haqdama to the Mishne Tora, Maimonides details the history of the Oral tradition all the way up to the times of the Geonate.

A key point in the Haqdama, as well as in Andalusian Halakhic jurisprudence, is that Ravena and Rav Ashe mark the end of “Hora’a”,2 meaning binding legal authority. After the canonization of the Babylonian Talmud, its enactments, decrees, and customs became widespread throughout all of Israel. The Geonate in Babylon was the legitimate physical and spiritual heirs of the Talmudic academies and provide the best interpretive framework for understanding various Sughyoth.

All of this seem perfectly reasonable at face value. In the Jewish world as we know it today no text is studied as frequently and as intensely as the Babylonian Talmud. It dominates the curricula of Jewish educational institutions at all levels wherever it may be found. The average Jew in the Orthodox system spends more time engaging with the Babylonian Talmud and its seemingly endless commentaries then any other document.

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This leads us to an important question in light of Maimonides’ Haqdama as well as the preeminence of the Bavli in contemporary Judaism: was the Bavli’s authority universally accepted?

The historical evidence on this front makes clear that while the Bavli was widely adopted by the Jewish communities of much of the Near East, North Africa, and subsequently Spain, the authoritativeness of the text was much more malleable in Ashkenaz and in the immediate region of what is today the State of Israel.

Alongside the Babylonian Talmud, there was a parallel tradition that emerged in the land of Israel, one that continued after the closing of the Babylonian Talmud and one that continued nearly until the turn of the millennium in written form and until the thirteenth century in body. The traditions of the Land of Israel had varying degrees of impact on various Jewish communities, though these affinities survive most obviously in a wide range of liturgical contexts. This is most pronounced in the Italian and Ashkenazi rites of different stripes and similarly extends to some other practices, though the full extent of such is a matter of a dissertation rather than a substack article.3

Prior to its destruction during the crusades, the communities of Eres Yisrael lived under the guidance of their own local Geonate, their own legal and liturgical traditions, rooted in the very land their ancestors had composed the Mishna, Tosefta, Yerushalmi, and most of the the major early Midrashim. The “Sons of the West” as they were called in Babylonian literature were not oblivious to the existence of the Babylonian Talmud. There are of course the high profile fights between the two Geonates and the related correspondences. However, from the literature we have both from the Geonim, as well as the Cairo Geniza, we know full well of a Jewish community that rejected the supremacy of the Bavli for a multitude of reasons, including deference to their own, organically developed traditions.

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Without addressing modern attempts at reviving this lost tradition, I think I have, albeit in brief, highlighted the existence of a community that accepted the authority of the Oral Law but not the Bavli. This of course puts a rather noticeable dent in the primary thesis of Maimonoides’ theory of Halakha. Personally, it strikes as odd to suggest that Maimonides was unaware of this problem. He acknowledges the existence of communities that complete their cycle of Torah in three years as opposed to the one year that is normative in our day and age.4

Part of Maimonides’ concern that led him to write the Mishne Tora is ironically rather akin to our current reality. The Jewish world is currently in a state of legal anarchy in which one person makes a claim, another makes a counter, and the dance of endless debate continues forever more. I know that in contemporary Orthodox thought this is either treated as part and parcel of the system, in line with the debates of the Talmud, or view it as something that is almost beautiful that reflects the metaphysical indeterminacy of Halakha. These notions are foreign to the legal ideology of Maimonides, who views the Babylonian Talmud as the least formally binding legal text, a hybrid between a common law system with statutory elements. Better put, it’s a common law system that is formalized by the statutes of the various Babylonian Bate Din whose deliberations comprise the Babylonian Talmud.

That is all fine and interesting, but what does any of this mean for Halakha as we understand it? Maybe we can chalk up the Bavli’s authority to the principle of Halakha KeVathra’e, but that seems overly simplistic and reductionist when dealing with a problem of this type. I know the folks over at Meqor Mayim Hayyim have written extensively about Halakha as a common law system with a heavy reliance on precedent. Their articles on the subject are certainly worth reading, especially for those interested in a more originalist approach to Halakha.

As something of an originalist myself, I find myself in a precarious position navigating the realms of history and Halakha. My inclinations are heavily Maimonidean for reasons that are probably worth discussing at a later date. Trying to understand our primary legal (and aggadic) texts on their own terms, as close as we can to the people who actually wrote them, is a key part of legal analysis. Otherwise it becomes quite easy to lose ourselves in games of broken telephone and semantic drift, yielding new “Halakhoth” that would have been unthinkable to the very people who wrote the texts we study.

Where does this leave me on this muddled, confusing journey? I am not fully sure. It is entirely possible that I have become too comfortable with the familiarity of highlighting Ravena and Rav Ashe as the end of Hora’a. While this certainly reflects the reality of much of world Jewry, it was not the absolute historical and legal reality for some, those who lived in the land that gave birth to so much of our legal and textual tradition. At the time of writing, I am tepidly okay with accepting Maimonides theory as reflective of a general reality on the ground as we know it. I can’t promise that I will always think in those terms, but affirming the primacy of the Babylonian Talmud as the last definitive authoritative legal text seems to me to be a safeguard against the legal anarchy that has persisted for centuries. Yet even writing this, I feel a sense of hesitancy, especially in light of my comments about originalism earlier. What if the Yerushalmi reflects an older tradition, closer to the roots of the Oral Law than the Bavli? Do we once again just chalk it up to Halakha KeVathra’e?

I wrote this piece knowing full well that I am short on answers. There’s a lot that I don’t know, a lot that I have yet to read and study, much less process and understand. I am still searching and hopefully this platform will serve as a journal of sorts to document evolutions in my thinking. For now, with Shavuoth right around the corner, these types of overarching questions are the very questions we ought to be asking. When celebrating the giving of the Tora, we are not just celebrating the event itself, but the very text itself. The text, the basis for all subsequent law, as well as its oral counterpart that allows us to apply the text consistently and conclusively to our lives. In investigating and researching the development and history of Halakha as it ought to be, I ask from God for wisdom and guidance in my analysis so that I do not err in calling the pure impure and the impure pure.

I wish all of my subscribers a Mo’adim LeSimha and that as accept the Tora anew, we continue our work in delving into its very depths.

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Gonzales made little room for doubt surrounding his motives. He triumphantly yelled “Free Palestine!” as he was arrested. Gonzales was considerate enough to post a long-winded manifesto on twitter.com which for now is available to be read by the general public. If you don’t have the time or patience to read the ravings of a rabid lunatic, I can roughly summarize the manifesto as follows:

1. Israel is engaged in a genocidal campaign against Gaza, making Israel the new Nazi Reich

2. America enables, supports, and is complicit in aforementioned genocide and is similarly evil

3. Violent resistance is the only path of action when faced with unimaginable evil

4. Therefore, any and all acts of violence are the only sane courses of action given the circumstances.

Read it for yourself if you want and please let me know if I missed anything.

That being the case, what makes an already more tragic story more tragic is that Yaron planned to propose the following week to his girlfriend. Their stories have now been forcibly ended by the machinations of evil. The Mishna famously teaches that one who saves a life is like one who has saved an entire world and that the opposite is true of one who destroys a life. When you have two young people, whose long futures were spread so far out in front of them, the double-edged reality of this Mishna cuts to the bone. Their families, forever changed. The future that they had hoped and prayed for has been stolen from them. All we can do on their behalf is commemorate their memories and bring some semblance of peace to the families who they were forced to leave.

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This short essay is only one of many articles and essays you will probably read about Wednesday’s murders and the fallout from them. There will be thinkpieces, op-eds, and longform social media posts. Each one will propose their own solution to the newfound immediate threat of deadly antisemitic violence. Buy guns. Make Aliyah. Pass more ineffectual legislation saying that antisemitism is bad. These are but a few of the options that will presumably be floated about in the coming days and weeks.

I don’t know what the solution is. Hell, I’m not even fully sure there is a solution. It could very well be that the extreme physical safety that American Jews enjoyed for the second half of the 20th century and nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st is now officially a thing of the past, if it weren’t already. The new norms of armed security at all Jewish institutions are all but cemented as a fixture of our lives. I am sorry to my 40 some odd subscribers at the time of writing this, but I don’t see a way out of this.

The current situation of American Jews, particularly in the Orthodox world is a peculiar one. There are more Jews than ever before in this country participating in Jewish education, synagogues, and other infrastructure necessary for a Orthodox communities to survive. Our institutions are stronger than ever, seeing increasing growth and influence, and have been wielding even more political influence than before. For our Conservative, Reform, and secular brethren, the picture is the opposite. Their institutions are rapidly fading into obsolescence. They have been marginalized, made irrelevant, empty shells of what they once were.

This is now particularly pronounced in left-wing political spaces. The Jewish intelligentsia has been largely pushed out in favor of more diverse voices. Let us not forget that the most recent Democratic presidential campaign sidelined a potential Jewish VP pick for fear of alienating the pro-Hamas wing of the party. The Left’s ideological strongholds, namely universities, are overwhelmingly in favor of “globalizing the Intifada”. Reprehensible figures popular with left-wing youth, like Hasan Piker, Badempanada, and other popular streamers regularly equate Zionism with Nazism and justified the killings on Wednesday night.

While the Trump administration has vowed to crush the perpetrator and all of those cheering on his barbarism, I remain pessimistic. I think that some people will face the appropriate legal penalties for their embrace of anti-American and antisemitic evil, but that the rot is so deep set that the scale of a purge required to thoroughly exorcise this societal cancer would be all but unthinkable to the average American. The only people who hunger for operations of that scale are ironically those who would wield that power to cleanse America of all “Jewish” and/or “Zionist” influence. In short, there is no obvious solution to the noxious source of venom that led to the deaths of Yaron and Sarah.

Elias Rodriguez did enough research to know that there would be an event held at the Jewish Museum in DC on Wednesday night for Jews and members of the “diplomatic community” alike. When two people exited the building, he did not stop to ask them whether they were Jewish or Israeli. It didn’t matter. The guilt by association was more than enough. While some have felt the need to highlight that Yaron wasn’t Jewish Al Pi Halakha, he was Zera Yisrael and chose in his life’s work to tie his fate to that of the Jewish People. He was killed for being perceived as Jewish, which is functionally indistinct from being killed for being Jewish. In the eyes of Rodriguez, the “Jewishness” and its links to Israel, America, and all things bad, of anyone who would attend an event hosted by a Jewish institution was enough of a crime that warranted the “only sane” response.

Rodriguez is an expression of a larger phenomenon that has enraptured the relatively young (under 40) set in this country and abroad. Again, I am not sure what exactly is to be done in order to counter it, but I know that left unchecked, Yaron and Sarah’s deaths will mark a new dark chapter in American Jewish history. May their souls and families find peace in amidst this chaos and tumult.

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I was hoping to make my next post on this website about the importance of multilingualism in Jewish tradition and an attack on cultural Platonism and intellectual inbreeding. I had a whole long spiel prepared for my twenty-something subscribers and it was gonna be a good one. I can’t do that. Not right now at least.

This morning, the world was treated to a traditionally celebratory Gazan victory parade where masked Hamas members marched the coffins of four dead Israelis, amongst them one former peace activist (Oded Lifschitz HY”D), a mother (Shiri Bibas HY”D) and two infants (Kfir and Ariel Bibas HY”D). The Gazan public brought their children to this sanctification of the Ur-value in their culture: death. Unlike the Egyptians however, the Gazan worship of death does not stem from a fear and trepidation of the unknown which requires the utmost care and planning. For Hamas, death is the highest calling of any sucker unlucky enough to be in the rank and file while spreading death as their only devotional act in their cult.

The scenes from the parade were jarring, coupled with some vintage antisemitic imagery printed by Gaza’s thriving graphic design subculture. The whole thing was so uniquely ghoulish that even the UN and the Red Cross, normally stalwart Hamas allies and supporters were stunned by the morbidity of the whole thing. Adding insult to insult, the AP, that former gold standard, reported that Kfir and Ariel Bibas were killed in an Israeli airstrike. Their source for this shocking claim? Hamas.

Once the bodies were returned to Israel, there arose other issues. For whatever innocent reason, Hamas decided to impede the Israelis’ ability to open the coffins they had been delivered. Only after that salt was shoved into a collective open wound was the truth revealed: Kfir and Ariel had been dead for quite some time, murdered by Gazans. Whether their murderers were Hamas operative per se will be forever unknown to us. For those who worship death, with Jewish death being their Holy of Holies, the instinct of whoever killed those two innocent babies was not to protect infants. It was to kill them. Presumably without so much as a second thought. And even in the event that there was a moment of hesitation, it mattered not. Those two kids were killed in cold blood.

The final insult had yet to be revealed. The body in Shiri Bibas’ coffin was not Shiri Bibas. Nobody knows for sure whose body it is. But it is definitely was not Shiri’s. The disbelief and shock that overtook me once that news went public made me go cold. Then hot. Then cold once again. After a cycle of grimly accepting reality alternating with blazing hot rage, I found myself at a loss. In the eyes of Hamas, letting the Jews bury their dead was not an honor that they could accord in full. They strive to slaughter us in life and desecrate our corpses in death.

I have a confession to make: as soon as the full list of hostages was announced back in late 2023, as soon as I saw Ariel and Kfir’s pictures, I assumed that they were dead. It would be difficult enough for the adults to survive Hamas captivity. Babies had no chance. Even knowing that, the events of this week and today in particular were nothing short of a gut punch. The image of their coffins being paraded around like trophies is now burned into my brain.

I feel anger. Rage. I feel Shimshon’s dying words etching themselves into my soul and into the souls of all Israel. Of all the deaths and losses, of which there have been many, of all that agony, the innocence and purity of the Bibas children has always stood out to me as particularly striking. In a way, they became a symbol of hope, that time-honored tradition of surviving generation to generation in spite of our enemies. That hope, however delusional, had power. Even as someone who did not have that hope, I understand it. Those boys, demonized as Nazis and fascists by virtue of their birth met their ends at the hand of modern day Nazis and Islamo-fascists.

Of everyone involved in this wretched tragedy, the most wretched is undoubtedly Yarden Bibas. I don’t know what the future will hold for him. What I do know is that the hope he had for the future, the one that he and his wife were building together, has been stolen from him. What I would give for that man to be able to embrace his wife and children just once more. My heart goes out to him, as much as it can, as he endures what came close to shattering Job’s faith. The key difference between the two is that Job was a Mashal.

I don’t know how Israel will respond. By that I mean the polity, not the people. The people have shared their feelings, not too dissimilar to that which I’ve shared. The grief is overpowering. So is the anger and rage. Much of it is rightfully directed at Hamas. Some is aimed at the Israeli government and army for how they’ve mismanaged this whole situation. Mine is all of that combined with an added primal anger that I have felt acutely since October 7th: anger at God. The God who I pray to daily, whose Law I keep to the best of my abilities, that God who entered into an eternal covenant with us. What is He doing? Is He asleep at the wheel? Indifferent? Does he not see the suffering that has afflicted His people for the past year and a half and beyond? I know I am not the first Jew to ever ask these questions. We have suffered too much as a people for such a thing to be possible. Instead, I will ask of God an ancient question, one to which He is free to answer:

“?הֲשֹׁפֵט כָּל הָאָרֶץ לֹא יַעֲשֶׂה מִשְׁפָּט”

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In the current paradigm, “indigenous” is the accredited man’s way of saying “so and so was here first.” The centrality of this claim to Third Worldist and anticolonial politics shapes the way in which we ought to view certain conflicts. Take for example the annual attempt at guilt tripping in the USA around Thanksgiving time when we are told to mourn the victims of mass genocide on occupied Turtle Island. The terms of the conflict are simple: the noble savages of the Americas were brutally displaced by the European white man as an act of selfish conquest (as opposed to the selfless variety). In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, fighting over who was in the land first is of course tied in with the perceived legitimacy of a given side, at least in left wing academic circles.

In practice, “Indigenous Zionism” is a genius marketing tactic that is designed to appeal to a range of young Jews yearning for something that feels Jewish in stark contrast to whatever watered down fare is available to them.3 Couple that with an appeal to “authenticity” and “indigeneity” and you’ve now given college kids and so forth an opportunity to connect with their roots in a way that feels exciting and in line with the values of their general environment. Even more brilliant is that due to decolonization’s unholy marriage of culturally purist ethnofascism4 and racialized Marxism-Leninism, you are able to imbue left wingers with far right ideas and enable right wingers to speak their ideas in the terminology of the most reality-divorced leftist. Heads you win, tails I lose.

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This in turn leads to yet another hyper-aestheticized variety of Judaism in a marketplace that is already swamped with them. The most infamous aspect of this is the promotion of the “Sudra” which in this case is just a recolored Kaffiyeh. The irony that it is referred to as a Sudra (an Aramaic term) as opposed to the Hebrew Sudar should not be lost on anyone. The Sudra specifically as a head covering is discussed in the Babylonian Talmud. It was worn as such by the Jews of Yemen most famously and by other eastern communities. This tracks with a running theme in “indigenous ” circles: a desperate attempt to be more overtly “ethnic”.5 By transforming a traditional Jewish element of clothing into a knock-off keffiyeh, the indigenous movement engages in an intellectual Freudian slip; the local Arab population is more reflective of the local norms than Israeli Jews are. In a bizarre sense, the effort at decolonization becomes an explicitly colonial endeavor of imposing imagined aesthetics and values onto an already living and breathing people.

The need to recast everything as either “indigenous” or “exilic” is a categorization that betrays the limitations of its proponents' understanding of Jewish tradition and history. Perhaps the people who come closest to being honest about this are the folks over at Machon Shiloh in their rejection of the Babylonian Talmud’s legal primacy. Unlike the Sudra-wearers, that is a legal argument, one that Judaism has the technical terminology to discuss.6 Instead, we are left with people who lack the educational background and rigor to appraise Jewish tradition and its connection to our homeland. If marketing Jewish tradition as “indigenous” gets the otherwise disaffected to reconsider Judaism, then it may have some utility. Even then, the instance on indigeneity is rooted in the instance that some self-proclaimed powers have to decide what is fair (al-ḥasn) and what is foul (al-qabiḥ). It is a sort of pick and choose Judaism but framed as being ultimately authentic in capturing the spirit of native Judean culture.

Something that I have noticed, or better yet, something that has consistently jumped out to me about indigenoid-Zionists: none of them are culturally Israeli. Many of course have moved to Israel, but the majority seem to be of English-speaking extraction. The insistence on insisting that you, specifically you, are indigenous to a specific tract of land on only vague cultural-aesthetic levels is in some ways a bad joke in the eyes of the people who don’t need an abstract intellectual justification for their connection to the land. They were born there, as were their parents, as were their grandparents. The instance on indigeneity is a prime example of the lady protesting too much. It speaks to a lack of security in their own identities to insist on a particular label that automatically grants social and cultural capital. When the indigenoids engage in Jewish texts, they tend to filter for the ones that either espouse doctrines of intrinsic Jewish supremacy or those that elevate the status of the Land of Israel to be a veritable Shangri-La in order to fulfill their fantasies and adopt a self-conception of the universe that they believe to be more in line with “authentic indigenous thinking” like that of certain Native American tribes.7

The indigeno-Zionists appeal to a certain disaffection amongst college educated young Jews, urging them to RETVRN but in a more abstract way than Chabad suggests they should. Being an indigenous Judean is vibes based more than anything else. It boils down to a hyper-romanticized version of Judean culture that borders on the fictitious combined with elevating local Arabs to the role of emulation-worthy Noble Savages. It betrays the lack of identity its adherents desperately seek out and lest they be designated as “white people”. As a result, the political program of Indigenous Zionism is one that seeks to win hearts over minds. It relies on the most emotionally driven elements of extreme right wing and left wing politics in order to make its case. It is intellectually a series of contradictions which is what naturally feeds into its appeal as a purely aesthetically driven movement. The style and thinking of indigeno-Zionism is rooted in a sense of aesthetics that makes substance subservient to style, rather than understanding the balance and deliberate union of those two aspects. It leads to yet another “proudly Jewish” movement that is largely devoid of anything distinctly Jewish.

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“בכל דור ודור, חייב אדם לראות את עצמו כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים"

Whereas in Hilkhoth Hames uMassa 7:6 and in the text of the Haggadha we see:

“בכל דור ודור, חייב אדם להראות את עצמו כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים"

While the discrepancy is only one letter, the change in meaning between “Lir’oth” and “LeHar’oth” is immense. Are we supposed to see ourselves as having exited Egypt or are we to present ourselves to others as if we have exited Egypt. I will elaborate on the implications of this distinction below, but for now, the issue is the disparity, however slight, between the two texts.1

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I leafed (or rather scrolled) through the traditional commentaries on the MT all of who seemed to be pretty unbothered by what I would have thought to be a significant deal.2 Instead, I turned to one of the great modern commentators on the Mishne Tora, Rabbi Yosef Qafih, for a potential explanation. His position is as follows: the intuitive read of לראות would be to read the Lamedh with a Hiriq (Haser) for most readers, but in Maimonides’ tradition that Lamedh is read with a Patah, with the Heh elided. In order to prevent confusion amongst readers of the MT, he added the Heh as a corrective so that readers would not err in pronouncing the word in question.

I’m always wary of interpretations that presume the existence of some Ur-text that we don’t have access to, especially when our presumed Ur-text undermines the theory in play. However, in lieu of a better explanation, Qafih’s seems more than sufficient. There’s a decent linguistic case to be made for it too on several grounds (if you hate Diqduq you are welcome to skip this section).

The question that we need to consider is whether it is possible for a Lamedh with a Shewa Na (לְ) and a Heh with a Patah (הַ) to plausibly collapse into a single syllable. In my humble opinion, the view is a resounding yes. We know from Sephardic grammarians such as Radaq and Avraham Ibn Ezra that the Shewa Na was generally pronounced as an extremely short “a”, with a handful of exceptions: when a consonant with a Shewa Na precedes any of אהחע”ר,3 it “absorbs” the quality of the vowel following it. This can be best demonstrated with proper nouns: “יְהוּדָה” is read as “יֻהוּדָה” and “יְהוֹשֻׁעַ” becomes “יֹהוֹשֻׁעַ” etc.4 In our case, that means the unvocalized להראות should be read as לֲהַרְאוֹת (Lahar’oth) instead of לְהַרְאוֹת (Lehar’oth). In lots of languages, the glottal stop (א) and the voiceless glottal fricative (ה) are among the first to be deleted in the vernacular and sometimes that is reflected in writing. When the preceding consonant shares the same vowel, that likelihood increases. Assuming that the full form of the word has an “a” sound under the Lamedh and another “a” under the Heh, it’s not unreasonable to think that the Heh was completely deleted in some vocalizations.

Before jumping to any conclusions, it’s also worth examining whether there are any other examples of this phenomenon in Maimonides’ writings. While I couldn’t think of any particular examples in Maimonides’ version of the Mishna, there was one in the MT that occurs many times. When Maimonides refers to the book we call in Psalms, he refers to תלים (“Tillim”) as opposed to the usual name תהלים (“Tehillim”). Knowing what we know now about how the Shewa Na’ ought to function, we can reasonably assume that the same phonological shift we saw in the Mishna is true here as well (or vice versa). 

Having established that the basis for the להראות text’s authenticity, we should address the obvious questions: does this change the meaning of the relevant texts and if so, how?

Our text comes from the tenth Pereq of Pesahim which deals exclusively with the Sedher and what is to be done at said over the course of the meal. For our purposes, the fifth Mishna is the most important. The Mishna is familiar to us from the Sedher:

“Rabban Gamliel says: All who has not said the following three words on Pesah, he did not fulfill his obligation; and they are “Pesah”, “Massa”, and “Mororim”. Pesah, because God passed over the houses of our forefathers in Egypt; Mororim, because the Egyptians embittered the lives of our forefathers in Egypt; Massa, because they were redeemed. In every generation, one is obligation to present himself as if he exited Egypt;…”5

The obligation to present oneself as if they personally left Egypt is in the context of the most overtly symbological elements of the Sedher. The Paschal offering, which plays on the verb used to described God passing over Israelite homes during the tenth plague, the bitter herbs as a reminder of our servitude, and Massa as a reminder of the hastiness of our redemption. These three items are the core components of the original Pesah, the three stages of our sojourn in Egypt in edible form. It is through these items and their centrality that we are able to present ourselves in an identical manner to our ancestors fleeing Egypt. Remember, this is the legal minimum. Anything less, you haven’t fulfilled your requirement and anything more is praiseworthy. This shared experience of a group of people using shared symbolism to commemorate and reinforce collective memory is one that is extremely powerful. It elevates us to the level of Moses’ generation while also degrading us, forcing us to eat like harried refugees with no better options. This particular point is all the more poignant as dozens of thousands of Jews have been forced out of their home for months on end under the specter of Iranian and Hezbollah missiles. It is that one moment of liberation which we are formally obligated to commemorate and from that moment flow all others.

LaHar’oth is a causative verb, literally meaning “to make one see (Lir’oth)”6. We are to be seen by those around us and last but not least by ourselves as having left Egypt, with everything that entails. Through our symbolic displays, the items, rituals, and texts transform both the individual’s experience of themselves and others’ perception of them. We tap into that memory of the Exodus and let our actions serve as more than parts in play, but as an experience for everyone involved to internalize the very moment Am Yisrael was born and let that experience reshape our psyches and our understanding of God, his Tora, and of course the holiday at hand.

Mo’adhim leSimha! 

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