Following my first translation of Berdyczewski, I had to make a decision as to what writings to translate next. I settled on a group of twelve letters Berdyczewski wrote when he was 23 years old and still studying in Volozhin. These twelve letters appeared in six installments throughout 1888 in the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Melitz. Berdyczewski originally wanted to publish them in Ha-Tzfira, a newspaper he had already been publishing in anonymously but Nahum Sokolow, the then editor of Ha-Tzfira was supposedly worried about backlash from the Rosh Yeshiva of Volozhin, The Netziv, and asked Berdyczewski to take his letters elsewhere.

Berdyczewski’s pseudonym “Bar-Bi-Rav” is the Aramaic term for a student or member of the scholarly academies of Babylonia. The letters are a portrait of the world of Volozhin from the inside, not a memoir or retrospective. The series presents as a correspondence between a student of Volozhin and a friend outside. As we will see, these letters are not purely critical or polemical in nature. There is an affection and admiration in the letters as well as brilliant humor and a yearning that the Yeshiva could provide more for its students, both materially and spiritually.

I chose Letter IX because it is young Berdyczewski’s most sustained description of what he believes should change at Volozhin. The language in which Berdyczewski makes this argument is itself significant. Almost every paragraph is littered with references to Tanach and Gemara. Showing just how suffused his thinking was with the textual traditions of the Yeshiva. I attempted to reveal that by adding notes to wherever he uses a textual reference. About 45 times in this short letter.

Here is letter IX, originally published in Ha-Melitz, issue #56 on March 20, 1888 in St. Petersburg, translated1 and annotated in full:

IX

Volozhin. My dear friend!

From your last letter I gather that, from all the letters I have written you thus far about our yeshiva, you have still not succeeded in arriving at a clear assesment as to the reforms and changes that ought to be made in it. This is because in my letters I always adopt a concise style, in accordance with the small amount of free time that remains to me, after Torah study, for writing letters.

I have therefore said, on account of “It is a time to act for Hashem…”2this time I shall try to write at a somewhat greater length and endeavor to clarify the matter for you, so that you may grasp its essence and so that I too may hear your opinion about my ideas.

If I am right, I shall lift up my head; and if I am wicked, woe unto me!3

One gives Kavod (Honor) to the rabbi first4 and therefore I shall begin by returning to the answer of our RoshYeshiva (The Netziv) that I quoted in my fourth letter.

The Rosh Yeshiva says that:

“Many of the Gvirim (Supporters of the Yeshiva) demand of him that he establish new arrangements in the yeshiva, and he fears that if he institutes any internal arrangements concerning the study of Torah, this will give those who seek changes an opening to demand even more.”

At the outset, I will recall the warning of our Chachamin (Sages) concerning the verse “You shall not fear any man”: Do not hold your words on account of any man.5

When the lesson is delivered in the yeshiva, I do not attach myself to those plate-lickers6 who nod their heads at every word and answer with the ox-driver’s cry, “Yes, yes!”7 I show favor to no man.8 Wherever it appears to me that he has erred in judgment, I argue before him “on the ground”9 and say:

“Rebbi, it seems to me that the matter is not quite so!”

And he, where you find his greatness, there you find his humility,10 for there is much in him of the qualities of Hillel11, does not rebuke me angrily. Rather, he enters into a Shakla V Tarya (back-and-forth) with me until he establishes the truth to me: either he retracts, or I retract what I have said.

All the more so here, when I am farther from Rebbe than the view of my eyes,12 and when we are dealing with a weighty matter of law, not some particular sugya in the Gemara or some interpretation in Tosafos, but the Foundation Stone upon which the entire yeshiva is founded.13

Surely, then, it is my duty to reveal my opinion to you, my dear friend. For who is more competent than you to judge the matter, to rescue a word of truth and bring forth the precious from the worthless?14

Whatever my thoughtful judgment compels me to say, I shall say;15 you must decide, not I.16

Between you and me, however, I shall tell you that my heart doubts whether these Gvirim “who forcefully demand of our Roshei Yeshiva that he make new arrangements in the yeshiva” are really so numerous and so distinguished.

For if this were genuinely the will of the Gvirim, and they demanded it openly, our Rosh Yeshiva could hardly brush them aside with a straw, since it is these Gvirim who provide the yeshiva with its bread and funding. And if many powerful men were making the demand, surely they would confine their demands to the reforms genuinely needed in the yeshiva. It would hardly be possible for the Rosh Yeshiva to send them away with nothing.

And if his concern were only that afterward they might demand too much, he himself could set a boundary around the mountain and tell them:

“This far you may come, and no farther.”17

We must therefore conclude that these “Gvirim” never existed and were never created, but were only a parable.18

And if they did exist and were created, they existed only in so small a quantity that they are nullified by their minority.19

And even if there is some grain of truth in this report, I wonder whether our Rosh Yeshiva genuinely worries about such a thing.

For who among us is greater than the (Russian) Minister of Public Instruction, who has written and sealed with his signet20 that the students of the yeshiva are required to study secular subjects? Every year the inspector of the schools in the Vilna province comes to investigate whether this work is being carried out negligently.21

And nevertheless, the world continues according to its custom.22

The inspector appears in all his majestic glory in the yeshiva and sees “with-all, from-all, everything”23 but secular knowledge? Who even mentions them?

Two or three students translate before him a perek or a sugya from the Gemara into a living language, and these particulars have gone forth to teach concerning the entire generality.24

Let us grant, then, that there really is some remote ground for concern: that once reforms are begun, people will say to him, “Finish what you have begun!”25 And that if he opens for them an opening the point of a needle, they will afterward open entrances through which wagons and carriages may pass.26

Very well.

That might apply to external arrangements and secular knowledge, which everyone agrees ought to occupy only a secondary position in the yeshiva.

But who prevents us from establishing proper arrangements and a definite method concerning the essential thing upon which everything depends: the study of the Talmud, the halakhic authorities, and all their commentaries?

Why should the students not be taught something of the history of our people; the order of the Tannaim and Amoraim; the biographies of the Sages and their respective approaches; the ways of the Mishnah and Gemara; and the grammar of the language of the Gemara?

Then the students would not wander in their studies like this blind man’s staff,27 groping like blind men in darkness,28 when confronted with the development of the Halacha, the reasons underlying decrees, and judicial decisions, each according to the circumstances of the particular court, in the particular place and time in which it stood and lived.

Why do they feed the students Torah like an ox,29 sour mash and fodder,30 filling their bellies with a darkened Torah31 and laws of obscurity,32 without bringing forth for them the light that is within it, so that they might enjoy its illumination,33 and so that the wisdom of Israel might enter into them with a proper order and according to a sound method, a word fitly spoken upon its wheels?34

Why are the Aggadot of our Sages handed over to the students according to their simple and literal meaning?

The student’s mind eventually develops. He encounters stories in them far removed from the natural (order) and things that appear impossible in reality; he kicks against them, denies them, and thereby goes forth into evil ways.35

Why, instead, do they not endeavor to explain these things to the students according to the concealed allusions hidden within them - allusions that are right to one who understands and straight to those who find knowledge?36

When they read in the Gemara and Midrashim the names of places and cities, animals and plants, technical ideas, and other foreign words borrowed from foreign languages, why must they grope like a blind man along a wall and not know between their right hand and their left37 concerning the actual meaning of those terms?

Why should they not make use of the excellent dictionaries and thesauruses that have appeared in our own days: Kohut’s Arukh Ha-Shalem; Levy’s dictionary; Rabbi Ludwig Lewysohn’s The Zoology of the Talmud; Adolf Neubauer’s Geography of the Talmud; and many similar works, in which all these matters have been clarified plainly and well, according to truth?38

Why should the discussions of Mishnah and Gemara not be arranged and clarified for the students of the Volozhin Yeshiva according to a proper method, tracing their course and development through the sequence of generations, somewhat in the manner in which the head of the yeshiva in the great community of Vienna, Rabbi Isaac Hirsch Weiss, arranged them in his excellent work Dor Dor ve-Dorshav—Each Generation and Its Commentators?39

Indeed, according to what I have heard, the leaders of that yeshiva have gone still further.

Even the books in the yeshiva library are arranged in their cases according to the chronological order of their authors and the generations in which they lived: the books of every generation in a separate shelf, one following another according to their historical sequence.

And from this too the students derive considerable benefit, for they learn the order in which Torah developed and rabbinic commentary unfolded, one stage after another:

each generation and its expounders, each generation and its sages.

All these things, and many others like them, are nothing more than internal arrangements. They touch solely upon straightening the method of learning. Their usefulness is undoubtedly great, and no issue whatsoever is to be found in them.

How greatly would reforms of this kind assist the students, ease their studies, and open before them a lucid and clear intentional view of the paths of our holy Torah!

And do not regard such a intentional view lightly.

Go and see what a great man bears witness concerning it!40

It is none other than the great Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines, who makes a path of straight logic through the sea of the Talmud.41 In his book Sha’arei Orah, page one, he writes as follows:

“A purposive view of every act is of very great value, for it, and it alone, knows how to direct and determine with extraordinary precision the fitting and appropriate name of every act according to its value.… With its clear and pure eyes it penetrates to the depth of every matter and presses inward, into the innermost chambers … in order to uncover the veil spread over every act.”42

And behold, the things that remain in my heart to place before you have not yet come to an end, but the sheet itself has already come to an end.43

I have no blank paper left.

Indeed, even this sheet I cut from the new volume of Gemara that I received today from the supervisor.

Forgive me, my Master!44

Since I possessed no other paper.

And because you are dear to me, for your sake I have transgressed the rule:

“In sacred matters we ascend and do not descend.”45

Especially since, according to my poor judgment, it is better that this paper be used for a matter such as this than that people write upon it pilpulim and marginal lomdus which, for the most part, are nothing more than straw brought to Afarayim.46

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Notes

Existential is an older word than the philosophy it now associates with. The Latin existentialis, appears in English as early as the seventeenth century simply to mean “about existence.” But the word acquired much of its modern weight through “existential” philosophy. Kierkegaard was writing in an explicitly “existential” tone in the 1840s, and by the 1940s, existentialism had become the name of a movement, and the postwar influence of Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus and others transformed existential from a rather technical term into a word loaded with fundamental questions of being, freedom, death, and meaning. By the latter half of the twentieth century, especially under the shadow of nuclear war, an “existential threat” increasingly meant not merely a serious danger but a danger to the continued existence of the thing itself. The phrase became dramatically more common from the 1980s onward and still more after 9/11.

Once you grant the category that much weight, it becomes very strange that we have built such a large discourse around all the ways AI might radically diminish or eliminate the future, while barely developing a language for all the ways it might radically expand it.

Part of Derrida’s deconstruction of the Western canon is his critique of linguistic hierarchies which I will summarize as follows: Western thought tends to theorize in linguistic pairs, good/bad, presence/absence, sanity/insanity, true/false, literal/metaphorical, and on and on. Usually these pairs are presented as neutral categorical arbiters with clean boundaries between the two. Derrida argues that this is a mirage: there is always a primary or privileged one of the two, and there is always a derivative or inferior.

A good example would be the linguistic pair: normal/abnormal. Theoretically, these should just be binary descriptive categories, one describing what falls within a given norm and the other what falls outside of it. Of course, there is already a hierarchy here. “Normal” does not merely describe something, it is also presenting itself as the natural and self-evident state of the world, while “abnormal” is defined entirely by its deviation from it. Whatever is called “normal” gets to hide from scrutiny, naming, discussion, and debate. While what is called “abnormal” is announced loudly, named, explained, and diagnosed. For Derrida, this is the sort of hierarchy we should become suspicious of. The supposedly primary term only appears self-sufficient because we have forgotten that it depends on the secondary term for its own meaning. There is no coherent concept of “normal” without the possibility of “abnormal”; the boundary itself is what produces meaning.

Accordingly, for Derrida, there is great possible danger in keeping up this facade of hierarchy in linguistic pairs: we begin to treat this false primacy as something natural and material, and not something merely generated through the boundaries of our language. This hierarchy inevitably comes to infect our ontology, the basic categories through which we understand what is real, natural, primary, and possible. What begins as a contingent distinction can slowly harden into an assumption about reality itself. “Normal” stops appearing as just a descriptive term in a language full of descriptive terms, it starts appearing simply as the way things are, while anything labeled “abnormal” becomes a deviation from reality, nature, or even Godliness. Once an ontology gets solidified on someone’s internal scene of representation, it can become excruciatingly difficult to change our minds even if the reality in front of our very eyes is telling us something different.

We are living through a tremendously odd time. The apocryphal line by Lenin, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”, can be used for our time, except I would add an order of magnitude. We may be living through a decade where centuries, even millennia, happen. Maybe not since the Neolithic transition or the Axial Age has humanity been faced with such a tremendous shift in ontology or “concepts regarded as fundamental”.

It is precisely because I believe humanity is staring down the barrel of such a transition (whether it takes till the end of this decade or the end of this century is irrelevant) that I have become obsessed with language. Why language?

Well, it is because, I contend, language does not merely describe the world we live in but is actively structuring and organizing our internal (minds) and external (world) scenes of representation. Meaning to say, the very words we presume to be simply “using” when we are talking or writing or even thinking are themselves subtly operating in on us at a higher level of abstraction than we normally are aware of. Some would imply “that we are prisoners of language” and entirely closed off from the world, I do not believe this is the case but I do think that the categories and terms available to us shape what we are able to collectively notice, think, and speak about the world.

It is only natural that at the same time that humanity is undergoing a technological revolution that is leading to an ontological revolution, we are losing precisely the thing required to collectively navigate it: a sufficiently stable shared language.

I would like to propose some immediate reframing to the Risk discussion that can at least get us to something resembling an actual discourse.

The first point to make is linguistic: “Existential Risk” has become such a powerful term that it has almost entirely dissolved its pair. I’m sure someone has, but I have not seen media of any sort-essays, video, or podcasts-use the terminology “Existential Reward.” Topologically, Risk looks like the Himalayas and Reward looks like a tiny village in Uttar Pradesh. To the extent that we must ask ourselves: can Risk/Reward even be considered a pair anymore? Obviously, in the eyes of the discourse, it is not. Risk has garnered extraordinary sums of philanthropic giving. There are multiple research organizations, both within The Labs and independent, with teams of supposedly serious and highly credentialed people working on Risk. Nearly all of the epistemic status has been reserved for Ex Risk.

But think of how silly this all is. Once we admit AI could alter the human future at an existential scale, there is no reason to define that scale exclusively in the negative direction. We have a case of what Derrida would call a “violent hierarchy.”

In our situation, what emerged is something like a mimetic virus around Risk. Risk, because of its hierarchy in the linguistic pair has secretly claimed epistemic status, and is considered more Real. Once Risk acquires prestige, its social importance becomes self-validating. All the smart people want to work on it, billionaires and philanthropies want to fund it, journalists take it seriously because of this, and on and on. Because the AI future is so uncertain, the discourse around it has shifted from ingesting evidence about AI itself to ingesting evidence about how seriously others are taking it.

There is also a burden-of-proof problem. The asymmetry, or, shall we say, terrorization, of Risk versus Reward forces all of the burden of proof onto the Reward theorists, while the Risk theorists get to go on book tours claiming that AI will inevitably destroy civilization. At the very least, it is incumbent upon us to restore symmetry to the discourse, if only to ask for equal amounts of evidence from both sides of the debate. This is without even getting into the possibility of the hyperstition, where humanity gets so caught up in theoretically catastrophic possibilities that it effectively closes off the possibility of a positive future. Even if AI Risk is truly existential, we should care and think just as much, and maybe many times more, about AI Reward scenarios. It is absurd not to.

There are times in a readers life when one encounters writing that strikes so deep into one’s soul that one becomes entirely overtaken by the writer. I have experienced this less times than I can count on one hand. My first reading of this story was one of those times. I believe I have produced the first public English translation of this story and I have already begun working on more of the authors work. I believe Berdyczewski may hold a key to delivering Judaism out of its current sad state of affairs.

Early Life & Volozhin

Micha Josef Berdyczewski, later Bin-Gorion (1865-1921), was a Russian Jewish writer, a journalist, and thinker. Born in Medzhibozh, the birthplace of The Baal Shem Tov, into a Rabbinic family par excellence. His father was Reb Moishe Aharon Berdyczewski, who served for almost 50 years as Rav of Dubova, near Uman. The Berdyczewski’s were part of a continuous documented rabbinic genealogy of fifteen generations, reaching back to at least the early sixteenth century. Among his direct confirmed ancestors was the early Hasidic Sage “The Rebbe Reb Shmelke” Rav Shmelke Halevi Horowitz of Nikolsburg (1726-1778), a leading disciple of Reb Dov Ber of Mezeritch, and Reb Yeshayahu Horowitz, more commonly known as “The Shelah Ha-Kadosh” (1555-1630) and according to family tradition, the “Baal Ha-Maor” (1115-1186).

Berdyczewski came of age at precisely the moment when the traditional world of his family and ancestors was beginning to enter deep crisis. As a boy, he secretly began to read works emerging from the Jewish Haskalah (Enlightenment). As a teen, already known as an illui (genius), he was married off into a wealthy but traditional family. He continued reading this forbidden literature. When his father-in-law discovered his involvement with these forbidden books, him and his wife were forced to separate. "Hetzitz V’Nifga1” is his semi-autobiographical literary account of this experience and his first ever work of published writing.

Separated from his wife, Berdyczewski entered the great Yeshiva of Volozhin. His arrival was unusual, though not for the reason one might expect. His growing interest in the Haskalah would hardly have made him unique there. More unusual was Berdyczewski’s background as a Hassid entering the power center of Misnagdic culture. Nor was his failed marriage necessarily an obstacle. As a young man no longer living with or supporting a wife, he fit more easily.

Apparently, he continues his learning Gemara (Talmud) in combination with reading increasingly more secular literature and philosophy. While at Volozhin, he began to write. He left us with an incredible corpus, almost an entire ethnography of Volozhin from the inside2. He genuinely loved Volozhin and highly respected the Netziv, its Rosh HaYeshiva (Dean) at the time. He also pointed out the great paradox of Volozhin. That Volozhin accidentally supercharged the Haskalah. By bringing together the greatest iluyim (geniuses) from across the Jewish world, even though and maybe because no secular curriculum whatsoever was taught, it unintentionally created a lively and electric intellectual black market. Berdyczewski calls this, wonderfully, “התועלת שלא בכוונה” — “the unintended benefit.”

He describes the remarkable amount of secular reading and “free language exchange” that occurred after and in-between a full day of Gemara study. He vividly describes the insane daily regimen of the ordinary Volozhin student. Twelve to fourteen hours a day engaged in rigorous Gemara study. After and interspersed with reading the critical accounts of Jewish history (and Oral Law!) such as Graetz’s “Geschichte der Juden” or Isaac Hirsch Weiss’ “Dor Dor ve-Dorshav”, modern German Philosophy, even Spinoza, as a new translation into Hebrew finally unlocked the original heretic. He also gives a long list of the Hebrew and Yiddish language magazines circulating in Volozhin, including: Ha-Tzefirah, Ha-Melitz, Ha-Yehudi, Ha-Yahadut, Ha-Mitzpeh, Ha-Asif, Maḥazikei ha-Dat, Ha-Boker Or, and Ha-Tzvi. As well as the Russian: Novosti, Neva, Svet, and Voskhod. And German: a Wochenschrift, Die Jüdische Presse, and, strikingly, Selbst-Emancipation, Birnbaum’s early Jewish nationalist journal.

Berdyczewski actually describes a desperately poor student trudging through the freezing rain at midnight with torn shoes to borrow Ha-Melitz, Ha-Tzefirah, Die Jüdische Presse, or Selbst-Emancipation. He even says there were two English-language periodicals being read! Sadly, he doesn't name them. He gives a truly astonishing quantitive detail: during one summer in Volozhin, likely 1887, there were about 40 copies of Ha-Asif (“The Harvest”), the prestige Hebrew literary annual-a thick book-like journal combining literature, Jewish history, criticism, biographies, science, current affairs, and essays on Jewish culture, circulating through Volozhin, roughly one copy for every ten students.

He eventually leaves Volozhin, officially divorces his wife, and goes on to have a tremendous career and influence as a writer in the emerging Hebrew literary and intellectual scenes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I hope to give his biography fuller treatment in later posts.

Here is the full story, published under the pseudonym, בר־בי־רב, April 13, 1888 in the Hebrew language periodical Ha-Melitz, and written when he was either 20 or 21, still in Volozhin. Like all good literature, I recommend reading slowly, and out loud if possible. From here on out are his words.

He Gazed and was Struck

Micha Josef Berdyczewski

The first story of M.Y.B.

A picture in five chapters (something like a true story)

I. This Against That

It was a winter night. The moon rode high, shining upon the blanket of snow that covered the earth of the town of Levana. The streets were bright as day from the glow of the lamps burning along the roads. The cold was fierce, piercing even warm clothes and fur coats, and yet the Jewish street was crowded like a flock with people coming and going: some strolling to enjoy the splendor of the night, others cocking an ear toward the singing and music that could be heard from the Hebrew theater.

Beside the entrance to the yeshiva stood a small young man, miserably clothed, with scarcely a garment between his skin and the cold. All his bones trembled, his knees knocked against one another; yet he stood rigidly in place, his ears stretched toward the theater like funnels, listening to the actors’ song as though he too were a man who knew and understood the art of music.

The schoolboys on their way to the theater looked at him with contempt, but he paid them no attention.

One student, a head taller than the boys his age, handsome and bold, wrapped in an expensive fur coat set with gleaming brass buttons, shoved him with his foot as he passed and said:

“Fool and boor! What are you standing out here for? Have you, too, a heart for song and music?”

The yeshiva boy answered him just as boldly:

“Get away from me and go on! I have a heart as you do, and I am no less than you in wisdom or feeling.”

The student burst out laughing, passed him by, and despised him in his heart.

A poor, weak yeshiva boy, who all his days had scarcely left the study house, dares tell a schoolboy with shining buttons that he is no less than he in wisdom and sensitivity! Has such a thing ever been heard? Has it ever entered anyone’s mind?

And yet, if we look not at the vessel but at what it contains, if we set this against that, the thing will cease to surprise us. We will discover that the yeshiva boy had not boasted falsely at all. In intelligence and taste he was in truth no less than the schoolboy—and perhaps even his superior.

The schoolboy, who by his height we may suppose is near the completion of his studies, possesses a limited knowledge of history, geography, arithmetic, and languages, according to what he has read and learned from the textbooks placed before him.

But do you know who and what this sapling-thin young man standing before you is?

This young man is a basket filled with books.

He is proficient in the whole literature of the rabbis. He has read deeply in Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew religious philosophy and descended with it into the abyss. He has acquired a considerable knowledge of our modern literature. He is versed in the history of the Jewish nation. The paths of natural science and worldly knowledge are also clear to him. With his sharp mind he has climbed the mountains of geometry and higher mathematics. He knows universal history and the chronicles of the generations, the science of social life, and political economy.

With his capacious intellect he embraces all these branches of knowledge, and with his acute powers he analyzes every subject he studies calmly and clearly, finding arguments, like an expert critic, both for and against.

The schoolboy is confined, for his sins, by his teacher within the schoolhouse. His method and measure have been marked out for him: what he is to learn and from which book he is to learn it. He proceeds along the road laid down before him, turning neither right nor left. He does not investigate what lies beyond him and does not inquire into what has been concealed from him.

But this yeshiva boy reads and studies everything.

Today he studies tractate Hullin and the laws of ritual slaughter and inspection; tomorrow he reads Spencer and Buckle. Today he pores over Hoshen Mishpat; tomorrow, the systems of Spinoza and Kant.

The schoolboy also gives his mind to the things of this world and to pleasures of the flesh, which do not always accord with the ways of modesty and morality. The yeshiva boy, meanwhile, walks the straight path and keeps himself far from the vineyard. No erotic chatter is upon his lips and no wicked fantasies in his heart. He does not sit among gamblers and does not play at dice. He seeks neither the luxuries of life nor the pleasures of men.

His strength, therefore, is in his brain, and his vigor in the striving of his soul. Like a sponge he absorbs everything; like a plastered cistern he does not lose a drop. When he finally passes through the gate into the city, he is already a little world, complete and full in himself.

And if you ask: Whose son is this young man? What future awaits him among Israel?

Look into the chapters that follow, and you shall know.

II. It and Its Young

Most of the rabbis of Poland are known as great kanoyim and strictly observant, but the rabbinic judge of the little town of Lupove was harsher than all of them.

He hated the handful of maskilim in his town and persecuted them bitterly.

For most of his life this judge was childless, and, like all childless men, he was cruel and had no pity. He used to say:

“If I had a son and he became a maskil, I would tear him apart like a fish.”

What did the Holy One, blessed be He, do?

He put the man to the test. In his old age He gave him a son, a little child of his later years.

A pumpkin is known already from its stalk. From earliest childhood it was apparent that this boy possessed a sharp intelligence and great talents.

His father educated him according to his own way. He stuffed him with Gemara and books of piety as one stuffs an ox. He watched the very roots of his footsteps so as to lead him upon the path of his own thoughts and the imaginings of his own heart; and he filled him as well with delusions, false prophecies, and misleading ideas, as happens to multitudes of Jewish boys who spend the choicest years of their lives under teachers and guides of this kind.

Before long he acquired a reputation as an illui, a brilliant dialectician, and also as a great fearer of Heaven.

He followed his father’s ways as well: he hated the maskilim and persecuted them relentlessly. When he encountered a Bible with a modern commentary, he would burn it-holy names and all.

The boy’s name was Moishe, and his father’s name was Yerucham.

And because the son was indeed the leg of his father, resembling him both in the features of his face and in the qualities of his soul, the maskilim of the town gave the pair a shortened name:

“It and Its Young.”

Moses continued to grow, and the number of maskilim in the town continued to grow as well.

The judge began to fear lest calamity befall his son: perhaps some wicked companion or wicked neighbor would corrupt him, and the malignant spirit of Enlightenment would come to rest upon him too.

So he took counsel with his circle and sent Moishe to Volozhin, to study in its great yeshiva and thus escape the snares in which youth are always being caught.

But alas and alack!

“A man’s feet are his guarantors: to the place where he is wanted, there they lead him.”

Had the spirit of Enlightenment descended upon the boy in his native town, his father might have ruled over him and imprisoned the wind.

But not so in the town to which he had come to study Torah.

There the wind had no barrier. There was no one to fence it in, no one to stand in the breach.

When the boy first arrived at the yeshiva, he devoted himself solely to Torah. He was exceedingly careful not to approach those students of whom he had heard that they were maskilim, for he feared being scorched by their coals.

But nothing can stand before the spirit.

As time passed, the boy of his own accord began drawing near to his enlightened companions and looking into books of the Haskalah.

This looking did not interfere with his studies. Torah remained his fixed occupation as before, and he meditated upon it day and night. Only in the moments between one study period and another, in those hours that are neither day nor night, did he permit himself to look into books such as Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, the Kuzari, Me’or Enayim, and similar works of the ancients, and into the writings of Krochmal, Frankel, Weiss, Isaac Baer Levinsohn, Figelish, and others among the moderns.

Had all this happened in his native town, had he begun reading books of Enlightenment there, he would undoubtedly have cast the Gemara behind his back at once; for such is the way of the maskilim in Poland: whoever goes forth toward Enlightenment immediately separates himself from the Gemara, and the one does not touch the other even by a hair’s breadth.

Not so in Lithuania, where the maskilim are not so fiercely persecuted. There Torah and Enlightenment are not rival wives.

For young men who still hold fast to Torah, Enlightenment becomes an elixir of life, opening their eyes to see the light contained within our Torah itself.

During the three years Moishe son of Yerucham spent in Volozhin, he advanced greatly in learning, scholarship, and poetry through books written in the Holy Tongue by the sages of the generation. And although he remained submissive and obedient to the supervisor, who watched the students with seven eyes, Moishe never drew upon himself so much as a line of suspicion-even though now and then external books were seen falling from his coat.

At the end of his three years in Volozhin he came to the town of Levana, settling into one of its Batei Midrashim to learn and investigate independently.

His good name preceded him.

One of the town’s honored and wealthy men, a fierce defender of the old ways named Reb Nehemiah, drew him near like a prince. Moishe became one of the guests at his Shabbos table and grew exceedingly precious in his eyes.

III. The Mouth That Forbade Is the Mouth That Permitted

In the methods by which the observant Jews of Poland educate their children, two opposites may be seen joined in a single subject.

Their sons they raise upon the knees of the Gemara alone. If they discover that the boys have so much as looked into external books, they are ready to gouge out their eyes. Nor will they permit them to change their clothes and dress in the European style. They hold the mountain over them like a barrel, compelling them never to turn their minds toward idleness and never to cease for a single moment from words of Torah.

This endless application and constant study, without a life of physical exercise, drains the marrow of their lives and turns them into men of pains, familiar with illness: sickly in appearance, thin in flesh, wrinkled before their time.

Not so the daughters!

They pamper and indulge them from childhood. They dress them in fine clothes according to the fashions of Paris. They teach them the language of the country and do not prevent them from reading external books.

The daughters therefore grow refined and splendid, healthy in body, beautiful in form and pleasant in appearance, while the sons grow ever thinner, more ignorant and foolish, scarcely knowing how to look another human being in the face, prisoners of the study house.

And a great abyss lies between the son and the daughter.

How is the poor young man, whose heart has become thick as fat, who does not know the first rule of civilized conduct and has no ease among other human beings, supposed to please the beautiful and educated young lady whose heart yearns for those young men whom she has heard of in the books she reads but whom her eyes have never seen?

The mouth that forbade Enlightenment and refinement to the sons is the very mouth that permitted them to the daughters.

From this emerges a pair of mutually contradictory propositions.

How, then, are these two opposites to draw near to one another, so that a man shall cleave to his wife and the two become one flesh?

The wealthy Reb Nehemiah, who feared God more than most and loved and honored the rabbis, greatly admired the young Moishe, son of the judge, for he saw that there was blessing in him.

He thought in his heart to take him as a husband for his only daughter, the beautiful Miriam.

Moishe was exceedingly modest, walking humbly with lowered eyes. He observed Reb Nehemiah’s behavior and understood that he had found favor in his eyes. He knew what lay before him and what the man desired of him.

And so he buried his Enlightenment deep, deep within his heart.

He behaved innocently before Reb Nehemiah and appeared in his eyes as a simple yeshiva boy who had never in his life seen so much as the shape of a single letter in those books that “defile the hands.”

But the thoughts of the father were not the thoughts of his daughter.

She had eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge with her father’s permission. Her father had hired teachers for her, and she had learned literature and languages.

And even more than she was educated and possessed of good taste, she was an exceedingly beautiful girl.

How could a young man such as this find favor in her eyes-a man she took for an idler and simpleton who knew neither his right hand from his left, whose appearance had been marred more than that of a man and his form more than that of the sons of men?

Moishe, meanwhile, knew the preciousness of Miriam’s soul and the grace of her worth; and he desired her beauty in his heart.

He said to himself:

If only I could reveal to her what I have hidden, so that she might know that I am not what she sees and judges with her eyes; that inwardly I too possess a heart that knows and understands as hers does, and that in knowledge and vision I am no less than she.

But he could find no suitable opportunity to speak with her, make himself known to her, and reveal his whole heart. Whenever he came to their house, her father was there with her and scarcely left her side.

Thus an old prejudice against Moishe son of the judge took root in Miriam’s heart. And when she saw her father drawing the young man nearer and saying that he wished to embrace him like a son, that prejudice grew stronger and became a hidden hatred-a baseless hatred.

The closer her father drew to him, the farther she withdrew.

How evil and bitter it seemed to Miriam when her father informed her one day of the terrible decree he had issued: he had found for her a husband after his own heart-Moishe son of the judge, the brilliant young scholar destined to become a great man in Klal Yisroel.

Though Miriam’s soul recoiled from this despised and worthless young man, she could not bring herself to rebel against her father.

She knew his character too well. He had spoken once and would not turn back; were she to beg him, he would not listen.

And so she became silent.

She sat desolate and bitter-hearted in her room, weeping in secret and mourning her girlhood.

IV. It Began Under Compulsion and Ended Willingly

The engagement was celebrated with a great crowd, with pomp and splendor. All the leading men of the town came to that banquet of delight. The groom’s father, the Dayin from Lupove, also came for the signing of the conditions.

The wedding was postponed for three months, and it was agreed that during that period the chosson would return to his father’s house. For it is not done in Klal Yisroel that a groom should live in the same town as his bride before the wedding, on account of the ways of modesty.

During those many days a bird of the heavens carried a rumor to Miriam’s father:

This Moishe, the man whom he had chosen from among the people, was not inwardly what he appeared outwardly.

True, he was a great man. A basket full of books.

But

he had already gazed and been stricken.

Reb Nehemiah asked, investigated, and inquired diligently, and behold, it was true.

This abomination had indeed been committed by Moishe son of the Dayin.

He had not restrained himself from speculation. He had studied external books. He had contemplated things into which he had not been given permission to inquire.

And he had added rebellion to his sin: he had disguised himself before Reb Nehemiah as a holy man, as a Nazirite of God from the womb, stealing his heart by failing to tell him that he had stretched forth his hand and taken of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Reb Nehemiah became exceedingly angry, and his wrath burned within him.

Yet he feared to break the bonds of the engagement lest some evil befall his daughter, for among people who observe vain superstitions there is a fixed belief that the breaking of an engagement brings danger upon the bride.

So he resolved to conceal the matter and conduct the wedding properly at the appointed time.

Who knows? he thought. Perhaps what the young man did before was merely an act of youth, because his impulse overcame him. Once he comes beneath the shadow of my roof he may become a penitent—and then, after all, the rank of a penitent is higher even than that of the perfectly righteous.

And if after the marriage I see that he has returned to his folly and does not regret his former deeds-why, he will be in my hands like clay in the hands of the potter. I shall cast him out of my house and force him to give my daughter a bill of divorce. Then there will no longer be any danger.

Throughout all the days between the engagement and the wedding, the groom did not see the face of the bride. He did not even write her a letter, for such a thing is an outrage in Klal Yisroel and simply is not done.

On the appointed wedding day, the families and attendants from both sides came to the chosen place outside the town. Reb Nehemiah had deliberately arranged the wedding beyond the town so that the number of guests would not grow too large.

Whoever has not seen that wedding has never seen joy mingled with sorrow.

In one corner the father withdraws and weeps.

In another corner the daughter withdraws and weeps.

She weeps because she is being married to a man who has never gone beyond the four cubits of Halakhah and has never entered the Pardes.

He weeps because he is marrying his daughter to a man who gazed and was stricken.

Readers of these words today will be astonished. They will shake their heads at me. They will refuse to believe that fathers so foolish and so hardhearted ever existed among Klal Yisroel - or that even to this day they may still be found among us, somewhere, in one corner or another.

The truth about her husband was revealed to Miriam immediately after the marriage.

In the very first conversation they had together she saw that he was a man in whom there was an extraordinary spirit, wise of heart and rich in knowledge.

She rejoiced over him as a person rejoices over a precious treasure found when he was not looking for it.

He became great in her eyes.

Love took the place of the contempt with which she had regarded and despised him in her heart until then.

Miriam’s soul cleaved to Moishe. He too loved her with an unconquerable love. They were happy, and they sensed a good future stretching out before them.

They did not know that the ambusher was sitting with them in the room, tracing the very roots of their footsteps.

From the day Moishe came to live in his father-in-law’s house he continued in his former innocent way. He devoted most of his day to Torah.

He did not study or read books of science while his father-in-law was in the house—not because he wished to steal the man’s heart or deceive him, but because he did not wish to do what was evil in his eyes or deliberately provoke him.

Only when his father-in-law was away did Moishe open various external books and study them.

Sometimes he would even read from them to his wife, hoping to turn her heart away from novels and tales that seduced the heart and filled it with dreams and vanities, and to bring her instead to greater books—books of science and reason, concerned with the realities upon which the world is built.

And it came to pass one night that Miriam had already gone to her bed to sleep, while Moishe still sat in his room.

No one else was in the house. Reb Nehemiah had left town that day on business and had said he would return the following day.

Moishe piled various books upon the table and upon his knees. He examined them, took notes, and copied passages onto the paper lying before him.

So deeply had he sunk into his investigations that he did not know his father-in-law had returned unexpectedly from his journey.

Suddenly he heard footsteps at the door of the room.

Moishe sprang from his seat and hurried to hide his books inside Miriam’s bookcase, as he had often done before—for all the books in Miriam’s case were pure in Reb Nehemiah’s eyes, and there they always rested in honor.

But Moishe did not have time to hide them.

His father-in-law suddenly entered the room.

And behold!

books of heretics were falling from his lap.

Reb Nehemiah trembled with an exceedingly great trembling.

He gave a great and bitter cry:

“So it is true! The matter is established! The rumor I heard going around among the people of Hashem was true! They did not falsely accuse you! You have brought abomination into my house!

“You are a disaster for Klal Yisroel! You have utterly crushed me!

“Out! Out, man of blood, worthless man!”

In his zeal and the fire of his wrath, he seized Moishe by the back of the neck, dragged him out, and cast him outside like a despised branch.

Then he slammed the door behind him and shouted:

“Go, go, dirty soul, wherever the evil spirit carries you! But do not set foot upon my threshold again, and do not defile my house!”

Miriam awoke at the shouting.

She saw her father, in rage and fury, taking vengeance upon her husband, the beloved of her heart.

She approached him, attempting to pacify him and turn his wrath away from destruction.

Her father rebuked her too. He thrust her aside with his arm.

She fell upon the bed and fainted from heartbreak and unbearable pain.

And Moishe went out from before his father-in-law like a man in shock.

Like a sheep before its shearers he was silent and did not open his mouth.

For the stumbling block of his sin stood before his face.

He had been caught in his guilt.

V. The Mikveh of Israel Is the Lord

The days were the days of Nisan, the season of melting snow and common winds.

The night on which Nehemiah expelled Moishe his son-in-law, that “man of blood and disaster to Klal Yisroel,” was a stormy night - a night on which, as our people say, a decent man would not drive even a wicked dog out of his house.

Rain and snow came down tangled together from the heavens.

A north wind blew, piercing skin and flesh and freezing the blood within a man.

Moishe had been thrown from his father-in-law’s house in the clothes he had worn while sitting in his room, with scarcely more than his garment upon his skin.

Now he walked through this biting cold along streets from which every human foot had already vanished.

His bones shook from cold and the damp of the night. His knees knocked against one another, and so did his teeth.

He crossed the marketplace and came to a corner. He walked toward a house from whose windows light could be seen breaking forth.

Why did Moses stop before that house and refuse to move?

Could it be that he heard the voices of men and women singing within it?

Or perhaps there hung upon the wall a harp that played by itself, the north wind blowing through it and making music, while Moses—a man of taste and feeling—made his ear into a funnel to hear the song and melody, just as we once saw him standing on a night of ice and bitter cold listening to the singers in the Hebrew theater when he was still a young prisoner of the study house?

Moses was indeed a man of taste and feeling.

But his was fine feeling, not coarse feeling.

Had Moses possessed coarse feeling, then in this hour of evil and sorrow that had suddenly fallen upon him he would have stood before another door—the door of the town official. Armed policemen would have brought him by force back into his wife’s house and into his study.

But because his feeling was fine, another spirit was with him.

Moses said in his heart:

Indeed, in his zeal, in the fire of his wrath, my father-in-law did what he did. A man is not held accountable in the hour of his anguish. And a man is obligated to honor his father-in-law, for David called Shaul “my father.”

There is therefore nothing better for me than to hide myself from him until the wrath has passed.

I shall go back for the approaching days of Passover to my father’s house. There we shall press on to discover the road upon which we should walk and the deed that we should do.

Moses spent that night at the inn—the very house before which we saw him standing and knocking on the night of his expulsion.

Early the following morning he sent one of the servants of the house to his wife with a written note:

My dear wife,

Do not be astonished at what happened to me tonight. Such and such things are consumed by zeal—by the blind zeal of religion, which says of its father and its mother, “I have not seen him,” which does not recognize its brother and does not know its own children.

You will understand for yourself that for the present I cannot return to your father’s house. I cannot come and see him in the hour of his disgrace, nor try to appease him while he is still angry.

There is therefore nothing better for me than to return for a few days to my father’s house and my native town, until your father’s anger toward me subsides. Then we shall see how the matter falls and what shall befall us in the latter days.

Please therefore send me a little money for the journey, a change of clothes, and my Tallis and Tefillin bag.

Farewell.

Do not tremble and do not fear. May the joy of Hashem be your stronghold during the coming Yomim Tovim, and may your hope for days better than these encourage you and sustain you.

Please show no angry face to your father, and tell no one anything of what has happened.

He is your father—you must not uncover his nakedness.

And I am always with you,

your husband, whose soul is bound up with your soul,

Moishe

These, dear reader, are the last words we shall hear Moishe speak before the Lord in the land of the living.

From that moment onward

his lips speak only in the grave.

Later that same day one of the wagon drivers returning to Levana saw him walking on foot along the road leading toward Lupove, his bundle upon his shoulder, as he had been accustomed to do in the days when he was a poor young man returning to his native town for the Yom Tov.

The wagon driver even testified that he had told Moishe the road was considered dangerous on account of the stream and the flooding of the pool, and had warned him to travel by daylight and not by night.

From that time onward, nothing more was heard in Levana of the man Moishe.

No one knew what had happened to him or what fate had been decreed upon him.

Then, as snow falling at harvest time, the news suddenly came to them in one of the newspapers.

There it was written as follows:

Lupove, Isru Chag of Passover

“A terrible and heart-stirring event has occurred in our town.

“On the first night of Pesach, while the Av Bais Din of our community sat at the Seder, dressed in white like a ministering angel and seated upon his chair like a king at his banquet, his wife like a fruitful vine within his house and his sons like olive shoots around his table, he finished eating and recited the Blessing After Meals.

“And it came to pass, when they had poured for him the third cup and opened the door, that the rabbi rose from his seat and cried:

“‘Blessed is he who comes!’

“And behold, two non-Jewish men of the town, fishermen and casters of nets upon the waters, entered, carrying in their net the dead body of a man.

“They laid it out before him and said:

“‘Rabbi Yerucham, recognize it, please: is this the body of your son or not? For we drew him from the waters.’

“The rabbi recognized him and said:

“‘It is the body of my son! The raging waters have passed over his soul. Drowned—Moishe is drowned!’

“The reader may imagine the bitter and dreadful impression made by this terrible event upon the rabbi’s household and throughout the town. Their banquet of delight became terror, and the joy of the Yom Tov was turned to mourning.”

Thus far the words of the correspondent in the newspaper.

The writer, as may easily be seen, is one of those fledgling journalists who have increased among us lately, men who desire to see their names revealed in print and who therefore hasten to proclaim publicly every event that occurs and every sound that is heard in their town.

Because they fear that someone else may get there first, they do their work in haste and make no effort to establish the details of the matter or determine the truth.

As to the event itself, there is no doubt:

Moishe son of the Dayin of Lupove, son-in-law of the wealthy Nehemiah of Levana, drowned upon the road as he journeyed toward his father’s house for the Yom Tov of Passover.

But as to the details—how the thing happened, whether robbers attacked him, whether an accident befell him, or whether he took his own life—opinions differed.

When the news reached Levana, the men of the study house, Moishes’ former companions, spoke to one another about it and debated the matter back and forth.

One said:

“Armed thieves went upon him and drowned him. After all, neither his wallet of money nor his bundle of clothes was found with him.”

The second answered:

“That proves nothing. Perhaps the waters swept them away—or perhaps the fishermen took them.”

The third said:

“I say he took his own life. He was always a man of dark melancholy and inclined toward depression.”

“Silence! Do not even mention such a thing!” the fourth rebuked him. “Did he not know that one who destroys himself has no share in the World to Come?”

“That proves nothing either. You have heard that he gazed and was stricken. No doubt he became a heretic and no longer believed in the resurrection of the dead or in the World to Come.”

Thus the fearers of Hashem spoke, each man to his companion.

They remained divided and never reached a common opinion.

On one matter, however, they all agreed:

Although Moses had gazed and been stricken, and although in his lifetime books of heretics had been seen falling from his coat, nevertheless his death was his atonement, for death cleanses sin.

“And it was not for nothing,” said the greatest among them, “that it was decreed that he should die in the month of Nisan and drown in a pool of water containing more than the minimum measure of a mikveh,

so that he might enter into the waters and be purified.”

And so, dear reader, let your heart be calm and your soul at rest concerning the lost Moishe.

Surely there was atonement for his sins in his drowning in waters containing more than the measure required for a mikveh.

And if perhaps you are still troubled about the wealthy Reb Nehemiah, and your heart accuses him over the sin of bloodshed—because he expelled his unfortunate son-in-law in the blackness and darkness of night and thereby caused his death—know that Reb Nehemiah’s own heart does not accuse him in the least.

He is utterly tranquil and at peace.

He knows that whatever he did, he did only for the honor of his Creator and out of zeal for his God.

For:

“The Lord is the Mikveh of Israel, their Savior in a time of trouble; just as the mikveh purifies the impure, so does the Holy One, blessed be He, purify Israel.”3

What, then, was Reb Nehemiah worried about?

He was worried about the waters of that flooded pool.

Perhaps they would have the legal status of waters without end4, so that no conclusive evidence of death could be established and his daughter would remain an agunah.

But now he has been relieved of this sorrow and anxiety as well.

For the dead man was found and brought before his father.

Miriam received permission to remarry from three rabbis, in a document stating explicitly that she was permitted to any man.

And among the signatures at the bottom appeared:

The humble Yerucham, here of the holy community of Lupove.5

—Ha-Melitz, 1888

Why I ended up outside the system. There were moments, maybe even entire months, when I thought the worldview would work for me. For me, it was never just about the day to day of yeshiva life, which was OK. It was about the worldview, the sense that everything fit, that all questions had answers if you only learned hard enough. And for a while, I kind of believed that. Then, one day, I stopped being able to answer a simple question: why am I still sitting in front of this Gemara?

No matter how good your friends or Rabbeim are, and I had great ones, the thing is at the end of the you eventually have to answer to yourself. The simplicity of the whole endeavor stopped charming me, the ignorance of that world began to gnaw at me, and the haughtiness, oh the haughtiness!

It is a system, proudly removed from the world, lustfully engaging in a cynical game of self aggrandizement.

Of course, no one cared to explain to us how this thing called the Talmud even came to be. Not the historical, political, or social conditions that led the Sages to write what they wrote. Not the centuries of redaction and reinterpretation that shaped it into what we have today. No. We were told only to worship every minute we spent learning from it. That reading another obscure Rishon was somehow holding the world on its axis.

I must say, I am impressed with the level of devotion, but only imagine where these 12-hour days in the Bais Medrash could be spent. The Yeshiva world could have created a utopia, a millennia ago.

The saddest part for me is that the sheer stupidity of the whole thing led me to question the entire religion it is embedded in, all the fundamental axioms questioned. What a shame, I would have made a great Jew if not for it.

P.S.

I believe that the Yeshiva World, by limiting the scope of what it means to be a Jew, has caused immeasurable damage to itself as a social and spiritual community. By deliberately identifying as apart from both the broader Jewish and non-Jewish worlds, it has, whether intentionally or not, acted against some of Judaism’s most fundamental values. The idea of living a life that reflects Godliness in the world, not outside of it. Judaism was never meant to be an exercise in isolation. It was meant to infuse the mundane with holiness, to sanctify work, family, creativity, and thought. The modern Yeshiva ethos has inverted that calling, retreating into a self-referential universe where holiness is defined primarily by separation rather than engagement and by obscurity rather than enlightenment.

P.P.S

I personally gained immensely from spending time in Yeshiva. Just not in the ways most people think about it. I hope to write a post on it.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger — something better, pushing right back.

In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.

In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.

In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.

I realized, through it all, that… in the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger — something better, pushing right back.”

Albert Camus

Israel

I had the privilege of being in Israel for the holiday of Sukkot. Sukkot in Israel is, in my opinion, one of the peak Jewish experiences available. Over 100,000 Jews from all over the world make their way to Israel to celebrate the festival. Sukkot lasts a full week, and pretty much every night there are parties and celebrations to attend.

This year in particular was special. At the beginning of the holiday, there were rumors that Trump (with Witkoff and Kushner) were on the verge of facilitating a prisoner-hostage exchange deal that would, in the words of my dear leader His Highness Trump, “end the war for good.”

I was still in a yeshiva in Jerusalem exactly two years earlier when the massacres of October 7th took place. Within a few days I witnessed the entire State of Israel, military and civic, mobilize against Hamas. People were shaken. It seemed that almost everyone in the country had a direct or one/two-degree connection to someone killed that day. I spent the month after October 7th in Israel raising money from American Jews, then buying and delivering an assortment of gear for the IDF with a group one of my friends had formed.

We were one of hundreds of small startup organizations that popped up in the weeks following the attacks to deliver critically needed gear for the hundreds of thousands of reservists who had been called up to fight in Gaza and on the northern border with Lebanon. I visited bases on both borders as well as those embedded within the West Bank. I witnessed men from the ages of 18 to literal grandfathers, men who had fought in the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars, volunteer to go fight on the frontlines in another war.

I believe there are very few countries with that sort of collective (well almost collective) faith and will.

October 7th and the subsequent War have clearly been the defining Jewish events of the 21st century.

In Hostage Square, Tel Aviv, the night before the hostages were due to be released, people were breaking out in emotional song and dance. The screen read “738 days.”

738 days since the hostages were inhumanely taken from us.

There was an incredible feeling in the air—that this nightmare the Jewish nation and Israeli people had endured was finally reaching its end.

I am eternally proud to have been born a Jew, and even though I am not yet an Israeli citizen (despite being born in Jerusalem), I consider it a privilege to be part of this nation and to play whatever small role I can in the living State of Israel.

Friends and Conversations

My good friend was gracious enough to allow me to stay at his apartment in Nachlaot :) Reach out to him if you are in tech or VC—he is up to something very interesting.

I spent many long nights debating religion and philosophy with both him and , another close friend who is now about to join the IDF doing technical research.

I also met and spent time with . Simon (pseudonym) has a unique background. He grew up in a strictly Yeshivish community in the U.S., attended the most elite yeshivas in America and Israel, and even wrote an entire Sefer Lomdus on tractate Zevachim before realizing his passion lay elsewhere. He is now finishing a bachelor’s at Bar-Ilan studying the Bible and the Ancient Near East.

We had a long and productive discussion on those and more topics, which I greatly enjoyed. He also has a Substack I highly recommend.

My uncle, who recently moved to Israel, hosted R’ Joey Rosenfeld at his sukkah on the first night of chol hamoed. I was only slightly familiar with his thought before this, and was quite impressed by his breadth and depth on both Jewish and secular philosophy. I was able to have an interesting discussion with R’ Joey on Leo Strauss’s interpretation of Maimonides’ Moreh Nevuchim, which I am in the middle of writing something on.

I am seeing a growing awakening among my generation that gives me hope that things will slowly change. Of course, like all major socio-political-religious-cultural change, where to look is among the youth, not the elders.

As I wrote in my last post, I believe we are at the beginning, and living in the midst of “A Great Turning.”

Trust in institutions, whether governmental, media, or religious, is at an all-time low in the post-WWII era. There is a lack of both trustworthiness and authenticity in the traditional halls of power. There is now an opportunity to create new institutions that have the capacity to hold the new vitality and authenticity that I see emerging.

The onus and responsibility are no longer on the old guard. In many ways, the old guard has lost the “mandate of heaven.” Gadol and gvir culture—and they have always gone together—have hollowed out Orthodox Judaism to the point where I believe a majority of our youth, if you asked them to speak openly and from the heart, would voice contempt for some part if not all of the current system.

Thankfully, I now see leaders emerging who hold within them the capacity for change. I am more optimistic than ever about our generation’s ability to fix what has been broken and to rekindle the ancient flame of Judaism, which has all but been turned into an over-intellectualization of things that don’t matter and an oversimplification and culture of obscurantism around the things that do.

With God’s help, our generation will begin to open and heal the dual wounds of the Enlightenment and the Holocaust. Each of which, in its own way, forced the hands of our religious leaders and caused our communities to become ill-educated, standoffish, and removed from society.

Slowly, slowly, the rays of true knowledge will begin filtering in again. Judah will awaken from his slumber, and Israel will emerge, as always, eternally victorious over the forces of evil.

Now please enjoy a random assortment of my camera roll from over Sukkot:

And more:

An anxious generation. Well, of course, given the above, it’s hard not to be. The first thing I think is helpful to consider is the (smart)phone and our relationship to it. It can be hard to remember, but it has only been about ten years since the phone reached full saturation across society. That’s a blip on the timeline of humanity, and even though God created us to be remarkably adaptable creatures, such a significant shift in such a short period, especially as it relates to day-to-day human functioning, has clearly been jarring. If this isn’t something you are consciously aware of, you’re probably not going to win. The phone and social media are engineered to take as much of your waking time as possible. That’s the economic incentive of the companies that make them. Don’t be mad at them. Use the phone and social media to your advantage—but if you get lost in them, you can easily waste away the best years of your life in mindless scrolling and posting, where the only beneficiaries are the platforms themselves, and you become their product.

The upside of being aware of and then limiting and curating your phone usage is that, if done properly, you can turn what for most of our generation is a major disadvantage into a huge advantage. You are already in the top 5% of our generation if you can pull this off.

As it relates to both politics and geopolitics, my estimation is that things will only get crazier from here as the technological and economic realities of the future make themselves clear. This isn’t the first time humanity has gone through seismic shifts in how we structure society. Think of the transitions from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to industrial societies, and the social and political revolutions that shifted the Western world out of monarchies and into liberal democracies. Even just staying level-headed and sane will get you far. Deep and wide knowledge coupled with ambition will get you even farther. Staying in your lane is probably an even worse move than it was for past generations. History—or shall we say historical times—favors the bold. Lanes that we thought would exist forever will collapse, whereas lanes that haven’t even been built yet will prove immensely successful. So experiment. Explore.

They said social media was the great amplifier. Well, AI is the greatest amplifier humanity has ever invented. If you are not finding ways to use AI to boost productivity in some area of your life, you will lose to someone who is. That’s it. Figure it out. Ask ChatGPT. There is no sector of the economy that will not change in some way.

Humans have been talking to each other in some form for something like 50,000 years, and reading and writing for 5,000. They are on the decline. You can easily stand out by getting really good at one. Preferably all three. Thankfully, learning how to get good at any of the Big Three is easy. You just have to do more of them. If you have successfully curated your phone usage, you will find yourself with an immense amount of time on your hands as you watch those around you continue endlessly scrolling. As a rule of thumb, I try to strike up a conversation with a stranger wherever I find myself. As I type this, I am on a flight to Madrid and just wrapped up a discussion on current and historical politics in Holland with my seatmate from Holland. At first, it may be awkward, but eventually it becomes second nature, and you’ll find yourself wondering why everyone isn’t talking to everyone around them all the time. Another pro of adopting this conversational mentality is that it’s one of the easiest levers I’ve found to make life more enjoyable. When it comes to reading and writing, just do more of it, in any form.

Exercise is non-negotiable. Being physically fit is not a nice-to-have. You are literally stuck in the meat sack you’ve been given for the rest of your life. To not optimally take care of it is an affront to all that is pure and good in the world.

Exactly because we are in a unique generation where so much of the institutional stability around us seems to be shifting, the opportunity to create things anew has never been greater. Shifts like the one we’re living through do not come around often—maybe once a century at best. If you can find a way to seize an opportunity around you, you will be greatly rewarded.

Modernity tries to tell you that you can never really know anything. The truth is that knowledge follows a power law. Ninety percent (more like ninety-nine) of the research papers out there are irrelevant to truly understanding whatever field you are in. Find the knowledge that matters. Get into group chats where esoteric knowledge is peddled. As Peter Thiel rightly states, the best companies are built on secrets—not magic, but secrets. Don’t believe the propaganda that because you are young you’re at a disadvantage when it comes to true knowledge of a subject. In many ways, you’re at an advantage. You’re unbothered by the discourse that came before; you can reason from first principles even more cleanly than someone older who has a million excuses for why they couldn’t do the thing. You can just do the thing.

Do not do things you do not enjoy. On its face, this may seem childish, as if I’m saying to forfeit all responsibility to sit at home, watch TV, and eat pizza. Could not be further from the truth. What I mean by “don’t do anything you don’t enjoy” is that all of us are fundamentally different in our proclivities and interests. If you decide to pursue a career solely for the sake of earning capital or appeasing your parents or friends, you will end up like many others—hating yourself, your life, and your family. This is bad. To find out what you truly enjoy doing, you must spend a lot of time trying new things. You will not discover your interests by watching videos about them; you have to throw yourself into the arena. Call people you know in various industries and ask to shadow or work for free for a week. See what draws you in. It is absolutely insane to me that people at twenty years old choose what to do for the rest of their lives based solely on sitting in classrooms and completing a few internships, mostly in the same field. This is sheer lunacy. I’ve tried to come up with a number and have landed on at least nine industries that I seriously explored before ultimately choosing to pursue something very seriously.

I’ve found that many of the things I was told really mattered, like having a perfect résumé or the right college, really just don’t matter that much anymore. People just want to see that you are smart, ambitious, and consistent. All of these things can be learned. You have agency to get really good at whatever it is you want to do. There is zero excuse for not being at a level where you can have a coherent conversation with an expert in whatever field particularly interests you.

Signing off,

A fellow Gen Zer

The word Haskalah (הַשְׂכָּלָה) comes from the Hebrew root שׂ־כ־ל (s-k-l), which is tied to ideas of intellect, reason, and understanding.

Seichel (שֵׂכֶל) → “intellect,” “reason.”

Maskil (מַשְׂכִּיל) → someone who is enlightened, intelligent, or educated. In medieval Hebrew it could also mean “philosopher” or “thinker.”

Haskalah (הַשְׂכָּלָה) → literally “the act of making wise,” or “education/enlightenment.”

If you move to Silicon Valley, they say you can live in the future. The tip of the spear technologies being built over there are first adopted within the city and then spread worldwide. I now feel the same way about my own life as it relates to Judaism. Something has happened in the past few months that was imperceptible at first but is becoming more and more clear to me as time goes on.

Guys (and girls!) from different yeshivas, seminaries, cities, and countries seem to be arriving at the same conclusion: the version of Orthodox Judaism they grew up with, especially in the Haredi and yeshiva world, is fundamentally flawed. In fact, much of it isn’t Judaism at all.

That might sound shocking, but we need to ask: what is Judaism, really?

Culture ≠ Judaism

First off, Judaism is not about clothing. Black hats, white shirts, jackets, wigs, knee socks, tights, these are cultural artifacts, not divine mandates. At best, a yarmulke may be a religious item, but even the yarmulke is debated. Culture is not religion. Culture is not faith. Culture is a How not a Why. Culture is style, not essence. Reducing Judaism to European shtetl style aesthetics is a historical accident, not a theological truth.

See, culture is a shell — a nothing burger. It carries no weight beyond the weight of the culture itself. It does not extend into the realm of faith or religion. The problem arises when we start pretending that culture is faith. This doesn’t just apply to clothing. It applies to many common beliefs as well. Views about the afterlife, reward and punishment, the messianic era, even attitudes toward non-Jews. Many of these, provably, do not originate in Judaism. For anyone who doubts this, I would point them straight to Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, because well I guess you are perplexed after all.

So if Judaism isn’t culture, what is it?

You could say Judaism is a set of practices, but that’s not the full picture. The Torah isn’t simply history or law. Every commandment, every story in Tanakh, carries symbolic meaning. Rambam, Ramban, the Vilna Gaon, Rav Hirsch, the Arizal — they all understood this, if you read them deeply enough. The commandments are not arbitrary tasks to earn points in some heavenly ledger. How absurdly childish! They are metaphors, symbols, and cloaks over deeper levels of reality, and if you are not feeling this when you perform a Mitzvah, you are not really doing anything at all.

When I was younger, I saw clearly that the “brownie points” version of religion made no sense. The idea that God - infinite, beyond comprehension - would demand we follow rules just to rack up merit badges felt absurd. It seemed idiotic to imagine the Creator of the universe cared about tallying points on a cosmic scorecard. If we really believe in God’s greatness, how could He possibly need our checklists of compliance and why do we care so much about following the minutia of every Law if isn’t even effecting our day to day lives, rather we dream of some future afterlife (nowhere to found in Tanach) where we will joyfully get to reap the rewards.

This is why Rambam’s negative theology struck me so deeply. God can’t be reduced to human language and mitzvos can’t just be reduced to surface-level obedience. They are not chores to do in service of a creator; they are symbols shrouded in layers, hinting at realities too profound for direct speech. You, dear reader, may perform them mechanically, content with the letter of the law. But the real pursuit, the one that elevates Judaism into something you can actually feel, is to uncover the inner essence, the symbol. This is the Journey of the Philosopher, or the life of the mind.

Seen this way, Judaism becomes Real. Capital R. In the Aristotelian sense, it moves from accidental qualities, the external forms and habits, to the essence, the substance of what it actually is. Not in an intellectual sense but at the body level experience. This is not something easily transcribed into words. See, imagine if I asked you to describe with words the feeling of going to a stadium tour concert of your favorite musician. You may give me all the classic words for that, but you’ll never be able to give me over your experience. That’s something that needs to be felt.

What’s Happening?

Friends in Mir, Brisk, BMG, Long Beach, Philly, places once considered bastions of unshakable belief in the Yeshiva world are questioning. They learn Gemara by day, and by night they read, talk, and wrestle with ideas once considered heretical. Just like Volozhin students once studied Haskalah and Zionist tracts after hours, today’s yeshiva underworld is quietly buzzing with conversations about the reality or unreality of the spiritual world they were raised in.

The Historical Break

Why now? I believe because the Mesorah itself was shaken during the Enlightenment and Holocaust. Haym Soloveitchik argued this powerfully in Rupture and Reconstruction. The Holocaust destroyed almost the entire leadership of European Ashkenazi Jewry. The chain of transmission snapped. Into that vacuum stepped figures like Rav Aharon Kotler, men of immense courage, but also men scarred by unimaginable trauma. Their project was survival. They rebuilt a world that looked like the one they lost. But in their rush to restore form, they may have unintentionally neglected essence.

In a famous responsum, Rav Hai Gaon, the last and possibly greatest of the Geonim and leader of the Jewish nation, writes that customs and practices passed down through Mesorah cannot be accepted blindly. They must be weighed against reason, halakhic principles, and the living reality of the community. His line is often paraphrased as:

“We do not rely on what was passed down alone (mesorah b’alma), but we examine and test it anew.”

He argued that tradition only survives if each generation actively re-engages and re-validates it. Otherwise, it calcifies.

The modern yeshiva system is a shell of its 19th-century ancestor. Back then, entering a yeshiva was countercultural, an act of radical agency. Today, it is compulsory, the default.

The Second Haskala

This is why I think what’s happening now is the Second Haskala. The first Enlightenment shattered traditional Jewish life, forcing a reckoning with modernity. This one is slightly different. It isn’t about reckoning with modernity, it is about reckoning with our own fractured Mesorah and rediscovering the depths hidden beneath layers of cultural mimicry. The first Haskala ended up trying to reform Judaism. The second seems to be doing something else. A return to Truth.

Recommended Reading:

Guide for the perplexed.

• Rav Kook

• Rav Soloveitchik

• Rav Shagar

• Abraham Joshua Heschel

• Hillel Zeitlin

• Martin Buber

• Franz Rosenzweig

• Yeshayahu Leibowitz

• Eliezer Berkovits

• Rav Yitzchak Hutner

• Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan

• Rav Nachman of Breslov

• Rav Zadok HaKohen of Lublin

• Emmanuel Levinas

• Rav Aharon Lichtenstein

• Rav Jonathan Sacks

• Søren Kierkegaard

• Friedrich Nietzsche

• Carl Jung

• Sigmund Freud

• Kant

• Hegel

• Martin Heidegger

• Jean-Paul Sartre

• Albert Camus

• Joseph Campbell

• René Girard

• Leo Strauss

• Many many more, I’m sure people will comment.

Enjoy the ride!

A lot of the positive change that has happened in my personal life has to do with a mindset shift I personally underwent as it relates to the concept of agency, and more specifically “high agency” and I wanted to write about what I think that is.

Let’s define high agency here as the ability to both think and act independently. The word independently does a lot of the heavy lifting here. As human beings we can all definitively say that we think and act, right? It is not the thinking and acting that would make us consider someone high agency. It is when an individual can both clearly think independently and then is also taking action downstream of his independent thought that makes for high agency.

I have from a very young age considered myself an independent thinker, a contrarian to a certain respect. I probably would have liked Peter Thiel in kindergarten. Almost all of my elementary school teachers had the same thing to say about me when it came to Parent-Teacher conferences, it was always something along the lines of

Your son is smart but he needs to learn how to control himself when voicing his dissent to the teacher.

or

Your son does well when he is engaged with the material, but when he does not understand why he needs to learn something he is impossible to deal with.

I like to say, the good teachers loved me and the bad teachers despised me.

As time when on, I learned to keep my public “dissent” to a minimum but continued holding contra-mainstream opinions throughout my school and Yeshiva years. I wasn’t what you would call a real rebellious child but I liked the idea of being headstrong and thinking fast.

Increasingly my contrarianism led me to question my religion itself. By 11th grade I was listening to a lot of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens and trying to read Maimonides “Guide for the Perplexed” or Carl Jung’s book “Man and his Symbols” on universal symbolism throughout world religions. By the time I graduated high school and left for my Yeshiva years in Israel, I was already really in another world religiously.

In Yeshiva, I mixed my daily learning with lots of Jewish and secular philosophy. I read the “Guide” again, this time understanding most of it. I started reading Nietzsche, more Jung, Freud, Kierkegaard, and tried some classics from Aristotle and Plato as well as Descartes and Spinoza.

Part of it was I was actually just genuinely interested in this stuff, I liked that some of the people around me considered the books I read “dangerous”. Part of it was that I recognized that reading and understanding (somewhat) philosophy and psychology made me sharper. I believe it made me a better thinker in all areas of life, but especially in Yeshiva where your daily life is literally centered around argumentation, having some knowledge of basic logical fallacies becomes really useful1.

Certainly, I enjoyed living life back then. Always had and continue to have great friends, but back then it wasn’t really “my life”. I was in a system, a structure, a strong community with norms, a society that had very clear rules of what was in or out. Now, for many, this is comforting.If you grew up in the Yeshiva world and check off all the boxes you may not have to make a major life decision until your late 20s. For some, even later:

• Yeshiva

• Graduate and go to Israel

• Yeshiva in Israel

• Back to America (to date)

• Date and get married

• Continue learning after marriage with support

Without getting into the merits or demerits of the system itself, I do find it unfortunate that some guys feel they do not have a choice in the matter in any of the decisions listed above.

To me the concept of agency is actually highly religious. I hope to write a full essay on this one day but I think we can look at many of the Biblical stories in aa agentic lens. The garden of Eden as pre agentic humanity, Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge brought agency to humanity. Noah famously went against the grain of society. Abraham being told by God to leave from his father’s house (i.e. gain agency over his life). Moses, being raised in the royal house but choosing to lead the Jewish nation out of Egypt. The whole Exodus story is obviously about the Israelites moving out of a non agentic position (slavery) to one of control over their destiny (freedom). And so on.

Really this thing called agency is what makes us human. If we are not able to act independently of our biological desires or our societies expectations, are we really better than apes? I think Orthodox Judaism does a great (maybe too great) of a job reminding us to be wary of our biological desires but it does a horrendous job of warning us about the second trap, being driven solely by the expectations and norms of the society that we are born into. Not only does it not warn us, I believe that post-Holocaust Orthodoxy has actively engineered itself to be as culturally mimetic as possible, primarily as a defense mechanism against what it considers to be the dangers of the post-modern non-Jewish world, but in doing so has ripped out the core of Monotheism, Agency.

This is not to say that we should become anarchists. Or leave religion. Norms and laws sometimes do exist for a reason. Something about Chesterton’s fence. There are smart rules and dumb rules in every society:

You must get out of the group on the left, but don’t stay too long in the middle group either.

Back to my own life. I directionally knew that I wanted to do something interesting and meaningful with my life but also be able to support a family. This is harder than it looks. You see, with a Yeshiva education there are two main pipelines guys choose:

1. Stay in learning for as long as possible while getting support from some combination of Parents/In-Laws/Kollel/Side Hustle

2. Work in a relatively uninteresting field

Though there are many Jews, there are very few ex-Yeshiva guys working on frontier technology2 in any industry and technology is really where I had always wanted to end up. If you think you have the capacity to do it, I think you should give it a shot.

It is one of the few careers in which you can create something that can meaningfully change the world around you. Getting back to our theme of agency, I didn’t want to just think all day, or learn all day for that matter. I wanted to be a doer. Not that there is anything wrong with becoming a lawyer or investment banker, but at the end of the day they really just facilitate the doers, and I’ve always wanted to do the doing.

I think this gets to the core of my critique of the Yeshiva world, thinking or learning without doing is worthless.

As the Mishnah in Avos says:

שִׁמְעוֹן בְּנוֹ אוֹמֵר, כָּל יָמַי גָּדַלְתִּי בֵין הַחֲכָמִים, וְלֹא מָצָאתִי לַגּוּף טוֹב אֶלָּא שְׁתִיקָה. וְלֹא הַמִּדְרָשׁ הוּא הָעִקָּר, אֶלָּא הַמַּעֲשֶׂה. וְכָל הַמַּרְבֶּה דְבָרִים, מֵבִיא חֵטְא

Shimon, his son, used to say: all my days I grew up among the sages, and I have found nothing better for a person than silence. Study is not the most important thing, but actions; whoever indulges in too many words brings about sin.

The agency part is all in the doing. Now, of course, if your thoughts are boxed into the culture or society that you were raised in, the actions that follow will be quite mid and not produce outsized results. You must first individuate3 before you can act with agency. But once you feel independent, truly independent, it is incmbent upon you to act. Not because you could make a lot of money (although you probably will based solely on the fact that you are an independent thinker) but because you have a role to play on the world stage of society. People that feel the call to act are needed for the progress of humanity. I believe it to be a moral imperative.

The thinker - doers:

Like the concept of agency, I think technology can and should be understood in a religious framework. Especially as it relates to the Jewish idea of a Messianic era. Once we understand that God has granted us with a spark of agency and it is our use of this independent agency that determines what our future life looks like, I would venture to say that as a nation and as a species, it is up to us to determine what the greater future holds for humanity.

Maimonidies, writing in many places, understood that the messianic era would not mean that anything ontologically changes about reality but rather the changes that occur during that era would be wholly naturalistic.

Humanity has clearly been given a tool with which to improve the conditions of life on earth. This tool is science + technology. Science + technology have led to more miracles of biblical proportions than the Bible itself.

I wish we had time machines, but it really should be mandatory in school to go through what a day was like in ancient Judea for example. 90% of ancient Israel lived in conditions we would consider abject poverty. The amount of food they had access to on a day to day basis was abysmal. 50% of your birthed children would not make it past the age of two. One in ten mothers would die in childbirth. 80% of your calories would come from bread. Average height was 5’3 for men and 5’0 for women due to nutrient deficiencies. 90% of the citizens of ancient Israel worked as subsistence farmers. Backbreaking labor from childhood to death was life for almost all its citizens. Human/animal feces lined the streets and fields, parasites and lice were universal.

I write all this to make a point. It is human ingenuity that is the reason we no longer live like this. It is humans thinking and taking bold action over long periods of time. More often than not it is the inventions of one man or small group of men that leads to this forward progress for society.

(I think a really interesting experiment would be to divide up a few different groups in Israeli society today and make them into different countries with their own political systems and economies, each one relying entirely on its own members for survival. With current beliefs intact, I guarantee ChareidiLand ends up a failed theocracy within the decade)

No, there is probably no Temple that is going to fall out of the sky one day. There is only a natural gradual enlightenment of humanity towards a messianic ideal. This enlightenment comes with it the ability to shape the world in Gods image, the perfected world. A world that does not require us to toil. A world that no longer requires human sweat and tears to put food on the table.

In many ways we already live in a proto-messianic world. A world where most people you know have desk jobs or work from home, compared to the way life was generally lived by the vast majority of humans over the vast majority of history. Our way of life would be astounding to our ancestors. We live much better than the Kings and Queens from only a few hundred years ago. Again, primarily because we have constructed technology, electricity, indoor plumbing, AC, washing machines etc., things that we take entirely for granted are giving us better quality of lives than the former highest levels of society.

The chart below does a great job of showing this visually. This is the global economic output (adjusted for inflation) from the year 1500 through 2024. No chart should make you more excited for the future than this:

אל תירא מרוחות סערה. הן באות רק לטהר את האוויר, לחזק את הנשמה, להרחיב את הלב. ואף־על־פי שבמעמד הרוחני של היחידים יש ירידה, במעמד הכללי של העולם ושל ישראל יש עליה… עליה בדעת, במוסר, בקירוב אל אור הכללי של הגאולה.

Do not fear the storm-winds. They come only to purify the air, to strengthen the soul, to broaden the heart. And although in the spiritual stature of individuals there is decline, in the collective stature of the world and of Israel there is an ascent… an ascent in knowledge, in morality, and in the nearness to the universal light of redemption.

Rav Avraham Yitzchok Kook

Orot Hakodesh

Now watch this Founders Fund video and do something useful:

Emergent Ventures is a low-overhead fellowship and grant program that supports entrepreneurs and brilliant minds with highly scalable, "zero to one" ideas for meaningfully improving society.

Initially funded by Peter Thiel1, EV aims to:

jumpstart high-reward ideas—moonshots in many cases—that advance prosperity, opportunity, liberty, and well-being.

Many past winners have come from underserved or underprivileged backgrounds.

I think Orthodox Jews have the highest upside potential of any group on earth.

It is no secret that Jews produce a significantly higher percentage of high-achieving scientists and technologists than any other ethnic group in the world. This can acutely be seen in the Nobel Prize results. Jews have recieved roughly 21% of all Nobel prizes. If we then select only for prizes in the sciences (Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine) and for prizes awarded after WWII, the percentage rises to about 30%. Jews represent ~0.2% of the world population. This means that we are awarded scientific Nobels at a rate 145x what our population should receive. This is insane.

But when we take a look at the Orthodox community, we do not see the same results. I argue this is not because there is less talent or ability to be found in the Orthodox community but rather that the way that Jewish Orthodoxy has structured itself in the modern era has made it exceptionally hard for those born within our community to meaningfully contribute to technological progress.

Some might argue this, that Orthodoxy has put an effective stranglehold on Jewish talent is reason enough to entirely do away with our system. I propose a different solution.

During my time in Yeshiva, I observed three distinct groups of peers.

The first group consisted of the “true believers,” those who wholeheartedly believed it was their life’s mission to dedicate every possible moment to studying Talmud for the rest of their lives. These guys, all power to them, are still learning and will continue for as long as is feasible.

The second group was made up of the “go with the flow” types. This group didn’t hold particularly strong beliefs either way but attended Yeshiva because it was the expected path. They continued studying Talmud until marriage, after which they generally pursued a business or went to law or medical school to support their families.

The third group, the focus of my proposal, were bright, curious, and restless. They enjoyed studying Gemara but also lit up when discussing topics like quantum mechanics, economics, music theory, or obscure historical debates they stumbled upon online at 2 a.m. They respected Jewish traditions but felt that their intellectual abilities could and should extend far beyond the walls of the Beis Midrash.

Unfortunately, in today’s Orthodox world, there is very little structured support for these individuals, if any at all. If they remain within the community, their curiosity is often redirected into narrow channels, they might become exceptional Talmud scholars, but their appetite for exploring the broader frontiers of human knowledge goes largely unfed. If they leave, they often face the challenge of building an entirely new intellectual network from scratch, with no institutional bridge between the worlds they straddle.

My proposal is to create that bridge. An EV for the Orthodox world. It would identify young men (and women) within Orthodox communities who show exceptional intellectual or creative promise outside the traditional framework, and give them the resources, mentorship, and crucially, a network to pursue transformative ideas in science, the arts, philosophy, and technology — without requiring them to sever ties with their community.

To prove my thesis, just look at some examples2 of Orthodox Jews that have been able to access the secular world. Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Heine, Maimon, some of the greatest names in philosophy, science, and technology came from an Orthodox background but imagine what could be if a program had existed to nurture these and other individuals!

My point is that there is a major bottleneck of talent within our community. My proposal is that we create an EV-like fund that would a) work to find this talent and provide capital to helping these kids go after whatever they are interested in and more importantly b) create the most talent dense community of like-minded Orthodox kids. I think if done correctly, this could be the highest ROI “investment” of any similar type of fund in the world.

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1

"Every reactionary period ends with a failure to restore the past it glorifies."

— Adapted from Eric Hobsbawm’s observations on conservative backlashes in The Age of Extremes.

This post is a response to both ’s post: “Overklalified” and a more radical solution than ’s "Underklalified". Naturally, I am calling this “Post-Klalified”.

Avigdor is correct about many of the symptoms plaguing the Yeshiva World (YW). Avigdor lays out the problems he sees and offers the standard fixes that people give:

For example:

• Too much Gashmiyus? Get our priorities straight. Call out Private Jets from Podiums.

• Too much Keeping up with the Jones’? We need to live more simply. EG Chasuna Takanos.

• Lack of Ruchniyus for a Balebus? Join a Chabura learning the Daf (Weekly or Yomi), Oraysah, Kinyan, or Neo-Chassidishe Shteeble.

• Women not feeling fulfilled? Career Consulting and women’s enrichment programs.

• Too few teachers? Raise salaries. Promote the value of Chinuch through Chasdei Lev.

• Shidduch Crisis? Wring our hands and change the system.

• Kids not getting into schools? More schools.

• Kids at Risk? More variety of schools.

• Yungeleit needing something more? Adirei HaTorah, smaller Kollelim, and Talmudo B’Yado.

And then his theory:

After much thought I believe the answer isn’t because of anything we did wrong. It’s because of what we did right.

The problem isn’t that we’re not driven. The problem isn't even that at our core we want the wrong things. It’s a function of our success as a community and a need to now gain individual identities and goals now that we’ve achieved our collective ones.

I believe it comes down to living in a generation of individual achievement while still maintaining a Klal identity.

To me, this is a deflection from engaging with what I believe are the fundamental issues in the YW worldview, which lead to the very symptoms he’s noticing.

The Yeshiva World is an unstable reactionary movement.

The YW is best understood as a reaction, not a natural evolution of Judaism. First to the Haskalah/Enlightenment, then, even more intensely, to the wholesale destruction of European Orthodoxy and postwar religious fragility. It was originally built to keep smart, curious shtetl boys from joining universities in Berlin or Vienna; later, it was rebuilt to resuscitate Orthodoxy in America and Israel. In a roundabout way, Spinoza, the father of the Enlightenment, had as much to do with the need for the modern yeshiva as Rav Chaim of Volozhin, the father of yeshivos, had to do with its form.

Communally, as Avigdor says, the YW is stronger than ever, far more people learning Talmud at a high level than at any point in Jewish history; robust schools, shuls, and kollelim; fundraising numbers that would have sounded fantastical to Rav Aharon Kotler. But movements built for wartime don’t always govern peacetime well. The YW calcified around a single ideal (Talmud study above all else) and kept doubling down even as the world around us, and our inner lives, shifted.

During the postwar era, the mission was external and collective, as Avigdor wrote:

Twenty years ago, when a yeshiva man hung a picture of Rav Aharon Kotler on his wall, it wasn’t a statement that “I will be Rav Aharon,” but that “I am a soldier in Rav Aharon’s army,” and my sense of mission, purpose, and worth was found in my role in the communal cause of “building Torah in America.” It was an external mission. We were building communal infrastructure—communities, yeshivos, schools, shuls, and the financial structure to support it all. We toiled, we sweated, we worked, and we succeeded together. We were all grains of sand on the seashore collectively holding back the mighty waves.

He is correct, postwar YW crowned a single ideal: full‑time Talmud study as the only true lechatchilah derech (best way to live your life), and it organized status and honor around the institutions that needed that ideal to survive. But the world has changed. The YW is (relatively) affluent and stable, and there is no longer a meaningful threat to the community. On the contrary, Orthodox Jews are by far the fastest‑growing group within both American and Israeli Jewry.

Enter the status games. If there is only one real crown and almost nobody can wear it, everyone else has to signal proximity. So, we lengthen Kollel years as social proof, because working early reads as capitulation. We shift income onto wives and in‑laws because that signals adherence to the postwar mission. We build “learning programs” for the working man - Daf Yomi, night chaburahs, kumzitzes. But these are paper‑thin replacements for an all‑consuming lechatchilah life of a being a full‑time learner. And when the spirit feels thin, status slides into its easiest proxy: money and spectacle.

That is how materialism explodes inside a world that talks nonstop about the perils of “gashmiyus”. You can rebuke from the amud until you’re hoarse; if the ladder only truly honors one path, people will buy status wherever they can. Simchah arms races. Insane school admissions games. Donor culture as theater. Adirei HaTorah tigers1. If only one life is crowned, the rest must purchase proximity to the crown. Spectacle is how you prove you’re close.

So, the “symptoms” above will intensify. Gashmiyus rebukes are optics, not changes to incentives or identity. Women’s roles and real contributions to family life expand relative to the past, while religious status for women lags behind. You can try to pay the frum math teacher more, but in a society that fundamentally believes math is a waste of time, fewer and fewer people will step forward for these positions.

You can say, “We did too well; now we need personal goals.” I don’t buy it. The problem isn’t that we’ve been so successful as a community that we’re now facing success’s problems. It’s that the founding logic of the YW is flawed. Past eras of Judaism knew how to honor multiple end‑states without dissolving communal standards. For example, 19th‑century German Orthodoxy and 14th‑century Spanish Jewry upheld rich, multilayered Jewish culture that honored poets, statesmen, philosophers, scientists, and businessmen alongside the traditional rabbinic elite. Until we expand what the ladder crowns, all‑too‑human status games will keep driving systemic issues. And the people inside the system will keep feeling spiritually defeated and underfed - even as the “klal” looks strong.

Orwell wrote:

“The attempt to freeze history always ends in violence or absurdity.”

The Yeshiva World is ending in absurdity.

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Everyone is giving you lists of 7, 10, 50, or 100 books to read. Here I present you with just three. Each one of these books is considered a classic - books that will remain meaningful for a very long time.

I have a theory on entertainment: if you think about it, each one of us only has limited time for entertainment, and limitless options to choose from: books, blogs, podcasts, movies, TV shows of all kinds. I think it’s a moral obligation that we try to entertain ourselves with the best of these.

Here are three great books: one philosophy, one history, and one novel. All very good ways to spend time entertaining yourself.

1. Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

I had always been interested in questions of morality and ethics growing up. I remember first becoming aware of the notion that it might be useful for me to pick up a book of secular philosophy. One, because I imagined that it would interest me very much, and two, because philosophy, even Jewish philosophy - was kind of off limits, or semi taboo in the world I grew up in which made it all the more interesting to me. And me, in my summer after my last year of high school, thought it would be high time to finally stick it to the system and buy a book of “real philosophy.”

I knew very little about Nietzsche except that Jordan Peterson would quote him sporadically and his famous, somewhat misleading line: “God is dead, and we have killed him.”

In any case, it is a very powerful and challenging book and although I no longer consider myself anything like a follower of Nietzsche’s philosophies, I hear myself coming back to a lot of the ideas brought up in this book.

2. The History of the Jews by Paul Johnson

This book is, in my opinion, the best option for a well-written, not overly academic or hagiographic work on the entirety of Jewish history. Johnson originally set out to write a history of his own faith, Christianity, but as he went back far enough, he realized he was going to need to do a full exposé on his parent religion, Judaism. He never actually got around to his history on Christianity, and “The History of the Jews” is Johnson’s best work. Even though I would one day love to read Graetz’s, Johnson’s sufficed at only 650 pages compared to Graetz’s eye-watering six-volume, 4,100-page set in English.

I liked that it was written by a non-Jew. Something about fresh eyes, I guess. Johnson is also very respectful and at times at awe of the Jewish story. It was also the first time I had read anything even remotely comprehensive on Judaism and Jewish history. Especially compared to my history books in school, it was a tremendous eye-opener and a great explainer for many of the cultural aspects of the Jewish world I had never thought about before. A good friend of mine who I recommended it to told me many parts of this book brought tears to his eyes as he finally felt he began to understand the community he was raised in.

3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

There is nothing more I could really write about what many consider to be the greatest modern novel of all time, except my own personal experience with the book. I picked it up during a particularly brutal winter zman and had the best next two months reading it. The writing is absolutely spectacular. It can take some getting used to, especially for those of you who have not read from the Russians before, but it is worth it. I think it took me past the first 100 pages until I was sold, but after that, the story and visuals control you. I think I even dreamed in 19th century Russia while reading it. Do yourself a favor and read it.

“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.”
— René Descartes

We know not all sacrifices were the same, nor were they brought for the same purpose. Some were fixed: daily offerings, weekly Shabbat offerings, offerings for the new moon and festivals. Others were more situational: thanks offerings, purification offerings, or sacrifices brought to atone for sin.

But I think there are fundamental problems with the entire concept.

Imagine I just explained the idea of God to you for the first time - that He created the universe, transcends it, and really cares about how humans behave. Then I tell you that the way this infinite, all-powerful being wants us to connect with Him is by building altars, slaughtering animals, and burning them because well, He enjoys the smell. Apparently, God is really into the scent of burning calves.

For some, this might not be a problem at all. The Torah is clear: God accepts sacrifices, He finds the smell pleasing, and the Temple rituals are a major part of divine service. That’s the end of the discussion.

But for me, and I suspect, for many others this feels… strange. It goes against our modern understanding of what God is, and what God wants. Even for someone with deep faith, it’s hard to feel inspired by the idea of bringing a sacrifice.

And yet, large portions of the Torah are devoted to the details of these offerings. Beyond that, enormous sections of the Talmud are dedicated to the precise legal procedures of sacrifice, thousands of technical laws, yet they rarely, if ever, explain why sacrifices matter.

That absence of explanation opens the door for Biblical critics. They point out that animal sacrifice was a widespread form of worship across the Ancient Near East. This, in and of itself, isn’t suspicious. But coupled with the lack of a clear internal rationale, it starts to look like the Torah was simply borrowing rituals from the surrounding cultures, a detail that Bible critics use to point to human as opposed to divine authorship of the Torah.

Broadly speaking, there are four traditional Jewish approaches1 to this issue:

1. The Circular Option – As seen in Rashi and the Talmud: Sacrifices matter because God commanded them. Their effectiveness and meaning don’t require explanation beyond that.

2. The Kabbalistic Option – As taught by the Ramban and the Zohar: Sacrifices are metaphysically powerful. They create change in higher spiritual realms, within the framework of the Sefirot.

3. The Symbolic Option – Articulated by the Abarbanel and Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch: Sacrifices are full of symbolism. They’re meant to awaken the human spirit, stir emotion, and teach moral or spiritual truths through action and ritual.

4. The Rational Option – Proposed most famously by the Rambam (Maimonides) and later by Rav Kook: Sacrifices were a historical concession. God, knowing the Israelites were surrounded by a culture steeped in sacrifice, allowed this form of worship to serve as a bridge. But the ultimate divine ideal would be a world without animal slaughter. Rav Kook even writes that in a future post-messianic era not only will we not bring animal sacrifices, but we will no longer eat meat of any kind.

Many are fine with the circular option, it is how they understand most of their religious experience anyways. The Kabbalistic option will only work for those who believe in/understand that framework. The symbolic option is nice, but it does not explain why God would need or want to use the sacrificial framework in the first place. To my mind the rational option is the only one that can hold its own weight against Biblical criticism, but it would require a sea change in how Orthodox schools teach their kids about the Torah.

I myself am not fully comfortable with accepting the purely rational approach. If God only wanted to use sacrifices as a bridge to connect with him without sacrifices why add all these extremely intricate laws? An even stronger critique would then be of the Talmudic sages, why waste so much time on the specifics of sacrificial law if the sacrifices were not to be brought again?

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P.S.

As an experiment can you comment if you grasp the concept of animal sacrifices or not? And if you do, can you explain the rationale behind them.

I will try and do a part 2 going into the actual critiques brough,t as well as some more non-traditional understandings of animal sacrifices.

A great essay written by a close friend. You should subscribe to his Substack at .

David Ben-Gurion famously said, “any Jew who doesn’t believe in miracles isn’t a realist.”

The Orthodox Jewish world took the line and ran with it. Miracles have long become a staple in our homes, speeches, and viral WhatsApp statuses: a Sefer Torah pulled unscathed from the inferno. A community spared in a terror attack because they kept Shabbat. A man who avoided being crushed in the Twin Towers because he was the tenth at a Shacharit minyan.1

These stories travel fast. They’re gripping, emotionally satisfying2, and affirm what we desperately want to believe: that Torah observance is rewarded not just spiritually, but visibly, immediately, and dramatically3. That God will turn the world upside down to “show up” for the faithful.

But what happens when He doesn’t?

What happens when a madman guns through a full Beit Midrash? When a Bnei Brak resident is killed by an Iranian missile? When the most devout were gassed in the Holocaust? That’s when this framework starts to tremble and the explanations grow creative: Maybe they had a hidden sin. Maybe their death was a kaparah for the generation. Maybe we just don’t understand.

That last one begins to get warmer.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: keeping the Torah doesn’t guarantee a preferential or pain-free life. If anything, as Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik argues, true religious commitment brings the opposite: loneliness, struggle, and the burden of being summoned4. And if your belief hinges on extraordinary interventions, if you require witnessing miracles to sustain your relationship, you’ve already shrunk God to something barely divine.

This critique isn’t new5. Baruch Spinoza argued that if God needs to intervene to tweak nature’s course, then He built a flawed universe to begin with6. David Hume went further: no testimony, he said, could override the weight of consistent natural law7. And in their way, they were right. If the universe is truly God’s creation, why would breaking its rules be the clearest sign of His presence? Isn’t that backwards?

The problem isn’t miracle stories. It’s that they’ve become our only working theology of divine involvement. We’ve made God a “god of the gaps8,” a being invoked only where explanation fails.

And so we raise generations who cannot find God in breath, in photosynthesis, nor in Halakha. We teach wonder only through shock, never through reverence.

That’s not just childish. It flirts with heresy.

Because it implies God exists only where reason breaks down. That as science advances, faith must retreat. That each natural explanation pushes God further out of reach.

But Torah’s vision is older and deeper. Kol haneshama tehallel Kah9-“every soul,” or perhaps more literally, every breath, praises God. Not just the blackout. Not just the burning bush.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel10 called this radical amazement, the spiritual discipline of greeting the ordinary with the reverence usually reserved for the extraordinary11. A sunrise. A child’s heartbeat. For Heschel, the miraculous was not the violation of nature’s laws, but the revelation that those laws are already saturated with meaning.

When the world is already holy, faith has no quarrel with science. It can draft science into the service of midrash and become an expanding commentary on divine intelligence.12

This isn’t just an idea, it’s built into how we live. Modeh Ani is the first thing we say when we wake up. Asher Yatzar thanks God for a working body. We say a hundred blessings a day, stopping to appreciate what we eat, what we see, and what we experience. Kiddush makes a drink into something sacred. Birkat Hamazon turns a meal into a moment of thanks. Halakha trains us to notice what we’d otherwise miss.

The payoff? You no longer need a ‘suspension’ of nature to feel close to God.13

Will we stop sharing miracle stories? Probably not. But the moral I tack on now is different: sometimes the shelf holds, sometimes it doesn’t. God is present in both. A faith that can bless a pulse-ox reading with the same reverence as the Exodus is a faith resilient enough for the ever-shrinking margins of mystery.

So tomorrow morning, before you scroll for the next viral nes, do something more subversive. Open your eyes. Breathe. Welcome to the biggest miracle you’ll encounter all day: the one you’re already living inside.

Zohran Mamdani had zero city-wide name recognition just six months ago, is a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America and is only 33 years old. The NYT essentially endorsed anyone but Zohran for Mayor. Normally any one of these stats should have immediately disqualified him as a serious contender for the Mayor of NYC.

Should he go on to win, he would become the first openly socialist mayor in NYC’s history and the first socialist mayor elected to any U.S. major city since Frank Zeidler (Socialist Party of America) was elected as the mayor of Milwaukee in 1948, as well as becoming the youngest Mayor of NYC in over 135 years2.

Though the fact that I am even writing this as a non-resident of NYC proves I have way too much time on my hands this summer, whoever becomes Mayor of NYC is objectively a significant political figure in the U.S. Not only does this individual take on the role of running the country’s largest and arguably the most important city in the world, but the Mayor of NYC also controls a larger budget than 46 of the 50 states!3

Oh, a few more points. Mamdani is openly behind the Pro-Palestine movement and in an interview even said he would have Benjamin Netanyahu arrested should he decide to travel to NYC while he is mayor4. This should have been an immediate three strikes in the most Jewish city in the world. So why did he win? And how did I know he would?

First off, he did not win because 50% of New Yorkers are antisemitic and wanted to “shove” a Pro-Palestinian Muslim candidate in the faces of the 1 million Jewish residents of NYC5.

A lot of what has informed my understanding of the future of the Democratic party and this race in particular has come from listening to the podcast of , who I highly recommend you follow6.

An extremely short overview goes something like this; after Obama the Democratic party was completely blindsided by the populist victory of Trump I. Biden represented the last gasp of identity politics in the U.S. Trump II came back even stronger, wiping the floor with an identitarian candidate. For the first time in a long time, the Democratic party has no central vision of the future.7

One way to move forward is with a return to Classical Leftism. I think we see a serious resurgence of Socialism in the United States of America.

As absurd as it may sound, I think this is the most fertile ground for socialist leaning candidates in 100 years. The wealth gap which has always been quite bad in the U.S is reaching levels close to that of the “gilded age” of the 1920s8. If Trump’s economic policy fails, I could imagine the large groups of low-income voters who voted for him only for economic reasons9 to switch easily to someone promising More Free Stuff™. Then of course we have the black swan of superintelligence eliminating vast swaths of the job market10. Fun times ahead!

If there is a silver lining here, it might be that we get to produce more sick Yiddish socialist posters :)

Credit to for sending me the above poster from NYC.

Since then, the pace of AI innovation has been quite astonishing. In AI world, weeks can feel like years of progress. Among these advancements, one is particularly relevant to our discussion: the emergence of reasoning-heavy AI models. For those in the know, that would be OpenAI’s “o” series of models or Anthropic’s “Opus” series. (Here is OpenAI’s September release of o1-preview, their first public reasoning model, and here is the December video release of their latest o3 model.)

Unlike earlier LLM’s, these models have been trained to emphasize techniques that aim to mimic the way that humans think about questions. These newer, more powerful models have already been used with some incredible effectiveness to push forward frontier research in various fields.

To understand their impact, it’s helpful to clarify what AI-powered Large Language Models (LLMs) are and how they differ from the tools we’re used to like search engines. When you ask a question on Google, its algorithms go through pre-existing web data, ranking what it predicts will be the most relevant and retrieving accurate answers. In contrast, an LLM like OpenAI’s GPT-4 goes further. It doesn’t locate data; it processes language naturally, synthesizes information, and generates novel responses based on an enormous corpus of text it has been trained on.

For straightforward questions—like “What are the best date-night restaurants in Lakewood, NJ?”—the difference between Google and an LLM is marginal. Both can deliver helpful answers, though the LLM might do so with a cleaner interface and fewer ads. But when the task requires deeper textual analysis, LLMs really show their utility. It’s important to remember that LLM’S are not retrieving information when you ask them a question; they’re actively deciding on what the next best word or thought is to help you solve for your question, very much in the same way that having a friend help you reason through a question, models like o1, o1 Pro, or the newly unveiled o3 can be seen as almost a second brain at your fingertips and are phenomenal at working through hard problems.

It is this capacity, the capacity to reason that positions these models to transform how Gemara is learnt. As I’ll try to show here, reasoning-heavy AI models could become incredible partners in Gemara study, capable of engaging with complex sugyas at a level that mirrors—or exceeds—your smartest chavrusa in Yeshiva.

When I was in Yeshiva full time, I spent an inordinate amount of time on Lomdus (The Talmudic version of intellectualism). The Yeshivas I went to in Israel were known for their focus on learning Gemara B’Iyun (Talmud in depth). This meant that I spent countless hours poring over pages of hundred- and thousand-year-old Hebrew and Aramaic texts with my Chavrusa (study partner) trying to decipher the Gemara at it’s deepest level.

For the uninitiated, the pinnacle of the Yeshiva education is learning Gemara B’Iyun, it is widely regarded as the highest form of Torah study and before right now it would be almost impossible for someone that did not go through the “Yeshiva system” to do successfully. For starters, we are studying the Talmud, a 2,000-year-old Rabbinic text written in a Jewish Babylonian dialect of Aramaic that is essentially 5,000+ pages of fierce debate on Jewish Law, Ethics, and story/myth (Aggadah). Studying Gemara B’Iyun involves using the Talmud only as a starting point and then diving into a 2,000 + year expedition of Rabbinic commentary on the Talmud, trying to ascertain core conceptual frameworks underpinning the Talmud and/or fundamental disagreements between the Talmudic Sages. Getting to this level of learning usually involves an education that starts in the 3rd or 4th grade by learning Mishna and slowly working your way up to the Talmud itself, then some early Rishonim (first commentators), Achronim (later commentators), and then to the modern rabbinic commentators.

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A recent sugya (topic) that we learnt in Yeshiva was that of the prohibition of carrying on Shabbos (Sabbath). Orthodox Jews have a slew of things that they don’t do on Shabbos, these prohibitions are connected to 39 fundamental categories that were done in the Mishkan (Precursor to the Temple). One of these categories is that of carrying or transferring an item from one domain to another. I asked OpenAI’s o1 model to help me walk through the Sugya of Hotza’ah (carrying), here was its response:

Below is a step-by-step overview of the opening sugya of Maseches Shabbos (primarily 2a–4a) that deals with the melachah (forbidden labor) of Hotza’ah—i.e., carrying from one domain to another on Shabbos. We will address:

1. Where the prohibition of carrying on Shabbos comes from

2. Why it is considered a melachah, even though it may not seem like a “creative act”

3. The structure of the Mishnah (“Yetzios haShabbos”), and how Chazal derive the details of this prohibition

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1. The Torah Source and Definition of Hotza’ah

a. The 39 Melachos and Their Connection to the Mishkan

• The Mishnah in Maseches Shabbos (73a) lists thirty-nine primary categories of forbidden labor on Shabbos. These thirty-nine (שלשים ותשע אבות מלאכה) all correspond to constructive activities performed in assembling or maintaining the Mishkan (Tabernacle) in the desert.

• One of these thirty-nine melachos is הוצאה מרשות לרשות—“transferring an object from one domain to another,” usually shortened to “Hotza’ah.”

b. Why Carrying Is Forbidden

• On the simplest level, the Torah explicitly singles out carrying as a prohibited labor on Shabbos (see e.g., Shemos 36:6 regarding not bringing further donations for the Mishkan on Shabbos, and Yirmiyahu 17:22 about carrying burdens out of one’s house on Shabbos).

• Even though carrying might not look “creative” like plowing or baking, the Torah’s categorization makes it a full-fledged melachah. Chazal often call it a “מלאכה גרועה” (less obvious or “inferior” melachah), but it is nevertheless in the same halachic status as all the others.

c. The Core Act: Akirah and Hanachah

• Hotza’ah is defined by two critical steps:

  1. עקירה (Akirah) – Uprooting or picking up the item in the first domain

  2. הנחה (Hanachah) – Placing it down in the second domain

• Only when one person (or the same person) performs both the akirah and the hanachah, taking it from a private domain (רשות היחיד) into a public domain (רשות הרבים)—or vice versa—do we have a full biblical prohibition (an “Av Melachah”).

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2. The Structure of the Opening Mishnah: “יְצִיאוֹת הַשַּׁבָּת”

The very first Mishnah in Maseches Shabbos (2a) begins:

יְצִיאוֹת הַשַּׁבָּת שְׁתַּיִם שֶׁהֵן אַרְבַּע בִּפְנִים וּשְׁתַּיִם שֶׁהֵן אַרְבַּע בַּחוּץ.
The “goings-out” (transfers) of Shabbos are two that are four (cases) inside, and two that are four (cases) outside.

This cryptic statement introduces eight scenarios of transferring items between a private domain and a public domain. The Mishnah sets up a scenario with two main characters:

1. The בעל הבית (ba’al habayis) – The homeowner, standing inside (the private domain).

2. The עני (ani / “poor man”) – Standing outside (the public domain).

Chazal illustrate the laws of “partial” and “complete” Hotza’ah through four basic interactions. Each can be broken down into sub-cases, hence “two that are four.”

a. “Two That Are Four Inside” / “Two That Are Four Outside”

1. The poor man stretches his hand inside to place or remove an object.

2. The homeowner stretches his hand outside to place or remove an object.

Depending on who does the aakirah (lifting up) and who does the hanachah (putting down), we get different outcomes:

• Full Biblical Violation (Chayav): One person does both the akirah and hanachah from one domain to the other.

• Exempt but Rabbinically Prohibited (Patur Aval Asur): One person does only half the action (e.g., the poor man lifts it up, but the homeowner puts it down).

The Mishnah’s opening examples clarify these distinctions.

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3. Walking Through the Mishnah’s Eight Cases

1. Case 1: Poor man extends his hand into the private domain, does akirah (picks up an item from inside) and removes it to the public domain (does the hanachah outside).

   • The poor man performed both akirah and hanachah → Chayav d’Oraysa (Torah-level prohibition).

   • The homeowner is not liable because he did nothing.

2. Case 2: Poor man extends his hand inside, homeowner places an object into his hand (so the homeowner did the akirah), and the poor man removes it outside (the poor man does hanachah).

   • Here two people collaborated: the homeowner does the akirah; the poor man does the hanachah.

   • Both are patur on a Torah level, because neither performed the entire act. However, Rabbinically it is forbidden (אסור).

3. Case 3: Poor man extends his hand inside and places it into the homeowner’s hand (the poor man does akirah), and the homeowner is considered as doing the hanachah by bringing it fully inside.

   • Collaboration again; each party did half. → Patur aval Asur.

4. Case 4: Poor man does both akirah from outside and hanachah inside (the reverse of case 1—now taking something from the public domain into the private domain). → Chayav.

Repeating a mirror set of four cases for the homeowner achieving or splitting the akirah and hanachah yields the total “two that are four inside, two that are four outside.”

Essentially, the Mishnah enumerates these scenarios to illustrate that full liability exists only if one person performs the entire act (akirah + hanachah) from one domain to another. If the act is split, each participant is patur from a Biblical standpoint but still אסור מדרבנן.

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4. Why “Carrying” Is Considered a Full Melachah

a. Derived from the Mishkan

• As noted, each melachah corresponds to a constructive act in the Mishkan. Indeed, the Jewish People would transport boards, curtains, dyes, or other materials from their tents (private domains) to the Levi’im’s communal area or to the site of the Mishkan (a different domain).

• Because these transfers were essential, the Torah labels “carrying from domain to domain” as an Av Melachah in its own right.

b. “Melachah Geru’ah”—But Still an Av Melachah

• The Gemara (Shabbos 96b and elsewhere) acknowledges that Hotza’ah might feel like a “weaker” melachah (מלאכה גרועה) because it doesn’t create or transform an object. Yet, it’s singled out in the Torah explicitly.

• One way to think of it: the Torah wants Shabbos to be a day free from both creative work and commercial or logistic activity. Moving goods between domains is the essence of commerce and public work, so the Torah includes it among the forbidden categories.

c. Ramban’s Explanation

• Ramban (on Vayikra 23:24 and in his commentary on the Torah) explains that the Torah deliberately highlights “carrying” to teach us that moving an object from place to place is also a “day-to-day labor” that disrupts the spirit of rest on Shabbos.

• Although you are not actively shaping or transforming an item, you are transferring ownership or location in a way that was integral to the Mishkan—and integral to mundane weekday life—and thus the Torah forbids it.

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5. Common Questions: “Why Isn’t Carrying a Ma’aseh?”

1. It is an action—albeit minimal.

   • True, carrying looks less like a “creative” act, but physically picking something up and placing it down in a new domain is indeed a complete action (when both akirah and hanachah are done by the same person).

2. Torah’s Definition of ‘Creative Work’

   • When we talk about “creative labor” (melachah), it is not purely about creating a new object; it is about mirroring the full scope of labor done for the Mishkan. The Torah defines “melachah” for Shabbos by example: “Anything that was necessary for the Mishkan’s construction or upkeep.”

3. Preventing Commerce and Errands

   • On a practical level, if carrying were permitted, one could do business, transport items in bulk, and effectively treat Shabbos like any weekday. Banning carrying safeguards the day’s sanctity and restfulness.

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6. Brief Overview of the Gemara’s Initial Discussion (Shabbos 2a–4a)

After laying out the Mishnah’s “two that are four” cases, the Gemara discusses:

1. Why start Maseches Shabbos with Hotza’ah?

   • Various answers are given—among them: because it is an “inferior” melachah (מלאכה גרועה) that one might mistakenly belittle. The Tanna wants to emphasize it first.

   • Alternatively, it might be singled out in the Torah (as per the pasuk in Yirmiyahu 17).

2. Exact definitions of Akirah and Hanachah

   • How high is considered “akiras cheifetz” from the ground or from a surface? (Within 3 tefachim of the ground might be considered resting on the ground, etc.)

   • Placing it onto something that is stationary or in motion.

3. Patur Aval Asur

   • When the Mishnah says “patur,” it generally means “exempt from a Biblical punishment but still rabbinically prohibited.” This concept is explored thoroughly in the cases of partial carrying.

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7. Practical Takeaway

• The opening Mishnah and Gemara set the framework for all subsequent halachos of carrying on Shabbos.

• Once we grasp that akirah + hanachah from one domain to another is the quintessential definition of Hotza’ah, we can then apply this knowledge to all halachic details: e.g., eruvin (how an eruv can transform a public area into a “shared private domain”), how we define public vs. private domains, and what is considered a “significant” lifting or placement.

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Summary

1. Carrying (Hotza’ah) is explicitly listed among the 39 melachos because it was done in the Mishkan (transporting items between domains) and is explicitly forbidden by the Torah.

2. Even though it’s called a ‘melachah geru’ah,’ that doesn’t lessen its Biblical gravity—its “weaker” appearance is overshadowed by its fundamental role in the Mishkan and the Torah’s explicit singling it out.

3. The Mishnah’s opening cases of the poor man and the homeowner illustrate the technical requirements of a full violation: performing both akirah (lifting) and hanachah (placing) from one domain to another.

4. If the act is split between two people, it is “patur” from a d’Oraysa standpoint but still Rabbinically prohibited (patur aval asur).

5. Conceptually, the Torah wants us to desist not just from creative building but also from the transportation and commerce-like activities that define weekday life.

By studying these opening lines in Maseches Shabbos, one gains a foundational understanding of how the Sages analyze a seemingly simple act—carrying an object—and define it with precise halachic parameters. This sets the stage for the rest of the tractate, which deals extensively with the various domains, the laws of eruvin, and all aspects of Shabbos rest.

To me, this was pretty impressive, especially considering the fact that these models are trained for general use and were not in any way specifically trained on the Talmud. But I wanted to test its understanding further. One of the major issues with “Carrying” on Shabbos is that it is quite hard to understand why it is part of this grouping of 39 categories, all of the other categories seem to have a “creative element”, as in cooking or planting, but with carrying we are only moving the item from one domain to another, nothing seems to be happening to the item itself. Needless to say, I spent months on this one sticking point when we were learning this Sugya in Yeshiva, here is what the model responded to my request to help me understand this concept further:

Below is a more in-depth exploration of why Hotza’ah (carrying) is called a “מְלָאכָה גְּרוּעָה” (an “inferior” or “less obvious” melachah), and how the Rishonim and Acharonim grapple with this term and its meaning. We will focus on primary sources in the Gemara (particularly Shabbos 2a, 96b), commentaries such as Rashi and Tosafos, as well as discussions in Ramban, the Ran, and others.

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1. The Term “Melachah Geru’ah” in the Gemara

Gemara Shabbos 96b famously refers to the melachah of Hotza’ah as “מלאכה גרועה.” The basic question is: Why single out carrying as “inferior” when it is fully listed among the 39 melachos?

1. Lack of Physical Transformation
   Most melachos (e.g., baking, weaving, writing) actively transform the object. Carrying, however, merely changes the object’s location—no physical or qualitative change occurs to the object itself.

2. Nevertheless an ‘Av Melachah’
   Despite this “less creative” appearance, the Torah explicitly forbids carrying as one of the primary melachos (see Shemos 36:6, Yirmiyahu 17:22). The Mishkan required transferring materials between domains, so “Hotza’ah” is fundamental.

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2. Rashi: Emphasizing the Torah’s Singling Out

While Rashi (Shabbos 2b s.v. Yetzi’os HaShabbos; 96b s.v. Melachah Geru’ah) does not use a lengthy philosophical explanation, he points to two key points:

1. The Mishnah begins with Hotza’ah precisely because it may be undervalued—it seems “less creative,” so the Tanna wanted to highlight it right away.

2. It is singled out in the Torah—the prohibition against transporting items on Shabbos is written explicitly in more than one place (Shemos and Yirmiyahu), giving it a unique prominence despite it seeming “lesser.”

Rashi thus indicates that the term “geru’ah” means that one might not intuitively see the “creative” or “constructive” aspect. But from the Torah’s perspective, Hotza’ah is as weighty as any other melachah.

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3. Tosafos: Why Call It “Inferior” if It Is Explicit?

Tosafos (Shabbos 2a, s.v. Yetzi’os HaShabbos) and elsewhere (96b, s.v. Kol HaPoshet) explore the “split action” aspect—Hotza’ah can easily be divided between two people (one does עֲקִירָה/akirah, the other does הֲנָחָה/hanachah), which leads to a patur (exempt) on a Biblical level. Tosafos point out:

1. Because it’s so easy to share the act and lose full culpability, the Gemara calls it “geru’ah”—it’s easy to think it’s not a real “complete” action.

2. “Geru’ah” also references the fact that it is not physically altering the item itself, in contrast to other melachos that transform matter.

Tosafos underline that “geru’ah” does not lessen its Biblical status—it only describes its nature of being less obviously creative than other melachos.

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4. Ramban’s Perspective: Why the Torah Stresses It

a. Ramban on the Torah

• Ramban (on Vayikra 23:24) famously discusses that Shabbos is not merely about refraining from “creative labor” but about refraining from any labor that was integral in the Mishkan or singled out by the Torah.

• Even though Hotza’ah doesn’t transform an object, it was absolutely necessary for the Mishkan (transporting materials). Consequently, the Torah explicitly forbade it.

• The Ramban also highlights that the Torah’s definition of melachah includes a broad range of “weekday-oriented” activities, not just physically creative tasks.

b. Ramban’s Emphasis on Public vs. Private Domain

• In his commentary on Shemos, Ramban notes that carrying out from a private home to a public place is a hallmark of commercial or communal activity. Shabbos is meant to disrupt normal economic life; thus transferring items is singled out to preserve the day’s sanctity.

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5. Ran and Other Rishonim: Observing the “No Visible Change” Factor

The Ran (on Rif, beginning of Shabbos) echoes a theme found in other Rishonim:

1. “Melachah Geru’ah” = No שינוי בחפץ (“no actual change in the object”): This is the simplest reason for calling it “inferior.”

2. Still a Melachah because the Torah says so: The Ran underscores that the classification of a melachah depends on the Torah’s linking it to the Mishkan-activities. It’s not about logic alone but about Divine decree.

Other Rishonim, like the Ritva and Meiri, make similar points when they comment on Shabbos 2a and 96b: They note that carrying is the ultimate test-case for Shabbos labor because it is so subtle—it’s the boundary case that might be overlooked if the Torah hadn’t been explicit.

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6. Acharonim: Exploring Conceptual Dimensions

a. Minchas Chinuch

• Minchas Chinuch (Mitzvah 32, 124, 244) discusses Hotza’ah as a “geru’ah” melachah in the sense that it lacks “מלאכת מחשבת”—there is no productive or tangible result to see. Yet the Minchas Chinuch explains that once the Torah singled it out and connected it to the Mishkan, that alone defines it as an Av Melachah with full gravity.

b. Chazon Ish

• The Chazon Ish (Orach Chaim 49) broadens the idea: calling it “geru’ah” simply means it is easy to disregard, and people might not sense the “work” in it. But “work” in halachah is not subjective feeling—rather, it’s determined by halachic definition.

• He also notes that carrying is the very melachah that, if permitted, would open the door to everyday commerce and traveling. Hence, the Torah ensures we treat it as a complete melachah.

c. Other Acharonim

• Pri Megadim (Introduction to Hilchos Shabbos) and Mishnah Berurah (introduction to Hilchos Shabbos) likewise point out that Hotza’ah restricts the flow of goods on Shabbos, ensuring a day of rest from “weekday hustle.” This integral function, though “geru’ah” in physical transformation, is central to the spirit of Shabbos.

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7. Three Core Reasons for “Geru’ah” Status

Putting these sources together, we can summarize three major reasons given by the Rishonim and Acharonim for why Hotza’ah is called “מלאכה גרועה”:

1. No Physical Change: Other melachos actively change or transform an object (e.g., cooking changes food, writing creates text). Carrying merely changes location.

2. Easily Split Action: Hotza’ah is uniquely prone to being performed by two individuals (one does akirah, the other hanachah), leading to patur on a Biblical level—making it feel “weaker” or “less complete.”

3. Viewed as “Commerce/Logistics” Rather Than “Creation”: From a “weekday life” perspective, carrying is more about transporting and commerce rather than creativity. The Torah needed to underscore that this too is forbidden labor on Shabbos.

Yet, the consistent refrain of all the Rishonim and Acharonim is that, despite its label as “inferior,” Hotza’ah is a \textit{full-fledged Av Melachah} and is just as severe as any other. It is “inferior” only in appearance or in the physical aspect of not altering the item, not in its halachic weight.

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8. Conclusion

• Hotza’ah is singled out: The Torah itself emphasizes carrying from domain to domain, tying it to halachos essential for preserving the restful, commerce-free spirit of Shabbos.

• “Melachah Geru’ah”: The term highlights its lack of visible “creation” or transformation and its susceptibility to being split between two people.

• Nonetheless, a full Av Melachah: All classical and later commentaries agree that the halachic status of Hotza’ah stands firmly as an Av melachah, punishable by the same standards as every other melachah.

This duality—the “inferior” look on the one hand and full severity on the other—makes Hotza’ah a paradigm for understanding that “creative labor” in halachah is defined first and foremost by the Torah’s association with the Mishkan, rather than by our intuitive sense of whether the act feels like “productive work.”

A great understaning! Again, the model has been trained to reason, and if we look under the hood we can see that it is literally walking us through the steps of how to understand these Talmudic complexities, Incredible.

Then I asked it to rope in the Rogatchover. R’ Yosef Rosen was arguably the most genius of all the recent Talmudic commentators. He is known for his almost unfathomably hard to understand Talmudic and Halachic theories and is not commonly learnt or understood by most Yeshiva students even in the most elite Yeshivos. Here is o1 explaining to us how he might understand the concept of Carrying on Shabbos:

Below is a broad-stroke presentation of how the Rogatchover Gaon (R. Yosef Rosen, 1858–1936) might illuminate the nature of Hotza’ah (carrying on Shabbos). While the Rogatchover’s works—chiefly his Tzafnas Pa’aneach on the Rambam—are famously terse and often require significant unpacking, his overarching conceptual approach can help us appreciate why “carrying” is a full-fledged melachah, despite being called a “melachah geru’ah” (an “inferior” or “less obvious” melachah).

Disclaimer: The Rogatchover rarely writes extensive, explicit treatises on individual topics. Instead, he scatters brief, cryptic notes throughout his writings, connecting many sugyos via underlying halachic principles. The summary below reflects themes that emerge from his methodology, particularly in Hilchos Shabbos.

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1. Rogatchover’s Method: “Domain” as a Fundamental Halachic Concept

A hallmark of the Rogatchover’s method is his focus on the conceptual (halachic) status of an act rather than its physical manifestation. Many times, he looks for a single underlying principle that applies across different areas of halachah—such as changing an object’s “domain” (רשות) or halachic status.

• In Hotza’ah (carrying), the Rogatchover views the critical element as “shinui reshus”—a legal transfer of domain—rather than mere physical movement.

• From his perspective, the “Akirah” (lifting up in Domain A) and “Hanachah” (placing down in Domain B) effectively change the halachic domain of the object. That legal shift is what constitutes the forbidden melachah on Shabbos—akin to how, in monetary law, picking an object up can make a kinyan (act of acquisition).

Connection to Mishkan

He often highlights how, in the Mishkan, transporting materials from a private tent to the Levite’s station or vice versa was the precise “domain-transfer” the Torah forbade. The melachah is not about how “hard” the physical labor is, but how it redefines the item’s halachic standing.

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2. Why This Explains “Melachah Geru’ah”

a. No Physical Change to the Cheifetz

One classic reason for calling Hotza’ah “geru’ah” is that there is no visible transformation. The Rogatchover’s approach sharpens this:

• Physically: the item remains the same.

• Legally: the object’s halachic “location” or “domain” has changed.

Thus, from a purely physical perspective, it looks “inferior.” But from a halachic vantage point, changing domain is a powerful act—no less “real” than writing letters or baking bread in terms of Shabbos law.

b. Transfer of Ownership or Reshut

Another feature that the Rogatchover might underscore is how Hotza’ah resembles a transfer of ownership. We see from many sugyos (e.g., Kiddushin, Gitin) that “giving” an item to someone involves the legal mechanism of נטילה and נתינה (taking and giving). Hotza’ah on Shabbos is effectively the same structure:

1. עֲקִירָה (Akirah) – The halachic “uprooting” of the item from Reshut HaYachid (private domain).

2. הֲנָחָה (Hanachah) – The halachic “placement” in Reshut HaRabim (public domain), thus finalizing the domain-change.

The Rogatchover often compares “moving an object to a new reshut” with other mitzvos or halachos that hinge on transferring domain—thereby demonstrating that the core halachic act of Hotza’ah is indeed a “meleches machsheves” (a halachically significant act of purposeful change), even if it’s “geru’ah” physically.

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3. The Essence of the Prohibition: Act of Legal Transformation

Because the Rogatchover so often focuses on whether a change in legal status has occurred, he would say:

1. Carrying is singled out in the Torah precisely because it’s not about physically altering an object, but it alters the halachic status (reshut).

2. The “מלאכה גרועה” label means that if you looked at it from a purely creative standpoint—like building or weaving—you would miss the point. The Torah, however, defines any act in the Mishkan (including domain-transfer) as a melachah.

This line of thought underlies why splitting the act between two people (one does akirah, the other does hanachah) destroys the single legal transformation from one domain to another. Each person only does half an act, so the unified “shinui reshut” is never performed fully by a single actor—leading to “patur aval asur” (exempt from Biblical liability, yet Rabbinically forbidden).

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4. Examples in Rogatchover’s Tzafnas Pa’aneach

While explicit, direct references on Hotza’ah can be sparse, a few patterns emerge from the Rogatchover’s Tzafnas Pa’aneach (on Rambam, Hilchos Shabbos) and his short teshuvos:

1. Domain-Change Parallels to Kinyanim: He often draws parallels between the Shabbos concept of lifting/putting down and the kinyan of משיכה (pulling an item into one’s possession) or הגבהה (lifting to effect acquisition).

2. Melachah Defined by the Torah’s Categories: The Rogatchover emphasizes that the 39 melachos are not limited to “physical artistry.” They are a system that the Torah established—so “carrying,” though physically minimal, is a complete halachic act if it replicates the Mishkan’s domain-transfer.

3. Comparisons to Acts of Giving and Receiving (נתינה): Some of his notes show how the Talmud’s opening cases (the poor man & homeowner) are basically acts of netina (giving) that finalize a reshut-change. The fact that the Talmud frames it as “the poor man extends his hand” highlights that we are dealing with a halachic transaction, not just the location of the object.

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5. Summary of the Rogatchover’s Contribution

In a nutshell, the Rogatchover Gaon’s conceptual approach helps us see why carrying is a melachah—even though physically it is “geru’ah”:

1. Halachic Domain-Shift: The core of Hotza’ah is the legal transfer from one reshut to another.

2. Torah’s Definition of ‘Work’: The Torah sets “domain-change” as a quintessential melachah from the Mishkan. It is “inferior” to the naked eye (because it lacks physical creation) but equally potent in halachic terms.

3. Comparable to Monetary Transfers: The same logic that a kinyan is an act of acquisition applies here. A single actor must perform both “uprooting” and “placing” to complete the domain-shift and trigger Biblical liability.

Hence, what makes “carrying” a forbidden labor is not the “exertion” but the halachic transformation. The Rogatchover’s framework highlights the difference between the physical and the legal: physically, not much happens; legally, an entirely new status arises. This clarifies why, even if it is a מלאכה גרועה in appearance, Hotza’ah is as fully binding as any of the 39 categories of melachah on Shabbos.

My takeaways are this:

a. These models are world-class at understanding hard to access and domain-specific knowledge.

b. As is, these models can understand and explain complex Talmudic topics at a level just as good if not better than most individuals I encountered in my time in Yeshiva.

c. Once these models are specifically trained on Talmudic analysis there will not be a better oracle for Lomdus than it.

d. I think the bar for first time learners of Gemara has significantly dropped as anyone can now learn with an elite Chavrusa at their fingertips.

If we really are on the cusp of another revolution akin to the agricultural, scientific, and industrial revolutions of the past it will be fascinating to watch and see what the societal and cultural responses are from the traditional Jewish world.

Will we embrace the emergent technology or burrow further into the luddite version of our community that is unwilling to face the present and future of civilization?

This question of continuity is not merely academic; it’s at the core of how the yeshiva world views itself and its goals. Many of the foremost yeshivos of our world today are named after the European towns of which they claim to be continuing the tradition of. Mir, Brisk, Ponovezh, Slabodka, shtetls spread across eastern Europe continuing to survive in the Jewish consciousness only through the success of the yeshivos that have incorporated their names. But is there really any credence to the idea that these yeshivos of today are continuing in their predecessors’ European tradition? I think not.

In 19th-century Europe, the yeshiva was an elite institution, a rarefied world reserved exclusively for the most outstanding boys. In many cases the only way to be accepted into these Yeshivas was either that you were the most brilliant kid in your shtetl or the most determined to go and learn. These yeshivos stood apart from the broader Jewish community, drawing only from those who possessed the rare combination of sharp minds, extraordinary diligence, and courage to abandon the comforts of home, family, and familiarity. Choosing to enter a yeshiva was a highly countercultural and agentic act, one that signaled a willingness to dedicate oneself for many years to a life of intense dedication. It wasn’t a given—many times it was expressly against his families wishes2.

The atmosphere inside these yeshivas was completely electric, charged with an extraordinary degree of intellectual acuity. There was no place for passive learning here. You were expected to not only know the text of the Gemara but to grapple with it, to squeeze new meaning from it, to sharpen your arguments against the cerebral steel of your peers. Mediocrity wasn’t tolerated because it couldn’t be. These yeshivas existed to and did produce greatness3—they became the Harvard, Yale, and Stanford of the religious world.

Now contrast that with the yeshiva of today. The modern yeshiva has become an almost compulsory waypoint in the life of any boy growing up in an observant Jewish community. It’s not a choice; it’s a given. The boy attends elementary school, then yeshiva ketanah (high school), then yeshiva. It’s not that anyone is forcing them in a coercive way—there’s no ultimatum—but opting out isn’t really an option. Going to a Yeshiva has become as much of a requirement to leading a religious life as keeping Shabbos or Kosher. You do it because that’s what every single one of your peers is doing.

And because the modern yeshiva is designed to accommodate almost everyone, it has drastically lowered its bar accordingly. Whereas the old yeshivas demanded brilliance and produced leaders, the modern yeshiva system prioritizes inclusivity and produces a different sort of graduate—young men who are culturally steeped in Torah but rarely transformed by it. The intellectual demands are lighter, the emphasis often more on compliance than on innovation. Original thought is not typically encouraged, nor is it necessary4. Long hours may be spent in the beis midrash, but much of the learning is guided and rote5. The goal isn’t to challenge the individual or to forge a leader but to create a sense of belonging, a shared communal experience. And while there’s value in that, it’s a far cry from the intensity of the yeshiva of old.

The yeshivas of the shtetl were counter-revolutionary institutions, born out of necessity. They arose as a response to the twin threats of modernity and assimilation, designed to preserve Torah learning at a time when traditional Jewish life was under attack. To attend a yeshiva in that era was to defy societal norms, to embrace uncertainty and hardship in pursuit of a higher calling. The yeshiva was a way for exceptionally bright Jewish boys to flex their intellect all while continuing to remain in a religious environment as the pull of modernity was quite strong at that time.6

Today’s yeshiva, by contrast, is deeply enmeshed in the fabric of Jewish life. It no longer stands in defiance of the status quo; it is the status quo. Instead of being a countercultural force, the yeshiva has become a stabilizing one, ensuring continuity within a community that values uniformity and compliance over the brilliance of individual agency. The modern yeshiva is no longer the crucible that forges leaders but a pipeline that produces followers.

The question of continuity looms large here. Can today’s yeshiva, so aptly defined by accessibility and routine, truly claim to be continuing in the tradition of the Yeshiva? The outer forms remain—the seder, the shiurim, the chavrusas—but the inner fire, the intellectual spirit, seems diminished. The yeshivas of the shtetl were completely transformative. They reshaped the boys who entered their doors, often at great personal cost, but also with tremendous personal reward. The yeshivas of today are safe, comfortable, predictable. They preserve tradition, but do they inspire? They instill knowledge, but do they spark genius?

Perhaps this shift was inevitable. The democratization of yeshiva education has undoubtedly brought Torah learning to the masses in a way that was previously unimaginable. That’s no small achievement. But it’s come at a cost. In making yeshiva attendance universal, we’ve stripped it of the agency and intellectual rigor that once defined it. What was once a highly courageous choice has become a foregone conclusion. What was once a crucible of intellectual excellence has become a conveyor belt of mediocrity.

This isn’t to say that today’s yeshiva doesn’t have its pros. It plays a role in the maintenance of Jewish identity and fostering communal belonging. But it’s worth asking whether that’s enough. Can we be satisfied with a system that perpetuates itself just fine but has stopped evolving? Can we be satisfied with a system that rarely produces leaders and intellectuals of the caliber that it once did?

To my mind, these are the essential questions we7 must ask ourselves. The yeshiva will endure—of that, there’s little doubt. The real question is what kind of yeshiva education we want for our children. Will it continue to reflect the spirit of complacency that has become its modern ethos, or will it reclaim some of the brilliance, the sacrifice, and the agency that once made it great? To answer that is to chart the future of Judaism itself. And in that sense, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

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I will try to introduce the orthopraxy1 phenomena, and why it’s caused such a stir on this platform. It usually makes people quite uncomfortable.

A few days ago, a new Substack appeared on my search page by the name of the “The Lakewood Skeptic”. Written by an anonymous individual calling himself Exit982. You can read his posts here, here, and here. They are mainly about his (and some of his friends) experiences losing their belief in the traditional understanding of Judaism and the then quite horrifying day in and day out of hiding these beliefs from those around him while continuing to practice outwardly, attending Minyan, Learning, and keeping Shabbos all while being a complete Apikores.

The phenomenon of orthoprax individuals in deeply religious communities is both fascinating and deeply unsettling. It forces us to confront questions about authenticity, community, and the nature of faith itself. What does it mean to belong to a religious group if belief is absent? And more pointedly, what kind of environment continues to foster such a profound dissonance between internal conviction and external practice?

His writings struck a nerve because I know they aren’t isolated anecdotes—they’re a window into a largely unspoken reality in the frum world. While his experiences are centered in Lakewood, similar stories are whispered in other Jewish enclaves around the world. They’re the stories of people who feel trapped, who can’t reconcile what they’ve been taught with what they now believe (or don’t believe), and who live in constant flux between faith and heresy. These are individuals who go through the motions, sometimes for years, to avoid the social and familial fallout of revealing their true selves.

I’ve heard these stories firsthand. Close friends, family members, even people I would have never suspected, have shared with me these struggles. Some started questioning in high school or yeshiva when they encountered ideas that didn’t align with what they were taught. Others had their faith shaken later in life, sometimes by a book, an article, sometimes by exposure to new ways of thinking. But the common thread is this: they felt there was no room to express doubt or explore these questions openly. So, they hid. They buried their doubts and carried on as though nothing had changed, because in communities where conformity is paramount, stepping out of line can mean losing everything.

What’s particularly eye opening is how these individuals continue to perform their public religious obligations meticulously. Outwardly they daven, they learn, they observe halacha to the letter. Not out of belief, but out of a sense of duty—or perhaps out of fear. They don’t want to hurt their parents or alienate their spouses and children. They don’t want to be the cause of familial shame or risk being ostracized. So, they stay. They stay, and they suffer in silence.

But why does this phenomenon exist in the first place? Part of the answer lies in the way doubt is treated in our communities. Questions, especially big ones about the existence of G-d or the veracity of Torah, are often seen not as opportunities for growth but as threats to be quashed. There’s little room for intellectual exploration or spiritual struggle, particularly in environments where faith is treated as binary: you either believe, or you don’t. If you fall into the latter category, the assumption is that you must have done something wrong—you didn’t learn enough, you didn’t daven enough, you didn’t try hard enough. In my experience many times, these were the individuals who were most into Judaism. Unlike the “Classic OTD” phenomena, these were usually individuals who were consistently top of class.

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The education system in many yeshiva-oriented communities doesn’t help. Secular education is minimal, critical thinking isn’t encouraged, and the curriculum often focuses more on rote memorization than on engaging with the complexities of Jewish philosophy or the challenges posed by modernity. It’s no wonder that when even adults who have spent years learning Gemara encounter difficult questions—whether through books, the internet, or their own experiences—they feel ill-equipped to address them. And because doubt is stigmatized, they can’t speak openly about it; they bury it.

The result is a growing number of individuals who outwardly conform but inwardly feel alienated. They’re not just questioning; they’ve lost their belief entirely. And yet, they stay, because leaving feels even more impossible.

This is not sustainable. Communities that prioritize appearance over authenticity, that value conformity over genuine connection to faith, are setting themselves up for a crisis. You can only paper over so many cracks before the entire structure starts to crumble. And make no mistake: the cracks are there, and they’re widening.

If we’re going to address this phenomenon—and I believe we must—it starts with creating spaces where doubt isn’t taboo, where people can ask hard questions without fear of judgment or ostracization. It starts with recognizing that belief and faith aren’t static states but a journey, one that includes peaks and valleys, certainty and uncertainty. And it starts with an honest reckoning about the pressures we place on individuals to conform, often at the expense of their mental and emotional well-being.

The orthoprax phenomenon is uncomfortable because it forces us to look at ourselves and ask hard questions about the type of communities we’ve built. Are we fostering communities where people and religion can thrive, or are we creating conditions that drive people to hide who they are?

It is my opinion that we are at an inflection point in the evolution of Jewish Orthodoxy in the Post-Holocaust era and I think the Orthopraxy question will only get louder.

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Maharshal (Yam Shel Shlomo, Chullin 8:12):

…some practice Kapparos on the eve of Yom Kippur, but I find this custom to be foolish. It is dangerous and akin to non-Jewish customs. It should not be done.

Rivash (Teshuvot HaRivash 207)

It seems to me that this is an inappropriate custom, for it is close to the way of the Ammorites.

Radvaz (Teshuvot HaRadvaz 3:550)

The custom of Kapparos should be abolished, as it has no foundation in the Torah or the words of the sages.

Chacham Tzvi (Teshuvot Chacham Tzvi 77)

I have always found the custom of Kapparos difficult to justify, and it seems to me a practice that should be avoided

Pachad Yitzchak (entry on Kapparos)

Kapparos is one of the customs that does not have any grounding in Jewish law, and it should be discarded

Ohr Someach (commentary to Mishneh Torah, Teshuva 3:3)

Kapparos seems to be an unnecessary and strange custom, and in any case, it is not appropriate for those who follow the rational law

Rav Yaakov Emden (Siddur Yaavetz)

This practice is nothing but vanity and nonsense and comes from the foolishness of the masses

In the Vilna Gaon’s glosses to Shulchan Aruch 605:1, he mentions it’s similarity to the ways of the Amoorites. In Maaseh Rav (written by the students of the Gaon) 209, it is written explicitly that the Gaon refrained from the practice of Kapparos and told people not to perform the ritual although he did not publish a total ban.

Before Yom Kippur it has become a common practice in many Ashkenazi communities to perform a ritual called “כפרות” (lit. atonements). This ritual1 involves taking a chicken (or rooster depending on if the individual is male or female) and swinging it overhead while chanting “This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my atonement. This rooster (hen) will go to its death, while I will enter and proceed to a good long life and to peace.” The chicken is then supposed to be slaughtered and given to the needy.

Before getting into the origin story of this practice, in my mind even as a child there was always a very basic problem with this practice. Do we really believe that we are somehow exchanging our bad deeds of the entire year with this poor chicken and getting off scot free? Even further, what sort of G-d would entertain such a practice, let alone enshrine it to be performed before the holiest day in the Jewish calendar? I think if you were or are hearing about this practice for the first time, you would instinctively place it into a bucket with other aesthetically pagan and backwards practices.

To start, the ritual of Kapparos is not mentioned anywhere in the Torah, Prophets, or Biblical Writings. Neither is it found anywhere in the 37 volumes of the Talmud. So where exactly did this practice originate from?

Some argue that Kapparos were instituted after the Jews could no longer perform the Azazel ritual before Yom Kippur and therefore exchanged the goat sent into the wilderness for a chicken over the head. And from a simple reading of the verses this seems to make sense:

Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites, whatever their sins, putting them on the head of the goat; and it shall be sent off to the wilderness through a designated man. Thus the goat shall carry on it all their iniquities to an inaccessible region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.

(Vayikra 16:21-22)

But Maimonides makes it clear in his Guide for the Perplexed that this was not a functional practice but rather a symbolic one2:

The goat [of the Day of Atonement] that was sent [into the wilderness] (Lev. 16:20, seq.) served as an atonement for all serious transgressions more than any other sin-offering of the congregation. As it thus seemed to carry off all sins, it was not accepted as an ordinary sacrifice to be slaughtered, burnt, or even brought near the Sanctuary; it was removed as far as possible, and sent forth into a waste, uncultivated, uninhabited land. There is no doubt that sins cannot be carried like a burden, and taken off the shoulder of one being to be laid on that of another being. But these ceremonies are of a symbolic character, and serve to impress men with a certain idea, and to induce them to repent; as if to say, we have freed ourselves of our previous deeds, have cast them behind our backs, and removed them from us as far as possible.

(Moreh Nevuchim 3, 46:10)

The problem is that Kapparos seem to hold a functional value for those that practice it nowadays not a symbolic one as we see from the prayer that is said. Before we try to untangle the possible origins of this practice, I would like to present a brief section on ancient “scapegoating” practices to show just how common these practices were in pre and post biblical non-monothiestic religions and civilizations.

Zoroastrianism, which was the ancient religion of Persian people held a deeply dualistic conception of the world, where the forces of good (Ahura Mazda) and the forces of Evil (Angra Maniru) were locked in a constant struggle and human beings could affect this battle between good and evil by performing various sacrifices and rituals.

Here is an excerpt from a book written by Mary Boyce, considered the foremost authority on Zoroastrianism discussing the Varasyaji ritual of the Persians:

In the Varasyaji rite, a white bull was chosen because it represented purity and righteousness within Zoroastrian tradition. This bull was used in a complex purification ceremony, which involved the symbolic transfer of impurities onto the animal. By involving the purest of animals, Zoroastrians believed that the sins or impurities of an individual or community could be absorbed and then ritually cleansed through the death or expulsion of the bull. The white bull acted as a sacred intermediary in restoring cosmic and personal purity."

Keep in mind that Zoroastrian practice and belief is considered by some to go back close to 10,000 years,

Another example of a common scapegoating practice in the ancient near east comes from the Mesopotamian beliefs of the Babylonians and Assyrians. The ancient Babylonians and Assyrians bordered Israelites to the north. They believed in a polytheistic cosmology, whereas many gods were in control of various aspects of reality and each had to appeased. Here is Jean Bottero, a renokned expert on the ancient near east on the role of gods in the ancient near east:

"In Mesopotamian belief, the gods were neither distant nor indifferent to the plight of human beings. Rather, they were intimately involved in the running of the cosmos, governing the natural and social orders. Each god held authority over specific aspects of life, and their favor or wrath could directly impact the fortunes of individuals and communities. The need for constant ritual observance and sacrifice reflected the precariousness of human existence in a world where the gods' will determined fate."

What sort of rituals did they perform to appease their gods? Here is Thorkild Jacobsen, a Danish Mesopotamian historian to explain the Puh ritual, a ritual where an animal (generally a goat) would be used to transfer a person’s sins onto:

"The scapegoat in the puḫ ritual served as a physical vessel for the transference of guilt or ill fortune. The priest would recite incantations as the sins or impurities were placed upon the animal. Once the scapegoat had been marked by these transgressions, it would be either sacrificed to the gods as an act of expiation or sent into the wilderness, ensuring that the impurities were removed from the community."

Keep in mind that there is evidence of these rituals from pre-biblical times, dismantling the idea that these rituals could have been a cultural exchange from the Israelites.

There are tens of more examples from around the world of various ancient, usually pagan or polytheistic cultures performing similar sin transference rituals, so why exactly were Jews doing them?

The answer is that no one really knows, as we will see, even many of the Jewish sources that allow for Kapparos to be done were clearly uncomfortable with the origin of the practice.

Here are some of the Jewish sources related to the practice of Kapparos, bear in mind that the oldest source is from the late Geonic period, only 1300 years ago!

Teshuvot of Rav Shishna Gaon (9th century):

You have asked about the custom to slaughter a chicken on erev Yom Kippur, and we don't know why (or we don't know what text to attribute it to). You have also asked if there is a difference between using fowl and cattle, and this is also a difficulty....

Rashi wrote on a custom involving beans?! (Shabbat 81b):

This parpisah- It is a perforated flower pot in which people plant. In the responsa of the geonim I found that they made baskets with palm leaves and filled them with dust and dung. And 22 or 15 days before Rosh Hashanah they would make one of these for every minor in the home. And they would plant in it, Egyptian bean or another legume and they call it "porpisah". After it sprouts, on Rosh Hashanah, each takes his or her own and spins around his/her head seven times and says: "This is instead of this, this is my replacement, this is my exchange" and then flings it into the river.

but nothing on chickens.

Teshuvot HaRashba 1:295

Mar, the Master already wrote: I have found that this custom (kapparah) was widespread in our town, that they would slaughter an old chicken for the sake of atonement over a young man, they would cut its head and hang it by its feathers at the door with garlic. And this is nonsense in my eyes like the ways of the Ammorites. I've pushed this custom out and by the grace of Heaven, they listened to my word and none of these practices remain anymore in our city.

I have heard from different people from Ashkenaz who sit with us in the beit midrash (house of study) that all of the rabbis of their land do this on erev Yom Kippur...I still withheld this from our town.

The famous Shulchan Aruch, calling it a “foolish custom” that should be stopped (Orach Chaim 605:1):

That which [people] are accustomed to perform kapparah before Yom Kippur by slaughtering a rooster on each male and to say verses over it, you should prevent the custom ((and it is a foolish custom) removed from later editions)

The Rema fights back:

There are some geonim who listed this custom (as a proper custom) and likewise many of the aḥronim listed it thusly. And likewise it is the custom in all these lands,. and it is not to be changed because it is a custom of the pious.

Except that we can see that the Geonim that listed this custom said they were unsure of its origins.

Here is what is most likely going on in my opinion. Like some other very popular now Jewish rituals (Hint: Lag B’omer Bonfires) the origin of this practice lies outside of the Jewish tradition. So, what happened? Once the Jews begin spreading outside of the land of Israel after the destruction of the second temple there begins to be something of a cultural/religious exchange between the nations of the world and the Jews. This exchange is largely done by the non-learned/peasant class (as we can see from the total lack of discussion of this practice in the Talmud, the elite writings of the Jewish sages). For whatever historical reasons, this practice became very popular among the townsfolk of Ashkenaz. The Rema being the Posek Hador (legal scholar par excellence) was not comfortable condemning his entire community and therefore wrote that the practice could continue but you can see from the way he phrases his response to the Shulchan Aruch that he wasn’t necessarily excited to defend the practice, said that he was relying on older sources for backup, and went on to delineate a very specific way of performing Kapparos (probably to remove as much non-Jewish influence as possible)

If you are going to be waving a chicken over your head tonight, you now might know why!

Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.

Disraeli, the Jew Prime Minister of England, and Leader of the Conservative Party, who was always true to his race and proud of his origin, said on a well-known occasion: "The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews." Certainly when we look at the miserable state of Russia, where of all countries in the world the Jews were the most cruelly treated, and contrast it with the fortunes of our own country, which seems to have been so providentially preserved amid the awful perils of these times, we must admit that nothing that has since happened in the history of the world has falsified the truth of Disraeli's confident assertion.

Good and Bad Jews

The conflict between good and evil which proceeds unceasingly in the breast of man nowhere reaches such an intensity as in the Jewish race. The dual nature of mankind is nowhere more strongly or more terribly exemplified. We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilisation.

And it may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical.

"National" Jews

There can be no greater mistake than to attribute to each individual a recognisable share in the qualities which make up the national character. There are all sorts of men – good, bad and, for the most part, indifferent – in every country, and in every race. Nothing is more wrong than to deny to an individual, on account of race or origin, his right to be judged on his personal merits and conduct. In a people of peculiar genius like the Jews, contrasts are more vivid, the extremes are more widely separated, the resulting consequences are more decisive.

At the present fateful period there are three main lines of political conception among the Jews, two of which are helpful and hopeful in a very high degree to humanity, and the third absolutely destructive.

First there are the Jews who, dwelling in every country throughout the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life, and, while adhering faithfully to their own religion, regard themselves as citizens in the fullest sense of the State which has received them. Such a Jew living in England would say, "I am an Englishman practising the Jewish faith." This is a worthy conception, and useful in the highest degree. We in Great Britain well know that during the great struggle the influence of what may be called the "National Jews" in many lands was cast preponderatingly on the side of the Allies; and in our own Army Jewish soldiers have played a most distinguished part, some rising to the command of armies, others winning the Victoria Cross for valour.

The National Russian Jews, in spite of the disabilities under which they have suffered, have managed to play an honourable and useful part in the national life even of Russia. As bankers and industrialists they have strenuously promoted the development of Russia's economic resources and they were foremost in the creation of those remarkable organisations, the Russian Co-operative Societies. In politics their support has been given, for the most part, to liberal and progressive movements, and they have been among the staunchest upholders of friendship with France and Great Britain.

International Jews

In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

Terrorist Jews

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek – all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.

"Protector of the Jews"

Needless to say, the most intense passions of revenge have been excited in the breasts of the Russian people. Wherever General Denikin's authority could reach, protection was always accorded to the Jewish population, and strenuous efforts were made by his officers to prevent reprisals and to punish those guilty of them. So much was this the case that the Petlurist propaganda against General Denikin denounced him as the Protector of the Jews. The Misses Healy, nieces of Mr. Tim Healy, in relating their personal experiences in Kieff, have declared that to their knowledge on more than one occasion officers who committed offences against Jews were reduced to the ranks and sent out of the city to the front. But the hordes of brigands by whom the whole vast expanse of the Russian Empire is becoming infested do not hesitate to gratify their lust for blood and for revenge at the expense of the innocent Jewish population whenever an opportunity occurs. The brigand Makhno, the hordes of Petlura and of Gregorieff, who signalized their every success by the most brutal massacres, everywhere found among the half-stupefied, half-infuriated population an eager response to anti-Semitism in its worst and foulest forms.

The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has tended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with the villainies which are now being perpetrated. This is an injustice on millions of helpless people, most of whom are themselves sufferers from the revolutionary regime. It becomes, therefore, specially important to foster and develop any strongly-marked Jewish movement which leads directly away from these fatal associations. And it is here that Zionism has such a deep significance for the whole world at the present time.

A Home for the Jews

Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character. It has fallen to the British Government, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and a centre of national life. The statesmanship and historic sense of Mr. Balfour were prompt to seize this opportunity. Declarations have been made which have irrevocably decided the policy of Great Britain. The fiery energies of Dr. Weissmann, the leader, for practical purposes, of the Zionist project, backed by many of the most prominent British Jews, and supported by the full authority of Lord Allenby, are all directed to achieving the success of this inspiring movement.

Of course, Palestine is far too small to accommodate more than a fraction of the Jewish race, nor do the majority of national Jews wish to go there. But if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.

Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system. Nothing could be more significant than the fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr. Weissmann in particular. The cruel penetration of his mind leaves him in no doubt that his schemes of a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination are directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal. The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.

Duty of Loyal Jews

It is particularly important in these circumstances that the national Jews in every country who are loyal to the land of their adoption should come forward on every occasion, as many of them in England have already done, and take a prominent part in every measure for combating the Bolshevik conspiracy. In this way they will be able to vindicate the honour of the Jewish name and make it clear to all the world that the Bolshevik movement is not a Jewish movement, but is repudiated vehemently by the great mass of the Jewish race.

But a negative resistance to Bolshevism in any field is not enough. Positive and practicable alternatives are needed in the moral as well as in the social sphere; and in building up with the utmost possible rapidity a Jewish national centre in Palestine which may become not only a refuge to the oppressed from the unhappy lands of Central Europe, but which will also be a symbol of Jewish unity and the temple of Jewish glory, a task is presented on which many blessings rest.