What Might Survival Cost For Israel & Jews?

Posted on July 28, 2026 by Luke Ford

There is a strand of Jewish thought that refuses the consolation of clean hands. It asks what a people has to be willing to do to live, and it accepts that some of the answers will be ugly. The strand runs from Rambam on siege through Rav Shaul Yisraeli (1909-1995) on reprisal to Asa Kasher (b. 1940) on asymmetric war to the settlement yeshivot that publish arguments most Jews find unbearable.
At least four different intellectual acts get filed under the same heading, and they carry different weight, different evidence standards, and wildly different status returns.
There is descriptive realism, which claims to report how the enemy thinks without recommending anything. There is tragic necessity, which admits the act is wrong and argues it must be done anyway. There is doctrinal hardening, which revises the rules so the hard act becomes permitted rather than excused. And there is halakhic permission, which locates the act inside a system of divine law where the moral cost disappears into the category.

The Kedar case

On July 1, 2014, days after the bodies of Gilad Shaar, Naftali Fraenkel, and Eyal Yifrah were found, Mordechai Kedar appeared on Israel Radio‘s Hakol Diburim to discuss deterring Hamas. He said the only thing that could deter a suicide bomber is knowing that if caught, his sister or his mother would be raped. He added that it sounds bad, and that this is the Middle East. When the interviewer said Israel could not take such steps, Kedar answered that he was not talking about what Israel should do, that he was talking about facts, and that this alone would bring the man home to preserve his sister's honor.
Bar-Ilan issued a joint statement with him saying he did not call for fighting terror by any except legal and moral means, that he used hyperbole to illustrate that suicide bombers cannot be deterred, and that his words contained no recommendation to commit such acts. Kedar wrote afterward that he opposes sexual violence in every circumstance. He kept his post. He kept his forty-five-day North American speaking tour, and no organization canceled him. He said the denunciations raised his profile.
Kedar is a Bar-Ilan Arabist with twenty-five years in military intelligence and a research fellowship at the Begin-Sadat Center. He is not a crank on the subject of Arabic political language, which was his dissertation.
The move Kedar made is the signature move of descriptive realism: I report, I do not prescribe. That move is legitimate in principle. An analyst who explains why a rival society responds to shame rather than to threats of imprisonment is doing his job, and a field that punishes such description makes itself useless.
The move also has two failure points, and Kedar hit both.
The first is that his claim was not a description of anything. He was not reporting an observed practice. He was asserting a counterfactual about what would deter, which is a claim about what Israel should permit its enemies to believe. That is a recommendation wearing a lab coat. The distance between “this would work” and “we should do this” is one sentence, and the speaker leaves that sentence for someone else to write.
The second is that the empirical claim was never tested and cannot easily be tested. It flatters the speaker by making a horrifying method sound like the price of clear sight. Hard talk that costs the speaker nothing and cannot be checked is not realism. It is a performance of realism, and the market for it is large.

The serious version

The strongest hard doctrine produced by Israeli scholarship came from Kasher and Amos Yadlin (b. 1951).
In 2005 they published “Assassination and Preventive Killing,” an essay on assassination within the framework of fighting terror. Kasher is professor of professional ethics and philosophy of practice at Tel Aviv University and an academic adviser to the IDF; Yadlin was a major general who later headed military intelligence.
A state fighting in territory it does not control may prioritize its own combatants over enemy noncombatants. That inverts a settled assumption of the war convention, and it does so with an argument rather than a slogan. The state's first duty runs to its own citizens, soldiers included. Soldiers are citizens in uniform. A doctrine that spends their lives to protect the civilians of a party that deliberately embeds itself among civilians rewards the embedding.
Avishai Margalit (b. 1939) and Michael Walzer (b. 1935) answered in The New York Review of Books in May 2009, noting that Amos Harel had argued in Haaretz that February that these guidelines governed IDF conduct in the Gaza fighting. Their objection was that if the lives of our soldiers take priority over their civilians, they asked, why could our soldiers not use those civilians as shields?
Shlomo Avineri (1933-2023) entered the exchange from a third direction, arguing that Walzer and Margalit were obfuscating, that no army owes enemy civilians the care it owes its own population, and noting the exchange between Kasher and Yadlin and Moshe Halbertal and Avi Sagi in Yediot Ahronot on April 10 of that year. Critics in Israel gave the new doctrine a nickname: license to kill.
Daniel Statman at Haifa has defended targeted killing on similar ground with more philosophical care. Yitzhak Benbaji at Tel Aviv works the contractarian foundations of the war convention. These men are doing hard work without hard talk, which is why almost nobody outside philosophy has heard of them.

Halbertal holds both ends

Moshe Halbertal helped write the IDF code of ethics. He also wrote a long critique of the Goldstone Report that defends Israeli conduct against what he considered a false standard while conceding failures. He argues against Kasher and Yadlin on the priority question and argues against Israel's foreign critics on proportionality. He accepts that asymmetric urban war generates situations where every available choice is wrong and insists that the wrongness stays wrong.
That is tragic necessity in its adult form. The act may be required. The requirement does not launder it. A man who does the necessary thing has still done the thing, and the residue is his to carry.
This position has the highest intellectual standing in the field and produces the fewest disciples. Randall Collins predicts that. Young men do not organize around a teacher whose message is that they will be guilty either way.

The halakhic line

In 1953 and 1954, Rav Shaul Yisraeli published “Takrit Kibiyah le-or ha-halakhah” in Ha-Torah ve-ha-Medinah, later expanded as chapter sixteen of Amud HaYemini. The occasion was the Qibya raid, an Israeli reprisal on a Jordanian-held village after months of cross-border killing, culminating in the murder of a mother and her two children in Yehud. Dozens of civilians died at Qibya and much of the village was destroyed.
Yisraeli composed the essay to justify the operation, arguing it was a battle in an ongoing war of revenge against hostile neighbors and sanctioned by halakhah. His position was controversial because it endorsed violence against civilians in wartime and because halakhah appeared to contain no precedent for wars of revenge. He constructed a new category, milhemet nakamah.
He also drew a line. Even inside that category, targeting civilians from the outset stays forbidden. He accepted collateral death without affirming total war.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994) wrote “After Qibiyeh,” the more famous response and the one every educated Jew has heard of. Gerald Blidstein judged Yisraeli's the more important of the two, measured by influence over time, because Yisraeli introduced most of the halakhic tools still used to argue about hostile civilian populations.
The essay that condemns is remembered. The essay that permits is used.
Rav Yisraeli was a dayan on the rabbinical high court and later rosh yeshiva at Merkaz HaRav. He was the establishment, doing the establishment's hardest work, and the tradition of source-driven argument about civilian risk that now runs through Religious Zionist responses to Gaza descends from him.

Where the floor gives way

In 2009 the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva in Yitzhar published Torat HaMelech by Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, a 230-page halakhic compendium on when a Jew may kill a non-Jew. Among its claims: that the prohibition on murder as stated in the Decalogue governs a Jew killing a Jew, and that the children of Israel's enemies may be killed on the reasoning that they will grow up to harm us. Yitzchak Ginsburgh and Dov Lior (b. 1933) endorsed it. Yehuda Bauer (1926-2024) called the book a mortal danger to the Jewish people.
Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein closed the investigation in May 2012 for want of evidence supporting an indictment for incitement to racism and violence. He found the racist content severe and the grounds for conviction absent, because the incitement statute exempts religious study. The High Court later ordered him to explain why the authors and endorsers had not been charged. The court said it was hard to doubt the racist approach of the authors. All four rabbis drew state salaries at a state-funded yeshiva.
A liberal state gave the most extreme halakhic argument in circulation a legal shelter that no secular argument of comparable content could obtain. Kedar needed a university to defend him. Shapira needed only the category of Torah study.
Ginsburgh's network is the one place in the Jewish world where willingness to say the unbearable is fully institutionalized, with yeshivot, publishing, communities, music, and disciples. He has the school. He does not have access to the general attention space, and he does not want it. His circle produces elaborators rather than falsifiers, which is what a school with a protected premise produces.

The diaspora register

Ruth Wisse (b. 1936) made the argument in a different key in Jews and Power. Jewish political weakness was converted over centuries into a moral achievement, and that conversion left Jews unfit for the exercise of power once they had it. Her target is the sentiment that treats powerlessness as innocence. She paid at Harvard in social standing and gained a devoted readership on the right.
Walzer invented the modern doctrine of supreme emergency in Just and Unjust Wars, the argument that a community facing annihilation may cross a line it may not otherwise cross, and he built it around the Blitz. Then he spent decades refusing to grant Israel that license in situations Israelis considered qualifying. A man may hold both. Whether he can hold both without special pleading is the question his critics keep asking.

Four tests

The genre is full of men who mistake brutality for candor. Some tests separate them.
Does the argument specify a floor? Yisraeli forbade targeting civilians at the outset. Kasher and Yadlin bound their priority claim to territory outside state control. Torat HaMelech has no floor, which is why it is not serious halakhah even where it cites real sources.
Does the speaker carry a cost, or only assign one? Halbertal's position costs him. Kedar's cost him nothing and paid a dividend.
Is the empirical claim checkable? Deterrence claims are the most abused in the genre because they can be asserted forever and tested never.
Would the argument survive publication in full, in context, to a hostile audience?

What the status economy rewards

Hard talk in the media market pays well, costs little, and produces no disciples. Hard doctrine inside the Israeli academy buys real institutional influence, real reputational damage abroad, and a handful of students. Hard halakhah inside a settlement yeshiva enjoys total legal and communal protection, generates genuine disciples, and forfeits any claim on the wider conversation. Tragic realism earns the highest respect from serious people and builds nothing.
The more responsible the position, the fewer the followers. Collins would say that a school needs an enemy it can defeat, and tragedy offers no victory to organize around. So the men who think most carefully about what survival might cost are the men least able to reproduce themselves, and the men least careful are the ones with yeshivot.
Since October 7 the stakes on this have risen. Religious rhetoric about Amalek, once an internal idiom, has been quoted back to Israel in international legal proceedings. That is the modern condition for every one of these arguments. Nothing stays in the beit midrash. A halakhic category invented for a border reprisal in 1953 now gets read by lawyers in The Hague.
If the hard thing is true, it should be sayable in the open, in full, with the limits attached and the cost admitted.

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If Mearsheimer Is Right

Posted on July 28, 2026 by Luke Ford

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…

If Mearsheimer is right, then the entire edifice of liberal political theory, liberal journalism, liberal education, liberal foreign policy, and liberal institutional self-understanding rests on a fundamental mistake about what humans are.

Men are social before they are anything else. Survival runs through the group. Reason ranks third behind innate sentiment and socialization, and it arrives late, after a long childhood during which the family and the surrounding society have already performed an enormous value infusion. A man has limited choice in formulating a moral code because most of his sense of right and wrong was installed before he could evaluate anything.

Grant all of it. What happens to Torah?

The first thing that happens is that most of the field’s prestige projects lose their footing. The second thing is that the value of Torah study goes up.

Analytic Jewish philosophy takes the hardest hit. The project of testing revelation, chosenness, and divine command as propositions under contemporary scrutiny assumes that a man can reason his way to or from a religious commitment. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says reason is the weakest of the three engines and the last to arrive. The Orthodox philosopher who follows the argument wherever it leads has, in the overwhelming majority of cases, already been formed to arrive where he arrives. The record supports this. The circle around the Association for the Philosophy of Judaism has produced sophisticated argument and almost no defections. Under Mearsheimer’s account that is what you expect from a group of men socialized into a tradition, working with the third-ranked instrument, on questions whose answers their formation settled decades earlier.

The moral critique of Torah loses its standing next. If moral knowledge comes from inborn sentiment and socialization, then the modern intuitions that indict Torah on slavery, Amalek, gender hierarchy, and the treatment of gentiles are products of a particular formation. Postwar Western liberal formation, to be exact, and Mearsheimer’s whole book is an argument that this formation mistook itself for a discovery about all human beings everywhere. Samuel Moyn (b. 1972), whom Mearsheimer quotes on how human rights came to define the highest aspirations of movements and states, has spent a career showing how recent that vocabulary is.

So the question “can Torah be morally wrong” becomes a question about whose sentiments are doing the judging and what installed them.

The traditionalist wins nothing here. His intuitions are also installed. Mearsheimer’s anthropology does not adjudicate between moral codes.

The authority problem dissolves. The deepest question in the field, as we mapped it, is how a historically produced text acquires transcendent authority. That question assumes obedience requires a warrant. Mearsheimer says obedience never worked that way for anybody. Men obey because the people who raised them obeyed and because the group they need in order to live expects it. Benjamin Sommer’s model of revelation and Ethan Tucker’s account of obligation are elegant answers to a question that only becomes urgent for people already loose enough from their formation to ask it. The question is a symptom rather than a problem.

That also explains the secular failure. The earlier map said the secular world has no persuasive theory of command without a commander. On this frame, nobody ever had a theory of command. Secular batei midrash produce readers rather than obligated men because they supply text without supplying the childhood, the endogamy, the calendar, the sanctions, and the burial society. The missing thing is density of formation.

One figure moves to the center under this frame.

Moshe Koppel argues that halakhah works like a first language. A native speaker knows what sounds right before he can state the rule. Communities, practices, intuitions, and exemplars carry the tradition, and codes and ideologies come second. That is Mearsheimer’s value infusion during a long childhood, restated in halakhic terms by a man who arrived at it independently.

Koppel becomes the most important living theorist of Torah if Mearsheimer is right. Not Lebens, who reasons. Not Sommer, who models. Koppel, who describes how transmission happens.

Rav Shagar rises for a different reason. He built a religious language for men whose formation had cracked and who could not repair it by argument. That is the correct response to a partial socialization failure. You cannot reason a deracinated man back into a tradition. You can give him a way to stand inside practice without the certainty he lost. Yishai Mevorach’s theology of absence is the same instrument in a harsher key.

And the Haredim rise, which is the finding nobody in the liberal or Modern Orthodox world wants. Near-total socialization density. Low individualism. High sacrifice for the group. Thin rational apologetics. Enormous demographic success. Modern Orthodoxy invested in synthesis and rational defense and does worse. Liberal Judaism maximized individual autonomy and does worst. Under Mearsheimer’s anthropology that ordering is precisely what the model predicts, and the model was not built to flatter anyone.

Mearsheimer explains group survival through security, territory, and state power. Jews survived close to two millennia without any of the three. No army, no borders, no sovereign. On a strict realist account that should not happen.

What did the work was Torah. A portable, textual, ritually saturated formation system that reproduced a people across dispersion, hostile hosts, and repeated destruction. It maintained endogamy, a calendar, a legal order, a language, and a lifelong labor that consumed the intelligence of the group’s ablest men. It is the only known technology for maintaining tribal cohesion without territory over that span.

That reframes Shaul Magid’s exile argument. Strip the theology and it becomes a sociological claim: diaspora forced the development of a formation system so strong it did not need a state, and sovereignty introduced a substitute that might weaken the original. You need not accept his politics to see that the empirical question is real and open.

If Mearsheimer is right, the value of studying Torah is that Torah is the most tested continuously operating socialization system on earth.

The old list of live questions was theological. This one is not.

What is the minimum density required to transmit? Which components are essential and which are ornamental? Endogamy, a distinct language, a full calendar, real sanctions on exit, a text demanding lifetime labor, immersion coextensive with childhood. Hadar is running one version of this experiment. Chabad another. Bnei Brak a third. Nobody compares them with any rigor.

Can a community that teaches its children the critical account of the text still produce adults who obey? This is the real version of the revelation question. Not whether revelation survives criticism as a proposition, but whether formation survives criticism as a practice. TheTorah.com is the natural test case and the results are not in. This question is more consequential than anything in the analytic literature and almost nobody is asking it, because asking it requires treating one’s own community as a subject of study.

What does Torah know about relations between groups once universalism stops being the default? The tradition thought about Jews and gentiles for three thousand years without liberal assumptions. Noahide law, ger toshav, the resident alien, the laws of war, the obligations owed to those outside the covenant. Under liberal assumptions this material reads as an embarrassment to be minimized. Under Mearsheimer’s assumptions it becomes a developed body of thought about how a particular people manages real obligations to outsiders without pretending outsiders are insiders. The liberal frame makes the material look reactionary. The nationalist frame treats it as ammunition. Neither reads it. This is the largest unworked seam in the field.

What restrains a people when restraint cannot come from universal rights? Mearsheimer removes the external check. His own answer to what limits a nationalist state is prudence and the balance of power. Torah limits are internal, ancient, and binding on men who do not care what The Hague thinks. Rav Shaul Yisraeli’s floor. Rambam on siege. Bal tashchit. The prohibition on wanton destruction. A serious account of internal restraint under conditions where nobody can enforce it from outside would be a contribution to political theory. No one has written it.

Mearsheimer explains why men believe. He does not establish that what they believe is false. God either spoke at Sinai or He did not, and no amount of sociology settles it. Lebens and Segal’s enterprise survives as a small, honest undertaking for the handful of men whose temperament requires it. It stops being the center of the field and becomes one room in it.

You were formed by something before you could evaluate anything. You will be run by that formation whether you inspect it or not. Studying Torah is the only available way to get any purchase on the operating system you are already running, because it is the system, laid out for examination, by men who spent their lives on it.

It binds you to the living people who study it. The study is itself the transmission. What we described earlier as interaction ritual is Mearsheimer’s socialization watched at close range, and a man who studies with a chavruta twice a week is not gathering information. He is being made.

It gives you a moral vocabulary with three thousand years of stress testing rather than seventy years of rights talk. Selection is not proof. A code that has survived that long has been selected for something, and fitness is evidence even where it is not truth.

If socialization determines moral code and reason is weak, then a preference for uncomfortable truth is socialized. The man who prizes candor over consolation belongs to a small subculture that rewards candor, and he is doing coalition work for it while believing he has escaped coalition work.

The reply is in Mearsheimer’s own conduct. He wrote a book of arguments against the primacy of argument. He must believe reason moves men at the margin, or the writing makes no sense. The margin is small and it is where every intellectual life happens. Torah study, done with your eyes open, is margin work performed inside an engine that runs on something else.

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Forty Thousand

Posted on July 28, 2026 by Luke Ford

Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard first hears the name in the checkout line at the market on Pico, from a woman who has been at the Barn eleven years and who puts her hand on his forearm to tell him that her daughter has started going to a young rabbi in Culver City and that he is a beautiful person.

“Beautiful,” Grossbard says.

“You should meet him. You’d love him.”

“I’d eat him.”

“Rabbi.”

By November he has heard the name forty times.

Rabbi Yoni Belfer, thirty four, Teaneck by way of the Gush, six foot two, runs the loop at Cheviot Hills four mornings a week, and has a full head of hair that he does not appear to know about. He and his wife Shira started Ahavas Reim in a storefront on Washington between a pilates studio and a shop that sells CBD chews for dogs. Sixty families now. Young ones, priced out of Pico, pushing strollers eleven blocks each way because there is nowhere closer.

He takes forty thousand dollars a year. He mentions this only when asked, and he is asked constantly.

He cried on the second day of Rosh Hashanah in front of two hundred people, in the middle of his own drasha, about his grandfather, and he did not apologize for it or turn it into a joke, and the room loved him. Nobody at the Barn has ever seen Grossbard’s face do anything he did not schedule.

The rabbi in Teaneck publishes a piece in December called The Rabbi We Deserve. It does not name Grossbard once and it is about nothing else. He was Belfer’s rabbi growing up. He has found his weapon and he intends to use it for a decade.

Belfer emails Grossbard the day it runs. Subject line: I’m sorry. Body: I didn’t know he was writing that, I asked him to take it down, he won’t, and I wanted you to hear it from me. Grossbard reads it twice and forwards it to nobody, which for him is an act of enormous restraint.

Belfer comes to the Wednesday class in January and sits in the back with his coat on.

Grossbard is doing the first mishnah in Kiddushin, and he has the room where he wants it, and at the end Belfer raises his hand and asks a question that is earnest and about half a question. Barry Teitelbaum turns around in his chair to watch what happens next.

What happens next is that Grossbard takes the question seriously for four minutes, finds the good version of it, gives Belfer the credit for the good version, and waves off two better questions from the front row to stay with it.

Adina Reiss writes one word on her legal pad and underlines it.

They go for coffee afterward at the place on Robertson that stays open, and Grossbard runs the bit at him for twenty minutes, because he cannot help it and because he wants to see what the kid does with it. Section two. The rate card. The forty thousand is a salary, Yoni, it gets paid in being the man who takes forty thousand, and every person who tells you they admire it has just made a deposit.

Belfer stirs his coffee.

“You sat with Bernie Klausner for nine nights,” he says.

“They pay me.”

“Okay,” Belfer says.

Grossbard waits for the rest. There is no rest. Belfer drinks his coffee and asks about the eruv, because Culver City doesn’t have one and he is about to spend four years getting one, and he wants to know who at the city Grossbard called.

Nobody has ever done that. Everyone argues. Thirty years of people arguing, and this one says okay and moves on, and Grossbard drives home on Robertson at eleven at night having decided that he likes him, which is inconvenient.

The Journal runs the piece in February. Two Rabbis, Two Los Angeleses. A photograph of Belfer in a folding chair in the storefront holding one of his kids, and a photograph of Grossbard at the bimah with his mouth open. Ezra Malik, seventeen, starts doing Belfer along with Grossbard, and the Belfer is warm and gentle and outperforms the Grossbard, and Ezra’s agent tells him to lean into the Belfer.

At the federation panel in March they put the two of them on a stage with a moderator from a think tank, and four hundred people buy tickets, and every one of them has come to watch Grossbard eat him.

He could do it in a sentence. He has the sentence by the eleven minute mark, when Belfer says something about learning for its own sake with three holes in it, and the sentence would be the funniest thing said in Los Angeles that year, and half that room would tell the story for twenty years.

He sets him up instead. He asks about the strollers on Washington. He gets Belfer talking about a family with a son in a wheelchair who moved from Beverlywood so they could walk to a shul on the flat, and Belfer tells it without weeping and without performing, and by the end of it four hundred people have forgotten there was supposed to be a fight.

Marla Feig finds Grossbard by the coat check.

“You had him.”

“I had him.”

“Why.”

“I liked what he said about the wheelchair.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“No,” Grossbard says. “It isn’t.”

Belfer calls the house in June. Not the office. The house, at nine at night, which is how Grossbard knows.

They meet at the Coffee Bean on Pico at 6:30 in the morning because that is when Belfer is up. Grossbard has not been awake at 6:30 without a levaya in four years.

Beth Yeshurun in Hancock Park has offered Belfer the pulpit. Four hundred families, old money, older building, a shul that has buried three rabbis and outlived two more. A hundred and sixty five thousand plus the house on Detroit Street. They want an answer in three weeks.

“Shira’s due in October,” Belfer says. “The landlord on Berryman is selling. Four kids, forty thousand dollars, and my father in law has paid the day school tuition for two years and calls it a gift.”

“How much of it does he tell people.”

“All of it,” Belfer says, and looks at the table.

Grossbard lets it sit.

“So take it.”

“I built Ahavas Reim out of nothing. Sixty families. Eleven of them moved to Culver City because I told them to. I told the Kaufmans to buy on Berryman, in my kitchen, to their faces.” He turns his cup around. “I stood up on Rosh Hashanah and said things about what a shul is, and two hundred people heard me say it. If I go to Hancock Park for money, every one of those things becomes something I said before I got a better offer.”

“Correct.”

“So tell me what to do.”

“You want me to tell you what to do.”

“I want the truth,” Belfer says. “You’re the only man in this city who gives it. That’s why I’m sitting here at six thirty in the morning.”

Grossbard looks at him a long time.

Here is the truth, and it takes eleven seconds. The forty thousand is the best asset the kid owns and he does not know he owns it. Every dollar he leaves on the table comes back at four to one in the coin he spends, which is being the rabbi who leaves it. He has built a following out of a renunciation he believes is not a strategy, and the belief is what makes it work, because a man performing humility gets found out in ten months and Belfer has never performed anything in his life. He should take the money and stop pricing his soul in a currency his children cannot eat. And by fifty, if he stays, he will hate those sixty families for what they let him do to his own kids, and he will not know that is what he feels, and it will come out sideways at his wife.

A minute. It would take a minute to say.

It would also take the man apart, because what comes out the other end of that minute is a rabbi who knows he has been running a play, and Belfer running a play he can see is worth nothing to anyone, starting with the wheelchair family on Washington, who are getting the real article this morning for free.

“Yoni. Look at me.”

“I’m looking at you.”

“Ahavas Reim doesn’t need you anymore. Nobody’s told you that. You built it and it’s built. Sixty families who walk eleven blocks will walk eleven blocks whether you stand there or not, and if you stay ten more years the only thing that changes is that they get used to you.” He leans in. “Beth Yeshurun has four hundred families and three dead rabbis and nobody home. Nobody. They’ve run on a building and a cantor since 2009. Four hundred people sitting in the dark in a beautiful room on Detroit Street. That’s your wheelchair family. There’s four hundred of them and they’ve been waiting seventeen years.”

Belfer stares at him.

“You think I should go for them.”

“I think you’re the only man in this city who’d go for them.”

Belfer puts both hands over his face. When he takes them down his eyes are wet and he does not apologize.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

Grossbard drives to the Barn and sits in the lot six or seven minutes before he goes in.

Dina asks that night how the coffee went.

“I lied to a rabbi.”

“Which part was the lie.”

“None of the parts. Every sentence was true.” He hangs up his jacket. “The arrangement was the lie.”

“Did it help him?”

“It’ll hold for about fifteen years.”

“Then it’s fine,” Dina says, and goes back to the crossword.

Belfer takes Beth Yeshurun in July. He tells Ahavas Reim from the bimah on a Shabbos morning in a storefront on Washington with the air conditioning failing, and he says that a community that can only exist while he stands in the middle of it was never a community, and that there are four hundred people on Detroit Street who have sat in the dark since 2009, and he says it the way he says everything, like a man who has never had a second thought in his life.

Grossbard stands at the back by the door and listens to his own argument come out of a better looking man’s mouth and watches two hundred people receive it as revelation.

The rabbi in Teaneck writes that Belfer has been called to a greater vineyard. Ezra Malik does the drasha that night and it goes to two million, and Belfer’s version becomes the version, and it will be quoted at Belfer’s funeral.

He is very good at Beth Yeshurun. Better than anyone expected, better than Grossbard expected, and Grossbard expected a great deal.

Three years in, at a bar mitzvah kiddush in the social hall on Detroit Street, Rabbi Yoni Belfer tells four hundred people that nobody in the room does one single thing for free, himself first, and gets a big laugh.

He does not know where he got it.

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Vox Day

Posted on July 28, 2026 by Luke Ford

He works out of an unfinished apartment in an industrial park.
The village is Cressier, in the canton of Fribourg, about twenty minutes from Murten, and the building has bare concrete where the floors should be. In one room there is a gym. In another there are cardboard boxes of leather stamped Made in Korea. Down in the basement, an employee feeds printed book blocks into a binding machine and burns the cover designs on with a laser. The company binds about fifteen hundred books a month, the owner says, and next year he wants ten times that.
The owner is Theodore Robert Beale (b. August 21, 1968), who writes as Vox Day. In December 2025 a reporter and a photographer from the Swiss public broadcaster's international service came to see him, because his blog draws better than half a million visits a month, mostly American, and because a term he invented on that blog in 2010 has since become a genre of TikTok video for boys who have never heard of him. The reporter asked about the label most often attached to him. Beale said the label was the wrong one. “I reject the Enlightenment,” he told him, and offered that as the correct grounds for objection.
A few hundred meters away stands the other property he owns in the village, a château of pale stone with frescoed salons and a large garden, listed by the Confederation as a cultural asset of national importance. When he bought it, the tabloid Blick announced that an American had turned a Swiss castle into a neo-Nazi stronghold. What has actually happened there since is that the municipal library held a bilingual story night for local families.
Both facts belong in the same paragraph. Keeping them there is the difficulty of writing about him.

Minnesota money

Robert Beale founded Comtrol Corporation, a Maple Grove computer hardware firm, and ran it as chairman and chief executive. He lived in North Oaks. He was a leader in his church and worked as a youth minister. In 1988 he served as Minnesota campaign manager for Pat Robertson (1930-2023), the television evangelist, during Robertson's run for the Republican presidential nomination. There were four sons.
That is the world Theodore Beale grew up in: Twin Cities technology money, evangelical Protestantism, Republican Party organizing done from a suburb with private roads. He went to Bucknell and graduated in 1990, having taken economics and East Asian studies. Both stuck. He has spent thirty years making large economic forecasts and thinking about civilizations as durable units rather than as collections of interchangeable people.
His father's arc ran the other way, and ran late. In the 1990s Robert Beale developed a theory that he did not owe federal income tax. Between 2000 and 2004 he routed some $5.6 million of Comtrol compensation through an entity called Chayil, a Hebrew word meaning strength or valor, and reported none of it. He forged a certificate releasing an IRS lien on his Florida house and filed it with the Collier County clerk, who believed it. Indicted in 2006, he failed to appear on the morning of trial and stayed gone fourteen months. During that time he moved $100,000 inside a Swiss bank in Comtrol's name, wired $50,000 to Florida, and tried and failed to move $700,000 more. He used the same cell phone for eleven months and called his family with it. His ex-wife called the police. Agents took him in an Office Depot parking lot in Orlando on November 1, 2007, without incident.
Sitting in county jail at sixty-four, in an orange jumpsuit, he told a Star Tribune reporter that using the one phone had been a really dumb mistake. His wife had divorced him and taken the assets. One of his other sons had removed him from the company. He was convicted on all seven counts on April 30, 2008, and drew eleven years and two months, with more added for a scheme to have the federal judge arrested by the provost marshal of his own common-law court. The Eighth Circuit affirmed in 2009, observing that his views on the constitutional order were not mistakes about what the law is but disagreements about what it should be.
The crimes are the father's. His son was thirty-eight, living in Europe, and had nothing to do with any of it. But two habits of mind pass down the line intact: the conviction that the governing institutions are illegitimate, and the practice of building a private structure to route around them.

Silicon Jesus

In 1987 Beale played keyboards in a Minneapolis cover band called NoBoys. At a club called The Underground he met Paul Sebastien, born Paul Skrowaczewski, whose father Stanisław Skrowaczewski (1923-2017) had conducted the Minnesota Orchestra for a decade. They started a duo, added the drummer Michael Larson and the engineer Daniel Lenz, and called it Psykosonik. They recorded in Sebastien's apartment and played First Avenue, the 7th Street Entry, and Prince's Glam Slam.
The record deal came through Wax Trax!, the Chicago industrial label, distributed by TVT. The 1993 debut carried tracks titled “Welcome to My Mind,” “Silicon Jesus,” “Teknojihad,” and “I Am God.” The music was cyberpunk techno with pop hooks, arriving in the same season as Nirvana and Green Day. They had four singles reach the Billboard dance club top forty, took a rotation on MTV, played Lollapalooza, and put a song into a Super Nintendo game. A second album, Unlearn, came in 1995. Beale left after 1994.
He was twenty-five and had already learned the lesson he would spend the rest of his life applying: an artifact made by four people in an apartment could reach a national chart without anyone's permission.
In 1993 he and Andrew Lunstad founded a Minnesota game studio, Fenris Wolf. Beale designed and produced Rebel Moon and Rebel Moon Rising, first-person shooters about lunar colonists fighting a United Nations authority. GT Interactive published them. Development of a third game, Rebel Moon Revolution, ended in February 1999 in litigation: Fenris Wolf sued for $1.7 million alleging breach of contract, GT answered that the developer had missed the ninth milestone and had been offered a path to fix it. The studio closed that year. Beale told GameSpot he was already talking to other publishers.
Then he and Lunstad made The War in Heaven, a Christian game about angels and demons, and Beale turned the same material into his first novel.

Eleven years at WorldNetDaily

The column began shortly after September 11 and ran until the end of 2012. WorldNetDaily billed him as a Christian libertarian, and for a decade that description held. He wrote against the Patriot Act, against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, against the Federal Reserve, against the Republican leadership, against free trade, gun control, feminism, and the expanding federal bureaucracy. Two books came out of the period: The Irrational Atheist (2008), which took apart the arguments of Richard Dawkins (b. 1941), Sam Harris (b. 1967), and Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), and The Return of the Great Depression (2009), which predicted a long global contraction that did not arrive on schedule.
Read the libertarian columns now and the later material is already sitting inside them. In a 2006 piece he quoted Ephesians on the struggle against principalities and powers in the heavenly realms. His farewell column in December 2012 dropped the political register entirely: Satan and his minions rule this fallen world, he wrote, and told readers to place their trust in Christ rather than in governments, guns, or gold. The “Clown World” vocabulary he adopted years later was a harder version of a position he had held the whole time.
In 2009 he also designed a computer mouse. It had eighteen buttons, an analog thumbstick, 512K of onboard memory, and support for sixty-three application profiles. It shipped first as the OpenOfficeMouse and then, in black, as the WarMouse Meta, at about eighty dollars. The company's press release quoted its lead designer, Theodore Beale, on the reaction: three emails had produced three million website hits over a weekend, and nobody believed an eighteen-button mouse could be anything other than a joke. “It's real, it's brutal,” he said. Reviewers found it the most advanced mouse they had ever seen and close to unusable. Early buyers had to be sent replacements. By 2012 it was gone.
The object is a fair portrait of the maker. Take a standard interface that two hundred million people accept without thinking. Refuse the standard. Replace it with something the user controls completely, at the cost of everything the standard was doing for him.

The tweet

In 2013 Beale ran for president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America against Steven Gould (b. 1955), to succeed John Scalzi (b. 1969). He lost roughly ninety to ten.
That June, at the Continuum convention in Melbourne, N. K. Jemisin (b. 1972) gave the guest of honor speech. She mentioned that about a tenth of the SFWA membership had voted for a man she described as a self-declared misogynist, racist, and antisemite, and argued that silence around such people is a form of enabling them. She did not name him.
Beale answered on his blog. He called Jemisin an “ignorant half-savage,” argued that Black Americans were less civilized than white Americans, and wrote that self-defense laws exist so that whites can defend their lives and property from people like her. In the surrounding exchanges he called the editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden (b. 1956) a fat frog. Then he pushed a link to the post through @SFWAauthors, the organization's promotional Twitter feed, which members could use to promote their own work.
The feed was the hinge. Writers had spent years complaining about him and getting nowhere, because a private blog is a private blog. Using the association's own channel to broadcast the post converted a matter of opinion into a matter of governance. Within hours, members were writing to their regional directors demanding expulsion. SFWA deleted the tweet, appointed an investigator, took his written response, consulted counsel and past presidents, and on August 13, 2013 the board voted unanimously to remove him. Gould's letter cited the Massachusetts bylaws. The board's public statement never named him. Beale named himself, published both the report and his reply, and signed off by saying he would find the wherewithal to soldier on somehow.
Two readings of that month have coexisted ever since without touching. In one, a professional association enforced a minimal rule: do not use the organization's platform to attack a member in racial terms. In the other, an ideological body expelled a dissident and proved that reform from within was impossible. Beale did not choose between them. He chose the second and monetized it.

Spokane

Larry Correia (b. 1977) started Sad Puppies in 2013 on a narrower complaint: that the Hugo Awards had drifted toward fiction admired by a small literary circle and away from books people buy. Brad Torgersen (b. 1974) ran the third campaign in 2015.
Beale launched Rabid Puppies on February 2, 2015, one day after the Sad Puppies list appeared. The lists overlapped. His differed in two respects. It included Castalia House titles and his own name, and it came with an instruction: nominate them exactly as they are.
It worked. Puppy picks took most of the ballot, several categories entirely. What followed was the largest mobilization in the history of the World Science Fiction Society. Nearly six thousand of the eligible members voted, up from about thirty-six hundred the year before.
The convention was Sasquan, in Spokane, the third week of August. Wildfire smoke sat over eastern Washington so thickly that attendees coughed their way between panel rooms and some gave up and went back to their hotels. Saturday morning the wind shifted and the sky cleared. That evening at the INB Performing Arts Center, David Gerrold (b. 1944) and Tananarive Due (b. 1966) hosted the ceremony. Five times they opened an envelope and read No Award. Before 1977 the members had done that five times in the entire history of the prize. The two hosts moved through those categories fast and looked uncomfortable doing it. The audience, spread across three large rooms, cheered every one.
Beale watched from Switzerland and declared victory. His opponents had preferred to burn the award rather than let outsiders win it, he wrote, which proved his account of them. The other side counted the ballots and saw a voluntary association refusing a slate by a margin of better than five to one.
Both are true and neither is the useful part. The useful part is that the Hugos are an election, and the Puppies ran an experiment on its rules. Anyone could nominate for the price of a supporting membership. The nominating stage used plurality counting across a very long list of eligible works, which meant a few hundred coordinated ballots could sweep a category that ordinarily fragmented across dozens of titles. The final stage used instant-runoff with a No Award option, which meant a large majority could annihilate anything the minority had put through. Beale found the first weakness with real precision and had no answer to the second.
The Business Meeting responded like an electoral reform commission. It passed E Pluribus Hugo, a single divisible vote with least popular elimination, which splits each nominator's ballot among his picks so that bloc voting buys less; and 5-and-6, which lets each member nominate five works while six become finalists. Both were ratified in 2016 and took effect in 2017. Beale ran another slate in 2016 and placed sixty-one picks on the ballot, then shifted to bullet voting once the algorithm arrived, which held him to one finalist per category, most of them below No Award. By 2017 all eighteen categories produced winners.
Science fiction fandom, arguing at a hotel business meeting for two summers, adopted a proportional nomination method that political scientists rarely see implemented anywhere. That belongs in the literature on voting systems and it is almost never cited there.
Gamergate ran alongside all of this and enlarged the field. Beale supported it early, wrote about its tactics, and went to a gathering in Paris in the summer of 2015, where a French reporter found among the attendees a Belgian in his thirties who had traveled specifically to discuss socio-sexual theory with him and had no interest in video games whatsoever. Gamergate did not create Rabid Puppies. It supplied the demonstration that diffuse online anger could be pointed at an institution and held there.

The doctrine and the firm

Castalia House began in 2014. It publishes military science fiction and fantasy, political polemic, translations, and reissued classics, and it gave Beale control of selection, editing, pricing, the customer list, and eventually the physical binding. Arkhaven Comics extended it into illustrated work. The Castalia Library and the smaller Libraria sell subscriptions to leather-bound editions.
SJWs Always Lie (2015) and SJWs Always Double Down (2017) supplied the operating manual. The argument: ideological activists enter an institution, learn its procedural language, convert professional norms into political tests, isolate dissenters, and end up controlling hiring and membership. The advice is tactical. Document everything. Never apologize under pressure, because the apology is the evidence. Never concede in the hope of being spared. Remove them before they remove you.
The books sold because a large number of people had watched some version of that happen and had never seen it described in operational terms. They also built a closed loop. Criticism of Beale becomes evidence that the critic is part of the capture. Commercial failure becomes sabotage. Rejection by any professional body confirms the body is compromised. The framework teaches its readers to notice a real pattern and simultaneously destroys their ability to distinguish it from ordinary quality control, ordinary market indifference, or ordinary personal dislike.
Infogalactic applied the same move to knowledge. Launched in October 2016 as a fork of Wikipedia's content on Wikipedia's own software, it invited users to revise articles under different sourcing standards. It never came near Wikipedia's scale, and by the mid-2020s Beale was writing that the way forward was machine generation rather than editors. The principle it embodied outlasted the site. When he decides an institution cannot be reformed, he copies it and walks.
Alt-Hero, launched in October 2017, showed how well the audience could be converted. Kickstarter declined the project. It ran instead on Freestartr, a crowdfunding platform built for material other services would not host, and closed at about $245,000 from a stated 2,190 backers, roughly ten times its goal. Chuck Dixon (b. 1954), co-creator of Bane and one of the most prolific writers in the history of American comics, signed on. Journalists at NPR's Reveal later noted that the pledge pattern was unusual, with many anonymous contributions in very large increments, on a private platform with no public accounting. Nobody outside the operation can confirm the figures. That is true of nearly every number Beale's companies publish.

Sigma

Around 2010 and 2011 he took the alpha and beta division that circulated in men's online forums, called it overly simplistic, and expanded it into a socio-sexual hierarchy with six ranks: alpha, beta, delta, gamma, omega, and sigma. The sigma was the man with an alpha's capacities who declines to compete inside the hierarchy at all.
The taxonomy is not a validated model of personality and does not pretend to derive from one. Its force is mythic and autobiographical. It converts exclusion into election. A man who has been thrown out of an organization is not below the hierarchy; he is outside and above it.
The term escaped. It moved through masculinity forums, then to TikTok, where it lodged among boys born after it was coined, most of whom could not name its author. A literary scholar who studies him, Jordan S. Carroll, whose Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right devotes attention to the Puppies, writes that Beale will be remembered, if at all, as a blogger and for that one word. In 2026 Beale published Sigma Game: The Complete Socio-Sexual Hierarchy, marketing it as an observational model based on a testable hypothesis about male behavior.

Seventy-two arbitrations

Unauthorized.tv opened in 2018 as a subscription video platform for performers who expected to be removed from the large ones. Its central figure became Owen Benjamin (b. May 24, 1980), a comedian who had opened for major acts and appeared with Christina Ricci in a 2009 film, and who was banned from YouTube and other services in 2019 after a run of antisemitic, racist, and anti-gay material. He still streams there, and Beale still appears on the streams.
The Patreon episode is the most instructive thing Beale ever attached his name to, and the least understood.
Patreon removed Benjamin in October 2019. Benjamin filed a JAMS arbitration seeking $3.5 million. Then seventy-two of his supporters filed their own individual arbitrations, claiming that Patreon had interfered with the economic relationship between them and the creator they funded. Patreon's terms of service required arbitration, barred class actions, and put the filing fees on the company. Under California practice those fees run to roughly ten thousand dollars per claimant and cannot be recovered even if the company prevails.
Patreon changed its terms on January 1, 2020, and then sued all seventy-two claimants in San Francisco Superior Court as a group, seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the arbitrations it had itself required. The claimants retained Marc Randazza. On July 29, 2020, in Patreon, Inc. v. Ayure, the court denied the injunction. Having to spend money to arbitrate is not irreparable harm, the judge wrote, and questions about whether the claims are arbitrable belong to the arbitrators.
Beale promoted the campaign and read the docket entries aloud to his audience. In his telling this became a landmark. It was not. There is no California appellate decision called Patreon v. Hyde, he was not among the seventy-two named defendants, and the ruling decided one motion at one stage. What is true is more interesting than the legend. Between 2019 and 2022, mass arbitration became a recognized instrument: thousands of individual claims filed at once against a company that wrote the arbitration clause precisely to prevent aggregation, with the fee structure doing the work a class action used to do. The Georgetown Law Journal published the first systematic study of it in 2022. Uber, DoorDash, Amazon, and Intuit have all been on the receiving end. A comedian's fans and a science fiction publisher in Switzerland were among the earliest people in the country to fire that weapon, and the legal literature does not know they exist.
The method is the same one he used on the Hugos. Read the rules the institution wrote for its own protection. Assemble people the institution assumes will stay isolated. Make compliance more expensive than accommodation. Never appeal to anyone's conscience.

Q

Beale did not receive his worldview from QAnon. He fitted QAnon into a worldview he already had.
The commercial expression was Alt-Hero: Q, written by Dixon and published by Arkhaven starting in 2018. The first arc was titled “Where We Go One,” from the movement's slogan. Arkhaven's marketing called QAnon an extraordinary global phenomenon and sold the series as ordinary heroes against global corruption and evil.
The commentary was more direct. In 2020 he wrote that Q was telling more truth than the major media and technology companies. He affirmed a globalist conspiracy he described as anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Trump, and accepted the claims that parts of the network preyed on children and held Luciferian commitments.
When the arrests did not come, he kept the cosmology and dropped the timetable. He began using “hopium” for reports promising imminent exposure, including reports he had once amplified. What survived is darker than “trust the plan.” In the later writing there are no benevolent insiders quietly winning. There is a fallen order under hostile spiritual authority, and no earthly faction to root for. He wrote in July 2025 that there are no good guys, in Clown World or in the rebel faction against it.

A million dollars

Rebel's Run was to be a live-action film built on an Arkhaven character. Viral Films Media raised more than a million dollars through equity crowdfunding, much of it from small investors who had backed the comics, sold on the promise of an alternative to corporate entertainment.
Beale could not get conventional film financing, for reasons no one disputes. He went instead to a Utah company called Ohana Capital Financial, whose advertised slogan was banking the unbankable. Its founder, James Wolfgramm (b. 1978), of Spanish Fork, presented himself on social media as a cryptocurrency multimillionaire. Federal prosecutors later alleged that the sports cars, the suitcase of cash, and the wallet screenshots were images lifted from other people's accounts; that a mining machine displayed in his office was connected to a monitor playing a recorded loop; and that in November 2020 a film company wired a million dollars into an Ohana account, where it was used to cover an earlier client's shortfall on a personal protective equipment deal. In September 2022 a grand jury in the District of Utah charged Wolfgramm, Bitex LLC, and Ohana with seven felony counts, five of wire fraud and two of money laundering. He pleaded not guilty.
The film was never made. Beale told his backers he did not expect the money to come back.
Read the record and the conclusion is that he and his investors were victims of an alleged fraud. Read it again and there is a second finding that sits alongside the first. The Ohana pitch depended on the mark's belief that the ordinary financial system was closed to him for political reasons. That belief was accurate. Every safeguard that a normal escrow arrangement, a normal bank, a normal completion bond, or a normal entertainment attorney would have supplied had been replaced by ideological solidarity and personal confidence.
Independence and competence are separate goods. Distrusting a bank does not make an alternative lender trustworthy. Discovering that the gatekeepers exclude you does not tell you which of the people who welcome you are honest.

Cressier

He has lived in Switzerland since 2005, first in Vaud, then in Fribourg. He praises direct democracy, cantonal sovereignty, and Swiss reluctance to defer to Brussels, and criticized the government for adopting EU sanctions against Russia. He has passed the required language examinations and says he intends to apply for citizenship.
The château he bought in Cressier belonged for many years to Gonzague de Reynold (1880-1970), the Fribourg writer, admirer of the authoritarian regimes of the 1930s, and a principal figure in Swiss spiritual defense during the war. Whether Beale knew that when he bought it, the coincidence is exact enough that Swiss journalists reached for it immediately.
Swiss reporting in 2022 assembled a list of his public statements. A 2015 interview in which he put the genetic propensity of Black Americans toward violence at five hundred times that of white Americans. A tweet, since inaccessible, arguing that a society which cannot persuade women to marry and bear children must compel them or die. A 2017 post, after the Manchester bombing, pairing a photograph of Anders Behring Breivik with the caption “Saint Breivik, pray for us.” Beale declined to answer the paper's questions, threatened a criminal defamation complaint, and reprinted the article on his blog under that heading.
Point fourteen of “What the Alt Right Is,” which he published in August 2016, states that the movement believes we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children. That is the Fourteen Words with the wording adjusted. He rejects the term white supremacist and argues that he cannot be one, since he claims Native American and Mexican ancestry and identified himself to SFWA as Hispanic. Both things are on the record. Readers can weigh them without help.
On Gab, where about thirty-five thousand people follow him behind a login, he is blunter. Asked in 2024 why he avoided naming a particular group, he replied that he avoided no words at all, that the Jews his interlocutor was obsessed with were the tools of the global satanists of Clown World, and that those satanists were themselves servants of older inhuman evils. Read that back to him in an interview and he does not flinch or retract. He says that if you are a Christian you believe in the supernatural, that George Soros and Hillary Clinton are likewise instruments, and that his picture owes nothing to the Protocols and everything to the passage in which Satan offers Jesus the kingdoms of the world and Jesus does not dispute that they are his to offer.
He also says he feels more at home in Black culture than among most people in Switzerland, and that the African men he plays football with could not care less what he writes.
His publishing house sponsors Dorking Wanderers, an English football club in Surrey.

What he built

He is not a major novelist. His economic forecasts have not held up. He did not capture the Hugo Awards, and the institution he attacked answered him with a rule change that worked. The film never got made. The mouse was discontinued. The encyclopedia never mattered.
What he has is stock. He owns intellectual property, imprints, mailing lists, subscription relationships, a video archive, and a bindery with the leather in the next room. That is why he outlasted the alt-right figures who were far more famous in 2017. Their careers were leases: on Trump, on Twitter, on YouTube, on cable bookings, on donors, on access to Republican offices. Every one of those leases was terminable, and most were terminated. His was not, because there was no landlord.
The American academics who study him read him as a discourse: as fan resentment, as reactionary nostalgia, as speculative whiteness. That literature is careful and it is looking at the wrong object. The thing he did that almost nobody on the political right did in that decade was build firms. Small ones, opaque ones, several of them bad ones, but firms, with production capacity and recurring revenue and a customer file he controls. The people who mock the eighteen-button mouse and the failed film are counting the products. The product was never the point. The capacity to make products without asking anyone was the point.
The bill for that comes in a single line, and it is the same line every time. The structure that lets him publish whatever he wants is a structure with no one in it who can tell him he is wrong. His readers are trained to hear criticism as attack and failure as sabotage. So the doctrine that correctly predicted how institutions expel people also guaranteed that when a man with fake photographs of sports cars offered to bank the unbankable, there was nobody in the room whose job was to say no.
He is an entrepreneur of secession. He begins from the position that the institutions are held by enemies and cannot be argued with, and he proceeds by forking, duplicating, withdrawing, and rebuilding. QAnon was not his source. It was a mythology compatible enough to publish. The Hugos were not his target. They were a proof of concept, and it worked well enough that a volunteer business meeting in Spokane rewrote its voting algorithm to stop him.

Notes

Opening scene, Cressier, the bindery, the interview quotes. Benjamin von Wyl and Vera Leysinger, “Far-right US blogger reaches hundreds of thousands from Switzerland,” SWI swissinfo.ch, December 9, 2025 — This is the single richest scene source and the only recent on-the-record interview. Everything I used about the unfinished flat, the gym, the Korean leather, the laser engraver, 1,500 books a month and the tenfold expansion plan, the half-million monthly visits (Similarweb), the 35,000 Gab followers and the Gab exchange, the citizenship plan, the football teammates, the Dorking Wanderers sponsorship, and the “I reject the Enlightenment” line comes from here. Fuller versions of his quotes on women’s suffrage, on the Protocols, and on Soros and Clinton are in that piece.

Château de Cressier, the Blick headline, the library story night, Gonzague de Reynold. Same swissinfo piece; also the original Tribune de Genève / 24 Heures reporting, summarized here and here — The de Reynold connection is from the Tribune de Genève.

Robert Beale. Randy Furst, “Ex-CEO regrets ‘mission’ to take on IRS,” Star Tribune, December 30, 2007 (the jail interview, the cell phone, the Office Depot arrest). United States v. Beale, 574 F.3d 512 (8th Cir. 2009) (the Chayil arrangement, the $5.6 million, the forged lien release, the Swiss transfers while a fugitive, the “misunderstanding versus disagreement” line). Sentencing: https://www.presspubs.com/shoreview/news/9-12-former-north-oaks-resident-sentenced-for-tax-fraud/article_d8dd7f27-57c1-5140-8d70-e2fbf779ca60.html.

Psykosonik. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psykosonik and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Sebastien (The Underground, First Avenue, 7th Street Entry, Glam Slam, Wax Trax!/TVT, four dance-chart top forties, Beale’s departure after 1994). Track listing: Discogs. Skrowaczewski paternity is on the Sebastien pages. A good period-flavored write-up: https://cdm.link/the-trippy-rave-y-90s-project-who-scored-mortal-kombat-and-marathon/

Fenris Wolf and GT Interactive. https://www.mobygames.com/company/1081/fenris-wolf-ltd/trivia/ (the February 1999 suit, $1.7 million, the ninth-milestone defense) and GameSpot, “GT Yanks Rebel Moon.”

WorldNetDaily. Column archive at wnd.com. The farewell column, “11 years of failure,” December 2012, has the Satan line. “In, but not of,” April 17, 2006, has the Ephesians passage.

WarMouse. Engadget, December 14, 2009, carries the full press release with the Beale quote: https://www.engadget.com/2009-12-14-warmouse-meta-openofficemouse-has-a-new-name-same-18-buttons.html — Review: https://www.engadget.com/2010/05/03/warmouse-meta-review/ — The replacement-units detail and the 2012 endpoint come from Camestros Felapton’s write-up, which is hostile but factual on the timeline.

SFWA and Jemisin. Jemisin’s Continuum speech and the reaction: https://amalelmohtar.com/calling-for-the-expulsion-of-theodore-beale-from-sfwa/ (this has the fullest quotation of the offending post, including the self-defense-laws sentence). SFWA board statement, August 13, 2013 — Gould’s letter as posted by Beale, via Locus: https://locusmag.com/2013/08/beale-expelled-from-sfwa/ — The detail that Beale identified himself to SFWA as Hispanic is from Cora Buhlert’s contemporaneous post; he published the PDFs.

The Puppies and the 2015 ceremony. Official results and No Award categories — Turnout (5,950 of 11,635 eligible, up from 3,587): https://www.npr.org/2015/08/26/434644645/how-the-sad-puppies-won-by-losing (also the source for the hosts’ visible discomfort and the audience cheering across three rooms). Wildfire smoke and the clear Saturday: https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2015/08/28/sci-fi-fandom-declares-victory-after-sad-and-rabid-puppies-hugo-awards — Wired‘s contemporaneous account has the “nominate them precisely as they are” instruction and the February 2, 2015 launch date.

E Pluribus Hugo and 5-and-6. Official explanation of the algorithm — https://electowiki.org/wiki/E_Pluribus_Hugo — Outcomes in 2016 and 2017, including the sixty-one 2016 finalists and the shift to bullet voting: https://fancyclopedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies and https://file770.com/will-e-pluribus-hugo-survive-re-ratification/ — If you want to push the voting-systems argument further, EPH is formally a single divisible vote with least popular elimination, and there’s a small technical literature on SDV-LPE.

Gamergate in Paris. Le Monde, July 2015, “A la rencontre du Gamergate.” The Belgian attendee who came only to discuss socio-sexual theory is in that piece.

Alt-Hero numbers. Beale’s own press release ($245,000, 2,190 backers, 978 percent of goal) reproduced at http://foxonnews.blogspot.com/2017/10/althero-press-release.html — The NPR Reveal skepticism about pledge patterns on Freestartr is quoted at https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2018/10/13/is-vox-day-crowd-funding-himself/ — Nobody has audited any of it, which is why I said so in the text.

Patreon mass arbitration. Order denying the preliminary injunction, July 29, 2020, in Patreon, Inc. v. Paul Michael Ayure et al., San Francisco Superior Court No. CGC-20-584586. PDF: https://s9503.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/29.07.2020-Denial-of-Preliminary-Injunction.pdf — Coverage: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/owen-benjamin-patreon-lawsuit/ and https://reclaimthenet.org/final-ruling-patreon-owen-benjamin-injunction-denied — For the scholarly hook: J. Maria Glover, “Mass Arbitration,” 74 Stanford Law Review (2022), the first systematic study, with a taxonomy of outcomes. Beale’s own post on the ruling: https://voxday.net/2020/07/30/patreon-denied-preliminary-injunction/

QAnon and Alt-Hero: Q. Arkhaven/Amazon marketing copy for Alt-Hero: Q Volume 1. His 2020 posts are on Vox Popoli; “We ARE being lied to,” September 12, 2020, is one. “There are No Good Guys,” July 18, 2025, is the source for the later position: https://voxday.net/2025/07/18/there-are-no-good-guys/

Rebel’s Run and Wolfgramm. DOJ press release, September 22, 2022 — Earlier charging documents including the November 2020 million-dollar film-company wire — Daily Beast original — Camestros Felapton tracked the SEC filings and the escrow language I could not confirm the disposition of United States v. Wolfgramm, 2:22-cr-00002 (D. Utah).

“Saint Breivik, pray for us.” This appears in the 2022 Tribune de Genève / 24 Heures investigation, which Beale reprinted in full on his blog under the title “A Portrait in Criminal Defamation,” June 1, 2022 — It was also noted by bloggers contemporaneously in May 2017. Beale threatened a defamation complaint over the article.

“What the Alt Right Is,” point 14. Primary source, Vox Popoli, August 24, 2016. Max Dosser (Vanderbilt) and Jordan S. Carroll are the two academics quoted in the swissinfo piece; Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right is open access at https://manifold.umn.edu/read/speculative-whiteness and Dosser’s dissertation is Nostalgic Futures.

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Page 261

Posted on July 28, 2026 by Luke Ford

Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard learns about the novel in June, from Marla Feig, who has a cousin in publishing and who calls the house at 7:40 in the morning to say that a man from the Barn has sold a book and that the rabbi is in it.

He is delighted. He is delighted for eleven weeks.

He tells the Wednesday class. He tells the board. He tells the men at the early minyan and he tells the periodontist and he tells his mother, who says a book isn’t a cardiologist. He tells the story about Stanley Fish (b. 1938), the literary critic, who got turned into a character named Morris Zapp by the novelist David Lodge (1935-2025), a loud brilliant American who takes over every scene he enters, and who was so pleased about it that he started behaving more like Zapp afterward.

“The character improved the man,” Grossbard says. “That’s the dream. You spend thirty years building a persona out of spare parts and then a professional comes along and does it properly and hands it back to you, and after that all you have to do is show up and match the description.”

He announces from the bimah in July that he expects to be the villain and asks the congregation to remember that a good villain does more for a book than a good rabbi does for a shul. He preemptively forgives the author. He does this three Shabbosim running.

He orders sixty copies in August, before he has read a word.

The author is Gideon Sonnenfeld, forty seven, fourth row of the men’s section for nine years, aisle side, always with a sefer he doesn’t open. He wrote for a procedural that ran three seasons and did punch-up on two pilots that died. He has written from five to seven in the morning at the Coffee Bean on Pico for six years and nobody at the Barn knew, including his wife’s book club, including Grossbard, who has said perhaps four hundred words to the man since 2017 and could not have told you what he does.

The book is called In Loving Memory Of. Three hundred and forty pages. Nine rejections, then a serious house, then a starred review, then nine hundred words in the Times. It sells about six thousand in hardcover, which is a great deal and also nothing.

The hero is Zalman Fried, seventy three, who is not called Zalman Fried in the book but who is Zalman Fried, and who has been the gabbai at the Barn since before it was the Barn, when the minyan met in the social hall of a defunct Conservative shul on Robertson. In the novel he assigns the aliyos. That is the plot. Three hundred and forty pages about a man with a spiral notebook deciding who gets called to the Torah, and about the yahrzeit list, and about the little brass plates.

The box comes on a Tuesday. Grossbard opens it in the kitchen at nine at night, takes the top copy, sits down, and finds himself on page 44.

He is late to a funeral. He has no name. Sonnenfeld calls him the rabbi. He arrives eight minutes late and Zalman has held the room for eight minutes by starting a conversation with the deceased’s brother about a hardware store that closed in 1978.

Page 112. Grossbard gives a drasha. It runs above the scene for eleven minutes while Zalman works out whether to give shlishi to a man whose own brother died in March or to the son in law of the family that paid for the sound system. Sonnenfeld gives the drasha one clause. Grossbard checks the date in the book and works out that it is his Chayei Sarah drasha from three years ago, which he considers the best thing he has ever written, and which appears in the novel as weather in another man’s head.

Then page 261.

Two families want the same aliyah on the same Shabbos and the fight has been coming since Pesach. Zalman fixes it three days early with two phone calls and a small lie about a chiyuv. Neither family knows. Nothing happens. And at the kiddush, when the older of the two men claps the rabbi on the shoulder and says whatever you did, thank you, the rabbi says, I had a feeling about it, and takes a piece of herring.

Grossbard remembers the day. He remembers taking the credit and he remembers knowing he was taking it while he took it.

He closes the book at 1:20 in the morning. Dina is asleep. He sits there.

Three pages. Unnamed. A man who is late, a sound in the background, and a piece of herring.

The community reads the wound in every direction except the one it goes in. Josh Adelman calls to say the herring thing is defamatory and that he has a friend at a firm. The rabbi in Teaneck writes eight paragraphs about the vulgarity of a shul so consumed with its own celebrity that its members write novels about it, and he has read the review and not the novel. Adina Reiss reads it in four days, says it is the best book about a shul she has ever read, and gives Grossbard a look he has not seen from her before, which is pity. Ezra Malik, seventeen now, with an agent since March, does forty seconds of the rabbi reading the novel and getting to page 261, and this is the first thing Ezra has ever done that nobody watches, because the joke needs the book.

Grossbard hosts the launch at the Barn in October. Two hundred and forty people, folding chairs in rows, wine from the good place on Pico. He interviews Sonnenfeld on stage for fifty minutes and he is superb. He is funny about himself, he is serious about the book, he gets Sonnenfeld to say two things Sonnenfeld has never said in an interview, and he closes by holding the book over his head and telling the room that a man who sat in the fourth row for nine years and said nothing has written a better account of this community than the rabbi has managed in nine years of talking. They sell a hundred and sixty copies. The line for signing goes out past the coat racks.

At 10:40 the room is empty and the two of them are stacking chairs, because Sonnenfeld will not leave without stacking chairs.

“Ask me,” Sonnenfeld says.

“Ask you what.”

“You’ve been sitting on it all night. You did fifty minutes on stage and you never asked.”

Grossbard sets down a chair.

“Why am I minor.”

Sonnenfeld nods, like a man who has had the answer ready for a while.

“You want the version I do at the Q and A or the other one.”

“The other one.”

“I tried you at the center. Two years. Four hundred pages that don’t exist anymore.” He stacks another chair. “It died every time.”

“Why.”

“Because you explain yourself. You come into a room pre-explained. You do it before anyone else can, and you do it better than anyone else could, and there’s nothing left over. A novel needs a man who can’t say what he’s doing. You’ve never had that day in your life.”

“That’s a compliment.”

“It’s a diagnosis.”

“Give me both.”

“You take the air,” Sonnenfeld says. “Nothing grows under you. Zalman has never explained himself to one human being. Not to me, not to his wife, not to God on Yom Kippur. So there’s room in there. That’s all a hero is. Room.”

Grossbard takes this standing up.

“Page 261 is accurate,” he says.

“I know.”

“I remember the day. I knew I was doing it while I was doing it.”

“I know,” Sonnenfeld says. “That’s why it’s in.”

The coat room behind the sanctuary has a rack, a mop sink, and forty one copies of In Loving Memory Of in a box that will still be there in three years. Zalman Fried comes in on a Thursday afternoon in November to get the folding table for the sisterhood and finds the rabbi sitting on the box.

“Zalman.”

“Rabbi.”

“Sit down a minute.”

Zalman does not sit down. Zalman stands with his hand on the table.

“I’ve been here nine years,” Grossbard says. “I want to ask you something and I want you to answer it and I’m not going to do anything with it.”

“Okay.”

“What do you do on Thursdays.”

Zalman looks at him.

“You leave at two every Thursday and you’re back by six and you’ve done it for nine years and I have never once asked you where you go.”

For a while Zalman says nothing at all. Then he takes his hand off the table.

“Chevra kadisha,” he says. “Since ninety four.”

Grossbard does not move.

“How many.”

“I don’t say the number.”

“You know the number.”

“I know the number.” Zalman looks at the mop sink. “Four hundred and some. It’s in a book at home. Not the same book as the aliyos.”

“Thirty two years.”

“Thirty two years.”

“Zalman, why did you never.”

“It’s not a thing you say,” Zalman says.

Grossbard sits on the box of forty one novels in the coat room of his own shul and has nothing to offer. This has happened to him twice in his adult life. He does not make a joke, which he thinks about doing, and which he decides against, and the deciding takes him four seconds and costs him something.

“Can I use it,” he says.

“Without my name.”

“Without your name.”

“Then use it,” Zalman says, and takes the table.

He gives it Shabbos morning. The men who wash the dead. The ones who do the work with nobody watching and no receipt and no thank you and no one to tell. Six hundred people and the room does not make a sound for nineteen minutes and grown men cry at the back by the loading door, and it is the best thing he has done in four years, and he knows that while he is doing it too.

He hates himself for about four minutes afterward, standing at the kiddush with a plate in his hand. Then it passes and he takes a piece of herring.

Ezra Malik does the drasha that night in his father’s gray sport coat. He has the pauses. It does a million and a half and it runs on a morning show in Israel and a kiruv outfit in Jerusalem that put Grossbard’s face on a cracked graphic in May posts it now without comment.

Zalman Fried watches it twice on his phone in the parking lot behind the funeral home on Venice, with the engine running. Then he goes inside and does the work and tells nobody.

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The Oven

Posted on July 27, 2026 by Luke Ford

The sixty days ran out in May and the money came back and Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard never mentioned it from the bimah, which disappointed everyone, including the board.
The Wednesday class meets at 7:30 in the room behind the coat racks that the architect drew as a bridal suite. Twenty six people. Three lawyers, a woman who does television business affairs, a periodontist, and two men in their seventies who have been learning for fifty years and know more than Grossbard does about a hundred things and less than he does about the thing he intends to do tonight. Adina Reiss sits in the front with a legal pad and four colors of pen.
He puts Bava Metzia 59b on the screen.
“The oven of Achnai,” he says. “Everybody here has heard a sermon on this. Hands.”
Nineteen hands.
“Right. And in every one of those sermons the story ends with God laughing. Nitzchuni banai. My children have defeated me. And the rabbi tells you this means the Torah belongs to us now, we’re the authors, isn’t that beautiful, please give to the building fund.” He clicks to the next slide. “The story does not end there. It runs another page and a half and it gets worse every line.”
He walks them through it. Rabbi Eliezer and the sages fight over an oven built in segments with sand packed between them. Eliezer brings every argument in the world and they don’t take it. He tells the carob tree to prove him right and the carob tree gets up and moves. You don’t bring proof from a carob tree. He tells the stream and the stream runs backward. You don’t bring proof from a stream. He tells the walls of the study hall and the walls start to come down, and Rabbi Yehoshua yells at the walls, and the walls stop halfway and stay leaning to this day out of respect for both parties, which Grossbard calls the funniest sentence in the Talmud and which gets a laugh.
Then the voice from heaven. The halacha follows Eliezer in every case.
Then Yehoshua stands up and says it is not in heaven.
“Now watch,” Grossbard says. “God laughs. Terrific. Everybody stops. Keep reading. They bring out everything Eliezer ever declared pure and they burn it. They take a vote and they put him under the ban. They send Akiva to tell him, and Akiva wears black and sits four cubits off, and Eliezer tears his clothes and sits down on the ground and cries. And the world takes a hit for it. A third of the olives, a third of the wheat, a third of the barley. Rabban Gamliel nearly drowns off the coast. And Eliezer’s wife, who happens to be Gamliel’s sister, spends the rest of her life keeping her husband’s face off the floor, because she knows if he ever gets all the way down and prays out of a broken heart her brother dies. One day a beggar comes to the door and she turns her head, and she comes back and he’s on the floor, and she says get up, you’ve killed my brother. And the shofar blows from Gamliel’s house.”
The room has stopped moving.
“So,” Grossbard says. “Ask me what it teaches.”
“What does it teach,” says Adina Reiss.
“That the text does not constrain you.” He gives it three seconds. “It can’t. It’s ink. It has no arms. Eliezer had the better argument. He had a tree, a river, a wall, and God on the record, and he lost, and he lost because the men in that room had been trained by other men in that room to hear certain moves as moves and everything else as noise, and a talking carob tree was noise. The Gemara doesn’t constrain you. Your rebbeim constrain you. Your chavrusa constrains you. The eleven people whose faces come up in your mind when you consider a lenient position constrain you.”
Barry Teitelbaum, sixty eight, forty five years of daf yomi, says, “Then it’s made up.”
“It’s made up by somebody.”
“So what’s the difference.”
“You’re not somebody,” Grossbard says. “That’s the difference and it’s the size of the ocean.”
Barry starts to answer and stops.
“And here’s where everybody goes wrong at this exact minute,” Grossbard says. “You hear that the constraint is human and you decide it must be soft. Go ask Rabbi Eliezer how soft it is. He was right. Heaven said so out loud in front of witnesses. They burned his things and cut him off and he sat on the ground for the rest of his life. The rabbis put that page in the book on purpose. They wanted you to know what they had done and what it cost, and then they wanted you to follow the majority anyway.”
Ezra Malik is not in this class. His cousin Yonatan is, and Yonatan has a phone.
The clip runs forty seconds and it is the forty seconds with the ink and the arms in it.
The rabbi in Teaneck writes about the denial of Torah min HaShamayim and reaches nine paragraphs before conceding he has watched only the clip. An outreach outfit in Jerusalem puts Grossbard’s face on a graphic with a crack down the middle. Two members quit the Barn and one rejoins inside a week because his daughter likes the youth minyan. Marla Feig calls the house, says one word, oven, and hangs up, which Grossbard takes as approval and which is approval.
Adina Reiss emails him at midnight with four questions in it, numbered. He answers all four before six.
Noam Perlstein, twenty nine, writes for a streaming show that has been renewed without a start date. He sat in the third row of the Wednesday class. He has a garage in Mar Vista with good light and a bimah his brother in law built out of reclaimed fir.
He calls it Achnai.
Nineteen people come the first Shabbos. The rule is that the community decides. The rule appears in the founding document, which is a Google Doc. There is no rabbi. There is a rotating facilitator. Noam tells a reporter from a Jewish website that they are taking Rabbi Grossbard’s teaching to its logical conclusion, and the reporter calls Grossbard for comment.
“Wonderful,” Grossbard says. “Beautiful. I give it to August.”
Week two they vote on korbanos. It carries nine to seven with three abstentions. Two of the seven don’t come back.
Week three a man moves to reconsider on the grounds that the vote happened before the late people arrived. The motion passes. They vote again. Korbanos loses.
Week four a woman named Jess asks who decided that a vote decides anything, and nobody at Achnai has an answer, because the only man who could have given her one is the man they left.
Week six they are eleven people and two of them are Noam’s parents.
Week eight it is a podcast.
The Kesslers come to the office on a Tuesday, which he does not take meetings on, and he takes the meeting.
Danny Kessler, thirty four, sells medical devices, carries his grandfather’s Hebrew name and his grandfather’s job at a bris, which is to stand there and be a kohen. Aviva Roth, thirty six, divorced four years, two boys at the day school, runs pediatric intake at a clinic in Culver City.
“We came because of the video,” Danny says.
“Everybody comes because of the video.”
“You said the text doesn’t constrain you.”
“I did.”
“So don’t be constrained. Marry us.”
Grossbard sits back.
“Say the rest. You’ve rehearsed it. Go.”
Aviva takes it. “A kohen can’t marry a divorcee. Nobody in this room believes Danny’s kohen status has been tracked accurately since Vilna. There’s no Temple. There’s no service. He has one job, which is to say twelve words at a bris and go first for an aliyah, and for that he loses me. And you stand up in front of six hundred people and tell them the law is a construction built by trained readers, and then you tell us the construction is a wall.”
“Every word of that is correct,” Grossbard says.
“Then do it.”
“No.”
Danny puts his hand flat on the desk. “You can’t say it’s all made up and then hide behind it.”
“I’m not hiding behind it. I’m standing inside it, and there’s a difference, and I’ll explain it once.” Grossbard leans in. “I told you the law gets made by somebody. You heard me say it gets made by anybody. Two different sentences. The somebody is a few thousand men over sixty generations plus about four hundred living people whose phone calls I take, and I am a rabbi because that room says I am. There’s no license from the state. There’s no exam. There’s a room, and the room lets me in.
“The afternoon I stand under your chuppah, the room stops letting me in. Hear the next part. It doesn’t make me a rebel. It makes me a man with opinions. My paper is worth nothing the minute I write on it whatever I like. So what would you be buying? A ceremony from a guy who thinks it’s fine. You can get that downtown and the parking’s better.”
Aviva does not cry, which he notes.
“There are four men in this city who’ll do your wedding,” he says. “Two of them are serious people. Rabbi Cohen in Mar Vista will do it and he’ll do it well and he’ll learn with your boys after. I’ll write the number down. I’ll come. I’ll dance. I won’t stand under it.”
“So you’re a coward with a theory,” Danny says.
“Yes.”
Nobody says anything for a while.
“That’s it? You won’t fight me on that?”
“You’ve had a hard month and you came in here to hit somebody and I’d rather it was me than her.” Grossbard writes the number on the back of a card. “Also it’s true. I’ve been a coward about eleven things in thirty years and this is number four. Take the card.”
Aviva takes the card.
The wedding is in October at a place in Malibu where the lawn runs down to nothing. Rabbi Cohen does it and does it beautifully. Two hundred people come.
At the dancing Grossbard goes in. Fifty nine years old, built like a refrigerator, and he goes to the middle and takes Danny Kessler by both hands and they go around until Danny’s yarmulke comes off, and Grossbard picks it up and sets it back on Danny’s head with both hands and holds it there a second and says something nobody hears.
A cousin films eleven seconds.
The clip does nine hundred thousand.
The rabbi in Teaneck writes that Grossbard has shown his hand at last, that the dancing endorses what he pretended to refuse, and that the refusal was theater. A shul in Santa Monica posts it with a caption about love winning. Josh Adelman forwards it to the board with a note reading legal exposure? Noam Perlstein, whose podcast has four hundred and eighty listeners, does eighteen minutes arguing that Grossbard is the most consistent man in Los Angeles and that nobody can see it, and it is the best episode he will ever record and nothing comes of it. Adina Reiss watches it twice, writes down one question, and saves it for Wednesday. Aviva’s mother, who has hated rabbis for nine years, watches it forty times.
Six readings. One video.
Grossbard sits at the kitchen table on a Sunday night going through the comments while Dina does the crossword her mother in law taught her to fold into eighths.
“You’re giving this to the class,” she says.
“Wednesday.”
“You’re going to make them feel stupid.”
“They’ll get there on their own. I’ll be in the room when it happens.”
He plays the eleven seconds again. He is in it for four of them. He thinks he looks heavy.

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Table Six

Posted on July 27, 2026 by Luke Ford

The Cypress at Encino keeps a fish tank in the lobby and a grand piano that a man named Duane plays on Sundays at four. Above the mailboxes a glass case holds the activities calendar in forty point type. Tuesday, Screen Time, 10:30, Multipurpose Room B. A volunteer from Milken named Talia, seventeen, comes and teaches the residents to work their iPads. She has come every Tuesday for eight months. She smells like grapefruit and the men adore her and she has never once made anyone feel stupid, which is a talent, and she will lose it in college.
She shows them the video on the first Tuesday in April.
She means it as a kindness. Pearl Grossbard’s son the rabbi, on the internet, two million views, and Talia has it queued before the class settles.
It is not the rabbi. Nobody filmed the rabbi, because he said it on Shabbos morning in front of six hundred people who keep Shabbos. It is a sixteen year old boy in his father’s gray sport coat, alone in a bedroom in Beverlywood, doing the rabbi. He has the hands. He has the pauses. Eleven women and four men watch a child put both hands on an imaginary shtender and say that he would not learn a page of Gemara if nobody paid him.
The room goes quiet the way the shul went quiet.
“Play it again,” says Selma Lieb, eighty-eight, who has a grandson at Cedars in interventional cardiology and a daughter who takes her to Palm Springs.
Talia plays it again.
By lunch it has reached the dining room.
Pearl Grossbard has held the head of table six by the window since March of 2019, when Ida Perlman died and the chair came open. The Cypress prints a seating chart and the activities director believes she assigns the seats. Nobody who lives there believes this. Table six seats six and takes the morning light and looks out at the courtyard where the good bougainvillea grows, and the women at table six have between them one federal judge, two orthodontists, a woman who wrote for a soap opera, and Pearl’s son, who has been on television in Israel.
Her son has been the strongest holding in the portfolio for four years. He is bald in the good way. He is quoted. When the Journal ran his photograph in September, Pearl carried the paper down to breakfast folded so the picture faced out and set it beside her grapefruit and did not mention it, and that is how you play the game at the highest level.
She comes in at noon and Selma Lieb looks up at her with an expression of tremendous sympathy.
“Pearl,” Selma says. “We saw.”
Pearl eats her chicken. She does not eat it fast and she does not eat it slow.
By Friday she has been asked twice whether her son is having a breakdown, once whether he lost his faith in the Holocaust, and once, by a man named Herschel Ostrow who has designs on her, whether the shul will let him keep the house. Saturday she takes her lunch in her room. Sunday she takes it in her room. Marilou, who has worked the third floor for nine years and misses nothing, brings the tray and says, “You want I should bring the good pudding,” and Pearl says she doesn’t care about pudding, and Marilou brings it anyway and it comes back untouched, which Marilou reports to nobody, because Marilou is a professional.
Grossbard comes Thursdays. He has come Thursdays for six years, eleven in the morning, and he brings a bag of the sour cherry candies she likes from the Russian market on Santa Monica, and he stays ninety minutes, and there are weeks when this is the only appointment he does not move.
He knocks and comes in. She has the crossword folded into eighths.
“Ma.”
“You’re early.”
“I’m four minutes late.”
“Then you’re late.” She does not look up. “Sit.”
He sits in the chair by the window. Her room has her own furniture in it, the walnut dresser and the chair with the worn arms, which is a status item at the Cypress and cost her twenty-two hundred dollars in delivery and storage, and she would pay it again.
He starts in. He can’t help it. It comes out of him the way a sneeze does.
“I have news. I’m not being paid at the moment. The board suspended me for sixty days. So I want you to understand that this visit is currently pro bono and I’d like it noted somewhere.”
She fills in seven across.
“Ma.”
“You want me to laugh.”
“It would be nice.”
“Talia showed us the video.”
He waits.
“Fifteen people in Multipurpose Room B,” she says. “Twice. She played it twice. Then Selma Lieb played it for her son on speaker in the hall so the whole floor could hear him say oh my God.”
“How’s the cardiologist.”
“He’s a cardiologist,” Pearl says. “That’s the thing about a cardiologist. He stays a cardiologist. He doesn’t wake up Tuesday and announce he only does the valves for money.”
Grossbard laughs. She does not.
“I lost the table,” she says.
“You didn’t lose the table.”
“I’ve eaten in this room for eleven days.”
He stops laughing.
“Eleven days.”
“Eleven days. And it wasn’t even you, Shlomo. It was the Malik boy in a sport coat. My son goes down for something a child said in a bedroom.” She takes a breath. “Eleven days, and Herschel Ostrow has been in my chair four times, which he thinks nobody notices, and Selma Lieb has started saying grace before the meal, out loud, at table six, which she never did in her life, and she does it looking at me.” Pearl sets the crossword down. “Do you know what I have here, Shlomo? I have a room, I have a dresser, and I have a chair by the window at the good table. That’s the inventory. That’s everything. And you gave it away on the internet for a laugh from a bunch of thirty year olds in sneakers who won’t come to your funeral.”
He looks at the courtyard for a while.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll fix it.”
“You can’t fix it.”
“I can fix it. I’ll come do a program. Sunday. A shiur, whatever they want, I’ll do the whole floor. I’ll say something rabbinical about Pesach. Marilou will put out the good cookies. Selma Lieb will have to sit there while forty people watch your son teach Torah for free, which will be the first time in her life she has had to sit through anything.”
“For free.”
“For free.”
“So the video was a lie.”
“The video was a theory.”
“It was a lie.”
“Ma.”
“You’ll come Sunday and do the cookies and every one of them will go back to their room and pull up the video again, because that’s what people do, they keep the version they liked.” She picks the crossword back up. “You can’t fix it with a program. You could fix it by shutting up and you’re not going to shut up, so let’s not sit here and pretend.”
The nurse’s cart goes by in the hall. Somebody two doors down has the Dodgers on at a volume you could hear from the parking structure.
“Why do you do it,” she says.
“It’s true.”
“It’s true,” she says. “Sure. And a hundred things are true and you say the one that gets you on television.”
“I say the one nobody else will say.”
“You say the one that keeps you safe.”
He turns his head.
“You heard me,” Pearl says.
“Say it plainer.”
“Your father learned for free.”
There it is. It has been in the room for six years of Thursdays.
“Nine to eleven at night at the shtiebel on Detroit Street,” she says. “Every night. Sundays from seven in the morning. Thirty nine years with Yudel Faktor, may he rest, and Yudel’s wife and I used to look at each other at simchas like two women who’d been in the same car accident. Your father sold refrigerators at Bernstein’s on Pico. He was the number two man in the store for eleven years and he never once asked Sol Bernstein for the floor manager job because the floor manager works Sunday morning.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know the numbers. I know the numbers. Eleven thousand four hundred dollars when he died and a leased Buick with fourteen months on it, and I went back to work at fifty four doing intake for a periodontist in Sherman Oaks, and I did that for nine years, and that’s how I’m sitting in this room instead of at your house in a room with your wife’s mother’s furniture in it.” She says all of this in the voice she used on the phone with insurance companies. “So don’t tell me about paid and unpaid. I priced it. I priced it before you were born and I’ve never gotten a different number.”
He does not say anything for a while.
“He never raised his voice to me,” she says. “Not once in thirty nine years. I’d have preferred it.”
Grossbard gets up and pours her water from the pitcher and puts it where she can reach it, which she notices and does not thank him for.
“What was it for,” she says. “Answer me like I’m not your mother. What is it for. Forty years of nine to eleven. What does it do.”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t be clever.”
“I’m not being clever, Ma. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t make a man good. I know men who learn twelve hours a day and I wouldn’t leave them alone with the tzedakah account. It doesn’t hold a marriage together. It didn’t hold yours. It doesn’t keep the grandchildren Jewish, I’ve watched it fail at that in a hundred houses. It won’t get you a better death. There’s a whole industry out there selling it as therapy, as continuity, as parenting, as a wellness practice, and every one of those people is lying, and they’re lying because they’re scared to say the true thing.”
“Which is.”
“That it’s good for nothing and it’s the best thing there is.”
Pearl looks at him.
“You can’t have both,” she says.
“That’s the only place it’s ever been,” he says. “Both.”
The Dodgers get louder down the hall. Somebody laughs at the nurses’ station.
“So he was right,” she says.
“He was right and it cost you everything and both of those are true and I will not sit here and choose, and I have never once in my life told a woman that her husband’s learning was worth what it took out of her, and I’m not going to start with you.”
“You tell everybody the price.”
“I tell everybody the price.”
“You got that from me,” Pearl says.
He does not answer.
“You didn’t get it from a book. You got it from a woman doing intake in Sherman Oaks at fifty four years old.” She takes a sour cherry candy out of the bag and works the wrapper with her thumbnail because her fingers don’t do the twist anymore. “You’ve been giving my testimony for thirty years and taking the credit.”
Grossbard reaches over and takes the candy and unwraps it and hands it back.
Then he takes the small Mishnayos out of his jacket pocket, the one with the cracked spine that was Manny’s, and he opens it on his knee and starts to learn out loud in the singsong, quiet, the way his father did it in the yellow chair after the store closed, and he does this for eighteen minutes while his mother sits with the candy in her cheek and the crossword in her lap.
“You look like him when you do that,” she says.
“I’m being compensated.”
“I know,” Pearl says.
He comes Sunday and does the program. Marilou puts out the good cookies. Forty one residents come, which is a record for a Sunday that isn’t a birthday, and he speaks for thirty five minutes on the four sons and he is extremely funny and he does not say one outrageous thing, and afterward Herschel Ostrow tells him he should have his own show, and Talia films the last four minutes on her phone and posts it and it does eleven hundred.
Monday, Pearl comes down to lunch at noon.
Grossbard has driven back out to bring her the eyeglass repair she asked for, and he stops in the doorway of the dining room because he can see her from there and she cannot see him.
She is at the head of table six. Selma Lieb sits at her left with her hands folded.
“He came Sunday for the cookies,” Pearl is saying. “You understand what I’m telling you. There’s a contract. A hundred and ninety thousand a year plus the house, and community programming is in section two, and if he skips it they dock him. He told me himself. That’s my son. He doesn’t do one thing for free.”
The women at table six make a sound.
“Pearl,” Selma says. “That’s terrible.”
“That’s what I’ve got,” Pearl says, and reaches for the salt.
Grossbard stands in the doorway another moment. Then he leaves the eyeglass repair at the front desk with Marilou and walks out past the fish tank and the piano and the glass case with the calendar in it, and he gets on the 101 at Balboa at 12:20 on a Monday, which is the only hour of the week that road moves, and he makes it back to Pico in twenty six minutes, which he tells everyone about for a month.

Posted in R. Shlomo Grossbard, Rabbis | Comments Off on Table Six

For Money

Posted on July 27, 2026 by Luke Ford

The Barn used to sell sectional sofas. It holds four hundred people now on pine folding chairs under exposed ducts painted matte black, and on a good Shabbos morning the overflow stands along the west wall where the old loading door still shows its rail. The espresso cart in the lobby runs on Friday afternoon and Saturday night, never in between, and the man who runs it collects residuals from a sitcom that ran two seasons on the WB. The mechitza runs down the center instead of the side, cost eleven thousand dollars, and took nine months of committee. Nobody wears a tie. Two men wear Rick Owens. One woman wears a hat that cost more than the ark.
Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard comes out at 10:40 in a gray suit he bought at an estate sale in Hancock Park off a dead orthodontist, and he stands there until the room quiets, and then he stands there longer.
“Terumah,” he says. “God has just delivered the law at Sinai. Fire, smoke, the voice, the whole production. And what does He ask for first? Gold. Silver. Copper. Blue and purple and scarlet yarn. Acacia wood. Ram skins dyed red.”
He lets that sit.
“He asks for money. Before He asks for anything else, He asks for money. And every rabbi in Los Angeles stands up on this parsha and tells you the money is a metaphor for the heart. I want to tell you the heart is a metaphor for the money.”
Josh Adelman, forty-one, sold his company in March, third row on the aisle, laughs once, alone.
“I want to say something and I want you to hear the end of it before you get angry, which you will, because getting angry is the best entertainment available to you on a Saturday morning at no charge.” He puts both hands on the shtender. “I would not learn a page of Gemara if nobody paid me. Not one page. Not one line. I would sleep in. I would take up tennis.”
The room makes a sound it has not made before.
“And neither would you,” he says. “You get paid too. You get paid in being the guy at the kiddush who knows what the Ramban says. You get paid in your daughter’s shidduch. You get paid in the feeling that comes over you at eleven at night when you close the sefer and think, I am a serious man. That is a salary. Mine has withholding taxes. That is the only difference between us and I am the only man in this room who prints his rate card.”
Ezra Malik, sixteen, stands at the west wall and says the last ninety seconds back to himself under his breath until he owns them.
Saturday night Ezra Malik puts on his father’s gray sport coat and does the ninety seconds into his phone. He has the hands right. He has the pauses right, which is the hard part. By Sunday afternoon it has two million views. By Monday the Jewish Journal has a piece. By Tuesday a rabbi in Teaneck has written eleven paragraphs about the crisis of the celebrity pulpit and a woman from Miami has emailed Grossbard a photograph of her father’s yahrzeit candle with the subject line HE LEARNED FOR FREE.
Grossbard answers every email. He answers the Miami woman at 6:15 in the morning: Your father sounds like a great man. He was paid in you.
He goes on three podcasts that week. He is better on the third one.
“Shabbos,” the host says. “You’d keep Shabbos anyway. Come on.”
“I would not keep Shabbos if nobody paid me.”
“That’s insane.”
“It’s arithmetic. I have a contract. Section four. But take the contract away and I still get paid, because there are eleven people in this city who would notice if my car moved on Saturday, and their noticing is worth more to me than the drive. That’s a payment. You’re calling it faith because faith sounds better on a plaque.”
“What about your wife?”
“Dina.”
“Would you have married a Jew if you weren’t paid?”
“Absolutely not,” Grossbard says. “The rebbetzin comes with the position. A rebbetzin is a company car. Except the car depreciates and Dina has gone up every year for twenty-six years, which is a bad deal for me and I want that noted.”
“Your kids? The bris?”
“I circumcised my sons under duress from a coalition I depend on for everything I have. So did you. The only man who cuts his son for free is a man with no friends, and I have checked, and there is no such man.”
“God, Rabbi. Do you believe in God?”
“On Tuesdays, no. Tuesday is my day off.”
The clip of Tuesday runs on a morning show in Israel. Somebody makes a T-shirt. Grossbard buys forty of them and gives them out at the youth minyan, which costs him $721 and gets him a second news cycle for free, and he mentions the $721 from the bimah so that nobody can accuse him of generosity.
The line about being paid to learn comes from Stanley Fish (b. 1938), a literary critic who said he would not read a poem if the university stopped his check. Grossbard has never hidden this. He teaches it in his Wednesday class. He photocopies the interview. When Marla Feig, seventy-three, whose father put up half the money for the building in 1979, corners him at the Chanukah party and says you took this from a goy at Duke, he says, “I took it from a goy at Duke and I improved it, and you are welcome to check my work, and if you find that I have improved it you may not tell anyone, because my whole thing depends on people believing I am a thief.”
The board meets in the back office on a Thursday night. Six people, a plate of rugelach from Delice, a bottle of Diet Snapple that nobody opens. Adelman runs the meeting. Marla Feig sits with her purse in her lap like a woman waiting for a bus she has already decided to miss.
“Two families left,” Adelman says. “The Bergs and the Steins. That’s ninety-four thousand in annual.”
“The Bergs were leaving,” Grossbard says. “Their son got into Harvard-Westlake and they’ve been shopping for a shul with better parents since October.”
“That’s not the point.”
“It’s the only point. You want to price my mouth. Fine. Price it. But price it against the ninety-one units we added in eighteen months, and price it against the fact that three hundred people under forty come here on a Saturday morning in a city where three hundred people under forty do not go anywhere on a Saturday morning.”
“They come to watch you set yourself on fire,” Marla says.
“They come to watch me set myself on fire and then they stay for mussaf. I’ll take it. Rav Kook would have taken it.”
“Don’t.”
“He would have hated it and he would have taken it.”
Adelman rubs his eyes. “We have to put out a statement.”
“I’ll write it,” Grossbard says.
“You can’t write your own condemnation.”
“I write the best condemnation in this room. Give me eight minutes.”
He writes it in six. It runs eleven sentences. It calls his remarks corrosive. It says that a rabbi who reduces avodas Hashem to a transaction has forgotten the widow at the back of the room who has nothing to transact with. It says the board holds him to a standard he taught them. Marla reads it twice and puts it down and looks at him for a long moment.
“This is good,” she says.
“I know.”
“Do you agree with it?”
“Entirely. And I’ll say the opposite on Shabbos and mean that too. You people think a man has one position. A man has a portfolio.”
The statement runs Friday. Six hundred and forty people come Saturday, which is a record, and Grossbard opens by reading the board’s condemnation from the bimah in its entirety, and then he says, “That was written by me,” and the room comes apart, and Marla Feig, who has not laughed in shul since her husband died, laughs into her purse.
Bernie Klausner takes eleven days to die at Cedars in a room on the sixth floor with a view of a parking structure. He has a nephew in Portland who does not come. Grossbard is there for nine of the eleven days. He is there the night the nurses change shift twice and nobody else visits, and he sits in the vinyl chair with a Mishnah he does not open, and around three in the morning Bernie’s mouth goes dry and Grossbard swabs it with the little green sponge on a stick, and he does this every twenty minutes for four hours, and he says the Shema in Bernie’s ear at 6:40 with the light coming up gray over the parking structure, and then he goes home and showers and teaches his Wednesday class at nine.
Ezra Malik’s mother is a hospice nurse on that floor. She tells people. It gets around, the way things get around, and by Shabbos a woman named Adina Reiss who converted four years ago comes up to Grossbard at the kiddush with her eyes wet and says, “You sat with him for nine nights. That’s who you are. All the rest of it is a bit.”
Grossbard takes a piece of herring off the tray.
“They pay me,” he says.
“Rabbi.”
“One hundred and ninety thousand plus housing. That’s the number. A death in the community is a core deliverable. It’s in section two.”
Her face changes. He sees it change. He sees the thing he has just done to her and he does not enjoy it, which surprises him, and he puts the herring down.
“Adina. Sit for one second.” She sits. “You paid eleven thousand dollars in conversion fees, mikveh, tuition for the class, and you sold a car to do it. You are the only person at this kiddush who knows to the dollar what her Judaism cost. That makes you the most honest Jew in the building and it makes me the second. Everyone else here is running a play and calling it a soul.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer I have.”
“You sat with him for nine nights.”
“I did.”
“Why.”
“Because they pay me,” he says, and then, after a moment, “and because I have never learned how to be somewhere else.”
Dina Grossbard, fifty-six, teaches fourth grade at Emek and has heard every word of this for twenty-six years. Tuesday night she is standing at the counter cutting a melon and he is telling her about the podcast in London that wants him in April, and she says, without turning around, “You’d have married me for free.”
“That’s slander.”
“I was nineteen and I had a Chevette with a hole in the floor and you followed me around Jerusalem for five months and nobody was paying you anything.”
“Deferred compensation.”
“Shlomo.”
“There was equity. It vested.”
She cuts the melon. “You know what’s funny about you,” she says. “You tell everyone the truth about money so you never have to tell them the truth about anything else.”
He does not answer that. He carries the plate to the table. Later he tells the London podcast that his wife is the smartest person he knows and that he pays her nothing, which is the great scandal of his household, and the clip does four hundred thousand.
In March the board votes four to two to suspend his salary for sixty days pending a review of the contract. Adelman calls him at home to tell him. Grossbard says thank you for calling personally, and asks after Adelman’s father, who has a stent.
Saturday morning Grossbard comes out at 10:40 in the dead orthodontist’s suit.
The room has heard. The room has heard within eleven minutes of the vote, because this is a shul and not a submarine. Six hundred people watch him walk to the shtender and nobody breathes.
Ezra Malik stands at the west wall with his lips already moving.
Grossbard puts both hands on the wood.
“I have been informed,” he says, “that I am not currently being paid.”
He lets it sit longer than he needs to.
“You are all sitting there thinking you have caught me. You have not caught me. You have made a category error, and I want to walk you through it, because if you leave here today with a bad argument in your head I will have failed you as a teacher and that is also in section two.”
He holds up one finger.
“I said I would not learn Torah if I were not paid. I am paid. I am paid in six hundred faces doing exactly what your faces are doing right now, which is the highest-margin compensation available to a man in this economy. I am paid in Marla Feig coming this morning to watch me suffer. Hello, Marla. I am paid in knowing that Ezra Malik has the first two sentences already and will be doing me in his father’s jacket by nine tonight, and that a rabbi in Teaneck will have it in eleven paragraphs by Tuesday, and I want to say to that rabbi, in advance, that I have read all eleven of his paragraphs and that paragraph seven was strong.”
He opens the chumash.
“What is in dispute between me and the board is a payment schedule. Nobody in this building disagrees with me about the underlying theory. They disagree with me about saying it out loud on a Saturday, which is a disagreement about manners, and manners are what a community uses instead of thinking.”
He looks down at the page. He looks up.
“Ki Tisa,” he says. “They take off their gold. They bring it to Aharon. Everybody always asks why they built the calf. Wrong question. They had just been paid, in gold, on the way out of Egypt, and this is the first thing they do with a windfall, and I want to talk this morning about what a man buys when he suddenly has money and no idea who he is.”
He teaches for forty minutes. It is the best thing he has done in two years and about ninety people in the room know it.
Ezra Malik does it that night. The jacket, the hands, the pauses.
It does fourteen thousand. Nobody shares it. The comments are about the suit.

Posted in R. Shlomo Grossbard, Torah | Comments Off on For Money

Live Questions in Torah

Posted on July 27, 2026 by Luke Ford

Every serious dispute in Torah now sits inside one question. What can divine command mean after historical criticism, moral autonomy, Jewish sovereignty, feminism, mass secularization, denominational collapse, and the discovery that every supposedly neutral reading comes from a community with interests?

That is the theological question. Alongside it runs a sociological one that Torah scholars rarely ask about themselves. Who gains status by asking? Who gains disciples? Where does the money come from, and what does the money want?

Randall Collins (b. 1941) gives the tools. In The Sociology of Philosophies he argues that intellectual history runs on small, dense networks. Thinkers rise because they occupy a hot center of interaction ritual: sustained face-to-face argument, master-disciple transmission, peer rivalry, and competition inside a limited attention space. Creativity comes from opposition close enough to hurt. A school that has no enemy produces elaboration.

Torah has more ritual density than any field in the humanities. Every beit midrash on earth manufactures emotional energy at industrial scale. What Torah lacks is a shared attention space. A Brisker lamdan in Bnei Brak and a rabbinics professor at Yale do not compete for the same prize. Neither can defeat the other. Neither has to answer the other. Collins predicts stagnation under those conditions, and that is what most of the field delivers: brilliant internal work inside sealed rooms.

The circles that generate heat are the ones that build an artificial arena where opposed parties have to listen. Yeshivat Siach Yitzchak forces Hasidism, Lacan, and halakhah into the same seminar. Hadar forces academic Talmud and binding practice into the same beit midrash. The Association for the Philosophy of Judaism forces analytic metaphysics and revelation into the same conference room. Somebody built those rooms.

What happened at Sinai

This remains the deepest question in Orthodoxy and the one non-Orthodox Judaism has never escaped. Historical criticism made verbal dictation hard to defend. Saying instead that Torah records Israel's evolving encounter with God does not explain why anyone must obey it. The hard problem is authority. How does a historically produced text acquire transcendent claim?

Benjamin Sommer at JTS has the strongest constructive answer in English. His Torah is internally plural, historically layered, recognizably human, and still revelatory, because revelation need not mean divine stenography. He reads biblical law as developing within the Bible and the Torah as an anthology of competing teachings.

Samuel Lebens at the University of Haifa attempts something larger. He asks whether Judaism's core doctrines survive contemporary analytic scrutiny. The Principles of Judaism tests God, revelation, and redemption as propositions. He follows arguments into places that unsettle religious readers.

Aaron Segal at Hebrew University works the same circle with more technical austerity. He asks what revelation is supposed to accomplish. Proving that God communicated does not establish why He chose this mixture of narrative, law, obscurity, repetition, and argument as the medium.

Tamar Ross (b. 1938) saw early that historical development has to be built into the theology of revelation rather than conceded as embarrassment. Joshua Berman (b. 1964) is the strongest Orthodox defender of a substantial historical core, though his work reads more like intelligent defense counsel. Zev Farber and TheTorah.com made the problem unavoidable for educated Orthodox readers. Making criticism discussable is a service. It is not a solution to the authority problem.

Sommer has the best worked-out answer. Lebens asks the larger question. Segal asks the harder one.

Why should Torah bind anyone

A command can bind because God issued it, because a covenantal community accepted it, because it embodies the good, because it formed the man who now evaluates it, or because life outside the tradition is thinner and less truthful. Those are five different answers with five different failure modes.

Ethan Tucker at Hadar grounds halakhah in obligation rather than obedience. Content and purpose have to count. One cannot resolve every moral conflict by declaring submission the highest good. His is the most serious contemporary effort to produce egalitarian halakhah that still makes demands.

Moshe Koppel argues that halakhah works like a first language. A native speaker knows what sounds right before he can state the rule. Tradition therefore rests on communities, practices, intuitions, and exemplars that no code can replace. This answers fundamentalism and liberal reconstruction at once. Koppel's political leadership now gives him interests beyond disinterested inquiry.

Chaim Saiman asks what kind of thing halakhah is, and answers that rabbinic law does work other civilizations divide among law, theology, philosophy, literature, and moral formation.

Menachem Fisch treats Talmudic argument as a religious epistemology where disagreement and external criticism are essential to revelation rather than defects in it. He may be the most original living thinker on what the Talmud thinks thinking is. He has almost no school, which is a puzzle worth its own essay.

Can Torah be morally wrong

Slavery. The conquest narratives. Amalek. Gentiles. Mamzerut. Agunot. Gender hierarchy. Sexuality.

Four standard answers. God's command defines morality. The objection rests on a mistaken modern morality. The troubling rule belongs to an earlier stage of revelation. Or the tradition contains resources by which one part of Torah judges another. The first preserves authority at the cost of moral intelligibility. The second becomes special pleading. The third dissolves command into history. The fourth is the most rabbinic and raises the question of who decides which strand judges which.

Shai Held (b. 1971) makes love, grace, and responsibility for the vulnerable organizing principles. Judaism Is About Love corrects accounts built on obedience and tribal survival, though its thesis smooths the tradition.

Yitz Greenberg (b. 1933) argues in The Triumph of Life that covenant has passed through stages and now demands greater human responsibility. God's self-limitation leaves man an increasingly responsible partner. It is among the last attempts by a living theologian to narrate the entire Jewish story.

In The Obligated Self, Mara Benjamin argues that maternal care becomes a source for rethinking the autonomous individual assumed by modern philosophy and by male Jewish theology. Dependency, interruption, bodily need, and unwanted obligation disclose what human beings are.

Aryeh Klapper is the candid Orthodox halakhist on the decisive smaller question: when a halakhic argument produces cruelty, what went wrong in the reasoning? He lacks institutional scale, which may preserve his freedom.

The frontier belongs to men who permit criticism to run both directions. Torah can expose the vanity of contemporary morality. Moral knowledge can expose inherited readings that mistook historical hierarchy for divine will. Anyone who permits only one direction protects a system.

What Torah demands of Jewish power

This is the most urgent question in Israeli Torah and the one most likely to destroy a career.

The state ended the luxury of discussing power through memories of persecution. Torah now has to address armies, borders, civilian vulnerability, occupation, collective punishment, revenge, state coercion, and the temptation to read military success as divine approval.

Moshe Halbertal (b. 1958) is the broadest serious thinker at the crossing of Jewish law, ethics, obligation, and political power. He is an ethicist of responsibility more than a theologian of the state.

Menachem Lorberbaum asks the prior question of whether politics can enter theology without corrupting both, and has developed a theological critique of the political.

Yehudah Mirsky at Brandeis is the best diagnostician of religious Zionism‘s internal crisis. He understands Rav Kook (1865-1935), liberalism, messianism, and Israeli institutions from inside.

Shaul Magid (b. 1958) is the most fearless dissenter. He asks whether exile was a discipline that restrained Jewish sovereignty and made diasporic Judaism possible. His argument has moved from the margins to Harvard Divinity School.

Rav Shagar (1949-2007) remains more consequential than most living figures. He asked whether Jews can be at home in Israel while preserving an experience of exile inside the home, which keeps the state from becoming the final horizon of Jewish meaning. Yishai Mevorach, his most radical heir, pushes toward a theology of absence, incongruity, and brokenness, refusing the fantasy that history sorts into righteous agents and evil enemies.

Magid is the smartest dissenter, Mirsky the best diagnostician, Halbertal the strongest ethicist, and the Shagar school the deepest laboratory.

Chosenness, man, and faith

Three questions keep converging.

Orthodox Jews have to explain how election avoids becoming ethnic supremacy. Reform Jews have to explain why universal equality does not render Jewish particularity superfluous. Secular Jews have to explain why peoplehood is more than ancestry and political solidarity. Leora Batnitzky works this boundary between religion, law, nation, and modern political identity better than anyone, and she is skilled at formulating the problem without resolving it early. Lebens and Segal ask what it could mean for one people to hold a special covenant.

The question of the human person is where feminist, queer, disability, ecological, and care-based Torah converge. The assumed subject of classical Jewish thought was an able-bodied, heterosexual, competent man who controlled his time, entered obligations voluntarily, and depended on women without treating dependency as a theological fact. Mara Benjamin breaks that model through caregiving. Julia Watts Belser
breaks it through disability and bodily difference, and she is among the few scholars making disability alter theology rather than asking synagogues to install ramps. Rachel Adler (b. 1943) and Judith Plaskow (b. 1947) remain the senior architects. Their questions have partly won institutionally while the deeper project stalls. An institution can admit women into an unchanged intellectual structure and declare the revolution complete.

Orthodox feminism has produced an enormous expansion in women's learning. The next question is whether a woman's experience can change what counts as a persuasive halakhic reason. The LGBTQ question is becoming more serious for the same reason: whether orientation and sexual self-knowledge are morally relevant facts inside halakhic reasoning, or pastoral facts surrounding a fixed prohibition.

Faith after certainty is the Shagar question. Can faith cease to be a possession? A man might remain inside halakhah, prayer, and covenant without claiming proof that this language alone describes reality. Mevorach goes further. Faith begins after the collapse of the image of God one had been defending. Lebens and Segal take the opposite route, asking whether conceptual clarity can rescue faith from dependence on vagueness. Shagar asks how to live when foundations fail. Lebens asks whether the foundations can be restated more intelligently.

Where the disciples are

Who reproduces?

The strongest movement in Torah is a dead man's. Shagar‘s network keeps expanding almost twenty years after his death. Siach Yitzchak remains active. His writings continue to be edited and released. His students shaped Otniel, Mekor Chaim, the Maaleh film school, women’s learning programs, and journals across Religious Zionism. The school has posthumous charisma, sacred objects in the manuscripts and recordings, a distinctive vocabulary drawn from Hasidism, Lacan, Rav Kook, Rebbe Nachman, and trauma, internal factions, and productive rivals in Har Hamor on one side and Har Etzion on the other. It also has something rarer: permission for talented students to say the inherited religious language has stopped working. The danger is mannerism. Students can learn to speak about fragmentation and absence without establishing that any particular claim is true.

Yitzchak Ginsburgh (b. 1944) is the strongest living charismatic disciple-builder. Institutions, communities, schools, publishing, music, political theology, and a Kabbalistic vocabulary that maps mathematics, psychology, sexuality, statecraft, and the weekly portion onto one structure. He gives followers a world.

Strong interaction ritual generates confidence independent of truth. As a producer of disciples, Ginsburgh ranks at the top. As a producer of independent thinkers willing to overturn the master, not so much

Hadar is the most exciting American Torahschool. It is not a Tucker personality cult; Aviva Richman, Dena Weiss, Micha’el Rosenberg, and others carry serious rabbinic and academic formation. It has the social machinery Conservative Judaism once had. It selects young people, gives them shared texts and practice, makes friendships and marriages, trains them hard, and sends them out to reproduce the model.

Will a second generation rebel against Tucker? Hadar has built the network. The intellectual grandchildren have not arrived.

Daniel Boyarin (b. 1946) built the clearest academic genealogy. He made the Talmud available for questions larger than source criticism: what body rabbinic Judaism imagines, how Judaism and Christianity separated, whether diaspora is a defective political condition or a positive Jewish form. His concepts have entered the ordinary language of Jewish Studies, which is victory and also a loss of energy. Once a rebellion becomes a syllabus, the young must radicalize it or find another enemy.

Moshe Idel (b. 1947) produced the most successful academic succession. Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) set the paradigm. Idel challenged Scholem‘s central narrative. Idel’s students, Boaz Huss and Jonathan Garb among them, then challenged categories used by Scholem and Idel both, Huss by questioning whether mysticism is an appropriate category at all. The disciples divided the inheritance and developed rival programs. That is a fertile school.

The Lebens-Segal association is a growing movement. Shared technical language, recurring events, collective volumes, sessions at the American Philosophical Association, leadership passing to younger scholars. Its weakness is emotional temperature. Conferences and precise distinctions create intellectual energy without creating a religious form of life. It also lacks a concentrated graduate institution.

Yeshivat Har Etzion under the Lichtenstein–Amital lineage lineage remains a textbook Collins case for volume: decades of intense beit midrash life producing rabbis, educators, and academics in dense alumni networks. Its strength is disciplined seriousness. Its limitation is that the fundamental framework stays protected.

Har Hamor is the essential counterexample. Coherent lineage through Rav Kook, Rav Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891-1982), and Rav Zvi Tau. Large institution, dense ritual, intellectual enemies, institutional reproduction, political consequences. By Collins's sociological criteria it is enormously successful. By a truth-seeking criterion it is unattractive, because its structure determines in advance which premises may be questioned. Comparing it to Siach Yitzchak clarifies what Shagar's students have: uncertainty is permitted religious meaning.

On the Christian side, Peter Leithart (b. 1959) and Theopolis run the strongest disciple factory. Residential fellowships, intensive courses, shared worship, meals, music. Participants pray together, eat together, acquire a common vocabulary, and carry it back to churches. Textbook Collins. The limitation is confessional. Torah is absorbed into a christological system.

Askers and answerers

The status-earning askers are Fisch, Batnitzky, Mevorach, Magid, and Benjamin. Fisch gains standing by asking whether Talmudic argument is a self-correcting epistemology. Batnitzky gains standing by refusing to let the religion-nation-law boundary settle. Magid gains standing by asking whether sovereignty was a mistake. None is rewarded primarily for a solution.

The answer-builders are Sommer on revelation, Lebens on doctrine, Tucker on obligation, Halbertal on the ethics of power, Greenberg on the arc of covenant. Tucker’s reward is institutional. Sommer’s is citational. Those are different currencies.

Halbertal comes closest to doing both, which explains his centrality and also explains why he has no school. A man who improves everyone’s argument gives nobody an enemy. Segal is the outlier: he asks small, hard questions inside a system others take as given, the highest-status move in analytic philosophy and close to invisible outside it.

Avivah Zornberg (b. 1944) generates extraordinary interpretive energy and resembles a brilliant salon rather than the head of a school. Without a graduate program, journal, or yeshiva, charisma does not convert into genealogy.

Geography

Constructive Torah questions have been evicted from Jewish Studies. A religion department can ask how communities construct accounts of revelation. It cannot easily ask whether God revealed anything. So the live questions migrate to philosophy departments, law faculties, divinity schools, and independent institutes.

The strongest concentration is the wider Jerusalem cluster. Hebrew University philosophy and Jewish thought, with Halbertal, Segal, and Lorberbaum, and Haifa nearby for Lebens. These men move among metaphysics, halakhah, ethics, and political theory without changing costume. No American department matches it.

Harvard Divinity School is the fastest riser in North America. Magid became Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence on July 1, 2025, a five-year renewable appointment and the school’s first in that field. A divinity school can host constructive Jewish theology because divinity schools never accepted the methodological ban.

Cambridge became more serious in September 2025, when Aaron Koller left Yeshiva University to become Regius Professor of Hebrew, the first practicing Jew in a chair established by Henry VIII in 1540. Oxford has left its Regius Hebrew chair unfilled since 2020. The British center of gravity has shifted, and disciple formation there is young.

Rising and falling

Rising: Lebens, because he attempts constructive theology at a level philosophers must engage. Segal, more quietly, and perhaps more durably. Mara Benjamin, because care, embodiment, and dependency are becoming central concerns. Magid, sharply, because Harvard placed a marginal argument about exile near the center of elite religious studies. The Shagar school, among ambitious Religious Zionists dissatisfied with both nationalist certainty and liberal accommodation. Hadar, as a formation center. Shira Billet at JTS, who asks about humility, self-criticism, and philosophical commentary in ways that could become a major account of Jewish moral knowledge. Disability theology, because it changes the assumed human subject rather than adding a constituency.

Falling: the denominational seminaries as sovereign centers of ideas. They still credential rabbis, keep libraries, and employ scholars. They no longer determine where the urgent thinking happens. Reform theology has won institutional battles without producing a successor to its twentieth-century systems; Michael Marmur is thoughtful and pluralist and is mapping fragments rather than building a center. Conservative Judaism has lost much of its younger observant intelligentsia to Hadar. Hartman remains enormously influential as convener and translator, and its obligations to donors, educators, Israel, and the broad public make it an unlikely place for a destructive question pursued to the end.

Who closes questions

Four methods.

Orthodox institutions close by defining conclusions as outside Orthodoxy. Torah from Heaven, women's ordination, sexuality, the authority of received halakhah. The sanction is employment and communal legitimacy.

Progressive institutions close by declaring an argument harmful rather than false. That closure is harder to appeal, because it makes the questioner the defendant.

The academy closes by method, converting every theological question into a question about the history of theological claims. The first version is unanswerable inside the discipline. The second is quietly removed from the table.

Donor institutes close by selection. They rarely censor. They hire men whose likely conclusions already fall inside an acceptable range.

One case shows the overlap. When Harvard appointed Magid, Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute
defended his scholarly standing while noting that Hartman had parted ways with him over ideological differences. The most influential Jewish convening institution in the world could not hold a scholar whose conclusions about sovereignty had traveled too far.

The money

Here is the part nobody in the field says out loud.

Constructive Jewish theology in English exists at its present scale substantially because of one American Protestant foundation. The John Templeton Foundation launched an analytic theology program in 2010, and its Jewish arm, the Jewish Philosophical Theology project, ran out of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem under Yoram Hazony (b. 1964), with Notre Dame and Innsbruck as Christian partners. In 2014 Templeton awarded the Herzl Institute $2.2 million, described then as the first multimillion-dollar grant in Jewish theology, supporting research, doctoral workshops, and rabbinic student workshops. Hazony ran the main phase with Joshua Weinstein and Raffi Eis from 2015 to 2017.

Trace who sat inside that project and a funding genealogy appears. Joshua Berman was a Resident Scholar at the Herzl Institute. Dru Johnson was Associate Director, charged with liaising with Christian scholars interested in Hebrew scripture, and he now runs the Center for Hebraic Thought. Alan Mittleman at JTS took a two-year, $70,000 Herzl grant in 2016 for a book on holiness. Lebens and Segal later held a Templeton grant of their own for a two-year project on the philosophy of worship, convening senior and junior scholars at summer workshops in Israel.

So the two nodes that look separate on any map of the field, the Orthodox defense of a historical core and the analytic reconstruction of doctrine, share an origin in money. Both grew from a project directed by a Jewish nationalist political philosopher and financed by a foundation committed to reconciling religion with science.

Collins says attention space is scarce and fought over. Here a portion of it was purchased.

The money also shaped the questions. Analytic theology asks whether propositions about God can be defended. It does not ask whether Jewish power is used justly. There is no Templeton for that.

The conservative Jewish funders run on different logic. The Tikvah Fund was founded with money from Zalman Bernstein and chaired by Roger Hertog (b. 1941), with assets its critics estimate near $163 million, financing academic programs, institutes hosted inside universities, and popular platforms while retaining control of content. The Maimonides Fund launched Sapir in 2021 with Bret Stephens (b. 1973) as editor. Stephens has said the journal publishes a range of views while drawing a line at anti-Zionism and support for BDS. The line is a boundary on the attention space. A journal that excludes the Magid question in advance cannot host the argument about sovereignty that is now the most urgent live question in Torah.

Then October 7 rearranged everything. Since 2023, new centers, positions, and funding streams for antisemitism studies have appeared at NYU, Penn, Michigan, Toronto, Harvard, Baruch, Denver, and USC. Gratz College launched the first doctorate in antisemitism studies and found it the easiest fundraising in the college’s history. Meanwhile many Jewish studies programs are shrinking for want of resources, facing the same pressures as the rest of the humanities. Some donors abandoned elite universities; others, like Jan Koum‘s foundation endowing Israel studies at Stanford, doubled down.

Money flows to defense. Antisemitism studies, Holocaust studies, Israel studies, campus climate. This is what a frightened community funds. None of that surge goes to whether a historically produced text can command, or whether halakhah can absorb moral knowledge from outside the beit midrash, or what Torah demands of an army in a city.

Hadar is the American exception, because it raises money from people who want a functioning religious community rather than a policy result. That independence is its main asset and its main exposure. Siach Yitzchak is protected by being small, Israeli, and hard to read in translation.

The missing figure

The live questions are not funded and the funded questions are not live. The one large exception bought itself a school inside a decade, which should tell you how cheaply an attention space can be acquired in a field this fragmented.

The scholar who could own the next thirty years has not appeared. He needs four qualities that no living figure combines. Shagar's existential authority. Tucker's institutional competence. Boyarin's ability to produce descendants who exceed him. And funding indifferent enough to let the central premises lose.

Templeton money will not do it, because it wants conclusions compatible with theism. Tikvah and Maimonides money will not do it, because they want conclusions compatible with sovereignty. University money will not do it, because the method forbids the question. Denominational money will not do it, because the denominations are dying.

That leaves small, poor, personally financed institutions with a teacher, a room, and a dozen students who are permitted to conclude that the master is wrong.

Which is where Collins says these things always start.

Related: If Mearsheimer is right about men

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Another Exciting Scold About AI From A University Professor!

Posted on July 27, 2026 by Luke Ford

According to the New York Times, “Debbie Millman is a designer and brand strategist, the host of the podcast “Design Matters” and the chair of the master’s program in branding at The School of Visual Arts.”

She’s also married to the magnetic author Roxanne Gay.

These two stars burn so bright, I have to look away.

Sometimes when we touch, the honesty’s too much, and I have to close my eyes and hide. I wanna hold you ’til I die, ’til we both break down and cry, I wanna hold you, Roxanne, ’til the fear in me subsides.

How is Roxanne Gay married, blissfully married, and I am not? Asking for a friend.

Debbie Millman writes in The New York Times:

There is a stern warning to anyone who wants to study Kabbalah, a mystical tradition within Judaism that seeks to uncover the hidden nature of God and the universe: Just wait. In traditional practices, prospective students are urged to delay their studies until they reach the age of 40, at which point it is assumed they will have developed the inner ballast to withstand what they might encounter.

We should consider doing something similar for artificial intelligence.

I understand how extreme this may sound, especially now that artificial intelligence has already entered seemingly every area of our lives. But the extremity is the point.

We have been so quick to treat access to new technology as an inevitability that we have failed to question whether every powerful tool should be placed in the hands of every developing mind the moment it becomes available.

Does Debbie Millman know anything about Judaism or Kabbalah? If she knew something, she’d know that Judaism contains thousands of stern warnings, and this one is not dispositive. It’s just the opinion of a few rabbis widely cited by those who like to boss the youth.

I don’t think Millman is out to lunch on this topic. She’s just addicted to scolding those below her in status.

She has a point. If the degree certifies that the holder can construct and defend an argument, and a model constructed it, the credential misinforms employers. Her line about writing to find out what you think is good. The failure is that she runs three arguments together. One is fraud, which justifies discipline. One is pedagogy, which justifies redesigning the assignment. One is an age hierarchy, which justifies nothing.

If she had run her piece by AI before publishing it, if she had pushed AI to critique her arguments, she would have saved herself great embarrassment.

I know that in her world, this shlock is a hit. To everybody else, these clichés are tiresome.

Would Debbie Millman describe her students as squirming, incapable of tolerating discomfort, unwilling to stay inside difficulty, if they were named and could answer back? Anonymity lets her characterize their interior lives on the op-ed page while they sit in her seminar incentivized to absorb her abuse and not fight back.

Where does Millman get the idea that she has a strong formed mind? On the basis of this post, she’s unimpressive.

Millman (b. 1961) is sixty-four. She co-founded the Masters in Branding at the School of Visual Arts in 2009 and chairs it. Her students are graduate students, many of them working adults in their late twenties and thirties. The illustration over the essay shows a baby in a crib reaching for blocks. The argument is pitched at children. The enforcement landed on adults paying graduate tuition to a private art school in Manhattan. She never reconciles those two facts, and the essay depends on not reconciling them.

Now the contract. The rule permits AI for research and the visualization of ideas and forbids it as a replacement for original thinking and writing. No one can draw that line. A student asks a model for five objections to his position and then writes his own answers to them. Has he researched or outsourced the thinking? He drafts a paragraph, asks for three tighter versions, picks one and rewrites half of it. Which half is his? A vague standard puts all the risk on the student and all the discretion with the chair. She then decides after the fact that “augment” was a euphemism that made the intervention sound clerical. The students supplied a word for what they did. She has the power to rename the act after the act, and she uses it, then reads their word choice as evidence of a character defect.

The thesis is the credentialing document. The tool is free, sitting in the browser, used by the agencies these students want to join. Detection is unreliable. Peers are using it. A rule with those properties does not produce compliance. It sorts students by willingness to conceal and taxes the honest ones. Her own account confirms the norm never landed: they admitted it at the first question. Students who believe they have committed fraud do not fold that fast.

Then there is the guild argument, which is the one she cannot see from where she stands. Every craft that meets a labor-saving tool produces the claim that the tool blocks the acquisition of real skill and can be handled safely by those trained before it arrived. Draftsmen said it about CAD. Compositors said it about desktop publishing. The claim is not false on its face. The people making it hold skill capital the tool devalues, and they also control access to it for the young. Millman’s standing rests on a formed voice acquired the slow way over thirty years at Sterling. Her rule preserves the price of that formation. This makes her an interested party who never discloses the interest.

The Kabbalah frame is ludicrous and that she chose to lead with it shows her ignorance. The age-forty custom is late and contested. The usual anchor is Isserles at Yoreh Deah 246:4, and what he requires is that a man first fill his belly with meat and wine, meaning Talmud and the codes. Age forty attaches later and unevenly. The Ari died at thirty-eight. Ramchal wrote Mesillat Yesharim in his twenties. Moshe Idel and others have described the restriction as a guild rule as much as a spiritual safeguard, which cuts both ways for her. The restriction also bound the teacher. It governed transmission, who may hand down what to whom, inside a community that shared the premise. Millman’s version exempts the person who wrote it and binds the people who pay her, and offers no path to qualification except waiting fifteen years.

Her other two analogies invert. We license sixteen-year-olds by putting them behind the wheel with a licensed adult in the passenger seat and graduated privileges after. Surgeons cut in their twenties under supervision. Both are apprenticeship models with staged access and a ladder. She offers prohibition and no ladder.

She concedes the rule cannot function as policy and then defends it as expression, saying a rule can be valuable because it tells us what a culture reveres. Expressive rules imposed downward on students who pay you are not expressive. She enforced it on particular people who have to endure her to get where they want to go.

We’ve all dealt with old people with power who demand to be flattered. Why does Millman want to announce to the world that she is one of them?

Scolding is the cheapest thing a professor can do. A pledge costs an afternoon. Redesigning a thesis sequence costs a year and a faculty fight. The pledge also casts the professor as the last defender of something sacred, which is a good part to play in front of colleagues, and it converts an institutional problem into a moral defect in the young. That trade has been available to teachers for a long time and they keep taking it.

The better postures are known, and Millman is better placed to run them than most.

Start with the defense. If a tool defeats the assignment, the assignment was measuring the wrong thing. Brand strategy is a presentation field. These students will spend their careers standing in a conference room defending a positioning to a client who did not want to hear it. A model can produce the thesis document. It cannot sit in the chair for forty minutes and answer why the second objection got dropped, what the third interview changed, which version she abandoned and when. Put the students in front of three faculty and two practitioners and ask hard questions for an hour. Nobody needs to sign anything. The problem solves itself and the exercise gets closer to the work.

Second, teach the tool as craft, because she can. Her claim is that a formed mind rejects false polish and hears when a sentence has not been earned. That is a teachable skill and she has it. Sit with a student, run three versions of a paragraph, mark why all three are dead. An hour of that teaches more than a signed agreement and it hands the student the discrimination she says only age confers. She has taken her strongest teaching asset and converted it into a reason for exclusion.

Third, make the record the deliverable. Ask for the dated notes, the abandoned direction, the interview transcripts, the paragraph that failed. Wolfe kept his notes. Reporters keep theirs. If the thinking is supposed to become visible, then grade the visible thinking and stop treating the finished document as the only evidence. This has the side benefit of teaching a habit the students will use for thirty years.

Fourth, disclosure beats prohibition. Ask every student to write a page describing what he used, where, and what he changed afterward. Compliance costs nothing, so most will comply, and the professor can grade the judgment on display. A prohibition regime generates lying and gives the faculty no information at all. Millman ended her year knowing less about how her students work than she knew at the start, which is a strange outcome for someone whose subject is how people make decisions.

Fifth, go first. If she published a piece showing where a model improved her own draft and where it wrecked a sentence she loved, the age asymmetry would dissolve on contact. She is asking for a restraint she has not demonstrated in public. Students read that quickly and it costs her more authority than the infraction cost them.

Sixth, compete on the ground the machine cannot reach. Send them out. Twelve interviews. Three hours standing in the store watching who picks up the package and puts it back. A model cannot go to the mall in Paramus. Brand strategy had already drifted toward decks assembled from other decks long before 2023. The tool exposed a rot that was there, and the response might be more contact with the world rather than a pledge about prose.

None of this requires believing AI is harmless. Grant her the strongest version. Something does get built by sitting with confusion, and some students will skip it and graduate weaker. The reply is that nobody has ever been shamed into loving a blank page. If the interior life is at stake, the work is to make the interior life attractive, which means small assignments, fast response, praise that lands, and a teacher who reads closely enough that the student wants to be worth reading. That is expensive and unglamorous and does not produce an op-ed.

The tell in her essay is her delight in others pain. She reports that the students squirmed. She read enjoyment into her own account of the moment. Good teachers like their students. Socrates worried in the Phaedrus that writing would ruin memory, and he was partly right, and the answer was never to make the young sign something.

A professor who believes the tool destroys judgment, and who has judgment, has one obligation, and it is to teach the judgment. Waiting until forty is not a curriculum.

What kind of bubble does she live in that nobody has told her the time of day?

There’s something about teaching that leads to some people to develop a bossy scolding personality, constantly instructing others. These people don’t bring joy.

She built her whole argument on a Jewish tradition she describes with confidence, and the description is shaky. Between her draft, her editor, the copy desk, the fact checkers, and whatever friends read it first, nobody asked where the age of forty comes from or whether the tradition says what she says it says. The Times has rabbis on speed dial. The claim sailed through because in that room a reference to Kabbalah reads as depth rather than as a factual assertion someone might verify. She reached for it the way one reaches for a color. That tells you more about her circle than any of her opinions do.

Second, the material stake she never discloses. Generative models are cutting through commercial design and illustration right now. Packaging comps, logo exploration, storyboards, stock photography, the middle tier of the work that fed shops like Sterling Brands for thirty years. Her students are paying for a credential in a field being repriced while they sit in the seminar. In that world, hostility to the tool is the ingroup position, and announcing that you caught your students using it earns applause from everyone whose income the tool threatens. She is not writing into resistance. She is writing into a standing ovation from people with the same exposure.

Third, the deformation of the craft. She has spent twenty years delivering monologues to an audience that arrived admiring her, and seven hundred interviews asking questions of guests who came to be understood. That is a fine life and it builds a real skill, which is the sincere spoken paragraph. It builds none of the other one, which is argument written for a reader who will look for the hole. Nothing in her week trains her to anticipate the objection that a graduate student in her thirties is not a baby in a crib. Her prose in this piece has the cadence of the podcast open: three clauses, a turn, a resonant close. It sounds finished. It has not been tested.

Fourth, the scolding. It has a payoff and she is collecting it. Complaint about the young is the one form of aggression in professional life that costs nothing. The targets cannot answer, the peers agree, and the complainer comes off as the person who still cares about standards. Compare the alternatives. Rebuilding a thesis sequence means a faculty fight, an admissions conversation, and an admission that the program measured the wrong thing for two years. Writing the op-ed takes a morning and produces a lifetime achievement award’s worth of nodding.

Fifth, the genre pulled her. The opinion desk buys a specific shape: personal anecdote from inside an institution, a diagnosis of the culture, an exotic frame borrowed from somewhere old, and a closing line that sounds like wisdom. She gave them the shape. The desk did not ask her to check the shape against the world, because the shape is what they bought. Some of what looks like her judgment is the form doing its work on her.

Now the fair part. She has run a program for seventeen years, she reads closely enough to notice that a word like augment is doing concealment work, and her worry about young people skipping the difficult stage is not silly. A smart version of her essay exists. The bubble did not make her wrong. It let her publish the first draft of a position instead of the fourth.

What would puncture it is small and unavailable to her. One student, on the record, under her name, replying in the same paper. Not a comment thread. A reply with a byline, describing what the tuition costs, what the job market looks like in July of 2026, what the rule said and how it could not be followed, and what it was like to read her own teacher characterize her interior life to two million strangers. Millman would have to sit with that the way she wants her students to sit with confusion. She has built a life where that reply never arrives.

That is the shortest description of the bubble. Every part of her week is structured so that the person who might answer her cannot.

The classroom is the only room most adults ever get where the audience cannot leave, cannot answer on equal terms, and is graded by the speaker. Run that five days a week for twenty years. A manner forms. In every other adult relationship, correcting a man’s reasoning or his usage is a small aggression you have to pay for. In teaching it is the job description, and the license does not switch off in the parking lot.

Add the answer key. Most conversations in life, nobody knows who is right. The teacher knows on schedule, has known since August, and gets to reveal it. That is a strange daily experience and few people are built to absorb it without effect.

Then the turnover. Students cycle out every year or two. The teacher never faces the person who heard the first version of the lecture and found the hole in it. Same material, fresh room, no correction arriving from anywhere. It preserves bad arguments and it preserves manner. A man who has said the same thing to a new audience for two decades has no way to know whether it holds.

The status. Humanities faculty carry high cultural capital and modest income, which Bourdieu called the dominated fraction of the dominant class. They hold the credential and the person they lecture out-earns them. Resentment paired with a podium produces a specific tone, and you hear it whenever a professor addresses the public rather than his students.

Selection runs the same direction. People who become teachers are people who liked school. School rewards verbal fluency, rule compliance rewarded from above, and comfort inside a grading hierarchy. The profession draws from the population that found that arrangement congenial and did well in it.

And the flattery. Nobody tells a plumber his work shapes minds. Teachers hear that they serve, sacrifice, and form the future, from administrators, from parents, from each other, at every commencement. A steady diet of hearing your work described as noble makes it easy to slide into believing your opinions are noble too.

The scolding trait tracks exposure rather than teaching. A piano teacher’s student either plays the piece or does not, in front of an audience, and the teacher’s reputation rides on it. A clinical instructor is judged by whether the resident kills anyone. A trade instructor’s graduates either pass the licensing exam or fail it. Those teachers are hard to find in the bossy category, because a verdict arrives from outside the room and lands on them. The manner concentrates where the field grades its own work and the teacher is the only judge.

Any role that pairs a captive audience with an evaluation license produces the same deformation. The columnist. The podcaster. The man with a livestream and no crosstalk who answers the objections he selects. The rabbi at the shiur. The therapist. The manager.

What comes out as scolding often starts as fear. Adjuncts on nine thousand a course, enrollments falling, a room of phones, a discipline nobody outside believes in. Scolding is what fear sounds like from behind a podium. Millman has less excuse than most, given the podcast and the awards, but the general case is more anxious than arrogant.

Here is the test I would use, and it takes ten seconds. Watch what a teacher does the moment a student is right and he is wrong in front of the room. Everything you want to know shows up there, and it does not correlate with subject, rank, or politics. Some of them light up. Those are the ones who came for the material. The rest came for the room.

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