“He has.”

“And?”

Zona smiled. “He’s in love.”

“With whom?”

“With everything. The mashpia, the niggunim, the other bochurim. Yesterday, someone explained a piece of Tanya to him, and he stayed another twenty minutes to review it. He even bought himself a hat.”

“The hat is of very little concern to us. What does he want?”

“To learn. To become a Chassid. To do what Hashem wants. At the moment, he wants all of it.”

“At the moment,” repeated the Satan. “Yes. An important qualification.”

“I’m assigning him to you.”

“Now?”

“You object?”

“To the timing, perhaps. For years, he ate treifus. He had a goyish girlfriend. Shabbos was a good day to go shopping. You left him quite undisturbed. Now he’s keeping Shabbos and learning Gemara, and you’re sending me.”

“You’re confusing activity with accomplishment. Nobody had ever taught him otherwise. As far as he understood, he was living a perfectly decent life. There was very little deliberate choice for us to concern ourselves with.”

“He seemed to be managing beautifully without us.”

“Precisely. We could hardly take credit.”

The Satan opened a folder.

“Now, however, he has learned something. He knows the Eibeshter expects something of him. He knows that his actions matter. He has begun to understand that being a Yid makes certain demands on him. Consequently, his decisions have become considerably more interesting.”

“And you want him back with the girlfriend?”

“I want you to tempt him. Kindly leave the particulars until you’ve understood the assignment.”

“I only ask because she’s already told him he’s become impossible to talk to. I see no reason to disagree with her.”

The Satan glanced down at the folder.

“He gets up for Chassidus. Attends both sedarim. Has asked for extra help with his reading.”

“He’s grateful to the people who brought him there,” the Satan continued. “He enjoys discovering things. These are pleasant circumstances in which to begin serving Hashem. We shall have to see what he does under other circumstances.”

“I imagine I can arrange a few.”

“You must give him reasons to neglect what he knows he ought to do. Reasons he’ll find convincing.”

“Of course.”

“And I expect more than an invitation to sleep late.”

“Really,” said Zona. “You do have a low opinion of my conversation.”

“I have a high opinion of his intentions.”

“So do I. They’re the most interesting thing about him.”

She leaned forward.

“How far am I permitted to go?”

“You’ll receive precise instructions. Your enthusiasm does not extend your authority.”

“You make it sound rather delicate.”

“It is. You have an important mission, and there is one part of it you must never discuss with him.”

Zona waited.

“He must not discover why you’ve been assigned to him.”

“He’ll know he has a yetzer hara.”

“Certainly. Let him discuss it. Let him complain about it. He may give an entire speech about it at a farbrengen. But he must regard your presence as an unfortunate interruption. Something preventing him from getting on with his avodah.”

“And if he begins to suspect otherwise?”

“Imagine trying to discourage someone who has begun to take your arrival as a reason to persist.”

Zona’s smile faded slightly.

“Yes. That would be tiresome.”

“He must wish you would leave him alone.”

“That,” she said, “I’m accustomed to.”

“I’m sure. Ideally, he should spend a good deal of time imagining how well he would serve Hashem if only you weren’t there.”

The Satan slid the folder across the desk.

“Very well,” said Zona, opening it. “Let’s see what our young man finds irresistible.”“

Does It Work? Judaism After Modernity

I think one of the largest changes taking place in religious Jewish life today is one that we barely have language for.

For most of the modern period, frum Jews understood themselves, in one way or another, as confronting modernity. Modernity came with science, secularism, universities, progress, individual freedom, and an entire way of looking at religion. Different communities responded differently. Some attempted to make peace with it. Others fought it.

Chassidic communities generally leaned much more heavily toward the second approach. Satmar is probably the clearest example. The yeshivish world did this in its own way. Chabad was never quite the same, but here too there was a strong sense that Torah represented one way of understanding reality while the modern secular world represented another.

Obviously, this is a huge oversimplification. But as a broad description, I think it is basically correct.

The problem is that we no longer really live in that world.

Modernity itself has lost much of its confidence.

People still believe in science in the normal sense. They go to doctors. They take medicine. They fly on airplanes and use smartphones. Nobody is suggesting that chemistry suddenly stopped working.

But the larger faith in Science—with a capital S—as something steadily leading humanity toward a more rational, enlightened and progressive future has taken a serious beating.

People talk about pharmaceutical companies and conflicts of interest. They distrust universities in a way that would have sounded strange a generation ago. Academic scandals are common. Governments are distrusted. Journalists are distrusted. Experts say one thing, then sometimes something quite different a few years later.

Whether every complaint is fair is almost beside the point.

The old confidence is gone.

And, interestingly, religion has benefited from this in certain ways. Tradition does not look nearly as embarrassing as it once did. Family, community, rootedness, older ways of life—things modernity often treated as obstacles to progress—have regained some appeal.

But that does not mean people have simply returned to the old religious mindset.

Something else happened instead.

The question changed.

It used to be, at least much more than today:

Is it true?

Increasingly, the question is:

Does it work?

I don’t mean that people no longer care about truth. Obviously they do. Nobody wants to think that he is knowingly living a lie.

But truth does not necessarily settle the matter anymore.

A Chabad person can believe in Hashem, believe that Torah is true, believe in the Rebbe and in Chassidus, and still conclude that the normal Chassidish life being offered to him is not working.

Maybe the beard gets in the way of the career he wants. Maybe the social structure makes marriage harder rather than easier. Maybe he looks around and simply does not see a realistic place for himself within the standard path.

So he loosens things. He dresses differently. He becomes less conventionally Chassidish, perhaps less observant in certain areas.

That does not necessarily mean that he stopped believing.

And you can see the opposite as well.

There are people in Satmar who may have very serious doubts about religion, sometimes extraordinarily serious doubts, and still remain completely Satmar.

They dress Satmar. Their children go to Satmar schools. They live in the community. Their marriages, families, businesses and friendships are all there.

Why leave?

The system works for them.

It gives them a wife, children, family, friends, a neighborhood, a community and an entire structure for life. Walking away would not mean merely changing a few beliefs. It could mean blowing up almost everything they have.

So the man who looks completely Chassidish may, in some cases, believe much less than the man who looks far less Chassidish.

That is something I think we often fail to appreciate.

And I think the same shift can even be seen in psak.

One of the famous battles of the previous generation involved Rav Moshe Feinstein and artificial insemination with donor sperm.

Rav Moshe held that since there had been no forbidden sexual relationship, there was no act of adultery, and therefore a child did not become a mamzer merely because the sperm had come from another man.

Satmar went to war over this.

And I mean war.

Rav Moshe’s sefarim were burned. His family was harassed. There are longstanding stories that members of the family needed bulletproof vests because of the threats surrounding the controversy.

Whatever the exact details of every story, nobody disputes the atmosphere. This was not treated like an ordinary disagreement between two poskim.

And the reason is understandable.

A married woman was having a child whose biological father was not her husband.

Rav Moshe’s point was that there had been no act of adultery. But hashkafically, something very basic had still been pulled apart. Marriage, intimacy, conception and biological fatherhood, which ordinarily all belonged to one structure, were no longer necessarily connected.

For Satmar, this was not a small technical innovation.

Now look at what is happening today.

Recently there was a major controversy in Satmar over ovarian transplantation. The Hisachdus HaRabbonim came out strongly against it. Rav Aharon Teitelbaum permitted it.

Of course, the two cases are not halachically identical. That isn’t the point.

In some ways, the newer case is even more striking.

With an ovarian transplant, one woman may provide the ovarian tissue and therefore the genetic material of the egg, while another woman carries the pregnancy and gives birth.

So who is the mother?

What is the child’s yichus?

If one woman is Jewish and the other is not, what is the child’s status?

Who are the child’s relatives? Whom may he marry?

These are not side questions. They go directly to some of the most basic categories through which halacha understands family.

And now, inside Satmar itself, major rabbanim are attempting to find a way to permit it.

That is an extraordinary shift.

The same world in which Rav Moshe’s heter involving donor insemination was treated almost as a breach in the walls is now itself producing heterim in cases that raise equally fundamental, perhaps even more complicated, questions about parenthood and yichus.

I don’t think the explanation is that Satmar suddenly became modern.

I think modernity simply stopped being the main issue.

The pressure is different now.

What do you tell a frum couple who cannot have children?

That is not a small question in Orthodox life. Children are close to the center of everything. Marriage, family, continuity, communal belonging—so much of the structure assumes that this is the future a person is building toward.

Now tell someone that because he follows halacha, that entire future may simply be closed to him.

What happens?

Maybe he accepts it.

Maybe he goes ahead with the procedure anyway.

Maybe he remains frum, but something inside his relationship with rabbanim and halacha changes permanently.

Or maybe, over time, Judaism begins to feel like a system demanding enormous sacrifices while offering no path through the problem.

That pressure matters.

You see something similar, I think, with Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, the Chabad posek in Sydney who has dealt extensively with fertility, yuchsin and difficult personal-status questions.

Rabbi Shmuel Zajac in Morristown has criticized elements of his methodology. As I understand the criticism, Rabbi Ulman will sometimes adopt one understanding of a sugya where it allows a heter, while elsewhere, where that same approach would create an unnecessary chumra, he may rely on another understanding. The same issue can arise over which sources are treated as authoritative.

In other words, the criticism is not merely that he is lenient.

It is that there is a very strong drive to find the heter.

I am not trying to decide here whether Rabbi Zajac’s criticism is correct in every instance. That is really a separate discussion.

What interests me is that everyone understands why such a drive would exist.

Tell a frum couple who desperately want children that halacha simply offers them no way forward and you are not merely giving them an inconvenient psak. You may be changing their entire relationship with Judaism.

A generation ago, one of the great fears was:

If we permit this, what are we giving in to?

Today there is another fear:

If we don’t permit it, what happens to the person?

That is not a small change.

You see the same mentality in a much more ordinary setting when people speak about marriage.

Today a marriage can end and, when you ask what actually happened, there may be no dramatic answer.

He wasn’t abusive.

Nobody cheated.

There was no addiction.

He made an okay living.

He may even have been, by everybody’s account, a perfectly decent person.

So what happened?

“It didn’t work.”

And increasingly, that is not the beginning of the explanation.

That is the explanation.

Again, I am obviously not saying that every divorce is wrong. There are terrible marriages, and there are marriages that clearly need to end.

I am talking about the language.

The question is increasingly whether the marriage works.

And I think people now look at religion in much the same way.

This is also why I think we have to be much more careful when judging who is more religious and who is less religious.

People are not rewarded equally for being frum.

For one person, being very Chassidish comes together with the family name, the position, the social standing, the good shidduchim, the job, the network.

Everything fits.

Being Chassidish works extremely well for him.

That does not mean he is insincere. He may have enormous emunah and yiras Shamayim.

But we should at least admit that his religiosity is being rewarded.

Another person can believe every bit as much and have a completely different experience.

He does not have the family name. He does not have the position. He doesn’t have the money or the connections. He may discover that the more closely he follows the communal script, the fewer options he actually has.

So you can end up in a rather strange situation.

You are expected to pay the price of being fully inside the system, while many of the benefits of being inside the system are not actually available to you.

That is a very different religious test from the one faced by someone for whom every part of the system lines up.

I think the same thing can be seen among people who come from divorced homes.

I have noticed that they are often less conventionally religious.

It is very easy to look at that and conclude that something went wrong with their emunah.

I am not sure that is true at all.

In fact, I have often found the opposite. Some are unusually thoughtful, decent, serious people. Sometimes they think much more deeply about religion precisely because life forced them to.

But they were given a harder version of frum life.

One child experiences Judaism together with two parents, a stable house, money, communal standing, good shidduch prospects and a clear future.

Another experiences the same Judaism together with divorce, fighting, divided families, financial pressure, social awkwardness and perhaps a mark against him in shidduchim before he has even done anything wrong.

Then, fifteen years later, we look at the first person, who stayed completely inside the system, and the second one, who became less religious, and conclude that the first one must have had greater yiras Shamayim.

Maybe.

But I don’t think we know that nearly as easily as we imagine.

Perhaps one of them simply received far more reinforcement for staying religious.

This is also why I have become somewhat more sympathetic to something I normally criticize: nepotism.

Nepotism is still nepotism. Giving your son a job because he is your son is not suddenly fair.

But I increasingly think there is another layer to it.

People are trying to make sure that Judaism works for their children.

Give your son the rabbinical position, and now he has a salary. He has status. His shidduch prospects improve. He has a defined place in the community. Remaining completely within the system becomes much easier.

You have built him a life in which being frum works.

The obvious problem is that the job you gave your son is now not available to someone else’s son.

And so the very mechanisms used to make Judaism work for insiders can make it work much less well for outsiders.

That creates a strange situation when we then turn around and judge the outsider for not being as religious.

None of this means that people have no responsibility for their choices.

Of course they do.

And it certainly does not mean Torah should change itself whenever someone finds something difficult. A Torah that simply reflects whatever is most convenient at the moment is no longer much of a Torah.

But I think religious communities spent generations preparing themselves to answer one particular challenge.

Modernity asked:

Is Judaism true?

We developed answers to that question. Arguments. Proofs. Hashkafa. Sefarim. Institutions.

But more and more, people are asking another question.

Does Judaism work?

That question cannot be answered only with a proof.

Eventually the person looks at his life.

Can I get married?

Can I have children?

Can I earn a living?

Can I belong here?

Is there actually a future for me?

And when someone becomes less religious, perhaps we should still ask what happened to his emunah.

But maybe we should also ask something a little less comfortable:

What kind of life did we actually make possible for him?

In a previous piece, I wrote about some of the tools that can help a person learn Gemara.

Here I want to talk about the other side of the equation: teaching it.

Over the years, in my classroom at Hadar Hatorah, I developed a number of methods for teaching Gemara. Not all of them are going to work in every yeshiva. Different students need different things.

But underneath all of them was one basic principle.

Students learn by learning.

Shock.

You might say: Obviously. How else are students supposed to learn?

But in practice, a lot of people who teach Gemara don’t really operate that way. The assumption is that students learn primarily by listening — listening to the rebbi explain the Gemara, listening to the shiur, listening to the teacher’s explanations.

That is not how most people learn. Definitely not for long periods of time.

The teacher’s job is to guide the student in how to learn, and ultimately to help him reach the point where he can learn on his own.

That is the basic idea behind everything that follows.

And it means that I see the relationship between shiur and chazarah almost exactly backwards from the way I think many maggidei shiurim see it.

Chazarah is actually the main learning time.

The shiur is preparation for the chazarah.

I think many maggidei shiurim instinctively see the shiur as the main event. The rebbi teaches the Gemara, and then chazarah exists so that the student can go over what the rebbi taught and make sure he remembers it.

I see the process almost in reverse.

The real learning happens when the student sits down afterward, opens the Gemara, and has to work through it himself.

The purpose of the shiur is to get him ready to do that.

I need to give him enough information, enough context and enough understanding that when he gets to chazarah, he can actually start learning.

The shiur is not supposed to replace the student’s learning.

It is supposed to make the student’s learning possible.

And once you see the shiur that way, a lot of other things follow.

The Students Should Be Doing Something

One of the most basic principles in my classroom was active learning.

The students should be doing something.

A very simple example: if I explained a question, I would ask the students whether they understood it. Often, I would ask one of them to explain the question back to me.

Even better, if one student understood it and another student didn’t, I would have the first student explain it to the second.

This had the additional advantage that I didn’t have to explain the same thing five times, which, mind you, I very much appreciated.

But there was a more important reason.

Teaching is one of the best ways to learn.

When you have to explain something to somebody else, you discover very quickly whether you actually understand it. You have to put the idea into words. You have to figure out where the steps are. You have to answer somebody else’s confusion.

So I wanted my students to become teachers too.

And quite often, a student could explain an idea to another student better than I could.

Not because he understood the Gemara better than I did.

Because he was closer to the difficulty.

A student who had struggled with the same point ten minutes earlier often remembered exactly what had confused him. He could explain it from the perspective of someone who had just figured it out.

I used the same idea during chazarah.

Often I would designate one or two of the more advanced students as the chacham — almost like an assistant teacher.

That gave him a certain responsibility.

Once a student knows that he isn’t learning only for himself — that somebody else may be depending on him to explain the Gemara — he has a different motivation to understand it.

So after we had already learned the material a few times, I might have one of the more advanced students read the Gemara and explain it to somebody newer or less experienced.

The advanced student gets another chazarah.

The newer student gets an explanation from somebody closer to his level.

Everybody wins.

And this went beyond simply explaining the Gemara.

If we needed to make a chart, I would have students help make the chart.

I would ask students to repeat answers.

If someone had a good question, I would have him explain the question to the class so that everybody understood what he was asking.

If somebody asked a more basic question, very often I would turn to the other students and ask them to answer it.

They weren’t an audience.

They were learning.

Test Them

Another very important part of the system was testing.

Now, when I say testing, I don’t mean using tests as a form of control.

Testing was feedback and accountability.

Usually, very early on, I could figure out approximately where each student was holding. From there, I would give each student his own “homework.”

Everyone was responsible for learning the material generally. But in addition, each student had a certain amount of Gemara inside that he was expected to master, depending on his level.

For a beginner, that might be only a couple of lines.

For a stronger student, it might be most of the shiur.

Giving everyone exactly the same assignment might look equal, but it isn’t necessarily good teaching.

Each student had something concrete that was his responsibility.

And then, most days, I would test him on it.

This sounds much more time-consuming than it actually was.

I didn’t test every line.

I would go over to a student, randomly choose a line, ask him to read and explain it, and then choose another line somewhere else.

Usually, within two or three lines, I already had a pretty good idea of how well he knew the piece.

And more importantly, so did he.

Maybe he thought he knew the Gemara. Then he tried reading it inside and realized that he didn’t know it nearly as well as he thought.

Good.

Now he knows what he has to work on during chazarah.

I would also often give a short written test once a week, depending on the class.

Nothing complicated.

Usually ten fairly simple questions.

And often I didn’t even mark them.

I would give the students the answers and let them mark the tests themselves.

Because the test was for them.

What do I know?

What don’t I know?

What do I need to go back and learn again?

That is what a test should tell a student.

If They Don’t Know It, Do It Again

And that leads to another very important rule.

If the students didn’t know the Gemara, we did it again.

I didn’t have a certain amount of material that I had to get through no matter what.

The goal wasn’t to be able to announce that we had “covered” another daf.

If they didn’t understand it, we repeated it.

In fact, I would often build that into the schedule.

The first day, I might teach the Gemara in a very basic form.

The next day, we would go through it again, perhaps adding Rashi.

The third day, we might go through it again and add a little more depth.

The point was to move slowly.

Because students usually do not understand a Gemara properly the first time.

Almost nobody does.

The first time, they get a general picture.

Then they play around with it.

They do chazarah.

They discover what they understood and what they didn’t understand.

Then we go through it again.

Then they do chazarah again.

Usually, it takes two or three days before the material has really worked itself out in the student’s head.

The amount of material we covered followed how well the students understood it.

Not the other way around.

First the Gemara. Then the Mefarshim.

Only after the students had a decent grasp of the Gemara itself did I start worrying about mefarshim.

And even then, I would usually begin with the ArtScroll notes.

First of all, because I think they’re excellent.

But there was another very important advantage.

The student could go back and learn them himself.

He didn’t have to remember something I quoted in shiur. He could open the notes, read them, work through them, check them again during chazarah, and come back with questions.

That keeps the student actively learning.

And even then, I would only bring in an ArtScroll note if I thought it was actually necessary, and only after we had already gone through the Gemara and understood the basic pshat at least once.

The focus should be on the text in front of the student, not on remembering every random thing I happened to say during shiur.

Once the student knows the Gemara, he can come back and say:

I don’t understand this line.

I don’t understand why the Gemara says this.

I understand the words, but I don’t understand the logic.

Now we have something to discuss.

And once in a while, I would bring in additional mefarshim as well.

But usually there had to be a reason.

If a student asked a question and one of the mefarshim addressed exactly that question, wonderful.

Now the mefaresh means something to him.

But I wasn’t interested in piling mefarshim onto a student simply because I happened to know them.

And I certainly wasn’t going to obligate him on a test to remember every extra point I mentioned.

The word mefaresh means an explanation.

An explanation is supposed to make something clearer.

If the student doesn’t yet understand the Gemara that the mefaresh is coming to explain — or if the explanation itself is only going to confuse him more — then what exactly have we accomplished?

First learn the Gemara.

Then explain it.

Give Their Brains a Break

There is also a much more basic part of all this.

Students need breaks.

Generally speaking, I would give a five-to-ten-minute break roughly every half hour. It is basically the Pomodoro idea applied to a Gemara classroom: learn for a concentrated period, stop, and then come back.

And I found this necessary even with baalei teshuvah.

These were not little kids being forced to sit in class.

These were mature adults who had chosen to come to yeshiva and wanted to learn Gemara.

And even they could not maintain full concentration indefinitely.

You have a few minutes at the beginning for everyone to settle in. You learn for around half an hour. Then you take a break. You come back, learn for another half hour, and take another break.

Breaks are not wasted learning time.

They are part of the learning.

A person needs time to absorb what he just learned, reset his concentration, and then come back fresh.

And frankly, if you talk at somebody for an hour and a half straight, eventually he is going to be bored out of his mind.

Now, honestly, I had an hour-and-a-half shiur.

So I needed to fill an hour and a half.

But that did not mean an hour and a half of straight Gemara.

Usually, for roughly the last half hour, we would discuss something lighter.

Often it was Jewish history connected to the Gemara we were learning. I found that understanding the historical background frequently made the Gemara itself easier to understand.

And if a student had something on his mind, we would talk about that too.

If there was a question about halachah, hashkafah, or simply acclimating to Jewish life, we would discuss it — either then or the next day.

There were jokes.

There were stories.

There were conversations along the way.

This wasn’t me standing on a podium lecturing.

It was a conversation taking place.

And frankly, if I were designing a Gemara shiur from scratch, I think an hour is probably the maximum it should be.

Because again, the shiur isn’t the main event.

The student’s learning is.

Treat Students Like Intelligent People

In general, I think all of this comes down to something very simple.

Treat students as intelligent individuals.

Not as empty containers that need to be filled with information.

Not as people who need to be managed every second.

Not as an audience sitting there while the rebbi performs.

They are people learning Torah.

They can think.

They can ask.

They can explain.

They can teach each other.

They can figure out what they know and what they don’t know.

They can take responsibility for their own learning.

The breaks, the chazarah, the testing, repeating the material instead of racing ahead, having students teach one another, giving different students different amounts to master — all of it comes from the same assumption.

The student is the one doing the learning.

The rebbi’s job is to help him do it.

Students learn by learning.

The next Mishnah continues with Nittai HaArbeli:

״נתאי הארבלי אומר: הרחק משכן רע, ואל תתחבר לרשע, ואל תתיאש מן הפורענות.״

Distance yourself from a bad neighbor, do not attach yourself to a wicked person, and do not despair of punishment.

The first two teachings are clearly the mirror image of the first two teachings of the previous Mishnah.

Yehoshua ben Perachya had taught:

״עשה לך רב, וקנה לך חבר״ — establish for yourself a rav, and acquire for yourself a friend.

Nittai HaArbeli now tells us the opposite: which relationships a person must make sure not to develop.

As we explained, a rav provides a person with a general direction. He is not necessarily involved in every small detail of a person’s day-to-day life. Rather, he gives him the broader perspective, the framework within which he understands where he is going and what kind of person he is trying to become.

Opposite the rav stands the שכן רע, the bad neighbor.

A neighbor also shapes the general environment in which a person lives. He may not be particularly close to you. You may not share your secrets with him, ask him advice, or even spend much time speaking with him. Nevertheless, he becomes part of the atmosphere surrounding your life.

You see what he considers normal. You hear the way he speaks. You observe what he values, what he laughs at, what he respects, and what he dismisses.

And slowly, sometimes without noticing it at all, those things begin to define what you consider normal.

That is why the Mishnah does not merely say not to become friends with a bad neighbor. It says:

״הרחק משכן רע״ — distance yourself from him.

The danger of the bad neighbor does not begin when you develop a close relationship with him. His very presence creates an environment.

In a certain sense, therefore, the שכן רע can become the negative substitute for the rav. If a person does not consciously choose who will define his direction, the people around him will often do it for him.

If you do not choose your rav, your environment may quietly become your rav instead.

The second statement follows the same pattern.

Yehoshua ben Perachya says:

״קנה לך חבר״ — acquire for yourself a friend.

As we explained previously, a true friend is much closer than a rav. A friend lives with you in the details. He eats with you, drinks with you, learns with you, shares with you the secrets of Torah, and helps lift you when you fall.

And therefore Nittai HaArbeli warns:

״ואל תתחבר לרשע״ — do not attach yourself to a wicked person.

The rasha is the negative counterpart of the chaver.

But there is an additional diyuk here.

In the positive case, the Mishnah says קנה לך חבר. In the negative case, it says אל תתחבר לרשע.

These are not quite the same expression.

A קנין means that something becomes yours. It enters into your domain and in some sense becomes part of your own life.

That is the kind of relationship that can exist in kedushah.

Two people can become so deeply bound to one another that the other person’s growth becomes his own concern. His friend’s success matters to him. His failure hurts him. His perspective becomes part of his own thinking.

The two do not merely stand beside each other. They become united.

With a rasha, however, the Mishnah uses the language of חיבור.

A chibbur means that two separate things have been joined together.

You can connect yourself to a rasha. You can spend time with him, identify with him, be influenced by him, and become socially bound up with his life.

But at its deepest level, evil does not create unity.

Ra is divisive. It separates.

Therefore, at best, there can be a חיבור — two separate entities attached to one another. There cannot be the same genuine unity represented by קנה לך חבר.

Kedushah can make two into one.

Ra can only bind together two things that remain separate.

We now see that the two Mishnayos form a precise pair.

The previous Mishnah teaches a person which relationships he must actively construct.

עשה לך רב — create the environment and direction that will surround you.

קנה לך חבר — build the intimate relationship that will accompany you through the details of life.

Nittai HaArbeli then teaches the reverse.

הרחק משכן רע — do not allow a corrupt environment to become the framework that defines you.

ואל תתחבר לרשע — do not allow an intimate attachment to a rasha to pull you into his world.

A person is shaped both by the atmosphere around him and by the people closest to him.

Yehoshua ben Perachya teaches us how to choose both.

Nittai HaArbeli teaches us that we must be equally careful about what we refuse to choose.

There is, however, a beautiful explanation of the Rebbe on this Mishnah.

The Rebbe asks an obvious question.

Why is it that when the Mishnah speaks about a שכן רע, a bad neighbor, it uses the much stronger expression:

״הרחק משכן רע״ — distance yourself from a bad neighbor.

But when it speaks about an actual rasha, it merely says:

״ואל תתחבר לרשע״ — do not connect yourself to a wicked person.

Seemingly, it should be the opposite. If anything, should we not distance ourselves more from a rasha?

The Rebbe explains that שכן רע does not necessarily mean that the neighbor himself is a bad person.

He may be a perfectly good person.

He is simply a bad neighbor for you.

The path that he is taking in his avodah and the path that you need to take are not necessarily the same. What is appropriate for him may be damaging for you.

The Rebbe gives the example of the Rambam’s teaching regarding middos. Normally, a person should follow the middle path. But someone who has fallen deeply into one extreme may need, for a period of time, to go all the way to the opposite extreme in order to correct himself.

For such a person, someone else who is properly following the middle path may nevertheless be a שכן רע. Not because there is anything wrong with him, but because his path is not the path that this person presently needs.

And therefore the Mishnah says הרחק.

When it comes to a rasha, however, the opposite is true.

A Jew cannot simply distance himself from another Jew because that Jew is a rasha.

On the contrary, that Jew needs to be brought closer. He needs to be introduced to Torah and mitzvos. He needs someone who cares enough about him to try to pull him upward.

And therefore the Mishnah does not say הרחק מן הרשע.

It says:

״ואל תתחבר לרשע״.

Bring him close.

Speak to him.

Teach him.

Help him.

But do not become attached to his path.

There must remain a clear understanding of the direction in which the relationship is supposed to go.

And perhaps this distinction has an important application to something taking place in the frum world today.

Over the past number of years, we have seen an increasing divide between more traditional elements of the frum community and groups that continue to identify as Charedi or Chassidish while moving in a significantly more modern direction.

One recent example is the new HaTzibur HaCharedi party in Eretz Yisrael. When I first heard about it, I actually thought the idea sounded quite reasonable. There are legitimate questions about military service and the relationship between the Charedi community and broader Israeli society.

But when I saw the kind of slate they were putting forward, including women among its highest-ranking candidates, it became clear to me that this was not simply the traditional Charedi world with a somewhat different position on the army.

Whatever terminology they choose to use, it represents a significantly different derech — one that, in important respects, is moving away from the traditional Charedi model and toward something much closer to Modern Orthodoxy.

That does not mean that everyone involved is insincere or not frum. The point is that once the assumptions about communal structure, gender roles, integration into broader society, and the kind of life one is trying to build begin to change substantially, we are no longer speaking merely about a minor disagreement within the same derech. We are speaking about a different direction.

The same issue arises in Crown Heights.

Why should there be communal or educational boundaries surrounding families who still identify as Chabad, but whose homes have substantially different standards of tznius, Shabbos observance, media, and general Chassidishe aspirations?

And there is an even stronger question:

Why are we drawing these boundaries particularly toward people who are still frum?

After all, Chabad goes out of its way to embrace secular Jews. We invite them into our homes. We put tefillin on them. We learn Torah with them. We invite them for Shabbos.

So why should someone who considers himself frum sometimes encounter stronger communal boundaries than someone who isn’t?

The answer may lie precisely in the distinction between שכן רע and רשע.

When we encounter a Jew who is far from Torah and mitzvos, there is no ambiguity about the direction of the relationship.

We are trying to be mekarev him.

We love him, welcome him, and bring him closer to Torah and mitzvos.

That is ואל תתחבר לרשע.

We approach him without adopting his present way of life as our own.

The case of the שכן רע is different.

Here the person may be frum.

He may dress similarly, send his children to frum schools, and identify with the same community.

But the question is no longer simply whether he is a good person.

The question is:

Is he going where I am trying to go?

If one family is trying to build a particular kind of Chassidishe home, while another is consciously moving toward a different model, then they are not necessarily traveling on the same road.

And because they appear to belong to the same world, the distinction between those roads can easily become blurred.

A secular Jew whom I am trying to be mekarev does not usually make my child wonder what kind of Chassidishe life he is supposed to build. The difference between the two worlds is obvious.

But when another family identifies as Chassidish while living according to very different standards of tznius, Shabbos, media, and communal life, the child no longer sees two clearly different worlds.

He sees two versions of the same world.

And that is where environment matters.

A school and a community establish what is normal. They teach a child not only what is permitted or forbidden, but what kind of life he should aspire to build.

That is the power of a שכן.

The issue, then, is not necessarily that the other person is bad.

He may be frum, sincere, and a very good person.

But if he is going somewhere different from where I am trying to go, then he may still be a שכן רע for me.

We can love every Jew and be mekarev every Jew.

But Ahavas Yisrael does not require us to pretend that every Jewish lifestyle is heading in the same direction.

The Mishnah continues:

״והוי דן את כל האדם לכף זכות״ — judge every person favorably.

And seemingly, there is an obvious question.

Yehoshua ben Perachya himself did the exact opposite.

When his student made an inappropriate comment, Yehoshua ben Perachya pushed him away. Not once, but repeatedly. Eventually, his student gave up, turned away from Yiddishkeit, and, as the Gemara tells us, began serving avodah zarah.

So how can the very same Yehoshua ben Perachya tell us:

״והוי דן את כל האדם לכף זכות״?

The answer may be that we are confusing two very different ideas.

Many mefarshim explain that דן לכף זכות does not mean pretending that something wrong is right. It means that when there are two reasonable ways of understanding what a person did — one innocent and one guilty — do not automatically choose the guilty one.

Avos d’Rabbi Nasan gives a remarkable example.

A young woman had been taken captive, and two chassidim went to redeem her. During the trip, one of the two men suddenly entered a brothel.

Now that certainly did not look good.

But when he emerged, his friend did not immediately assume the worst. He explained that he had assumed the man had gone inside in connection with finding out how much money would be necessary to redeem the captive woman.

And the man replied:

״העבודה, כך היה״ — indeed, that is exactly what happened.

That is דן לכף זכות.

The action looked suspicious. There were two ways of reading it. His friend chose the better one.

But that was not the case with Yehoshua ben Perachya’s student.

There was no innocent explanation for what he said. His comment was inappropriate. Yehoshua ben Perachya did not have to invent some favorable interpretation of an action whose meaning was perfectly clear.

In fact, one might argue that the story itself proves this understanding of דן לכף זכות. Yehoshua ben Perachya was the author of the Mishnah — and nevertheless he rebuked his student. Evidently, דן לכף זכות does not mean that every wrongdoing has to be explained away.

So what did Yehoshua ben Perachya do wrong?

The Gemara tells us explicitly:

״לעולם תהא שמאל דוחה וימין מקרבת, ולא כיהושע בן פרחיה שדחפו לאחד מתלמידיו בשתי ידיו״

There must be a שמאל דוחה.

Sometimes a person needs to be pushed away. Sometimes behavior has to be called what it is. Sometimes the correct response is not greater tolerance, but rebuke.

And indeed, Chazal place שמאל דוחה first.

The Rebbe points out(chelek yud zayin pesach)that this order itself is significant. There is a legitimate place in chinuch for pushing away what is wrong. A student cannot grow if nothing is ever rejected.

But there are two conditions.

First, it must be the left hand that pushes away — the weaker hand.

And second, the rejection must lead to ימין מקרבת. The stronger movement must always be the movement of bringing close.

That was Yehoshua ben Perachya’s mistake.

Not that he pushed his student away.

He pushed him away with both hands.

The initial rejection may have been justified. What was missing was the stronger hand telling the student: What you did was wrong — but I still want you back.

And once that hand disappeared, the rebuke no longer corrected the relationship. It destroyed it.

There is, however, another way of understanding the Mishnah.

According to pnimiyus ha’inyanim, דן לכף זכות does not only mean that when a person’s actions are ambiguous, we should interpret them favorably. The Rebbe explains that לימוד זכות means looking at a person from the side of his זכות — seeing the good that is still within him, and the positive kochos that he still possesses. (Likkutei Sichos, vol. 27, p. 164.)

According to this, דן לכף זכות does not require us to deny that someone did something wrong. Sometimes the wrongdoing is perfectly clear. The point is that the wrongdoing should not become our entire definition of the person.

And perhaps this is precisely what happened with Yehoshua ben Perachya.

His student’s remark was clearly inappropriate, and Yehoshua ben Perachya was right to reject it. The Gemara itself does not say that there should never be rejection. On the contrary, it says:

״לעולם תהא שמאל דוחה וימין מקרבת״

There are times when a person needs to be pushed away. There are times when a rebbe has to make clear that certain behavior is unacceptable.

The problem was that Yehoshua ben Perachya went too far.

״דחפו בשתי ידיו״

He pushed him away with both hands.

In other words, the rejection of the action became a rejection of the person.

And that is where דן לכף זכות enters.

Had Yehoshua ben Perachya continued to look at his student from the side of his זכות, he could have rejected what he said without allowing that statement to become the entirety of how he viewed him.

After all, this was not simply a troublesome student. This was a student who had remained attached to his rebbe even through exile. When Yehoshua ben Perachya fled from Yanai HaMelech to Alexandria, this student followed him. There was a real relationship there. There was loyalty. There was attachment.

The statement needed to be rejected.

The student did not need to be rejected with it.

This may be the meaning of שמאל דוחה וימין מקרבת. The left hand rejects what is wrong, but the right hand continues to see what is right. Once a person ceases to see the זכות in the other person, the שמאל דוחה can very easily become דחפו בשתי ידיו.

And Biurim LePirkei Avos(from the Rebbe) explains that Yehoshua ben Perachya himself learned this lesson from what happened.

The proof is what happens later.

By then, his student had fallen far further. He had already turned to avodah zarah. There was certainly nothing left to reinterpret or explain away.

And nevertheless, Yehoshua ben Perachya told him:

״חזור בך״

Return.

That is דן לכף זכות in its deeper sense.

Yehoshua ben Perachya knew exactly what his student had done. But he still believed that the person standing in front of him was more than what he had done. He still believed that there was enough good left within him for him to return.

Perhaps that is precisely why Yehoshua ben Perachya later taught:

״והוי דן את כל האדם לכף זכות״

He had seen what happens when a person is judged entirely by his failure. And he had seen how far a relationship can unravel once the person himself is pushed away together with the sin.

And perhaps that is why Yehoshua ben Perachya places these three teachings together:

״עשה לך רב, וקנה לך חבר, והוי דן את כל האדם לכף זכות״.

It is not enough to make for yourself a rav and acquire a friend. The real difficulty is maintaining those relationships when the person disappoints you.

A friend will make mistakes. A rav may disappoint you. Someone whom you respect may do something that genuinely deserves criticism.

The question then becomes whether you are able to criticize what he did without allowing what he did to become your entire judgment of who he is.

Perhaps that is why והוי דן את כל האדם לכף זכות follows עשה לך רב and קנה לך חבר.

The first two teach us how to build the relationship.

The third teaches us how to preserve it.

For many Lubavitchers, mivtzoim is one of the defining experiences of bochurhood. Friday afternoon means grabbing a pair of tefillin, heading out on a route, and looking for another Yid with whom to do a mitzvah.

Then life changes.

Marriage comes, followed by parnassah, children and the thousand responsibilities that fill an adult week. Without anyone ever deciding to stop, mivtzoim can slowly become something a person remembers doing rather than something he still does.

At JFK Airport, a growing group of yungerleit and baalei batim are showing that it does not have to be that way.

They are businessmen, teachers, photographers, fathers and grandfathers. They do not have the free schedule of a bochur, and they do not pretend that they do.

But week after week, they still go.

We spoke to three of them about why.

It was two o’clock in the morning at JFK, and a yeshivah bochur had nowhere to go.

He had come from Monsey to catch an Arkia flight to Eretz Yisrael, only to discover that the flight had been cancelled and pushed off until the following afternoon. He had no working phone, no SIM card, and no practical way to arrange somewhere to stay.

So he sat down on a bench in the airport.

Shmuly Butler was getting ready to leave when he noticed him.

“What are you doing here?”

The bochur explained the situation.

“Come to my house,” Butler told him.

He drove him back to Crown Heights and gave him a place to stay. The next day, Butler made sure he got to 770 and had a chance to see the library and some of the other Lubavitch landmarks. Then, when the time came for his rescheduled flight, he arranged for the next group heading out on mivtzoim to bring him back to JFK.

For Chabad Air, stories like this are not especially unusual. A flight is cancelled. Someone loses his luggage. A traveler runs into trouble with a visa. A Jew needs food, a place for Shabbos, or simply someone who knows what to do.

What is perhaps more surprising is who is increasingly there to help.

Butler is not a bochur with a weekly mivtzoim route. He is married, has two children, and teaches in several Crown Heights schools, reaching close to a thousand students each week. During the school year he nevertheless tries to get to JFK around three times a week, usually for the nighttime flights. In the summer, when his teaching schedule is lighter, he sometimes goes almost every day

And he is far from the only one.

On different days at JFK, one can find Yitzchok Raskin, a married father who runs a STaM business; Levi Liberow, a photographer, father of seven and grandfather; and an expanding group of other yungerleit and baalei batim who have made regular mivtzoim part of their weekly schedules.

They have jobs. They have wives and children. They have bills, appointments, weddings, school schedules and all the other demands that come with adult life.

And yet, once or several times a week, they get into a car and drive to JFK.

Some put tefillin on travelers. Others distribute neshek or sign people up for letters in a Sefer Torah. They help people with visas and luggage, bring food to stranded passengers, give travelers shliach-mitzvah money, and sometimes bring complete strangers home for Shabbos.

For a Lubavitcher, there is nothing particularly novel about mivtzoim.

What is striking is something else.

For many bochurim, mivtzoim is simply part of the weekly schedule. Then comes marriage, parnassah and a growing family, and without anyone consciously deciding that it should happen, that regular involvement can slowly disappear.

These men decided that it did not have to.

Marriage changed their lives. It changed their schedules. In some ways, it even made going on mivtzoim harder.

But it did not mean graduating from mivtzoim.

The interesting thing is that for at least two of these men, regular mivtzoim had once disappeared from their lives.

Levi Liberow is quite open about it.

“For years, unfortunately, after the wedding I did not go.”

There was no dramatic decision. He got married, started working, raised a family, and somehow the regular mivtzoim of his bochur years became something that belonged to an earlier stage of life.

Yitzchok Raskin’s break came much later.

For years, he had a regular route and often took his children along. Then Covid came, the building he visited shut down, and the routine stopped.

Once it stopped, restarting proved harder than expected.

“It was always on my mind,” he says, “I always wanted to do it.”

What finally changed things was Menachem Gurevitch.

Around that time, Menachem Gurevitch, who was already going to JFK every week, suggested that Raskin join him.

Raskin was interested, but he wasn’t sure where he would find the time.

“I don’t have time. I have a lot on my plate. I’m busy.”

Still, he decided to try it.

He went once.

That was around two years ago. Today, Tuesday morning generally finds him driving out to JFK with Gurevitch and another member of the group. They arrive around ten, spend a couple of hours working the flights, and head back.

When I asked Raskin how he suddenly found those hours, he almost seemed puzzled by the question.

“When you want to do something, you find the time.”

His schedule had not suddenly emptied. He had simply stopped waiting for an empty schedule

.

Liberow tells much the same story from a very different life.

He is a photographer, and his regular airport group includes Yossi Cohen, the musician, and Zalman Tevel, the videographer—three married men from the simcha world, where a supposedly free Thursday can disappear the moment a wedding gets booked.

So they work around it.

If Thursday is taken, Liberow goes Wednesday. If one member of the group cannot make it, they switch shifts. With flights leaving JFK throughout the morning, afternoon and night, there is usually another opening.

“A lot of people are not aware how easy it is to find a shift and go,” he says.

Coming from Liberow, the point is especially meaningful. He knows firsthand how easily regular mivtzoim can fall away after marriage—and how different it feels once it becomes part of life again.

“Once I started, I became addicted,” Liberow says. “It’s not an option not to go. I’m enthusiastic. I’m looking forward to going on mivtzoim.”
Shmuly Butler is the one who refuses to let the story become too neat.

When I suggested that perhaps being a baal habayis gives a person certain advantages on mivtzoim, he pushed back immediately.

“Honestly, I think you’re more limited when you’re a baal habayis.”

Then he added:

“It’s more of a sacrifice.”

Butler goes several times a week. He teaches, has two children, and knows perfectly well that an evening at JFK is an evening that cannot be spent somewhere else.

That tension never really disappears.

What changes is that, at some point, mivtzoim stops waiting for the free night.

It becomes one of the things the week is built around.

More Than Tefillin

Making the time is only half the story.

Once they are there, though, another difference begins to show. Being a baal habayis does not necessarily make a person better at approaching another Jew. None of the men I spoke to really claimed that. A bochur may have more energy, more boldness, and sometimes an easier time simply walking over to someone.

But a baal habayis brings other things with him.

A car. A home. A Shabbos table. And sometimes an entire life that can suddenly become part of the mivtzoim.

Butler saw that once with a young woman from a frum background who brushed him off when he approached her.

“I realized that when someone does that, usually they’re going through something,” he says. “There’s more under the surface.”

So instead of pushing, he changed direction and started talking to her.

At some point she asked whether he had a Chabad house.

“Every chassid’s home is a Chabad house,” Butler told her.

“Do you have meals like a Chabad house?”

“Sure.”

The conversation eventually led to her spending Shabbos with Butler and his family.

A bochur could have had the same first conversation. What Butler could offer was what came next: a car, a home, a family and a Shabbos table.

And that comes up at JFK all the time.

A traveler is stuck with luggage. Someone needs help with a visa. A passenger has been delayed for hours and needs food. At JFK, mivtzoim can quickly move beyond the initial mitzvah. Sometimes the first thing a Jew needs is simply help getting through the airport.

Butler remembers a group of Israeli teenagers from a very secular background whose trip had become a mess after a delayed connection. The volunteers went out and brought them kosher pizza.

The kids were surprised that a group of visibly frum Jews had gone out of their way for them. During the interaction, some of the boys put on tefillin, while the girls received neshek.

“Helping a Yid in gashmiyus,” Butler says, “gives them a whole other yachas.”

Raskin, meanwhile, found a different way to use the airport itself.

He kept seeing all these Jews getting on planes—going to Eretz Yisrael, going elsewhere—and began thinking about the Rebbe’s practice of giving travelers money for tzedakah, making them shluchei mitzvah.

Why not do that here?

So Raskin paid to have a proper card designed, attached a coin to each one, and began handing them out to travelers with the request that they put the money in tzedakah when they arrived.

“You make him a shliach mitzvah,” he says.

The effect is simple but powerful: the traveler is no longer merely passing through JFK; he is leaving with a mitzvah to do at the other end.

Liberow sees yet another side of it.

As a photographer, he is constantly running into people at JFK whom he knows from weddings and simchos, often people from outside Lubavitch. They know him as the photographer. Then they see that same person standing in the airport doing mivtzoim.

That makes an impression.

“Wow,” they tell him. “Working people also do it, not just bochurim.”

And they remember it. Liberow says that months later, at another simcha, people will sometimes bring it up again.

The photographer they know from the simcha is the same man they now see standing at JFK, asking another Jew to do a mitzvah

.

The Children Are Watching

There is another consequence of going on mivtzoim as a baal habayis, and it begins before he ever reaches JFK.

His children know where he is going.

Raskin sees that very clearly.

When he first started going again, the question naturally came up: what does his family think about Tatty disappearing for several hours every Tuesday?

Raskin almost seemed surprised by the question.

“There’s no tension at all,” he says. “They’re very proud.”

More than that, his children often want to come along.

Raskin had already made a habit of taking them on mivtzoim when they were younger. For years, he would bring them with him on his regular route. Today, when school schedules allow, they still ask to join him at the airport.

“My kids love to come with me,” he says. “Whenever there’s an opportunity, they ask, ‘Could I come with you?’”

For Raskin, that is part of the point.

A father can talk endlessly about what a chassid is supposed to value. But children are also watching what actually gets space in his week.

“You walk the walk,” he says. “You don’t just talk the talk.”

Butler has found much the same thing.

He sometimes brings his own children to JFK, particularly when the opportunity works out around Yom Tov. And he deliberately brings students on mivtzoim as well—even when, from a purely practical standpoint, it would be easier to leave them behind.

Some of the boys are slower. They may need encouragement. Butler could probably accomplish more in the same amount of time on his own.

That is not necessarily the point.

He spends much of his week teaching boys about the Rebbe. Going to JFK allows them to see that those lessons are not only something their teacher speaks about in a classroom.
Liberow is already at a different stage of life. His children are grown, some are married, and there are grandchildren as well.

Yet he says the effect is still there.

They know that there is a time during the week when their father—or grandfather—is going on mivtzoim, and that other things have to work around it.

For a married man, family responsibilities can easily become the reason mivtzoim falls away.

For these men, the family has become part of the reason it stays

.

What They Bring Home

There is another reason they keep coming back.

Ask these men why they return to the airport week after week, and eventually they begin talking about what happens to them there.

Liberow describes arriving with the idea that he is going to strengthen somebody else and discovering, repeatedly, that the opposite happens as well.

“You feel like you’re going out to be mechazek people,” he says, “but at the end you come back with a chizuk yourself.”

Travelers stop and tell them stories—about the Rebbe, about an answer they received years ago, about a bracha that stayed with them, or about some part of their own connection with the Rebbe. Sometimes people are willing to share the story but not their names; other times they simply begin talking because they see the Chabad stand and something comes back to them.

“You come back from mivtzoim on a high,” Liberow says.

Raskin describes the same phenomenon in his own way.

JFK brings every kind of Jew past the stand. Frum, not yet frum, Litvish—people from every background. Some stop for tefillin. Some only want a cup of water. Some come over simply because they are happy to see another frum Jew in the middle of an airport.

Raskin has also begun recording some of the more remarkable stories people tell, particularly about their connection with the Rebbe. He says that over the past number of years he has been struck by how many Jews speak openly about going to the Ohel and how proudly they describe those experiences.

“It’s very geshmak,” he says.

And that geshmak tends to spread.

Raskin himself only started because Menachem Gurevitch kept asking him to come. Once he began going, he started encouraging other friends. Some were hesitant. They came once, discovered that they enjoyed it, and began showing up regularly themselves.

“It’s like a domino effect,” he says.

Liberow has seen the same thing. A yungerman comes once with someone more experienced, learns the rhythm of the airport, and then begins bringing somebody else.

That may explain why the group of married men at JFK has continued to grow.

Not everyone needs to begin with a grand commitment.

Sometimes it begins with nothing more complicated than a friend asking, “Do you want to come with me?”

For all three men, the point eventually comes back to something very basic.

Mivtzoim was never meant to be something a chassid does only because it appears on a yeshivah schedule.

Raskin puts it most bluntly.

“This is in our DNA,” he says.

For him, going to JFK is not primarily about nostalgia for what he used to do as a bochur, and not even about the brachos he says he has seen from it.

“You want to be able to connect another Yid to the Rebbe,” he says. “The Rebbe is demanding it, but ultimately it should be your inyan.”

Butler says it in his own language. When I asked what drives him to keep spending evening after evening at the airport, his answer was short.

“To bring a Yid closer to the Rebbe.To prepare the world for Moshiach.”

And Liberow, perhaps because he spent years after marriage without regular mivtzoim, speaks less in slogans and more from experience.

“Once I started, I became addicted,” he says. “It’s not an option not to go.”

That may be the strongest answer to the question the article began with.

Marriage changes the schedule. Parnassah changes it further. Children make it fuller still. None of these men deny that.

But none of them see those changes as a reason for mivtzoim to belong to the past.

For them, mivtzoim has simply grown up with them.

The bochur may have gone out with a pair of tefillin and a route. The baal habayis may arrive with a car, a home, a family, a profession and a far more complicated calendar.

The mission itself has not changed.

And sometimes, as Raskin discovered, it begins again with something as simple as another yungerman asking:

“Do you want to come with me?”

The sixth Mishnah of Pirkei Avos states:

יְהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן פְּרַחְיָה אוֹמֵר: עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב, וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר, וֶהֱוֵי דָן אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם לְכַף זְכוּת.

Yehoshua ben Perachya says: “Make for yourself a rav, acquire for yourself a friend, and judge every person favorably.”

The connection between this Mishnah and the previous Mishnayos is actually quite straightforward.

As we discussed earlier, Mishnah Four and Mishnah Five deal with the establishment of a Torah home and with extending that Torah home outward to others. One must make his home a place of Torah, a place in which talmidei chachamim gather, and at the same time a home that is open to others.

But once a person has established a Torah home, another question immediately arises: what kind of Torah home will it be?

The fourth Mishnah already told us:

יְהִי בֵיתְךָ בֵּית וַעַד לַחֲכָמִים

“Let your home be a gathering place for the sages.”

But there are many chachamim. There are many different approaches, many different emphases, and many different paths within Torah. If one’s home is a gathering place for all of them, which path does the individual himself follow?

It is precisely here that Yehoshua ben Perachya answers:

עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב

“Make for yourself a rav.”

A person cannot remain forever merely surrounded by many different Torah approaches. At some point, he must choose a particular teacher and a particular path that will become his own.

Interestingly, we can see sthis idea in the story Chazal tell about Yehoshua ben Perachya and his student, Yeshu.

When Yehoshua ben Perachya was forced to flee to Egypt, Yeshu went down to Egypt together with his rebbe. Even before the later rupture between them, we already see how strongly he had attached himself to Yehoshua ben Perachya as his teacher.

After Yehoshua ben Perachya became upset with his student, he repeatedly pushed him away. Eventually, the student concluded that his rebbe would no longer accept him, and he abandoned the path entirely.

At first glance, one could ask a simple question. If Yehoshua ben Perachya would no longer accept him as a student, why did he not simply find another rebbe?

There were surely other Torah teachers. There were surely other paths available to him.

Yet that is not what happened. His attachment to his rebbe was so strong that once he believed that this relationship was lost, he did not simply transfer his loyalty to another teacher. He abandoned everything.

And the irony goes even deeper.

When Yehoshua ben Perachya later attempted to bring him back and urged him to do teshuvah, Yeshu answered:

כָּךְ מְקוּבָּלַנִי מִמְּךָ: כָּל הַחוֹטֵא וּמַחֲטִיא אֶת הָרַבִּים אֵין מַסְפִּיקִין בְּיָדוֹ לַעֲשׂוֹת תְּשׁוּבָה

“This is what I received from you: anyone who sins and causes the public to sin is not given the opportunity to repent.”

Even Yeshu’s understanding of why he could no longer do teshuvah came from his rebbe.

(As an aside, there may be a particular reason that this was the teaching Yeshu remembered from Yehoshua ben Perachya.

Yehoshua ben Perachya lived during the reign of Yannai HaMelech. As the Gemara in Kiddushin relates, Yannai was initially associated with the Chachamim, until Elazar ben Po’ira turned him against them and encouraged him to reject their authority. The result was a campaign against the sages so severe that Yehoshua ben Perachya himself was forced to flee to Egypt.

In that context, the idea of הַחוֹטֵא וּמַחֲטִיא אֶת הָרַבִּים — one who sins and causes others to sin — would hardly have been an abstract teaching for Yehoshua ben Perachya.

He had personally lived through a period in which one person’s influence over a king helped lead an entire nation away from the Chachamim and brought about the destruction of Torah leadership on a massive scale.

It is therefore quite understandable, l’choira, that Yehoshua ben Perachya may have placed particular emphasis on the danger of being מחטיא את הרבים.

And if so, it is fitting that this was precisely the teaching that remained etched in the mind of his student. Even after Yeshu had broken away from his rebbe, when he tried to understand whether teshuvah was still possible for him, the warning he remembered was one that may have carried unusual force in the life and teaching of Yehoshua ben Perachya himself.)

He had rebelled against Yehoshua ben Perachya, but he had not stopped thinking as his student. The very categories through which he understood his own spiritual condition were still the categories that his rebbe had taught him.

In a tragic way, he had internalized the very principle that Yehoshua ben Perachya himself taught:

עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב

Make for yourself a rav.

A rav is not merely one teacher among many interchangeable teachers. He is the person through whom a particular Torah path becomes yours. He gives the student not only information, but a framework through which to understand Torah, himself, and the world around him.

I remember hearing a story when I was growing up that was intended to teach almost the opposite lesson.

The story concerned a father whose son eventually left Yiddishkeit. When the father asked his son why he had left, the son answered that he had been taught that his father’s path was the only legitimate path. Therefore, once he rejected that path, there was nowhere else for him to go.

The point of the story was that one should not delegitimize every other derech in Yiddishkeit. If a child believes that only one path is valid, the argument goes, then rejecting that one path may mean rejecting everything.

There is certainly something to that concern.

But Yehoshua ben Perachya seems to emphasize the opposite danger as well.

It is important that a person actually have a path.

A Torah life cannot consist simply of knowing that there are many legitimate approaches and moving freely between all of them. There is value in recognizing the legitimacy of other paths, but a person must nevertheless choose one path that is his own.

The Mishnah does not say merely that one should listen to chachamim.

It says:

עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב

Make for yourself a rav.

One may respect many teachers. One may learn from many teachers. One’s home may even be a בית ועד לחכמים, a gathering place for many different sages.

But ultimately, a person must decide who his rav is and what his own derech will be.

The Mishnah continues:

וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר

“Acquire for yourself a friend.”

Here we already notice a difference in the language of the Mishnah. When speaking about a rav, Yehoshua ben Perachya says עשה לך רב — “make for yourself a rav.” When speaking about a friend, however, he says וקנה לך חבר — “acquire for yourself a friend.”

The rav provides a person with his general derech. He gives him the overarching path through which he understands Torah and through which he approaches life. In that sense, the rav operates on a somewhat more makifdikel level: he establishes the general direction in which the person is supposed to travel.

But knowing the direction is not enough.

Once a person enters the day-to-day grind of life, how does he make sure that he actually remains on that path? How does he ensure that the derech his rav taught him does not remain merely an ideal, while his actual life slowly begins moving somewhere else?

For this, Yehoshua ben Perachya says:

וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר

Acquire for yourself a friend.

Avos d’Rabbi Nosson explains:

וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר כֵּיצַד? מְלַמֵּד שֶׁיִּקְנֶה הָאָדָם חָבֵר לְעַצְמוֹ, שֶׁיֹּאכַל עִמּוֹ וְיִשְׁתֶּה עִמּוֹ וְיִקְרָא עִמּוֹ וְיִשְׁנֶה עִמּוֹ וְיִישַׁן עִמּוֹ, וִיגַלֶּה לוֹ כָּל סְתָרָיו, סֵתֶר תּוֹרָה וְסֵתֶר דֶּרֶךְ אֶרֶץ. שֶׁכְּשֶׁיּוֹשְׁבִין וְעוֹסְקִין בַּתּוֹרָה וְטָעָה אֶחָד מֵהֶם הֲלָכָה אוֹ רֹאשׁ הַפֶּרֶק, אוֹ שֶׁיֹּאמַר עַל טָמֵא טָהוֹר אוֹ עַל טָהוֹר טָמֵא, וְעַל אָסוּר מֻתָּר וְעַל מֻתָּר אָסוּר, חֲבֵרוֹ מַחֲזִירוֹ. וּמִנַּיִן שֶׁכְּשֶׁחֲבֵרוֹ מַחֲזִירוֹ וְקוֹרֵא עִמּוֹ שֶׁיֵּשׁ לָהֶם שָׂכָר טוֹב בַּעֲמָלָן? שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: טוֹבִים הַשְּׁנַיִם מִן הָאֶחָד אֲשֶׁר יֵשׁ לָהֶם שָׂכָר טוֹב בַּעֲמָלָם.

“‘Acquire for yourself a friend’ — how so? This teaches that a person should acquire for himself a friend who will eat with him, drink with him, study Mikra with him, study Mishnah with him, sleep with him, and to whom he will reveal all his secrets — secrets of Torah and secrets of derech eretz. When they sit and learn Torah and one of them errs in a halachah, at the beginning of a section, calls the impure pure or the pure impure, the forbidden permitted or the permitted forbidden, his friend corrects him.”

This is a very different relationship from that of a rav.

A rav gives a person the path. A friend lives that path together with him.

He eats with him. He drinks with him. He learns with him. He knows his private thoughts and his personal struggles. Precisely because the relationship operates in the ordinary details of life, the friend can notice when the person is beginning to make a mistake and bring him back.

This may also help us understand a remarkable statement of Yehoshua ben Perachya himself. The Gemara relates:

בַּתְּחִלָּה, כׇּל הָאוֹמֵר ״עֲלֵה לָהּ״ — אֲנִי כּוֹפְתוֹ וְנוֹתְנוֹ לִפְנֵי הָאֲרִי; עַתָּה, כׇּל הָאוֹמֵר לִי לֵירֵד מִמֶּנָּה — אֲנִי מֵטִיל עָלָיו קוּמְקוּם שֶׁל חַמִּין.

“At first, anyone who would tell me, ‘Ascend to the position,’ I would tie him up and place him before a lion. Now, anyone who tells me to descend from it, I would pour over him a kettle of boiling water.”

The imagery here is striking.

A lion is the king of the animals and therefore serves naturally as an image of malchus. But a lion is also something that can consume a person completely.

Now, on the surface, Yehoshua ben Perachya says that if someone had told him to accept the leadership, he would have tied that person up and placed him before a lion. But l’chaira, he is really describing what that person would have been doing to Yehoshua ben Perachya himself.

This kind of formulation is not unusual in the language of Chazal. When speaking about something terrible happening to themselves, Chazal will sometimes avoid stating the negative possibility directly and instead place it upon another person. Here too, Yehoshua ben Perachya does not say, “He would be tying me up and throwing me before a lion.” Instead he says, “I would tie him up and throw him before a lion.” But the image describes what accepting the nesius would have felt like to Yehoshua ben Perachya.

Anyone who would have told Yehoshua ben Perachya, “Go up and accept the nesius,” would, in his eyes, have been doing the equivalent of tying Yehoshua ben Perachya himself up and placing him before a lion.

The detail that he is tied up is important.

He is not merely standing near a lion. He has been bound and placed directly in front of it. He cannot run. He cannot escape. He cannot change his mind once the lion begins to consume him.

That is how Yehoshua ben Perachya originally viewed leadership.

To place him into the nesius would be to place him into something that could consume his entire life, while leaving him with no way to retreat.

Before becoming Nasi, Yehoshua ben Perachya therefore wanted nothing to do with it.

But once he had actually entered the position, the image changes entirely.

Now, anyone who would tell him to descend from the nesius would receive a קומקום של חמין — a kettle of boiling water.

Here too, l’chaira, Yehoshua ben Perachya is describing what that person would effectively be doing to him.

Water is an image for Torah. But boiling water is water into which tremendous energy has entered. It is no longer still. The heat causes it to bubble and rise upward, until eventually it can even leave the vessel as steam.

That is what leadership had done to Yehoshua ben Perachya.

As explained in Chassidus, malchus can awaken and expand a person’s senses and kochos in an extraordinary way. Responsibility can draw out capacities that otherwise would never have emerged. A person who becomes responsible for others begins to think more broadly, feel more intensely, act more decisively, and access powers within himself that he may never have known existed.

Before Yehoshua ben Perachya became Nasi, those powers were still dormant.

Once he entered the nesius, however, the position heated the water. It energized him. It brought powers upward that had previously remained hidden.

And this is where the image of the kettle becomes even sharper.

The person is not merely turning off the flame and allowing the water to cool.

He is pouring the boiling water out.

The water that had been heated, activated, and raised upward is now being emptied from its vessel altogether.

That is what Yehoshua ben Perachya is describing about the loss of leadership. It would not merely mean that the energy of leadership would disappear and he would return peacefully to what he had been before. Something that had already become part of him would now be taken away.

The vessel itself would be emptied.

This makes the Gemara’s comparison to Shaul HaMelech especially powerful.

When Shaul was originally chosen as king, he did not seek the position. When they came looking for him at the public coronation, he was hiding among the vessels.

Yet becoming king changed him.

Shmuel had already told Shaul:

וְצָלְחָה עָלֶיךָ רוּחַ ה׳... וְנֶהְפַּכְתָּ לְאִישׁ אַחֵר

“The spirit of Hashem will come upon you... and you will be transformed into another man.”

And indeed:

וַיַּהֲפָךְ לוֹ אֱלֹקִים לֵב אַחֵר

“Hashem transformed him with another heart.”

Malchus did not merely give Shaul a title.

It created something inside him that had not been there before.

He received a רוח ה׳. He was given a לב אחר. He became an איש אחר.

But after Shaul sinned and Shmuel informed him that the kingship would eventually be taken from him, that process began to reverse.

Dovid was anointed, and the Navi tells us:

וַתִּצְלַח רוּחַ ה׳ אֶל דָּוִד מֵהַיּוֹם הַהוּא וָמָעְלָה

“The spirit of Hashem came upon Dovid from that day onward.”

Immediately afterward:

וְרוּחַ ה׳ סָרָה מֵעִם שָׁאוּל

“The spirit of Hashem departed from Shaul.”

Shaul therefore faced something far worse than simply having to perform the difficult responsibilities of kingship without the same Divine assistance.

Something inside him had died.

He knew what it had meant to possess that רוח ה׳. He knew what it felt like to have a לב אחר, to become an איש אחר, to possess powers that had been awakened in him specifically through malchus.

And now those powers were being taken away.

He remained the king outwardly, with all the burdens and pressures of the position, while inwardly something that had become a profound part of him was disappearing.

That is precisely the tragedy represented by the boiling water being poured out of its vessel.

It is not simply that the water is no longer boiling.

The water itself is gone.

Something that had filled the vessel is now missing.

That helps us understand the profound depression into which Shaul subsequently fell. He was not merely worried about losing a political position. He was experiencing the loss of something within himself that he had already tasted and possessed.

And Dovid represented the possibility of reversing that loss.

If Dovid was the person destined to replace him, then eliminating Dovid could, in Shaul’s mind, preserve his kingship. And if his malchus could be preserved, perhaps he could preserve — or somehow recover — some of the spiritual vitality and רוח ה׳ that had accompanied that kingship in the first place.

His pursuit of Dovid therefore becomes more understandable.

He was not simply fighting to keep a crown on his head.

He was desperately trying to prevent a part of himself from dying.

The same Shaul who originally hid from the kingship eventually could not bear to lose it, because the kingship had created within him a person he could no longer simply return from being.

And this brings us back to וקנה לך חבר.

Precisely because experiences can change a person so dramatically, a rav by himself is not enough.

A person may know the correct path. He may even have received that path from a great rav. But as he goes through life, circumstances change him. Leadership changes him. Success changes him. Failure changes him. Responsibility changes him. New kochos emerge, new pressures appear, and his own perspective on himself can become distorted.

According to this, we can now better understand the second part of Yehoshua ben Perachya’s teaching:

וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר

“Acquire for yourself a friend.”

Precisely because a person can change so dramatically, having a rav alone is not enough.

The rav can give him the derech. He can establish the general path along which the person is supposed to travel. But the person walking that path will change along the way. New circumstances will affect him. New responsibilities will awaken new kochos within him. Success, authority, pressure, and even spiritual growth can change the way he sees things.

He therefore needs someone who is walking close beside him.

As we saw earlier, Avos d’Rabbi Nosson describes the chaver as someone intimately involved in a person’s life — someone with whom he eats and drinks, learns Torah, and shares his secrets. And then it adds something particularly important: when one friend makes a mistake, the other corrects him.

וְטָעָה אֶחָד מֵהֶם הֲלָכָה אוֹ רֹאשׁ הַפֶּרֶק, אוֹ שֶׁיֹּאמַר עַל טָמֵא טָהוֹר אוֹ עַל טָהוֹר טָמֵא, וְעַל אָסוּר מֻתָּר וְעַל מֻתָּר אָסוּר — חֲבֵרוֹ מַחֲזִירוֹ.

If one of them makes a mistake in halachah — declaring the tamei tahor, the tahor tamei, the forbidden permitted, or the permitted forbidden — חבירו מחזירו, his friend brings him back.

Remarkably, something very close to this happened to Yehoshua ben Perachya himself.

The Tosefta in Machshirin records:

יְהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן פְּרַחְיָה אוֹמֵר: חִטִּים הַבָּאוֹת מֵאֲלֶכְּסַנְדְּרִיָא טָמְאוּ מִפְּנֵי אַנְטַלְיָא שֶׁלָּהֶן. אָמְרוּ חֲכָמִים: אִם כֵּן, יְהוּ טְמֵאוֹת לִיהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן פְּרַחְיָה וּטְהוֹרוֹת לְכָל יִשְׂרָאֵל.

“Yehoshua ben Perachya says: Wheat coming from Alexandria is tamei because of its antlia. The Chachamim said: If so, let it be tamei for Yehoshua ben Perachya and tahor for all of Israel.”

Yehoshua ben Perachya was concerned about the manner in which Alexandrian wheat came into contact with water, which could render the wheat susceptible to tumah. The exact meaning of the אנטליא is debated, but his concern was sufficiently serious that he considered the wheat tamei.

And this was no insignificant question. Wheat was being imported from Alexandria into Eretz Yisrael. Declaring Alexandrian wheat tamei could therefore have broad consequences far beyond Yehoshua ben Perachya’s own kitchen.

Yet the Chachamim restrained him.

Their answer is fascinating:

יְהוּ טְמֵאוֹת לִיהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן פְּרַחְיָה וּטְהוֹרוֹת לְכָל יִשְׂרָאֵל

Let them be tamei for Yehoshua ben Perachya — but tahor for everyone else.

They did not necessarily need to tell him that there was absolutely nothing to his concern. On the contrary, their formulation can be understood to mean: if you personally wish to take this concern upon yourself, you may do so. But do not turn your personal chumra into the standard for Klal Yisrael.

Perhaps Yehoshua ben Perachya had a real point. He was, after all, one of the great Chachamim of his generation. It is even tempting to wonder whether his own familiarity with Alexandria — where he had lived during his exile — made him particularly sensitive to how its wheat was produced and transported.

Nevertheless, his fellow Chachamim told him: this far, but no farther.

And the language is almost uncannily similar to Avos d’Rabbi Nosson.

There, the Mishnah’s chaver is the person who sees his friend beginning to call טהור טמא — something tahor, tamei — and חבירו מחזירו, brings him back.

Here Yehoshua ben Perachya himself wanted to declare the wheat of Alexandria tamei, and the other Chachamim effectively told him: for yourself, perhaps. But for Klal Yisrael, it remains tahor.

This may be precisely why a person needs a chaver.

It is not only the ignorant person who needs someone to correct him. Sometimes the greater a person becomes, the more necessary that correction becomes. A person with no authority can have a mistaken chumra and inconvenience himself. A Nasi with a mistaken chumra can impose it upon an entire nation.

And precisely because Yehoshua ben Perachya understood how profoundly leadership can change and expand a person, he understood that a rav alone cannot protect a person from every mistake.

A person also needs people close enough to tell him when he has gone too far.

חֲבֵרוֹ מַחֲזִירוֹ.

His friend brings him back.

The tenth Mishnah in pirkei avos says:

שמעיה אומר, אהוב את המלאכה, ושנא את הרבנות, ואל תתודע לרשות — “Shemayah says: Love work, hate authority, and do not become too connected to the government.”

Now, the simple way most of the mefarshim understand אהוב את המלאכה is that a person should work. Some explain that he needs to work in order to support himself, so that he should not eventually come to depend on other people, or even to take from others improperly. Others explain that the point is to avoid idleness, because when a person gets used to doing nothing, that itself can eventually lead him to sin.

And many of the mefarshim understand שנא את הרבנות as continuing the same point. A person should not say that because he is an important person, ordinary work is beneath him. They bring the Gemara in Pesachim (113a):

פשוט נבילתא בשוקא ושקיל אגרא, ולא תימא כהנא אנא וגברא רבא אנא וסניא בי מילתא — “Skin a carcass in the marketplace and take payment for it, and do not say, ‘I am a Kohen, I am an important person, and such work is beneath me.’”

In other words, do not allow your position, your importance, or the way you see yourself to become a reason not to work.

First of all, if the entire point of אהוב את המלאכה is simply that a person needs to get a job, why does the Mishnah say to love work? לכאורה, the instruction should simply be: work. Get a job. Support yourself. Why אהוב את המלאכה — why should a person love it?

In fact, Chassidus seems to emphasize almost the opposite idea. The pasuk says, יגיע כפיך כי תאכל — “When you eat from the labor of your hands.” Chassidus points out that it says the labor of your hands, not the labor of your head and heart. A person may need to work for a living, but his entire mind and heart do not have to be invested in his business. His פנימיות should remain somewhere higher.

If so, why is Pirkei Avos telling us not merely to engage in work, but to love it?

There is also a second question. If מלאכה here simply means having a job and earning a living, why does the Mishnah use the word מלאכה in the first place?

מלאכה does not necessarily mean a profession or a source of income. It means work, productive activity, something a person does. We find the word used in many contexts that have nothing to do with making money. Even Torah itself can be described as מלאכת הקודש, holy work. And in fact, some of the mefarshim interpret אהוב את המלאכה here as referring to לימוד התורה itself.

So if Shemayah’s entire point were simply that a person needs a way to make a living, why not say that more directly? Why specifically tell us: אהוב את המלאכה?

Then the Mishnah continues: שנא את הרבנות — hate authority.

And seemingly this is a little bit shver.

If שנא את הרבנות simply means that a person should not say, “I am a great person, and therefore this kind of work is beneath me,” then the problem here is not really rabbanus. The problem is that he considers himself above work. There is nothing specifically wrong with the authority itself. The authority only becomes a problem because it causes him to say, “This type of work isn’t for me.”

If so, why does the Mishnah say שנא את הרבנות — hate authority? Seemingly it should say: don’t consider yourself above melachah. שנא את הרבנות sounds like the problem is with the rabbanus itself — that there is something about authority which a person should not like.

Many mefarshim therefore explain שנא את הרבנות more literally: a person should not desire positions of authority. He should not run after becoming a rav, a leader, or someone with status. If such a position comes to him and there is a need for him to take it, he may accept it, but it should not be something he is eager for.

And this certainly makes sense. If a person loves authority, he will naturally begin chasing positions, honor, and influence. So שנא את הרבנות can simply mean: do not make rabbanus into something you want.

Still, the wording of the Mishnah seems a little stronger.

It does not say, “Do not chase after rabbanus.” It says שנא את הרבנות — hate it. That sounds like more than simply not pursuing a position. It sounds as if even when a person does have the position, the authority itself should not be something he loves.

And there is another small point.

According to the first explanation we brought, the connection between אהוב את המלאכה and שנא את הרבנות is very clear. They are almost direct opposites. Love work, and do not think that because you are an important person, work is beneath you. The more you love melachah, the less room there is for the attitude of “I am too great for this.”

According to this second explanation, there is certainly still a connection. Love work, and do not desire positions of authority. But the two ideas are no longer quite opposites in the same way. Why specifically are these two attitudes placed together — loving melachah on the one hand, and hating rabbanus on the other?

So perhaps the Mishnah is not only telling us that a person should work and should not chase positions. Perhaps there is a deeper contrast between melachah and rabbanus themselves.

The Mishnah then continues: ואל תתודע לרשות — do not become connected to the government.

Now, why shouldn’t a person become too connected to the government?

One could have explained that the reason is simply that people in power are ultimately looking out for themselves. They may appear to be your friends when they need you, but when you need them, they will not necessarily be there for you.

But Pirkei Avos itself says this explicitly later:

הוו זהירין ברשות, שאין מקרבין לו לאדם אלא לצורך עצמן. נראין כאוהבין בשעת הנאתן, ואין עומדין לו לאדם בשעת דחקו — “Be careful with the government, because they only draw a person close for their own needs. They appear as friends when it benefits them, but they do not stand by a person in his time of difficulty.”

If so, our Mishnah would seemingly not be coming merely to repeat the same point.

And therefore many mefarshim explain that the concern here is not primarily with what the government will do to us, but with what becoming too connected to power can do to us.

A person who becomes too involved with those in power can himself become attracted to power — to influence, access, importance, and control. And once a person becomes attached to that world, there is always the danger that the power itself will begin to corrupt him.

This also fits much better with the flow of the Mishnah. Until now, Shemayah has been speaking about the person himself: אהוב את המלאכה — what he should love; שנא את הרבנות — what he should hate. He is shaping the person’s own attitudes and desires.

And רבנות itself is already about power and position. A person may need to hold authority, but the authority itself should not become something he loves.

So too, ואל תתודע לרשות continues the same idea on a larger scale. רבנות is the authority a person himself may hold; רשות is the greater power above him, the government and those who control things.

The concern, then, is not merely that the government may fail him when he needs it. It is that becoming too connected to power can itself affect the person, drawing him toward influence, access, and control, and eventually corrupting him.

There are still a few points in the wording of ואל תתודע לרשות that need to be understood.

First of all, until now the Mishnah has been speaking in terms of what a person should love and what he should hate: אהוב את המלאכה, love work; שנא את הרבנות, hate authority.

But when it comes to רשות, the Mishnah suddenly changes its language. It does not say שנא את הרשות — hate the government. It says ואל תתודע לרשות — do not become connected to it.

Seemingly, why the change? Why is it not enough simply to dislike the power of the government in the same way that a person is supposed to dislike rabbanus? Why, when it comes to רשות, does the Mishnah go further and tell us not even to become too connected to it?

There is also a more basic question. If רבנות means authority, then seemingly רשות is itself simply a greater form of authority. The government is, after all, the larger power above everyone else. If Shemayah has already told us שנא את הרבנות, why does he need to add a separate warning about רשות? Apparently, ואל תתודע לרשות is coming to add something that is not already included in שנא את הרבנות.

And this becomes even more interesting when we look at Shemayah himself.

Shemayah was the Nasi. He himself held one of the highest positions of authority in the Jewish people. Clearly, then, שנא את הרבנות cannot mean that a person should never hold authority.

And presumably, as the Nasi, Shemayah could not simply pretend that the government did not exist. A leader of the Jewish people may sometimes have to deal with the government and with those who hold political power.

Indeed, the Mishnah itself does not say that one may never deal with the government. It says ואל תתודע לרשות — do not become connected to it. There is a difference between dealing with power when necessary and becoming attached to the people who hold that power.

Which leaves us with a larger question: why is Shemayah specifically the one teaching these ideas? What was there about Shemayah himself, and about the world in which he lived, that made the distinction between work, authority, and becoming connected to political power so important?

The explanation of all this is that אהוב את המלאכה is not merely telling a person to get a job. It is telling him that he needs to do productive work.

That can certainly include working for a parnassah. But מלאכה is broader than that. It can include Torah, avodah, gemilus chasadim, or any other productive work that a person is supposed to be doing.

The exact type of melachah is not really the main point. The main point is that a person needs to do. He needs to produce. He needs to create.

As the pasuk says, היום לעשותם ולמחר לקבל שכרם — today is the time to do, and tomorrow is the time to receive the reward. And as Chassidus constantly emphasizes, המעשה הוא העיקר — action is the main thing.

A Yid is an eved Hashem. No matter what position he has, where he finds himself, or what stage of life he is in, he always has something he is supposed to be doing. He always needs to be involved in melachah.

And this is where שנא את הרבנות comes in.

The opposite of this attitude is when a person begins to define his productivity by his position.

That can happen in two ways.

A person can have a position and begin to feel that because he already has the title, he has already accomplished something. He is the rav, the menahel, the director, or the person in charge. He may still do the work necessary to fulfill the position, but his sense of importance begins to come from the position itself rather than from what he is actually accomplishing.

Or the opposite can happen. A person does not have the position, and therefore he feels that there is nothing for him to do. Teaching is for the maggid shiur. Leading is for the rav. Accomplishing is for the person who has been given the official role.

Both people are making the same mistake. They are confusing their position with their avodah.

A Yid’s responsibility to accomplish does not begin when somebody gives him a title. And it does not end once he receives one.

That is why, in order to properly fulfill אהוב את המלאכה, a person has to be שנא את הרבנות. The rabbanus itself — the title, the authority, the fact that he is the one in charge — should not be what he desires.

That does not mean that a person can never accept a position of authority. Sometimes the position is exactly what allows him to do his melachah properly. A rav can accomplish things because he is the rav. A menahel can build something because he has the authority to run the institution.

But the rabbanus is never the goal. It is only, when necessary, the כלי through which the melachah gets done.

The goal remains אהוב את המלאכה — to love doing, building, producing, and accomplishing what HaKadosh Baruch Hu put you in this world to accomplish.

However, there are still two important differences between רבנות and רשות.

When it comes to רבנות, even though a person is supposed to be שנא את הרבנות, he may nevertheless need to be deeply involved in the rabbanus itself. If a person is a rav, a menahel, or has some other communal responsibility, this may be his actual tafkid. He has to care deeply about the people he is responsible for, think about the institution, and throw himself into the work.

In other words, he should hate the authority, but he should not hate the job.

If HaKadosh Baruch Hu placed him in a position of leadership, then that leadership itself may be the כלי through which he is supposed to accomplish his melachah. He should not enjoy the fact that he is the one in charge, but he certainly needs to be connected to the responsibility that comes along with it.

There is also another difference. Even when a person becomes too caught up in his rabbanus, and begins to get some of his sense of importance from the position itself, at the end of the day he still has a job to do. A rav has to answer shailos. A menahel has to run the school. A person in charge of an institution still has actual responsibilities. Even if he does no more than what the position demands from him, he is still doing some melachah.

רשות is different.

The government is not necessarily the person’s tafkid. He may need to deal with it. He may need political connections in order to help the community, obtain something that is needed, or accomplish some other important goal. But he does not need to make that world into his world.

And, even more than rabbanus, connection to רשות can give a person the feeling that he is accomplishing something when in fact he has accomplished very little. He knows important people. He has access. He is close to those who have power. People know that he can make a phone call.

That itself can begin to feel like accomplishment.

And therefore רשות can become an even greater contradiction to אהוב את המלאכה than rabbanus. With rabbanus, at least the position generally comes together with an actual responsibility. With reshus, a person can become attached to the power surrounding the work without necessarily doing the work itself.

That is why the Mishnah changes its language. It does not merely say to hate רשות. It says ואל תתודע לרשות — do not become too connected to it.

Obviously, there are times when a person needs to deal with the government. But it should remain on a need-to-know basis. Use the connection when it is necessary for the melachah that needs to be done, but do not allow the connection to power itself to become something that you live in or identify with.

Because once that happens, a person can begin to feel that being close to power is itself a form of accomplishment — when really it is only supposed to be a means toward accomplishing something.

And all of this is לשיטתיה דשמעיה — it fits very well with Shemayah himself.

Shemayah did not come from some great or prominent Jewish family. On the contrary, Chazal tell us that Shemayah and Avtalyon came from the descendants of Sancheriv; according to some sources, they themselves were gerim, while according to others they were descendants of gerim. And nevertheless, through what they themselves accomplished — through their Torah, their avodah, and their מלאכה — they rose to become the leaders of Klal Yisrael. Shemayah himself became the Nasi.

And we see this בפועל ממש in a remarkable story the Gemara tells in Yoma (71b).

After Yom Kippur, the Kohen Gadol left the Beis Hamikdash and everyone followed behind him. Then the people saw Shemayah and Avtalyon. The Gemara says:

כיון דחזיונהו לשמעיה ואבטליון, שבקוהו לדידיה ואזלי בתר שמעיה ואבטליון — “When they saw Shemayah and Avtalyon, they left him and went after Shemayah and Avtalyon.”

Later, Shemayah and Avtalyon themselves came to take leave of the Kohen Gadol. Apparently insulted by what had happened, he said to them:

ייתון בני עממין לשלם — “Let the descendants of the nations come in peace.”

He was making a reference to their lowly lineage, to the fact that they descended from converts.

Shemayah and Avtalyon answered him:

ייתון בני עממין לשלם דעבדין עובדא דאהרן, ולא ייתי בר אהרן לשלם דלא עביד עובדא דאהרן — “Let the descendants of the nations come in peace, who perform the deeds of Aharon; and let not a son of Aharon come in peace who does not perform the deeds of Aharon.”

The contrast could hardly be sharper.

The Kohen Gadol had the lineage. He had the position. He had perhaps the most prestigious religious title in Klal Yisrael. And the Kehunah Gedolah during the Second Beis Hamikdash had in general become heavily entangled with money and political power; Chazal themselves describe a period in which people would give money in order to receive the position.

Shemayah and Avtalyon, by contrast, came from the very bottom of the social ladder. They could not point to an important family or impressive yichus. What they had was what they themselves had become and what they themselves did.

And Klal Yisrael recognized the difference. When they saw Shemayah and Avtalyon, they left the Kohen Gadol and followed them.

Their answer to the Kohen Gadol says almost the same thing as our Mishnah. What matters is not merely that you are a בן אהרן. What matters is whether you are עביד עובדא דאהרן — whether you actually do the deeds of Aharon.

That is אהוב את המלאכה.

Do not build your sense of importance around where you come from, what title you have, or what authority has been given to you. Build it around what you actually do.

And perhaps that is why Shemayah, of all people, could say שנא את הרבנות. He himself possessed tremendous rabbanus. He was the Nasi of Klal Yisrael. Clearly, then, the point cannot be that having authority is inherently wrong. His own life demonstrated the opposite. A person may need rabbanus in order to accomplish his tafkid.

But the rabbanus is never the tachlis. The tachlis is the melachah.

And with this, the different points in the Mishnah begin to come together. אהוב את המלאכה does not merely mean that a person needs a paycheck; it means that he should love doing and accomplishing. שנא את הרבנות does not mean that he can never accept authority; it means that the authority itself should never become what he desires. And ואל תתודע לרשות goes one step further: do not become attached to the larger centers of power around you, where it becomes even easier to confuse access, influence, and importance with actual accomplishment.

Shemayah’s message is that a Yid’s life is supposed to be built around מלאכה — around what he is actually doing for HaKadosh Baruch Hu. Position and power have value only to the extent that they help him do that work.

There is a familiar complaint about yeshiva education: bochurim spend years learning, yet many leave without the ability to learn Gemara particularly well and without the yedios one might expect after so many years in a beis midrash.

The easiest explanation is to blame the bochurim.

They do not work hard enough. They waste seder. They lack discipline. Today’s generation has shorter attention spans.

Certainly, sometimes that is true. But when the same result appears again and again, across large numbers of students and over many years, at some point we have to stop asking only what is wrong with the students and ask what the system itself is producing.

And the problem is broader than Gemara.

A bochur can spend years learning Chassidus and still leave yeshiva without a coherent grasp of many of its central ideas. He may have learned dozens of maamarim and sichos, but struggle to organize the concepts into a larger picture. The same can be true of halacha and general yedias haTorah.

There is plenty of learning taking place. Somehow, however, it does not always accumulate into knowledge.

Why?

There are undoubtedly many reasons. But I think one of them lies in a question we rarely ask: What does yeshiva actually understand its job to be?

At its most basic level, the modern Jewish school and yeshiva have performed an extraordinary function: they keep Jewish children Jewish.

A boy placed for his formative years into an environment of Torah, tefillah, Shabbos, kashrus and mitzvos is far more likely to emerge committed to those things than a child educated entirely in the surrounding secular culture. Whatever criticisms we may have of our schools, their success in transmitting frum life should not be underestimated.

A Chabad yeshiva has another primary goal as well. It wants its bochurim not merely to remain frum, but to emerge as identifying as chabad.

And here, I think, we begin to understand part of the problem.

Every institution has an official curriculum, but it also has a hidden curriculum. Students very quickly learn what actually earns admiration, what generates excitement, what is treated as essential and what is merely considered nice.

A Chabad bochur knows that mivtzoim matter. Farbrengens matter. Chitas and Rambam matter. Going to the Ohel matters. Learning the Rebbe’s sichos matters. Hiskashrus matters.

These things are not merely activities. They are markers of identity. They tell the bochur—and everyone around him—that he is becoming a certain kind of person.

But is yedias haTorah treated in the same way?

If a bochur rarely goes on mivtzoim, avoids farbrengens and appears indifferent to the Rebbe, people will rightly worry that something fundamental is missing from his Chabad identity.

Suppose, however, that he reaches the end of zal without broad yedios in Gemara, cannot confidently open an unfamiliar sugya, has weak practical knowledge of major areas of halacha and cannot clearly explain many basic concepts in Chassidus.

Does that provoke the same reaction?

If not, the bochur has learned something very important about what the institution actually considers indispensable.

This helps explain a phenomenon one often hears from bochurim. A bochur will speak enthusiastically about having a geshmak in Chassidus. Perhaps he does. But having a geshmak, attending seder Chassidus and participating in farbrengens are not the same thing as mastering Chassidus as a body of knowledge.

Participation can become a substitute for mastery.

This is not because Chabad ideology does not value Torah learning. Quite the opposite. The Rebbe constantly encouraged Torah learning, yedias haTorah and growth in both Nigleh and Chassidus.

The issue is not the ideal. The issue is which parts of that ideal have become powerful markers of communal identity.

The contrast with the Litvishe yeshiva world is instructive.

Litvishe yeshivas have their own educational problems, and they too transmit far more than a desire to be frum or to learn Torah. They are also creating a Yeshivish identity.There creating a “Ben Torah”

But as the name implies, learning itself is central to a Ben Torah identity.

The bochur wants to understand the rosh yeshiva’s shiur. He wants to ask a good kasha. He wants to say a svara. The older bochur admired by his peers is often admired precisely because he can learn. Being a lamdan is not an extracurricular achievement. It is part of what it means to be a successful yeshiva bochur.

One can even argue that certain forms of sophisticated lomdus are taught to boys before many of them are really ready to understand them. Pedagogically, perhaps they would sometimes benefit more from learning greater quantities of Gemara.

But that tells us something important.

The goal is not only to teach the boy Gemara. It is also to teach him what a Ben Torah is. Even when he does not fully understand the lomdus, the culture is communicating: This is greatness. This is what you should aspire to become.

And the same thing can work in the other direction. Hashkafah, practical halacha, middos tovos and other important areas may receive less attention precisely because they are not seen as equally essential to being a Ben Torah.

The result (at least as far as learning is concerned)is an environment that pushes even its average students toward greater learning, while pushing its strongest students much further.

This also explains why one common response in Chabad yeshivas misses the point.

A rosh yeshiva frustrated that bochurim are not learning may begin fighting mivtzoim, farbrengens or other Chabad activities. Perhaps mivtzoim should occasionally be regulated. Perhaps a farbrengen should not continue until four in the morning when there is seder the next day. A yeshiva has every right to manage its students’ time and energy responsibly.

But a few hours of mivtzoim on Friday are not the reason a bochur fails to learn seriously during the rest of the week.

The deeper problem begins when the bochur is made to feel that there is a choice: he can be the enthusiastic Chabad bochur who cares about mivtzoim and farbrengens, or he can be the serious yeshiva bochur who cares about Gemara.

If learning is placed on the opposite side of Chabad identity, the battle has already been lost.

Nobody sees a contradiction between learning Chassidus and going on mivtzoim. Nobody asks whether going to the Ohel (or 770) undermines Chitas. They are understood as different parts of one Chabad life.

Torah learning has to be understood the same way.

The solution is therefore not less mivtzoim, fewer farbrengens or less hiskashrus.

It is to make knowing Torah itself part of what hiskashrus and Chabad identity demand.

A graduate of Tomchei Temimim should feel that if he cannot learn, something essential is missing. If he knows little Gemara after years of seder, something essential is missing. If he has spent years learning Chassidus but cannot explain its fundamental ideas coherently, something essential is missing.

Yeshivas already know how to make things important to bochurim. They create excitement, expectations, incentives, role models and social norms around the things they want students to value.

The question is not whether that machinery works.

We know that it works.

The question is why we have not used it strongly enough to communicate one simple message:

A Chabad bochur is supposed to know Torah.

He worked his way onto a high-school team, was recruited to play in college, and for a time seriously considered pursuing the sport professionally. But as that dream began to lose its hold, another search opened up—one that took him surprisingly far into the world of Eastern spirituality before eventually bringing him back to Yiddishkeit and to a more personal question: what did Hashem want from him?

The answer, eventually, led him somewhere he had never expected: chinuch.

In this conversation, Rabbi Mizrachi reflects on the path from college baseball to the classroom, the experiences that shaped his approach to teaching, and why he came to see chinuch not simply as a profession, but as his shlichus.

Tell us a little about yourself. Where did you grow up, and what was your childhood like?

I was born in Caracas, Venezuela. The Jewish community there was mostly traditional and very close-knit, and Venezuela in those days was a very warm, lively place. It was actually known for years as one of the happiest countries in the world. After the communists took over in 1998, the country changed dramatically, and while I was still young my family moved to Florida.

And growing up there, my world became pretty simple. There were really only two things I cared about:friends and baseball.

I had almost no interest in school. I don’t think I even read a book until I was over twenty years old. I wasn’t thinking about what I wanted to study or what kind of career I was going to have. As far as I was concerned, I was going to play baseball. I wanted to become a professional baseball player, and that was what I was working toward.

The funny thing is that I wasn’t naturally such a gifted baseball player. It wasn’t something that came easily to me. I just worked harder than everybody else.

And because of that, I kept getting further than I thought I would.

I made the high-school team, and eventually colleges started recruiting me. At one point I was ranked the number-one hitter in the state of Florida, Eventually I was recruited to play Division II baseball at Alfred State College,and during my first year there I was ranked seventeenth in the country.

I never looked at myself and thought, Of course I’m going to become a professional baseball player. But each time I reached a level I hadn’t expected to reach, the next one started to seem possible. I hadn’t thought I would make the high-school team, and I did. I hadn’t thought I would make it to college baseball, and I did that too.

So I figured that if I kept working the same way, maybe I could keep going

.So what changed? At what point did you begin to realize that baseball might not actually be what you wanted?

Eventually I had to ask myself a very basic question: Why am I doing this?

If I was going to become a professional baseball player, I knew I had to want it with everything I had. I wasn’t the kind of player who could coast on natural talent. I had gotten as far as I had because I was completely consumed by it. So if I was going to keep going, I had to be sure this was really what I wanted.

And once I began seeing what the career actually looked like, I wasn’t so sure.

You’re constantly traveling with a group of guys who are your teammates, but they’re not necessarily people you would ever choose to spend all your time with. Some of the guys I was living and traveling with were simply not people I wanted to build my future around.

I was also a starting pitcher, which means you generally pitch once every five games. So I started looking at it very practically: four games out of five, I’m traveling around and sitting there watching baseball.

I love playing baseball. I didn’t want to spend my life watching baseball.

And then there was the future. One day, b’ezras Hashem, I wanted to get married and have children. Did I really want to be away from my family for six months of the year? And if I actually became successful, then there was the fame on top of it—the idea that you couldn’t necessarily just go somewhere with your family without being recognized.

Suddenly, the dream looked very different when I pictured what it would actually mean day to day.

But there was something else that bothered me even more.

Baseball was something my father and I had always shared. He was a huge fan, and a lot of my love for the game came from him. So I would finish a game after doing really well, and the first thing I wanted to do was call him. I wanted to tell him what happened and hear that reaction: “Wow! Amazing!”

But sometimes I would call and he was busy, or he hadn’t seen the game. I would tell him how well I had done and he would just say, “Oh, nice job.”

And I remember thinking: That’s it?

I had just had this great game. On paper, I had succeeded. I could sit there afterward and look at my statistics again, remind myself how well I had done, and maybe get another little high from it.

But it wasn’t enough.

I had spent years imagining that success in baseball was going to give me something. And now I was actually succeeding, and I was beginning to realize that it wasn’t giving me what I thought it would.

So for the first time in my life, at around twenty-one years old, I allowed myself to seriously think: Maybe this isn’t for me.

The problem was, I had no idea what else was.

Around that same time, though, something else was beginning to open up in me.

After my first year of college, I went to Eretz Yisrael on Birthright. I had always had a spiritual side, and I had wanted to go to Eretz Yisrael for years. I remember feeling something very strong in Tzfas, but what really stayed with me happened on the last day, when we went to the Kosel.

I stood there and just broke down crying.

I must have been there for three and a half hours. I can’t really explain exactly what happened. I just felt this very deep connection, something very pure. It was almost like the best part of me suddenly came to the surface, and all I could think was: Hashem, I want to be good. I want to be good.

It wasn’t that my life was falling apart. I wasn’t coming from some terrible place. But I was living the normal college life—parties, all of that—and suddenly I felt very clearly: I don’t want this. There’s something dirty about this, and I want something better.

I was crying so much that between the tears and the summer heat, the paper I was writing on was literally starting to fall apart.

Then I went back to college for my second year, and it was almost like I had these two different worlds inside me at the same time.

On the baseball side, I was coming back after a very successful first year. Now I was a captain, I had status on the team, people looked at me differently. But at the same time, I had this new feeling from Eretz Yisrael that I didn’t really know what to do with.

I remember I started doing little things that, for me, felt almost ridiculous. I would try to go to sleep on time and read a book before bed. I had basically never read books, so even that felt to me like, Okay, now I’m being a good person.

And then that year became a mess.

I got mono and was sick for a long time. I remember Yom Kippur came out during baseball, and even though I was too sick to play—and I was fasting—they still required me to be there. So my Yom Kippur was basically sitting in the dugout for two games.

The team itself started falling apart. My coach got fired. A whole series of things happened, and meanwhile I was already asking myself why I was doing any of this.

Eventually I decided I was done. I moved back home to finish my degree.

And now the question became much bigger than baseball.

For the first time, I really had to ask myself: What am I supposed to do with my life now?

By then, I was very open spiritually. I was finishing college, and almost by accident I took a world religions class.

Until then, Judaism in my mind was very basic. It was the stories I had grown up with—Avraham, Moshe, the things you learn as a kid. But in that class we started talking about Hinduism, Buddhism, meditation, mysticism, ideas about the soul and spirituality, and I remember thinking: Whoa. This is what I’m looking for.

So I started exploring it seriously. I read a lot, got involved in meditation and yoga, visited ashrams, and eventually went pretty deep into that world. I was looking for something real, something spiritual, something that would tell me what I was supposed to be doing with my life.

For a while, I thought I had found it

.My father, though, was very uncomfortable with the direction I was going in, and eventually he convinced me to sit down with the local shliach.

I told the shliach everything I was doing. He listened, and then he said something that changed everything for me.

He told me, “Even though this path may be doing you good—and probably not as much good as you think—I don’t believe it is fulfilling your neshamah.”

I can’t really explain what happened when he said that. It was like a gunshot. My heart was pounding, and I didn’t even know why those words had affected me so strongly.

Was he actually touching something true? Or was this just part of me resisting the path I was on?

That one sentence sent me into more than a year of searching. I kept asking Hashem: What do You actually want from me?

Around that time, I joined a Sinai Scholars program in college. We would learn every week, and toward the end of the program we spent a Shabbos together.

And I remember being surprised by how much I loved it.

There was something about doing mitzvos that felt very pure and very right. At the same time, I still felt that there was a certain depth I was looking for and hadn’t yet found. So for a while I was still searching, still trying to understand where all of this was leading.

Eventually I remembered that the shliach had suggested that I go to yeshivah, and I decided to spend a couple of months at Mayanot in Yerushalayim.

That was where things started coming together.

For the first time, I began learning Chassidus seriously, and I remember thinking: Wait. This is here too.

All of this depth, all of this spirituality that I had gone searching for somewhere else—I had simply never known that Yiddishkeit had it.

For the first time, I began realizing that what I had been looking for elsewhere might have been inside Yiddishkeit all along.

How did you end up in Chinuch? That seems like a very different direction from where you started.

Interestingly, even before I was frum, I had this idea that if you really want to change the world, you have to work with the next generation.

I remember once meeting a homeless man. He had a sign that said, “I don’t want money. I want to eat,” so I took him out for food and we started talking. At some point I told him that I wanted to help people like him, and he looked at me very seriously and said, “Forget about us. We’re already messed up. Focus on the next generation.”

And that stayed with me. Maybe he was a malach, I don’t know. But something about that sentence stuck.

Years later, after yeshivah and kollel, I got my first opportunity to teach. When that ended, though, I was actually very excited about a different possibility: Hadar Torah. I loved the whole idea of working with baalei teshuvah. I could see myself going there, becoming a maggid shiur, getting involved with the guys, really throwing myself into the place. I had this whole picture in my head of what I could do there, and I was very into it.

So after Shavuos, I wrote to the Rebbe. I shared a bunch of good news and hachlatos I had taken on, and then I asked about what I should do next.

The answer first thanked me for the good news. And then, in response to my question, it spoke about how understated it is just how important it is to work with children before bar mitzvah.

And I was like: Okay. I got the message.

Soon afterward, I was offered a position teaching sixth grade. Before bar mitzvah.

So I took it.

And since then, this keeps happening. I’ll write to the Rebbe, and nine times out of ten it almost doesn’t matter what I’m asking about—the answer somehow comes back to chinuch. I can be asking one thing, thinking about something completely different, and again the answer is about chinuch. The importance of chinuch, the responsibility of a mechanech, what the work demands from you.

Again and again.

Soto me its very simple,: the Rebbe sent me here. And ever since, I feel like the Rebbe keeps pushing me in the same direction—chinuch, chinuch, and more chinuch

.If you see chinuch as the place the Rebbe sent you, what does that mean for the way you actually approach the job?

I feel that a mechanech has to teach with his whole being. Chinuch can’t just be something you do from nine to four, where you walk into the classroom, give your lesson, and then go home. If this is really your shlichus, then it has to occupy you.

I feel this very strongly with the Rebbe. There are times when I’m exhausted, a kid has been giving me a hard time for a week, and then he comes over: “Rebbi, can I show you something?” My natural reaction is, Not now. Please, not now. And somewhere in the back of my head I feel the Rebbe saying: Give him attention. He’s standing in front of you. Give him attention.

And for me it goes beyond what happens during class. If I go to sleep and I’m not prepared for the next day, I feel like I made a mistake. If there’s a student I should have called, or a parent I should have spoken to, or something in the class that isn’t working and I haven’t really thought through how to fix it, that bothers me.

You look at other professions where people understand that the work demands everything from them. A doctor, Hatzalah—people are working, they’re sweating, they’re giving it everything they have. Why should chinuch be approached with less seriousness? We’re dealing with children. We’re helping shape who these kids are going to become.

And that also means I don’t want to become comfortable. I have this thing where I’m almost allergic to simply recycling what I did last year. If I did a certain project with last year’s class, I don’t want to automatically pull it off the shelf and do the exact same thing again because, well, it worked.

Maybe I’ll do it again. But if I do, I want it to be because it’s right for this class.

To me, being alive in chinuch means that every year has to be a little different, because the children in front of you are different. If I’m just repeating myself because that’s what I did last year, then something has gone missing.

With all that effort, what are you ultimately trying to give the children? What do you want them to walk away with?

What I would love to see is that in every classroom there should be order, there should be a Torah-true education, the kids should be happy, and there should be love in the room.

And part of that, I think, is that we have to have confidence in what we’re giving them. Sometimes we sell children short. We think that if you simply tell a child, “We’re learning Torah because we want to connect to the Eibershter,” he’s going to look at you like, What are you talking about? Maybe the first time he will. But children can respond to that. You just have to believe it yourself first.

One example is prizes.

My first year teaching sixth grade, I printed out a welcome packet for the class. By accident, the last page from the previous rebbi’s packet got mixed in with mine, and this page had this unbelievable list of prizes—a bicycle, a drone, all kinds of things.

So I’m standing there talking to the boys about how we’re here to learn Torah, we’re here to connect to the Eibershter, and suddenly one of them raises his hand.

“Rebbi, what about the prizes?”

I said, “What prizes?”

He shows me the page.

I looked at it and said, “Okay, everybody take that last page, crumple it up, and throw it away.”

Because I didn’t want to begin from the idea that we have to bribe a child to learn Torah.

And later that year, one of the boys came over to me and said, “Rebbi, this is the first time in our lives that we haven’t been bribed to learn Torah.”

Then, on the last day of school, another boy told me to look inside his desk. He had written something on a piece of paper and taped it inside for the boy who would have that desk the following year.

He wrote: “Torah iz di beste schorah.”

He was twelve years old, and that was the message he wanted to leave for the next class.

So I really believe we can teach children this way. We don’t always have to assume that Torah itself isn’t going to speak to them, or that we have to offer them something else in order to get them interested.

But first of all, you have to believe it yourself.

You’ve spoken a lot about keeping chinuch rooted in Torah. At the same time, you’re very involved with Igud HaMelamdim and you put a lot of emphasis on professional training for teachers. Why is that so important to you?

Because I learned very quickly that caring is not enough.

My first year in chinuch, I thought I could basically rely on my natural abilities. I’m a pretty social person, I connect well with people, and I figured that if I cared about the kids and had a good relationship with them, I would be fine.

I got eaten alive.

The class was very rowdy, and I realized that there were basic things about running a classroom that I simply didn’t know. So that summer I took the Igud HaMelamdim course, particularly the training with Rabbi Rottenberg, and for me it changed everything

.

What he gave me was a framework. How do you set up a classroom properly? How do you establish expectations? How do you prepare so that you’re not spending the entire year reacting to problems after they happen? These are practical skills, and once I started applying them, it gave me the wings to fly. The following year was completely different.

That’s why I became so passionate about this kind of training. I’ve seen what it can do, not only for me but for other mechanchim as well. I know teachers who were really struggling, who took the training, applied what they learned, and came back the next year almost like different teachers.

And one of the biggest things it changes is preparation.

This year, for example, I came into the school more than a week before classes began because I wanted to start getting ready. I figured I would probably be the only person there.

There were already two other rebbeim in the building.

All three of us had taken the Igud HaMelamdim training.

That tells you something. School hadn’t started yet, nobody was forcing us to be there, but we were already thinking about the year—setting up the classroom, preparing, trying to anticipate what the kids were going to need before they walked through the door.

To me, that’s a big part of being a serious mechanech. You can have all the right intentions in the world, and obviously the foundation has to be Torah and the way the Rebbe looks at chinuch. But you also have to know how to do the job.

A mechanech needs both.

In this article, I want to take a broad look at the story of Gideon in Sefer Shoftim and offer some of my own thoughts on what is happening throughout the story.

I’m going to assume that the reader already has at least a general familiarity with the events of Shoftim, so I won’t be retelling every story in detail. And while many of the ideas I discuss can certainly be found, in one form or another, in the mefarshim, my goal here is to gather them together and frame them in the way that I understand the larger story of Shoftim.

I hope you enjoy.

One of the things that stood out to me in the story of Gideon is how strongly it seems to be written as a kind of second Yetziyas Mitzrayim. Gideon is repeatedly presented in ways that remind us of Moshe, and the salvation from Midian begins to look like a smaller reenactment of the Exodus.

The first hint comes even before Gideon appears.

After the Jewish people fall under Midianite oppression, Hashem sends a Navi:

״כֹּה אָמַר ה׳ אֱלֹקי יִשְׂרָאֵל אָנֹכִי הֶעֱלֵיתִי אֶתְכֶם מִמִּצְרַיִם וָאֹצִיא אֶתְכֶם מִבֵּית עֲבָדִים.״
(Shoftim 6:8)

“I brought you up from Egypt, and I took you out of the house of slavery.”

The emphasis is not merely that Hashem took them out of Egypt. He took them out of slavery — from being a people living under the domination of another nation.

The Navi continues:

״וָאַצִּל אֶתְכֶם מִיַּד מִצְרַיִם וּמִיַּד כָּל לֹחֲצֵיכֶם... וָאֶתְּנָה לָכֶם אֶת אַרְצָם.״

Hashem rescued them from their oppressors, drove the nations out before them, and gave them the land.

That is precisely the tragedy of their present situation. Hashem had taken them from slavery and given them Eretz Yisrael, yet under Midian they have, in a sense, returned to where they started. They are again frightened, oppressed, and living under the power of another nation.

So the Navi’s reference to Egypt is not simply a reminder of an old miracle. It gives us the framework for the entire story. Midian is being presented as a new Egypt. The Jewish people once again need an Exodus.

And that prepares us for the appearance of Gideon — who, as we will see, begins to look increasingly like a new Moshe.

We then meet Gideon himself:

״וְגִדְעוֹן בְּנוֹ חֹבֵט חִטִּים בַּגַּת לְהָנִיס מִפְּנֵי מִדְיָן.״

“Gideon his son was beating wheat in the winepress, to hide it from Midian.”

The mefarshim point out that there is more happening here than simply Gideon trying to save some wheat. The Radak, quoting a Midrash, explains that Gideon’s elderly father, Yoash, had originally been threshing the wheat. Gideon told him to go inside and took his place, because if the Midianites suddenly appeared, his father would not have the strength to run away. The malach therefore says that because Gideon had fulfilled the mitzvah of kibbud av, he was worthy of saving the Jewish people.

I think this tells us something important about how leaders emerge in Tanach. Before a person is given responsibility for an entire nation, we often first see how he behaves when nobody is watching — when he is simply responsible for someone else.

We find something very similar with Moshe. Before Hashem appoints him to lead the Jewish people, Moshe is shepherding the sheep of Yisro. Chazal describe how one little sheep ran away, and Moshe followed it, realized that it was thirsty, and eventually carried the exhausted animal back on his shoulders. Hashem says: if this is how you care for the sheep of a human being, you are fit to shepherd My people.

Gideon is introduced in much the same way. Before he saves Klal Yisrael from Midian, he is protecting his elderly father from Midian.

And then the malach says something almost strange:

״ה׳ עִמְּךָ גִּבּוֹר הֶחָיִל.״

“Hashem is with you, mighty warrior.”

The irony is obvious. Gideon does not look much like a mighty warrior at this moment. He is hiding wheat from the Midianites in a winepress — hardly the normal place to thresh wheat — because the Jewish people are too frightened to do so openly. And yet the malach calls him a gibor hachayil.

Gideon’s response is equally striking. He does not simply accept the compliment. Instead, he immediately challenges the very premise of what the malach has said:

״בִּי אֲדֹנִי וְיֵשׁ ה׳ עִמָּנוּ וְלָמָּה מְצָאַתְנוּ כָּל זֹאת וְאַיֵּה כָל נִפְלְאֹתָיו אֲשֶׁר סִפְּרוּ לָנוּ אֲבוֹתֵינוּ לֵאמֹר הֲלֹא מִמִּצְרַיִם הֶעֱלָנוּ ה׳ וְעַתָּה נְטָשָׁנוּ ה׳ וַיִּתְּנֵנוּ בְּכַף מִדְיָן.״

“If Hashem is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all His wonders that our fathers told us about, saying, ‘Did Hashem not bring us up from Egypt?’ And now Hashem has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.”

Once again, the comparison to Moshe becomes difficult to miss. Moshe too, at the end of Parshas Shemos, responds to the suffering of the Jewish people by turning to Hashem and asking why He has allowed this to happen. His instinct is to defend the Jewish people.

Gideon does something very similar. The malach speaks to him personally — “Hashem is with you” — and Gideon immediately answers in the plural: if Hashem is with us, then why are the Jewish people suffering? His first response to being called is not to think about himself, but about Klal Yisrael.

Rashi adds one final detail that ties the entire scene together. This encounter took place on Pesach. Gideon had heard his father reciting Hallel the previous night and telling him about the miracles of Yetziyas Mitzrayim. That is why his mind immediately turns back to Egypt: if Hashem once redeemed us in such a miraculous way, where is that redemption now?

So Gideon, the man who is about to be chosen to bring about a kind of second Exodus, is chosen on Pesach itself — while fulfilling kibbud av toward the very father who had just told him the story of the first Exodus.And when the malach appears, Gideon’s very first question is: if Hashem performed those miracles then, where are those miracles now?

Hashem then turns to Gideon and gives him his mission:

״וַיִּפֶן אֵלָיו ה׳ וַיֹּאמֶר לֵךְ בְּכֹחֲךָ זֶה וְהוֹשַׁעְתָּ אֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל מִכַּף מִדְיָן הֲלֹא שְׁלַחְתִּיךָ.״

“Go with this strength of yours and save Israel from the hand of Midian. Have I not sent you?”

Gideon’s response immediately gives us another parallel to Moshe:

״בִּי אֲדֹנָי בַּמָּה אוֹשִׁיעַ אֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל הִנֵּה אַלְפִּי הַדַּל בִּמְנַשֶּׁה וְאָנֹכִי הַצָּעִיר בְּבֵית אָבִי.״

“Please, my Lord, how can I save Israel? My family is the weakest in Menashe, and I am the youngest in my father’s house.”

Once again, Gideon does not see himself as the obvious person for the job. Like Moshe, his first reaction to being chosen is essentially: Why me? I am not capable of this.

And I think there is something deeper here about the kind of leaders Hashem chooses. The leader is often not chosen because he appears, naturally, to be the strongest candidate. In some cases, he seems almost uniquely unsuited to the very task he is being given. Precisely because of that, he can become a vessel through which it becomes clear that the salvation is coming from Hashem.

Moshe is perhaps the clearest example. His mission is to stand before Pharaoh and speak — and yet Moshe describes himself as כְבַד פֶּה וּכְבַד לָשׁוֹן, someone for whom speech itself does not come easily. The man being sent to confront the most powerful ruler in the world does not even see himself as a capable speaker.

Gideon has a similar problem. His task will require him to rally the Jewish people and bring the tribes together against Midian. One would therefore expect Hashem to choose someone from a powerful family, someone with status and influence who could naturally command the allegiance of others.

Instead, Hashem chooses Gideon. His own description of himself is almost the opposite: his family is among the weakest in Menashe, and he himself is the youngest in his household. He is, by his own estimation, one of the least likely people to be able to unite the nation behind him.

And perhaps that is part of the point. Gideon will not defeat Midian because he begins with political power, military strength, or social standing. He will do it because ״הֲלֹא שְׁלַחְתִּיךָ״ — because Hashem sent him.

As with Moshe, the weakness of the messenger becomes part of the message.

Then, much like Moshe Rabbeinu, Gideon asks for a sign:

״וְעָשִׂיתָ לִּי אוֹת שָׁאַתָּה מְדַבֵּר עִמִּי.״

“Give me a sign that it is You who are speaking with me.”

Gideon then asks the malach to remain while he goes to prepare an offering. And what does he bring?

״וַיַּעַשׂ גְּדִי עִזִּים וְאֵיפַת קֶמַח מַצּוֹת.״

He prepares a young goat together with matzos.

Here again, I think the Pesach imagery is very difficult to miss. Rashi specifically explains that Gideon prepared matzos because it was Pesach. And Gideon, who had just spoken about the miracles of Yetziyas Mitzrayim that his father had taught him the night before, certainly knew the story of the Korban Pesach: a lamb or goat eaten together with matzah on the night that Hashem redeemed the Jewish people from Egypt.

I do not mean that Gideon was literally offering a Korban Pesach. But the imagery is clearly there. Gideon has just asked, Where are the miracles of Yetziyas Mitzrayim? And now, on Pesach itself, he brings before Hashem a goat and matzos — almost as though he is placing the symbols of that first redemption before Him and asking: will You redeem us again?

The answer comes dramatically.

The malach tells Gideon to place the meat and the matzos on the rock and then to pour the broth over them. He touches them with the end of his staff:

״וַתַּעַל הָאֵשׁ מִן הַצּוּר וַתֹּאכַל אֶת הַבָּשָׂר וְאֶת הַמַּצּוֹת.״

“Fire rose from the rock and consumed the meat and the matzos.”

The broth makes the sign even more striking. This is not food that simply happened to catch fire. Gideon has just poured liquid over it, and nevertheless fire comes miraculously from the rock and consumes it.

And I think this is Hashem’s answer to Gideon. Gideon has asked: If You performed those miracles for our fathers in Egypt, where are those miracles now? He then brings before Hashem the imagery of that first Pesach — the goat and the matzah — and Hashem answers by accepting it with heavenly fire.

The message is clear: the God of Yetziyas Mitzrayim is still here. The miracles Gideon has heard about are not merely stories from the past. And now Gideon himself is being called to take part in a new redemption.

The story then continues that very night:

״וַיְהִי בַלַּיְלָה הַהוּא וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ ה׳ קַח אֶת פַּר הַשּׁוֹר אֲשֶׁר לְאָבִיךָ וּפַר הַשֵּׁנִי שֶׁבַע שָׁנִים וְהָרַסְתָּ אֶת מִזְבַּח הַבַּעַל אֲשֶׁר לְאָבִיךָ וְאֶת הָאֲשֵׁרָה אֲשֶׁר עָלָיו תִּכְרֹת.״

Hashem tells Gideon to destroy the altar of Baal belonging to his father and cut down the Asherah beside it. He is then commanded to build an altar to Hashem in its place and offer a korban there.

And this is really a continuation of what we just saw with the imagery of the Korban Pesach. Gideon had brought a goat and matzah, evoking the first redemption from Egypt. Now Hashem takes that imagery one step further and brings us back to another central element of the Korban Pesach: before the Jewish people could be redeemed, they had to show that they were no longer part of the avodah zarah surrounding them.

The Korban Pesach was not simply something the Jewish people brought before being redeemed. It was also a declaration. Chazal describe the Jewish people in Egypt as having sunk into avodah zarah themselves — הללו עובדי עבודה זרה והללו עובדי עבודה זרה. Before they could be redeemed, they had to demonstrate that they were separating themselves from that world.

They therefore took the very animal associated with the avodah zarah of Egypt and slaughtered it for Hashem. They were making a statement: this is no longer our god. We belong to Hashem.

Gideon is now being asked to do the same thing.

The problem is not only that Midian is oppressing the Jewish people. The Jewish people themselves have become attached to the avodah zarah of the nations around them. If Hashem is going to redeem them again, there first has to be an act showing that they are no longer part of that avodah zarah.

And Gideon has to begin with his own household.

Before he can go out and change Klal Yisrael, he has to tear down the Baal in his own backyard. Before the Jewish people can be freed from Midian, Gideon first has to show that he and his family are no longer part of the religious world that brought Midian upon them in the first place.

So the connection to the Korban Pesach is not merely the goat and the matzah. It is the deeper pattern of redemption itself: before Hashem takes the Jewish people out from under the power of another nation, they first have to show that they have taken themselves out from under the influence of that nation’s gods.

And then Hashem goes one step further.

Gideon does not merely destroy the altar of Baal and cut down the Asherah. He is commanded to take the wood of the Asherah and use it as fuel for a korban to Hashem, to offer the bull associated with this idolatrous worship upon a new mizbeach, and to build that mizbeach to Hashem in the very place where the altar of Baal had stood.

I think there are two different ideas being expressed here.

The first is that the destruction of avodah zarah is itself a form of avodas Hashem.

The Asherah is not simply cut down and thrown away so that afterward Gideon can begin doing something holy. Its very destruction becomes part of the korban. The wood of the Asherah is burned beneath the offering to Hashem. The altar of Baal is torn down, and in its place stands a mizbeach to Hashem.

In other words, destroying Baal is itself part of returning to Hashem. The rejection of avodah zarah is not merely clearing away an obstacle before avodas Hashem can begin; that rejection is itself an act of avodas Hashem. The destruction of Baal becomes incorporated into the korban offered to Hashem.

But there is also a second layer.

What Gideon does to the Asherah, the bull, and the altar is, in miniature, what he is being called upon to do with the Jewish people themselves.

The Yidden have attached themselves to Baal. Gideon’s task is to break that attachment and transform those same people back into ovdei Hashem. He is not being sent to replace them with another nation. He is being sent to take the very people who had been serving Baal and turn them back toward Hashem.

That is exactly what happens in his father’s courtyard. The Asherah is cut down and its wood is used for Hashem. The bull associated with Baal becomes a korban to Hashem. The altar of Baal comes down, and a mizbeach to Hashem rises in its place.

So the scene contains both parts of Gideon’s mission: to destroy the Jewish people’s attachment to avodah zarah, and through that very rejection, to transform them once again into a nation devoted to Hashem.

What Gideon does that night to the altar of Baal is, in a sense, what he is about to do to Klal Yisrael.

The pasuk then tells us:

״וַיִּקַּח גִּדְעוֹן עֲשָׂרָה אֲנָשִׁים מֵעֲבָדָיו וַיַּעַשׂ כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר אֵלָיו ה׳ וַיְהִי כַּאֲשֶׁר יָרֵא אֶת בֵּית אָבִיו וְאֶת אַנְשֵׁי הָעִיר מֵעֲשׂוֹת יוֹמָם וַיַּעַשׂ לָיְלָה.״

“Gideon took ten men from among his servants and did as Hashem had told him. But because he was afraid of his father’s household and the people of the city to do it by day, he did it at night.”

There is an interesting detail here: why does Gideon take ten men with him?

On the simplest level, he presumably needed help. Tearing down an altar, cutting down a large Asherah, building a new mizbeach, and preparing a bull as an olah is not a small job.

But I wonder whether there is something more in the number ten.

After all, if Gideon is frightened of being discovered, bringing ten other people into the secret is hardly the safest way to go about it. He does the act at night because he is afraid of the townspeople, but at the same time he makes sure that he does not do it alone.

In halacha, ten Jews transform an act from something private into something done b’rabim. Chazal teach regarding Kiddush Hashem that אין פרהסיא פחותה מעשרה בני אדם — an act is not considered public in this sense with fewer than ten Jews.

Perhaps that is part of the symbolism here as well.

Gideon is not merely sneaking out at night and privately destroying an idol. He takes ten Jews with him. The rejection of Baal itself becomes, in some sense, a Kiddush Hashem b’rabim. There is now a group of Jews standing together and declaring, through their actions, that Baal is not their god and that the altar belongs to Hashem.

That fits particularly well with what we have just seen. The entire purpose of this act is to reverse the Jewish people’s relationship with avodah zarah. Gideon is beginning with his own household, but he does not begin entirely alone. The first small group has already been formed: ten men participating together in the destruction of Baal and the rebuilding of avodas Hashem.

Gideon may still be afraid — that is why he works at night — but his fear does not turn the act into a completely private one. The first battle against Baal begins with ten Jews standing together.

The next morning, the people of the city wake up and discover what Gideon has done:

״וְהִנֵּה נֻתַּץ מִזְבַּח הַבַּעַל וְהָאֲשֵׁרָה אֲשֶׁר עָלָיו כֹּרָתָה וְאֵת הַפָּר הַשֵּׁנִי הֹעָלָה עַל הַמִּזְבֵּחַ הַבָּנוּי.״

The altar of Baal has been smashed, the Asherah has been cut down, and the bull has been offered upon the newly built mizbeach.

They begin investigating, and before long they discover that Gideon was responsible. This is hardly surprising. Gideon had carried out a dramatic attack on the avodah zarah located on his own father’s property, together with ten other men. Whatever secrecy he gained by doing it at night was not going to last very long.

The townspeople demand that Yoash hand over his son to be killed. But Yoash responds:

״הַאַתֶּם תְּרִיבוּן לַבַּעַל אִם אַתֶּם תּוֹשִׁיעוּן אוֹתוֹ... אִם אֱלֹהִים הוּא יָרֶב לוֹ כִּי נָתַץ אֶת מִזְבְּחוֹ.״

“Are you going to fight Baal’s battle? Are you going to save him? If he is really a god, let him fight for himself, since someone destroyed his altar.”

I think Yoash’s response is extremely revealing. This is his altar, yet when his son is threatened, he does not defend Baal. He mocks him.

And this is the same Yoash who, according to Rashi, had just spent Pesach night telling Gideon about Yetziyas Mitzrayim and reciting Hallel with him. That already suggests that whatever his involvement with Baal may have been, he had certainly not abandoned his connection to Hashem. Perhaps he genuinely believed in Baal to some degree. But it is also entirely possible that the altar was there because this was what the surrounding culture did, because it was socially expected, or because he hoped Baal might bring rain and prosperity.

His argument sounds very much like the classic Jewish mockery of avodah zarah. It is reminiscent of Avraham Avinu’s ridicule of the idols: if these things are really gods, let them defend themselves. Tanach itself repeatedly uses this kind of language against idols — exposing the absurdity of worshipping something powerless and then expecting human beings to protect it.

Yoash’s argument is not really a theological argument. It is a joke at Baal’s expense: If he is such a great god, why does he need you to save him?

And remarkably, the people accept it.

That is revealing as well. Perhaps the townspeople believed in Baal more sincerely than Yoash did; after all, they were initially prepared to kill Gideon. But even their belief seems surprisingly shallow. One sharp piece of ridicule is enough to stop them.

If they truly believed that Gideon had attacked a powerful god, it is difficult to understand why Yoash’s mockery would settle the matter. The fact that it does suggests that underneath all the anger and ritual, they themselves were not entirely convinced.

And then Gideon goes one step further. He has not only removed the avodah zarah from his own family; he has publicly exposed its powerlessness to the entire community.

Yoash’s challenge is simple: if Baal is really a god, let him punish Gideon himself. And then nothing happens. Gideon remains alive. Baal does not respond. So the destruction of the altar becomes more than a rejection of avodah zarah. It becomes a public demonstration that Baal cannot actually do anything. Gideon has now shown not only his family, but the entire town, that the god they had been serving is powerless.

And I think this is part of what the story is trying to show us. The Yidden had certainly fallen into avodah zarah, but Baal had not completely replaced Hashem in their minds. Their connection to Hashem was still there underneath. The avodah zarah may have been reinforced by habit, social pressure, fear, or the hope for material prosperity, but it had not completely conquered their Jewish identity.

In other words, this episode is not merely telling us how Gideon managed to get away with destroying the altar. It is showing us something about Klal Yisrael themselves. The moment Baal is seriously challenged, their attachment to him begins to collapse. The people who seemed ready to kill for Baal are ultimately willing to stand back and see whether Baal can even defend himself — and when he does nothing, the emptiness of the entire worship is exposed.

And perhaps this is also part of what makes them worthy of the redemption that is about to come. Gideon has now publicly exposed that, beneath their involvement with avodah zarah, the Yidden have not truly exchanged Hashem for Baal. Their loyalty has become confused and covered over, but it has not disappeared.

The story is therefore showing not only Gideon, but in a sense showing before Hashem as well: these are still Your people. They can still be brought back.

Shlomo’s journey into meditation did not begin in a monastery, a retreat center, or even a search for spirituality. It began on the basketball court.He grew up in Houston, Texas, with a strong Jewish identity, though not a frum upbringing. Basketball became the place where he felt most alive. On the court, he experienced what athletes call “flow” — a state where the mind quiets down, the person stops overthinking, and he is fully inside the moment.

When injuries interrupted his college basketball career, Shlomo began looking more seriously at what coaches had always called “the mental part of the game.” Meditation, mindfulness, and sports psychology became tools to help him train that side of himself.

But what began as a tool for basketball slowly opened into something much larger. The search for focus, health, and inner clarity led him into the world of wellness and personal development — and eventually, in a way he did not expect, back toward Yiddishkeit.

In this conversation, Shlomo discusses basketball, flow, meditation, injury, Shabbos, and the slow realization that for him, true inner alignment cannot remain separate from Torah, mitzvos, and Chassidus.

Can you introduce yourself a little bit — where you grew up, and how basketball became such a big part of your life?

Yeah. I grew up in Houston, Texas, with a strong Jewish identity. As far back as I remember, I was always taught that a Jew is a Jew. I didn’t really even know there were different types — Reform, Conservative, Orthodox. We went to shul on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we celebrated Pesach and the major holidays, but I wouldn’t say I grew up religious in a serious way.

At the same time, I was very into sports. I played a lot growing up. Basketball, football, baseball — all the regular sports kids played. But basketball was always the one I felt most connected to. I couldn’t have explained why then, but looking back, I think it had to do with the state it put me in.

There was a certain flow I would get into when I played. I was out of my head. I wasn’t thinking so much about myself, or what people were thinking, or whether I was doing the right move. I was just in the game, responding to what was happening — how the person was guarding me, where the opening was, what needed to happen next.

It felt like going beyond my ego, beyond myself. Later, I would use more spiritual language for it. I would say that in those moments, it felt like Hashem was playing through me.

Baruch Hashem, I eventually got offered to play college basketball at a university in Dallas. It was a Catholic university, which shows how much basketball meant to me at the time. My mother was very worried that I was going to intermarry. But I always had that strong Jewish identity, and I didn’t see myself as someone who would leave that.

I studied business there, while playing basketball for the school. It was Division III, which means it was still real college basketball, but not like a major Division I program where the whole university is built around the team and the athletes. So on the one hand, we were practicing and playing seriously. On the other hand, I still had regular classes, assignments, and all the pressure of school.

That balance was intense. Sometimes we would have practice from six to eight in the morning, then go to classes, and then come back later in the day for another practice. So it was a lot — trying to keep up with the business classes and also train and play at a serious college level. It definitely took a toll

.So what happened with the injury, and how did that lead you into meditation?

My sophomore year, I broke a bone in my left foot, around the pinky-toe area. It’s called the fifth metatarsal. I ended up needing surgery, and they put a metal rod into the bone. For a while, I was on a scooter and couldn’t practice normally.

Up until that point, I was always a very hardworking person physically. If I needed to train, I trained. If I needed to practice, I practiced. But suddenly I couldn’t just stand on the court and shoot, run, or dribble the same way. So in a certain sense, I had to rebound. I had to find another way to keep growing when the regular way was taken away from me.

People would always say, “The mental part of the game is important.” Coaches would tell me, “You have the skills. It’s the mental part that’s not there.” But nobody ever showed me what that meant. It almost felt like I was being thrown under the bus. If the mental part is the issue, then show me how to work on it.

That’s when a close family friend, who was a psychologist, introduced me to mindfulness and meditation. And for me, it became very practical. It was not about becoming spiritual at that point. It was about basketball. It was about performance. It was about learning how to train the mind when I couldn’t train the body in the same way.

For me, “sports meditation” does not mean some separate type of meditation. It means meditation being used for sports performance. Sometimes that could be visualization — picturing yourself playing well, seeing the goal you want to reach. Sometimes it means practicing how to be present, how to slow down your mind, and how to bring your attention back when it runs somewhere else.

In basketball, a lot of things can knock you out of your game. Someone trash-talks you. A referee makes a bad call. A coach says something, or takes you out. Suddenly you’re in your head. You’re upset, pressured, thinking about what everyone else is thinking.

Meditation gave me a way to work with that. I didn’t have to accept every thought that came up. I didn’t have to believe every voice, whether it was coming from someone else or from inside myself. When I came back from the injury, I remember playing well — maybe even better than before — because now I had a way to work on the mental part of the game. I was learning that it’s not only the body that needs training. The mind needs training too.

After that first injury, meditation became a real practice for me. I would do it before basketball games, before practices, sometimes five or ten minutes. And I started noticing that when I was in that flow, it wasn’t only on the basketball court that I was doing better.

I was playing well. I was doing better in classes. I was taking care of my body, eating better, meditating, paying attention to sleep and health. There was a time where everything felt like it was moving in a good way.

But I think that was also part of the issue. I was doing a lot — basketball, school, a relationship, an internship, training, and all the regular pressures of life. I had learned how to use meditation to perform better, but I had not yet learned how to live in a more integrated way.

Then during practice, I got a concussion. At first, I tried to push it away. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. That’s also a very athlete thing. You get hurt, you try to keep going. You don’t want to miss another season.

But then the symptoms started showing up, and I noticed that the more stress I had, the worse it became. So I started seeing that this was not only about one injury. It was showing me something about how I was living.

I couldn’t separate everything into different boxes anymore — basketball over here, school over here, health over here, relationships over here, meditation over here. It was all connected. What I ate affected how I felt. How I slept affected how I played. How much stress I was carrying affected my body. My mindset affected my performance. And my physical health affected my emotional and spiritual state too.

That pushed me deeper into health, wellness, meditation, and personal development. A close family friend told me to read Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza, and at that time it was very transformational for me. I devoured it. It spoke about meditation, changing habits, and working with the mind in a way that felt very powerful to me then.

I wasn’t looking at it as religion yet. I was looking at it as: how do I live in that state? How do I live with more clarity, more flow, more alignment? How do I take care of myself physically, mentally, and spiritually in a way that actually works together?

At that point, I still had another year of basketball eligibility because of the injury, and I had signed up for graduate classes. But as I was doing this inner work, I started feeling very strongly that I didn’t want to keep playing basketball at that university anymore.

It was hard to explain. On paper, I had a plan. I had school, basketball, graduate classes. But internally, I felt like I had to listen to what was happening inside. So I left that path. I dropped the classes. I remember thinking, “What did I just do?” But there was also a calmness, like: I’m confident in this decision.

That was a major turning point. I was no longer just trying to get back to basketball. I was starting to ask a bigger question: what am I really drawn to? What kind of life am I actually trying to build?

So how did that start connecting more directly with Yiddishkeit?

Through hashgacha pratis, Yiddishkeit started coming into it more and more.

In December 2019, I went on a ten-day silent meditation retreat. It was very powerful and transformational for me. It was in a remote place, away from regular life, and the whole experience was built around silence, meditation, and being present.

Then the next month, in January 2020, I went on a Crown Heights Encounter trip. I was connected with a shliach in Houston who was running YJP, and he encouraged me to go.

That Shabbos had a very big impact on me. It may have been the first real Shabbos I kept. And what struck me was that the state I was trying to reach on a ten-day silent retreat, Shabbos was able to create inside regular life.

On the retreat, you have to go away somewhere remote. But with Shabbos, you are still in the world. You are around people, in the middle of life, and yet through the halachos — not being on the phone, not working, following the structure of Shabbos — it creates this oasis inside the chaos of the world.

I was still meditating and doing different practices, but I started noticing something. The meditation helped me become more present and helped me work on myself, but I did not feel like I was really moving forward in the way I wanted unless I was also taking on more Jewish practices.

One example I remember is with wearing a kippah. I would meditate in the morning, and my mind would keep going and going. Normally, with meditation, if your mind is very active, you just sit longer and eventually it quiets down. But this time it did not stop.

So I finally paid attention to what my mind was even saying. And it was almost like this inner voice saying, “Put on your kippah. Wear your yarmulke even when you meditate.”

At first I thought, why does that matter? Meditation is internal. It is within me. Why should it matter what I am wearing externally?

But the next day I tried it. I put on the kippah while meditating, and I felt this wash of calm come over me. That was very eye-opening for me. I started to realize: this is not just a physical garment. There is something here.

And similar things started happening with kosher, with tzitzis, with other parts of Yiddishkeit. Slowly I came to see that my personal life, and even my professional life, was not really advancing unless I was growing in my Yiddishkeit.

So for me, Yiddishkeit did not come as something separate from the inner work. It became part of the inner work. The more I was trying to become aligned, the more I felt drawn toward actual mitzvos, actual practices, actual connection with Hashem.

You often talk about merging holistic wellness with Chassidus, what does that actually mean?

For me, it starts with the idea that a person is not split into separate parts. The body, the mind, and the neshama are all connected. What I eat affects how I feel. How I sleep affects my mind. How much stress I am carrying affects my body. And the way I take care of my body and mind also affects my ability to be present in Yiddishkeit.

But I want to be clear. I did not get into meditation because I was looking for some Eastern spiritual system. I got into it originally for sports, for performance, for breaking habits, for learning how to calm my mind. It was very practical.

Later, as I started becoming more involved in Yiddishkeit and Chassidus, I started feeling that some of the elements around those practices did not really fit anymore. Even when meditation is presented as secular, a lot of it still comes from Eastern practices. So I became more sensitive to that. I started asking: what is the actual tool here, and what is the philosophy being packaged with it?

The tool itself can be useful. A person learns to slow down, to become present, to notice what is happening inside, to bring his attention back. But that does not mean I am taking the whole ideology. I am trying to use the practical tool in a way that fits with Torah and Chassidus.

So meditation, for you, is not the avodah itself?

Right. It can help prepare a person for avodah.

If your mind is racing, how are you going to focus on an inyan in Chassidus? If a person is always being pulled by anxiety, pressure, distraction, or whatever is happening in his day, then even when he sits down to learn or daven, he may not really be there.

So a short practice of quieting the mind can help a person become more present. It can help him come back to himself. Then he can focus better on davening, on learning, on the inyan in Chassidus. It is not replacing Torah. It is helping the person become more of a keli to receive and live with Torah.

In Chassidus we talk about the nefesh habehamis being strong in the morning, about all the different pulls a person has before davening. So for me, this is part of learning how to quiet those pulls and come back to that still, quiet place inside — what I would call the kol demama daka.

But how do you know that the inner voice you are hearing is really the neshama, and not just your subconscious or your own desire?

That is a very real question. It is something I have asked people myself on my podcast, because the more you grow in these areas, the trickier it can become.

For me, the godly soul speaks in a softer way, but also in a clearer way. It is not usually loud and anxious. It comes with more simcha, more lightness, more confidence, more fluidity. When something is coming from a deeper, truer place, it does not feel like pressure or panic. It feels more aligned.

But that does not mean every feeling is automatically right. That is why Yiddishkeit is so important. The inner voice needs direction. It needs Torah. It needs mitzvos. It needs a framework outside of yourself.

So what happens if a mitzvah does not feel spiritually aligned to you?

Then it is beyond feeling.

That is the whole point. If everything is only about what feels aligned to me in the moment, then I can make anything spiritual. Torah is not just a reflection of my feelings. Torah gives direction to my feelings.

Meditation can help me listen inward, but Yiddishkeit tells me what the inner life is supposed to be aligned with. A mitzvah is not true because I feel it. It is true because Hashem commanded it. The feeling may come later. Sometimes it comes through doing it.

That was part of my own experience. I was meditating and trying to become more present, but I started noticing that I was not really moving forward unless I was also taking on actual mitzvos — kippah, kosher, tzitzis, Shabbos. Those things gave the inner work a real form.

Tell us something practical you learnt in your health journey?

One thing I learned is that you can do the right thing in the wrong way.

A person can exercise in an unhealthy way. He can eat healthy in an unhealthy way. He can meditate in an unhealthy way. He can even learn Torah in a way that becomes rigid, pressured, and not really alive.

There was a time when my morning routine became very long. I would meditate, go to the mikvah, learn, daven — all good things. But at a certain point, the very tools that were supposed to help me become more flexible started making me feel trapped. So I had to learn that it is not only about having healthy practices. It is also about having a healthy relationship with the practices.

The goal is not to become a person who just collects habits. The goal is to become more aligned with Hashem, more present, more alive, more able to serve.

So what are you trying to build now?

Right now, I am finishing my semicha program, and I also have my background in coaching and holistic nutrition. The way I see it, I want to be both a rabbi and a coach.

I do not know exactly how it will manifest yet, but my dream is to build a community, maybe a shul, maybe something like a transformational center, where people can come for healing physically, mentally, and spiritually. A place where health and wellness are not separate from Yiddishkeit, and Yiddishkeit is not separate from how a person actually lives in his body, his mind, and his daily life.

For me, that is the shlichus I feel drawn to — to bring these worlds together in a way that is grounded in Torah and Chassidus, but also speaks to the whole person.

.

Antigonus Ish Socho says in Pirkei Avos:

אַל תִּהְיוּ כַעֲבָדִים הַמְשַׁמְּשִׁין אֶת הָרַב עַל מְנָת לְקַבֵּל פְּרָס, אֶלָּא הֱווּ כַעֲבָדִים הַמְשַׁמְּשִׁין אֶת הָרַב שֶׁלֹּא עַל מְנָת לְקַבֵּל פְּרָס.

“Do not be like servants who serve their master in order to receive a reward. Rather, be like servants who serve their master without serving for the sake of receiving a reward.”

On this Mishnah, Avos D’Rabbi Nosson tells us something astonishing.

Antigonus had two students, Tzadok and Baisos, who heard this teaching and misunderstood it completely.

They thought that when Antigonus said that a person should not serve Hashem for the sake of reward, he meant that there was no reward at all.

No Olam Haba.

No techiyas hameisim.

And from this mistake, everything unraveled. They separated from the mesorah and ultimately became the founders of the Sadducees and the Boethusians.

We need to understand what happened here.

The rise of the Sadducees was not a small thing. It was one of the great breaks within Judaism during the Second Temple era. An entire movement separated itself from the Torah shebaal peh, from the mesorah, from the world of the chachamim.

And according to Avos D’Rabbi Nosson, it began with two students listening to their rebbi.

That itself should make us stop.

What did they hear?

At first glance, their mistake is very hard to understand.

If I tell a person not to do something for the sake of reward, that does not mean the reward does not exist. It means the reward should not be the reason he is doing it.

If I tell someone, “Give tzedakah because it is right, not because people will praise you,” I am not saying that no one will praise him. I am saying that the praise should not be the point.

So when Antigonus says that a person should not serve Hashem in order to receive reward, why would Tzadok and Baisos understand him to mean that there is no reward?

Why would they hear a teaching about a higher form of avodah and understand it as a denial of Olam Haba?

The question becomes even stronger according to the Maharal in Derech Chaim.

The Maharal explains that the Mishnah could have stopped after the first line:

אַל תִּהְיוּ כַעֲבָדִים הַמְשַׁמְּשִׁין אֶת הָרַב עַל מְנָת לְקַבֵּל פְּרָס.

Do not be like servants who serve the master in order to receive reward.

If that was all the Mishnah said, we would have heard it very sharply.

Do not serve Hashem for reward.

That sounds like a rejection. It sounds like serving Hashem for reward is wrong. Perhaps even forbidden. As if a person who serves Hashem because he wants Olam Haba is doing something improper.

But the Mishnah does not stop there.

It continues:

אֶלָּא הֱווּ כַעֲבָדִים הַמְשַׁמְּשִׁין אֶת הָרַב שֶׁלֹּא עַל מְנָת לְקַבֵּל פְּרָס.

Rather, be like servants who serve the master without serving for the sake of receiving reward.

That second line tells us how to read the first.

Antigonus is not saying that serving Hashem for reward is assur. He is showing us two levels in avodas Hashem.

There is a person who serves Hashem with his eye on the reward. And there is a person who serves Hashem without making the reward the center of his avodah.

The first person is also serving. The Mishnah itself calls him an eved hamshamesh es harav — a servant serving his master. His avodah is real. It is not fake. It is not outside avodas Hashem.

But it is still not the highest way to serve.

It is like telling a student: do not learn only for the test; rather, learn because you want to understand the truth itself.

That does not mean that learning for a test is wrong. The student is still learning. His learning is real. But the teacher is showing him that there is a higher kind of learning.

That is the model being built into the Mishnah.

Antigonus is not coming to destroy the lower level. He is not saying that reward has no place. He is saying that a person cannot remain there.

Reward exists. Serving for reward is still avodah. But the reward cannot become the whole relationship.

So Antigonus was not denying Olam Haba.

He was doing the opposite.

He was taking a person who already believes in reward and teaching him how to serve Hashem on a higher level.

And that is what makes the mistake of Tzadok and Baisos so shocking.

The Mishnah itself seems to go out of its way to prevent their mistake.

It does not leave us with a bare warning: do not serve for reward. It adds the second half. It gives us the higher model. It tells us that the issue is not whether reward exists, and not whether serving for reward is avodah, but what place reward should occupy in a person’s relationship with Hashem.

In other words, Antigonus did not merely say something that could have been misunderstood.

He said it in a way that should have protected it from being misunderstood.

And yet Tzadok and Baisos misunderstood it anyway.

How did they hear a teaching that was meant to lift them to a higher avodah as if it were a denial of Olam Haba altogether?

A simple answer would be that Tzadok and Baisos were not really looking for the truth.

They heard the words of Antigonus and twisted them into something he had never meant.

There is some basis for reading the story this way from the Rambam’s explanation of Avtalyon’s warning later in the first perek of Pirkei Avos.

Avtalyon says:

חֲכָמִים, הִזָּהֲרוּ בְּדִבְרֵיכֶם, שֶׁמָּא תָחוֹבוּ חוֹבַת גָּלוּת וְתִגְלוּ לִמְקוֹם מַיִם הָרָעִים, וְיִשְׁתּוּ הַתַּלְמִידִים הַבָּאִים אַחֲרֵיכֶם וְיָמוּתוּ, וְנִמְצָא שֵׁם שָׁמַיִם מִתְחַלֵּל.

“Scholars, be careful with your words, lest you incur the penalty of exile and be exiled to a place of evil waters. The students who come after you may drink from them and die, and the Name of Heaven will thereby be desecrated.”

The Rambam explains:

מים הרעים — כנוי למינות. ואמר השמרו בדבריכם בתוך ההמון, ולא יהיה בדבריכם מקום שיסבול פירוש אחר. מפני שאם יהיו שם אנשים כופרים יפרשו אותם כפי אמונתם, והתלמידים כבר שמעו אותם מהם ויחזרו למינות ויחשבו שזאת היתה אמונתכם, ויהיה בזה חלול השם, כאשר אירע לאנטיגנוס עם צדוק וביתוס.

“The evil waters are a reference to heresy. And he said: be careful with your words when speaking among the public, and do not allow your words to contain room for another interpretation. Because if there are heretics there, they will explain those words according to their own beliefs. The students will then hear those words from them and return to heresy, thinking that this was your belief. This will cause a chillul Hashem, as happened to Antigonus with Tzadok and Baisos.”

According to the Rambam, the danger is that a true statement can be taken by people who already hold mistaken beliefs and explained in the direction of those beliefs.

The teacher says one thing.

The kofrim hear it, bend it, and explain it according to their own world.

Then the students hear that explanation and think that this is what the original teacher meant.

If we read the story this way, then the mistake of Tzadok and Baisos may not have begun as an innocent misunderstanding. They may have already had some leaning toward kefirah, and the words of Antigonus gave them something to hold onto.

However, this does not appear to be how the Bartenura and others understand the story.

On Avtalyon’s warning, the Bartenura writes:

וְנִמְצָא שֵׁם שָׁמַיִם מִתְחַלֵּל. שֶׁיִּשָּׁאֲרוּ אוֹתָן דֵּעוֹת בְּטֵלוֹת בָּעוֹלָם. כְּמוֹ שֶׁקָּרָה לְאַנְטִיגְנוֹס אִישׁ סוֹכוֹ עִם צָדוֹק וּבַיְתּוֹס תַּלְמִידָיו, שֶׁאָמַר לָהֶם אַל תִּהְיוּ כַּעֲבָדִים הַמְשַׁמְּשִׁים אֶת הָרַב עַל מְנָת לְקַבֵּל פְּרָס, וְאָמְרוּ הֵם, אֶפְשָׁר פּוֹעֵל עוֹשֶׂה מְלָאכָה כָּל הַיּוֹם וְטוֹרֵחַ וְלָעֶרֶב אֵינוֹ מְקַבֵּל פְּרָס. וְיָצְאוּ לְמִינוּת הֵם וְתַלְמִידֵיהֶם, וְנִקְרָאִים צְדוֹקִים וּבַיְתּוֹסִים עַד הַיּוֹם.

“And the Name of Heaven will thereby be desecrated” — because those false views will remain in the world. As happened to Antigonus Ish Socho with Tzadok and Baisos, his students. He said to them, “Do not be like servants who serve the master in order to receive reward,” and they said, “Is it possible that a worker performs labor the entire day and toils, and in the evening does not receive reward?” And they and their students went out to heresy, and they are called Sadducees and Boethusians until today.

In the Bartenura, the story sounds more direct.

Antigonus taught his students. They heard his words. They themselves asked: how can a worker toil the whole day and not receive his reward at night?

In other words, the danger is not only that someone knowingly twists the words of the chachamim. The danger is that a student may hear the words of his own rebbi and honestly misunderstand them.

And from the fact that the Bartenura brings Tzadok and Baisos as the example of Avtalyon’s warning, it would seem that this is how he understood their mistake.

At least in the beginning, Tzadok and Baisos did not set out to twist the words of Antigonus.

They misunderstood him.

The same impression emerges from Avos D’Rabbi Nosson itself.

It does not describe Tzadok and Baisos as people cynically searching for an excuse to leave Torah. It says that they examined the teaching of Antigonus and reached a conclusion:

אֶלָּא אִלּוּ הָיוּ יוֹדְעִין אֲבוֹתֵינוּ שֶׁיֵּשׁ עוֹלָם אַחֵר וְיֵשׁ תְּחִיַּת הַמֵּתִים, לֹא הָיוּ אוֹמְרִים כָּךְ.

“Had our fathers known that there is another world and that there will be a resurrection of the dead, they would not have said this.”

That is a revealing sentence.

They are not saying, “We do not care what our teachers believed.” They are trying to understand what their teachers must have believed.

Their reasoning was terribly mistaken. But it was still reasoning. They heard Antigonus say not to serve Hashem for reward, and concluded that he must not have believed in Olam Haba or techiyas hameisim.

Avos D’Rabbi Nosson then describes the result:

עָמְדוּ וּפֵרְשׁוּ מִן הַתּוֹרָה, וְנִפְרְצוּ מֵהֶם שְׁתֵּי פְרָצוֹת: צְדוֹקִים וּבַיְתוֹסִים. צְדוֹקִים עַל שׁוּם צָדוֹק, בַּיְתוֹסִים עַל שׁוּם בַּיְתוֹס.

“They arose and separated themselves from the Torah, and from them emerged two breaches: the Sadducees and the Boethusians — the Sadducees named after Tzadok and the Boethusians named after Baisos.”

Only after that does the text continue:

וְהָיוּ מִשְׁתַּמְּשִׁין בִּכְלֵי כֶסֶף וּבִכְלֵי זָהָב כָּל יְמֵיהֶם, שֶׁלֹּא הָיְתָה דַעְתָּן גַּסָּה עֲלֵיהֶם.

“They would make use of vessels of silver and vessels of gold throughout their lives, without becoming haughty because of them.”

And Avos D’Rabbi Nosson continues with their claim against the chachamim:

מסורת היא ביד פרושים שהן מצערין עצמן בעולם הזה, ובעולם הבא אין להם כלום.

“The Perushim have a tradition in their hands that they afflict themselves in this world — and in the World to Come they have nothing.”

That line explains the silver and gold.

They were not simply chasing luxury because they were arrogant people. They had developed a shita. In their minds, the chachamim were giving up this world for the sake of a future world that did not exist. So why live that way? Why live with poverty and restraint if, in the end, there is no Olam Haba?

That is why the phrase שֶׁלֹּא הָיְתָה דַעְתָּן גַּסָּה עֲלֵיהֶם matters.

It does not mean they were right. It does not soften the disaster of what they did. But it does mean that their wealth was not presented as the original engine of their heresy.

It was the expression of their belief.

First, they misunderstood Antigonus. Then they concluded that there was no Olam Haba. Then they separated from the Torah. Only afterward did their life of silver and gold become part of the way they lived out that conclusion.

Once they became convinced that there was no future world, it made sense to them to enjoy whatever this world had to offer.

Avos D’Rabbi Nosson therefore appears to describe Tzadok and Baisos — at least at the beginning — not as cynical heretics searching for an excuse, but as students who made a genuine and devastating mistake.

We are left with the original question.

What could have led the students of Antigonus to misunderstand him so completely?

To answer this, we need to look carefully at the language of the Mishnah and compare it with the language of Avos D’Rabbi Nosson.

The Mishnah says:

אַל תִּהְיוּ כַעֲבָדִים הַמְשַׁמְּשִׁין אֶת הָרַב עַל מְנָת לְקַבֵּל פְּרָס.

“Do not be like slaves who serve their master in order to receive a pras.”

There are two words here that are especially important.

Antigonus describes the person serving Hashem as an eved.

And he describes the reward as a pras.

The Rambam explains that a pras is not the same thing as schar.

Schar is payment. It is something a person is owed for the work he performed.

A pras, however, is different. It is not a wage. It is not something the master is required to pay. It is something additional — a gift, an expression of kindness, something given beyond the strict obligation.

As the Rambam writes:

זֶהוּ הַהֶפְרֵשׁ אֲשֶׁר בֵּין פְּרָס לְשָׂכָר, כִּי הַשָּׂכָר הוּא שֶׁיִּנָּתֵן בְּדִין.

“This is the difference between pras and schar: schar is something that must be given as a matter of justice.”

So Antigonus is speaking in a very specific language.

He is speaking about an eved who serves his master, and about a pras that may be given afterward. The reward exists, but it is not being described as wages.

But when we turn to Avos D’Rabbi Nosson, Tzadok and Baisos speak in a completely different language.

Avos D’Rabbi Nosson says:

עָמְדוּ וְדִקְדְּקוּ אַחֲרֵיהֶן, וְאָמְרוּ: מָה רָאוּ אֲבוֹתֵינוּ לוֹמַר דָּבָר זֶה? אֶפְשָׁר שֶׁיַּעֲשֶׂה פּוֹעֵל מְלָאכָה כָּל הַיּוֹם וְלֹא יִטּוֹל שְׂכָרוֹ עַרְבִית? אֶלָּא אִלּוּ הָיוּ יוֹדְעִין אֲבוֹתֵינוּ שֶׁיֵּשׁ עוֹלָם אַחֵר וְיֵשׁ תְּחִיַּת הַמֵּתִים, לֹא הָיוּ אוֹמְרִים כָּךְ.

“They stood and carefully examined their words, and they said: ‘What caused our fathers to say such a thing? Is it possible for a worker to perform labor throughout the entire day and not receive his wages in the evening? Had our fathers known that there is another world and that there will be a resurrection of the dead, they would not have said this.’”

The difference is striking.

Antigonus says eved.

They say po’el.

Antigonus says pras.

They say schar.

Those are not just different words. They are different models of the entire relationship.

An eved serves because he belongs to his master. A po’el works because he was hired.

A pras is an additional gift. Schar is the payment a worker is owed.

So when Tzadok and Baisos repeated the teaching of Antigonus, they were no longer hearing it in the terms he had used.

Antigonus had spoken about an eved and a pras.

They heard a po’el and his schar.

That change in language is not incidental.

It is the opening through which the whole misunderstanding enters.

To explain what I mean, I want to speak for a moment from my own experience.

I am Chabad today, but I grew up in Flatbush and learned in a Litvish yeshiva.In yeshiva, we were taught the concept of schar va’onesh—reward and punishment.

We serve Hashem in order to receive schar in Olam Haba, and we avoid aveiros so that we will not be punished in Gehinnom.

Obviously, they did not focus very much on Gehinnom. There was a feeling that American boys could not really handle serious talks about punishment.

But there was also a sense that, ideally, we should have been hearing them. The problem was not with the message. We simply were not considered proper vessels to receive it.

There was, however, a strong focus on Olam Haba.

This came up especially during Mussar seder. Sometimes we would hear a shiur in Mesillas Yesharim. Often, we would learn teachings from the different sefarim of the Chofetz Chaim dealing with these ideas.

I remember that on one occasion they quoted the Chofetz Chaim explaining why a person should work toward Olam Haba. If a person is jealous of his friend’s possessions in this world, he said, he will certainly be jealous of his friend’s portion in Olam Haba.

The idea was not merely that reward is one possible motivation for serving Hashem. Reward was presented as the central goal toward which a person should be working.

A person should think about his portion in Olam Haba. He should desire it. He should shape his life around earning it.

At the same time, Olam Haba was not understood only as the personal goal of the individual. It was also presented as the purpose of creation itself.

This world exists so that a person can perform Torah and mitzvos and thereby receive the ultimate good in Olam Haba.

After all, the Eibishter is טבע הטוב להיטיב—it is the nature of the Good One to bestow goodness. The world was therefore created so that Hashem could bestow that ultimate good upon us.

They would also quote the Mishnah later in Pirkei Avos:

הָעוֹלָם הַזֶּה דּוֹמֶה לִפְרוֹזְדוֹר בִּפְנֵי הָעוֹלָם הַבָּא. הַתְקֵן עַצְמְךָ בַּפְרוֹזְדוֹר, כְּדֵי שֶׁתִּכָּנֵס לַטְּרַקְלִין.

“This world is like an antechamber before the World to Come. Prepare yourself in the antechamber so that you may enter the banquet hall.”

This world is the place where a person does the work. Olam Haba is the place where he receives the reward.

The purpose of the antechamber is to prepare him to enter the banquet hall.

The entire understanding was therefore built on two ideas.

On the level of the individual, reward in Olam Haba is the goal a person should be working toward.

And on the level of creation itself, the purpose of this world is that through our avodah here, we should earn and ultimately receive that reward.

Once that is the language a person has been given, the words of Antigonus do not enter neutral ears.

They enter ears already trained to hear avodah as work, and Olam Haba as the reward waiting at the end.

Seen from within that framework, the reaction of Tzadok and Baisos becomes much easier to understand.

They thought of reward as schar—the payment a worker receives for the work he performs.

And payment does not only come after the work as a reward for what the worker has already done. It is also the reason he agreed to do the work in the first place.

A po’el works throughout the day because he expects to receive his wages at night.

That is exactly the example Tzadok and Baisos give:

אֶפְשָׁר שֶׁיַּעֲשֶׂה פּוֹעֵל מְלָאכָה כָּל הַיּוֹם וְלֹא יִטּוֹל שְׂכָרוֹ עַרְבִית?

“Is it possible for a worker to perform labor throughout the entire day and not receive his wages in the evening?”(see vayikra 19:13)

From their perspective,if Hashem promises schar for mitzvos, then the purpose of that schar is to motivate a person to perform them.

It would therefore follow that a person is supposed to serve Hashem in order to receive the reward.

Just as the wages motivate the po’el to work, Olam Haba should motivate a person to perform Torah and mitzvos.

And once we add that Olam Haba is the very purpose of creation, the problem becomes even stronger.

If the world was created so that a person could earn and ultimately receive Olam Haba, then working toward Olam Haba would seem to mean working toward the very purpose for which the world was created.

Yet Antigonus had taught them directly that a person should not serve Hashem in order to receive reward.

To them, these two ideas appeared impossible to reconcile.

If schar exists in order to motivate a person, how can a person be told not to be motivated by it?

And if receiving Olam Haba is the purpose of creation, how can a person be told not to make it the purpose of his avodah?

Tzadok and Baisos did not respond by rejecting the teaching of Antigonus. They had heard it directly from their rebbi, and they accepted it as true.

So they concluded that the other belief must be mistaken.

If Antigonus taught that a person should not serve for the sake of reward, then there must be no future reward for which to serve.

This is what they meant when they said:

אֶלָּא אִלּוּ הָיוּ יוֹדְעִין אֲבוֹתֵינוּ שֶׁיֵּשׁ עוֹלָם אַחֵר וְיֵשׁ תְּחִיַּת הַמֵּתִים, לֹא הָיוּ אוֹמְרִים כָּךְ.

“Had our fathers known that there is another world and that there will be a resurrection of the dead, they would not have said this.”

Their reasoning was simple.

If Olam Haba truly existed, Antigonus would not have told them not to seek it.

Since he had told them not to serve for the sake of reward, they concluded that he must not have believed in Olam Haba at all.

But Antigonus was speaking about an entirely different relationship.

He did not describe a person as a po’el who works in order to receive schar. He described him as an eved—a slave who belongs to his Master and is therefore obligated to serve Him.

A po’el works because he is being paid. That is the agreement between him and his employer.

An eved does not need payment to give him a reason to serve. He serves because he belongs to his master. He is obligated to serve in any case.

That does not mean that Hashem does not reward him. Hashem may certainly give him a pras.

But the pras is not a wage that the eved has earned and is now owed. It is something additional that Hashem gives him out of His kindness.

This distinction resolves the contradiction.

Since the eved must serve Hashem regardless, the pras is not what gives him a reason to perform the avodah. It does not need to be the motivation, because the obligation to serve already exists.

The focus can therefore remain on the service itself, not on what the servant may receive afterward.

Tzadok and Baisos thought in terms of a po’el and his schar.

Antigonus was speaking about an eved and a pras.

But then a simple question emerges.

Why were they thinking so differently from their rebbi?

Why were Tzadok and Baisos thinking like Litvishe yeshiva boys, while Antigonus was speaking like a chassid?

The answer can be understood based on the Rambam.

The Rambam writes that the highest form of avodas Hashem is to be עושה האמת מפני שהוא אמת—to do the truth because it is true.

A person should not serve Hashem because of the reward he will receive. He should serve Hashem because serving Hashem is itself the truth.

But the Rambam also explains that this is not where chinuch begins.

A child is not yet ready to learn Torah simply because Torah is true. So we begin by offering him sweets.

Later, we motivate him with money. After that, perhaps with honor.

Only as he matures do we gradually teach him that Torah should not be learned for any of these reasons. It should be learned because it is true.

The lower motivations were not lies. They were necessary stages.

But they were stages.

The Rebbe uses this idea to explain the way Olam Haba is described.

The true reward of Olam Haba is closeness to Hashem. Yet Olam Haba is often described in the Torah as physical pleasure and abundance.

Why?

If the ultimate reward is the connection to Hashem itself, why speak so much about the physical good that will accompany it?

The answer is that not everyone is ready to appreciate closeness to Hashem as the greatest possible reward.

A child—or someone who is still spiritually immature—may not yet be motivated by the idea of knowing Hashem and becoming closer to Him.

Olam Haba therefore needs to be described to him in a way that he can understand and desire.

This does not mean that the physical rewards are false. They are real. Teaching about them is certainly a proper Torah understanding.

But it is not yet the fullest understanding of Olam Haba.

It is the way Olam Haba is presented to someone who still needs reward in order to motivate him.

This is what happened with Tzadok and Baisos.

They had been taught that a person performs Torah and mitzvos in this world and receives his schar in Olam Haba. There was nothing wrong with this understanding. It was true.

But it was still the lower level of schar va’onesh, in which the reward is what motivates the person to perform the avodah.

Antigonus was speaking from a much higher perspective.

He was speaking about a person who already understands that he is an eved of Hashem and that he must serve Him because this is the truth.

From that perspective, Olam Haba certainly exists. But it is no longer the reason for the avodah.

The person serves Hashem because he belongs to Him. The reward is something Hashem gives afterward, but it is not what created the relationship in the first place.

The mistake of Antigonus was that he assumed his talmidim were already holding on that level.

He spoke to them from his own elevated perspective without realizing that they were still living within the earlier understanding of schar va’onesh.

So when Antigonus told them not to serve Hashem for the sake of reward, they did not hear that he was introducing them to a higher form of avodah.

They heard him taking away the very reason for the avodah they already knew.

And because Antigonus never explained how the higher level fit together with the lower—and entirely valid—teaching of schar va’onesh, they reached the conclusion that seemed logical to them.

If a person should not serve for the sake of Olam Haba, then perhaps Olam Haba does not exist at all.

In that sense, the fault was not only with Tzadok and Baisos.

Antigonus should have understood the level of his students.

He taught them a truth that was too elevated for them without first preparing them to understand it.

This is the deeper meaning of Avtalyon’s warning, חכמים, הזהרו בדבריכם—“Scholars, be careful with your words.”

A teacher’s responsibility is not only to say something true.

It is not even enough to say it clearly.

Antigonus’s words were clear. He spoke about an eved, not a po’el, and about a pras, not schar.

He also did not say simply, “Do not serve for reward.” He said, “Do not serve in this way; rather, serve in that way.”

From the words themselves, it should have been clear that he was describing a higher form of avodah, not denying reward altogether.

And yet Tzadok and Baisos still misunderstood him.

Why?

Because they were not prepared to understand what he was saying.

Antigonus spoke one language. They heard another.

He said eved. They heard po’el.

He said pras. They heard schar.

The words were clear. But the world through which they heard those words was different.

That is something every mechanech has to understand.

There are often very good ideas that a teacher wants to give over. The idea may be true. It may be deep. It may even be exactly what the student will eventually need.

But if the idea is far above the student’s present level, he may not receive it as the teacher intended.

This is especially true when speaking to mesivta bachurim, to people who have only recently become baalei teshuvah, or, honestly, to almost anyone who is still building the foundations of his understanding.

The teacher sees where the idea is supposed to lead. The student hears it from wherever he is standing now.

If the steps in between are not explained, the student may use the higher idea to destroy the lower truth that was supposed to carry him toward it.

What was meant to raise him higher can lead him in the opposite direction.

That still leaves a deeper question.

Why did Antigonus fail to recognize the distance between himself and his students?

Why did he assume that his talmidim were ready to understand a teaching that was, in truth, far above their level?

The answer may be found in three details: his name, the place he came from, and the period in which he lived.

Antigonus is not a Hebrew name. It is a Greek name: Ἀντίγονος, Antigonos.

The name is generally explained to mean “comparable to his father,” or “worthy of his father.” It comes from the Greek idea of being connected to one’s birth, one’s line, one’s father, one’s origins.

That meaning is striking.

Because the Mishnah tells us:

אנטיגנוס איש סוכו קיבל משמעון הצדיק.

Antigonus Ish Socho received the mesorah directly from Shimon HaTzadik, the last of the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah.

In other words, this was not just his name. It was almost his identity.

Antigonus was the man who remained connected to his fathers. He saw himself as a direct continuation of Shimon HaTzadik and the world of the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah.

His avodah was to receive the Torah of the previous generation and to live according to it.

He was, quite literally, “like his fathers.”

The same point may be seen in the place with which he is identified: Socho.

Socho is not just a random place-name. It appears in Tanach in connection with the battle between Dovid and Golyas.

The Navi says:

וַיַּאַסְפוּ פְלִשְׁתִּים אֶת מַחֲנֵיהֶם לַמִּלְחָמָה, וַיֵּאָסְפוּ שֹׂכֹה אֲשֶׁר לִיהוּדָה, וַיַּחֲנוּ בֵּין שֹׂכֹה וּבֵין עֲזֵקָה בְּאֶפֶס דַּמִּים.
— Shmuel I 17:1

“The Pelishtim gathered their camps for war, and they gathered at Socho, which belongs to Yehudah, and they encamped between Socho and Azekah, in Ephes Damim.”

That is where Golyas stood and mocked the Jewish people.

And before Dovid entered the battle, Shaul promised a very great reward to the man who would defeat him:

וְהָיָה הָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר יַכֶּנּוּ, יַעְשְׁרֶנּוּ הַמֶּלֶךְ עֹשֶׁר גָּדוֹל, וְאֶת בִּתּוֹ יִתֶּן לוֹ, וְאֵת בֵּית אָבִיו יַעֲשֶׂה חָפְשִׁי בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל.
— Shmuel I 17:25

“The man who strikes him down, the king will enrich him with great wealth, he will give him his daughter, and he will make his father’s house free in Israel.”

That was no small reward.

Wealth. Freedom for his father’s house. The daughter of the king.

But when Dovid himself speaks about why Golyas must be defeated, that is not the language he uses.

Dovid says:

כִּי מִי הַפְּלִשְׁתִּי הֶעָרֵל הַזֶּה, כִּי חֵרֵף מַעַרְכוֹת אֱלֹקים חַיִּים.
— Shmuel I 17:26

“For who is this uncircumcised Pelishti, that he has defied the armies of the living G-d?”

And when he stands before Golyas, he says even more clearly:

אַתָּה בָּא אֵלַי בְּחֶרֶב וּבַחֲנִית וּבְכִידוֹן, וְאָנֹכִי בָא אֵלֶיךָ בְּשֵׁם ה׳ צְבָאוֹת אֱלֹקֵי מַעַרְכוֹת יִשְׂרָאֵל אֲשֶׁר חֵרַפְתָּ.
— Shmuel I 17:45

“You come to me with sword, spear, and javelin. But I come to you in the Name of Hashem, Master of Legions, the G-d of the armies of Israel, Whom you have defied.”

And then:

וְיֵדְעוּ כָּל הַקָּהָל הַזֶּה כִּי לֹא בְּחֶרֶב וּבַחֲנִית יְהוֹשִׁיעַ ה׳, כִּי לַה׳ הַמִּלְחָמָה.
— Shmuel I 17:47

“And this entire assembly will know that Hashem does not save with sword and spear, for the battle belongs to Hashem.”

Dovid knew about the reward.

The Navi tells us that the reward was being spoken about in the camp. But that is not why Dovid fought.

He did not go out as a po’el calculating his schar.

He went out as an eved of Hashem.

The name of Hashem was being disgraced. The armies of the living G-d were being mocked. And for Dovid, that was enough.

The wealth and the king’s daughter could come afterward. But they were not the reason he entered the battle.

That is the world of Socho.

And that is the world Antigonus was speaking from.

A Jew serves Hashem because he belongs to Hashem. A Jew does what has to be done because the honor of Hashem demands it. Whatever reward comes afterward is not the point of the avodah.

For someone whose entire identity was bound up with Shimon HaTzadik and the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah, and who is remembered as Ish Socho, this teaching may have seemed completely obvious.

Of course a person serves Hashem because he is an eved.

Of course the reward cannot be the point.

But his talmidim belonged to a different generation.

During the lifetime of Shimon HaTzadik, Alexander the Great brought Eretz Yisrael under Greek rule. Jewish tradition itself connects Shimon HaTzadik with Alexander’s arrival.

The change did not happen overnight. The Jews of Eretz Yisrael did not suddenly wake up the next morning speaking Greek and thinking like Greeks.

But Alexander’s conquest brought Judea into a world increasingly shaped by Greek language, Greek ideas, and Greek culture.

This does not mean that Greek philosophy itself taught Tzadok and Baisos to think in terms of a po’el and his schar.

The point is much more subtle.

The air had changed.

A person can still be taught Torah. He can still learn about mitzvos, schar va’onesh, Olam Haba, and techiyas hameisim. He can still use all the right words.

But if the atmosphere around him becomes thinner, those words may not grow inside him in the same way.

The first level of chinuch is schar va’onesh. A person is taught that he performs mitzvos in this world and receives reward in Olam Haba. That is true, and it is necessary.

But it is not the end.

A talmid is supposed to grow. Slowly, he is supposed to be carried higher. He is supposed to come to understand that a Jew does not serve Hashem only because of what he will receive afterward.

He serves Hashem because he belongs to Hashem.

He serves Hashem because this is the truth.

That progression does not happen automatically.

It requires more than correct information. It requires an atmosphere where avodas Hashem is lived. It requires a world in which serving Hashem is not merely a way of earning something later, but the natural life of a Jew.

That was the world Antigonus still belonged to.

But his students were already growing up in a different atmosphere.

Not because they had become Greeks. Not because they had abandoned Torah.

But because the world around them had become less spiritually protected.

They had received the teachings of the earlier generation, but not necessarily the same atmosphere that allowed those teachings to grow to their full depth.

They had been taught about Olam Haba.

They had been taught about schar.

But they had not yet been carried from schar to pras, from po’el to eved, from serving in order to receive reward to serving because one belongs to Hashem.

What was self-evident to Antigonus was no longer self-evident to them.

This may be why he underestimated the distance between them.

Because he had received the mesorah of Shimon HaTzadik, he assumed that his talmidim were receiving it in the same way.

He did not realize that a world can change even when the words remain the same.

A talmid can hear the same teaching, learn the same Mishnah, repeat the same ideas, and still receive them from a completely different place.

Antigonus therefore taught them from the place where he himself was standing.

To him, the meaning was obvious.

But his talmidim were no longer standing in the same world.

What sounded to Antigonus like the natural continuation of Shimon HaTzadik sounded to them like a denial of everything they had been taught about schar and Olam Haba.

That was the tragedy.

Antigonus was “like his fathers.” He remained inwardly in the world of Shimon HaTzadik.

He spoke from Socho, from the world of Dovid HaMelech, where a Jew goes out to battle not because of the king’s daughter, not because of the wealth, but because לַה׳ הַמִּלְחָמָה—the battle belongs to Hashem.

But his students were already breathing the air of the world Alexander had created.

They had not left the Torah.

But they no longer heard it from the same place.

Antigonus spoke as though the old world was still carrying them.

It was not.

He spoke as an eved.

They heard as po’alim.

And from that distance, one of the highest teachings in Pirkei Avos became the beginning of one of the deepest breaks in Jewish history

.

Rabbi Eisenman, Rosh Yeshiva of Lubavitch Yeshiva Zal in the Poconos, was not interested in speaking about himself.

From the beginning of the conversation, he made it clear that the focus should be on the yeshiva: the bachurim, the learning, the challenges, and the responsibility of preparing Chassidishe bachurim for life.

At the center of his approach is a mahalach in learning aliba d’hilchasa. But, as Rabbi Eisenman explains, this does not mean turning iyun seder into a practical halacha class. It means learning the sugya through its main halachic thread — from the Gemara, through the Rishonim and Acharonim, with a special focus on the Rambam and the Alter Rebbe — until the bachur begins to see what the sugya is really about.

In his view, this gives bachurim something many are missing: direction. Instead of moving from one mefareish to another without seeing the center, the bachur begins to understand the main question, the ikker machlokes, and how the sugya develops.

In this conversation, Rabbi Eisenman discusses the roots of this mahalach, the place of lomdus, the difference between Mesivta and Zal, and the practical ways a yeshiva can help a bachur enter the sugya with clarity, depth, and geshmak.

Rabbi eizenman,Tell us about the yeshiva and about your role as Rosh Yeshiva.

Around eight years ago, we began a new mahalach in the yeshiva’s learning. We started learning sugyos aliba d’hilchasa.

I want to explain what I mean by that, because it can be misunderstood. It does not mean that we turned iyun seder into a practical halacha class. We are not just learning the final psak, or only discussing what a person should do today.

The idea is to follow the main halachic thread of the sugya. We learn the Gemara, the main Rishonim, the important Acharonim, and we try to see how the sugya develops until it reaches the halachic conclusion.

In other words, the bachur is not just learning a piece of Gemara by itself. He is seeing the life of the sugya. He sees where the discussion begins, what the Gemara is asking, how the Rishonim understood it, what the main points of disagreement are, and what comes out from it in halacha.

One of the reasons we began doing this is because the Alter Rebbe writes in Hilchos Talmud Torah that a person has to know not only the halachos, but also the reasons of the halachos. If a person only knows the final psak, but does not understand where it comes from, then he is missing something very important. He may know what to do, but he does not really understand the sugya behind it.

Usually, this type of learning happens much later. If a bachur goes on to kollel, then perhaps he begins learning halacha l’maaseh with Rishonim and Acharonim in a serious way. But many bachurim do not end up going to kollel. And even among those who do, not everyone is learning halacha l’maaseh in depth, with a real iyun into the sugya.

So the question is: why should a bachur go through his main yeshiva years without being trained to learn a sugya this way?

But there is another point here, and to me this is very important.

Many bachurim today are lacking meaning in their iyun learning. Iyun seder is supposed to be the strongest part of the day. It is supposed to be where a bachur learns how to think, how to analyze, how to break open a Gemara, how to understand a machlokes and follow a sevara.

But for many bachurim, it becomes the hardest part of the day — and sometimes the most boring part of the day.

A bachur can sit through a shiur, hear many mefarshim, write down many marei mekomos, and still walk away asking himself: What did I actually gain from this? Where was this all going?

Of course, there are always strong bachurim who enjoy the learning. They can handle complicated hesbeirim, and they can get satisfaction from the depth itself. But even by stronger bachurim, the learning does not always feel grounded. And by weaker bachurim, the problem is much stronger. They often feel that the sugya is floating somewhere above them.

They are learning another mefareish, and then another mefareish, and then another side discussion — but they do not always see the center of the sugya.

That is where learning aliba d’hilchasa changes the experience.

It gives the sugya direction. It tells the bachur: we are not just collecting shittos. We are trying to understand the sugya itself. What is the Gemara’s question? What is the ikker machlokes? What are the Rishonim really arguing about? And how do those different ways of understanding the Gemara lead to different conclusions?

It also keeps the learning from becoming scattered.

In a regular iyun seder, it is very easy to go off in many directions. One person gets caught up in one detail. Another person gets caught up in a different detail. A Maggid Shiur can spend a lot of time on one side point, while the bachurim are still not clear what the main sugya is about. Sometimes everyone is working hard, but the center gets lost.

The ma’alah of learning aliba d’hilchasa is that it keeps everyone connected to the ikker. It does not mean that we avoid depth. Just the opposite. We want depth. But we want depth that is connected to the sugya’s main halachic structure.

The halacha solidifies the sugya. It takes a sugya that can feel very broad, with many details and side points, and shows the bachur: these are the one or two central issues around which the sugya revolves.

That is why the Rambam has such a central place in the learning. Every bachur has a connection to Rambam because of the Rebbe’s takana. So when we learn a sugya, we learn the Rambam and see how he understood the Gemara.

Then we go back and look at the main Rishonim — Rashi, Tosfos, the Rambam, and others — and we see how each one learned the sugya. What did Rashi understand the main point to be? What bothered Tosfos? How does the Rambam read the sugya? And how do those different understandings lead to different conclusions in halacha?

That gives the bachur a much clearer picture. He is not just learning “another opinion.” He begins to see that the machlokes has a structure. The mefarshim become connected. Every part has a place.

The Gemara is not just an abstract discussion. The Rishonim are not just different opinions on a page. The Acharonim are not just lomdus for the sake of lomdus. It is all part of one living sugya.

And when a bachur sees that, the learning becomes much more meaningful. He feels that he is not just learning around the sugya. He is entering into the sugya itself.

This sounds similar to the derech of the Maharal. It is well known that the Maharal emphasized learning Gemara with the Rosh, because the Rosh brings the sugya toward halacha and gives clarity to the sugya. How is your mahalach different?

There is definitely a similarity. The Maharal was also bothered by learning that becomes disconnected from the real structure of the sugya. He wanted the learning to have clarity. He wanted a person to know where the sugya is going, and not just get lost in pilpulim that do not lead anywhere.

So in that sense, yes, there is a common point.

But I would not say it is exactly the same mahalach.

The Maharal’s derech was part of a broader approach to the whole order of learning. He took very seriously the order of Chazal: בן חמש למקרא, בן עשר למשנה, בן חמש עשרה לתלמוד. A child first learns Mikra, then Mishnah, and only afterward Gemara. The idea is that before a person enters the world of Talmud, he first has to build the foundations of Torah knowledge.

The Alter Rebbe, however, explains that this order depended on the reality of those times. In those days, Chumash was not printed the way we have it today, with nekudos and ta’amim. They read from a Sefer Torah, so the child had to spend years becoming fluent in the pesukim, the nekudos, the ta’amim, kri and ksiv, and so on. Mishnayos also had to be learned by heart. So the years of Mikra and Mishnah reflected the way Torah had to be transmitted then.

Today, the situation is different. We have printed seforim. We have Chumashim with nekudos and ta’amim. We have Mishnayos printed and available. So the Alter Rebbe does not understand the Mishnah in Avos to mean that every child today must spend five full years on Mikra, then five full years on Mishnah, and only then begin Gemara.

My shver Rabbi Chaim Shalom Deitch once told me that when he learned in Etz Chaim in Yerushalayim, they did not have a separate seder of Mishnayos before Gemara. They went directly into Gemara. That was the accepted style of learning there.

Now, there is a Zilberman mahalach today that tries to follow that order much more literally — Mikra, then Mishnah, and only later Gemara. I do not want to speak as though I can evaluate every yeshiva or every talmid. Clearly, talmidim who go through such a system can come out with a tremendous amount of yedios, and that is a real ma’alah.

But the question is not only how much a bachur knows. The question is how he understands what he knows.

A bachur can know a tremendous amount of Mishnayos and Gemara, and still not necessarily have a deep havanah in a sugya. He may have strong bekius, but the sugya itself may not yet be alive to him. He may know the words and the information, but still be missing the inner movement of the sugya — what the Gemara is really asking, why the Rishonim understand it differently, and how those different understandings lead to different conclusions.

Our mahalach is not just to say: learn Gemara with the Rosh, and then you will know the halacha.

The goal is to train the bachur to enter the sugya in a way that gives him havanah and geshmak. We want him to see the main halachic issues inside the sugya. How does the Rambam learn it? How does Rashi learn it? How does Tosfos learn it? How do the later poskim understand it? And how does all of that bring out the ikker of the sugya?

So the difference is this: the Maharal’s derech, as it is commonly understood, puts a strong emphasis on building the proper seder of Torah knowledge, and on using the Rosh to bring the Gemara toward halacha.

Our mahalach is using the halachic structure of the sugya itself as a tool to give bachurim clarity, meaning, and havanah in iyun.

It is not only about reaching the halacha. It is about using the halacha to understand what the sugya is really about.

Granted, that is a very good point. But couldn’t the same question be asked about your mahalach as well?

In other words, there is a well-known lomdishe mahalach of the great Roshei Yeshivah. And even in Lubavitch, we find that someone like Reb Yudel Eber did not necessarily learn every sugya in the direction of halacha l’maaseh. His emphasis was on deep lomdus and amkus, even if the style was different from the Litvishe Roshei Yeshivah.

So couldn’t someone argue that when you move away from that kind of pure lomdus and amkus, you may gain clarity, but you lose some of the passion, depth, and excitement that comes from learning a sugya in a deeper lomdushe way?

I would not frame it that way.

The mahalach we are speaking about is not a move away from lomdus. On the contrary, it is very close to the real derech of the great Roshei Yeshivah.

What was the greatness of the Roshei Yeshivah? They knew how to find the ikker of the sugya. They did not chase every possible prat until the sugya became scattered. They could take a complicated sugya and show you: this is the main point. This is the definition. This is what the machlokes depends on.

That is very different from what can happen today, where a bachur is shown many mefarshim and many side discussions, but he still does not walk away with the central nekudah.

Before the war, the style of learning was also simpler in terms of the amount of material being used. The Roshei Yeshivah did not have endless seforim the way we do today, and certainly the talmidim did not have piles of mefarshim in front of them. The learning centered around the Gemara, Rashi, Tosfos, the Rambam, the Rosh, and the main Rishonim. From there, they built the understanding of the sugya.

You see this clearly in the Brisker derech. Reb Chaim focused tremendously on the Rambam. The Rambam was not being learned merely as a sefer of practical psak. The Rambam became a key to understanding the sugya. Through a diyuk in the Rambam, Reb Chaim would uncover the yesod, the definition around which the sugya turns.

The same is true with other great Roshei Yeshivah, such as Rav Naftali Trop. The focus was not to collect every possible opinion. The focus was to understand the ikkar.

So when we learn a sugya aliba d’hilchasa, it does not mean that we are giving up amkus. It means that the amkus is guided. The halachic structure helps us identify the central issues of the sugya. It shows us what the Gemara is really dealing with, what the Rishonim are arguing about, and what difference it makes.

That itself produces deep lomdus.

There is a kind of lomdus that can become detached from the sugya. It may be clever, and it may even be exciting, but it does not always leave the bachur with a clearer understanding of the sugya itself.

Our goal is a different kind of lomdus — lomdus that grows out of the Gemara, is tested through the Rishonim, becomes sharpened through the Rambam and the poskim, and gives the bachur a real havanah in what the sugya is about.

So I do not see it as a choice between halacha and lomdus. The opposite is true. When it is done properly, learning aliba d’hilchasa brings out the lomdus of the sugya in a very strong way.

It gives the bachur both things: clarity and depth.

Why do you think many yeshivos today do not learn this way?

A large part of it is because that is the way people were taught when they were in yeshiva themselves. A person naturally teaches in the style in which he was taught.

But there is also a deeper point here. There is a mahalach that is very appropriate for Mesivta.

In Mesivta, the main goal is not necessarily that the bachur should walk away with the full ikker of the sugya, with all the main Rishonim and the halachic structure worked out. The main goal is to build his basic learning skills.

A Mesivta bachur has to learn how to read a Gemara properly, how to understand Rashi, how to break his head over Tosfos, how to follow a question and an answer, and how to work through the different parts of a sugya.

So in Mesivta, it makes sense that the learning covers many aspects of the sugya. The Maggid Shiur may take the bachurim through one part, then another detail, and add a short piece of lomdus here or there to clarify the pshat. That is not a problem. At that stage, the purpose is to give the bachurim practice. They need to touch many areas of the sugya, because that is how they develop the basic tools of learning.

You can see this kind of style in the writings of Reb Elchonon Wasserman, for example in Kovetz Shiurim. He covers a lot of ground. He goes through many sugyos, sometimes large parts of a masechta, and on different pieces he gives a sharp lomdushe point that helps clarify the pshat. It is not always about reducing the entire sugya to one central halachic issue. It is about giving clarity in the pieces of the sugya being learned.

For Mesivta, that is very important.

But Zal is different.

By the time a bachur reaches Zal, he should not still be learning only on that level. Of course, he still needs Gemara, Rashi, and Tosfos. Of course, he still needs to understand the basic pshat. But now he needs something more mature.

In Zal, the bachur has to learn how to see the sugya as a whole. He has to learn how to identify the ikker. He has to understand what the main issues are, how the Rishonim are learning the Gemara, how the Rambam understands the sugya, and how those different understandings lead to different conclusions.

That is where learning aliba d’hilchasa becomes so important.

It is not that Mesivta learning is wrong. It is right for Mesivta. But if a bachur continues in Zal with the same approach — learning many details, many side points, a little lomdus here and there, without ever being trained to see the central structure of the sugya — then something is missing.

Sometimes, in the Litvishe world, there can be a tendency to become very involved in the fine details of the lomdus — the subtle definitions, the chakiras, the conceptual distinctions. There is certainly a ma’alah in that. But if it is not held together by the sugya itself, a bachur can get lost in the details.

In Lubavitch, the opposite can sometimes happen. Because there is a hesitation to become too caught up in that style of lomdus, the learning may avoid those deeper conceptual principles altogether. So the bachur may learn the Gemara and the mefarshim, but still not come away with the yesod of the sugya.

The mahalach we are trying to develop is a healthy middle.

We want real lomdus, but lomdus that is connected to the sugya. We want the halachic structure, but not as a dry halacha class. We want the bachur to see how the Gemara, Rashi, Tosfos, the Rambam, the Rishonim, and the Acharonim all come together around the main issues of the sugya.

That is what a Zal bachur needs. He has to move beyond covering the sugya piece by piece. He has to learn how to see what the sugya is really about.

What originally got you interested in this mahalach?

I originally received this mahalach from my shver, Rabbi Chaim Shalom Deitch.

When I was learning in Toras Emes, we were learning Maseches Pesachim that year. My shver was giving the shiur on the first perek, and he would learn the sugya together with the Alter Rebbe’s Shulchan Aruch.

The first perek of Pesachim itself has many sugyos that come down in halacha l’maaseh, especially in the Alter Rebbe. We would learn the Gemara and the Rishonim, and then we would see how the Alter Rebbe brings it down in halacha.

That opened my eyes.

Because when you learn the Alter Rebbe carefully, you see that he is not just giving you the final psak. He is illuminating the sugya. He is showing you how the sugya is built, what the main issues are, and how the different parts come together.

After we finished the first perek, instead of continuing straight to the next perek, Perek Kol Sha’ah, my shver decided to go to the third perek, Perek Eilu Ovrin.

That was also connected to this mahalach, because Eilu Ovrin contains major sugyos in kashrus and halacha l’maaseh. He wanted us to continue seeing the Alter Rebbe’s chiddushim in those areas.

Later, when I learned semicha, that gave me a tremendous yesod.

I had done well in yeshiva. I had good Maggidei Shiurim. I had learned sugyos b’iyun. But this was something different. Through the Alter Rebbe, I began to see how halacha can open up the sugya.

It is known that if someone is a true lamdan, he can see how the Alter Rebbe answers many of the questions that later Acharonim, such as Reb Akiva Eiger, raise. The Alter Rebbe’s wording is precise. His order is precise. The way he brings the halacha is not just practical; it reflects a deep understanding of the sugya.

That had a very strong impact on me. I saw that learning halacha through the Alter Rebbe is not a smaller way of learning. It is not less deep than lomdus. It is a way of learning that brings the lomdus of the sugya into focus.

Practically speaking, how does this work in the yeshiva? How do you guide the bachurim through the sugya?

One of the things we do is that every week we give the bachurim a paper with the sugya of the week. It lays out what we are learning and what each bachur is expected to do.

We also have different tracks for different levels. Not every bachur is holding in the same place, and not every bachur can learn the same amount of material. So we guide them. We tell them which meforshei pshat they should learn, according to their level.

Many of these mefarshim are already found in the back of the Gemara, so the bachurim are not being sent all over the place. They are learning the sugya with the main tools that are right there.

Another thing we do is that whenever Rashi or Tosfos mentions another Gemara, I show the bachurim exactly where to look. I do not want it to remain just a vague reference. If Tosfos is building on another Gemara, the bachur has to see that Gemara inside and understand the context.

That is very important, because many times, those background Gemaras open up the whole sugya.

For example, sometimes the Rambam writes something in a certain way, and at first it is not clear why he chose that wording or that approach. But then you look at the Gemaras that Tosfos brings, and you begin to see that the Rambam may be trying to reconcile two Gemaras that seem to be saying different things.

So the bachur begins to see that the Rambam is not just giving a psak. He is reading the whole sugya. He is taking into account the different Gemaras and showing how they fit together.

That gives the bachur a much deeper understanding. He learns not only the words in front of him, but also the background sugyos that the Rishonim are working with. Once he sees that, the whole sugya becomes much clearer.

The Opening of Pirkei Avos

Pirkei Avos begins with the chain of the transmission of Torah:

“משה קיבל תורה מסיני, ומסרה ליהושע…”

Moshe received the Torah from Sinai and passed it on to Yehoshua. Yehoshua passed it to the Zekeinim, the Zekeinim to the Nevi’im, and the Nevi’im passed it to the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah.

Then the Mishnah says:

“הם אמרו שלשה דברים: הוו מתונים בדין, והעמידו תלמידים הרבה, ועשו סייג לתורה.”

“They said three things: Be deliberate in judgment, establish many students, and make a fence around the Torah.”

At first glance, this sounds simple. The Anshei Knesses HaGedolah said three things.

But really, the Mishnah needs to be understood.

First of all, what does it mean that they said three things?

Obviously, the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah said many more things than these three. They were the leaders of Klal Yisrael at the beginning of the Second Beis HaMikdash. They established tefillah, guided the Jewish people, and helped rebuild the spiritual life of Klal Yisrael after the destruction and the exile.

So when the Mishnah says, “הם אמרו שלשה דברים,” it cannot simply mean that these were the only three things they ever said. It means that these were the three things they emphasized. This was, so to speak, the motto and model of the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah.

And that itself is the question:

Why davka these three?

Why was the main message of the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah: be careful in judgment, establish many students, and make a fence around the Torah?

There is another issue as well. This is not only a statement of the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah. It is the opening Mishnah of Pirkei Avos. And when a perek begins with a certain idea, that idea is usually foundational. First the Mishnah puts down the foundation, and only afterward does it go into the details.(maharal derech chaim)

If that is true by the beginning of each perek, it is certainly true by the beginning of the entire Pirkei Avos. This Mishnah is not only telling us what the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah emphasized. It is telling us what Pirkei Avos itself is built on.

So we have to understand why the whole Masechta begins with these three ideas.

The question becomes stronger when we look at the three statements themselves.

“הוו מתונים בדין” is about din. A dayan has to be careful. He cannot rush to judgment. He has to think it through properly before giving a psak.

“והעמידו תלמידים הרבה” is about talmidim. A person has to establish many students.

“ועשו סייג לתורה” is about siyagim. One has to make fences around the Torah, so that people should not come to violate the Torah itself.

These seem to be three separate worlds.

One is judgment.

One is education.

One is protecting Torah observance.

What are they doing together?

The Abarbanel explains that all three are really connected to din. Be careful in judgment. Establish many students who can help clarify judgment and carry it further. And make fences around the Torah so that halachah will be protected.

But that does not seem to be the simple way most mefarshim understand the Mishnah. Most mefarshim seem to learn that these are three separate instructions. If so, what holds them together? Why are these three things the opening foundation of Pirkei Avos?

The question becomes even deeper when we look at the next Mishnah:

“שמעון הצדיק היה משיירי כנסת הגדולה. הוא היה אומר: על שלשה דברים העולם עומד, על התורה ועל העבודה ועל גמילות חסדים.”

“Shimon HaTzaddik was from the remnants of the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah. He would say: On three things the world stands — on Torah, on avodah, and on gemilas chasadim.”

This is very strange.

The Mishnah does not introduce Shimon HaTzaddik as a totally separate person. It specifically says that he was “משיירי כנסת הגדולה” — from the remnants of the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah. He is a continuation of them, the remaining representative of that same group.

If so, his statement should continue their statement.

They said three things.

He also says three things.

They spoke about din, talmidim, and siyagim.

He speaks about Torah, avodah, and gemilas chasadim.

What is the connection between the two?

And if Shimon HaTzaddik says that Torah, avodah, and gemilas chasadim are the three things upon which the world stands, why did the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah not say that first? They were the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah. They were the great assembly. Shimon HaTzaddik was only from the remnants of that assembly.

Seemingly, if any teaching should open Pirkei Avos, it should be:

“על שלשה דברים העולם עומד, על התורה ועל העבודה ועל גמילות חסדים.”

But that is not what happens.

Pirkei Avos first brings the three statements of the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah:

“הוו מתונים בדין, והעמידו תלמידים הרבה, ועשו סייג לתורה.”

Only afterward does it bring the three statements of Shimon HaTzaddik.

There is also another point. Shimon HaTzaddik says that one of the three pillars is Torah. But the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah already spoke about Torah. They said, “והעמידו תלמידים הרבה” — establish many students. They said, “ועשו סייג לתורה” — make a fence around the Torah.

So what is Shimon HaTzaddik adding when he says “על התורה”?

And why does this teaching belong specifically to Shimon HaTzaddik? Pirkei Avos is not just bringing random sayings. Each teaching belongs to the person who said it. It reflects his role, his time, and what his generation needed.

The opening of Pirkei Avos therefore has to be understood as one flow.

First we have the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah.

Then we have Shimon HaTzaddik, who is from the remnants of the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah.

First we have three things: din, talmidim, and siyagim.

Then we have three things: Torah, avodah, and gemilas chasadim.

Are these two separate teachings placed next to each other? Or is Shimon HaTzaddik continuing the teaching of the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah — and if he is, what exactly is he adding?

Rebuilding a Torah Nation

In order to understand this, we first need to understand the role of the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah.

The Anshei Knesses HaGedolah lived at the beginning of the Second Beis HaMikdash period. The First Beis HaMikdash had been destroyed. Klal Yisrael had gone into exile. The spiritual structure of the Jewish people had been broken.

Many Yidden had assimilated. Many had married non-Jewish women, as described in Ezra and Nechemiah. The entire society was in need of rebuilding.The Anshei Knesses HaGedolah were not simply giving good advice to private individuals. They were dealing with a much larger question:

How do you rebuild a Torah nation?

After a churban, after exile, after spiritual collapse, how does Klal Yisrael become a Torah society again?

That is what the Mishnah is telling us. When the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah said these three things, they were giving the basic tools needed to rebuild a Torah nation.

That is why this Mishnah begins Pirkei Avos. Before Pirkei Avos can discuss specific middos, ethical teachings, and forms of avodas Hashem, there first has to be a society that can hold those teachings. There has to be a stable Torah world. There has to be a basic structure in which Torah can live.

Before we can speak about the individual, we first have to make sure that there is a nation.

There has to be someone to talk to, so to speak.

The Anshei Knesses HaGedolah therefore begin with three things.

The first is:

“הוו מתונים בדין” — be deliberate in judgment.

This does not only mean that there should be justice. Obviously, a Torah society needs justice. It does not only mean that there should be honesty and integrity.

It means something more than that.

There has to be such an extreme level of justice, such an extreme level of honesty, that every person can see that the judges are acting with the utmost integrity.

Because if a judge rushes to judgment, even if he is right, people may not experience it as justice. They may feel that he already made up his mind. They may feel that he did not really hear the case. They may feel that the system is not truly fair.

That itself is already a problem.

A Torah society cannot just have justice in theory. It has to have justice in a way that people can recognize. People need to feel that din is real, that the judges are careful, and that they do not pasken from emotion, pressure, convenience, or personal bias.

That is why the Mishnah says “הוו מתונים בדין.”

Be slow in judgment.

Even if you think you understood the case the first time, think about it again. Even if the answer seems obvious, pause. Do not rule based on the emotional pressure of the moment. Give the matter time, so that the judgment can come from a calm and level-headed place.

Because the first foundation of a Torah society is justice.

A society where people do not trust the justice system cannot function as a Torah society. If people feel that din does not matter, that Choshen Mishpat does not really apply, that power or convenience decides things, then the entire moral structure begins to collapse.

This is why we find that one of the primary roles of a king in Torah is to be a judge. A king is not only a ruler in the political sense. He is responsible for justice. He establishes order. He makes sure that society is not ruled by corruption or chaos.

Because without justice, there is no nation.

And this is not only true on the national level. It is true in every small society as well — a yeshiva, a school, a community, a family, a business.

When people feel that things are done fairly, there is trust.

When people feel that things are not fair, the trust begins to erode.

I remember once there was a raffle for a set of sefarim. In order to enter the raffle, a bachur had to write an essay. I was in Shiur Daled at the time, and there were hundreds of bachurim in the yeshiva. As it turned out, I was the only one who wrote the essay.

But then, when the time came, they did not want to give me the sefarim. The reason given was that no one else had participated.

Now, to me, this was very simple. If the condition was that whoever writes an essay enters the raffle, and only one person writes the essay, then that person wins. That is the whole point. You cannot change the rules afterward because the result is inconvenient.

And I remember that what bothered me most was not even the sefarim themselves. What bothered me was the feeling of betrayal. I had trusted the rules. I had trusted that when an authority figure creates a condition, and a person fulfills that condition, the condition means something. But when the result became inconvenient, suddenly the rules changed.

Now, of course, this is a small example. It is not the biggest issue in the world.

But it taught me something very important.

When people are not careful with fairness, even in small things, it creates a feeling that Choshen Mishpat does not really matter. That rules are flexible when they become uncomfortable. That people in authority can decide things however they want.

And that feeling is very dangerous.

Because it undermines trust.

A Torah society is not built only on inspiration. It is not built only on learning and davening. It is built first on the basic confidence that there is din. That there is yashrus. That there is fairness. That people in authority are careful not to abuse their position.

That is why the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah begin with “הוו מתונים בדין.”

Before you can rebuild a Torah nation, you need to rebuild trust.

And trust begins with justice.

The second thing the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah say is:

“והעמידו תלמידים הרבה” — establish many students.

This comes after “הוו מתונים בדין,” and the order is important.

Before you can properly teach Torah, there first has to be trust. If people do not trust the rabbanim, the dayanim, and the leaders, then the entire system of chinuch is weakened. Parents will not fully trust the rebbeim. Talmidim will not fully trust what they are receiving. Torah will not be able to pass naturally from one generation to the next.

First there has to be din. There has to be justice. There has to be yashrus. There has to be basic trust in the leadership.

Only then can you move to the next stage:

“והעמידו תלמידים הרבה.”

Here the lashon is very important. There are two points.

First, “הרבה” — many.

If you are rebuilding a Torah nation, Torah cannot remain only by a small group of great people. It cannot remain only by the elite, or only by the unusually gifted bachurim, or only by those who naturally know how to learn.

Torah has to spread.

A Torah nation is not built when a few individuals know Torah. A Torah nation is built when Torah becomes accessible to many talmidim.

The second point is “והעמידו.”

The Mishnah does not say, “ולמדו תלמידים הרבה” — teach many students.

It says, “והעמידו תלמידים הרבה” — establish many students.

The goal is not just that the talmid should hear Torah from the rebbi. The goal is that the talmid himself should be built. He should become someone who can stand on his own.

A talmid who always needs the rebbi to explain everything to him was taught Torah, but never learned Torah.

“והעמידו תלמידים” means that the talmid is given the ability to learn, to understand, to ask, to investigate, and eventually to give Torah over to others.

This is a very important point in chinuch.

There are many talmidim who spend years in yeshiva. They hear shiurim. They sit in zal. They are around Torah all day. But at the end, many of them still do not know how to open a basic Gemara and learn it properly by themselves.

Why?

Because very often they were taught the Gemara, but they were not taught how Gemara works. They were given information, but they were not given tools.

And this is one of the reasons I wrote Tools for Talmud, which, G-d willing, should be published soon. The point of the book is not just to give a few steps for learning Gemara. It is to give a talmid the basic tools he needs to understand Gemara: the history of Gemara, the purpose of Gemara, the structure of Gemara, and the practical method of how to read and think through a sugya.

After “הוו מתונים בדין” creates trust, “והעמידו תלמידים הרבה” creates continuity.

A Torah nation cannot survive only because it has leaders. It survives when those leaders establish many talmidim — and establish them in a way that they themselves can stand.

The third thing the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah say is:

“ועשו סייג לתורה” — make a fence for the Torah. (Pirkei Avos 1:1)

This comes only after “והעמידו תלמידים הרבה.”

Once you have talmidim — people who know Torah, understand halachah, and can explain Torah to the nation — then you can build a society that keeps Torah and mitzvos on a stronger level.

That is the point of a siyag.

A siyag is not just an extra rule. The purpose of a siyag is to protect קיום המצוות. It creates distance from the issur. It helps make sure that the basic halachah is actually kept. It gives the person, and the nation, a stronger framework for living a life of Torah and mitzvos.

“ועשו סייג לתורה” means that the Torah society has reached a level where it can keep mitzvos not only at the minimum level, but with care, with protection, with chumros, hiddurim, minhagim, and even nedarim when appropriate — all for the purpose of strengthening the actual fulfillment of Torah and mitzvos.

But this only works when people are learned.

A person needs to know what is the din, what is a siyag, what is a chumra, and what is a hiddur. When people know the halachah clearly, the siyag strengthens the din. It gives clarity. It makes the mitzvah more protected.

This is why Chazal say:

“ולא עם הארץ חסיד.”
“An am ha’aretz cannot be a chassid.” (Pirkei Avos 2:5)

Higher levels of observance require Torah knowledge. To live with chumros and hiddurim properly, a person first has to understand the halachah that those chumros and hiddurim are coming to protect.

Without that clarity, problems begin.

Sometimes a person is machmir in a situation where halachah itself would allow room for leniency, especially in difficult circumstances.

Sometimes a person becomes very careful with the chumra, but less careful with the ikkar hadin.

And sometimes, if a person thinks the chumra is the din, then once the chumra falls away, the din itself may fall away with it.

This is what we see from Adam and Chava. Adam told Chava not to touch the Eitz HaDaas. There was nothing wrong with making a fence. The problem was that it was not clear enough that touching was only the fence, while eating was the actual issur. Once the nachash showed her that touching did not bring death, he was able to convince her to eat from the Eitz HaDaas and give it to her husband, bringing death upon the entire world. (Avos d’Rabbi Nosson, nusach A, ch. 1)

The problem is not siyagim. The problem is siyagim without Torah knowledge.

When a Torah society is learned, “ועשו סייג לתורה” allows mitzvos to be kept properly. It protects the din. It strengthens the keeping of Torah and mitzvos. It makes Yiddishkeit more stable and more lasting.

The order of the Mishnah is exact.

First, “הוו מתונים בדין” — create trust through justice.

Then, “והעמידו תלמידים הרבה” — build many talmidim who understand Torah.

Only then, “ועשו סייג לתורה” — create fences around Torah, so that קיום המצוות will be protected and strengthened.

Maintaining a Torah Nation

Once we understand the three things of the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah, we can understand the next Mishnah.

The Anshei Knesses HaGedolah were answering one question: how do you rebuild a Torah nation?

Their answer was: first, justice. Then, Torah education. Then, fences around the Torah, so that halachah can be properly kept.

Shimon HaTzaddik is asking a different question.

Not how to rebuild a Torah society.

How to maintain one after it has already been rebuilt.

And this is not only a historical question. It is a question for every generation. Once there is already a Torah community, once there are schools, shuls, rabbanim, talmidim, and a basic framework of Torah life, what keeps that world alive?

To this, Shimon HaTzaddik says:

“על שלשה דברים העולם עומד: על התורה ועל העבודה ועל גמילות חסדים.”
“On three things the world stands: on Torah, on avodah, and on gemilas chasadim.” (Pirkei Avos 1:2)

The Anshei Knesses HaGedolah teach how to build a Torah society. Shimon HaTzaddik teaches how to maintain one.

Now, “העולם” can mean the world in the general, metaphysical sense. But it can also be understood as “the world” in the sense of the Jewish world, the Torah world. Like people say in yeshiva, “der velt zogt” — the world says.

And the Jewish people are the center of the world. So when Shimon HaTzaddik says that the world stands on these three things, he is telling us what holds up the Jewish world, what gives continuity to a Torah nation.

His answer is: Torah, avodah, and gemilas chasadim.

These are not disconnected from the first Mishnah. They are the next stage.

The Anshei Knesses HaGedolah taught how to build the structure of a Torah nation. Shimon HaTzaddik teaches what has to live inside that structure.

First, Torah.

Once a Torah society exists, the first thing that must fill it is Torah learning. Torah cannot be something on the side. It has to be the center of the society. There has to be serious learning, broad learning, constant learning. The people have to live with Torah.

This is the continuation of “והעמידו תלמידים הרבה.”

The Anshei Knesses HaGedolah said that you have to establish many talmidim. Shimon HaTzaddik says what those talmidim must continue to do: they must live a life of Torah.

Second, avodah.

Torah cannot remain only in the mind. It has to become avodah. It has to become the fulfillment of mitzvos, the actual service of Hashem.

In the simple historical sense, avodah refers to the service in the Beis HaMikdash. But more broadly, it is avodas Hashem, the life of mitzvos.A Torah society is not maintained only by people learning ideas. It is maintained when Torah becomes practice, when people live according to what they learn.

This is the continuation of “ועשו סייג לתורה.”

The Anshei Knesses HaGedolah said to make fences around the Torah so that halachah can be kept properly. Shimon HaTzaddik says what the goal of that is: avodah — that the Jewish people should actually serve Hashem and live a life of Torah and mitzvos.

Third, gemilas chasadim.

A Torah society cannot survive only through learning and mitzvah observance. It also needs kindness between people. It needs responsibility. It needs people caring for each other.

This is the continuation of “הוו מתונים בדין.”

Obviously, gemilas chasadim is not the same thing as justice. Justice is the basic level. It creates trust. It tells people that society is not hefker, that there is fairness, order, and yashrus.

But gemilas chasadim takes that social trust further. Justice starts the social cohesion. Gemilas chasadim maintains it, strengthens it, and increases it.

Shimon HaTzaddik is not repeating the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah. He is taking their structure and showing what it is meant to become.

The Anshei Knesses HaGedolah tell us how a Torah nation is rebuilt:

Justice.

Torah education.

Fences around mitzvos.

Shimon HaTzaddik tells us how that Torah nation is maintained:

Torah.

Avodah.

Gemilas chasadim.

First you build the society.

Then you keep it alive.

Rebuilding a Person

But the Rebbe adds another point.

The three things of the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah are not only a model for rebuilding a Torah nation. They are also a model for rebuilding a person.

The first step is:

“הוו מתונים בדין” — be deliberate in judgment.

On the simple level, this means that a dayan has to be careful before judging a case. But when it comes to teaching Torah to another person, it means something else as well.

Do not be quick to judge him.

If you want to bring someone closer to Torah, if you want to teach him, if you want to influence him, the first thing is that he has to feel that you are not judging him.

As Chazal say:

“אל תדין את חברך עד שתגיע למקומו.”
“Do not judge your fellow until you have reached his place.” (Pirkei Avos 2:4)

You do not really know what another person is struggling with. You do not know his background, his weaknesses, his pain, his confusion, or the place from which he is coming.

The first step in being mashpia on someone is therefore “הוו מתונים בדין.”

Be slow to judge.

Once a person feels that, you can come to the second step:

“והעמידו תלמידים הרבה.”

Because people do not want to learn from someone who is judgmental. They do not want a mashpia or rebbi who looks down at them, even if he says the right words. People can feel when someone is pretending not to judge them, but inside he really is judging them.

What draws people in is genuine empathy.

When a person feels that you see him, that you understand him, that you are not looking at him with contempt, then he is able to receive from you. Then you can have “תלמידים הרבה” — many talmidim.

But again, the Mishnah does not only say to teach them. It says “והעמידו.”

You have to establish them. You have to build them. You have to help them stand on their own as Yidden, as learners, as people who can grow in Torah and mitzvos in a real way.

Only after that can you come to the third step:

“ועשו סייג לתורה.”

Once the talmid is established, once he has a foundation, once he is standing on his own, then you can guide him to take on more: chumros, hiddurim, minhagim, takanos, and higher standards in avodas Hashem.

The order matters.

I have seen this often in yeshivos. People push bachurim to take on beautiful things — Rambam, Chitas, mikvah, hiddurim, extra seder, extra hachlatos. And of course, these things are beautiful and important.

But if the bachur does not yet know how to learn, if he is not yet succeeding in yeshiva, if he does not yet have a basic geshmak in Torah and Yiddishkeit, then the extra things may not become long-lasting.

First, the bachur has to become established. He has to become a talmid. He has to feel that he can learn, that he belongs, that he is growing, that Yiddishkeit is not just a list of pressures being placed on him from the outside.

Then, once he is standing, the siyagim and hiddurim can become real. They become part of his avodas Hashem, not just another burden.

The same thing is true with a person himself.

Before a person can really grow, he also has to be careful with how he judges himself.

In today’s world especially, many people are constantly judging themselves. They are angry at themselves, disappointed in themselves, and always thinking about how far they are from where they should be.

But that often does not lead to avodas Hashem. It leads to atzvus.

And as Tanya explains, atzvus is a major obstacle to serving Hashem, because a person needs simchah in order to serve Hashem properly. When a person is stuck in sadness and self-judgment, he loses the energy and joy he needs for avodah. (Tanya, ch. 26)

Even with oneself, the order is the same.

First, “הוו מתונים בדין.”

Do not be so quick to judge yourself. Do not define yourself only by your failures. Look at yourself with honesty, but also with patience and compassion.

Then, “והעמידו תלמידים הרבה.”

Begin to learn. Build yourself. Connect to Torah. Develop a geshmak in Yiddishkeit. Become established.

And only then, “ועשו סייג לתורה.”

Take on hiddurim, chumros, and stronger hachlatos that will protect your mitzvos and help you grow higher.

The Mishnah is teaching the order of healthy growth.

First, do not destroy the person through judgment.

Then build him through Torah.

And only then add the fences that will protect and strengthen his avodas Hashem.

How to Start Reading the Gemara Inside

After the student understands the basic shakla v’tarya of the sugya, and after he understands which steps the Gemara is taking, he can begin working on reading the Gemara inside.

This is an important stage.

Until now, the student may have understood the Gemara from a rebbi, from ArtScroll, or from another explanation. He may know what the sugya is saying. He may understand the question, the answer, the kushya, and the terutz.

But now he needs to begin seeing these ideas in the words of the Gemara itself.

Generally speaking, by this point the student should already know a certain amount of basic Gemara words. But there is an important point to understand.

The Gemara is not written like a regular spoken language.

It is not like a regular conversation, where every sentence may use new words and new expressions. The Gemara has its own style. It uses many of the same words and phrases again and again.

This is especially true because Gemara is a language of learning. It is a language of questions, answers, proofs, difficulties, and resolutions.

Therefore, many of the same words appear many times.

A student does not need to know every Aramaic word before he begins reading Gemara inside. But he does need to become familiar with the most common words and phrases.

For this, a Gemara Card can be very helpful. A student can also use a Talmudic Aramaic dictionary. But for a beginner, it is usually better to begin with a Gemara Card, because it gives him the common words in a simple and organized way.

There are also sefarim today that list the harder words for each daf, so that the student does not have to search for every difficult word in a dictionary. These can also be very helpful.

The practical way to begin is as follows.

The student should take a printed copy of the Gemara, with the tzuras hadaf.

He should choose a Gemara that he already learned well. He should know the meaning of the Gemara before he begins this exercise. This should not be the first time he is seeing the sugya. He should already have learned it, understood it, and know the basic flow.

Then, on the printout, he should begin marking the Gemara.

He can add commas, periods, and question marks.

He can mark where the statement begins, where the question begins, where the answer begins, and where the Gemara moves to the next step.

When he comes to easier words, especially common Gemara words, he should use the Gemara Card.

He does not need to write the English translation above every word.

In fact, writing every word can make the page too crowded. Then the student may have so many notes on the page that it becomes harder to read the Gemara itself.

Therefore, it is usually better to use the Gemara Card for the easier and more common words, and to write short English translations only above the harder words.

This keeps the page clear, while still giving the student the help he needs.

After this, he should begin reading the Gemara inside.

At first, he may read slowly. That is normal.

The goal at this stage is not speed. The goal is to begin seeing how the Gemara works inside the words.

As he reads, he should notice what the Gemara is doing. Here the Gemara is making a statement. Here it is asking a question. Here it is giving an answer. Here it is bringing a kushya. Here it is giving a terutz.

In this way, the student begins to connect three things together:

The words of the Gemara.

The meaning of the sugya.

And the structure of the shakla v’tarya.

This is an important step toward becoming independent in learning.

In my experience, if a student can learn one daf this way properly, he has gained a very important key. Once he knows how to break down one daf, read it inside, and understand how it works, he can begin to approach other dapim in Shas as well.

Of course, this takes practice.

After the student works through the daf with notes, translations, and markings, he should review it several times.

Then, when he feels that he knows it well, he should test himself.

He should take a clean tzuras hadaf, without his notes, commas, translations, or markings, and try to read it inside.

It is even better if he can read it to a rebbi or teacher.

The rebbi can see if he is reading the words correctly, if he understands where the sentences break, and if he is following the shakla v’tarya properly.

This is how the student slowly moves from understanding the Gemara from the outside to reading the Gemara inside.

Making a Leining

After a bochur knows the basic shakla v’tarya of a sugya, and after he has learned how to read a basic Gemara inside, the next stage is learning how to make a leining.

A leining means that the bochur prepares the sugya before shiur in an organized way.

This is already a more advanced stage. It should not be expected from a student who still cannot read a basic Gemara inside. First, he needs to know how to follow the Gemara, how to recognize the basic steps, and how to understand the words with some independence.

But once he has those skills, he can begin learning how to prepare a leining.

In my experience, if bochurim are taught properly, and if they are trained with the methods we described earlier, many bochurim can begin making a leining with some support around shiur beis mesivta. In a lesser level yeshiva, they can often begin earlier with guidance, and by the end of shiur beis they should be able to make a more consistent leining.

In some yeshivos, this may only begin in shiur gimmel mesivta. But in general, a bochur should not be going much later than that without beginning to learn how to make a leining, unless the yeshiva has a different kind of program, such as a trade-school structure.

The purpose of a leining is not that the bochur should understand every detail perfectly before shiur.

The purpose is that he should come into shiur already knowing the basic flow of the sugya. He should know what the Gemara is discussing, where the main questions are, where the answers are, and what needs to be understood better.

Then the shiur can build on something.

A leining can be done in four stages.

1. First look: the general flow

First, the bochur should look over the Gemara in a general way.

At this stage, he is not trying to understand every detail. He is trying to see the subject of the Gemara and the general flow of the sugya.

What is the Gemara talking about?

Where does the sugya begin?

What seems to be the main issue?

Where does the Gemara seem to be going?

This first look should be quick. It does not need to be fancy. Often, five to ten minutes is enough.

The goal is only to get a first picture of the sugya.

2. Second time: line by line

After that, the bochur should begin learning the Gemara line by line.

Now he should go more slowly.

He should try to understand each piece of the Gemara on its own. What is this line saying? Is it a statement, a question, an answer, a kushya, a terutz, or a proof? What is this part trying to do?

At this stage, he is not yet focusing mainly on the whole sugya as one unit. He is focusing on each piece by itself.

He does not need to understand everything perfectly. But he should try to understand each part decently well.

3. Third time: how the pieces connect

After he understands the parts, he should learn the sugya a third time.

This time, the focus is on how the pieces connect to each other.

It is not enough to know that the Gemara asked a question and then gave an answer. He needs to ask: how does the answer answer the question?

If the Gemara brings a proof, he should ask: why is this really a proof?

If the Gemara brings a kushya, he should ask: what exactly is difficult?

If the Gemara gives a terutz, he should ask: how does this remove the difficulty?

At this stage, he is no longer only asking what each line says. He is asking how the sugya works.

This is a very important part of making a leining.

4. Fourth time: the whole sugya together

After this, the bochur should learn the whole piece again in one flow.

This is similar to the first step, where he looked for the general picture. But now it is different, because he already worked through the details.

Now he can try to see the whole sugya with understanding.

He should ask himself:

What is the sugya about?

What is the main movement?

How does it begin?

How does it develop?

What is the conclusion?

This gives him the bird’s-eye view of the sugya, after he has already gone through the details.

Writing down questions

While making a leining, the bochur will often have questions.

This is normal, and it is a good thing.

But he has to be careful not to lose the whole leining because of one question.

If he gets stuck on a question and spends too much time on it, he may lose the flow of the sugya.

Therefore, when he has a question, he should write it down on a piece of paper.

Then he can continue learning.

Later, he can ask the question to his maggid shiur.

This way, he does not ignore his questions, but he also does not allow them to stop the whole leining.

The goal is to come into shiur prepared.

He may not understand every detail yet, but he should know the basic sugya. He should know what is clear, what is unclear, and what questions he wants to ask.

That is the purpose of making a leining.

A Note to Mechanchim and Maggidei Shiur

It is important for mechanchim and maggidei shiur to understand that making a leining is not only about learning the words of the Gemara.

Making a leining is an art.

A bochur has to learn how to understand a piece of Gemara in a way that prepares him for shiur. He has to learn what is a good question and what is not really a question. He has to learn what needs to be discussed in the leining and what does not need to be discussed yet.

He also has to learn how to read the words of the Gemara in a way that brings out the shakla v’tarya. He is not only reading words. He is trying to understand what the Gemara is doing, where the sugya is moving, and what needs to be clarified.

Therefore, when a yeshiva tells bochurim to make a leining, it is very important that there should be a meishiv available.

This is especially true during iyun seder.

The meishiv has to be able to answer the bochurim’s questions. But more than that, he should help guide them in how to make the leining itself.

After a bochur has looked over the Gemara a little bit, the meishiv can go over to him and read with him. He can ask him to explain what the Gemara is saying. He can ask simple questions that help the bochur notice what the Gemara is trying to do.

Sometimes, through these questions, the bochur will realize on his own what the main issue in the sugya is.

Other times, the bochur will bring his own questions. The meishiv can then decide how to respond. Sometimes he can give a short answer. Sometimes he can say, “That is a good question, and this is something we will discuss in shiur.”

The point is not to turn the leining into the whole shiur.

The point is to train the bochurim to become familiar with what a leining is.

Another thing a maggid shiur can do is give a leining shiur.

This means that he gives a shiur in which he models how to prepare the sugya. He shows the bochurim how he looks at the Gemara, what issues he notices, what questions need to be asked, and how the parts of the sugya connect to each other.

In such a shiur, the maggid shiur is not only teaching the sugya. He is teaching the bochurim how to prepare a sugya.

This can be very helpful, because many bochurim were never shown what a real leining is supposed to look like.

At the same time, even when the bochurim are making their own leining, it is still important for the maggid shiur to go over the Gemara clearly in shiur.

This is especially true when learning Tosafos, but it is also true with the Gemara itself.

A bochur may have a general idea of the sugya from his leining, but that does not mean that he understood every word properly. He may have understood the basic flow, but missed an important phrase, a detail in Rashi, or the exact meaning of a line.

That is okay.

The purpose of the leining is not that every bochur should come into shiur already knowing everything perfectly.

The purpose is that he should come in prepared enough that the shiur can build on his preparation.

When the maggid shiur then goes through the Gemara clearly, the bochur can hear the shiur much better. He already has the basic picture, and now the shiur helps him sharpen it, correct it, and understand it more deeply.

A Short Note About Learning Rashi

This kuntres is mainly about learning Gemara itself. Therefore, we will not explain at length how to learn Rashi and Tosafos.

However, a few points about Rashi should be mentioned.

Rashi’s main purpose is to explain the simple meaning of the Gemara. He helps the student understand the words, the case, the flow, and the basic meaning of the sugya.

At the same time, Rashi is very exact. His words are written with great precision. Therefore, even though Rashi is coming to explain the simple meaning, a student should know that every word of Rashi matters.

For a beginner, the easiest way to begin learning Rashi is usually to first learn the Gemara well.

If a student is using ArtScroll, he should understand that ArtScroll is often trying to explain the Gemara according to Rashi. One of the reasons ArtScroll is helpful is because it tries to give the student the Gemara as Rashi understands it, in clear English.

Therefore, the student can first learn the Gemara with ArtScroll and make sure he understands what the Gemara means according to Rashi.

After that, he can open the Rashi inside.

At that point, he is not seeing Rashi for the first time with no background. He already knows what Rashi is coming to explain. Now he can try to read Rashi inside and see how Rashi says it.

This is a very helpful way to begin learning Rashi.

The same method that we explained earlier for Gemara can also be used for Rashi.

If there are hard words in Rashi, the student can write short English translations above those words. He does not need to write above every word, because that can make the page too crowded. But for words that he does not know, writing a short translation can help him read the Rashi more smoothly.

Over time, the student should begin to move beyond this.

Just as we explained earlier that the student should slowly learn to read the Gemara inside without relying on ArtScroll, the same is true with Rashi.

At first, he may use ArtScroll to understand how the Gemara reads according to Rashi. But eventually, he should begin learning the Gemara together with Rashi inside, without first looking in ArtScroll.

This takes practice.

First, he learns the Gemara with help.

Then he reads the Rashi inside and sees how Rashi explains the Gemara.

Then, slowly, he begins learning the Gemara with Rashi on his own.

The goal is that Rashi should not remain something outside the Gemara. Rashi should become part of the way the student learns the Gemara itself.

This is an important step in becoming more independent in learning.

A Note About Learning Tosafos

Just as we mentioned with Rashi, this kuntres is not coming to explain at length how to learn Tosafos.

The main purpose of this kuntres is to help a student learn Gemara itself.

However, one basic point about Tosafos should be mentioned.

Rashi and Tosafos are doing two different things.

Rashi helps the student understand this Gemara.

Tosafos helps the student understand this Gemara as part of Shas.

This is the main point.

Rashi usually explains the simple meaning of the Gemara in front of us. He explains the words, the case, the flow, and the basic pshat of the sugya.

Tosafos goes further.

The word Tosafos means “additions.” In a simple way, Tosafos takes the Gemara and opens it up into the larger discussion of Shas.

Earlier, we explained that the Gemara does this with the Mishnah.

The Mishnah gives the halachah in a short way. The Gemara then explains the Mishnah, asks questions on it, compares it with other Mishnayos and Beraisos, brings statements of Amoraim, develops new cases, and clarifies the halachah.

Tosafos does something similar with the Gemara.

Tosafos shows that a Gemara cannot always be understood only from the few lines in front of us. Sometimes this Gemara has to be compared with another Gemara. Sometimes one sugya seems to say one thing, and another sugya seems to say something else. Sometimes the pshat that works in one place has to be tested against other places in Shas.

Therefore, Tosafos often asks questions from other Gemaras.

He may ask that our Gemara seems to contradict another Gemara.

He may answer that the two sugyos are speaking about different cases, or different opinions, or different levels of explanation.

He may explain our Gemara differently because of a difficulty from another sugya.

He may discuss whether Rashi’s explanation fits with other sugyos, or whether another explanation is needed.

And many times, Tosafos also helps clarify the halachah that comes out of the Gemara.

This is why Tosafos is difficult for a beginner.

Tosafos is not only explaining the line in front of him. Tosafos is showing how this Gemara fits into the larger world of Shas.

That is also why Tosafos is so important.

A student who learns only Rashi may understand the local sugya. He may know what this Gemara is saying.

But when he begins learning Tosafos, he begins to see that every sugya is part of a larger Torah discussion. The Gemara here must fit with the Gemara there. One pshat must fit the words here and also the sugya somewhere else. The halachah has to come out from the whole picture.

Therefore, Tosafos is not just an extra comment on the side.

Tosafos teaches the student to learn Gemara as part of Shas.

For those who do want to learn Tosafos more seriously, an excellent guide is the sefer Tools for Tosafos.

In my opinion, any bochur who is learning Tosafos should try to learn this sefer.

It explains the background and history of Tosafos, the language of Tosafos, the common expressions used by Tosafos, and the basic structure of how Tosafos is written. It gives the student the tools he needs in order to understand what Tosafos is doing.

The sefer is written clearly and is easy to use. It is also easy to find things inside it. Every page is coming to explain something practical and important.

For a bochur who is beginning to learn Tosafos, this can make a very big difference. Instead of seeing Tosafos as a difficult block of words, he begins to recognize the style, the structure, and the way Tosafos thinks.

I would strongly suggest that any bochur learning Tosafos should have this sefer and use it.

There are also two other resources that can be helpful.

One is Tosafos in English, and the other is Mei Menuchos.

Both can be found online as free PDFs, which makes them easy for a student to access.

Each one has its own advantage.

Tosafos in English has two major advantages.

First, it is in English. This makes it accessible even to a student who is not yet comfortable learning a long Tosafos in Hebrew.

Second, it often has many notes that bring the student deeper into the sugya. These notes can open up important points, show different ways of understanding Tosafos, and raise questions that help the student think more deeply.

At the same time, these two advantages can also bring certain difficulties.

The first difficulty is practical and aesthetic.

Since Tosafos in English is written in English, it is written from left to right, while the Gemara and Tosafos themselves are written from right to left. This can make the page feel less natural. The student is moving between two different directions, and that can sometimes make the learning feel less smooth.

The second difficulty is the style.

Gemara topics are not always easy to explain in English. Since English works differently than Hebrew and Aramaic, the explanation sometimes has to become longer. Because of this, even though the sefer is trying to make Tosafos clearer, at times the English explanation can feel complicated or hard to follow.

There is also another point.

There is no single accepted peirush on Tosafos in the same way that Rashi explains the Gemara. Therefore, Tosafos in English will sometimes explain Tosafos in a way that may be different from the way a student’s maggid shiur is learning it.

For this reason, it can be very helpful, but the student should use it with seichel. He should know that it is a tool, not the only possible way to understand Tosafos.

Mei Menuchos has a different advantage.

It is written in Hebrew, and it often explains the pshat of Tosafos in a more direct way. Because it is in Hebrew, it is closer to the language and style of the sugya itself.

For many students, this can make it a better tool for understanding the basic pshat of Tosafos.

The disadvantage is that it is in Hebrew, so it may be harder for a student who is not yet comfortable reading Hebrew explanations.

Also, for a more advanced student, Tosafos in English may sometimes be more useful because it brings more notes, questions, and different ways of looking at the sugya.

Therefore, each sefer has its place.

For basic pshat in Tosafos, Mei Menuchos can be very helpful.

For a student who needs English, or for a more advanced student who wants more discussion and more points to think about, Tosafos in English can also be very useful.

The main thing is that the student should know what he is using each sefer for.

A Note to Mechanchim About Tosafos

There is another point that should be mentioned to mechanchim and maggidei shiur.

In the earlier years of mesivta, the main goal of iyun should be to teach the bochur how to understand a sugya clearly from the inside.

This means that the bochur should learn how to understand the Gemara, how to read it with Rashi, how to follow the shakla v’tarya, how to ask basic questions in pshat, and how to see the main point of the sugya.

The goal is not only that he should know the translation of the words. He needs to learn how the sugya works.

This is the foundation.

Once that foundation is strong, Tosafos can add a tremendous amount. But if the foundation is not yet strong, difficult Tosafos can sometimes confuse the bochur more than it helps him.

There are three main reasons for this.

The first reason is the language.

Tosafos is not written in the same style as the Gemara. It has its own Hebrew and Aramaic, its own grammar, and its own sentence structure. A bochur may have begun to read Gemara inside, but that does not mean he is already ready to read Tosafos easily.

The second reason is the shortness.

Tosafos often says a lot in very few words. In some ways, it can be even shorter than the Gemara. The Gemara has Rashi to explain it, but Tosafos itself does not have a Rashi on the side explaining every word and every step.

The third reason is that Tosafos often brings in other sugyos.

Very often, Tosafos is not only explaining the Gemara in front of us. Tosafos may ask a question from another Gemara, sometimes in another masechta, which the bochur has never learned. Then Tosafos may use that other Gemara to explain our Gemara in a new way, sometimes differently than Rashi.

For an advanced learner, this is part of the beauty of Tosafos.

But for a younger bochur, it can be too much at once.

He may still be trying to understand our Gemara with Rashi. He is still learning how to read the sugya, how to follow the shakla v’tarya, and how to understand the basic pshat. If at that point the shiur spends too much time on a difficult Tosafos from another masechta, the bochur may lose the main Gemara itself.

Therefore, in shiur aleph and shiur beis mesivta, the main focus should usually not be on difficult Tosafos.

This does not mean that Tosafos should never be learned at that stage.

If there is a short Tosafos that helps explain the basic pshat of the Gemara, it can be very useful. But long and difficult Tosafos that bring contradictions from other masechtos should usually not be the center of the shiur for younger bochurim.

The main focus at that stage should be the Gemara and Rashi.

The shiur should help the bochurim understand what the Gemara is saying, why the Gemara asks its question, how the answer answers the question, how one part of the sugya connects to another part, and what the basic point of the sugya is.

This is not a low level of learning.

This is iyun.

Iyun means that the bochur is learning to understand the sugya properly. He is not only reading words. He is learning to see what is difficult, what is being answered, what remains unclear, and what the sugya is really teaching.

Good ArtScroll notes can sometimes be helpful for this, because they often raise simple pshat-based questions on the sugya. Other Rishonim, such as the Ritva and the Meiri, can also be helpful when they explain a basic question in pshat.

It is also important to discuss some of the basic halachah that comes out of the sugya.

This helps the bochur see that the sugya is not only an abstract discussion. It is connected to a real halachic reality.

This does not mean that the shiur has to become a full halachah shiur. But some basic connection to halachah can make the sugya more real.

Lomdus also has its place.

A simple lomdishe point can sometimes help the bochur understand the conceptual “why” of the sugya. But it should be used to clarify the Gemara, not to overwhelm the talmid. The point is not to impress the bochur with brilliance. The point is to help him understand the Gemara more deeply.

Once a bochur reaches shiur gimmel mesivta, he can begin learning Tosafos more seriously.

At that stage, he should already have more grounding in Gemara and Rashi. Then he can begin learning how Tosafos connects our sugya to other sugyos in Shas, how Tosafos asks from one place to another, and how Tosafos builds a new understanding of the Gemara.

As is known, the Maharal spoke strongly about not making Tosafos the center of learning for younger students before they have a solid foundation in Gemara itself.

However one understands the exact application, the basic point is important.

Tosafos is called Tosafos because it is an addition.

The addition is precious. But first there has to be something to add to.

Conclusion: Learning Gemara with Seder

The purpose of this kuntres was to give the student a clear way to begin learning Gemara.

Gemara can feel very difficult when it is approached without seder. A student may open the Gemara and see many words, many questions, many answers, and many different ideas, without knowing how they fit together.

But Gemara has a structure.

First, a student needs to understand the Mishnah. He needs to know the background, the case, the question, the ruling, the reason, the chiddush, and the general principle.

Then he can begin to understand what the Gemara is doing. The Gemara explains the Mishnah, clarifies the halachah, develops new cases and ideas, and teaches Aggadah and Yiras Shamayim.

After that, the student can learn to recognize the basic steps of the Gemara: the statement, the question, the answer, the kushya, the terutz, and the raיה.

Once he understands the meaning of the sugya and the shakla v’tarya, he can begin reading the Gemara inside. He can use a Gemara Card, mark the tzuras hadaf, write short translations above difficult words, and slowly train himself to see the sugya inside the words of the Gemara itself.

Then, when he is ready, he can begin learning how to make a leining. He can look over the sugya, learn it line by line, understand how the pieces connect, and then review the whole sugya together.

This is the seder.

A student does not become independent in learning in one day. It takes time, patience, chazarah, and guidance from a rebbi.

But when he learns with seder, the Gemara becomes much clearer.

He begins to see that the Gemara is not just a page of difficult words. It is a living discussion of Torah. It has questions, answers, proofs, difficulties, resolutions, and depth.

And when the student begins to see that structure, he can begin to enter the Gemara himself.

That is one of the greatest gifts a rebbi can give a talmid: not only to explain one sugya to him, but to teach him how to learn

.

You grew up in Westport, Connecticut. What kind of world did you come from?

It’s funny, because people sometimes assume I’m Chabad from birth. I was at a gala recently, and an older Russian art collector came over to me and said, “You live in Crown Heights, right? Your family also lives in Crown Heights?” People see the way I dress now, the way I talk now, the fact that I’m always referencing the Rebbe, and they assume I come from that world.

But no. My family is so secular.

I grew up in Westport, Connecticut, and we knew we were Jewish in the sense It was a Jewishness connected to humor, art, ideas, music, film, and that whole secular creative world — but not really to Torah.Some people did Reform, but mostly it was nothing. Jewishness was there, but it didn’t mean Shabbos, kosher, mitzvos.

Westport is an upper-class town, and it has a very strong Jewish presence. And the world I came from was very connected to the arts. My father was an artist before he became an architect. My grandmother was a painter. My mother was a modern dancer. Around me were people in film, television, music, architecture, design. So being an artist was not weird. It didn’t mean you were lost or irresponsible. That’s what people did. They made things.

And I don’t want to pretend it was all dark or empty. If a young woman at a neo-Chassidic event asks me about my upbringing, I’ll say honestly: it was fun. We were partying, people had beautiful houses, there was a convertible by the beach going to a mansion. The world felt like it was at our fingertips.

But it was also chaotic. There wasn’t a lot of boundary structure in that environment. At the same time, I was given something real. I was given freedom. From when I was young, we were making bands, promoting shows, printing things, booking things, creating an identity and putting it out into the world. Adults around me understood that. They affirmed it.

So later, when I learned Chassidus, I had language for it. It was Tohu energy. Powerful. Very powerful. And I don’t want to destroy that. That energy is a gift. But from a young age, I started feeling that it wasn’t leading anywhere on its own. It needed keilim. It needed Tikkun.

Before Chassidus entered your life, you were already searching. What did that search look like?

It wasn’t like I was looking for Judaism. That’s very important. Judaism was completely veiled from me.

In the world I came from, if someone was spiritually searching, Judaism was the last place he would think to look. You go to India, you go to Buddhism, you go to psychology, you go to art, you go to music. But Judaism? Not really. That was not the association.

For me, the search was happening first through art and music.

In college I studied in the Sonic Arts program at City College. It was music studies, sound production, engineering — a serious program. I don’t emphasize that part of my life now because my focus is painting, but it was important. It was one of the first times I felt what it meant to be rigorous. When something spoke to me, I could apply myself very intensely.

And I was looking. I was reading, painting, listening, thinking. I had this sense that art was not just a career, and not just decoration. It was connected to the inner life. It was a way of finding something in myself.

That is also where the psychologist Jung came in.

I found Jung in college. I’m owning the Jung thing because it happened, and I don’t know what the Eibishter wants from it. But it did happen. I even have a sketch somewhere of a portrait of Jung with one of his quotes.

Later, my mother could tell I was spiritually searching. She’s a sensitive woman, and she found a Jungian analyst near our house. So I started going to him once a week and analyzing my dreams. I did that seriously for eight or nine years.

For me, Jung was not just, “Oh, here is an interesting psychologist.” It became a serious practice. The dreams, the depths, the archetypes — that whole world became a way of trying to make sense of what was happening inside me.

The basic idea that affected me was that a person is not just random. There is something in the psyche that is trying to make the person more whole. Even if a person feels fragmented, the dream is trying to show him something. It is trying to bring different parts of the person into some kind of relationship.

That mattered to me. I had a lot of creativity, a lot of energy, a lot of freedom. But I was trying to understand what it all meant. Where was it going? What was the shape of it?

So before Chassidus, that was the path: art, music, dreams, analysis, the inner life. It was not yet Torah. It was not yet mitzvos. But it was a real search.

How did that search start becoming specifically Jewish?

It happened because the Jewish material started separating itself from everything else.

At first, there were Jewish symbols and Kabbalistic themes around me, but they were mixed together with all kinds of non-Jewish sources.Avodah zara, New Age books, random esoteric material. The non-Jews also took our Kabbalah, so for me it was all confused. I did not yet know how to differentiate.

But then certain things started to hit differently.

Someone once said to me, “My husband is a Sephardi Jew.” I didn’t even know what that meant. I said, “What’s a Sephardi?” I couldn’t spell it.

So I looked it up, and I saw an image of the Rambam. Something about it struck me. I thought he looked like my grandfather on my father’s side. I didn’t know anything.I thought Maybe there was something there.

So I made a painting called Self-Portrait Imagined as Maimonides. It was a real painting, and I exhibited it. But while I was painting it, I also started asking, who is this Rambam? What is this world?

At the same time, I was encountering Kabbalah through Jung and through writers like Gershom Scholem. It was still mixed up. It was not clear yet. But my dreams, my psyche, my whole inner life began responding very strongly to the Jewish material.

At a certain point, even my analyst could not fully follow me there. He was trying to read Gershom Scholem and catch up, but the Jewish piece was becoming too central.

That was the discovery. Not just, “I am Jewish” in the cultural sense. I knew that already. But that my soul was responding to this. The art, the dreams, the symbols, the searching — it was all beginning to point back toward my own people.

Once the Jewish piece became real to you, how did that turn into actually keeping mitzvos?

That is an important question, because a lot of people get interested in Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism and it does not necessarily lead them to mitzvos.

For me, it did.

Part of it was that I already understood, from the work I had been doing, that spirituality cannot just be floating around. A person has to get down into this world. You cannot just become more and more spiritual until you are flying somewhere. That is not the purpose of a human being.

So when I started encountering mitzvos, they made sense to me. If you tell me the body needs a certain kind of food, that there is a way to eat, a way to mark time, a way to put on tefillin, a way to live with Shabbos — that was coherent to me. It was not just an abstract idea. It was spirituality entering the body, entering time, entering ordinary life.

And very quickly I saw that I was encountering something much larger than myself. At first, maybe there was a brief period where I thought, “This is my tradition, this is connected to my soul, this will be good for me.” But it did not stay on that level. Very quickly I felt that if I was being honest and earnest, this was something I had to move toward.

How did Chabad enter the picture?

I found Chabad.org, and I started watching Rabbi Raskin’s classes there. I liked him right away. Part of it, honestly, was that I have a certain feeling for someone who wears nice suits and can speak nicely. But it was more than that.

I watched a Rambam class and saw he had halachah. Then I watched him speak about Kabbalah and Chassidus, and he had that too. I felt, here is someone who can stretch up high and reach down low. He was integrated.

So I emailed him. And that night, at eleven o’clock, he got on the phone with me. Soon I was at his house for Shabbos and Shavuos — my first Shavuos. I got a bar mitzvah. I announced it to everybody there. And boom, boom, boom, he took me in like a son.

I really think that warmth is why I kept growing.

Once I started, it was very fast. I didn’t know Shabbos, kosher, tefillin — and then, in weeks, whatever I could understand and actually do, I did. It was not a slow progression for me. It was more like a light switch.

I was keeping Shabbos to the best of my ability. I was putting on tefillin. I was davening as much as I could. I was taking on boundaries in my life. It was hard and rocky in the beginning, but I wanted it very badly.

I think I also saw the beauty of the structure. Torah tells you to love Hashem and enjoy Shabbos, but there are also the “don’t do’s.” And I saw that the “don’t do’s” were very beautiful. I could see intuitively that the structure was going to be healthy for me. I needed it.

Rabbi Raskin wanted me to go to yeshiva. He could tell that if I was going to commit to this long-term, I needed to sit and learn properly. I was already older, and it was during the pandemic, so it took me some time. But when Tishrei came, I felt I had to be somewhere. I came to Crown Heights, went to Hadar HaTorah, and from doing a Tishrei in Crown Heights, I fell in love more deeply with it.

At a certain point, if you are being honest, you see what has to happen. For me, that was yeshiva.

How did becoming a Chassid change your art?

Right away, when I got into Torah, I saw that Torah would tell an artist to hold back from painting certain things. That itself was a big shift. That was not what I had been taught.

Before that, I was painting Greek myths, archetypes, stories like that. The Jungians love Greek myths, and I was very involved in that world. But then I started moving away from that and toward Tanach, Kabbalah, and eventually Chassidus.

But I don’t want to say that becoming a Chassidic artist means you just illustrate Chassidic ideas. That’s not really what I’m doing.

If someone paints the Rebbe, or illustrates a possuk, or makes a picture of something from Tanya, that can be beautiful and useful. I’m not knocking it. But that is not necessarily the same thing as art in the deeper sense. That can be illustration.

For me, the question is: what does it mean to be a Chassidic artist when you are not only illustrating the Rebbe? What does it mean when your soul is Chassidic, and the painting comes from that?

I think the answer is that I’m not trying to paint something I learned, like a page of Tanya. I’m trying to live something and let it come through. If I’m a Chassid of the Rebbe, and I daven, and I learn Chassidus, and I go to mikvah, and I experience Tishrei, and I dance at Simchas Beis HaShoeivah, then the paintings become an extension of that living.

It’s not that I sit down and say, “Now I’m going to illustrate ratzo v’shov.” But if ratzo v’shov is part of how I understand life, then it may come through. If Chochmah is bittul, and the yud is bittul, and the head becomes like an empty cup filled with golden light, that image can become part of a painting. If Malchus, or the feminine, or the desire to be in the world is something I’m really living with, then that also comes through.

So I’m not illustrating Chassidus. I’m allowing Chassidus to become my life, and the paintings are an extension of that life.

A great artist is an explorer of consciousness. He is trying to be honest about what he is really seeing and feeling inside. So a great Chassidic artist has to do that honestly — but while living a Chassidic life. That is the difference.

The painting is not just a Jewish object placed on a canvas. It is coming from a person whose inner world is being shaped by Torah, mitzvos, the Rebbe, and Chassidus.

What can that kind of art give to a Chassidic community?

I think it can create a space for hisbonenus.

At the gallery, people are not only looking at paintings. They start talking about themselves, about their neshamos, about Torah, about what they learned, about what they are living with.

I saw that very clearly at the show with Rabbi Raskin and Chaya Eliyav’s gallery. The whole thing happened in a very Chabad way. I walked into a grocery store, and Chaya said to me, “Shmuel, when are you going to do a show at my gallery?” I said, “Okay, let’s do it.” Then there were all the practical details, the budget, the sponsor, the flyer, the hanging of the art — the whole thing.

But once the show happened, I saw people integrating around the art.

Someone who did not come from a strong Torah background was standing there asking, “Where are the sefiros in this painting?” Then he is doing a guided meditation with a rav on one of the Hebrew letters and its meaning, and he is moved by it. That is something.

Then there are seminary girls, or frum women, who know Chassidus, but they don’t always have a place where they can speak about it in that way. Suddenly they are standing in front of a painting and saying, “I learned a maamar of the Rebbe on this topic,” or, “Did you ever think of this?” The painting gives them a way into the conversation.

I have also had frum women come to the paintings of Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel, or even to a vase or another feminine symbol, and they feel seen. Sometimes there are tears. They feel acknowledged, empowered, reminded of the purpose of who they are as Jewish women.

That is very important to me.

The gallery can become a place where different kinds of Jews meet each other in a more inward way. A Chabad person, a secular Jew, a Williamsburg guy with peyos, a woman with a tattoo, a seminary girl — people who might not normally have that conversation. But around the art, something opens.

We are not just talking about paint. We are talking about our souls. We are talking about who we are. We are talking about our story.

That is what I mean when I say art can become a kind of communal hisbonenus. It takes something a person has been thinking about or living with, translates it into color, form, and mystery, and then lets people gather around it and be moved together.

The feminine seems to appear often in your work — Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel, Malchus, even symbolic forms like a vessel or a vase. Why is that so central for you?

I think the feminine is very central, but I don’t mean that in a shallow way.

It is not just, “I like painting women,” or something like that. It has to do with the way I understand this generation, and the way I understand Chassidus entering life.

People today want something very real. They want to be seen. They want real relationships. They want emotional honesty. They want their work to mean something. They want their homes to mean something. They don’t only want abstract ideas. They want the idea to enter their actual life.

To me, that is connected to the feminine. It is connected to Malchus. It is connected to embodiment — to the place where something becomes lived.

When I paint Rachel, or Rivkah, or Sarah, I’m not trying to make a nice Jewish image. I’m trying to touch something that is already there in the soul of the Jewish people. There is longing there. There is pain there. There is dignity there. There is hidden power.

I have seen this very clearly with frum women who come to the paintings. Sometimes it is a painting of one of the Imahos, and sometimes it is even a vase, or some form that carries a feminine presence. They understand it right away. They feel seen. They feel acknowledged. Sometimes they are moved in a very deep way, because the painting reminds them that what they are doing, and who they are, has a spiritual purpose.

That means a lot to me.

At the same time, I don’t think honoring the feminine means everything becomes soft and without structure. It is the opposite. If you want the feminine to be revealed in a holy way, you need strong structure. You need boundaries. You need stability. You need a real masculine side also — not in a crude way, but in the sense of being dependable, giving form, creating safety.

Without that, the feminine does not really get honored. It just becomes chaos.

So for me, the feminine is not a side topic. It is part of the whole question of Tohu and Tikkun. There is tremendous feeling, tremendous life, tremendous longing. The question is: can it enter a vessel? Can it become dignified? Can it become holy? Can it become part of a life of Torah and mitzvos?

That is a lot of what I am trying to paint.

You speak about art as something that opens people up. But isn’t there also a danger in that?

Yes. There is a danger.

If art is real, it is not always calming. It is not always decorative. Sometimes it disturbs you. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. I mean it disturbs your equilibrium. It touches something that you may not have wanted to touch.

Some of my earlier paintings, especially around the time I was doing teshuvah, have that disturbing quality. I was trying to be honest about what I saw in the world, and what I felt in the world, and to bring that into images from Tanach.

Take Rachel, for example. When I paint Rachel weeping, I’m not just making a nice picture of a Jewish mother. I’m taking experiences of pain, things I felt and saw in the lives of the daughters of Israel, and I’m putting that into the form of Rachel. There is longing there. There is exile there. There is the pain of the Shechinah there.

And we have to be honest: isn’t Tisha B’Av disturbing? Isn’t galus disturbing? Isn’t the exile of the Shechinah disturbing? So if a painting touches that, it may also be disturbing.

But that is exactly why art has to be handled with responsibility.

I understand why religious people can be suspicious of art. Art can open a can of worms. It can open parts of the person that are not simple. Pain, desire, longing, confusion, imagination — these are powerful things. You can’t just say, “I’m an artist, so everything I express is holy.” That is not true.

A person has to have keilim.

In psychology also, if someone wants to go very deep, a serious analyst may say, “You’re not ready for that.” Not everyone can handle opening everything at once. Artists can become unstable. People can get lost in what they uncover.

So yes, there is voltage there. And I think I can handle a lot of voltage because I did a lot of inner work. I had the privilege to do that. I have strong capacitors, so to speak. I can go into difficult places and still keep my feet on the ground.

But I don’t think that gives an artist permission to be reckless.

For me, the mitzvos are higher than the art. That is very important. I don’t want to do anything that would take me away from my real purpose. So there is an editorial process. I ask. I check with a rav. I’m not just fully doing whatever I want.

Being an artist means you are exploring consciousness, but it does not mean you have no boundaries. It does not mean you can use danger as an excuse. The whole point is the opposite: to take something powerful and give it a vessel.

That is the same question again — Tohu and Tikkun. Can you touch real energy without being destroyed by it? Can you reveal something painful without making it chaotic? Can the painting disturb a person, but in a way that leads him deeper into truth, not away from it?

That is the responsibility.

What would you tell a young Jewish artist who thinks he has talent? Where should he start?

Honestly? Talk to other artists.

And if they are older than you, listen to them. Really listen. Chabad is amazing, but if you come from a background where you were not exposed to art, then you have to learn. You have to read. You have to go look at art. You have to speak to people who actually understand the language.

If a baal teshuvah comes into the community, you tell him, “Okay, you have to learn Kitzur Shulchan Aruch. You have to learn the basics.” Art also has basics. It has a history. It has a language. It has different forms. You can’t just say, “I’m talented,” and then expect to be taken seriously.

I would also tell him to think carefully about what he actually wants.

Maybe you want graphic design. Maybe you want illustration. Maybe you want to draw cartoons. Maybe you want classical drawing, where someone can say, “This is technically good.” All of that is fine. There is nothing wrong with it. But it is not all the same thing.

Art, in the deeper sense, is something else. It asks more from you. It may not even be what every talented person should do.

I don’t know that everyone has to take on what I had to take on. I became an artist because I was brought up in a particular family, in a particular world, with certain connections, certain exposures, certain inner questions. I have to deal with that. Maybe someone else does not.

But if you do want to paint, then really look at color.

Not just, “This is blue, this is red.” Sit with color. Look at it. Feel it. Get embodied and present to it. If you are painting, ultimately you are looking at color on a canvas. There is Elokus in that too.

So my advice is: don’t be shallow about it. Don’t reduce art to “I can draw well,” or “I can make a nice Jewish image.” Learn the medium. Learn the history. Speak to artists. Ask yourself what you are really after. And then, if you are going to do it, do it with seriousness, with humility, and with yiras Shamayim.

You also work in video and social media. How do you think about that world?

Look, people like to say social media is a waste of time, and a lot of it is. I’m not going to argue with that.

But you also have to ask: why is it so powerful? Why are people looking at images all day? Why does a short video affect people?

We are a textual people. Yidden are connected to sefarim, to words, to learning. But the human psyche is also very imagistic. A child understands images before he understands complicated language. Dreams usually come in images. If a person sees something, even for a second, it can make an impression.

So when you have a technology that produces images constantly, that is powerful. The question is not whether it is powerful. The question is what you are doing with that power.

With Rabbi Raskin, it is simple. He is devoted to shlichus. If he has an idea from the Rebbe, or an idea in Torah, and by putting it into a short video it can reach many more people, then why wouldn’t you use that? It is a way of spreading something.

But the main thing is that there has to be real value. People ask me sometimes, “What is the secret? How did this get so many views?” The secret is that the person actually has something to offer. Rabbi Raskin has been learning, teaching, speaking, and doing shlichus for decades. My father has been practicing architecture for forty years. When they speak, there is something there.

Social media can package that. It can carry it. It can help it travel. But it cannot create depth where there is no depth.

If a person does not have something real to say, then he starts relying on tricks. Hacks. Trends. What will get attention? What will make people react? And that is where it becomes dangerous, because then the tool starts shaping the person. You go in not knowing exactly who you are, and you come out knowing even less.

So I don’t think everyone needs to be posting. Sometimes people come to me and ask about social media, and the real question is: will this move the needle? Will it help your shlichus, your business, your community, your message? If yes, then good. If not, then why are you doing it?

And even when it is useful, you need restraint.

If I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is start scrolling, that is not good. I need to say Modeh Ani. I need to daven. I need to learn something. I need to eat breakfast. I need to enter the day like a person, not like someone being pulled by a machine.

For me, video and social media are part of my parnassah, and they are also creative tools. I like video. I like technology. I like helping an idea come into a form people can receive. But it has to stay a medium. It cannot become the identity.

That is really the same point again. There is a lot of energy here. A lot of power. The question is whether it has keilim.

Last time, we discussed at length why figures like Tucker Carlson and others on the Christian right are becoming increasingly antisemitic.

We were not merely asking whether these figures are antisemitic, or collecting examples of antisemitic statements. We were trying to understand why this particular form of antisemitism is emerging specifically from the Christian right, and what it reveals about the religious and psychological world from which it comes.

Today, I would like to turn to the other side of the political spectrum and discuss antisemitism on the left.

Here, however, the antisemitism expresses itself very differently.

On the left, antisemitism does not usually present itself openly as hatred of Jews. Instead, it presents itself primarily as hostility toward Israel. But even that does not fully describe it. The central claim is not merely that Israel has made bad decisions, that a particular Israeli government has acted wrongly, or even that Israel is too aggressive in defending itself.

The claim is much deeper.

The claim is that Israel itself is immoral.

Israel is described not merely as mistaken, but as colonialist, racist, oppressive, and fundamentally unjust. Its very existence is increasingly presented as a moral crime.

That raises an important question.

Why has antisemitism on the left taken this particular form? Why does the hatred of the Jew now express itself through the accusation that the Jewish state is uniquely immoral? Why is Israel not merely criticized, as every country is criticized, but turned into a symbol of everything that the modern left considers evil?

That is what I would like to explore today.

At the same time, I would also like to return to some of the Torah sources that I mentioned only briefly in the previous discussion. Last time, I used those sources mainly to explain the antisemitism of the Christian right. But the sources themselves have a much broader background, and I think that by examining them more carefully, we may be able to understand not only the antisemitism of the right, but also the very different form of antisemitism that has emerged on the left.

In order to understand this, we first need to return to the basic nature of antisemitism.

Last time, we discussed the Gemara’s description of Haman and Achashverosh through the image of a man who has a hole in his field and another man who has a mound of earth.

Haman is the man with the hole.

Something is missing at the center of his identity. He has wealth, power, children, honor, and the favor of the king. The entire empire bows before him. Yet the moment one Jew refuses to bow, everything else suddenly becomes worthless.

Haman himself says:

וְכָל־זֶה אֵינֶנּוּ שֹׁוֶה לִי בְּכָל־עֵת אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי רֹאֶה אֶת־מָרְדֳּכַי הַיְּהוּדִי יוֹשֵׁב בְּשַׁעַר הַמֶּלֶךְ

“And all of this is worth nothing to me whenever I see Mordechai the Jew sitting at the king’s gate.”

Mordechai does not create the hole within Haman. He reveals it.

Haman already knows, somewhere within himself, that all his power and honor have not given him a real sense of worth. Mordechai’s refusal to bow simply brings that truth to the surface.

Achashverosh also has a hole.

But the difference is that Achashverosh does not see it.

From Achashverosh’s perspective, there is nothing missing from his life. He has wealth, power, women, honor, pleasure, and success. Whatever emptiness may exist within him has been completely covered by physical abundance.

This is the meaning of the enormous feast at the beginning of the Megillah. Achashverosh does not merely throw a party. For 180 days, he displays the wealth and glory of his kingdom. There is gold, silver, expensive vessels, endless wine, and a complete absence of restraint.

The same is true of his desire for women. Achashverosh attempts to fill every part of his existence with physical pleasure.

Haman feels the hole and desperately tries to fill it with recognition.

Achashverosh has covered the hole so completely that he no longer believes it exists.

That is why Achashverosh sees the mound.

The Jew does not appear to Achashverosh as someone who possesses an answer to a problem within him. As far as Achashverosh is concerned, there is no problem. His life is already full.

The Jew therefore appears to him as something extra.

The Jewish people represent the idea that a successful physical life is not yet a complete life. A person can possess wealth, power, pleasure, and comfort and still be missing the central purpose for which he exists.

But Achashverosh does not believe that he is missing anything. Therefore, he does not see Judaism as providing something essential. He sees it as an unnecessary addition—something old that no longer serves a purpose.

And in a certain sense, this resembles the way many liberals today view religion.

Religion is not necessarily seen as evil. It may be respected as a tradition, a culture, or something that gives certain people comfort.

But it is often seen as antiquated.

The central goals of life are to earn a living, become successful, build a comfortable life, and be a decent person. Religion may be added to that life as a personal preference, but it is not viewed as essential to what life itself is about.

It is not necessarily bad.

It is simply extra.

But this raises an obvious question.

If the Jew is truly only extra, why does Achashverosh care whether he remains in the field?

There are many things in life that a person considers unnecessary. He may ignore them, dismiss them, or simply live without them. He does not ordinarily need to remove them.

The fact that the mound bothers Achashverosh suggests that something deeper is taking place.

Achashverosh may not consciously see the hole within himself. He may genuinely believe that wealth, pleasure, power, and success have given him everything he needs.

But the Jew represents the possibility that they have not.

The Jew’s very existence says that physical success is not the same thing as a complete life. A person can possess comfort, pleasure, honor, and wealth, and still be missing the purpose for which he was created.

Achashverosh does not want to hear that message. More importantly, he does not want to recognize that the message affects him.

And therefore, he calls the Jew extra.

The Jew is extra because Achashverosh believes he has no need for him. But the Jew is disturbing because, somewhere beneath the surface, his presence reminds Achashverosh that the feast may not be enough after all.

So too with many modern liberals.

On the conscious level, religion appears unnecessary. The important thing is to earn a good living, become successful, enjoy life, and behave like a decent person.

Religion may still be respected as a tradition, a culture, or something that gives people comfort. But it is no longer seen as essential.

Yet the continued existence of the religious Jew creates a certain discomfort.

Why?

Because the Jew does not merely live differently. His very existence makes a claim.

He says that success is not enough. Pleasure is not enough. Man does not create the ultimate standard of right and wrong. He is answerable to God.

This was one of the great distinctions between Judaism and the pagan world.

In the pagan world, power, nature, appetite, and the state could become sacred. The ruler could speak in the name of the gods, and at times even present himself as divine.

Judaism declared that God stands above the king and above the state. Power does not create morality. Even the strongest ruler remains subject to a law that he did not write.

This is why the Jew has so often disturbed tyrants.

A tyrant wants the state, the race, the revolution, or the ruler himself to become the highest authority. The Jew represents a limit that human power cannot erase.

This helps explain the hatred of Jews found in regimes such as those of Hitler, yimach shemo, and Stalin. Their ideologies were very different, but both demanded submission to a human political power that claimed absolute authority.

The Jew represented Sinai.

Of course, modern liberalism is not Nazism or Stalinism.

But a quieter form of the same discomfort can emerge whenever a person believes that modern life is already complete without anything above it.

The liberal may consciously dismiss religion as antiquated and unnecessary. But the religious Jew reminds him that career, comfort, pleasure, and social respectability may not be enough.

The Jew appears extra because the liberal believes he has no need for him.

Yet the Jew remains disturbing because his presence suggests that something is still missing.

How, then, does the modern liberal defend himself against what the Jew represents?

He does so through antisemitism—but through a very particular form of antisemitism.

He accuses the Jew of being immoral.

The religious Jew, simply by continuing to exist, represents the claim that morality is not whatever contemporary society decides it should be. There is a law above man, and man is answerable to it.

This creates an accusation, even when the Jew has said nothing personally to him. The Jew’s existence suggests that the liberal’s understanding of morality may be incomplete—that success, pleasure, compassion, and social respectability are not enough if morality itself remains subject to human desire.

The liberal responds by reversing the accusation.

The Jew does not expose my moral emptiness. The Jew is immoral.

And Israel becomes the perfect vehicle for making that claim.

Israel kills innocent civilians. Israel oppresses the Palestinians. Israel is colonialist, racist, apartheid, or genocidal. The exact language may change, but the central accusation remains the same: the Jewish state is not merely mistaken. It is morally corrupt.

This helps explain why Israel’s alleged oppression receives an intensity of attention that the oppression committed by many other nations does not receive.

The point is not simply that liberals care deeply about Palestinian suffering. Many undoubtedly do. Nor does it mean that every criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Israel, like every country, can act wrongly and can be criticized.

The question is why Israel so often becomes the supreme moral crime—the country whose wrongdoing appears uniquely revealing, while far greater brutality elsewhere produces only passing concern.

The answer is that Israel serves an ideological purpose.

If the Jewish state can be shown to be fundamentally immoral, then the moral claim represented by the Jew can be dismissed. The Jew no longer stands as the bearer of Sinai, reminding the world of a morality beyond human power. He becomes a hypocrite: a people that speaks in the language of morality while practicing oppression.

Israel’s alleged immorality therefore becomes more important than the oppression of almost any other nation because it is used as proof that the entire Jewish moral claim was fraudulent from the beginning.

The accusation is a form of projection.

The Jew’s existence raises the possibility that modern secular morality is missing something. The liberal answers by insisting that it is the Jew who has failed morally.

This pattern of projection is not unique to modern liberalism.

A similar process can be seen in Christianity.

The accusation is different because the hole is different. The liberal accuses the Jew of being immoral because the Jew exposes a weakness within his morality. Christianity accused the Jew of being spiritually evil because Judaism exposed a hole within the Christian religion itself.

The continued existence of Judaism does not merely present Christianity with an intellectual disagreement. Judaism and Sinai expose a hole in the Christian religion—and by exposing the hole in the religion, they expose an emptiness within the Christian believer.

Christianity does not present itself as a religion disconnected from Judaism. It claims to be Judaism’s fulfillment.

It takes the Torah, the prophets, the Jewish idea of Mashiach, and the promises of redemption, and claims that all of them were fulfilled through Jesus. According to Christianity, once Jesus arrived, the earlier covenant had reached its purpose.

But the Jew remains.

He continues to stand at Sinai. He continues to believe that the Torah is eternal, to observe its commandments, and to await the coming of Mashiach.

The Jew is the bearer of the very covenant that Christianity claims to have fulfilled. He reads the prophets whose promises Christianity claims were realized. Yet he continues to say that those promises have not been fulfilled.

Mashiach has not yet come.

The world has not yet reached redemption.

The covenant was not replaced.

The Torah was not abolished.

Jesus did not accomplish what Mashiach is supposed to accomplish.

The Jew therefore challenges Christianity simply by continuing to exist as a Jew. He does not need to stand outside a church and argue. His loyalty to Sinai already makes the argument.

If Christianity had truly fulfilled Judaism, why did the people of Sinai remain at Sinai?

If Jesus was truly the promised Mashiach, why did the people who introduced the idea of Mashiach to the world continue to await someone else?

Historically, this placed Christianity in an impossible position.

Either the Jew was wrong, or Christianity was.

The Jew could not simply be accepted as an honest religious dissenter. If he was correct in rejecting Jesus, then Jesus was not the true Mashiach, and Christianity had not fulfilled Judaism. It had replaced it.

More precisely, Christianity had taken the Jewish promises concerning Mashiach and placed them upon someone who had not fulfilled them. In that sense, Jesus and the religion built around him became “Antichrist”—not necessarily in the technical Christian meaning of the term, but in the simpler sense of something standing against the true Mashiach by taking his place.

This is the accusation Judaism presents to Christianity simply by remaining alive.

Christianity could not accept that possibility, because the hole it revealed was not limited to one doctrine. If Jesus was not Mashiach, then the religious world through which the Christian understood God, redemption, and his own salvation had been built around a false claim.

The hole in the religion therefore became a hole within the believer himself.

And so, just as the modern liberal reverses the moral accusation, Christianity reversed the theological accusation.

The Jew became the Antichrist.

The Jew became allied with the devil.

The Jew became the enemy of God and redemption.

The very people whose continued existence raised the possibility that Christianity stood against the true Mashiach were accused of standing against Christ.

This was not merely a random insult. It was the same form of projection.

Judaism revealed the possibility that Christianity had substituted a false messianic claim for the true Mashiach. Christianity responded by placing that falsehood onto the Jew.

Something of this ancient theological discomfort still exists within parts of the Christian far right today. The religious Jew continues to represent Sinai, and Sinai continues to deny that Christianity has replaced Judaism.

But this is no longer necessarily the main source of the hatred.

As we discussed in the previous article, the central hole within today’s far-right antisemite is often more emotional than theological. He feels humiliated, uprooted, spiritually empty, and deprived of the religious identity and certainty for which he longs.

He turns toward Christianity as a source of strength, rootedness, and meaning. But often, what he possesses is more of a Christian identity than a deeply lived religious life.

Then he encounters the Jew.

The Jew possesses the continuity, rootedness, and lived connection to God that he himself is searching for. Judaism enters the Jew’s food, clothing, family, calendar, and daily life. It is not merely a political identity or a slogan about restoring civilization.

That creates jealousy.

But this jealousy does not need to invent a new language in which to express itself.

Christian history has already provided one.

The old accusations against the Jew—the Jew as demonic, subversive, opposed to Christ, and secretly aligned with evil—become the vessel through which the newer jealousy is expressed.

Some of the old theological discomfort remains. Some of the old ideology may still be believed directly. But much of the emotional force comes from the more personal wound we discussed before.

The old theology provides the language.

The modern wound supplies the emotional force.

And the jealousy pours itself into a vessel that Christian antisemitism has spent centuries preparing.

This also explains why the Christian far right can move so easily from attacking Israel to attacking the religious Jew.

As we discussed, the religious Jew exposes the hole within the far-right Christian. He reveals the difference between speaking about religion and actually allowing religion to govern one’s life.

At the same time, Judaism touches the older theological wound within Christianity itself. And centuries of Christian antisemitism have already taught him how to interpret the Jew who makes him uncomfortable.

The Jew is not merely mistaken.

He is sinister.

He possesses hidden power.

He influences rulers, controls governments, and directs events from behind the scenes.

This older belief in secret Jewish power is important, because it allows the far-right antisemite to connect the religious Jew to the actions of Israel.

Israel is accused of killing innocent civilians, oppressing Palestinians, and behaving with extraordinary cruelty. But in his mind, Israel is not acting alone. Behind Israel stands a wider Jewish power that also controls American leaders and guarantees American support.

This is where groups such as Chabad enter the conspiracy.

Chabad is not directing Israeli military policy. A Chabad chassid in America is not deciding which targets the Israeli army strikes. But once someone already believes that religious Jews possess hidden control over politicians and world events, he can easily imagine that Chabad controls the American government and that America, in turn, enables everything Israel does.

The conspiracy theory therefore creates the connection.

Israel commits the alleged moral crime.

Religious Jews are imagined as the hidden power controlling Israel and its American supporters.

Israel’s alleged immorality can then be placed onto the religious Jew himself.

And this completes the projection.

The religious Jew originally exposes the moral and spiritual hole within the far-right Christian. He reveals a seriousness and submission to God that the Christian claims to admire but has not fully absorbed.

The Christian responds by accusing that same religious Jew of secretly standing behind Israel’s cruelty.

In other words:

The Jew does not reveal my moral emptiness.

The Jew is the hidden source of moral evil.

The older Christian belief in secret Jewish power gives the far-right antisemite a way to connect his jealousy of the religious Jew with his moral accusations against Israel.

Israel supplies the accusation of immorality.

The conspiracy theory allows him to place that immorality onto the religious Jew.

The very Jew whose religious life exposes what is missing within him is transformed into the secret force behind everything he considers corrupt.

What, then, should we take from all of this?

Perhaps the most practical lesson concerns how Jews should respond to hostile media and public accusations.

Our response must contain two very different elements.

First, we must understand that antisemitism is not always a rational response to something Jews have done. Often, the accusation is itself part of the sickness we have been describing.

When the Jew is accused of controlling governments, directing world events, deliberately murdering children, or embodying some unique form of evil, it is usually a mistake to believe that one more explanation will resolve the matter.

The accusation did not begin with the facts.

It began with the need to make the Jew guilty.

That does not mean that we should never correct a falsehood. At times, the record must be corrected, particularly for the sake of honest people who are watching. But we should not confuse correcting the record with persuading the antisemite. A person who needs the Jew to be immoral will generally reinterpret every new fact as further evidence of Jewish deception.

There is no purely rational answer to an accusation whose source is not rational.

But there is a second side to this as well.

The existence of antisemitism does not give us permission to ignore genuine wrongdoing.

Precisely because accusations against Jews and Israel are magnified so quickly, anything truly immoral will not remain a small or private matter. It will be seized upon, publicized, and transformed into evidence against the Jewish people as a whole.

That reaction may be unfair. The same standard may not be applied to anyone else. But that does not make the original wrongdoing acceptable.

We therefore need to distinguish very carefully between two questions.

The first question is: Is the accusation being made honestly and proportionately?

Often, the answer will be no.

But the second question is: Did something happen that we ourselves know was wrong?

If the answer to that question is yes, then pointing to the antisemitism of the accuser is not enough. We have an obligation to correct what is wrong—not because the media demands it, but because morality demands it.

Our response must therefore be twofold.

We should not exhaust ourselves trying to satisfy people whose hostility comes from a deeper need to condemn the Jew.

But neither should we use their antisemitism as a shield against honest self-examination.

False accusations must be recognized for what they are.

Real wrongdoing must be prevented and corrected for what it is.

We cannot control the sickness through which others view us. But we can ensure that we do not hand that sickness something real upon which to feed.

One of the strangest political developments of the past year has taken place on the religious right.

For years, religious conservatives stood among Israel’s strongest supporters. Most hostility toward Israel came from the left. That clear division is now breaking down.

A growing number of influential voices on the right — including some who speak openly in the language of faith and tradition — have begun promoting antisemitic ideas. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are the most visible examples. But the form this antisemitism has taken is more striking than its appearance.

These attacks often single out religious Jews.

Tucker Carlson recently claimed that Chabad helped push America into war with Iran as part of a plan to rebuild the Third Beis Hamikdash. He presented Chabad not as shluchim teaching Torah and serving Jews, but as a hidden force controlling American policy. That marks a real shift.

For much of modern history, the antisemite feared the Jew who had entered secular society — the Jew in government, business, the universities, or the media. The religious Jew seemed backward and powerless. He belonged to the past. People might mock him, but they rarely cast him as the secret architect of the future.

Now the religious Jew stands at the center of the conspiracy. The Jew who openly believes in Torah, Mashiach, and the coming Geulah is no longer dismissed as a figure from the past. He is described as a dangerous force secretly shaping the future.

Why has antisemitism begun to grow inside parts of the religious right? And why does so much of it target Jews who remain openly religious?

To understand what is happening, we can look back at the first great antisemite described in Tanach: Haman.

Haman’s Hole

The Gemara in Maseches Megillah gives a mashal for Haman and Achashverosh. One man had a pile of dirt in his field. Another man had a hole and wanted to buy the dirt to fill it. When he offered payment, the owner told him, “Take it. I have no need for it.”

So too, Haman offered Achashverosh money in exchange for permission to destroy the Jewish people. Achashverosh was willing to hand them over without taking the money.

The mashal does not simply teach that Achashverosh also hated Jews. Chazal already knew that non-Jewish rulers could hate the Jewish people. The mashal therefore points to something deeper. Haman and Achashverosh hated the Jews for different reasons.

Achashverosh saw the Jewish people as something unwanted — like a pile of dirt in his field, an obstacle he was happy to remove. Haman’s hatred was different. He did not merely want the Jews removed. He needed them destroyed. He was the man with the hole.

Today I want to focus on Haman. What was the hole inside him? And why did the existence of Mordechai the Jew make him feel it so sharply?

The Man Who Had Everything

Haman lacked nothing externally. He was wealthy and powerful. He had a large family and stood above every other officer in the kingdom. Everyone who entered the king’s gate was commanded to bow before him.

Yet when one Jew refused to bow, none of it mattered. Haman said so himself:

וְכָל־זֶה אֵינֶנּוּ שֹׁוֶה לִי בְּכָל־עֵת אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי רֹאֶה אֶת־מָרְדֳּכַי הַיְּהוּדִי יוֹשֵׁב בְּשַׁעַר הַמֶּלֶךְ

“And all of this is worth nothing to me whenever I see Mordechai the Jew sitting at the king’s gate” (Esther 5:13).

Haman did not claim that Mordechai ruined his life or threatened his position. Mordechai had no army and no political movement. At that stage he was not even openly attacking Haman. He simply refused to bow. That single refusal made everything else feel worthless.

Haman’s honor rested on nothing inside himself. It depended entirely on the people around him confirming his greatness. As long as everyone bowed, he could believe he was important. The moment one person remained standing, the entire structure collapsed.

Mordechai did not create Haman’s emptiness. He revealed it.

Haman had built his entire identity around power, recognition, and submission. He needed others to bow because he had nothing within himself that could give him a stable sense of worth. The more honor he received, the more he needed. The hole could never be filled.

This is why Haman did not merely want Mordechai punished. If one government official disobeys a royal command, the normal response is to arrest him. Haman instead sought to destroy every Jew in the kingdom.

The Megillah explains why:

וַיַּגִּידוּ לוֹ אֶת־עַם מָרְדֳּכָי

“They told him the nation of Mordechai” (Esther 3:6).

Mordechai would not bow because he belonged to something beyond Haman. His identity did not come from the king’s gate or the approval of the surrounding culture. It came from his connection to Hashem and to the Jewish people. That is why the Megillah repeatedly calls him מָרְדֳּכַי הַיְּהוּדִי — Mordechai the Jew.

Mordechai possessed what Haman lacked. Haman had status but no inner foundation. Mordechai had lost his land, his Beis Hamikdash, and his political independence. He lived in exile under a foreign king. Yet he still knew who he was.

Haman therefore could not dismiss Mordechai as one stubborn individual. Mordechai represented the existence of a people who could live inside the empire without receiving their deepest identity from the empire. They could respect the king without worshipping him. They could participate in society without allowing society to define the ultimate meaning of their lives.

For someone like Haman, that was intolerable. The Jew did not merely refuse to fill Haman’s hole. The Jew demonstrated that a human being did not need to live with such a hole in the first place.

Religion Without Faith

This may also explain something strange about Haman. He is not a secular figure in the modern sense. He lives in a deeply religious world. He believes in spiritual forces. He casts lots. He speaks about destiny. His wife and advisers understand Mordechai’s Jewish identity as possessing spiritual significance.

Haman has religion. But he does not have faith.

His religion does not lead him to submit himself to something greater. Instead, it becomes another tool through which he tries to establish his own greatness. He wants ceremony. He wants hierarchy. He wants everyone to know his place. Above all, he wants people to bow.

This is religion emptied of its inner content. True religion tells a person that he is not God. Haman’s religion tells everyone else that Haman must be treated as though he were.

That is why Mordechai threatens him. Mordechai’s refusal exposes the difference between serving God and using God. Haman speaks the language of fate, tradition, hierarchy, and sacred order. Beneath all of it stands a terrified human being trying to cover an empty pit. The more frightened he becomes, the more enemies he needs. Eventually he looks at the Jewish people and concludes: They are the reason I cannot feel whole.

The Hole in the Religious Right

The story of Haman belongs to a very different world, yet the pattern it reveals is not confined to ancient Persia.

The same pattern appears in parts of the far right today.

We live in a generation often described as postmodern. Religious values are still under attack. But the deeper problem is no longer simply the rejection of one set of values and the adoption of another. The deeper problem is emptiness. Life no longer seems to possess clear meaning. The traditional structures through which people once understood themselves — family, religion, community, nation — have been badly weakened.

Many people were taught what to reject. They were never given anything substantial with which to replace it.

This helps explain why figures such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens appear drawn to Catholicism. Catholicism represents tradition. It possesses ancient rituals, authority, hierarchy, beauty, and a connection to the past. To someone living in a world that feels rootless, all of this can seem attractive.

Yet there is an important difference between being attracted to religion and actually becoming religious. To become religious does not merely mean admiring tradition. It means submitting yourself to God. It means accepting that truth is not created by your own feelings. It means allowing your life to be commanded by something outside yourself.

Many people on the religious right are deeply attracted to the idea of religion. They enjoy speaking about Christian civilization, traditional values, and the failures of liberalism. Much of their criticism of liberalism is valid. Liberal culture did help weaken many of the institutions that once gave society stability and meaning.

But criticizing the destruction is not the same as rebuilding what was destroyed. Many of these people are not truly prepared to give up modernity. They still want its freedom, its individualism, and its refusal to place real demands upon the self. They want religion to give them identity. They do not necessarily want religion to command them.

Religion therefore becomes something placed over the hole. It gives the appearance of tradition. It offers language, symbols, and enemies. But it does not necessarily fill the emptiness underneath.

And then they see the religious Jew. More specifically, they see Chabad.

The Chabad Jew lives in the modern world. He uses technology. He travels. He speaks to people from every background. He establishes institutions in the center of modern cities. Yet he does not receive his identity from the modern world. He believes in Torah. He believes in mitzvos. He believes in Mashiach and Geulah. He does not feel embarrassed that his life is built around obligations the modern world does not understand.

He is modern in the sense that he lives fully in the modern world. But he has not bowed to it.

This is precisely what makes him disturbing. The religious Jew reveals the difference between possessing the appearance of religion and actually living within a religious identity. He reveals that tradition does not need to function merely as an aesthetic, a political weapon, or a way of expressing anger at liberals. It can actually govern a person’s life.

Once that becomes visible, the religion of the far right can begin to look like what it really is: something covering the hole rather than filling it. That is why the religious Jew produces such anger. He did not create the emptiness. He revealed it.

Like Mordechai standing before Haman, he reminds the person with the hole that all the symbols, rhetoric, and public displays of tradition have still not given him what he is looking for. Rather than asking why his own religion has failed to fill the hole, he begins to blame the Jew who has exposed it. And rather than attempting to build a real identity of his own, he decides that the person who possesses one must be destroyed.

What Can We Do?

What, then, can we do practically?

The first answer appears in the Purim story itself. When Haman’s decree was issued, the salvation came through the Jewish people gathering together, fasting, davening, and resubmitting themselves to Hashem. The answer to Haman was not for the Jew to become less Jewish. It was for the Jew to become more deeply connected to Hashem.

That remains the primary answer. When the Jewish people connect themselves to Hashem, Hashem protects them.

Yet there is also another point worth noting.

Ironically, the more the Jew fills his own hole, the less antisemitism there may be.

At first this seems difficult to understand. We have just explained that Mordechai’s fullness was precisely what made Haman so angry. Haman saw in Mordechai a person who possessed an identity that Haman himself lacked.

But the Jew’s fullness does not have to remain inside the Jew. It can overflow.

When a Jew is truly filled with Torah, faith, and an awareness of Hashem, that fullness can affect the people around him. They no longer experience the Jew only as the person who possesses what they lack. They themselves begin to become a little more full.

This may be part of the meaning of the Rebbe’s emphasis on teaching the Sheva Mitzvos Bnei Noach. Certainly the Sheva Mitzvos are important because non-Jews themselves are commanded to keep them. But the Rebbe also connected them with the need to create a stable society.

A society that recognizes Hashem is not only more moral. It is also less empty. A person who knows that the world has a Creator, that life has a purpose, and that he has a responsibility to Hashem does not live with the same inner hole. He is therefore less likely to become angry, restless, and consumed with the need to find someone else to blame. And very often, the person he would otherwise blame is the Jew.

The Sheva Mitzvos teach the non-Jew that he too has a relationship with Hashem. He too has mitzvos and a purpose. The Jew no longer appears only as the person who possesses meaning while everyone else stands outside. He becomes the person who brings meaning to others.

We can see something of this in the difference between evangelical Christians and the new antisemitic religious right. I do not mean that evangelical theology is correct, or that every evangelical Christian truly loves Jews. But something psychologically important has taken place. Evangelicals have taken the Jewish people, who could have remained a painful reminder of what they lack, and placed them inside their own story of redemption. They see the return of the Jewish people to Eretz Yisrael as connected to the coming of their Messiah. The Jew is no longer experienced only as the person whose existence exposes what is missing. He is experienced as someone connected to the fulfillment of what they are waiting for.

The understanding of the Messiah is not ours. But the psychological move is worth noticing. The Jew has been transformed, in their eyes, from a source of disturbance into a source of hope. That shift does not eliminate every tension, but it changes the emotional posture.

When we spread the Sheva Mitzvos Bnei Noach, we are doing something similar in our own way. We are not telling the non-Jew that he must become Jewish. We are telling him that Hashem created him as well, gave him mitzvos, and gave his life a purpose. In other words, we are beginning to fill his hole rather than leaving him to experience the Jew only as the person who possesses what he lacks.

This is not something separate. When a Jew deepens his connection to Hashem, that connection does not remain inside him alone. It extends outward. Teaching the Sheva Mitzvos is one of the main ways this extension takes place. The protection of the Jewish people comes from their own connection to Hashem. But when that connection is genuine, it does not stay private. It affects the world around it.

The practical answer to antisemitism is therefore not for the Jew to hide his fullness. It is for him to become more full — and then to allow that fullness to overflow into the world around him.