A prominent New Jersey rabbi sexually assaulted a single mom — and even sent her a pic of his genitals, admitting, “Not great. But works” — before launching a cyber-smear campaign against her, court papers allege.
Married Rabbi Avraham Appel — who runs an elite rabbinical seminary in the tight-knit Lakewood Orthodox community — used “his position as a rabbi, mentor, and trusted community leader to sexually assault and exploit” mom-of-two Israeli immigrant Miryam Malachi for months, according the explosive Ocean County lawsuit.
Malachi, then a single mom, had approached Appel for financial help with daycare bills “during a period of acute financial distress” in 2020, says her suit filed earlier this year in Ocean County Civil Court.
Appel helped her financially, the lawsuit says. But things took a dark turn in June 2022, when Appel sexually assaulted her as she was home alone, court documents allege.
Appel “forced himself” on Malachi and “took sexual advantage of her” multiple times afterward, the suit claims.
He also sent her lewd texts with “incredibly crude and graphic sexual content,” including descriptions of oral sex, his desire to “squeeze your breasts” and an image of his genitals, the lawsuit says.
Appel wrote under the genitals image, “Not great. But works,” court documents claim.
When Malachi finally threatened to sue last fall, a vicious smear website popped up calling her “A DANGER TO KLAL YISROEL” — roughly meaning a threat to all Jewish people, her suit says.
Malachi claims Appel’s allies even plastered defamatory flyers at her children’s private school, according to the court papers.
Appel allegedly offered $50,000 to buy her silence before his lawsuit threat, a move she “vehemently rejected,” the suit says.
Appel and his lawyers have denied all of the accusations, claiming that the pair only had a “business relationship,” court papers show.
His lawyer, Ian Goldman, told The Post on Tuesday that Malachi’s “credibility, motives, and factual assertions are not only disputed but entirely fabricated.”
Goldman added that the “screenshots are fabricated and form part of what he contends is an extensive extortion and smear campaign directed against him,” and that Appel claims “even a cursory examination of the photographs at issue demonstrates that the individual depicted is not him.”
Half of the conversion courts in Orthodox Judaism in Los Angeles are led by predators (and have been been for decades), but the people with the goods are too difficult for me to work with, and they usually recognize it is not in their interest to go public with the damning evidence.
Along with dozens of other journos, I knew that Harvey Weinstein was a creep before he was finally outed, but the story was too difficult for me to report. One day a brave soul will provide the story on how some conversions operate in Orthodox Judaism in ways that would sicken normal people.
Orthodox rabbis are like other men in their appetites. They enjoy power and they enjoy getting what they want when they think they can get away with it. They are not better nor worse than other men.
If an institution, religious or otherwise, believes it can get away with theft, it will often try to get away with theft.
We all bear some responsibility for how people treat us, and for how our institutions behave, and how our leaders operate.
Rav Avrohom Yeshaya Appel, also written Avraham Yeshaya Appel, is an American Orthodox rabbi and the founder and rosh kollel of Kollel Cheshek Shlomo in Lakewood, New Jersey. He built the institution from a small founding group in 2018 into one of the larger advanced kollelim in the town. He became a recognized figure in the Lakewood Torah world before a 2026 civil suit carried his name into the secular press.
Appel trained in the Lithuanian yeshiva tradition. He learned within the orbit of Beth Medrash Govoha, the Lakewood yeshiva that Rav Aharon Kotler founded and that turned the town into a center of advanced Talmud study. The Lakewood press describes him as a talmid of the Noviminsker and Brisker yeshivos and as the go-to person in Beis Medrash Govoha’s Princeton upstairs beis medrash, a powerhouse of clear thinking and intense learning. Before he opened his own kollel he led a chaburah at the Mir in Jerusalem. That chaburah devoted twelve hours a day to learning, and Appel later sought to duplicate it in Lakewood and struggled. He has cited Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky and Rav Yeruchem Olshin as the men he consulted before he moved ahead, and he is associated through his learning with Rav Asher Arieli of the Mir.
He founded Kollel Cheshek Shlomo in 2018. The kollel launched that year with twenty-four founding yungerleit drawn from the yeshivos of Fallsburg, Philadelphia, Keren HaTorah, Rabbi Slomowitz, and others, and within four and a half years it expanded to more than seventy members. The kollel runs an admissions bar that sets it apart from most. Each man passes an oral bechinah on 250 blatt before he joins, then completes entire masechtos with both iyun and bekiyus, with regular chazaros and bechinos to hold him to account. A subsidiary, Chaburas Kinyan Torah, runs on the same derech halimud, and the kollel’s own count puts the combined number above two hundred men.
The model rests on a claim Appel repeats. You cannot produce a gadol, he says, but you can provide the right environment that lets the yungerman reach gadlus. The kollel acts on that claim by removing the ordinary pressures on a young family. It runs a set schedule, serves fresh daily meals, and subsidizes daycare under its own auspices. Visitors to the beis medrash, in accounts the kollel circulates to donors, describe warmth and calm where they expect strain. These accounts come from the institution and its supporters, and they read as the language of a fundraising operation. They tell you what the kollel wants its donors to see.
The most concrete piece of Appel’s communal work is brick and land. He envisions a campus that gives the yungerleit a full day of learning at an affordable price, with a daycare center for their children in their own backyard, and a housing project that charges roughly fifty percent of the market rate, just enough to cover the mortgage. In January 2024 he presented the plan to the Lakewood Planning Board himself, alongside the kollel’s engineer, to a room full of supporters, and the board delayed its decision. The reporting describes opposition from neighbors over the use of a residential zone. The plan, as the kollel states it, develops four acres outside West Gate into housing built next to the beis medrash, so that a man loses no time to traffic between learning, home, and daycare.
This work places Appel inside a wider shift in the role of the American Orthodox rabbi. The scholar still draws his authority from learning. But the prominent rabbi now raises money, mediates, counsels, and builds. In a town knit together by yeshivos, charities, schools, and businesses, a man’s reach often turns on the people who trust him rather than on his title. Appel ran several charities and counseled women in hard circumstances, and that role sits at the center of the case against him.
In 2026 Miryam Malachi, an Israeli-born mother of two, sued Appel in Ocean County (docket number OCN-L-000016-26, filed around January 5, 2026). The complaint alleges that she came to him during acute financial distress over daycare bills, on a teacher’s suggestion, and that he presented himself as a rabbi, mentor, and friend she could trust. The suit alleges that he then used that position to exploit and assault her over a period that began in 2020, with an alleged assault in June 2022, explicit messages, and an image of his genitals. The complaint further alleges that he threatened her, told her that an inmate who had taken the fall for him in another matter would take care of her if she spoke, and warned that he would have her exiled from the community. It alleges that he insisted she see a therapist he chose and scripted what she should say so that she could get help without revealing what had happened. The suit says he offered fifty thousand dollars for her silence, which she rejected, and that after she threatened to sue, a website appeared calling her a danger to klal yisroel and flyers went up at her children’s school. The complaint says subpoenaed GoDaddy records tied the site to Appel’s cell phone, his brother’s email, and his business partner’s credit card.
Appel denies all of it. His lawyer, Ian Goldman, told the New York Post that Malachi’s credibility, motives, and factual claims are not only disputed but fabricated, that the screenshots are fabricated and part of an extortion and smear campaign against his client, and that the man in the photographs is not Appel. Appel’s filings accuse Malachi of fraud and extortion and deny any tie to the website. As of June 2026 the litigation continues and no court has ruled on the allegations. The reader should hold the two accounts apart and wait for the record.
The case set Appel at the center of an argument that runs through many faith communities and not his alone. A tight community protects its respected men, and that instinct can shield a leader from scrutiny or can crush a complainant before her claim is heard. The same closeness that lets a man raise a million dollars and build homes for young scholars also lets a man, if the worst allegations against him hold, exert pressure on a single mother who came to him for help. Which story the record supports is the question the court has yet to answer.
Whatever the outcome, Appel’s path shows several features of Lakewood life in this decade. Advanced learning still sits at the center. The kollel has grown into an engine of housing, childcare, and money as much as of Torah. And the rabbi who runs it carries the weight of all those roles at once, under a public scrutiny that the digital age has sharpened and that the older structures of the community were not built to meet.
When these type of allegations are made, how does the local orthodox community decide who to side with?
The community does not hold a vote. It reads signals, and the strongest signal is standing.
Standing means how deeply a man sits inside the networks that run the town. Appel employs more than two hundred men, raises millions, builds housing, and holds a place in the donor and rabbinic circles that hold Lakewood together. His fall costs the community jobs, money, a building project, and a name it has paid into. The woman who brought the suit came as an immigrant single mother asking for charity. Her vindication costs the community a respected man and forces a reckoning it would rather avoid. The default tilt runs toward the embedded man before anyone weighs a fact. People know, without saying it, which outcome is cheaper for them.
Then comes rabbinic authority. The community waits to see which rabbonim stand where. A signed letter from a recognized rosh yeshiva or posek can close the question for thousands of people who never read the complaint. If senior figures back the accused, the town follows. If they step back, his support drains in a week. So the verdict is less a judgment than a cascade keyed to a handful of men at the top. Most people take their position from the position of the man above them.
Distrust of secular courts shapes the rest. Going to a civil court against a fellow Jew, rather than to a beis din, reads to many as a breach of its own. It lets the accused cast the accuser as the one who broke faith with the community. The phrase used against the plaintiff here, a danger to klal yisroel, draws its force from exactly that suspicion. It reframes a woman pressing a claim as a woman attacking the Jewish people. The historical root runs deep. For centuries the outside court was the enemy’s court, and informing carried real danger, so the instinct to keep disputes inside has the weight of survival behind it. That instinct protects the community from hostile outsiders. It also protects men who count on no one talking.
The community also moves to contain. A scandal is a chillul Hashem, a stain on the name of the institution and the town, and the first response of the people around an accused leader is to make it quiet. That means settlements, pressure, chosen therapists, lawyers, and a careful management of who hears what. The advocacy groups that publicize these cases, ZA’AKAH among them, exist to break that containment, which tells you how strong the containment runs.
Underneath all of this sits a reading of credibility that has little to do with evidence. The community reads yichus, marriage, money, and length of belonging. A married man with a family, a beard, a kollel, and decades inside reads as substance. An immigrant single mother who took charity reads as someone who can be painted as unstable, ungrateful, or after money. The same facts land differently depending on who carries them.
Information control decides the rest. Almost no one reads the filing. They learn the story through WhatsApp, through a website, through what a rabbi said at a tisch. Whoever owns the channel owns the verdict. An alleged smear site and flyers at a school are not side details. They are a fight over the only thing that moves this community, which is the story it hears.
What flips it is hard evidence and broken ranks. More complainants coming forward, since a pattern is harder to wave off than one account. Documents that resist denial, like the registration records cited in this suit. A beis din ruling, or a senior rabbi who turns. Standing shields a man right up to the point it stops, and then the collapse runs fast, because the same people who followed the authority down now follow it back up.
None of this is particular to Lakewood or to Orthodox Jews. Any tight community with strong internal authority and a long memory of hostile outsiders behaves this way. The Catholic Church did. The pattern follows from the structure, not the theology. A community protects its own, and the cost of that protection falls on whoever has the least standing to begin with.
Tipping is key. The trick is to watch the signals that cost the signaler something. Online comments are free, so they tell you nothing. A man moving his money, a rabbi attaching his name, a board member resigning, a kollel scrubbing a website: those cost something, and they move before anyone will say out loud which way he leans.
The clearest tip toward collapse is a second complainant. One account stays a contest of two people’s word. A second turns it into a pattern, and a pattern resists the fabrication defense. The advocacy group in this case has already asked others to come forward, so the watch is on whether anyone answers. Silence after that call is itself a reading, and it points the other way.
Next, watch the rabbonim, and watch for the thing that does not happen. In a town like Lakewood a recognized man under attack draws a signed letter of support fast. If the senior names stay quiet, that vacuum is the signal. A letter that never comes says more than any letter that does. The same goes for distancing dressed as procedure: a leave of absence, a co-rosh kollel stepping to the front, his name coming off the campaign, an event quietly cancelled.
Then watch the money, because money is the most honest vote in the community. Donors pause before they speak. A stalled campaign, a board that goes silent, pledges that do not clear: these move ahead of public opinion. Note that the published campaign here shows past its goal, above a million dollars. Read that with care. It might mean the base holds, or it might be money raised before the suit surfaced and not yet withdrawn. The number to watch is the next one, not this one.
A shift in the defense is a tell. A move from “it did not happen” to “it was a business dispute” or “it was consensual” concedes contact and fights over its meaning. Watch whether the lawyers hold the line that the man in the photographs is not Appel, or whether they let it drift. Watch the documents. If the registration records that tie the website to a phone and a credit card survive challenge, the fabrication story gets harder to sell, and people who were waiting start to move.
Now the signs the other way, toward the accused holding. A unified letter from named authorities. A counter-suit for extortion that produces its own evidence and reframes her as the aggressor. A smear that takes, so that the room repeats “danger to klal yisroel” without anyone pushing back. The accuser’s own credibility attacked with material the community finds plausible, a prior dispute, a money motive, an inconsistency. And above all, no second voice. If the call for others goes out and nothing answers, the man tends to hold.
The asymmetry to keep in mind is timing. Support is loud and early. Collapse is quiet and late. The early noise can sit on top of an erosion already underway, so the official position of the community can stay frozen while the private position has moved. Watch the gap between what people say and what they do, between the public letter and where the checks go, between the tisch talk and the empty seats. That gap is where the tip shows up first.
Standing protects a man until the cost of protecting him passes the cost of dropping him. The tip is the moment enough people privately cross that line. You see it not in the speeches but in the small, expensive withdrawals that come before the speeches change.
The public record here runs mostly through criminal cases involving children, so hold one thing in mind before the pattern. The Appel suit is a civil action brought by an adult woman. Most of the cases that reached a courtroom and left a trail involved minors, and the criminal track moves on different rails from a civil one. With that caveat, four trajectories recur.
The first is flight. Avrohom Mondrowitz, a Ger Hasid in Brooklyn who presented himself as a rabbi and a psychologist and ran a practice and a school for troubled boys, was indicted in 1985 on sodomy and sex crimes against five minors and fled to Israel in 1984 as New York authorities prepared to arrest him. Advocates put the number of his alleged victims near a hundred. He was never tried. The first extradition request failed because sodomy did not count as an extraditable offense under the treaty, the treaty was amended in 2007, and in January 2010 Israel’s Supreme Court still refused to send him back. Critics charged that Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes slow-walked the case for two decades to keep the ultra-Orthodox vote. Malka Leifer, the Melbourne case close to your own world, ran the same way and ended differently: she fled to Israel, fought extradition for years, and was sent back and convicted in 2023. Flight sometimes works and sometimes only delays.
The second is intimidation, then conviction, then a long campaign to undo the conviction. Nechemya Weberman, an unlicensed counselor in the Satmar community, was convicted in December 2012 of 59 counts of sustained sexual abuse of a girl who came to him over three years from the age of twelve. During the trial men were arrested for trying to bribe the girl and her husband to drop the case, and others were accused of photographing her on the witness stand and posting the images online. He drew 103 years. But that number became the community’s grievance rather than its reckoning. The Satmar bloc worked the system for over a decade, and in January 2026 a Brooklyn judge cut the sentence to eighteen years, with the victim present and objecting. A conviction is not the end. The pressure continues against the sentence for as long as the votes hold.
The third runs through Lakewood and Ocean County court. Yosef Kolko, a camp counselor and yeshiva teacher, abused an eleven-year-old boy. The father first wanted the matter handled inside the community and asked a senior rabbi to keep Kolko away from children and send him to therapy, then went to prosecutors in 2009. The family was attacked and ostracized for going to the police, one man was charged with witness tampering for pressuring them to drop the charges, and the family was forced to move to the Midwest. The father, a prominent rabbi, lost his job. Kolko pleaded guilty mid-trial, days after a woman and a man came forward to say they too had been victims, and drew thirteen years. He then spent years claiming the community had coerced the plea, an inversion where the abuser borrows the language of communal pressure to walk it back.
The fourth is the institutional cover-up broken by the press. Baruch Lanner ran regions of NCSY, the Orthodox Union youth group, and teens complained about his abuse to his superiors for years and no action was taken until The Jewish Week published a detailed investigation of three decades of abuse, after which the group dismissed him. He was convicted in 2002. A vocal minority of rabbis attacked the paper and the reporter for lashon hara, the prohibition on spreading damaging speech. The lever was a reporter, not a rabbi, and the institution moved only once it could no longer not move.
Across the four, the variables that decide the outcome are consistent. A second voice changes everything, as Kolko shows. The press changes everything, as Lanner shows. A prosecutor willing to spend political capital changes everything, and a prosecutor unwilling to spend it lets a Mondrowitz run out the clock. Documentary evidence that resists denial does the rest. The throughline is that the community’s first instinct is containment, the families who break ranks pay a price whether or not they win, and even a win can be chipped away for years by the same forces that resisted it at the start. The cases that end in a conviction are the ones where the containment failed early, usually because more than one person spoke.
The same standing that buys a woman belief in these situations also raises the price she pays to speak.
A community that runs on trust networks rather than on documents allocates credibility by standing, and a woman’s standing gets read through observance, dress, speech, marriage, connections, and yichus. The reading happens before anyone hears the substance. A woman who dresses and speaks right draws the benefit of the doubt. A woman who reads as modern, or as a baalas teshuva, or a convert, or an immigrant, or divorced, or dependent on charity, starts behind, and has to overcome a prior the other woman never faces. Reputation does the same work a clean evidentiary record does in a court that has no records.
The credibility and the freedom to use it run in opposite directions. The woman most likely to be believed, the tznius, well-married, well-connected woman from good yichus, is the woman with the most to lose by speaking. Her family’s shidduchim, her husband’s standing, her children’s schools, all of it sits on the table the moment she goes public. So she tends to stay quiet. The woman least likely to be believed, the modern or marginal one, is freest to speak, because she has already priced herself out of the shidduch market and the social economy that the community uses to discipline her. The contempt and the loss of control come together. That is why so much of the exposure in these cases comes from the margins or from people who have already left. Leaving trades credibility for immunity from leverage.
The reading is also comparative, not absolute. The community does not weigh her standing alone. It weighs her standing against his. A woman of high yichus accusing a man of lower standing is a different contest from the same woman accusing a rosh kollel who employs two hundred men and raises millions. Her connections help her only up to the point where they exceed the pull of his centrality. Past a certain gap, no amount of modesty or lineage moves the room, because the cost of believing her is the loss of him, and the room counts that cost first. The Appel suit sits near the far end of the mismatch. An immigrant single mother who came for help against a man who anchors a whole network. That gap, more than any fact in the complaint, sets the early tilt.
High standing on her side does not only protect her. It can also convert into pressure from her own people to stay silent, because a family with a name to guard often guards the name before it guards the daughter. So the formidable, connected woman gets believed and gets leaned on, by the community and by her own family, to spare everyone the scandal.
The believability of a woman accusing a powerful man has always tracked her class, her race, her respectability, her connections. Juries read defendants the same way. The frum community uses tznius and yichus where the secular world uses polish and pedigree, and both sort the witness before they weigh the claim. Saying so out loud is the only part that breaks a taboo. The sorting runs everywhere.
If a high-level rav with years of Talmud learning does something graphic and gross akin to what is alleged in this NY Post story, how do they understand and justify it?
People, including rabbis, do what they can to satisfy their appetites when they believe they can get away with it.
The learning does not stop it. Talmud trains analysis, memory, verbal speed, and status competition. It does not train a man against using a desperate woman. Decades in the beis medrash can sit on top of a moral interior that never grew, and the assumption that the lamdan must therefore be good is itself one of the beliefs that shields these men. So the first thing to drop is the expectation that the learning and the conduct cannot live in the same person. They live in the same person often.
The way they live together is by compartment. The learning occupies the daylight self, the office occupies a sealed room, and the two rarely touch in his mind. He does not walk around feeling like a fraud. He experiences his avodah as real, because it is real, and the conduct happens somewhere the Torah categories never get carried. That is why the alleged register is so crude, the locker-room voice, the line under the photo. A man does not bring the vocabulary of the sugya into that room. He brings appetite and a different self, and the crudeness is the sign that the room runs on its own rules.
Then the trained mind turns from guard into tool. The same skill that finds a heter for a hard case in money or kashrus can build a permission for himself. He redefines the category. He tells himself the act does not meet the technical definition of the forbidden thing, that her status or her conduct changes what it is, that this is not the prohibition the simple man thinks it is. A plain man cannot talk himself past a plain issur. A sharp one constructs the staircase around it. The sophistication is the danger, not the protection.
Years of paskening for others feed a second move. A man who decides for everyone else what is permitted can come to locate the law in himself. If he allows it, it is allowed. His sense of how much he carries for klal Yisroel becomes a standing exemption in his own head. The rules bind ordinary men. He carries the load, so he draws latitude. The judge comes to believe he sits above the thing he judges.
He also rewrites the woman. She pursued him, she wanted it, she is troubled, she is a nisayon sent to test him. The charity he gave gets re-narrated from exploitation into generosity she now repays with a knife. This is where the smear comes from, and not only as tactics. Branding her a danger to klal Yisroel confirms his story to himself. The threat is her. He is the one under attack. And the cover-up gets a halo. Exposure would destroy the Torah he built and the families he feeds, so silencing her becomes the defense of something holy rather than the defense of himself. A man who scripts a woman’s therapy sessions can tell himself he is helping her.
Theology hands him an exit on top of all this. If teshuva is always open and his merits are vast, the sin turns into a debit in a ledger he trusts will balance. He can do it on Monday and learn with fire on Tuesday, because the account never closes. The greatness and the fall coexist as a story he has heard about great men before.
The support structure does the rest. He sits where money, deference, and access all flow toward him, where he decides who gets a stipend and who gets a home, where no one tells him no. A man who stops hearing no from the world stops hearing it inside.
I cannot read this man’s mind, and the allegations are denied and unproven, so take the above as the shape of the general case, not a verdict on him. And not every offender does this interior work. Some know exactly what they are, feel the guilt, and act anyway. Some are closer to ordinary predators wearing the costume, and the learning is the costume. The compartment is not airtight for everyone.
The hard finish is the one your earlier question already pointed at. The community, and the man himself, lean on the belief that the learning guarantees the character. It does not. The learning gives him the tools to evade and the cover to keep evading, and the more impressive the learning, the better the cover.
I know rabbis criminally convicted of embarrassing sex crimes who can’t stop themselves from teaching Torah, even in mundane conversations. Why? Because teaching Torah is the last wall of the self still standing.
Strip the title, the shul, the kavod, the freedom, and the one identity that survives the conviction is the man who knows and gives over. He built his whole worth on the teacher’s chair. He has nothing else to be. So in a mundane conversation the vort comes out, because it is the one role left that still tells him he is someone. Each small piece of Torah is a quiet claim. I am still that man. The crime did not erase the scholar.
Part of it runs on rails. Decades of learning make Torah his native speech. He thinks in sugyos and reaches for a vort the way another man reaches for a story about his kids. The crime never touched the wiring, so even in small talk the Torah comes out, because that is how his mind moves.
The teaching also restores the old order in the room for a second. Giving Torah puts him back in the higher seat, above the listener, the source rather than the receiver. For a disgraced man that small reassertion of the hierarchy he lost is balm. Every time someone takes his Torah, the verdict that he is below and contemptible gets overturned for a moment. The generosity is a status move wearing the clothes of a gift.
Then it holds the compartment wall in place. The scholar-self and the conduct lived in separate rooms, and the teaching is the proof he keeps offering himself that the scholar is the real man and the crime was the sealed room. As long as he is giving over Torah, the crime stays an episode and not an identity. Stop teaching and the wall cracks, and the crime has to be folded into who he is. He cannot afford that, so he cannot stop.
The Torah in his mouth never turns on him, which is why it stays comfortable to hold. It became a tool of evasion before the crime and it stays one after. He can hold forth on the holiness of speech while having sent the texts, because the Torah he handles has been cut loose from any application to himself. Teaching it costs him no reckoning. It only flatters him.
The compulsion is real, and it shares a root with the crime. The man who could not stop himself in the office cannot sit in a room as an equal and let the floor belong to someone else. The grandiosity that told him he stood above the law is the same grandiosity that needs an audience and cannot tolerate being one man among others. The predation and the compulsive teaching grow from one stem, a self that has to hold the room and cannot rest as ordinary.
The community feeds it. The reverence for the words is strong enough that the speaker gets a pass when the vort is good. People still nod, still thank him, still defer to the Torah even from a convicted source. He learns that the one currency accepted everywhere, even from a man like him, is Torah, so he keeps spending it, because it still buys a flicker of the old standing.
For some of these men it is not a scheme. It is a wrecked life clinging to the one clean thing left in it, and the teaching is the only hour of the day they feel like the person they meant to be. That is sad rather than sinister. Both can be true in the same man, in the same shiur, on the same afternoon.
