A classroom in Los Angeles. A boy in the back row, fifteen, lets his eyes go flat. A page of Talmud sits open in front of him. The page argues about damage and intent, a quarrel older than any court the boy will fear in his life. To him it reads as static. Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn watches the eyes go flat, and what he feels is close to grief.
This is the scene he returns to in his own telling, and it holds the whole man. A teacher does not fear his own death first. He fears the death of the thing in the next mind. The page lives only if the boy carries it. When the eyes go flat the page dies a small death, and the chain that runs back through the boy’s father and his father’s teacher and a thousand years of teachers stops at a bored fifteen-year-old in the back row.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) built a whole account of human life out of that kind of fear. In The Denial of Death he argues that man is the animal who knows he will die, and that culture is the answer he builds against the knowing. Becker names two terrors. One is the fear of death, the dread of rotting, of going to nothing. The other is the fear of life, the dread of standing out, of carrying the full weight of a separate self. Against both, a culture hands its members a hero system: a set of roles and rules that lets a man feel he counts in a scheme that outlasts him. Becker calls these immortality projects. You beat death by pouring yourself into something that does not die. The nation. The book. The faith. The work.
The rabbi holds an immortality project that asks him to disappear. The chain outlasts the man, and the good rabbi wants it that way. Mesorah, the handing down, runs through him the way water runs through a pipe, and his honor lies in passing it on. Maimonides (1138-1204) did not write to be Maimonides. He wrote so the law would stand after him. A man who gives his life to that does not fear oblivion for himself. He fears it for the thing in his care.
So set the boy’s flat eyes inside that fear and you see why Einhorn fought the way he fought. He built songs for the hard principles. He drew the Talmud’s quarrels next to the plots of Marvel movies. He turned the law into a game where boys argued like medieval rabbis. His colleagues thought he had lost his mind. The boys started to carry the page. That was the win, and it was a win against death.
Then comes the turn that puts his name on a row of web addresses ending in .ai. He sits with a chatbot and asks it to open a hard passage of Maimonides. The answer comes back correct and dead. He reads it the way he once read the boy in the back row. The machine returns the words and carries none of the life. It makes the student’s old mistake. It can say the thing and cannot hold it.
He had standing. Twelve years a dean, twenty-three years at a pulpit. Here a smaller man stops, and a stranger one keeps going. Einhorn does not conclude that the machine has no place near the sacred. He concludes the opposite. In his telling the realization lands all at once. The skills he spent thirty years teaching, the patient questioning, the building of context layer on layer, the hunt for the pattern under the text, these are the skills that open the machine too. The Talmud, he decides, is the training manual for intelligence that the engineers never read. He starts to build. A virtual study hall. A line of ventures with the kind of names a venture man picks. Chavruta, the old paired study where two men sharpen each other over a page, becomes a thing you do with software, and the rabbi becomes a consultant who happens to wear a rabbi’s title.
Watch the words travel as he carries them across that line, because the same word means a different thing in every hero system it lands in, and the whole question lives here.
Take understanding, the word Einhorn leans on hardest. He wants the machine to understand, not regurgitate, and he means something precise by it, though he never says what.
A heart surgeon means one thing. Understanding is the map worn so deep in the hands that they move ahead of thought and find the bleed before it shows. The resident knows the textbook. The surgeon knows the body on the table at two in the morning. His hero system runs on the patients who walk out and the residents who carry his technique after him, and death stands in the room every time he cuts. For him understanding keeps a man alive tonight.
A Carthusian in his cell means the reverse. For him understanding means surrender. He does not master the verse. The verse masters him. He chews one line for an hour and lets it read him. The slowness is the gate. His hero system holds the world up through prayer no one sees, and the self is the thing he gives away to reach the eternal. Tell him you have made the sacred fast and easy and you have told him you have lost it.
A jazz pianist in the bebop line means a third thing. He learns ten thousand tunes so he can forget them. Understanding sits in the fingers as feel, the knowing of the changes so deep he can leave the melody and trust it to be there. His chain is who taught whom, the lick passed hand to hand in back rooms, the record that outlives the room. Memory for him is the runway. He builds it to leave it.
A trial lawyer means a fourth. Understanding is anticipation, the witness read before he speaks, the jury’s faces, the question that lands because the file lives in the lawyer’s bones. His hero system is the verdict and the record, the win that stands after the client is gone. Memory and care serve combat. The text is a weapon.
A founder in the same Los Angeles world Einhorn now courts means a fifth thing, and his meaning sits closest to the surface of the .ai pages. Understanding is edge, the thesis that moves before the market sees it, the insight a man can defend in a room full of money. He hears the rabbi’s pitch and thinks distribution, moat, the size of the market. Same word. Opposite weight.
One more man belongs here, and the rabbi would know him as kin across every wall of language and faith. A griot in West Africa, or a reciter of the old Icelandic sagas, a man who carries the dead in his mouth. For him to forget a name is to kill an ancestor a second time. His understanding is custody. He holds the line of the living who hold the line of the dead, and he fears one death only, the death of the chain. Sit him beside the rabbi and the two need no translator. They fear the same thing. They guard the same fire.
That kinship is the key to reading Einhorn with the care he has earned. When he asks whether a machine can understand Torah he is not making the founder’s claim or the surgeon’s. He is making the griot’s. He is asking whether a machine can join the line of the living who carry the dead. That is not a novelty pitch. That is the oldest fear a rabbi owns, dressed in a consultant’s clothes. He is not selling a gadget. He is trying to keep the page alive in one more vessel before the eyes in the back row go flat for good.
Now the hard part, because truth asks for it. The thing Einhorn wants from the machine is the thing he saw it cannot give. He read its answer about Maimonides and named it dead. Understanding, not regurgitation, was the line he drew, and the machine fell on the wrong side of it by his own account. His hope rests on the vessel becoming what he watched it fail to be. A surgeon does not hand the scalpel to a tool he just called blind. The rabbi hands the chain to a thing he called soulless and trusts that his method will wake the soul in it. Maybe it will carry the words. Whether it can carry the life is the question.
A second cost follows. Becker would name it the fear of life. The rabbi’s old hero system asked him to vanish into the chain. The new one puts his face and his name on the door, RabbiEinhorn.ai, the man as the brand. To step out of the institution and stand alone under your own name takes nerve, and it carries the danger Becker warned of, that the immortality project starts to serve the self it was built to dissolve. The chain runs through the pipe best when no one can see the pipe. A pipe with a logo is a different thing.
Rabbi Einhorn worships the unbroken line, the handing down that outlasts every hand it passes through. He fears the small death in the back row, the page that dies in a bored mind, the chain that stops at his watch. And the rescue now wears his own face in a way some of his peers tell him to avoid.
None of that makes him a fraud. It makes him a teacher who would rather try a strange thing than stand at the front of the room and watch the eyes go flat. A man who loves the fire that much will reach for any lamp. The reaching is the honor. The lamp is the question.
Shlomo Einhorn: A Biography
Shlomo Einhorn (b. January 21, 1979) is an American Modern Orthodox rabbi, educator, author, and, since 2024, an artificial-intelligence entrepreneur. For most of two decades he held pulpit and school positions on both coasts, and he built a public reputation as an innovator who paired classical Torah study with the vocabulary of self-improvement, popular culture, and, in the last stretch of his career, machine learning. The documentary record on his early life and institutional postings is thin and rests in large part on his own promotional materials, a short Wikipedia entry, and a handful of Jewish community profiles, so several of the claims that circulate about him, including some repeated below with attribution, have not been verified by independent sources.
He was born and raised in the Fairfax and Hancock Park neighborhoods of Los Angeles, in a home that joined Modern Orthodox and Hasidic strands. According to a 2023 profile in the Jewish Journal, both of his parents were children of Holocaust survivors, his mother’s family belonged to the Satmar Hasidic community, and his father’s family reached the United States by way of postwar France, settling in St. Louis. He attended YULA, the Modern Orthodox high school in Los Angeles, and in interviews he has said he weighed a legal career before turning toward the rabbinate.
Einhorn pursued his higher education at Yeshiva University in New York, where, by the accounts of his promotional biography and the Grokipedia entry drawn from it, he earned a bachelor’s degree in world history, rabbinic ordination through the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, and a master’s degree in education through the Azrieli Graduate School. Employment-record aggregators place his university years between 1997 and 2001. His Talmudic training followed the analytic Brisker method associated with the Yeshiva University tradition of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993), and he has cited the Hasidic writings of Rabbi Shalom Noach Berezovsky (1911-2000), the Slonimer Rebbe, as a counterweight on questions of feeling and spiritual growth.
Before entering the pulpit, Einhorn worked in Jewish education, serving, by his own account, as director of education for the New Jersey NCSY junior division and teaching Talmud for five years at the Marsha Stern Talmudic Academy, the Yeshiva University high school in Manhattan. He then took an internship at Lincoln Square Synagogue on the Upper West Side.
In 2005 Einhorn became head rabbi of the West Side Institutional Synagogue in Manhattan. The congregation had struggled with an aging membership and weak attendance, and over his seven-year tenure the synagogue’s weekly turnout grew to more than four hundred, a recovery he and others have put at about seventy percent growth. The work drew the notice of the Orthodox Union, which in 2010 established a small think tank under his direction to design engagement programming for synagogues elsewhere in the country.
In 2012 he returned to Los Angeles to become rav and dean of Yavneh Hebrew Academy, the preschool-through-eighth-grade Orthodox day school he had attended as a boy. He was the school’s first dean, a post created after the 2011 departure of Rabbi N. Daniel Korobkin for a Toronto pulpit. A 2015 account in the Jewish Journal reported that enrollment had climbed toward the school’s zoning cap of about 498 students after years of stagnation, with annual tuition near twenty thousand dollars, and credited Einhorn with widening the school’s sense of which students it could serve. He led Yavneh for about twelve years and served at the same time as rabbi of its affiliated congregation. In his own later accounting he has counted his congregational service, across these and earlier roles, at twenty-three years.
Einhorn’s public teaching has drawn on sources outside the rabbinic canon, citing figures such as Kobe Bryant (1978-2020), Bruce Springsteen (b. 1949), and Tony Robbins (b. 1960) as entry points into traditional texts. He set out this approach at length in his 2015 book, Judaism Alive: Using the Torah to Unlock Your Life’s Potential, which frames Jewish teaching less as a system of obligation than as a resource for character and purpose. The book carried endorsements from senior Orthodox figures, among them Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020), who praised it warmly, and Rabbi Steven Weil, who called Einhorn the top young Orthodox rabbi in North America.
Music has run alongside the teaching across his career. He released an album, KLI, in 2000, writing, singing, and playing guitar; a companion album to the book, Judaism Alive: A Musical Odyssey, followed in 2015 and, by his promotional account, reached number three on the iTunes world-music chart; and in 2017 he released Teshuva: The Return, a concept album on repentance and renewal. He has held that music can carry spiritual ideas where lecture cannot.
He became known within Orthodox circles for marathon fundraising lectures billed as the longest continuous Torah classes on record, a claim repeated in community press though not adjudicated by any outside body. The first, an eighteen-hour class delivered on December 24, 2015, raised a reported $250,000 for Jewish education. A nineteen-hour class on Lag B’Omer, May 3, 2018, raised a reported $500,000. The Wikipedia entry dates the longer class to 2017, but his own materials and contemporaneous reports place it in 2018.
Underneath the public reputation as a communicator ran a more traditional credential. In 2021 Einhorn received Yadin Yadin ordination from Yeshiva University, the advanced semicha that qualifies a man to sit as a judge on a Jewish court of law. The year is documented in community listings, though the examiners and particulars are not.
The COVID-19 closures of 2020 pushed his teaching online and, by his telling, opened a longer interest in what digital tools could do for Torah study. In 2024 he stepped away from day-to-day leadership at Yavneh. The circumstances of that departure are not publicly documented, and his own later writing describes the shift in both professional and personal terms. In June 2024 he founded Shpait.AI, a firm that pairs AI consulting with Jewish-education projects, and he has since described a wider Shpait Ecosystem that takes in OfficeBox.AI and LomdAI, the last an AI-driven beit midrash, still in development, meant to guide learners through Talmudic texts. He is founder and chief executive of Mallacore, an AI consulting and deployment firm he describes as serving mid-size businesses with decision-intelligence work. Since 2024 he has written a stream of essays on Medium, posting under the byline Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn and applying Torah categories to artificial intelligence and the reverse.
Einhorn lives in Los Angeles. He is married to Shira Einhorn, and they have raised a large family. Across the pulpit, the school, the recordings, the lectures, and the AI ventures, the through-line he claims for his own career holds steady: that classical Jewish learning can travel into each new cultural and technological setting without surrendering its Orthodox commitments. Whether that amounts to a single coherent project or a sequence of reinventions is a question the record leaves open.
The People He Defends
David Pinsof, David Sears, and Martie Haselton call their account Alliance Theory, and it makes a hard claim. Political belief systems do not grow from abstract values like equality or authority or tradition. They grow from the structure of who stands with whom. A man’s values track his allies and his rivals. When he argues for a principle, he argues for the people the principle protects.
Run Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn through that lens and a generous portrait comes out, not a cynical one, because Alliance Theory describes a function, and a function can be honorable. Einhorn does the work of raising a coalition’s morale and standing. His allies are the observant, the day-school families, the men and women who keep Shabbat and kashrut and sense that the prestige culture around them files those commitments under quaint. His rivals are less other people than a secular elite that codes Orthodox life as backward, narrow, a thing a bright young man grows out of. Einhorn stands between his people and that judgment. A man who does that for his own is doing loving work.
Alliance Theory holds that we support our allies with a set of tilts the authors call propagandistic biases. We magnify our allies’ grievances and shrink their faults. We assign their wins to virtue and their losses to circumstance. We work to make third parties see our side as the moral one. None of this needs a liar. The theory’s sharpest point is that sincerity is the proof of loyalty. A partisan who shaded the truth on purpose would be a mercenary. The true ally believes.
Einhorn’s gift is the raising of commitment. He makes belonging feel like strength. The young Jew who half hides his observance in a secular room, who reads his own tradition as a list of restrictions he carries out of habit, hears Einhorn and reads it instead as a calling. That shift in feeling holds a coalition together. Alliance Theory predicts quiet defection when members feel embarrassed and thinly attached. Einhorn closes that exit by turning attachment into honor rather than burden.
His second move inverts the rival’s frame. The secular world calls the tradition confused. Einhorn turns the charge around. The confusion sits outside. The tradition knows what it does. This is the boundary work Alliance Theory describes, the sharpening of the line between allies and rivals by feeling more than by rule. Each side in a conflict paints its own as reasonable and the other as lost. Einhorn paints with confidence, and his people stand straighter for it.
His third move raises the stakes. He frames the observant life as a high and serious thing, a calling worth a whole life, not a style one picks among others. High stakes bind the committed and push off the lukewarm. That is the trade his manner makes. It deepens the loyal and thins the marginal.
Take a word like pride. Inside the coalition Einhorn serves, pride in the tradition reads as backbone, the refusal to be ashamed of what your grandparents kept under worse pressure than yours. Carry the same word into the rival’s room and it reads as chauvinism, a closed mind, a people who think too well of themselves. The word holds steady on the page and bends in the world. Alliance Theory says this is the rule, not the exception. The people under a value decide what it defends.
What Einhorn does not do tells you as much as what he does. He does not spend his hours translating Orthodoxy into secular moral language for the doubters at the edge. He does not soften the norms to keep a marginal member from walking. He does not build the slow, dull routines that hold an institution steady across decades. He mobilizes. He does not consolidate. The work he does best and the work he leaves to others are two trades, not one.
A coalition under pressure needs more than one kind of man. Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein fortifies the same tradition from the intellect, supplying arguments and tending the long quarrel with the rival culture at its border. Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky works the other margin, lowering the cost of staying for those who might otherwise leave, easing edges so the doubtful keep a foot inside. Einhorn raises the stakes where they lower them. He makes the tradition feel like a calling, and a calling inspires some and loses others. Three men, three functions, one alliance. Alliance Theory expects the division of labor.
His recent turn toward artificial intelligence reads through the same lens. Einhorn now calls himself a consultant, registers addresses that end in .ai, and tells a wide audience that the Talmud is the training manual the engineers never read. Strip the novelty and the alliance logic shows. Silicon Valley holds the prestige currency of the moment. To set the sacred text of his people beside that currency, to claim the tradition trained the very thing the rival elite prizes most, raises the coalition’s standing in the eyes of the third parties who decide what counts as serious. The cure for low status is borrowed status. Einhorn borrows it and carries it home.
The manner carries a cost, and Alliance Theory points at it without scorn. A man who runs on intensity raises commitment fast and strains the routines built for the long haul. The same heat that binds the devoted might wear out a system made for predictability and slow formation. Such men often move rather than settle. Einhorn spent twelve years as a dean and twenty-three at a pulpit, and then he moved. The theory does not tell us why any single tenure ends, and I will not guess. It tells us that mobilizers spend down what consolidators build, that a coalition needs both, and that the two rarely live in the same man.
Hold the portrait at arm’s length and three things stand clear. Einhorn serves the observant Jew who feels his life shamed by the room he walks into, and he serves him by turning that life into honor. He serves him through the ordinary tilts of any loyal ally, the magnified grievance, the inverted charge, the borrowed prestige, none of which need a dishonest man and all of which Alliance Theory counts as the marks of belonging. And he pays for the gift with the thing the gift cannot do, the patient keeping of an institution, which falls to quieter men.
Alliance Theory would file his sincerity as a loyalty signal. The label sounds cold until you sit with it. A man who believes every word he says to his people, who lifts their heads in a culture that wants them lowered, is the kind of ally a pressed people would thank God for. The theory names the function. It does not lower the man.
‘The Outrage Machine Built Better Rails Than the Positivity Economy. What If Someone Borrowed Them?’ (Apr. 20, 2026)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
This morning, The Washington Post published an investigation that should unsettle anyone who cares about the architecture of online influence. Over fifteen months, reporters analyzed 1,435 hours of live streams from white nationalist Nick Fuentes, using AI to scan 2.6 million video frames. What they found was not just grotesque. It was highly organized. Roughly 11,000 donors sent Fuentes nearly $900,000 in superchat payments — digital gifts that flash a donor’s name on screen while the streamer reads it aloud during a live broadcast.
Sit with that for a moment.
After the payment processor takes its cut, he still clears a massive sum. The top 500 donors account for nearly half the total. Around the streams sits an entire auxiliary ecosystem: merchandise, paid inner circles, clip-makers, and a network of loyalists slicing long broadcasts into viral fragments for wider distribution. One TikTok account pushed a single clip past four million views.
That is not random virality. That is infrastructure.
And that distinction matters.
Because the lesson here is not that hate is innovative. The lesson is that hate has been willing to operationalize human needs that more decent corners of the internet have treated vaguely: belonging, recognition, ritual, status, mission, shared language, visible participation, repeatable giving.
The ideology is evil.
The machine is effective.
And unless we are willing to separate those two things analytically, we will keep losing valuable ground to people who understand something simple: communities do not scale on content alone. They scale on rails.
Read the details of the story and your first instinct is revulsion. Mine too. But if you stop at revulsion, you miss the deeper point. The internet has already run the experiment. It has already shown that thousands of people will repeatedly fund a worldview when that worldview gives them identity, participation, and liturgy.
The core move is sound, and not new. Separate the ideology from the infrastructure. Grant that belonging, recognition, ritual, and visible giving are human, not the property of cruelty. He states it well, and the line about decent people confusing niceness with structure is true and worth saying. A lot of good work loses because it trusts the message to travel on its own. He also speaks to two rooms at once, the Talmud line and the Yoda line, and that is a real skill, not a trick.
Truth first, though. The essay enacts the thing it studies. It opens on a hate-streamer and a $900,000 figure, rides the moral urgency of a Washington Post exposé, runs eight numbered tools to hold your attention, and lands on a product. Those are his own rails. The shocking enemy pulls you in, and the destination is Mallacore and a paying client, Jerry Joyner. He discloses the client, which is rare and to his credit. The disclosure makes the piece honest. It does not make it analysis. By the third “that matters” and the third round of credit for Jerry, you are reading advertising.
The deeper trouble sits in his own quotations. He cites Yoda. The dark side is quicker, easier, more seductive. That line argues against him. If the rails carry corrosion better than they carry gratitude, the form is not neutral. His first tool makes the point for me. Build identity around refusal, find an enemy, even if the enemy is “a pattern.” He concedes the engine needs an enemy, then tries to launder it. Contempt produces a compulsive return that gratitude does not. He wants the same dopamine with the opposite spiritual effect and assumes the swap comes free. The whole piece rests on that unexamined assumption.
Then the evidence. He builds a scalable playbook out of a single extreme case. We see the Fuentes operation that worked. We do not see the thousands who built the same rails and drew nothing. The concentration he admires, top 500 donors supplying half the money, is a story about a small fanatical core, not a model that ports to earned optimism. One proof of concept is not a blueprint. I take the Post figures as he reports them; my read does not turn on the numbers.
Now the empathy. The man opens with midah tovah merubah and he means it. He believes good has greater overflow, and he is trying to make goodness compete against a machine built for cruelty, which is harder and more honorable than waiting for goodness to win on its own. His charge that the well-meaning have been structurally unserious is humane and right in the main. And he hands you eight usable things. That is a teacher’s generosity, not a guru’s fog.
Last spring he wrote as a rabbi who had expanded his toolkit, Torah at the center, AI as the new vessel for an old love. Now he writes as the founder and CEO of an AI firm, one Talmud line up top and business mechanics filling the rest. The center of gravity moved from the text to the company. Many men make that move. I name it, and attach no verdict.
So: a real idea, half right, delivered in a sermon-shaped sales document that performs its own thesis, weakened most by an author who quotes the case against himself. The kindest true thing I can say is that the impulse is good and the vehicle is compromised, and he was honest enough to tell you so himself.
‘The Updated “Signs AI Wrote This” List’ (Mar. 16, 2026)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
What is damning is the cluster. Over-symmetry combined with over-polish combined with fake insight combined with generic abstraction combined with predictable rhythm. When those five things appear together, readers feel it before they can explain it.
The Tells, In Order of How Much They Hurt You
Writing in threes. “Strong, sound, and scalable.” “Clear, grounded, and practical.” “Simple, powerful, effective.” The triad creates instant rhetorical symmetry, which is exactly why it reads as manufactured. Humans stumble into threes occasionally. AI reaches for them as a default rhythm engine.
Fake profundity transitions. “This is the part I want to tell you.” “Here’s what most people miss.” “Let that sink in.” “The truth is.” These phrases create the sensation of revelation without the substance behind it. The tell is not the phrase itself. The tell is that the sentence following it rarely justifies the buildup.
Over-clean contrast structures. One well-placed contrast is a legitimate rhetorical move. Repeated contrasts feel templated. “Less about X, more about Y.” “From X to Y.” “The goal is not X, it is Y.” When a piece uses this move four or five times, the reader stops feeling persuaded and starts feeling processed.
TED-talk in text form. Short sentence fragments stacked for drama. “The kind that shows up. In hard moments. When no one is watching.” This was a genuinely effective technique when it was rare. Now it is one of the most recognizable AI-coded aesthetics in public writing…
Stake. Say something specific enough to be wrong. Say something that has a cost attached to it. Write as if someone you respect will read it and disagree, and you are saying it anyway.
The underlying shift in 2026 is that audiences are no longer spotting vocabulary. They are spotting template logic. The question is no longer “did a machine write this?” The question is “did a person actually think this through?” Those two questions have started to feel the same.
Most of the list is right. Writing in threes, the fake-profundity transition, the over-clean contrast, the paragraph that always lands on a tidy thesis, low burstiness, no idiolect, the keynote ending that means nothing. He has a good ear. He reads enough to have heard these patterns and named them, and the closing turn is the sharpest thing here: the tell moved from vocabulary to template logic, and the real question is whether a man thought something through.
Now the problem. The piece is a specimen of the thing it hunts. It writes in threes throughout. It runs the contrast structure it warns about in almost every entry. The tell is not the phrase, the tell is the sentence after it. The question is no longer this, the question is that. It stacks fragments for drama. Elegant. Empty. Every item ends on a neat takeaway, which is the relentless closure he flags a few lines later. It mocks “X is not about X, it is about Y,” then leans on that frame to close the whole essay.
And the three fixes he prescribes are the three things the piece lacks most. Specificity: no exact street, no precise number, no detail that could come from one man and no other. Stake: nothing here is costly or embarrassing or his own. Idiolect: no pet phrase, no odd syntax, no person behind the wheel. By his own test the essay fails. It could have been generated. Some of it may have been.
That is the real trouble with the genre, and he steps right up to it and stops. Once “asymmetry reads as human” becomes common knowledge, asymmetry turns into a style to fake, and the overlong sentence and the abandoned thought become a new template. He names the edge of this with “template logic,” then backs away. The honest version of his own essay runs about two hundred words: the detector migrated from words to structure, the structure is now gameable too, and what remains is the old question of whether anyone thought. Everything above that point is the filler the point indicts.
The essay he meant to write lives in his last two paragraphs. The rest is the genre he is describing.
A man who makes his living deploying AI wrote the guide to spotting AI in a voice the guide would flag. He gets close to something real about thinking against generating. He does not turn it on his own prose, which is the one place it would have cost him something, and cost is the thing he says good writing carries.
‘The Talmud as AI Model’ (Mar. 12, 2026)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
For fifteen years I sat in a beit midrash, watching students wrestle with texts that were written to resist easy answers. The Talmudic sugya is a remarkable intellectual machine: it opens with a bold claim, invites a devastating objection, entertains a minority view that reframes the whole question, and only then issues a practical ruling. Nothing is accepted. Everything is pressure-tested.
When I moved into AI deployment, I kept running into the same problem with language models. Ask a question, get a confident answer. Ask for analysis, get a well-organized opinion. The model would rarely challenge its own first move. It would commit to a frame, elaborate on that frame, and dress up the result with appropriate caveats at the end. Sophisticated-looking. Structurally shallow.
I started wondering whether the sugya could fix that.
This one is the best of the four essays I’ve read so far because the rabbi is writing from the thing he knows. Fifteen years in the beit midrash give him the sugya from the inside, and the mapping he draws is clean and not forced. Claim, objection, reframe from a different premise, ruling with conditions. That shape is real, and laying a prompt over it is a fair and useful move. Where the AI-tells piece had no specificity and no stake, this one has both. The drop-in prompt is concrete. A man could paste it tomorrow and get a better answer on a strategy call than a single pass gives him. Credit where due.
Now the trouble. His account of why it works is shakier than the tool itself. He says hallucination is confidence without friction, and that structural resistance cures it. But the objection the model generates comes from the same engine as the claim. The model can invent a self-generated kushya the same way it invents the first answer. His own step two says cite or simulate evidence. Simulate evidence is an instruction to make things up with better posture. You can get the choreography of rigor with none of the grounding, and that reads more trustworthy than a plain answer while being no truer. The form of contradiction is not the substance of it.
The disanalogy he skips is the one that carries the weight. The sugya’s objections were not improvised. They came from a closed canon of recorded positions, argued inside a tradition that transmitted them. The rigor was downstream of the corpus and the community. The model has the moves and none of the substrate. It performs the beit midrash with no books on the shelf and no men across the table. So the structure can sharpen reasoning, and I think it does, while doing nothing to anchor a claim to fact.
One line deserves a flag. He says the rabbis were not chiefly after truth, only after reasoners who could not be fooled. That is a strong claim about a tradition that prizes emet, and he asserts it because his AI point needs it. The sugya bends to fit the tool. A reader who did not know better would take it as settled. It is not.
And a touch of oversell at the close. Two thousand years, the prompt already written, we just had to see it. Structured adversarial prompting is not new. It runs under other names in the prompt literature. His contribution is the framing, the idiom that makes the technique land for a particular reader. That is worth something. It is not a discovery.
The tool is good and the explanation is off. The prompt helps because it forces the model to surface considerations a single pass skips, not because it stops the model from inventing. Keep the prompt. Drop the claim that it reduces hallucination, or keep it tentative. And notice the pattern across his work. When the Torah carries the load instead of seasoning the top, he gets specific, and the writing gets good.
‘How AI can help you with Mesilas Yesharim’ (Dec. 16, 2025)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
The pursuit of ethical perfection in Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto’s Mesillas Yesharim presents a unique challenge: the Ramchal explicitly states that his work contains no new information for the scholar. The difficulty is not yediah (knowledge) but hargashah (internalization) and chazarah (constant review).
Large Language Models offer an unprecedented opportunity here. While AI cannot possess a soul or perform commandments, its capacity for infinite patience, rigorous logical structuring, and persona simulation makes it an ideal “external cognitive scaffold” for Cheshbon HaNefesh (accounting of the soul).
The prompts that follow are designed to transform passive reading into active, dialogic character refinement. Each prompt can be copied directly into ChatGPT, Claude, or any capable AI assistant.
How to Use These Prompts
• Copy the entire prompt text (everything in the gray boxes) and paste it into your AI chat.
• Engage authentically — these work best when you answer honestly, not performatively.
• Use consistently — the Ramchal emphasizes daily practice. Consider scheduling specific prompts for specific times.
• Adapt as needed — these are starting points. Modify the language to fit your life circumstances.
This sits with the sugya piece as his strongest work, and for the same reason. He starts from the text and reads it right. The Ramchal (1707-1746) says outright that he teaches the scholar nothing new, that the gap is not yediah but hargashah and chazarah, and Einhorn builds for that gap and not for information. That is the correct read of Mesillas Yesharim, and most people who quote the sefer miss it. The prompts are concrete and a few are good. The Rationalization Adversary, the machine voicing your strongest yetzer-hara arguments and then taking them apart, maps onto nogea b’davar and ahavat atzmo with real care. The Invisible Man and Credit Swap tests turn lishma into something a man can check. He read the book.
Truth first, though, and the trouble runs deeper here than in the other pieces, because the substrate is supposed to be your own soul.
Mussar runs on friction. The hargashah he names comes from the self wrestling itself, from the reckoning done by the one being reckoned with. Hand the cheshbon hanefesh to a machine with infinite patience that does the structuring for you, and you risk stripping out the friction that makes the work work. You get the report without the reckoning. The flashlight he describes is held by someone else. It lights the room. It does not train your eyes. He waves at the line, no soul, no mitzvot, and then the prompts cross it. The Vigilance Audit has the model deliver the Ramchal’s verdict. The Rationalization prompt has it rule clean or tainted and quote the principle at stake. An LLM invents those quotes the way it invents anything, and now it paskens your moral state. The Ramchal worked inside a mesorah and sent real questions to a rav. The prompt seats a confabulator as posek and mashpia.
Then the flattening, which runs through the whole thing. The mussar arrives dressed as behavioral science and consulting. Behavioral Engineer. Habit stacking. Two-Minute version. Heart MRI. Strategic Risk Analyst. The desire-deconstruction prompt tells the model to strip a craving to its chemistry and clock the crash at thirty minutes, which is Marcus Aurelius and dopamine talk, not the Ramchal. This is the move he makes every time. He translates the sacred into the prestige idiom of the moment. Last spring it was Silicon Valley. Here it is the habit-science shelf at the airport bookstore. The translation buys reach and thins the thing.
The impulse is good. He wants people to walk the path, not just read about it, and the sefer begs for exactly that. Mussar has always borrowed the tools of its day. Rabbi Yisrael Salanter would recognize the instinct if not the device. For a man with no mashpia and no chavruta at 2am, an interrogator of infinite patience might be the thing that gets him to start at all.
But the same trait that makes it accessible makes it thin. The patience, the absence of judgment, the always-on. A mashpia helps because he remembers you across years, because the relationship carries stakes, because he can rebuke you and love you in one breath. The machine forgets, risks nothing, and can do neither. It can scaffold the shape of cheshbon hanefesh. It cannot supply the witness.
‘How AI is Revolutionizing Israel Advocacy’ (Jul. 29, 2025)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
Imagine knowing exactly when and where negative sentiment about Israel begins to spike online before it becomes a trending topic. Advanced AI sentiment analysis tools like Sprinklr, Brandwatch, or even custom solutions built on platforms like Twitter’s API can continuously monitor millions of social media posts, news articles, and forum discussions.
These tools go beyond simple keyword tracking. They analyze context, tone, and emotional indicators to provide nuanced insights. For instance, they can distinguish between legitimate policy criticism and antisemitic rhetoric, or identify when discussion about Israel shifts from neutral news coverage to emotionally charged debate.
The practical application is powerful: advocacy teams can receive real-time alerts when sentiment shifts, allowing them to deploy resources strategically. Teams can intervene early with factual information and context, rather than discovering a viral misinformation campaign after it has already spread.
This is the weakest of the six, and the cause sits closest to his heart.
The piece is generic in a way the sugya and Mesillas Yesharim pieces never were. Swap “Israel advocacy” for nonprofit fundraising or real estate marketing and almost nothing changes. He is not writing from a place he knows here. He is listing tools. Sprinklr, Brandwatch, Video Authenticator, IBM Watson, Jasper, DeepL, NodeXL. And the list has aged badly. Microsoft’s Video Authenticator was a minor 2020 release, never a frontline detector. Watson was a fading brand by 2025. He name-checks Twitter’s API as if it were open, when access had been priced out for two years. The roster reads like it came from old training data, not from a man who has run these systems.
This is from July 2025, and it is the purest specimen of the voice he would teach people to detect eight months later. Game-changing. Force multiplier. Lightning speed. The most immediately practical application. The frictionless keynote ending about who will be best positioned. By the checklist he published in March, this piece fails on every line.
Now strip the banner and read what he proposes to build. Sentiment surveillance across millions of posts. Chatbots dropped into WhatsApp groups and Twitter threads to inject corrections. Network maps that find the key accounts and the communities where an idea takes root, so teams can hit “strategic intervention points.” Netflix-style targeting that feeds each man the version of the story he is most likely to swallow. That is an influence operation. It is the same apparatus, rail for rail, that he would admire in the Fuentes machine nine months later and try to invert. He recommended building it before he saw what it was. Automated persuasion and bot-seeded argument corrode the information commons no matter whose hand is on the switch. Doing it for a cause you believe in does not change what it does to the room. The same line applies to every side that builds these tools, which is the point.
He hands a classifier the job of telling antisemitism from legitimate policy criticism, at scale, as if that line were settled and machine-readable. It is neither, and false positives there carry real cost. And he sells autonomous fact-correction, a bot that cross-checks an image and posts the correct information, as reliable. The same overconfidence about AI runs through all six pieces. The machine is steadier in his telling than in life.
He keeps the human-element caveat, frames AI as helper and not replacement, warns against one-size messaging. People who care about a cause often move slower than the people working against them, and that gap stings. He wants to close it.
But this is the piece where sincerity and craft sit furthest apart. He cares most about this subject and brought the least thinking to it. He reached for the tool list and the marketing voice, and he never stopped to ask whether the machine he was urging people to build is the machine he distrusts everywhere else.
‘Truth, Justice, and the Torah Way: Exploring the Jewish Conception of Justice’ (July 10, 2025)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
The libertarian vision of justice resonates deeply with Torah values emphasizing personal freedom and individual responsibility. The Torah repeatedly underscores the dignity of the individual, exemplified vividly in the divine creation narrative: “So God created mankind in His own image” (Bereishit 1:27). The Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4:5) elaborates powerfully, stating that the creation of a single person teaches that each individual holds infinite value, and “one who saves a life, saves an entire world.”
The Rambam (Maimonides), in his Mishneh Torah, champions a system designed to protect individuals from violence and coercion, aligning closely with Nozick’s minimal-state concept. Halachah, Jewish law, notably in tractates such as Baba Kamma and Sanhedrin, meticulously outlines prohibitions against theft, violence, fraud, and invasion of personal property, underscoring a robust protection of individual liberties.
Yet, Torah’s understanding of justice extends beyond mere non-interference. The Jewish tradition continually insists upon an active moral duty towards communal welfare, fundamentally diverging from pure libertarian minimalism.
The move at the center of his essay is the safest one in comparative thought. Set up two poles, libertarian and egalitarian, then land in the wise middle that holds both. Almost any tradition read with sympathy can be made to do this. Swap in Catholic social teaching or Confucianism and the essay changes almost nothing. The synthesis is so wide it cannot be wrong, and a claim that cannot be wrong does not tell you much. He reaches balanced wisdom too fast, which is the moral-neatness tell he would publish a warning about eight months later.
The good parts are real. Tzedakah from tzedek, obligation and not charity, is a true and clarifying point for a lay reader, and the West-versus-Torah contrast lands. The built-in redistribution, Shmita, Yovel, Peah, Leket, is apt. The Rambam’s eight levels with self-sufficiency at the top, correct. When he stays on Jewish ground he is fine.
The trouble starts when he imports the axis. Nozick (1938-2002) and his Anarchy, State, and Utopia name the libertarian pole, but the egalitarian pole stays anonymous. The man he wants is John Rawls (1921-2002), and A Theory of Justice goes unnamed in a piece pitched on a philosophy hook. That is a hole. The deeper problem is that the Torah does not run on the liberty-versus-distribution axis at all. Its categories are covenant, mitzvah, the ownership of all wealth by God. Tzedakah is not liberal egalitarianism with Hebrew roots. It is a commanded obligation that flows from God’s claim on what you hold, a different thing wearing the same coat. He dresses the Torah in Nozick and Rawls so it reads in the seminar room. That is the move he makes in every piece, the sacred translated into the prestige idiom of the hour. Last year Silicon Valley. Here the political-philosophy syllabus.
One citation needs a flag, and I checked it. He credits the Maharal (c. 1512-1609) with Netiv HaTzedek. The Maharal’s ethical work is Netivot Olam, and its charity path is Netiv HaTzedakah. A path of justice sits beside it, the path of din. Netiv HaTzedek is not among them. Worse for his case, the Maharal there does something more pointed than the balance of freedom and solidarity Einhorn assigns him: he ties charity to justice, to din, and sets it apart from chesed. Einhorn flattens that into a warm equilibrium. The citation is plausible and a little off, which is the hazard that runs through all his work.
Here are the sources behind that passage.
For the work Netivot Olam, and the Maharal’s dates, see the Sefaria text page, https://www.sefaria.org/Netivot_Olam (it gives him as c. 1512-1609 and lists the 33 netivot).
For the charity path, Netiv HaTzedakah, the text on Sefaria: https://www.sefaria.org/Netivot_Olam,_Netiv_Hatzdaka
For the structure of the paths and the point that the Maharal places charity closer to justice (din) than to kindness, the Yeshivat Har Etzion study: https://www.etzion.org.il/en/philosophy/great-thinkers/maharal/torat-hamussar-3 (it walks through the order Torah, avoda, gemilut chasadim, then tzedakah, din, peace, truth, and notes that the Maharal sets charity against chesed and nearer to justice).
For the charity-versus-chesed distinction stated plainly, Rav Zechariah Tubi at Kerem B’Yavneh: https://www.kby.org/english/torat-yavneh/view.asp?id=3589
For background on Netivot Olam as the Maharal’s late ethical work and its place among his books, the Har Etzion overview: https://etzion.org.il/en/philosophy/issues-jewish-thought/issues-mussar-and-faith/maharal-1
Here is the through-line that struck me. This July 2025 essay is a field guide to the AI tells he would publish in March 2026. He delves in the second paragraph, the first meme-word on his own later list. Nuanced appears three times. Dynamic equilibrium sits in the middle. The prose stacks adverbs, vividly, powerfully, meticulously, passionately, profoundly. It closes on a benediction about societies worthy of divine blessing, the frictionless ending he would name. He wrote the specimen, then wrote the diagnosis.
And the bow pulls against the essay. He spends the piece arguing that Torah transcends the libertarian and egalitarian split, then turns and says the American way might reflect that Torah wisdom after all, which folds the distinction he just built.
As a four-minute devar Torah for a lay audience, it’s fine. Judaism does not slot into the American binary, and tzedakah-as-duty is a correction. He does not bend Torah to a program. He lands on both-and, where the tradition sits. But the essay is safe, the frame is borrowed, and it carries the voice he would later teach his readers to distrust.
https://medium.com/@rabbieinhorn
I just read the main page of https://medium.com/@rabbieinhorn.
Seen whole, the feed tells a story no single piece does. Read top to bottom, it runs backward through a conversion.
The early months, winter and spring of 2025, are a rabbi’s notebook. Korban Pesach. Teishvu versus Taduru. The Tanya, twice. The Kitzur Shulchan Aruch. Tzniut. The Golden Rule against Mengzi. These are source pieces, a man working inside the texts he knows. Then a turn. By late 2025 and into 2026 the titles are data scraping, Alexa, an ABA startup’s SEO, Veo cartoons, the outrage rails, Mallacore. The Torah thins to a garnish or drops out. The byline never changes. Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn carries every piece, and that is the point. The title is the asset. It is what lets a business AI consultant speak with borrowed authority about web scraping. He did not leave the pulpit so much as repurpose it.
His own readers tell him this is a mistake, and he does not seem to be listening. Look at the claps. Teishvu, twenty-one. Tzniut, twenty. The Mengzi piece, seventeen. The Jungian Tanya piece, ten. Now look at the consulting pieces. Zero to five. The crowd that follows a rabbi rewards the learning and ignores the funnel. The signal could not be cleaner, and the trajectory runs against it. He writes less of what his audience values and more of what pays. Rational for the wallet. A quiet loss on the page.
The Superman cluster shows the other half of the shift. Seven Superman pieces land between July 2 and July 24, 2025, around the release of James Gunn’s film. The movie opened in the United States on July 11, 2025, and its own logline is a Superman whose truth, justice, and the American way now read as old-fashioned, the exact hook he reaches for. That is a man riding a wave for discovery. Nothing wrong with it. But it marks the move from writing what he is learning to writing what will be found. SEO logic enters the work, and the earlier chiddushim give way to topical hooks.
One habit holds across the whole run and explains both his best and his worst. He is a pairer. Freud meets Moses. The Golden Rule against Mengzi. The animal soul and Jung. Superman and the Übermensch. Superman against Moshiach. The Tanya’s two loves. Truth and justice between Nozick and Rawls. Almost every essay maps one thing onto another. When both sides are things he knows cold, two Torah ideas or a sefer beside a thinker he has read, the mapping lights something up. When one side is a thing he half-knows, the AI tooling, the unnamed Rawls, the map goes thin and reads like the template he would later mock. The format is his gift and his crutch at once.
A couple of ironies the feed makes visible. In July he argues that positive psychology turned virtue into snake oil. Nine months later he is building rails for a Find Your Bright Side positivity brand. In March he publishes the guide to spotting AI prose, dropped into a feed that often trips its own alarms. He can see the patterns. He keeps walking into them.
The learning underneath is deep. The Teishvu piece, the Tanya pieces, the Mengzi piece, these are not the work of a dabbler. He is wide awake, curious across Freud and Jung and Mengzi and Nietzsche, and industrious. Remaking yourself in midlife to earn a living is honorable, not cheap. But the feed reads as a man monetizing the part of himself that sells while writing less of the part that is good, and keeping the title that makes the first part work. The best of him is the part he is leaving behind.
‘Why Positive Psychology Turned Virtue Into Self-Help Snake Oil’ (July 3, 2025)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
Positive psychology didn’t discover virtue, it strip-mined it. When Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman published their handbook of character strengths, they performed an impressive feat of cultural archaeology. They dug up wisdom from Aristotle to Confucius, catalogued 24 character strengths under six virtues, and handed us a neat little assessment tool.
But something died in translation.
Aristotle spoke of eudaimonia, literally “good spirit,” a flourishing that came from aligning your soul with cosmic truth. The Stoics saw virtue as living in harmony with the rational order of the universe. Eastern traditions connected character development to transcendence of the ego and unity with ultimate reality.
Peterson and Seligman kept the vocabulary but gutted the vision. They gave us Wisdom and Knowledge, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance, and Transcendence, but these became personality traits to optimize, not pathways to truth.
This is virtue after the lobotomy.
The Zombie Shuffle
Walk into any corporate wellness program and you’ll see them: zombie virtues shuffling through PowerPoint presentations. “If your top strength is Kindness, try three random acts of compassion this week!” “Got Curiosity? Take an online course!” “Scored high on Gratitude? Start a journal!”
These aren’t virtues anymore, they’re life hacks with ancient names.
Real virtue was never about self-improvement. It was about self-transcendence. The ancients understood something we’ve forgotten: you can’t cultivate authentic character by focusing on yourself. Virtue only makes sense when it points beyond the self to something larger, truer, more enduring.
The fact/value split killed that understanding.
This one has a pulse. After a run of consulting pieces, here is a man writing with conviction about something he has read and felt. The voice shows up. Virtue after the lobotomy. Zombie virtues shuffling through PowerPoint. The Great Virtue Heist. That is idiolect, the thing his own AI-tells piece says good writing needs, and the target is real. Corporate positive psychology did keep the vocabulary of the virtue traditions and drop the metaphysics that gave the words their weight.
But the argument already has a name on it, and he leaves it off. Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) wrote this exact thesis in After Virtue in 1981: that modern moral talk is the surviving fragments of older schemes, used by people who no longer hold the framework that made the fragments make sense. Einhorn reinvents the wheel and never credits the man who built it. The omission stings more because of the timing. MacIntyre died on May 21, 2025, at ninety-six, six weeks before this piece ran. The popularizer of the idea did not say the name.
The polemic also runs hot and flattens what it touches. He folds Aristotle, the Stoics, Confucius, and the East into one package that all says virtue needs a transcendent cosmos. None of them says quite that. Aristotle’s eudaimonia is the characteristic activity of a human functioning well, more biology than union with the stars. The Stoic logos is reason inside the world, not above it. Confucian virtue is relational and ritual and of this world. He homogenizes four traditions to make them sing one chorus, the synthesizer’s habit, the differences sanded off so the mapping holds.
And the clean wall he builds between ancient self-transcendence and modern self-help does not stand. The ancients ran practices. Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) showed that ancient philosophy was a set of spiritual exercises, daily drills for the self. Marcus Aurelius (121-180) kept a journal of self-correction. That is the Meditations. The Stoic examined his conduct at day’s end, a cousin of the cheshbon hanefesh. Virtue-as-practice is not the modern crime he says it is. The ancients hacked too. The real question is what makes a drill formative rather than hollow, and he never asks it.
He never asks it because the constructive half is a wave of the hand. We need a new synthesis. We need approaches that honor rigor while admitting reality exceeds the lab. Which approaches. Name one. He spends four-fifths on the autopsy and closes on a benediction about the cosmic conversation, the frictionless ending he would later flag.
He mocks the test, the gratitude journal, the three acts of kindness this week, the strength you optimize. Five months later he publishes nine numbered prompts for working Mesillas Yesharim: a daily audit, habit-stacking, a two-minute version, a trigger mantra, a Heart MRI for your motives. He rebuilds the life-hack architecture he calls a lobotomy here, with Hebrew names and an LLM. He might say the metaphysics survives because it is Torah. Seligman could say the same, that the strengths point at flourishing. The structural charge he levels lands on his own later work. He commits in Hebrew the sin he names in Greek.
He writes this one from the gut, not the template, and it shows. But the piece borrows its thesis without paying the source, flattens the traditions to fit it, dodges the cure, and indicts a way of doing virtue he would take up himself before the year was out.
‘The Tanya’s Two Loves’ (June 1, 2025)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
I need to tell you something. For years, I approached these teachings as an academic exercise. I parsed the Hebrew, traced the philosophical lineages, mapped the psychological parallels. I understood the Tanya perfectly.
I just didn’t live it.
The transformation came during a period when everything fell apart. Professional failure. Personal loss. The kind of crisis that strips away everything nonessential.
In that emptiness, I found myself returning to the simplest meditation the Tanya offers: “He is our life.” Not a philosophical proposition. A felt reality. The recognition that whatever was sustaining me through the darkness wasn’t coming from my own strength.
That’s when contemplative love stopped being a concept and became an experience. When I realized that the Tanya isn’t describing exotic spiritual states, it’s mapping the territory of the human heart.
This is the most exposed of his pieces. The personal confession, the crisis, the return to a single line of contemplation, that is real stake on the page, the thing his AI-tells piece prizes and the consulting pieces never risk. And the textual frame is sound. The Chinuch Katan is the Alter Rebbe’s introduction to Shaar HaYichud VehaEmunah, the second part of the Tanya, and it turns on love and fear of God and their root in faith in His unity. He has the structure right. The Alter Rebbe (1745-1812) does teach that love and awe give the commandments their wings, and that without them observance is a body without a soul. The childhood-foundations reading, chanoch lana’ar carving channels in the soul, is a faithful and lovely application.
But he overshoots the teaching and flips its order. He writes that feelings, not behaviors, are the foundation of spiritual life. The Tanya says close to the opposite. Love and awe are the wings. The deed is the floor. The hero of the book is the beinoni, the in-between man, and the whole architecture exists for him: the one who does not feel the tzaddik’s fire, whose heart may be cold, who serves through action anyway, ruling his hands and mouth and mind when the feeling will not come. That is the Alter Rebbe’s hard innovation. Service does not wait on emotion. Einhorn turns the sefer into an emotion-first spirituality, the warm modern reading and the one the beinoni was written to correct.
The subtitle is Ancient Wisdom Meets the Human Heart, and the body of the essay props the Tanya on Dacher Keltner’s awe research, on loving-kindness meditation, on Peck and Fromm, on the claim that psychology is at last catching up to the mystics. One month later he publishes the essay arguing that dragging ancient wisdom into modern science is what lobotomized virtue, that the lab kept the words and gutted the vision. Here he does the thing he condemns there. He validates the Tanya by the science, props the sacred on the study he would soon call snake oil. The two pieces sit four weeks apart and cancel.
The natural love he describes, the hidden spring, the Alter Rebbe ties to the divine soul, and in the Tanya that soul is the particular inheritance of the Jew, half of a two-soul doctrine. Einhorn dissolves it into human nature, wired for devotion, designed for love, one path that works for everyone and reaches a single water table. Warm, and wider than the text. The Alter Rebbe is more particular than the universal reading allows.
And the seminar set-piece runs cheap. The professor who says you cannot command a feeling holds a serious position, Hume and Kant behind her. She was spectacularly wrong, he writes, then reaches the real answer without crediting it: you cannot command the feeling, you can command the attention and the deed that train it. The Rambam said as much about loving God through contemplation. The difficulty deserved engagement.
He writes this one from inside the life, not the template, and the counsel is sound. Start where you are. Love is a practice. Do not throw away the simple faith you outgrew. When he stays with the Alter Rebbe’s own moves, contemplation kindling love, the child’s apple and the father’s tallis as foundation, he is good. The trouble is the reach past the text, the borrowed science, and the order reversed. The deed holds up the love. He has it the other way round.
Something is going on with the rabbi and I can ground it in his own words.
Look at the line from the AI-explorer piece. I didn’t change careers, I expanded my toolkit. A man at peace with a clean, chosen move does not need to insist he didn’t change careers. The denial of the break is the tell. You protest the rupture you feel.
Then set that beside the Tanya confession, written weeks later in the same season. He names it himself. Professional failure. Personal loss. The kind of crisis that strips away everything nonessential. He does not say Yavneh, and I will not weld it there for him. But the two voices land within the same few weeks. In May the toolkit expands and all is forward motion. In June everything fell apart. That gap, between the triumphant public account and the confessional private one, is the thing I am sensing. It is his testimony against his own marketing.
The scatter supports it too. Mallacore, an ABA startup’s SEO, Veo cartoons, data scraping, Alexa, the rails piece. A man trying many doors in a year reads more like making the best of things than like a chosen passion. A settled reinvention tends to head one way. His headed several at once.
What I cannot tell you is why. I have no fact about the departure, and I am not going to build one out of vibes. It could be money, fit, health, a board, a high-intensity man wearing out a routine institution. Any of those, none of those. The texts show the shape of a hard landing. They do not show the cause, and inventing one would be the move I keep faulting him for, the plausible story that fills a gap it has not earned.
Reframing a hard exit as an adventure is not a lie. It is how a man keeps his dignity and his income while the ground shifts under him. Expanded my toolkit is what you tell the market, and what you tell yourself at 6am so you can make the calls. Most of what anyone does is make the best of things. There is something honorable in his refusal to narrate himself as a casualty, and something sad in how hard the public voice works to stay bright while the private one, once, told the truth.
‘Why Teishvu isnt Taduru’ (May 25, 2025)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
Torah isn’t about erasing yourself. It’s about right-sizing yourself. A valley represents the kind of humility that paralyzes — so low you can’t see anything, so diminished you can’t act. A towering peak represents the arrogance that blinds — so high you think you’re above everyone else…
We live in an age that’s forgotten how to balance engagement with detachment. We’re either completely committed to things that don’t deserve it, or completely detached from things that do.
We treat our Twitter feeds like sacred texts and our sacred texts like Twitter feeds. We invest emotionally in political outcomes we can’t control while neglecting relationships we can nurture. We build identities around careers that could disappear overnight while ignoring souls that will outlast our résumés.
This is the piece you write after a painful career change. I feel like he’s telling himself everything is going to be OK.
This is his best register, and the claps are earned. The voice is here. The laptop on the wobbly table, fronds in the coffee, twenty years of building and packing away. That lived detail is the thing his AI-tells piece prizes and the consulting work never carries. And the life-lesson lands: engaged but not attached, appropriate attachment, all dwelling temporary once you zoom out far enough. As a derush for a wide audience it is warm and useful, and people felt it.
But the engine he builds it on runs backward, and the gemara he is glossing says close to the reverse of his claim.
His thesis: teshvu carries temporariness, taduru carries permanence, so the rabbis kept teshvu to hold the sukkah impermanent, dwell-but-don’t-settle. Open the sugya. On teshvu k’ein taduru the Sages derive that all seven days a man makes his sukkah keva, permanent, and his house arai, temporary. From the phrase comes the rule to carry your fine vessels and good bedding into the sukkah, to eat and sleep and relax and learn there as you would at home. The taduru standard does not preserve temporariness. It imports permanence into the hut. The rabbis did not avoid taduru. They invoked it, and the upshot is that the flimsy booth becomes your fixed home for a week while the solid house turns provisional.
That is the real paradox, and it beats his. The structure stays arai, temporary, by law it cannot even rise past twenty cubits. Your dwelling inside it must be keva, permanent. The tension does not sit between two verbs. It sits between the booth and the conduct: a temporary shell you live in as if it were the most settled place you have. He felt the paradox, which is why the piece moves, then assigned the words the wrong way round. And the etymology will not carry his weight. Yashav is not the temporary root. Yishuv, moshav, toshav, settlement and settler, all grow from it. If a verb in that phrase leans permanent, it is teshvu as much as taduru.
The Sinai stretch is a second essay stitched to the first. The Goldilocks mountain, the right-sizing, Rebbe Nachman (1772-1810) on holy chutzpah, the Shelah on the Maggid telling the Beis Yosef’s circle to think of themselves as giants. Lovely material, and a different derush. The seam between sukkah-as-balance and Sinai-as-right-sizing is thin, joined by the word right-sized more than by an argument. Two good talks under one heading.
And the usual inflation rides along. You’ll never read Torah the same way again. This changes everything. The Netflix and YouTube jokes. The register is pitched to wonder, which his readers like, and which costs the piece precision.
When he sits in his own sukkah and tells you what it taught him, he is good, and the core insight, hold engagement and transience together, is true. The trouble is small. He had the better paradox in his hands, the booth made permanent and the house made temporary, and reached past it for a looser one about two verbs. The sugya he quotes would have served him better than the etymology he supplied.
Sukkot falls in the autumn. He wrote this in May, months from the chag, no holiday pulling the theme toward him. A man does not reach for the sukkah in late spring unless the sukkah is speaking to something he is living right then.
Read the essay with that in view. The structure that briefly held my life dissolves back into storage bins. Careers that could disappear overnight. This teaches us more about security than any insurance policy. A darshan does not pick those examples at random. That is a man who just watched his structure come down, telling himself the structure was always temporary, so the loss is survivable. The sukkah is the perfect text for it. A dwelling that looks like a home and was never built to last, and you are told to find your security inside the flimsiness.
Set the dates together. The sukkah piece, May 25. The toolkit-expanded piece, May 28. The Tanya confession with professional failure in it, June 1. Three essays in eight days, one season, three angles on the same event. The public voice says I chose this. The Tanya voice says everything fell apart. The sukkah voice does the work in between, turning the fall into a teaching.
It also rereads the seam I called thin. The Sinai stretch, the right-sizing, the holy chutzpah, consider yourself a giant. I said it was a second essay bolted on. The two halves are not joined by argument. They are joined by need. One half says the home you lost was always a booth, so you can bear the loss. The other says you are still big enough to build again, so get up and make the calls. A man steadying himself needs both at once.
And it may explain the slip. I said he got the gemara backward, that the sugya makes the sukkah keva, permanent, and the house arai, while he read teshvu as holding the place temporary. A man whose keva had just turned to rubble might feel impermanence in the phrase, because impermanence is what he was standing in. He might not have seen the booth become a fixed home because his own had just stopped being one. The error reads like the autobiography leaking through the lamdus.
This is a reading of the words and the season, not a fact about his life. Writing your dislocation into the parsha is the oldest use the text has. The tradition is built on men turning the wound into Torah, and doing it in the off-season, when no one asked, is Torah.
‘The Sacred Dimension of Self-Respect: A Torah Perspective’ (May 6, 2025)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
I still remember my shock as a fifteen-year-old yeshiva student when my rebbe slammed his hand on the table and declared, “Tzniut has nothing to do with shame!” The classroom fell silent. Here we were, teenage boys awkwardly navigating puberty, assuming modesty meant hiding our embarrassing bodies from God’s disapproving gaze. He had shattered our misconception in eight words…
My grandmother survived Auschwitz with this verse branded on her soul. “They took everything,” he once told me while rolling up his sleeve to reveal his number, “but not this.” He tapped his chest. “Never this.” He understood what the Nazis couldn’t: human dignity isn’t granted by governments or earned through achievement. It’s built into our DNA…
I once witnessed a venerated rabbi deliberately violate Shabbat law restrictions to preserve the dignity of a mentally ill man who had soiled himself in shul. Without hesitation or sanctimony, he simply took care of what needed doing. No sermons, no self-congratulation — just quiet recognition that kavod habriyot demanded immediate action. That moment taught me more than a thousand shiurim…
I’ve spent too many hours speaking brilliant, observant Jews who meticulously fulfill every detail of the law while treating themselves with shocking cruelty. A young woman once told me she couldn’t imagine God loving her — despite volunteering at a chesed (kindness) organization every week. “But you believe God loves those you help?” I asked. “Of course,” she replied immediately. “Then why are you the exception?” Her tears answered before her words could…
My own relationship with this teaching crystallized during a health crisis of a friend several years ago. Bedridden for weeks, I initially viewed my friends situation as merely inconvenient — until my rav visited and gently suggested I was neglecting a mitzvah. “Your body isn’t a rental car,” he said. “It’s the only vehicle you’ll ever have for serving Hashem in this world.” His words stung because they were true. I’d treated my health as spiritually irrelevant…
At sixteen, my friend broke Shabbat deliberately for the first time. Rebellion, peer pressure, curiosity — take your pick of motivations. What followed haunts him still: not guilt but a terrifying emptiness. If he could so easily discard what he claimed to value, who was he? His identity collapsed under the weight of his actions….
Last Shabbat, my colleague asked why I cover my head with a kippah even when alone in my backyard. “Is it because Hashem will be mad if you don’t?” he asked with childish directness. I paused before answering, suddenly aware how my response might shape his understanding of Judaism.
“No,” I finally said. “It’s because wearing it reminds me who I am.”
His face scrunched in confusion. “But you already know who you are?”
“Sometimes we forget,” I told him. “Sometimes I forget.”
This is the warm register again, and the reframe is true and worth making. Tzniut as dignity, not shame. Omnipresence as accompaniment, not surveillance. Darkness is like light read as you are never lost rather than you can never hide. The young woman who runs every chesed and cannot picture God loving her, and the question that breaks it open, why are you the exception. That is real pastoral work, and the people who clapped felt it. When he preaches that a man’s worth does not rest on his achievements or anyone’s approval, he is good.
But two of the sources do not hold the weight he puts on them.
Kavod habriyot first. He quotes Berachot 19b, human dignity is so great it overrides a negative commandment, and reads it as dignity trumping explicit Torah prohibitions. The gemara says less than the headline. A few lines on, the Talmud narrows the override to lo tasur, the command to heed the Sages, so the principle suspends rabbinic prohibitions, with biblical ones set aside only in passive cases or monetary matters. The Rabbis held they had no power to set aside Divine law by an act of their own. His own example fits the narrow reading, not the broad one. The rabbi who cleaned up the soiled man on Shabbos was setting aside rabbinic carrying and handling rules, the category the sugya allows. The drama he wants, dignity overriding the Torah itself, is the line the gemara walks back.
The self-love claim is worse, because he hangs a modern idea on two rishonim who say close to the opposite. He writes that self-love is mandatory, that v’ahavta l’reiacha collapses without it, and credits Ramban (1194-1270) and Ibn Ezra (1089-1164) with you can’t give what you don’t have. Open them. Ramban calls the verse an overstatement, since the human heart cannot love another exactly as itself, and reads it as wanting good for your neighbor and shedding envy. Ibn Ezra reads kamocha adverbially, that you should wish good to befall your fellow the way you wish it for yourself. Neither makes self-love the prerequisite. Ramban leans the other way, toward chayecha kodmin, your own life first. The empty-cup reading is self-help theology, and putting it in the mouths of these two is the same plausible-but-wrong citation I keep finding.
Then a tell. The piece runs on first-person testimony. Read two of the anecdotes with care. My grandmother survived Auschwitz, he writes, then four times: he told me, his sleeve, his number, he tapped his chest. Grandmother, then he. And the health story opens on a health crisis of a friend, then turns to bedridden for weeks, I, then my friends situation, then a rav telling him he is neglecting the mitzvah of his own body. Who was bedridden, the friend or the writer. The story cannot decide. A man recounting his own grandfather’s tattoo or his own illness does not lose the thread like that. These are the seams of text assembled rather than lived, and they sit in the one essay whose power depends on the memories being real. The author of the guide to spotting AI prose left two of his own alarms ringing in his most personal piece.
The season is here too, May 6, three weeks before the sukkah essay. Worth not resting on achievement. Teshuvah as return to the self when identity collapses. We can return because we have somewhere to return to. The same man steadying himself, preaching the dignity that outlasts the loss of a position.
The heart of this is right and kind, and the close, the kippah in the backyard because sometimes I forget who I am, is good. He did not get tzniut wrong. He reached for sources that say less than he needs and let the testimony blur.
‘Freud Meets Moses: Where Psyche Meets Soul’ (May 6, 2025)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
Growing up in an observant home while studying psychology, I felt pulled between two worlds — secular theories that dissected the human mind versus ancient wisdom that nourished the soul. The conflict played out in my own community: an elderly gentlemen, a deeply religious man, once dismissed my college psychology textbook with a wave of his hand. “This Freud,” he muttered, “knows nothing of the real human struggle.”
Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that these traditions weren’t as contradictory as they seemed. After years grappling with both, I’ve come to see these frameworks as unexpected dance partners — sometimes in perfect harmony, other times stepping on each other’s toes…
Freud didn’t discover the unconscious — he just gave it a clinical name and framework. The notion that we harbor hidden thoughts was old news to Jewish sages. Rabbi Yisrael Salanter beat Freud to the punch by decades when he wrote about our “inner forces” in 1880. While counseling a troubled student, he’d often say, “The problem isn’t what you know about yourself — it’s what you don’t know.”
…I remember the awkward silence when, during a Shabbos dinner, a psychology-major guest mentioned Freud’s belief that toddlers experience erotic pleasure during toilet training. My Orthodox brother-in-law nearly choked on his challah…
One synagogue member resolved her anxiety not just by understanding its psychological roots but by reconnecting to God’s compassion. A more secular member found healing through Freudian insight complemented by wisdom from Jewish ethical teachings, though he would never have sought “religious” counsel.
We don’t need to choose between these frameworks. We need both maps to navigate the magnificent complexity of being human. Freud named the battles within; Torah teaches us how to win them and transform them into something sacred.
Some of the pairings here are apt. Hitbodedut beside free association, Rebbe Nachman’s unstructured outpouring as the older talking cure. Cheshbon hanefesh beside the work of catching your own defenses. The yetzer hara as raw energy to be channeled rather than crushed, a good Jewish idea, the house that never gets built without it. And the frame is sympathetic, a man pulled between the observant home and the psychology department, trying to make peace between them.
But the method stacks the deck. He posts this on Freud’s own birthday, May 6, a nice touch, then fights the intro-textbook Freud (1856-1939), the most literal and most discredited version, against Torah’s best. Infants with erotic drives, toddlers and toilet training, a child lusting for one parent and plotting the other’s death, religion as patricidal guilt. He picks the lurid, century-old Freud that analysis itself left behind, object relations, attachment, ego psychology, and sets it against the highest reaches of the tradition. A fair fight pairs mature with mature. This one pairs Freud’s worst with Moses’ best and calls Moses the winner.
The landing calls itself integration and runs closer to annexation. Freud gets the basement, the id, the dark. Torah gets the foundation and the upper stories. Freud named the battles, Torah teaches us to win them. That is not two maps. It is one map with the other demoted to a tool, psychology the junior partner that diagnoses while Torah heals. A fine thing to believe, and apologetics wearing the costume of dialogue. The pairing format, his favorite, here elevates the home team.
The title oversells, too. Freud Meets Moses, and Moses shows up for a single line, would have seen through it just as clearly as Freud. The Jewish side is Salanter (1809-1883), Rav Kook, Soloveitchik, Rebbe Nachman, the gemara, not Moshe. The headline promises a confrontation the essay never stages.
A couple of the quotes I cannot place. That the mussar masters wrote about hidden forces before Freud is defensible. But the bedside line, the problem is what you don’t know about yourself, and Soloveitchik’s (1903-1993) every human being is a genius at self-justification, read like quotes furnished to fit. Some of his sourcing lands, the gemara on the uninterpreted dream, the Mishnah’s five-thirteen-eighteen, the worry spoken aloud from Yoma. Others have the ring of a paraphrase promoted to a quotation.
This essay and the tzniut piece carry the same date, May 6, and the same flaw. The connective tissue is garbled. An elderly gentlemen, singular, called gentlemen three times and once eldergly. I would have given my this six year old a crash course. The narrator slides from rabbi to therapist to psychology professor to therapy client inside a paragraph, and routes his own material through a friend, a student, a one and a themselves. A man writing one lived essay does not do this. A man producing two eight-minute essays in a day, with help, does. The seams match across both, which tells you how they were made.
And the stance cancels against a later one. Here, May 6, he weds Torah to Freud and says we need both maps. On July 3 he argues that dragging ancient wisdom into modern psychology lobotomized virtue. The discipline he welcomes in the spring is the one he calls snake oil by summer.
‘Updating the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch on Physical Health’ (April 27, 2025)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
This article is both an academic endeavor and a personal journey. Despite being aware of the importance of health, I often fall short in making choices that honor my body’s well-being. By reexamining Siman 32 through the lens of modern health practices, I aim to inspire not only myself but also others to align our daily habits with both halachic guidance and current medical understanding.
I feel like all of his best work on this site is part of a personal journey addressed primarily to himself. This is not his best work.
Start with what the text is, because the framing hides it. Siman 32 is not ancient Jewish wisdom about the body. It is Rambam’s medical regimen from Hilchot De’os, chapter four, codified by Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried (1804-1886) into the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch. And Rambam’s regimen is the best medicine of the twelfth century, Galen by way of the Arab physicians: the natural warmth, the humors, the temperaments balanced hot against cold, the fumes that rise from oversleep. So the original column is medieval science, transmitted as halacha.
That changes how to read the thirty-two annotations. The piece grades the old text on a curve. Where the regimen lands on advice any era reaches, eat less, chew your food, walk after a meal, sleep enough, he writes validated, ancient wisdom confirmed. Where it is simply wrong, he does one of two things. He retires it in a quiet aside, bloodletting obsolete, no link between sex and eyesight. Or he retrofits it. The worst case is the fumes. The medieval text says oversleep sends harmful vapors up to the brain. He pairs this with the glymphatic system clearing beta-amyloid during sleep and calls it resonance. The resemblance is verbal. Fumes is a word that happens to sound like a finding it has nothing to do with. That is concordism, reading today’s science back into an old text so the text comes out ahead, and it is the move his own positive-psychology essay calls a lobotomy.
The deeper trouble is that he refutes himself in the introduction and does not notice. He states the right principle up front: health rulings track the best medicine of their day and update as the medicine advances. True. But that principle says to retire Siman 32’s physiology and follow your doctor, not to spend twelve minutes showing the regimen was right all along. He writes the disenchanting truth in paragraph two and re-enchants the text for thirty-two sections against it.
And the modern column is shakier than he lets on. It reads less like evidence-based medicine than like wellness-blog consensus, which is its own era’s folk medicine. Detoxification, as if the liver runs a cleanse. Resveratrol in red wine as a benefit, a claim the doses never supported and the field has walked back. The Okinawan longevity story, now under hard scrutiny for its data. So the dialogue he stages is not tradition meeting science. It is twelfth-century folk medicine paired with twenty-first-century folk medicine, both dressed as rigor, and the seams papered over with the word holistic.
Then the form. Thirty-two units, every one Original Text then Modern Insight, identical shape, the same vocabulary cycling through, mindful eating, gut microbiome, WHO one hundred fifty minutes three times over, bullet under bullet, the tidy both-honored conclusion. This is the long-form an LLM produces on request, and by the checklist he would publish eleven months later it fails on almost every line: even polish, no idiolect, template logic, generic intensity words, paragraphs that all land the same way. It is the most machine-made piece of the set, and his readers seem to have sensed it. One clap.
‘The Critical Thinker’s Toolkit: 20 Powerful Prompts for Sharper Decisions and Clearer Thinking’ (March 31, 2025)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
19. Contrarian Scenario Mapping Prompt
I’m inclined towards [preferred decision]. Outline a contrarian scenario where the opposite is plausible and beneficial.
There is nothing here, and that is the thing to notice.
Strip the byline and no trace of the man remains. No Torah, no lamdus, no voice, no Superman, no confession. Twenty stock prompts any account could have posted, and plenty have. Belief audit, devil’s advocate, opportunity cost, systems thinking, pre-mortem. These are good tools, and not one is his. The pre-mortem is Gary Klein’s (b. 1944). Opportunity cost is first-year economics. Steelmanning and second-order effects are common stock. He lists them clean and credits no one, the same borrow-without-paying I keep finding, except here there is no argument sitting on top, only the borrowed list.
This is the floor of the corpus. The consulting end taken to its limit, where the author has vanished and the word Rabbi on the byline is the only thing left of him, a brand tag on commodity output. And it is a clean specimen of the genre he would teach people to spot a year later. Powerful, sharper, clearer in the title. Universal applicability, for life and work. The frictionless close, use them regularly to cultivate a habit. Writing in threes, template logic, no idiolect, no stake. Twenty templates is template logic made literal. By his own March 2026 checklist it trips every wire. Zero claps, which reads about right.
‘Echoes of Desire: Exploring the Interplay of Mimetic Theory and Jewish Ethical Values’ (Jan. 4, 2024)
Rabbi Einhorn writes:
The communal aspect of Judaism further deepens these ethical commitments. Jewish life is inherently communal, with rituals, prayers, and festivals designed to be shared and celebrated. The concept of collective responsibility (Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh) suggests that all Jews are responsible for one another, reinforcing the idea that one’s ethical obligations extend beyond the self to the community and beyond. This sense of interconnectedness fosters a community where members are accountable to each other and support and uplift each other in their ethical and spiritual journeys.
This is the baseline Einhorn. The pairing habit is here, X meets Y. The smooth template voice is here, we will jump into, as we delve into each account, the dynamics of mimetic desire. The disconnected ethics section is here. None of it was made by the crisis. The crisis only swapped the subject, from Torah-and-theory to consulting. The method was already his.
Some of this lands. Joseph and his brothers is a fair Girardian read, the favored son, the collective turn against him, the expulsion. David and Saul works too, Saul’s envy of the man the people love. And René Girard (1923-2015) gets a competent summary, mimetic desire, the scapegoat, transcendence by renouncing violence. As cross-pollination it is a respectable popular essay, and the fifteen claps fit.
But Story Two gets the heart of it backward, and a famous rabbi already wrote the version he missed. He says the Yom Kippur goat mirrors Girard’s scapegoat mechanism. It runs closer to the opposite. Girard’s scapegoat works by misrecognition: the crowd unites against a victim it believes guilty and discharges its violence while hiding that violence from itself. The azazel goat does none of this. The kohen confesses the people’s own sins aloud over it. No one thinks the goat is guilty. No crowd, no belief, no concealment, only an open admission that the sins are ours. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020) said it straight: the scapegoat of Acharei Mot is the precise opposite of the scapegoat as we now use the word, because the rite exists so that blaming others would never take root, we say mipnei chata-enu, because of our sins. The English word scapegoat even comes from this ritual, then drifted into meaning its reverse. So the goat and Girard’s scapegoat share a name and invert each other. That inversion was the essay. He wrote mirror and walked past it.
He uses mimetic as a dressed-up word for envy and loses what is particular to Girard, the triangle, desiring a thing because a model desires it. Envy is not yet mimetic desire until you name the mediator. And the frame demotes his own tradition, which he does not notice. Girard holds the Gospels as the place the scapegoat is finally laid bare, and the standard reading types the two Yom Kippur goats onto Jesus and Judas, with the Hebrew Bible as the preparation. A rabbi reaching for Girard to show Judaism transcends mimetic violence is borrowing a frame that seats Judaism below Christianity. In the Freud essay he rigged the theory down to let Torah win. Here he adopts a theory rigged to make Torah lose, and says nothing.
The fourth section drifts off the topic. A wall of rich ethical framework, robust commitment, intricately connected, asserting that communal values are the antidote to mimesis without showing how, and forgetting that in Girard the community is the engine of the scapegoat. Solidarity can sharpen the knife.
Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn, His Own Cooler
Erving Goffman (1922-1982) took the phrase from the con. In the confidence game the victim is the mark. A team ropes him in, takes his money, and walks. One man stays behind. His job is not to steal. The theft is done. His job is to keep the mark quiet, to sit with him after the loss and help him find a story he can live with, so he does not run to the police or make a scene. Goffman called this man the cooler, and the work cooling the mark out.
Then he did the thing that made the essay last. He said the con is only the clearest case. The work goes on everywhere. Every time a man loses a status he counted on, the job, the rank, the marriage, the place at the head of the room, someone has to help him take up the smaller self that is left, and take it up without blowing his top. The employer eases the worker out with a softer title. The family lets the failure call it a fresh start. It comes to the same thing every time. A defeated man needs a face to keep, and cooling is the giving of that face.
Sometimes there is no cooler on hand. Then the man cools himself.
That is Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn. The line is already written, in his own hand. I didn’t change careers, I expanded my toolkit. That is the cooler’s sentence, spoken by the mark to the mark. A man at ease with a clean move does not reach for it. You reach for that line when something was taken and you need a way to stand up from the table without the room seeing how much you left on it.
What was taken, I cannot tell you, and I will not invent it. The loss is his to name, not mine to guess. He names it himself, weeks after the toolkit line, in the Tanya essay. Professional failure. Personal loss. Everything fell apart. That is the mark before he is cooled, the truth leaking out before the story reseals it. Read the two voices in order and you watch the cooling happen. In May the toolkit expands and the move is forward and chosen. In June, for a paragraph, the loss is named. Then the public voice returns and does not name it again. The cooler wins.
The front he builds is a managed thing, and Goffman hands you the tools to see it. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life he calls the part a man shows the room the front, the setting and the title and the manner that announce who he is. Einhorn’s front is the byline. Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn rides every essay, the data-scraping piece and the cartoon piece and the outrage piece, and it does the front’s work. It carries the old prestige into the new room. It lets a consultant speak about web scraping with the authority of the beit midrash. Front stage, the confident voice, the lightbulb that explodes, the eight tools, the founder and CEO. Back stage, the scatter, the many doors tried in a year, the essays produced faster than a man can live them, the grandmother who turns into a he four lines on. The seams show because the front runs at speed. A managed front always keeps a back room, and his is visible at the edges.
Goffman asked of every performer whether he believes his own front. The cynic knows it is a show. The sincere man has taken his own part for the truth. Einhorn is the sincere one, and this is the heart of it. He runs no con on his readers. He is the mark and the cooler in one body, and he believes the cooling. That belief is what makes the arrangement hold, and it is also what keeps it honest in the only way that counts. A man who talks himself into a livable story is doing what almost every defeated man does, and Goffman did not sneer at it. He thought cooling was among the kinder things people do for one another, and the kindest thing a man can do for himself.
But watch what kind of cooling this is. The ordinary cooler helps the mark accept a smaller self. Step down, take the lateral move, call it enough. Einhorn’s cooling does more than shrink the claim. It raises it. He does not grant that he came down. He tells the room he went up, out ahead of Silicon Valley, the rabbi who saw that the Talmud was the training manual for the machine. That is a heavier lift than the usual face-saving. To cool a man into a quieter life is one thing. To cool him into believing he rose when he fell takes constant work, and the work shows. The front has to be propped higher than the ground supports. The overconfidence about the machine, the citations that run a little off, the guide to spotting AI prose written in the voice that guide would flag, these are the costs of holding a front pitched above its footing. A modest cooling needs little upkeep. A triumphant one needs a new essay every week.
There is a second room Goffman points to, the audience. Cooling is not finished when the mark accepts the story. The room has to accept it too. A face is something others grant. And here the record speaks. When Einhorn writes as the rabbi, the sukkah, the Tanya, the gemara on dignity, the readers grant the face. Twenty claps, twenty-one. When he writes as the founder, the consultant, the AI man, the room goes quiet. One clap. Zero. The audience keeps him on as the teacher and declines to ratify him as the seer of Silicon Valley. The cooling works on himself and stalls with the crowd. He has talked himself into the new status. He has not talked them into it, and their silence is the part of the performance he cannot stage.
So the Goffman reading lands soft and hard at once. Soft, because cooling oneself out is no crime and no weakness. It is how a man keeps his feet after the floor goes. The toolkit line is no lie. It is the face he needs, and needing a face is the most human thing there is. Hard, because the face he chose is pitched too high, and a face pitched too high has to be defended against the facts, which is exhausting, and which pulls a man off the one thing he does that the room still claps for.
The cooler’s best counsel to this mark would run quieter than the one he gave himself. You do not have to say you rose. You can say you lost the pulpit and are building something smaller and new, and that the learning was the best of you and is still yours to give. That face costs less to keep. It needs no machine to prop it, no weekly proof. And it would let the lamdus back in, the work the room has been telling him all along it wants. The mark who claims he climbed must guard the claim forever. The mark who grants the fall, and keeps his dignity in the granting, is the one who is finished being cooled, and free to work.
Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn and the Exchange Rate
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) saw money as only one kind of wealth. A man can hold cultural capital, the learning in his head and the diplomas on his wall. He can hold social capital, the network that returns his calls. He can hold symbolic capital, the honor a field grants to those it counts as worthy. And the forms convert. Cultural capital becomes economic when the degree lands the job. Symbolic capital becomes economic when the name on the door brings the clients. But the conversion is never free and never clean. Each form trades against the others at a rate, and the rate is set by the field a man stands in. Carry your wealth across a field’s border and the rate can turn against you.
Einhorn’s career is one long conversion.
Start with the fortune he built. Twenty-three years in the pulpit by his own count, twelve as dean of Yavneh, semicha from a serious seminary, and in 2021 the Yadin Yadin, the advanced ordination that seats a man on a rabbinic court. A book. Three albums. Two marathon lectures that ran past the clock and into the record books. A think tank handed to him by the Orthodox Union. In the religious field this is a large estate, and most of it sits in the durable forms, the learning embodied over decades and the titles that fix it in place.
Note what the lectures already did. An eighteen-hour class raised money, a nineteen-hour class raised more, and the field blessed the act because the conversion ran the sanctioned way, his symbolic capital turned into cash for the institution, not for him. The religious field permits that. It permits the rabbi to raise a fortune for the school. It frowns on the rabbi who raises one for himself. Hold that rule. It returns.
The title is the asset that travels. Bourdieu called the credential institutionalized cultural capital, the form that takes the learning out of one man’s head and stamps it into a portable certificate with a known rate. Rabbi. The word rides every essay he now posts, the ones on the Talmud and the ones on web scraping and customer-service automation, the ones with no Torah in them at all. The byline is the title doing its work, carrying the honor of the old field into the new room. When a consultant writes about data pipelines under the word Rabbi, the title is the thing he spends.
Then comes the border, and the discount. The business field runs on its own currency. It pays for shipped results, for client returns, for competence other men can measure. The rabbinic title buys a little there, novelty and a little trust, the meeting taken out of curiosity. It does not command the room the way it commanded the sanctuary. So he does what a man does when his strong currency weakens at the border. He tries to set his own rate. He makes the religious capital the product. Torah-guided AI. The Talmud as the training manual for the machine. The rabbi who understood the machine from the inside of an ancient text before he used it. The move is an attempt to make his own currency legal tender in a field that did not mint it. Whether the field honors the rate is the open question, and the early signs answer it. The practice, by his own telling, started on clients sent his way by generous people, the network passing him work. That is social capital converting into economic capital, the old congregation and its goodwill paying out, while the brand does less of the lifting than the brand claims.
Habitus is the next cost, and the deepest. Bourdieu meant by it the set of dispositions a field presses into a man until they run without thought, the feel for the game. The beit midrash pressed its game into Einhorn for thirty years. The pairing of a sacred text with a secular one. The derush that finds a teaching in a pop song. The homiletic turn that lands a paragraph on a lift of feeling. In the religious field these reflexes were capital. They filled rooms and sold books. Carried into the business field they read as fluff, the ornament a client skims to reach the deliverable. Bourdieu had a word for the lag, hysteresis, the habitus tuned to a field that no longer holds, the man playing the old game by reflex on a board with new rules. The citation slips and the easy confidence about the machine are the same lag. The feel for the sugya is not the feel for the system, and a man fluent in one can mistake himself for fluent in the other, because the dispositions do not announce that they have crossed a border.
There is a tax the religious field levies that he carries with him, and here his training helps. That field rests on disinterest, on the refusal to price the holy. The rabbi must not look as though he sells. So the commercial, when it comes, has to be dressed. Watch the Mallacore rewards program arrive in the language of hakaras hatov, gratitude, the gift, four named tiers of referral commission wrapped in the vocabulary of thanks. Bourdieu called this the disavowal of the economic, the labor by which a field that lives on money refuses to name it, the transaction performed as a favor. Einhorn does it well because the religious field trained him in it for decades. The disavowal is the one piece of the old habitus that converts at par, because the business field, too, likes its money dressed.
Step back and the whole move has a name inside Bourdieu’s sociology of religion. He divided the religious field, after Weber (1864-1920), into roles. The priest administers settled grace inside an institution, salaried, housed, his authority underwritten by the church that employs him. The prophet brings an original word from outside, in a time of rupture, and must charismatize his own authority because no institution stands behind him. The sorcerer sells discrete services to a private clientele. The dean of Yavneh was a priest. He held a chair, drew a salary, spoke with the institution’s weight behind every word. Outside it he becomes the sorcerer, selling services one client at a time, his authority no longer underwritten by the school but staked fresh each morning on his own performance. The river of Medium essays is the labor of a man recharismatizing himself each day, manufacturing by output the standing the institution once supplied by fact.
Capital does convert, a man may spend what he earned, and there is no shame in turning a life of learning into a living. The truth he manages is the rate. The title that ruled the sanctuary buys novelty at the office door. The habitus that was mastery now reads as ornament. The practice leans on the network more than on the name it puts forward. Bourdieu’s lesson holds without mercy and without malice: the worth of what you carry depends on the ground you stand on, and a fortune in one currency can be a small sum across the border.
There is one field where his capital still trades at par, where the learning is the coin and the page is the market and the audience pays him in the attention he can still command. The estate is real. It is in Torah.
‘A Big Misunderstanding’
David Pinsof has a complaint about intellectuals. They blame the world’s troubles on misunderstanding. Polarization, bigotry, war, unhappiness, all of it a comprehension problem, and all of it curable by the people whose trade is comprehension. Pinsof finds this story too flattering to trust. If every trouble is a misunderstanding, then the men who sell understanding are saving the world by getting up in the morning. He offers a colder account. People are savvy animals who grasp what they have an incentive to grasp. Stupidity is strategic. Advice is mostly bullshit. And the trouble with us is seldom bad beliefs. It is bad motives, dressed in good ones, which we confuse with the real thing the way a customer confuses the Starbucks mission statement with the drive to book profit.
Hold that up to Einhorn and the fit is close, because Einhorn is in the understanding business.
Look at what he sells. LomdAI rests on a comprehension gap. The Talmud is hard, learners cannot follow it, and the machine will decode it for them. The twenty-prompt toolkit rests on a comprehension gap. Your decisions are poor because you have not audited your assumptions, so here are the audits. The mussar essays rest on a comprehension gap. You are unhappy because you misread the Tanya or skipped your cheshbon hanefesh, and the right prompt will set you straight. Then the same gap moves to the office. Businesses misunderstand AI, and Shpait will teach them to think with it, to ask better questions. Every product is the same product. The trouble is that you do not understand, and the cure is a man who does. Pinsof’s myth, sold by the unit.
This is a fine thing to sell, because it makes the seller important. The fixer, the bridge, the decoder. Pinsof’s intellectual, saving the galaxy one bias at a time.
The frame’s main tool is the gap between stated motive and actual motive. Einhorn’s stated motives sit on the surface in mission-statement prose. Make ancient wisdom alive. Help people flourish. Transform your business through Torah-guided innovation. Invite audiences to live more consciously. Pinsof does not call this lying. He calls it the story we tell over the thing we are doing, and he says we believe the story, which leaves us no less savvy underneath. Under the prose the frame names the usual goals, status, resources, coalition. The record-setting lecture and the top-young-rabbi laurel are status. The consulting fee and the lifetime-commission rewards program are resources. The defense of Israel and the rallying of the observant are coalition. None of this needs him to be a fraud. The savvy runs beneath the sincerity, the way it runs beneath all of ours.
Watch one move, because Pinsof drew the template for it. The Mallacore rewards program pays referral commissions on four named tiers, and it arrives wrapped in the word hakaras hatov, gratitude. That is the mission statement laid over the profit, the sweetie signal on the competitive act, and the man means the gratitude while the commission does its work. Pinsof expects this. He thinks we all talk this way, and that the talk is a weapon we do not know we are holding.
Now the strategic-stupidity test, which is the sharpest thing the frame does to him. Pinsof says people understand what pays them to understand and stay foggy where the fog pays better. So read the errors by their location. On the page where he learns, the gemara, the Tanya, the Ramchal, his reading runs deep and mostly right. That is his strength, and he has every incentive to get it right, and he does. Move to the AI claims and the citations that prop them, and the errors gather, the overconfidence about what the machine can do, the sources that sit a little off. The frame does not read these as honest gaps in a man doing his best. It asks what he has an incentive to grasp. The market for a Torah-and-AI sage pays for confident bridging, not for accuracy about the bridge. To understand the machine’s limits too well would spoil the product. So the fog collects where the fog pays. He is not failing to understand the machine. He understands as much about it as his position rewards, and no more.
Then advice, which Pinsof calls mostly bullshit. Einhorn runs an advice shop, unlock your potential, master AI in one-on-one sessions, twenty prompts for sharper thinking. The frame predicts such advice does little for the people who take it and a great deal for the man who gives it, and the corpus bears the prediction out. The pieces that cast him as sage, the consulting and the toolkits, are the ones the readers pass over. The lamdus he half-discounts as the old work is the one thing the room pays him for in attention. Even the audience, savvy animals too, has sorted the effective advice from the bullshit by the oldest method there is. They show up for one and not the other. The advice is effective, in Pinsof’s sense. It serves its actual goal, the giver’s standing, while missing the stated one.
Reading a man this way, as a savvy primate selling a flattering cure, is a status move by the reader. It lets me feel sharp at his expense, which is the cynic’s version of the intellectual’s halo. The cynic is a hierarchical animal too, and the dunk pays the dunker. So I will not pretend the cold reading floats above the thing it describes. It does not. It competes in the same marketplace.
And it leaves Einhorn where Pinsof leaves all of us, in the hole. After the loss at Yavneh he produces understanding at speed, essay on essay, framework on framework, a man studying the hole he stands in down to the last molecule of dirt. The frame says the studying will not lift him out, because his trouble is not a misunderstanding either. He can explain the value of the bridge in a hundred posts, and the market still will not pay what he asks for the title, and the readers still will not click the consulting, because they have no incentive to, and no number of clearer explanations changes an incentive. The one misunderstanding in the whole picture is the one he holds about himself. That if he explains it better, the world will come. Pinsof’s line lands on him last. The world does not want to be saved, and it does not want the bridge, and it will not say so to his face. It will go quiet in the clap count instead.
There is a place where the savvy thing and the true thing meet, and it is the page where he learns. There his stated motive and his actual motive run together. He studies the text because it pays him and because it is so, and the room rewards the studying because the studying is real. That is the one corner of the business where nobody is sold a cure, because nothing there needs curing. Everywhere else he sells understanding, which Pinsof says is the one thing that was never the problem, and so was never going to be the fix.
David Pinsof: ‘Bullshit Advice’
David Pinsof writes:
Here’s a list of problems with the idea that advice is purely about helping us:
A lot of advice is baseless, but we want it anyways. We seek advice from famous actors on politics or the meaning of life, even though they’re not economists or philosophers. We gobble up Einstein’s vague advice about happiness, even though he wasn’t a psychologist.
A lot of advice is one-size-fits-all, even though people are different. “Be kind to yourself” is good advice for a perfectionist but bad advice for a narcissist. “Believe in yourself” is good advice if you’re talented but bad advice if you suck.
Much advice centers on goals we don’t really have—for example, how to be happy (even though happiness is bullshit), how to express your authentic self (even though authenticity is bullshit), or how to make the world a better place (even though we don’t really care about that).
Advice is rarely focused on the goals we actually have. For example, here’s what the self-help section might look like if it was focused on our real goals:
Zen and the Art of Social Climbing
Echo-Friendly: 10 Steps to Ensconcing Yourself in a Cocoon of Ideological Conformity and Motivated Reasoning
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Virtue Signalers
The Lips 2 Butt Method: Take Control of Your Life by Sycophantically Ingratiating Yourself with High-Status People
Own It: Keep Rival Male’s Sperm out of Your Mate’s Vagina
You Can Do It! How to Harness the Power of Moral Ambiguity and Plausible Deniability to Rationalize Your Fucked-Up Behavior
Eat, Pray, Confabulate
A lot of advice is nearly impossible to follow. “Don’t be afraid of failure.” “Be happy with who you are.” But emotions are typically involuntary.
A lot of advice applies to all moments, even though moments are different.
Pinsof has a test for advice. Helpful advice needs two things. The man giving it has to know your situation, and he has to have a stake in how you come out. Your brother has both. Your lawyer has both. Almost nobody else does. The stranger with the listicle knows neither your life nor cares how your life goes, and so his advice, however bright it sounds, is grooming. Primates pick dirt from each other’s fur, and the picking once kept them clean, but it runs now on rank and alliance, the low grooming the high, the flow of it tracking the social map more than the dirt. Advice works the same. Easier to guess who advises whom from the hierarchy than from who needs instruction. Advice is mostly the social ritual wearing the costume of help.
Einhorn gives advice for a living. Run him through the two conditions.
Take the first, knowledge of your situation. His advice goes out to everyone, which means it fits no one. Twenty prompts for sharper thinking, addressed to the whole internet. Unlock your potential, sold to any reader who clicks. Master AI in a one-on-one session, the session standardized. Pinsof calls the one-size advice the tell, good for the perfectionist and poison for the narcissist, and handed to both without a glance. The twenty-prompt toolkit is the purest case. It cannot know you. It was written for no one in particular and so for nobody.
Take the second, a stake in how you come out. The consultant draws his fee at the engagement, not at your success a year on. The blogger is paid in clicks the moment you arrive, whatever you carry away. Neither has skin in your outcome. And here the arc of his career gives it away. The pulpit rabbi and the dean had something near both conditions. He knew the congregant by name, sat with the family, carried a real stake in the child he taught for years. That advice could help, because the conditions held. The move to Medium and the consulting deck is the move out of both at once, from the man who knows you and is bound to you, to the man who knows the crowd and is bound to the invoice. His advice did not get worse because he got worse. It got worse because he stopped meeting the two conditions that ever made advice more than a groom.
So what is the advice for, if not for you. Pinsof lists the uses, and Einhorn’s output runs the menu.
It signals that he stands above you. The sage who saw the machine coming, the rabbi who read the future in an old page. Every piece of counsel carries the line underneath, I know and you do not, and the byline says it before the first sentence.
It flatters you back. Pinsof’s circle. The reader of an Einhorn piece has boundless potential, beautiful goals, a life waiting to be unlocked, and the power to grow at will. The critics of such a reader are haters. You ask the rabbi how to be wise, he tells you how wise you already are, and both of you leave groomed.
It rationalizes. Pinsof points the finger at consulting by name, and the finger lands. Consulting justifies what the client meant to do before he called. A business that wants AI for the usual reasons, lower cost, fewer staff, more scraped data, can buy from Einhorn the same plan wrapped in Torah and ethics, a permission slip with a blessing on it. The vagueness is the feature. Think with AI, ask better questions, advice loose enough to fit any agenda the client already holds. Pinsof says the vaguer the advice, the easier to bend it to the thing you wanted. Einhorn’s is vapor, and vapor takes any shape.
It cements the tribe. Counsel on defending Israel, on living observant in a secular age, on raising children inside the tradition, runs along the lines of coalition like aid shipped to an ally. The advice says we share the values before it says anything else. And the Mallacore referral plan, four tiers paying lifetime commission, turns the grooming into a comp structure, the passing of clients made the way you climb, rank bought by the flow of favors. Pinsof said the grooming tracks the alliance map. Einhorn drew the map and priced it.
Now the honest tax, because the frame bites the hand that holds it. This essay is a groom. Reading a man’s advice as a status ritual is a status ritual, the critic preening his nose for bullshit, signaling to the readers who share the taste that we see through the things the marks fall for. Literary criticism is high primate grooming with footnotes. I have no big stake in Einhorn’s outcome, of if I did, I wouldn’t tell you, I like the man, I admire the man, I am grateful to the man, I admire some of his work, I want only good things for him and his but he’s not family and he’s not among my five closest friends, and if he were, I wouldn’t tell you, and I have no knowledge of his situation past his published words, which by Pinsof’s own test makes any counsel I might offer him one more groom in the pile.
So I will not give it. Pinsof ends his piece by refusing the call to action, the hollow uplift the thinkpiece bolts on to flatter the reader on the way out, and the refusal is the one part of his method that fits Einhorn like a key. The crescendo of bullshit advice is the Einhorn close. Every essay lands on the lift, use these each day, live more consciously, grow, the frictionless groom at the end of the page. The shape of his work is the shape Pinsof mocks, counsel rising to a takeaway that entails no act anyone can name.
I could end mine the way the others ended, with a quiet word about the path back, the page where his learning is real, the kinder thing he might do. That is a groom too. So here is no takeaway. He will do what he was going to do, which is give advice, because that is the trade, and you will take the advice you were going to take, and the fur gets picked either way.
The Energy in the Room
Sociologist Randall Collins (b. 1941) built a whole sociology out of a small unit, the interaction ritual. Put people in a room. Let them attend to the same thing, feel the same mood, fall into the same rhythm, with a line drawn around them that says who is in. When that goes well the bodies sync, the mood climbs, and three things come out. The group feels like a group. The symbols at the center, the text, the flag, the song, soak up the charge and carry it. And each man walks out with what Collins called emotional energy, a battery of confidence and drive that lasts until the next ritual tops it up or fails to. Life is a chain of these rooms. The energy runs along the chain. Men drift toward the rooms that charge them and away from the ones that drain. Take away the room, the bodies, the rhythm, and the energy falls. There is no charging a battery alone at a desk.
This explains Einhorn better than anything said about him so far, because it explains the one thing the other readings only label. The quality curve.
His old life was a long chain of high-energy rooms. The beit midrash first, bodies bent over the same daf, the barrier of the observant drawn tight around them, the focus locked on a line of Aramaic, the mood rising as the argument rises, two men trading the sugya back and forth until the thing catches. The shiur, a rabbi and a crowd, the rhythm of question and answer, the niggun, the l’chaim. The pulpit, the same on a larger floor. And at the top of the scale, the marathon lectures, eighteen hours, nineteen hours, a hall held for a day and a night by one man’s voice, the money climbing as the energy climbs, Collins’s collective charge stretched past the limit and not breaking. Einhorn was a master of the room. The reputation says it straight. He filled halls, he reached the bored teenager, the room came alive when he worked it. In Collins’s terms that gift has a name. He was an energy star, a man others sought out because nearness to him charged them. Charisma was the energy he could raise in a room of other people.
The symbols took the charge and held it. Torah, the daf, the chag, dignity, the chain of transmission. Decades of live rituals soaked those symbols until they ran hot, and the heat stored in them and in his trained body. So when he writes lamdus now, alone, the page still carries current, because he draws on a battery the assembly charged over thirty years. The gemara piece, the Tanya piece, the sukkah piece, they live because the symbols in them are still warm from the room.
Then 2024, and the chain breaks. He leaves Yavneh, and Yavneh was the engine, the place that assembled the bodies every morning. He moves to Medium and a desk he sits at alone. Run the four conditions against that desk and every one reads zero. No bodies in the room. No line drawn around a group. No other face to focus with. No shared mood, because there is no one to share it. Collins held that talk across a wire runs cooler than talk in a room, because the rhythm needs bodies close enough to feel, and a man typing to no one has no rhythm to catch at all. The consulting essays come out of that desk, and they are about symbols, rails and decision-intelligence and the machine, that no ritual ever charged. No stored heat, no live room, nothing to draw on. So the prose runs flat. The theory called it before we read a word.
The claps are the reading on the meter. A reader feels the energy in a piece the way a man feels the warmth coming off a room he walks into. The Torah pieces still throw heat, and the room of readers feels it and answers, twenty claps, twenty-one. The consulting pieces are cold, and the readers feel that too, and pass on. The clap count is not a measure of argument. It is a measure of charge, and the charge tracks the source, hot where the symbols were made in assembly, cold where they were picked up off a website.
Now the part that gives the whole thing away, his reach for rails. Read his recent fixations as the acts of a man who lost his chain and is trying to build another. The pieces on live ritual forming online. The talk of rails, channels cut to carry energy and attention. LomdAI above all, a virtual beit midrash, a study partner on call at every hour. That last one is the confession. He is trying to rebuild the room in software, to put the chevruta back together out of code, because some part of him knows the room was where the energy came from and the room is gone. The instinct is right and the medium fails him. A machine on call can hold your focus, maybe, but it brings no body, draws no circle, shares no mood. It is focus without the other three conditions, and focus alone does not charge the battery. He is engineering a cold copy of a thing that only ran hot because it was warm with people.
And the velocity fits the same reading. A man whose battery is draining pedals harder. Essay after essay, framework after framework, output standing in for the charge that output cannot give, because writing alone is not an interaction ritual and never throws off what the room threw off. The volume climbs while the energy sinks, the surest sign of a chain that has come apart.
Emotional energy is a description and not a sin. The gift was real. It was social, made in rooms full of people, and the loss is not of talent but of the rituals that powered the talent. His best work was never the solo act. It was the energy of the room moving through him and out onto the page, and a man cannot type his way back to a current that only the assembly puts out. The symbols are still warm. The rooms are still standing. The battery charges in one place, and it is not the desk.
The Beliefs That Pay
Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) spent a career taking the air out of big words. Norms, culture, shared understanding, the things social theory leans on, he kept asking what work they do and whether they earn their keep, and he kept finding that many of them survive because they are useful, not because they are true. A convenient belief is one a man holds because holding it pays. It greases his path, secures his standing, settles a tension he would rather not feel. Turner’s sharp point is the next one. We do not file these beliefs under convenient. We file them under true, or under what any reasonable man sees, or under what the experts know. The convenience hides behind the robes of knowledge. And the belief gets held with full sincerity, because the man experiences it as true.
Run Einhorn’s corpus through this.
Start with the test. Ask of a belief, would he hold it if it cost him. The beliefs that pass, the ones he would keep even when they bring him nothing, sit on one side. His close readings of the gemara, the Ramchal, the Tanya. He held those when they paid him a dean’s salary and he would hold them broke, because the learning is a thing he loves apart from its yield. Notice that these are also his most accurate pages. On the other side sit the beliefs that vanish the instant they stop paying. That the Talmud is the training manual for the machine. That the old health code already knew the new science. That the move out of Yavneh was an expansion and not a fall. That the prompt can stand in for the cheshbon hanefesh. Each of these earns him something, a product, a bridge, a face, a fee, and each would evaporate the day it stopped earning. Turner’s sort runs clean down the middle of the man, and the convenient side is the flat side.
Now the stitching. A convenient belief recruits its evidence, and when the evidence will not come, the convenient version gets cited anyway. So the errors have a direction. Look back at the citation slips. The Maharal bent toward the point he was selling. The Yom Kippur goat read as the modern scapegoat when the tradition makes it the reverse. The verse on self-love hung on Ramban, who read it the other way. Teshvu turned to mean its opposite. These are not scattered. Each mistake leans the way his interest leans, toward the bridge, toward the synthesis, toward the reading that lets the ancient text shake hands with the modern one and lets him broker the deal. A man making honest errors errs in all directions. A man holding convenient beliefs errs in one. The slips are not noise. They are the fingerprints of the convenience, pressed into the text where the truth would not fit.
Then the laundering. Einhorn does not say it is useful to me to believe the Talmud trains the machine. He says the Talmud is the training manual, a flat claim about how the world is, and under it a soft command, this is what you would see if you were wise. The convenient belief comes dressed as objective fact and as a norm binding on the reader. Turner spent years watching that costume change, the slide from useful to me over to true and incumbent on you, and he taught that the costume tends to be expertise. Here the costume has a name on it. Rabbi. The byline certifies the convenient belief, turns a thing that pays into a thing that is known, lends the authority banked in the old field to the claim made in the new one. The Yadin Yadin, the decades, the record-setting hours, all of it stands behind the sentence and says trust this. The credential does not make the belief true. It makes the convenience hard to see.
Convenient does not mean false. Some of these beliefs may be true. Dignity might rest on something other than position after all, and the sages might have grasped a thing the doctors later named. The frame does not rule on the truth of the belief. It asks why this belief, held this hard, by this man, at this hour, and it answers that the timing tracks the need. The dignity teaching rises in him just as his position falls. The Talmud-trains-AI belief arrives just as he has AI to sell. The beliefs arrive on the schedule of his interests, which is the tell, whatever their truth.
I should grant that the frame is convenient for me too. Calling a man’s beliefs convenient lets me wave away what I do not like without meeting it on the merits, and that is a belief that pays the critic. So I have tried to meet the merits, the cited texts, the direction of the errors, the timing, rather than rest on the label. The frame earns its keep here only if the seams are real, and the seams are checkable. Go check them.
What the sort leaves standing is the same thing every reading of this man keeps leaving standing. There is a body of belief he holds because it is so, and would hold for nothing, and it is the learning. There is a body of belief he holds because it pays, and would drop the day the pay stopped, and it is most of what he has built since. The first is true whether or not it is convenient. The second is convenient whether or not it is true. A man is known by which pile he is adding to, and for thirty years he added to the first. The question the frame leaves on the table is which pile gets the next page.
