{"id":193476,"date":"2026-06-16T12:01:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T20:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193476"},"modified":"2026-06-16T14:25:04","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T22:25:04","slug":"rabbi-shlomo-einhorn-and-the-unbroken-chain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193476","title":{"rendered":"Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn and the Unbroken Chain"},"content":{"rendered":"

A classroom in Los Angeles<\/a>. 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<\/a>, and what he feels is close to grief.<\/p>\n

This is the scene he returns to in his own telling<\/a>, 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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924-1974) built a whole account of human life out of that kind of fear. In The Denial of Death<\/em><\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

The rabbi holds an old and self-effacing version of this<\/a>. His immortality project 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 carrying it clean and 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Then comes the turn that puts his name on a row of web addresses ending in .ai<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Now the hard part, because truth asks for it. The thing Einhorn wants from the machine is the thing he saw it cannot give<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The People He Defends<\/strong><\/p>\n

David Pinsof, David Sears, and Martie Haselton call their account Alliance Theory<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Run Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn through that lens and a generous portrait comes out, not a cynical one, because Alliance Theory<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Alliance Theory<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> predicts quiet defection when members feel embarrassed and thinly attached. Einhorn closes that exit by turning attachment into honor rather than burden.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> says this is the rule, not the exception. The people under a value decide what it defends.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> expects the division of labor.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The manner carries a cost, and Alliance Theory<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Alliance Theory<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

‘The Outrage Machine Built Better Rails Than the Positivity Economy. What If Someone Borrowed Them?’ (Apr. 20, 2026)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Rabbi Einhorn writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

This morning, The Washington Post published an investigation<\/a> 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 \u2014 digital gifts that flash a donor\u2019s name on screen while the streamer reads it aloud during a live broadcast.<\/p>\n

Sit with that for a moment.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

That is not random virality. That is infrastructure.<\/p>\n

And that distinction matters.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The ideology is evil.<\/p>\n

The machine is effective.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.
\nTruth 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 expos\u00e9, 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.
\nThe 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.
\nThen 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.
\nNow the empathy. The man opens with midah tovah merubah<\/em> 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.
\nLast 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.
\nSo: 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.<\/p>\n

‘The Updated \u201cSigns AI Wrote This\u201d List’ (Mar. 16, 2026)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Rabbi Einhorn writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The Tells, In Order of How Much They Hurt You
\nWriting in threes. \u201cStrong, sound, and scalable.\u201d \u201cClear, grounded, and practical.\u201d \u201cSimple, powerful, effective.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Fake profundity transitions. \u201cThis is the part I want to tell you.\u201d \u201cHere\u2019s what most people miss.\u201d \u201cLet that sink in.\u201d \u201cThe truth is.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Over-clean contrast structures. One well-placed contrast is a legitimate rhetorical move. Repeated contrasts feel templated. \u201cLess about X, more about Y.\u201d \u201cFrom X to Y.\u201d \u201cThe goal is not X, it is Y.\u201d When a piece uses this move four or five times, the reader stops feeling persuaded and starts feeling processed.<\/p>\n

TED-talk in text form. Short sentence fragments stacked for drama. \u201cThe kind that shows up. In hard moments. When no one is watching.\u201d This was a genuinely effective technique when it was rare. Now it is one of the most recognizable AI-coded aesthetics in public writing…<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The underlying shift in 2026 is that audiences are no longer spotting vocabulary. They are spotting template logic. The question is no longer \u201cdid a machine write this?\u201d The question is \u201cdid a person actually think this through?\u201d Those two questions have started to feel the same.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.
\nNow 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.
\nAnd 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.
\nThat 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.
\nThe essay he meant to write lives in his last two paragraphs. The rest is the genre he is describing.
\nA 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.<\/p>\n

‘The Talmud as AI Model’ (Mar. 12, 2026)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Rabbi Einhorn writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I started wondering whether the sugya could fix that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.
\nNow 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.
\nThe 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.
\nOne 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.
\nAnd 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.
\nThe 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.<\/p>\n

‘How AI can help you with Mesilas Yesharim’ (Dec. 16, 2025)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Rabbi Einhorn writes:<\/a><\/p>\n

The pursuit of ethical perfection in Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

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 \u201cexternal cognitive scaffold\u201d for Cheshbon HaNefesh (accounting of the soul).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

How to Use These Prompts
\n\u2022 Copy the entire prompt text (everything in the gray boxes) and paste it into your AI chat.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Engage authentically \u2014 these work best when you answer honestly, not performatively.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Use consistently \u2014 the Ramchal emphasizes daily practice. Consider scheduling specific prompts for specific times.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Adapt as needed \u2014 these are starting points. Modify the language to fit your life circumstances.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.
\nTruth first, though, and the trouble runs deeper here than in the other pieces, because the substrate is supposed to be your own soul.
\nMussar 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.
\nThen 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.
\nThe 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.
\nBut 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.<\/p>\n

‘How AI is Revolutionizing Israel Advocacy’ (Jul. 29, 2025)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Rabbi Einhorn writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

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\u2019s API can continuously monitor millions of social media posts, news articles, and forum discussions.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the weakest of the six, and the cause sits closest to his heart.
\nThe 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.
\nThis 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.
\nNow 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.
\nHe 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.
\nHe 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.
\nBut 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.<\/p>\n

‘Truth, Justice, and the Torah Way: Exploring the Jewish Conception of Justice’ (July 10, 2025)<\/a><\/p>\n

Rabbi Einhorn writes:<\/a><\/p>\n

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: \u201cSo God created mankind in His own image\u201d (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 \u201cone who saves a life, saves an entire world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Rambam (Maimonides), in his Mishneh Torah, champions a system designed to protect individuals from violence and coercion, aligning closely with Nozick\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Yet, Torah\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe 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.
\nOne 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<\/cite>, and its charity path is Netiv HaTzedakah<\/cite>. A path of justice sits beside it, the path of din<\/cite>. 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<\/cite>. 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.
\nHere are the sources behind that passage.
\nFor the work Netivot Olam, and the Maharal’s dates, see the Sefaria text page, https:\/\/www.sefaria.org\/Netivot_Olam<\/a> (it gives him as c. 1512-1609 and lists the 33 netivot).
\nFor the charity path, Netiv HaTzedakah, the text on Sefaria: https:\/\/www.sefaria.org\/Netivot_Olam,_Netiv_Hatzdaka<\/a>
\nFor 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<\/a> (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).
\nFor 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<\/a>
\nFor 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<\/a>
\nHere 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.
\nAnd 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.
\nAs 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.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/medium.com\/@rabbieinhorn<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

I just read the main page of https:\/\/medium.com\/@rabbieinhorn<\/a>.
\nSeen whole, the feed tells a story no single piece does. Read top to bottom, it runs backward through a conversion.
\nThe early months, winter and spring of 2025, are a rabbi’s notebook. Korban Pesach<\/a>. Teishvu versus Taduru<\/a>. The Tanya<\/a>, twice<\/a>. The Kitzur Shulchan Aruch<\/a>. Tzniut<\/a>. The Golden Rule against Mengzi<\/a>. 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.
\nHis own readers tell him this is a mistake, and he does not seem to be listening. Look at the claps. Teishvu<\/a>, twenty-one. Tzniut<\/a>, twenty. The Mengzi piece<\/a>, seventeen. The Jungian Tanya piece<\/a>, 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.
\nThe 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<\/cite>, 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.
\nOne 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 \u00dcbermensch. 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.
\nA 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.
\nThe 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.<\/p>\n

‘Why Positive Psychology Turned Virtue Into Self-Help Snake Oil’ (July 3, 2025)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Rabbi Einhorn writes:<\/a><\/p>\n

Positive psychology didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

But something died in translation.<\/p>\n

Aristotle spoke of eudaimonia, literally \u201cgood spirit,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This is virtue after the lobotomy.<\/p>\n

The Zombie Shuffle<\/p>\n

Walk into any corporate wellness program and you\u2019ll see them: zombie virtues shuffling through PowerPoint presentations. \u201cIf your top strength is Kindness, try three random acts of compassion this week!\u201d \u201cGot Curiosity? Take an online course!\u201d \u201cScored high on Gratitude? Start a journal!\u201d<\/p>\n

These aren\u2019t virtues anymore, they\u2019re life hacks with ancient names.<\/p>\n

Real virtue was never about self-improvement. It was about self-transcendence. The ancients understood something we\u2019ve forgotten: you can\u2019t cultivate authentic character by focusing on yourself. Virtue only makes sense when it points beyond the self to something larger, truer, more enduring.<\/p>\n

The fact\/value split killed that understanding.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.
\nBut the argument already has a name on it, and he leaves it off. Alasdair MacIntyre<\/a> (1929-2025) wrote this exact thesis in After Virtue<\/a> 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.
\nThe polemic also runs hot and flattens what it touches. He folds Aristotle<\/a>, the Stoics<\/a>, Confucius<\/a>, and the East into one package that all says virtue needs a transcendent cosmos. None of them says quite that. Aristotle’s eudaimonia<\/a> is the characteristic activity of a human functioning well, more biology than union with the stars. The Stoic logos<\/a> 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.
\nAnd the clean wall he builds between ancient self-transcendence and modern self-help does not stand. The ancients ran practices. Pierre Hadot<\/a> (1922-2010) showed that ancient philosophy was a set of spiritual exercises, daily drills for the self. Marcus Aurelius<\/a> (121-180) kept a journal of self-correction. That is the Meditations<\/a>. 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.
\nHe 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.
\nHe 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>: 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<\/a> 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.
\nHe 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.<\/p>\n

‘The Tanya\u2019s Two Loves’ (June 1, 2025)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Rabbi Einhorn writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I just didn\u2019t live it.<\/p>\n

The transformation came during a period when everything fell apart. Professional failure. Personal loss. The kind of crisis that strips away everything nonessential.<\/p>\n

In that emptiness, I found myself returning to the simplest meditation the Tanya offers: \u201cHe is our life.\u201d Not a philosophical proposition. A felt reality. The recognition that whatever was sustaining me through the darkness wasn\u2019t coming from my own strength.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when contemplative love stopped being a concept and became an experience. When I realized that the Tanya isn\u2019t describing exotic spiritual states, it\u2019s mapping the territory of the human heart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/cite>, and it turns on love and fear of God and their root in faith in His unity<\/cite>. 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.
\nBut 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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe 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.
\nAnd 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.
\nHe 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.
\nSomething is going on with the rabbi and I can ground it in his own words.
\nLook 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.
\nThen 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.
\nThe 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.
\nWhat 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.
\nReframing 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. <\/p>\n

‘Why Teishvu isnt Taduru’ (May 25, 2025)<\/a><\/p>\n

Rabbi Einhorn writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Torah isn\u2019t about erasing yourself. It\u2019s about right-sizing yourself. A valley represents the kind of humility that paralyzes \u2014 so low you can\u2019t see anything, so diminished you can\u2019t act. A towering peak represents the arrogance that blinds \u2014 so high you think you\u2019re above everyone else…<\/p>\n

We live in an age that\u2019s forgotten how to balance engagement with detachment. We\u2019re either completely committed to things that don\u2019t deserve it, or completely detached from things that do.<\/p>\n

We treat our Twitter feeds like sacred texts and our sacred texts like Twitter feeds. We invest emotionally in political outcomes we can\u2019t control while neglecting relationships we can nurture. We build identities around careers that could disappear overnight while ignoring souls that will outlast our r\u00e9sum\u00e9s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the piece you write after a painful career change. I feel like he’s telling himself everything is going to be OK.
\nThis 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.
\nBut the engine he builds it on runs backward, and the gemara he is glossing says close to the reverse of his claim.
\nHis 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<\/cite>. 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<\/cite>. 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.
\nThat 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.
\nThe 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.
\nAnd 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.
\nWhen 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.
\nSukkot 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.
\nRead 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.
\nSet 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.
\nIt 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.
\nAnd 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.
\nThis 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.<\/p>\n

‘The Sacred Dimension of Self-Respect: A Torah Perspective’ (May 6, 2025)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Rabbi Einhorn writes:<\/a><\/p>\n

I still remember my shock as a fifteen-year-old yeshiva student when my rebbe slammed his hand on the table and declared, \u201cTzniut has nothing to do with shame!\u201d The classroom fell silent. Here we were, teenage boys awkwardly navigating puberty, assuming modesty meant hiding our embarrassing bodies from God\u2019s disapproving gaze. He had shattered our misconception in eight words…
\nMy grandmother survived Auschwitz with this verse branded on her soul. \u201cThey took everything,\u201d he once told me while rolling up his sleeve to reveal his number, \u201cbut not this.\u201d He tapped his chest. \u201cNever this.\u201d He understood what the Nazis couldn\u2019t: human dignity isn\u2019t granted by governments or earned through achievement. It\u2019s built into our DNA…
\nI 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 \u2014 just quiet recognition that kavod habriyot demanded immediate action. That moment taught me more than a thousand shiurim…
\nI\u2019ve 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\u2019t imagine God loving her \u2014 despite volunteering at a chesed (kindness) organization every week. \u201cBut you believe God loves those you help?\u201d I asked. \u201cOf course,\u201d she replied immediately. \u201cThen why are you the exception?\u201d Her tears answered before her words could…
\nMy 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 \u2014 until my rav visited and gently suggested I was neglecting a mitzvah. \u201cYour body isn\u2019t a rental car,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s the only vehicle you\u2019ll ever have for serving Hashem in this world.\u201d His words stung because they were true. I\u2019d treated my health as spiritually irrelevant…
\nAt sixteen, my friend broke Shabbat deliberately for the first time. Rebellion, peer pressure, curiosity \u2014 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….
\nLast Shabbat, my colleague asked why I cover my head with a kippah even when alone in my backyard. \u201cIs it because Hashem will be mad if you don\u2019t?\u201d he asked with childish directness. I paused before answering, suddenly aware how my response might shape his understanding of Judaism.
\n\u201cNo,\u201d I finally said. \u201cIt\u2019s because wearing it reminds me who I am.\u201d
\nHis face scrunched in confusion. \u201cBut you already know who you are?\u201d
\n\u201cSometimes we forget,\u201d I told him. \u201cSometimes I forget.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.
\nBut two of the sources do not hold the weight he puts on them.
\nKavod 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<\/cite>. The Rabbis held they had no power to set aside Divine law by an act of their own<\/cite>. 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.
\nThe 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<\/cite>. Ibn Ezra reads kamocha adverbially, that you should wish good to befall your fellow the way you wish it for yourself<\/cite>. 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.
\nThen 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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe 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.<\/p>\n

‘Freud Meets Moses: Where Psyche Meets Soul’ (May 6, 2025)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Rabbi Einhorn writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Growing up in an observant home while studying psychology, I felt pulled between two worlds \u2014 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. \u201cThis Freud,\u201d he muttered, \u201cknows nothing of the real human struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet I couldn\u2019t shake the feeling that these traditions weren\u2019t as contradictory as they seemed. After years grappling with both, I\u2019ve come to see these frameworks as unexpected dance partners \u2014 sometimes in perfect harmony, other times stepping on each other\u2019s toes…<\/p>\n

Freud didn\u2019t discover the unconscious \u2014 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 \u201cinner forces\u201d in 1880. While counseling a troubled student, he\u2019d often say, \u201cThe problem isn\u2019t what you know about yourself \u2014 it\u2019s what you don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

…I remember the awkward silence when, during a Shabbos dinner, a psychology-major guest mentioned Freud\u2019s belief that toddlers experience erotic pleasure during toilet training. My Orthodox brother-in-law nearly choked on his challah…<\/p>\n

One synagogue member resolved her anxiety not just by understanding its psychological roots but by reconnecting to God\u2019s compassion. A more secular member found healing through Freudian insight complemented by wisdom from Jewish ethical teachings, though he would never have sought \u201creligious\u201d counsel.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.
\nBut 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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe 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.
\nA 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.
\nThis 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.
\nAnd 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.<\/p>\n

‘Updating the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch on Physical Health’ (April 27, 2025)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Rabbi Einhorn writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.
\nStart 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<\/cite>. 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.
\nThat 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.
\nThe 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.
\nAnd 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.
\nThen 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.<\/p>\n

‘The Critical Thinker\u2019s Toolkit: 20 Powerful Prompts for Sharper Decisions and Clearer Thinking’ (March 31, 2025)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Rabbi Einhorn writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

19. Contrarian Scenario Mapping Prompt
\nI\u2019m inclined towards [preferred decision]. Outline a contrarian scenario where the opposite is plausible and beneficial.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is nothing here, and that is the thing to notice.
\nStrip 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.
\nThis 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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