A shadchan calls a rosh yeshiva about a bochur. She asks the one question the call exists to ask. What is he like in learning. The rosh yeshiva answers in the code everyone reads. He is a masmid. He has a good head. He sits and learns. He is among the better boys in the chaburah. Each phrase is a number, and the shadchan writes the number down, and the number sets the boy’s worth on the market, the size of the support his father-in-law will pledge, the apartment, the years in kollel. No one in the conversation says the word rank. The conversation is about nothing but rank.<\/p>\n
David Pinsof<\/a> has a name for the thing that lets this happen without anyone feeling soiled by it. He calls it a sacred value. A sacred value, in his account, is a cover story that keeps a status game from collapsing once the players catch themselves playing it. The story insists that the competition is about something high and selfless, honor, holiness, wisdom, the love of the thing for its own sake. The yeshiva world holds the purest example anyone has built. Torah lishmah, learning for its own sake, with no eye on the reward.<\/p>\n Pinsof writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n Status game collapse<\/a>.<\/strong> When players of a status game gain common knowledge<\/a> that they\u2019re playing a status game. They suddenly see each other as vain, insecure, or self-absorbed, which sends them scrambling to play a different status game. This is one of the engines of cultural evolution. <\/p>\n Sacred value<\/a>. <\/strong>A cover story for status-seeking designed to prevent a status game from collapsing. We deny we\u2019re seeking dominance or superiority and instead pretend that we\u2019re seeking honor, wisdom, beauty, authenticity<\/a>, self-actualization<\/a>, equality, morality<\/a>, or the betterment of humankind. <\/p>\n Darwinian cynicism<\/a>. <\/strong>The view that everyone\u2019s basic desires are products of natural selection. This is cynical because evolution cannot favor a basic desire to make the world a better place\u2014only the desire to help ourselves, our families, or our tribes. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Lishmah does the work David Pinsof assigns to a sacred value. He argues that the value should sit as far from status as a thing can sit, while it tracks real status acquisition step for step underneath. Lishmah says learning has nothing to do with standing. You learn for Him. The reward of the mitzvah is the mitzvah. A man who learns for honor has missed the point so badly that the tradition warns he might have done better not to learn. And underneath that teaching the yeshiva ranks its men by the same learning, finely and without rest. The illui at the top. The masmid who sits sixteen hours. The lamdan who builds a sharp sevara. The baki who holds the most ground. The boy the rosh yeshiva calls on when the hard Tosafos comes up. The order is exact and every man knows where he stands in it, and the sacred value says the order is not there.<\/p>\n That gap is the cover story working. Strip lishmah away and look at the same room. Young men compete for years for prestige, for the best shidduch, for a stipend, for a chair, for the right to be called a talmid chacham. Name it that way and the room turns ugly, a tournament of vanity dressed in black. Lishmah saves the room. It tells the men, and tells the world, that the striving is devotion and the ranking a trick of the eye. The behavior that reads as careerism in a law firm reads as avodas Hashem in the beis medrash, and the thing that flips the reading is the cover story.<\/p>\n Sacred values borrow their plausibility from real ones. Men do love Torah. The lishmah experience is real. There are men who sit and learn with no thought of the shadchan’s call, who would learn alone on a desert island, who taste the sweetness the seforim promise. The sacred value lives off these men. Because real lishmah exists, the claim of lishmah stays believable, and the believable claim covers the thousand men whose learning follows the market close. The system needs its handful of true masmidim the way a currency needs a little gold in a vault while most of the bills are paper.<\/p>\n Pinsof argues that a status trait gets the heaviest cover where it is hard to verify from outside, easy to fake, and shameful to chase. Learning fits all three. You cannot see into a man’s head. The fluent fake and the deep lamdan sound alike across a crowded room. And a holy community punishes the visible striver hard. Wealth needs less cover, which is why the gvir can let his name go up on the wall while the talmid chacham must look as though the honor pains him. The currency that is easiest to counterfeit and most shameful to want is the one that needs lishmah most.<\/p>\n So much for the steady state. Now the exit.<\/p>\n Pinsof calls the other half of the pair status game collapse. A status game collapses when the players gain common knowledge that a status game is what they are in. The cover story fails. The men who looked devoted look like climbers. The hierarchy turns over. The one who stepped on others to reach the top looks worst, because the higher his rank the more he must have wanted it, and wanting it is the sin the sacred value forbids. The man who left learning to drive a truck and feed his children, who sat at the bottom, looks honest. Top sinks, bottom rises.<\/p>\n For most men this never comes. The cover holds for life. For some it comes all at once, and the frum name for it is going off the derech. The trigger is common knowledge breaking in. He reads the expos\u00e9. He watches a gadol shield an institution and sees what the shielding protects. He notices that the ben Torah learning all day is carried by a wife worked to the bone and in-laws past the edge of ruin, and the arithmetic he was taught not to do gets done. He marries the top bochur the system priced so high and finds a man who can hold a Tosafos and not a marriage. The spell breaks in an hour and does not return. Once a man sees the ledger he cannot unsee it, and the seforim that sang to him last year read as the prospectus of a fund he no longer trusts.<\/p>\n Then he does what Pinsof predicts. He leaves and scrambles into another game where defying the first one pays. The off-the-derech memoir is the clean case. A man writes the book, Shulem Deen’s All Who Go Do Not Return, Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox, and the secular literary world the yeshiva taught him to pity hands him the standing the yeshiva pulled back. He gains status now by the same act, the leaving, that cost him status there. The collapsed game inverts for him alone. Where he stood near the bottom, unable to win at iyun, he stands now as a witness, brave, free. Acting against the dead game is the new game’s winning move.<\/p>\n Not everyone leaves the community. Most who feel the cover slip stay and switch games inside it, which Pinsof also predicts. The man who cannot win at sharp learning reframes. He becomes a baal chesed, a gabbai of the tzedakah, a man known for hachnasas orchim, and chesed is a currency the lamdan cannot corner. Or he goes the way of the gvir and buys the standing the learning never gave him, the dinner honoree, the wing with his name on it. Or he claims emunah peshuta, simple faith, the plain Jew who has no need of pilpul, and the claim of not playing the learning game becomes its own quiet bid for honor, the move that wins by looking like no move. Or he crosses from yeshivish to chassidish, or to Modern Orthodox, trading a game he loses for one he might win. The community keeps him. He has changed only which sacred value he serves.<\/p>\n The cover story guards the exit against spread. Pinsof notes that any attempt to call the sacred value a status game reads, to the men inside, as a cue of the caller’s own low standing. He is bitter. He could not hack it. He is an apikoros with a grievance. The reading is sometimes wrong and often right enough to stick, since the man with the most reason to expose the game is the man losing it. So the one who names the ledger is dismissed by the name he earns for naming it, and common knowledge stays caught at the level of the single man. The spell breaks for him and seals behind him. This is why the pair holds. The sacred value runs the steady state, the collapse opens the exit, and the sacred value guards the exit so that one man’s collapse never becomes the room’s.<\/p>\n What saves lishmah from contempt is that the high thing is true. A man can learn for the love of it. Some do. The trouble is that the community needs them less for their learning than for their sincerity, which it spends as cover for everyone else, and the man who wakes up has woken to that, that the system needed him not to notice the ledger it kept on him in a language he was taught was prayer. Steady state and exit, the cover and the broken spell, one machine with two settings. Most men live their whole lives on the first. A few find the second, and pay for it, and a smaller few get paid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A shadchan calls a rosh yeshiva about a bochur. She asks the one question the call exists to ask. What is he like in learning. The rosh yeshiva answers in the code everyone reads. He is a masmid. He has … Continue reading