If you consider his grievance for just a moment, it is quite insidious. Without evidence, he’d have waved me away. With receipts, he attempted to shift the focus away from the content onto the person presenting it. Not whether the statements are true or defensible, but the fact that I remembered them. He took no issue with what was said, only that I didn’t forget it. His move is simple: shift the narrative from the substance of the comments to the supposed defect that I lack amnesia.

It wasn’t an issue that Jonathan Sacks was quoted in an interview as saying that Israel’s counterterrorism efforts made him “feel very uncomfortable as a Jew.” It wasn’t an issue that David Lau excitedly discussed a future in which the Temple Mount would host the beis hamikdash alongside both a church and a mosque. It wasn’t an issue that Shlomo Riskin referred to Jesus as “Rabbi Jesus.” None of those statements triggered the discomfort I was being lectured about. The rabbi only displayed discomfort when those statements were remembered, produced, and sourced.

Paying attention to what is actually said, and taking it seriously, becomes a character flaw. This inversion punishes thought and rewards passivity. Teaching people that paying attention and thinking critically is a flaw flips the entire moral structure on its head. Slandering the brave soldiers of tzahal to an antisemitic rag operation isn’t beyond the pale, but reading it, remembering it, and taking issue with it is. According to this inverted framework, being a brainless follower is treated as a virtue, while actually thinking about what is said, and who is saying it, becomes suspect.

The supposed “Jewish leaders” aren’t judged by whether what they say is true, or even aligned with basic Jewish principles. They’re judged on tone, posture, and whether they maintain the right image. Their statements can contradict foundational ideas, and you’re still expected to respect them. As long as nobody is allowed to remember what they said, all is well. They are effectively treated as beyond scrutiny, insulated not by truth, but by enforced forgetfulness.

At that point, what exactly is left in the religion? Religion itself becomes fake and gay, a hollow performance sustained by image and protected by enforced amnesia. If leadership can publicly contradict core ideas, and the only thing that’s considered out of bounds is noticing and remembering it, then we’re no longer dealing with a real religion in any meaningful sense. We’re dealing with a PR department with a kippah that has to train its flock not to look too closely.

Not long after October 7th, there was a gathering where people stood arm in arm, singing “Acheinu,” swaying with eyes closed, fully immersed in the moment. My friends and I, unimpressed with the complacency programming, started a different chant, something less… passive. We were quickly shushed in the name of “Achdus.” Because apparently, when Jews are being butchered, the appropriate response is to hold hands and sing songs of peace. Don’t, G-d forbid, ruin the aesthetic with anything resembling urgency, anger, or action. The Torah’s response is slightly different:

“You shall not stand idly by your brother’s blood” (Vayikra 19:16)

Not: lock arms and harmonize while your brothers are slaughtered. What we are witnessing is the perpetuation of “Nothing Ever Happens” Judaism. Jews get slaughtered, and the achdus response is to sing slower. No urgency, no reaction, certainly no un-Jewish vengeance. Nothing ever happens.

So the question becomes, what does achdus actually mean? The literal translation is unity, but unity around what? Actual achdus is putting aside personal differences in the furtherance of national objectives. Public chilul Hashem in the name of feminism? A carefully curated, hasbara-approved response to the torture and slaughter of Jews? Uniting around those things is not virtuous; it is a perpetuation of the problem. Funny how “Achdus” never seems to mean: keep halacha or protect Jews. It only ever shows up when someone says something true that threatens the social equilibrium.

“Achdus” is no longer used to unite Jews, it is used to temper them. It has been redefined into a demand: be passive and take it. Its modern meaning is complacency in the face of unacceptable behavior. It appears the moment someone breaks that script, when suddenly the issue is no longer the complacency, but the person pointing it out. “Achdus” is invoked to shut down anything that resembles truth or justice in the name of Hashem. We have been trained into passivity, trained to believe that not reacting is moral, that discomfort is worse than wrongdoing, that preserving the system matters more than confronting its decay. That is not unity, that is Hellenist compliance training. It is a weaponized reminder: don’t be the one who makes things real.

This is actually sourced quite plainly in the Torah:

“Do not follow the majority to do evil.” (Shemos 23:2).

If the crowd is wrong, your job is not to preserve unity, your job is to not join them. Chur did not stand aside for the sake of Achdus at the sin of the Golden Calf, he resisted, and his legacy was rewarded through Betzalel building the Mishkan. Pinchas did not call for a unity forum with those publicly violating the Torah. Instead, he acted, and the Torah says:

“He turned back divine wrath” (Bamidbar 25:11).

The Maccabees did not host an “Achdus” forum with the Hellenists, they ended them. Upon even a basic reading, the Torah’s heroes were not especially concerned with preserving the emotional comfort of the room.

So why does “Achdus” keep resurfacing in this form? It is a tool used by Hellenist Jews to hollow out the religion into nothing more than a performance. It is wielded to beat your Judaism into something that doesn’t offend and serves no G-d. No demands to defy the prevailing culture in the name of G-d, no mitzvos that make you visibly different, and certainly no confrontation. All that remains is a hollow shell of good vibes, meticulously stripped of anything that would force you to stand apart from the world around you.

If your version of Achdus requires embracing evil, you are nothing more than the latest iteration of the erev rav who concocted the Golden Calf.

Most people reading this article will not recognize the name, but they will recognize the ideas. You have heard his theories parroted by brainless NPCs repeating slogans about “overpopulation” and “too many people on the planet.” Ehrlich was the modern father of that ideology. He was a Stanford professor, bestselling author, and government advisor. For decades he argued that the central problem facing humanity was not war, poverty, or disease.

The problem, according to Paul Ehrlich, was the existence of human beings.

“The first effect of not believing in G-d, is that you lose your common sense.” - G. K. Chesterton

Many people come up with theories that are wrong, unfair, or just plain stupid. Very few manage to turn those stupid BS theories into a mainstream ideology embraced by millions. Paul Ehrlich was the exception; he built a mainstream human death cult. He believed that the existence of human beings was an evil that must be eradicated. Curing diseases was evil because it allowed more humans to survive. Having children was evil because somewhere there was a starving child in Africa. Human success itself became immoral. In Ehrlich’s worldview, it would be better if humanity simply starved and died.

I remember learning these nonsense theories in grade school, where we were taught (indoctrinated) about the looming catastrophe of “overpopulation.” At the time I didn’t really understand the arguments, but I definitely remember being worried about the coming ice age and the planet collapsing under the weight of too many humans. Fortunately, good ol’ Paul Ehrlich was here to save us from such a fate. His solution was simple: no more humans. No more babies being born, and the ones who were already here should start dying off as quickly as possible. Ironically, Ehrlich himself managed to live to 93.

“Public education has not produced an educated public.” - G. K. Chesterton

Dumb academics in ivory towers say stupid things all the time, but Paul Ehrlich managed to outdo them all. He predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, the exact opposite happened. Food production increased and agricultural innovation exploded thanks to profit incentive. None of these weird imaginary fears about some sort of global famine in Ehrlich’s stupid head came to pass. Instead, more people than ever had access to food. Ehrlich was disappointed, because this wasn’t just a prediction for him, but a fantasy.

I know some of you think I’m being “extreme” or “overly judgmental” about this dead man. I’m not, he literally wrote entire fictional news stories about plagues killing millions of people. Some people write fantasy about wizards and dragons. Paul wrote fantasy about mass death.

Ehrlich repeatedly framed his teachings in one simple equation:

Population growth = cancer

And like any cancer, the solution was obvious: you don’t negotiate with it, you cut it out. Ironically, cancer is what eventually killed Ehrlich, not population growth. He pushed this idea relentlessly, framing human existence itself as a disease that needed to be eliminated. Ehrlich didn’t want there to be more abundance of food, better jobs or greater prosperity. He wanted us all dead.

When humanity cured malaria, yellow fever and other diseases, most normal humans celebrated. This was a win for everyone, we had actually achieved something. Though not for Paul and his evil cult of death. To him, saving lives only made the population problem worse. Every person who survived was another mouth to feed, another strain on the planet. What most people saw as progress, Ehrlich saw as a setback. Because if those people had died instead, the problem would have been smaller. In his world, dead would have been preferable to cured.

In his book, he points out that Costa Rica’s life expectancy was improving. You’d think that would be something that would make him happy. But no, Ehrlich teaches that people dying earlier is considered beneficial.

Ehrlich was unhappy that some countries had higher birthrates. To solve this, he proposed sending in helicopters and surgical teams to perform forced vasectomies on men with three or more children. Yes, he actually said this. And to preempt critics, Ehrlich wrote:

“Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause.”

Thanos at least had the decency to leave half of the population alive. History usually remembers people who advocate mass suffering as monsters. Ehrlich is widely remembered as a distinguished professor.

“Wherever there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice.” - G. K. Chesterton

The underlying theory of Ehrlich’s work was simple: everyone must suffer. Poor countries must stop reproducing. Rich countries must reduce consumption. Everyone must accept lower living standards. Ehrlich did not hate one group of humans more than another. He hated the existence of humanity. But his ideas didn’t die with him. He is the progenitor of the degrowth cult, anti-capitalist environmentalism, funded by people like Bill Gates and pushed by figures like Yuval Harari. The underlying theme is always the same: there are too many people.

In his book, Ehrlich includes an entire section on how to turn people against each other in the name of population control. If someone has eight kids, you’re supposed to guilt them about how they won’t be able to afford presents for all of them. If they are childless, you’re supposed to push them to resent those who have children. If they have two kids, you’re supposed to accuse them of selfishness. This is an instruction manual for recruiting others into his evil death cult. He even identified schoolteachers as ideal targets for spreading these ideas, arguing they were already primed to believe in overpopulation because of overcrowded classrooms.

“Modern people, especially urban people, think that anything which has got itself printed has somehow passed an examination and received a diploma; has somehow, in fact, shown itself to be true.” - G. K. Chesterton

The scary part is that Ehrlich was not some loser in his mom’s basement. He was a Stanford professor, a bestselling author, and a government advisor. He influenced millions and helped shape many of the ideologies that still plague our world today. He should have been on the edges of the fringes, but instead he was mainstreamed.

History has already answered Ehrlich, and his dumb predictions (fantasies) never came to pass. The mass famines he warned about never arrived. Instead, humanity became more prosperous than ever before. That should have discredited his ideas, but he built an unfalsifiable ideology. When things get better, it is just further evidence that the problem is getting worse. And when reality contradicts the theory, the theory stays (at least for the evil idiots still repeating it).

Ehrlich considered the distinct possibility that he may be entirely incorrect. To address this, he framed his solutions as a kind of no-lose situation. If he’s right, then extreme population control saves the world. And if he’s wrong, then fewer people is still a net good outcome. So either way, the answer is still the same. There was no point at which the problem was solved. Lower birth rates weren’t enough. Reduced consumption wasn’t enough. The people already born were still a burden. In his warped framework, even where you are born determines how much of a “problem” you are.

Paul Ehrlich spent his life insisting that humanity was a plague on the earth that needed to be eradicated. Thankfully, we largely ignored him and have flourished all the more for doing so. He spent his life trying to reduce the number of people on this planet. And now the man who warned that the world had too many people has finally reduced the population by one.

Well, the position of Minister of Silence is not limited to the Jewish religion and apparently churches have them as well. So much so that it became a culture war debate on social media. The main characters are Matt Walsh and David French, who decided to go at it on social media (again lol) on this precise topic. This time it was over a church deciding to make a “Loud Kid Policy” which can be read below:

For the uninitiated, Matt Walsh is a very order-focused conservative commentator. David French is a hicklib. But that’s not super important for the purposes of this article, just some interesting background on our dueling personalities. Well, Matt responded to the “Loud Kid Policy” as follows:

So, the obvious question is, what is the policy we should take as a community towards raising our children correctly? The Minister of Silence angrily reading my article is probably excitedly running over to his shelf to flip through the Mishnah Berurah as fast as his stubby legs can carry him. And to be fair, things over there are actually pretty clear-cut. he Mishnah Berurah (Orach Chaim 98) notes that small children who disturb the congregation during prayer should not be brought to shul. Seems cut and dry on the side of Team Walsh.

Well, Lubavitch is different! Enter the Rebbe in 770 on Purim 1981, when the kids went crazy with overenthusiastic noisemaking during the Megillah reading. Obviously we all understand the importance of hearing every word of the Megillah, so many of the (grumpier) adults present attempted to quiet down the kids. In the moment, the Rebbe smiled broadly at the noise-making of the children. Later, the Rebbe said directly to those adults:

“In their innocence, the children were enjoying the spirit of Purim. Of course you want to hear the reading, but we must also appreciate G‑d’s own great joy in seeing these children celebrate.”

The Rebbe wasn’t done. At a farbrengen that Shabbos, the Rebbe commented further.

“The gabbaim walk around with serious faces, attempting to shorten the noise-making, but the children know that there is still a Haman!”

Another incident with the Rebbe involving unsupervised kids occurred on Shavuos in 1978. A young child in 770 mistook the Rebbe for his father, grabbed his hand, and wiped his dirty face on the Rebbe’s coat. The mother was mortified and wrote an apology letter to the Rebbe. The Rebbe responded to her letter:

“On the contrary: He brought me great pleasure. One cannot begin to measure the heartfulness, simplicity, innocence, and sincerity of a child, if only similar qualities could be found in adults.”

Strange that he didn’t respond with a lecture about maintaining an “orderly” shul and keeping “control” of her children.

The Rebbe wasn’t done there. In the spring of 1980, he launched a major campaign, Mivtza Aseres Hadibros, urging that every single Jewish child be brought to shul on the first day of Shavuos to hear the reading of the Ten Commandments. And yes, that explicitly included newborns and infants. Obviously all the male Karens who misunderstand the purpose of shul and instead view it as an ego validation exercise for themselves revolted. How are the adults supposed to concentrate, maintain decorum, and actually hear the Torah reading?

Good news is that the Rebbe didn’t leave us hanging for too long and responded to all of these concerns directly at the farbrengen on the Shabbos preceding Shavuos!

1. He pointed to the famous Midrash that before giving the Torah, Hashem demanded guarantors. The Jewish people suggested the patriarchs. Not good enough. The prophets. Rejected. Only when they said “our children will be our guarantors” did Hashem agree. Which means something very simple: the reason we have the Torah in the first place is because of the children. Complaining about their presence while reading it is missing the entire point.

2. Second, the Rebbe emphasized that Shavuos is not just a commemoration of Matan Torah. It is a re-enactment of it. At Har Sinai, every Jewish soul was present: men, women, children, and infants. If babies belonged at Mount Sinai, they belong in shul when the Ten Commandments are read.

3. The Rebbe rejected the argument that infants gain nothing from being there. Even if a child cannot intellectually understand the words, the holiness of the moment reaches the neshama. The spiritual impact of that experience outweighs an adult’s preference for perfect silence.

4. The Rebbe taught that the sounds of Jewish children in a shul should not be viewed as a nuisance. The crying or babbling of a child during the Ten Commandments is precious to G-d. If the noise makes it a bit harder for the adults to hear the reader, that is a sacrifice worth making so the children can be there.

To help manage the environment and ensure the kids didn’t feel like they were just being dragged to a boring, restrictive service, the Rebbe also encouraged communities to throw ice cream parties for the children immediately afterward. This ensured that their association with shul, the Torah, and the holiday would remain entirely sweet and joyful.

Matthew Cordes responded to Matt:

A shul should be a place where children feel welcome and free to be themselves. Creating this positive environment is the best way to make Yiddishkeit a source of happiness, ensuring they stay frum and continue attending shul into adulthood.

Obviously, if a child is having a full meltdown, it would be appropriate to step out with him for a bit. We are talking about behavior within the normal range of what kids do. This was never really about noise, and the entire Walsh/French debate misses the point. The question is not whether children occasionally make noise in a religious space. The question is whether adults remember why the space exists in the first place.

Many parents expend countless amounts of energy enforcing perfect discipline on their children. In the process, they squeeze the joy out of the mitzvah experience and turn their children into robots. Ask enough children of BT families how that project turned out. Not super swell.

The children are not disturbing the purpose of the shul. They are the purpose of the shul.

EDIT: if this is your messaging, you are definitely the Minister of Silence:

A special appreciation to Yisroel Weisberg for his contributions to this piece.

We live in galus, and that means there is always a magnifying glass on how Yidden conduct themselves. Our public behavior does not exist in a vacuum. It reflects on our community, on the Torah, and ultimately on Hashem Himself.

The goyim have the New York Times to issue their annual Halloween costume fatwa. Apparently YWN felt that Klal Yisrael was tragically deprived of that stupidity.

As Purim approaches, it is worth thinking carefully about costumes that could, chas v’shalom, create a chilul Hashem.

Chilul Hashem = anything that might upset BlueSky users, apparently.

Some costumes that may once have been viewed as harmless now carry meanings that are widely understood as deeply offensive. Blackface is one clear example. Today, it is broadly recognized as a symbol of racism, and even a safek of causing chilul Hashem is a serious halachic concern.

This purim I was planning on dressing as the Joker, but now I need to modify that to ensure that I upset whoever this anonymous Lakewood-dweller is.

Another type of costume that may appear this year, based on recent events, is ICE or immigration-enforcement uniforms. While these may seem like innocent fun to some and do not pose any direct threat to our community, for many people—including individuals whom many of us interact with regularly—they represent real fear and trauma, having witnessed families torn apart in painful ways.

You mean “trauma” for the people who violated immigration laws and are residing in our country illegally?

This is not about politics.

Yeah? Then show us your voter registration.

It is about recognizing that such costumes carry emotional weight and create an unnecessary risk of chilul Hashem.

The anonymous author of this post attempted to redefine Chilul Hashem from something that violates Torah values to anything that will trigger a lib who already hates our community. On the yom tov we have that celebrates the defeat of a genocidal bureaucrat, you decide to wokescold us to be deferential to the genocidal bureaucrats of our day and age.

Also, thank you for telling me what I should dress up as. If only I had your address so I could drop by to give you some shaloch manos, that would really make my purim.

Purim is a holy Yom Tov, meant for simcha, achdus, and spiritual growth. There are countless ways to celebrate joyfully without risking harm to others or embarrassment to Klal Yisrael.

The only embarrassment to klal yisrael are your nonexistent T-levels. I cannot imagine what possessed him to write this stupidity, nor can I fathom why Yeshiva World News published it. Hopefully “he” will learn to shut his effeminate mouth in the future so that he does not cause further chillul Hashem and total embarrassment to klal yisrael. There is a zero chance that the author would not have bowed his nose to his toes when Haman came around.

Bad Bunny, an artist that most Anglo Americans have not heard of, headlined the Super Bowl halftime show. The show was very culturally Hispanic, from the language, to the costumes, to the sets. There is nothing wrong with Hispanic culture; it exists and thrives on its own. But the Super Bowl is not a Hispanic Heritage demo. It is the largest and most important American sporting event of the year, a national civic entertainment event with a broad, shared audience.

The entire performance from Bad Bunny was in Spanish, so basically, if you don’t speak Spanish or sign language, this was not the show for you. Press 1 for English. The point is not that Spanish shows are bad. The point is that they do not belong at an event where the vast majority of the viewership is not Spanish-speaking. The majority of the audience understanding what is happening is not supposed to be an afterthought.

When that baseline is abandoned, it is not because the organizers failed to cater to the audience. It is because they were not trying to cater at all. They were trying to program the audience. When you are not catering to an audience, but catering to an agenda, you are attempting to condition people to accept something they did not ask for.

Many Americans noticed this and had feelings about it. Most people are not particularly skilled at translating instinctive reactions into clean arguments, but that does not make those reactions invalid. The response to those feelings has been to malign those people as racist. Accusing people who struggle to articulate what they sense as racism is a bad faith move meant to deflect from the actual issue, which is the forced globalization of American culture.

This whole spectacle was not an accident. It was about artificially astroturfing global ideas and cultures onto a distinctly American cultural event. This was not organic representation responding to the audience of the Super Bowl. It was the imposition of a different cultural framework onto a shared national space.

There have been many Super Bowl halftime performers who incorporated elements of their native cultures into shows that still spoke to the country as a whole. That is how assimilation works. This show was not that. This was not inclusion. It was displacement. This is the explicit result of refusing to melt and insisting that the shared space bend instead.

And no, this is not about hatred, and it is not about race. It is about whether America is allowed to have a core culture at all. Whether a national event is still permitted to speak to the nation watching it, or whether every shared institution must be repurposed as a vehicle for globalized identity messaging.

It is shameful that this messaging is being rammed down our throats, and we should be embarrassed that this is where we are at. A national event that no longer speaks to its nation is not inclusive. Do not let yourself be intimidated into applauding it anyway, or silenced by being called sheep names like “racist” or whatever.

In his (Hazony’s) view, the Republican Party and the conservative movement as a whole are now divided into liberal, nationalist, and alt-right wings….

Correct.

Hazony names as “liberal” politicians like Lindsay Graham, who has been a dedicated supporter of President Donald Trump and MAGA since Trump was first elected in 2016.

Here Benjy decides to conflate ideological support with political support. It is well-known that Lindsay Graham is quite liberal and his extensive voting record reflects that.

Now, there are numerous issues with Hazony’s claims, not least of which is his use of vituperative language like “rubbish” and “disgrace” to describe people who are simply trying to fight antisemitism as best they can.

Hazony is not “trashing” people who are fighting antisemitism. He is criticizing an industry that deploys antisemitism selectively as a political cudgel, only insofar as it can be leveraged to smuggle neoliberal norms back into a movement that explicitly rejected them.

The truth is that, increasingly, there is no clear division between the nationalist and alt-right wings of today’s conservative movement.

What Benjy is doing here is not analysis but association laundering. By insisting that the nationalist and alt-right wings are indistinguishable, he avoids engaging national conservatism on its actual claims, and instead indicts it through faux-proximity. His objective is to tie the nationalist camp to the alt-right in order to disparage National Conservatism, not on its merits, but on invented associations.

I know you might be thinking that I am unfairly asserting bad faith to Benjy, but he’ll come through for me, don’t worry:

Carlson, for example, is not an alt-right figure. He has welcomed and promoted the alt-right, but is not of them. He is wholly of the nationalist wing.

Tucker Carlson used to operate within the nationalist camp until he discovered that antisemitic signaling was significantly more profitable than grounded political theory. Kerstein falsely asserts that Carlson is not a member of the alt-right (despite a long public record of rhetoric and associations that Benji chooses to ignore).

Vice President J.D. Vance, has openly refused to purge antisemites from the party and recently faced serious criticism after refusing to mention the word “Jew” in a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

By Kerstein’s logic, Vice President J.D. Vance’s omission is proof of nationalist antisemitism. By that same logic, Governor Josh Shapiro’s identical omission would place him in the same nationalist antisemitic camp. Obviously neither of them wrote those statements personally…

From this, one could conclude that it is not the liberal wing that started this fight, but the nationalist wing, and thus the nationalist wing—not the liberals—bears responsibility for it.

Google Translate: Y’all non-antisemitic nationalists should revert to neoliberalism because muh feelings.

I think part of the reason for Hazony’s somewhat desperate rhetoric may be that he does not want to face the fact that antisemitism may be, to an extent, “baked in” to the kind of American nationalism he seems to admire and has done much to promote.

This is asserted without evidence because evidence would require engaging Hazony’s actual work rather than impugning motives. Kerstein needs antisemitism to be intrinsic to nationalism, because without that premise there is no argument left for abandoning the retvrn, and instead submitting ourselves, once again, to the neoliberal order we explicitly rejected.

Sadly, American nationalism appears to find it increasingly difficult not to decide that the Jews, among others, are “the alien.”

Largely because elite Jewish neoliberal figures insist on pathologizing national identity, a posture that predictably corrodes trust and then moralizes the backlash it helped generate.

The enemies of antisemitism deserve better than to be called a disgrace for remembering this simple fact.

Benji here styles himself an “enemy of antisemitism,” but what he is actually practicing is elite concern-trolling in its purest form. Antisemitism is invoked not to be eliminated, but as a tool used in service of enforcing neoliberal boundaries.

Here we will now see the awesome intellectual prowess of Benjamin Kerstein!

Antisemitism is always the fault of the antisemites

Ironically, in criticizing the anti-antisemites in order to get the nationalists off the hook, Hazony becomes what, in another context, he most despises.

It is literally in the next paragraph. The mental pretzels this man ties himself in to push neoliberalism…

He is on a quest to save nationalism for the Jews, but it is increasingly likely that this cannot be done.

Benji should have titled this piece “An Ode to Neoliberalism” and spared everyone the moral theater. Instead, he cloaks ideological nostalgia in the language of traditional Jewish fear, hoping no one notices that the remedy he offers is the very framework that led us to this very place. If this is the best defense neoliberalism can muster, it is not worth the servers it’s hosted on. Hazony does not need saving from nationalism. Neoliberalism needs saving from irrelevance, and this whiny concern-trolling reads like a panic response to that realization.

No Jew has escaped school, or even a scolding by a fellow adult, without hearing the phrase “Derech Eretz Kadma l’Torah.” By now, most of us think we know what this means instinctively, after having it drilled into our skulls often enough, but most of us have likely never analyzed what it actually means. The obvious implied translation is thoroughly ridiculous: derech eretz, meaning “being nice,” comes before Torah. If you take a minute to analyze that for even a moment, it’s a completely asinine statement. But enough “rabbis” and otherwise frum NPC authority figures have repeated it to us like trained parrots that we are no longer even stunned by the implication.

This quote is also used in more nefarious circumstances, often by those associated with the Reform institution known as “Yeshiva” University. The femboys over there translate derech eretz as “the way of the land,” so the slogan becomes, “The way of the land comes before Torah.” YU NPCs will blurt this out in an attempt to convince you that Torah wants you to minimize your Yiddishkeit, especially in public spaces. I genuinely cannot think of a more laughable assertion, but I guess that’s YU “genius” for you.

Whether the NPC weaponizing this kefirah quote is attempting to get you to be “better behaved” or to quiet down your Yiddishkeit, rest assured that either way, you’re dealing with a blithering idiot who should be ignored.

Now let’s actually analyze the source of the quote “Derech Eretz Kadma l’Torah.” Many readers are already smugly chanting “Pirkei Avos” inside their little heads. No, stop being an NPC, that is not the source.

The only source for this phrase is Midrash, Vayikra Rabbah 9:3:

עשרים וששה דורות קדמה דרך ארץ את התורה

Esrim v’shishah dorot kadmah derech eretz es haTorah.

Derech eretz preceded the giving of the Torah by twenty-six generations.

The best part is that if any of the NPCs who parrot this line had a handle on basic Hebrew, they would immediately realize how stupid they sound when they use it the way they do. So, a basic Hebrew lesson:

קָדְמָה – kadma - preceded, came earlier in reality or development

קוֹדֵם – kodem - takes precedence, has priority in obligation or importance

The entire perversion of this phrase depends on a simple sleight of hand: quietly swapping kadmah for kodem and hoping no one notices. The first describes chronology, while the second describes priority. Switching the two is not an accident, but done to code our youth with complacent behavior.

Chazal very deliberately used kadmah, not kodem. So what does the quote mean? In context, it’s saying that derech eretz existed before the Torah was given, and that’s it. It is not saying derech eretz is more important than Torah, chas v’shalom. It is not saying derech eretz overrides Torah. And it is certainly not saying to water down your Yiddishkeit so goyim feel more comfortable around you.

And when people insist that derech eretz here means a “basic human baseline,” what they are actually smuggling in is a modern, Globohomo definition of acceptable behavior: be agreeable, be palatable, don’t offend, don’t stand out, and definitely don’t prioritize Torah when it causes friction. That perverted value system is not a neutral baseline, it is new-age agreeableness which Chazal were certainly not endorsing.

If these imbeciles actually knew what they were saying, they would have replaced kadmah with kodem to make their intended message coherent. But they didn’t, because most people repeating this quote in these contexts are morons. And if these imbeciles had basic knowledge, they would realize that Chazal had a perfectly good word for precedence and chose not to use it. When someone barks at you, “Derech Eretz preceded the Torah!” the only correct response is: “Yeah, thanks for the history lesson?” It’s a timeline, not an argument. And when people throw it at you like it’s a moral mic drop, they don’t even comprehend how moronic they sound.

I remember the first time I heard this phrase weaponized against me, it bothered me deeply. Something comes before Torah? Nothing comes before Torah, we all know that! The perverted meaning sounded off, like it was cooked up by some YU fag (which apparently it was). So I went digging, and everything above is what I found. The slogan only works if you don’t know the source, don’t know the Hebrew, and don’t notice the word that was quietly swapped.

Once you actually read the Midrash, the subversion attempt collapses. Kadmah is chronology, not hierarchy. And anyone using this line to police your behavior is not quoting Chazal, they’re ventriloquizing them. So, the next time some shmuck throws this slogan at you, laugh at them and tell them to stop being a kofer.

It is not because the Navy SEALs are the same as every other branch of the armed forces. Nobody endures that kind of physical and psychological punishment to be equal, they do it to be better. Better trained, better prepared, more capable, more trusted. They do it because distinction exists, and because not everyone makes it through. If a SEAL is not functionally superior to a standard infantryman, then there is no rational reason to put oneself through that process at all.

This reveals a truth about society that has become taboo to acknowledge. Excellence requires hierarchy by definition. Wherever competence, sacrifice, and cost differ, hierarchy emerges. Society is not equal, and attempts to force equality of outcome are a communist utopian pathology.

Obviously not everyone has the intelligence to attend an Ivy League institution. When you cannot make everyone a success, the only way to manufacture equal outcomes is to flatten those who rise. It is marketed as compassion, but in reality it is sabotage cloaked in faux-morality. It is the “logic” behind participation trophies, and it destroys the incentive structure that produces excellence in the first place. If additional schooling, discipline, and sacrifice do not produce commensurate reward, then what is the point? These ideals did not stay in the realm of economics, but trickled down to religion as well.

Pluralism, and especially religious pluralism, functions as the spiritual arm of collectivism. It advances the same goals through softer language. Whereas Marxism attacks hierarchy directly, pluralism dissolves it gently. It insists that everything is equal, every path is valid, and every belief is interchangeable. The rhetorical move is always the same: why go through the extra hardship that one of these flavors requires if the other one that requires less is not any less? Pluralism tells you all of that cost is unnecessary.

“Religious pluralism is how communists convince religious people to accept atheism.” - Gavi Shapiro

This is where people get confused, because pluralism does not deny G-d outright. It takes a more subversive approach. It trains you to treat truth-claims as rude. It teaches that believing too strongly is a problem. It reframes conviction as moral failure. Pluralism is not tolerance, it is an anti-truth philosophy. If every religion is equally true, none of them are worth obeying. When obedience becomes optional, belief becomes aesthetic. Once belief is aesthetic, disbelief is inevitable.

“When truth is interchangeable, disbelief is inevitable.” - Gavi Shapiro

If all religions are of equal value, then what’s the point? Why go through work and hardship if you will end up equal to everyone else anyway? Obviously you wouldn’t. Just as you wouldn’t go through the additional schooling to become a doctor if you’ll make as much money as someone who has a job that did not require such extensive training. These beliefs have the same effect as communism, but on our religious institutions.

“No one creed has a monopoly on the spiritual truth.” - Jonathan Sacks

This sentence sounds cute until you actually process what it means. A religion that cannot say it is true in any meaningful way is not a religion, it is a collection of customs and a social framework. A G-d who prefers nothing, demands nothing, and distinguishes nothing is not a G-d that governs reality. This is atheism in every way except the name, not because it insults G-d, but because it makes Him irrelevant.

“Nothing is true; everything is permitted.”

Chassidus is actually quite explicit about this. Ritual without intention is empty, but intention without obligation is meaningless. Kevanah only matters because the mitzvah is real, commanded to us by the One Creator. Serving Hashem “because He asked” only makes sense if He actually asked, and if not every other path counts as an answer. Pluralism doesn’t simply hollow out practice, it hollows out intention itself. When truth is interchangeable, adherence becomes performance. What remains looks religious, but it is only performative in practice.

A world in which everything is true is functionally a world in which nothing is and this outcome is not accidental. It is the standard operating procedure of collectivist propaganda. Marxism does not wake up one day and ban your religion. It begins by neutralizing it. This is a tale as old as time, and it is exactly the strategy used by the Greeks in the Chashmonaim era: not erasing Jewish identity overnight, but converting it into a hollow, Hellenized performance that no longer resists anything.

First you are told your truth is not unique. Then close adherence is ridiculed as fundamentalism. Then what makes your religion distinct is labeled offensive to others. Eventually, all that remains are hollow traditions that pose no threat to power and only barely pay homage to what once was.

Religious pluralism dissolves polarity by design. It erases chosenness. It treats hierarchy as immoral and distinction as dangerous. The result is a faith that means nothing and therefore does not generate any reason to sacrifice for it.

Actual Judaism will not perpetuate in that paradigm. Just look at the Conservative and Reform movements. None of their grandchildren will be Jewish. Unsatisfied with even that achievement, the religious pluralists have turned their attention to the Orthodox movement in an effort to complete the project.

Judaism perpetuates precisely because it is chosen. Judaism is centered around selection. Just ask any convert, it is not so easy to join. Hashem chose a people, imposed obligations, and demanded a lifestyle that is more challenging than those of other creeds. Why go through all of that if it is declared interchangeable? Why accept additional responsibility, restriction, and sacrifice if the outcome is declared equal to those who accepted none of it? When you erase chosenness, you erase obligation. When you erase obligation, you erase the drive for perpetuation.

Jonathan Sacks attempted to program us with the universalist belief that all religions are equally valid. His universalist framing trained religious people to relinquish exclusive truth claims in the name of “civility.” That move denies divine truth without ever saying the words. It replaces covenant with coexistence and obligation with mutual affirmation. A G-d that made a world where everything is true is indistinguishable from no G-d at all. Religious pluralism is atheism in every way except the name. Those who study real Torah understand this intuitively, because it is coded throughout. They choose where to live based on it. They structure their lives around it. They submit to it because they know it is not interchangeable and because it is not equal.

There are people who spend years studying Judaism, uprooting their lives to convert. They move communities, endure rabbinic scrutiny, and take on commandments that overturn their previous lifestyles. They give up the ability to do whatever they want, whenever they want. Now imagine telling them that after all of that, they are equal to someone who sacrificed nothing. That their covenant carries no distinction. That their sacrifices were unnecessary. Belief would collapse instantly, not because people are weak, but because the system declared sacrifice irrational. This is why pluralism always precedes secularization.

Hierarchy is part of the natural order. Collectivism cannot tolerate hierarchy because hierarchy produces chosenness, and chosenness produces authority. Marxism seeks to erase this because a world where no one is chosen is a world where no one can claim divine mandate. Pluralism is the tool used to inch toward that goal, using religious-coded language that is just safe enough to pass muster.

This hollowing of belief is what is destroying religion across civilization. The small religious revival we see today is powered by the rejection of pluralism, not its embrace. People are returning to faith because they are exhausted by meaninglessness, repelled by moral equivalence, and starving for something that actually has consequences. Religious exclusivism is a net positive for society. It creates polarity and pushes civilization to actively believe in G-d. It transforms religious institutions from cultural centers back into houses of worship.

A faith that refuses to declare itself uniquely true will eventually stop believing anything at all.

So I arrive at his office for what can only be described as the dumbest experience imaginable. He removes his shoes, sits on a chair without legs like a preschooler at circle time, and has me lie down on a mat on the floor. He turns on ambient water sounds, because apparently adulthood now requires pretending you are a leaf floating down a stream. Before anything begins, he tells me that if I don’t have an answer to a question, I should just make one up. This detail matters. This entire system openly encourages fabrication. Its defenders will claim this is not invention but “the subconscious speaking.” That distinction is meaningless. Discovery is impossible in a process that relies on fiction. This is not insight. It is LARPing for emotionally incontinent adults.

He begins a routine of faux hypnosis, snapping his fingers and asking questions. He tells me to “scan my body” and pick a part that is “standing out.” I choose my arm, because in a system completely detached from reality, any answer is equally valid and equally useless. He presses for more detail, asks which part of my arm, then announces that we are going to “open a door” to that part. He asks me to think of a number. I say six. He snaps his fingers again like a man who watched half a YouTube video on hypnosis and instructs me to imagine my six year old self.

He asks where I am. I tell him I’m at school. He responds with a drawn out, slightly sexual “yeahhh.” He asks where in the school. I say the hallway. The sexual moaning intensifies. He asks how I’m feeling. I’m fine, because this is make believe and because I am not a woman who measures his existence through nonstop emotional check ins. He then asks how the six year old boy is feeling. At this point, I am genuinely fighting the urge to say, “Extremely creeped out because an adult man is moaning at me while trying to regress me into childhood.”

This goes on for an absurd amount of time. He asks meaningless questions. I invent answers, because fabrication is the only way this ritual can proceed. The process grows progressively stranger as the moaning becomes more intense and the infantilization more overt. This is not healing, but manufactured faux-vulnerability. It is the deliberate erosion of adult boundaries disguised as self improvement. It is regression marketed as growth. This is what happens when a culture mistakes emotional exposure for virtue and weakness for depth, and then congratulates itself for the confusion.

Over the course of the session, he must have used the word “feeling” a hundred times. Not once did we discuss actions, outcomes, decisions, behavior, competence, or results. I was missing work. I was losing money. I was lying on the floor listening to an adult man sexually moan. Therapy culture is not merely useless. It is parasitic and dangerous. It consumes time while pretending to be productive. It replaces output with introspection and then congratulates itself for uselessness.

This is an infallible, closed loop system. Endless inward excavation, narrative obsession, and fixation on subjective meaning ensure that everything becomes proof of deeper trauma. Resistance is denial. Discomfort is proof. Strength is repression. Productivity is avoidance. There is no exit. The system cannot fail, because failure itself is reframed as pathology. The practitioner is not a guide, a builder, or a producer. He is interchangeable with any other man trained to run the same script. This is not growth. This is ideological entrapment.

When the music was finally shut off and we were sitting upright again, he asked me how I felt. I told him the experience was deeply annoying. Then I flipped the script, which he did not appreciate. I grabbed frame and asked him why he was obsessed with feelings. I asked what concrete change this process produces. I asked how he distinguishes insight from imagination when the client is explicitly instructed to fabricate answers. I asked how lying on the floor pretending to be a child improves a man’s effectiveness in the real world.

I pressed him on why, as a man, he was sitting with his legs crossed, blubbering about feelings for an hour, and selling this as work. I asked how he justifies pushing passivity, introspection, and emotional indulgence onto a generation of men already drowning in indecision and weakness. He had no answers, because of course he didn’t. A system designed to be unfalsifiable cannot explain results.

The reality is simple. I should have spent that hour working, building, producing, or improving something tangible. Instead, I sacrificed it so you don’t have to. I gained no insight, no clarity, no actionable information, and no improvement in behavior. The only thing revealed was how aggressively this practice substitutes imagination for competence and feelings for outcomes.

This was genuinely one of the dumbest experiences of my life. Those pushing this nonsense are Globohomo agents, whether they realize it or not, advancing an ideology that pathologizes strength, glorifies weakness, and replaces masculine action with endless emotional navel gazing. Your job is now to join me in making fun of them. Mock them relentlessly. Push this garbage out of the public square and out of the Overton Window.

Men are not broken. They are underutilized. They do not need to lie on the floor and hallucinate childhoods. They need purpose, responsibility, pressure, and results. Anything else is just expensive, creepy roleplay for adults who are afraid of reality.

“We all must suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.” - Jim Rohn

The rise of online voices pushing men toward strength, competence, and self-improvement coincided with growing pushback against feminism and a broader rejection of narratives that rewarded fragility, passivity, and endless self-explanation. This piece is here to serve two purposes. First, to accelerate that correction. Second, to give men a clear operating manual for how to win instead of merely existing. Firstly, to all men: Be a man. Take responsibility. Take action.

Making yourself excellent will get you the best life

In a recent video titled Get Better, Dr. Orion Taraban pointed out that there are three universal things that everyone basically wants. Everyone inherently wants to be stronger, richer and more attractive. Yet if we look around, it is obvious that many men are none of those things. The question, then, is simple. If these desires are so universal, why are so many men failing to get what they claim to want?

Because incentives matter, and most men are only disciplined when consequences are immediate.

"We'll replace rugged individualism with collectivism" - NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani

Most of us understand some basic realities about life. Many people would happily lie on the couch all day ordering Uber Eats and watching Netflix if life allowed it. If not for consequences, plenty of us would do exactly that. The reason we don’t is obvious: we would lose our jobs, run out of money, and eventually end up homeless. This is precisely the fatal flaw with socialism and its UBI-adjacent fantasies: remove consequences and productivity collapses. Historically, the only way that problem has ever been “fixed” is with gulags, but that is not the focus here.

The point is this: men are very good at avoiding pain that arrives quickly, and terrible at committing to effort where results are more gradual. Becoming stronger, richer, and more attractive happens incrementally. So does becoming weak, broke, and undesirable. The penalties for neglect arrive slowly, quietly, and are easy to rationalize, which is why so many men spend years stuck in the gray zone, telling themselves they are fine while steadily decaying.

The challenge for men is not insight, it is discipline. It is learning to trade short-term comfort for long-term power. Excellence is not a personality trait, it is a behavior pattern. It is the repeated choice to do what compounds instead of what soothes. Men who make that choice consistently do not just become better dating prospects, they build lives that actually work, for themselves and their families.

Average is the most dangerous place to live

Human beings, and men in particular, crave optionality. This is not ideological, it is biological. No one wants to be trapped with only one option. This is why people value living in a capitalist society. When you walk into a store, you can choose between dozens of brands and types of deodorant. In Mother Russia, everyone used the same one, if they used any at all. When you travel, you would rather have choices of where to stay than be forced into a run-down hostel with a shared bathroom at the end of the hall. You may even choose to stay in a skeevy hostel, but it is better to do so as a preference rather than as a necessity imposed by lack of optionality.

Choosing where to stay on vacation is simply a parable for the rest of life. Average men end up in average jobs, average relationships, and average lives not because they carefully chose them, but because those were the only options available. Average is not a preference; it is a default. It is where you wake up one day and realize your life was selected for you by inertia, not intention.

“Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.”

This is what makes average dangerous. It does not feel like failure, it feels tolerable. Comfortable enough to endure, yet painful enough to drain you slowly. Average is where men tell themselves they are “doing fine” while quietly surrendering leverage in every domain that matters.

Excellent men do not “get lucky,” they build leverage. They become the man with options. In work, the excellent man gets hired, promoted, and paid. In life, he gains freedom. In dating, he chooses instead of waiting to be chosen. The average man does not choose, he accepts. He takes what is left, if anything is left at all. You may think you want an average life. What you do not want is to arrive there because you lacked the strength, discipline, or courage to earn anything better.

Excellent is being stronger, richer, and more attractive

So what does an average man actually have to do to become an excellent one? First, a disclaimer: it is not easy. If it were, you would already be doing it instead of reading this piece.

Let’s start with the basics: a hard, sweating workout a minimum of four times per week that does not take place in your house or apartment. Now I’m sure that a number of my readers have just balked at that suggestion. Or more likely, you have begun to perform mental gymnastics inside your head. “Well, I have a pull-up bar at home,” or “I do go to Crunch and walk on the stair machine a couple times a week,” or “It’s too cold to leave the house that often.” These are not obstacles, they are negotiations with discomfort. This is why you are weak.

The reason you are an average man, and the reason you are not stronger, richer, or more attractive, is simple. It is easier to be average than it is to be excellent. Most of you were never trained to push through resistance. You were trained to negotiate with it, often with the help of that therapy that taught you how to explain discomfort instead of overcoming it.

There is a reason the old gym teacher trope still applies: “The only person you’re cheating is yourself.” When the push-ups got hard, most people found ways to make them easier instead of better. They shortened the reps, rushed the movement, and sacrificed form. It hurt less in the moment but cost them strength long-term. That instinct clearly did not end in gym class, you carried it straight into your work, your discipline, your finances, and your relationships.

This beta pattern extends far beyond physical training. Most people choose the path of least resistance by default. If even the suggestion of structured, consistent effort made you flinch, that reaction explains exactly why you are still average. Becoming an excellent man requires that instinct to be beaten out of you. You must learn to move toward resistance instead of away from it. So first, I suggest a good MMA class for that purpose. It teaches you, very quickly, that discomfort does not kill you and avoidance does not save you, and excuses do not work. What is hard for you is hard for everyone else. The difference is not talent, it is choice.

Excellent men take the harder path by default while weak men look for the bell. One confronts resistance head-on while the other schedules their weekly therapy session to explain why it feels unfair. And women can tell which one you are long before you ever open your mouth.

Hustle is not exploitation, it is apprenticeship

Men are lazy, and that’s fine. Left to our own devices, most of us would happily live like sheikhs, served the finest foods with a harem down the hall for when we are in the mood. That instinct is pretty universal. The problem is that for roughly 99.99999% of us, that life is not coming. There is no lottery ticket, no genie, no pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. So if you want more than the bare minimum, you are going to have to hustle.

This is where hustle enters the picture, and where it is most often misunderstood. Hustle is not exploitation; it is apprenticeship. It is how men acquire leverage by learning how the world actually works.

“You either build your dream or someone will hire you to build theirs.”

In the previous section, we talked about avoiding the path of least resistance. This is where that principle becomes non-negotiable. Doing what everyone else does will only get you what everyone else has. If you want more, you have to produce more value. That means working smarter, and often harder, longer, and more deliberately than the people around you, especially early on.

The job of a man is to build something. For himself, for his future family, and for the community he lives in. The beauty of a capitalist system is that it forces competence. You are only rewarded to the extent that you solve real problems for real people. There is no bypass, no shortcut, and no moral exemption.

Hustle is simply the process of learning how to become useful at a high level. It is how you acquire skills, judgment, and credibility before you have options. It is the tuition you pay before leverage kicks in.

So stop treating hustle like an insult. It is not exploitation, it is education. Find a path that aligns with your abilities and temperament, then commit to it fully. Work until you are useful. Then work until you are difficult to replace. Then go out and build your empire. That is how excellence is built and how freedom is earned.

Your personality sucks

Speaking of dating, you might be wondering why you’ve had such a hard time with women. The truth is your personality sucks. Yes, you. You are uninteresting, flat, and dull. Your guy friends know this too, which is why your friendships are shallow and you spend most nights watching Netflix and other things alone. The men around you do not seek you out, do not rely on you, and do not miss you when you are gone. If other men do not enjoy your presence, why on G-d’s green earth would a woman?

Yes, this section applies to you. You do not need more dating advice, you need a personality that generates energy instead of consuming it. You need to become a more interesting person. That does not mean reading idiotic books like How to Win Friends and Influence People. Personality is not learned in theory, it is forged in action.

Get hobbies. Join a sports league. Engage in healthy male competition. Build skill in something that demands effort and produces visible progress. It does not matter what it is. What matters is that it gives you momentum, structure, and something real to talk about that you are passionate about and did not come from a screen.

Women are not looking to complete you, they are evaluating whether you are already complete. They are watching to see if you have gravity, direction, friendships, and a spine that exists independently of them. A man without gravity repels everyone. Fix that, and your dating failures will correct themselves without you saying a word.

Porn, OnlyFans, and synthetic intimacy

Hashem designed man with an innate desire for intimacy. As He says, “It is not good that man be alone; I will make him a helpmate opposite him.” Personally, I think another dude would be more practically helpful, but that’s probably why I was not consulted during creation. The world was designed intentionally, and the drives placed within us are not accidents or bugs in the system. They exist to propel men toward building, creating, and advancing the world.

Masculine drive, fueled by testosterone, is not gentle or abstract. It seeks to compete, to build, to acquire, and yes, to conquer. Men are wired to pursue resources, status, and the ability to attract a wife not because we are crude, but because nothing of value is handed to us freely. One of the core features of that drive is optionality: the possibility of winning, choosing, and earning access rather than being assigned it. In Chassidic terms, desire creates ratzon, and ratzon pulls divine energy into action. When there is no striving, there is no growth. When everything is given, nothing is built. Optionality is not indulgence, it is the engine that keeps a man moving forward.

Technology, like everything else, is morally neutral. It amplifies whatever it touches. In the hands of a builder, it builds. In the hands of a degenerate, it corrodes. Pornography is one of the most destructive examples of this amplification. It takes the strongest motivating force a man has and feeds it a counterfeit victory. The brain receives the chemical reward of success without the effort, risk, or competence that success is supposed to require. The engine revs, but the wheels never touch the road.

“Get your dopamine from what you create not what you consume.”

OnlyFans escalates this by adding the illusion of connection to the illusion of intimacy. You are no longer just watching, you are “interacting.” You are given the simulation of being chosen. In reality, more often than not, you are chatting with old Indian men in call centers following scripts designed to keep you paying. You feel selected while becoming weaker. You feel validated while becoming poorer. You feel desired while doing nothing that would actually make you desirable.

This is synthetic intimacy. It hijacks the reward system while bypassing the purpose of desire entirely. The drive that should push you into the gym, into work, into risk, and into pursuit of a real woman gets discharged in private, with nothing to show for it. Over time, this trains a man to watch instead of act, to consume instead of pursue, to expect pleasure without effort. Real intimacy requires courage, rejection, patience, and competence. Synthetic intimacy requires only a screen and a credit card. Eventually, the man who chooses the simulation loses his appetite for the real thing, not because it is unavailable, but because he trained himself to avoid the discomfort that gives life its meaning.

These systems do not accidentally harm men, in fact they are designed specifically to harm men. A sedated man is compliant. A man chasing simulations does not build, does not compete, and does not threaten anyone in power. Porn and OnlyFans do not merely waste your time, they neuter the very force that would have made you formidable. They turn masculine drive into a closed loop of consumption and self-soothing. These are nothing more than instruments of the Globohomo, designed to pacify masculinity and keep men docile, distracted, and easily managed. If you want to be stronger, richer, and more attractive, this has to go. Not because you should be a monk, but because they are siphoning off the fuel meant to build a real life.

Stop inner work nonsense and chase something real

The latest fad pushed by our Globohomo masters to sedate men is the claim that everyone is “damaged” and therefore must engage in endless “inner work” before taking any meaningful action in life. If you do not believe you have trauma, that is conveniently reinterpreted as proof that your trauma is simply too deep to recognize. It is a perfect, unfalsifiable paralysis doctrine. The outcome is always the same: delay action, defer responsibility, and retreat into feelings that never improve your life.

This ideology trains men to obsess over internal states that produce nothing. You are taught to endlessly analyze feelings that do not pay your bills, strengthen your body, sharpen your judgment, or make you more capable in the real world. You feel productive while producing nothing, busy while building nothing, and self-aware while your life remains unchanged.

These ideas have infected both religious and secular spaces alike, and they function much like pornography. Both redirect masculine drive away from action and into the intangible. One numbs desire, the other numbs responsibility. Both promise relief and deliver stagnation. The result is not growth, it is inversion: men are trained to see themselves as fragile projects instead of capable actors, and to derive identity from their supposed brokenness. In reality, the Victimhood Olympics has never made anyone fulfilled and will only cause stagnation for its competitors.

“Inner work” has become the most socially acceptable excuse for avoiding outer work. It provides a respectable reason to delay responsibility indefinitely. You are always almost ready, always processing, always recalibrating. Meanwhile, nothing improves, no strength, no achievement, and certainly no tangible results.

“But I have generational trauma.” No, you have TikTok vocabulary and no discipline. Your trauma credits will not pay your rent or buy groceries. They will not fund the Pesach vacation you want or the life you imagine for yourself. Get off your ass and start doing real work. No amount of therapeutic language will substitute for effort, competence, and follow-through.

If you want a better life, stop staring inward and start building outward. Harness your masculine drive to make something of yourself, rather than transforming into a whiny little bitch. Lift heavy things. Learn hard skills. Take risks that scare you. Produce something real. Masculine drive is meant to be discharged into creation, not endlessly analyzed into impotence. Do not complain that women do not want you. Become someone worth wanting. Inner work will not save you, outer work will.

Attraction is a consequence of competence

Women are deeply, biologically attracted to competent men. This is not a theory, a social construct, or something invented by the manosphere. It is easily observable reality. Competence signals safety, direction, and reliability. When a woman senses that a man can handle problems as they arise, she relaxes. She stops managing, anticipating, and compensating. Attraction grows in the absence of worry.

The feeling that drives this is simple: “I don’t have to worry because he’s got it handled.” That is one of the strongest attraction triggers there is. Not because women are weak, but because attraction is not built on sameness, it is built on polarity. Women are drawn to men who can take responsibility where it matters, just as men are drawn to women who bring what they lack.

This is why all the “inner work” you’ve been doing is not making you more attractive, no matter how convincingly it is packaged on Instagram by dumb influencers. Emotional vocabulary does not fix a flat tire. Processing your feelings does not solve problems under pressure. A man who can calmly and confidently handle real situations beats a man who can perfectly narrate his childhood wounds on cue.

Knowing how to change a tire, plunge a toilet, or figure things out when something breaks is far more attractive than how articulate you are about your inner world. Women do not select men based on how reflective they are. They select men based on whether life feels easier, calmer, and safer with them around. No one cares about your trauma or how much of a victim you are. Strength, resilience, and composure under pressure are what actually register as attractive.

And this shows up constantly. She notices whether you planned the date properly. Whether you stayed composed when something went wrong. Whether you froze, deflected responsibility, or took charge. She is not consciously scoring you, but she is registering everything. Competence leaks, but incompetence leaks faster.

You do not need to be able to renovate a house by yourself, but she does want to see that you can handle the basics. She wants a man who can figure things out, a man who does not unravel the moment something breaks. A man like that does not need to explain himself, his presence alone does the talking.

So stop trying to be attractive by looking inward. Some women will tell you that is what they want, but their actual selection behavior tells the truth. Build skills, build decisiveness, build reliability. Attraction is not created by self-analysis. It is created when a woman looks at you and knows, without thinking about it, that you are capable.

Men and women do not experience attraction the same way, and pretending otherwise is one of the great lies of modern dating advice. Men ignite through stimulus and direction. Women warm through safety, consistency, and emotional attunement. This is not a value judgment, it is a wiring difference. Ignore it and you will sabotage attraction while blaming everything except the actual cause.

This is why competence matters more than communication. Men lose attraction when they stagnate. Women lose attraction when emotional continuity breaks. One side requires momentum, the other requires stability. A man who understands this stops trying to “connect” his way into attraction and starts building a life that naturally creates it.

Pursuit

A man who does not pursue does not get chosen, period. This is not bitterness or insecurity, it is biology. Attraction does not materialize on its own, and women are not going to move the process forward for you. If you are waiting to be noticed, you are already losing.

Pursuit is a masculine responsibility. It is not desperation and it is not simping, it is leadership. Someone has to initiate and create momentum and it will never be her. Men turn potential into reality by stepping forward, that is how anything ever happens.

Modern men have been brainwashed into believing that pursuit is creepy, immoral, or beneath them. That lie exists to keep you passive, docile, and alone. Yes, bad pursuit is awkward. So what? The answer to bad pursuit is not withdrawal, it is competence. And competence is only built one way: practice.

Rejection is part of the deal. It stings, absorb it and keep moving. Masculinity has always required the ability to take a hit and stay standing. If a simple no rattles you, you are nowhere near ready for a yes, because a yes requires steadiness, not fragility.

“Fear is an evolutionary response designed to keep you safe from predators, not girls.”

Women do not want to manufacture momentum, they want to respond to it. Even the women who say they prefer men who do not pursue, reliably choose men who do. Ignore what is said and observe what is rewarded. Behavior tells the truth long before language does.

Pursuit does not mean begging or chasing endlessly. It means stating interest clearly, extending an invitation, and remaining grounded regardless of the outcome. You ask, she answers. You move forward or you move on. No spiraling, no sulking, no huffing the copium pretending it was mutual when it was not.

If you ask a woman out in a normal, direct, respectful way and she reacts poorly, that is not a failure, it is information. Men who understand pursuit collect information and continue. Weak men internalize it and stall.

Waiting to be chosen is a feminine strategy. Men who adopt it do not become evolved, they become irrelevant. If you want a woman in your life, you must step forward and create the opportunity for yourself. No one is coming to tap you on the shoulder and hand you a relationship.

So stop hiding behind fear, excuses, or fake morality. Build yourself into a man worth responding to, then act like it. Pursuit is not optional. It is the price of entry.

What acceptable dating criteria looks like

Ask most people what the sexual organ of a man is and they’ll give you the obvious answer, but they’re wrong. The primary sexual organ of a man is his eyes. That is not primitive; it is biological reality. Men experience attraction visually first, always. So let’s start with the baseline requirement that everyone pretends is controversial but everyone privately understands: you must be genuinely attracted to her.

If you cannot imagine intimacy with her, you should not be going out with her. This is not cruelty, it is honesty. Dating someone you are not physically attracted to is not noble, it is dishonest and it wastes both of your time. Attraction is not optional, it is the entry requirement. Clear the threshold or walk away.

That does not mean you are entitled to a fantasy. If your standards are distorted because your primary exposure to women comes from a Hub tab in an incognito window, that is your problem to correct. You are not entitled to a 10 simply because the only women you look at are performers optimized for a camera. Attraction is a threshold, not a trophy. Clear the threshold, then move on, because once attraction is present, it rapidly drops in importance.

A wife is not just a personality match, she is a teammate for life. The correct question is not just “Do we get along?” It is “Does my life function better with her in it?” If her presence adds chaos, instability, emotional drag, or constant friction, then attraction becomes irrelevant very quickly. Chemistry does not build a life, function does. This is where most men fail, because they screen for excitement instead of outcomes.

Which brings us to the criterion most men are embarrassingly bad at screening for: motherhood. This will look different for each man, but most do not consider it at all. They fixate on chemistry between the two of them while completely ignoring her suitability as the mother of their future children. You are not just selecting a woman for yourself, you are selecting the environment your children will grow up in. Her emotional regulation, temperament, values, and capacity to nurture matter far more than how entertaining she is on a date. Men who ignore this trade short-term excitement for long-term regret.

Some women will treat you poorly. Some will test boundaries, drain energy, or manufacture drama, sometimes without malicious intent. It does not matter why they do it. Those are not good women and you should not tolerate that behavior. They will not unlearn such patterns for you. You remove yourself and keep moving. Attractive women often get away with bad behavior precisely because they are attractive. Do not let beauty blind you to dysfunction.

Acceptable criteria is not complicated. Attraction gets you in the door. Function determines whether you stay. Motherhood determines whether you build. Respect determines whether you walk away. Men who get this wrong end up trapped. Men who get it right end up choosing instead of settling. That is the difference between dating intentionally and letting your life be decided for you.

What your feminine energy is actually for

Every bad actor today will tell you to “get in touch with your feminine energy.” You are bombarded with this message constantly, from pop psychology, from social media, from therapy culture, from people whose lives you should not want. You can safely assume that anyone instructing a man be more in touch with his feminine side is attempting to weaken him. That is not because feminine energy does not exist, rather there is an agenda to deliberately misapply it. You do possess feminine energy, and you must apply it in the correct time and place.

In Chassidus, masculine and feminine are functions. Masculine is mashpia, the initiator, the vector, the force that moves reality forward. Feminine is mekabel, the receiver, the stabilizer, the vessel that allows direction to land. When these roles invert, or when both sides pursue leadership, chaos ensues. When the polarity is correct, everything aligns.

Feminine energy in a man has exactly two purposes.

1. Emunah & Bitachon

The first is emunah and bitachon, the ability to receive (be mekabel) from Hashem. Faith, humility before G-d, and trust that provision does not come from our inputs alone. This is where softness belongs: upward, toward Hashem. Not outward toward women, coworkers, or strangers in some performative emotional exchange.

A man who spills his internal state everywhere is not evolved, he is undisciplined. Your feminine side is there to enable you to receive from Hashem, not for unloading uncertainty onto women and calling it vulnerability. Strength does not come from emotional exhibitionism, strength comes from alignment with something higher than yourself.

Let’s be clear about what this means in practice. Women are not where you process fear, doubt, or uncertainty. The moment you look to a woman to stabilize you emotionally, you invert the dynamic. She does not feel closer, she feels responsible, and responsibility kills attraction. If you need grounding, you take it to Hashem, to disciplined action, or to other men who can handle the weight without collapsing. You do not bring it into your romantic life and pretend it is vulnerability.

2. Calibration

The second purpose of feminine energy is calibration. It exists to sharpen masculine direction, not replace it. It helps you read the room, sense timing, adjust pressure, and know when to push and when to pause. This is not passivity, it is precision. Masculinity sets direction while feminine energy fine-tunes execution.

This is why men who are overly masculine become blunt, socially clumsy, and unnecessarily abrasive. And why men who are overly feminine become passive, approval-seeking, and invisible. Both fail, though not equally. Masculinity must lead. Feminine energy exists to support direction, not substitute for it. Polarity requires both, but never in equal measure.

Your job is not to emotionally merge with everyone around you. Your job is to set the frame. Women do not want you to feel what they feel. They want you to understand what they feel while remaining grounded in yourself. One is leadership, the other is submission disguised as empathy.

Modern culture tells men to lead with feelings. That advice reliably produces men who hesitate, over-explain, and wait for permission. A man who leads with feelings does not feel safe, he feels unstable. Here is the rule: feelings inform action, they do not initiate it. Feelings are data, not directives. Not every feeling needs to be spoken and not every emotion needs to be shared. Action comes first, reflection happens later, privately.

“Your mind must be stronger than your feelings.”

So stop trying to “get in touch” with your feminine side as if it is a replacement for masculinity. It is not, it is simply a tool for you to use to sharpen your masculinity, not to justify your inaction. Masculinity leads while feminine energy supports. When you invert that order, attraction dies. When you get it right, everything locks into place.

In conclusion…

If you strip everything in this piece down to its non-negotiables, the formula is simple. Lift your body until it is strong. Build a skill until it pays for the lifestyle you desire. Eliminate the habits that sedate your drive. Pursue women directly and absorb rejection without collapsing. Choose deliberately instead of randomly. Lead spiritually upward, not emotionally outward. Act first, reflect second. Feelings inform action, they do not dictate it. Men who live this way do not need motivation, permission, or validation. Their lives work because they are constructed to work.

Modern culture does not produce men worth following or women who feel safe with them. It produces polite paralysis, endless self-analysis, and a permanent state of almost-ready. The script tells men to talk more, feel more, process more, and take fewer risks. It treats strength as toxic, ambition as dangerous, and competence as uselessness. Meaning is not found by naming your suffering correctly. Meaning is built by becoming competent enough that your life actually works. Discipline is replaced with discussion. Action is replaced with rumination. Responsibility is replaced with diagnosis. The outcome is predictable: softer men, weaker marriages, stalled lives, and a dating market full of adults who can describe their feelings flawlessly while being unable to build, lead, or carry weight when it actually matters. The alternative is not cruelty or chaos, it is excellence rooted in responsibility, achievement, and competence.

A man who lifts, works, builds, pursues, and chooses deliberately does not outsource his spine to a therapist, his confidence to his feelings, or his direction to a HR department. He understands that feelings are information, not instructions. That competence creates attraction. That polarity creates harmony. That responsibility creates freedom. This is not revolutionary. It is (apparently now, un)common sense. Torah never instructed men to narrate their way into excellence. It demanded that they act, lead, sacrifice comfort for the future, and become formidable enough to protect it. Do that and everything else follows. Ignore it, and no amount of talking about your feelings will save you.

P.S. I know some of you who read through this are girls and are smirking about all the work guys need to do. Fret not, the piece eviscerating y’all is hot on the tail of this one. You lot aren’t so great either.

Today, that is no longer true. No one has sex anymore, let alone relationships. Matrimonial desire among both men and women sit at record lows. And we are not talking about a few points down, we are approaching a point where disinterest in marriage is becoming the majority position. The moral crusade against hookup culture succeeded only in destroying sex. It was not replaced with marriage culture, it was replaced with celibacy culture. This is not progress, this is decay.

Most people these days do not want to date, and they certainly do not want to get married. They would rather sit alone in their apartments, anesthetized by Netflix, porn, and algorithmic slop, than risk the discomfort of human intimacy. This is not because they are uniquely broken, it is because the culture trained them to be this way.

Relationships are no longer encouraged, they are treated as distractions. Having a boyfriend or girlfriend is framed as unserious, regressive, or even embarrassing. Articles that shame attachment are published without resistance. The people promoting these ideas are treated as moral authorities rather than the pariahs they actually are. That must end. A culture that attacks pair bonding is a civilization that is committing suicide, and those promoting it should be treated accordingly.

These conditions are the predictable outgrowth of feminism and the ideological mutations that followed it. Allowing those ideas to fester unchecked has been disastrous. Young people are taught that they are complete as they are, that needing another person is weakness, and that dependency is shameful. This is a direct rebellion against the way the Creator designed the world and against basic natural law. Humans are not built to exist as isolated, independent hermits. We are built to form families, societies, and interdependence.

The hostility between men and women is not the root problem, rather it is a symptom. The deeper issue is a hatred for society itself, a hatred for natural order, and ultimately a hatred for G-d. Just as modern Satanism is not about belief in Satan but about opposition to G-d, so too is modern gender ideology a war against the natural order disguised as collective justice.

The collateral damage from this war is everywhere. People are not happier alone, they are anxious, bitter, medicated, and chronically dissatisfied. Hookup culture at least provided brief companionship while celibacy culture provides nothing. It leaves people sexually frustrated, emotionally starved, and permanently pent up. This is not a neutral lifestyle shift, it is a mass psychological deterioration.

The culture does not merely tolerate this loneliness, it actively markets it. Algorithmic slop push narratives designed to suppress instinct and rewire desire. People are trained to believe that wanting connection is weakness, that desire is manipulation, that attraction is dangerous, and that isolation is empowerment. The copium is nonstop. You are alone and you will be happy. The other sex hates you and wants to control/manipulate you. These messages are piped directly into people’s feeds until basic human instincts are overridden and reframed as moral failures. This is not liberation; it is sedation.

People are not stupid, they respond rationally to incentives. When sex is cheap, commitment is expensive, and marriage is framed as a liability rather than an achievement, people opt out. When men are told that pursuit is predatory and women are told that dependence is degrading, the safest move is withdrawal. Netflix and porn are not moral aberrations, they are the path of least resistance in a culture that punishes initiative and vulnerability.

Technology only pours gasoline on this fire. Porn offers infinite novelty without rejection. Dating apps offer infinite optionality without responsibility. Social media offers the illusion of intimacy without presence. These systems do not merely reflect cultural rot, they train it. They create a population that is overstimulated, underbonded, and addicted to the idea that the next option is always better.

What this culture did to men

Men were taught that their desire is primitive, their leadership is domineering, and their standards are oppressive. They were instructed to be sensitive but not assertive, vulnerable but not directional. When they internalized these lessons, they were blamed for becoming weak, unmotivated, and porn-addicted. A generation of men learned that doing nothing is infinitely safer than doing something wrong. Many men did not become bad, they became cautious. Then they were chastised for their caution.

What this culture did to women

Women were taught that needing a man is weakness and choosing family over autonomy is betrayal. They were promised fulfillment through independence, yet independence without attachment produces loneliness, not joy. Selectivity turned into hostility, and attraction turned into resentment. Many now demand partnership without polarity and intimacy without surrender, which is a contradiction, not a preference.

Sex requires difference and desire requires tension. Tension requires asymmetry yet modern culture treats asymmetry as injustice. The result is relationships where no one leads, no one follows, and no one wants anyone. What remains is endless negotiation, therapy-speak, and eventual silence.

Relationships are now optimized for emotional safety rather than meaning. Discomfort is treated as harm while conflict is pathologized. Boredom is framed as trauma. Every relationship is expected to feel like a perpetual aftercare session. Sex cannot survive in this environment. Marriage cannot survive when every disagreement is treated as a red flag and every sacrifice is treated as self-erasure.

Waiting is not neutral nor is time. In family formation, delay without movement is not patience, it is decay. The lie being sold is that one can wait indefinitely while remaining fully alive, purposeful, and on track. That is false. Waiting only has meaning when it is directed toward action. Without urgency, waiting becomes drifting, and drifting quietly converts years into excuses. Biology does not pause for self-narratives, fertility does not care about inner work, and communities do not survive on presence alone. Time is a moral factor here, and pretending otherwise is how people wake up ten years later with nothing built and no one to blame but the stories they were told.

Marriage is not supposed to feel easy and yes, it is supposed to cost you something. Sacrifice is not abuse, constraint is not oppression, and loss is not harm. Meaning is produced by trading optionality for obligation and comfort for responsibility. A culture that treats sacrifice as pathology will never produce adults capable of building families. What is being defended as compassion is actually fear of cost, fear of narrowing one’s life, fear of choosing and being chosen. That fear does not deserve accommodation. It deserves correction.

So the response cannot be gentle, it cannot be suggestive, it must be corrective.

First: re-normalize pair bonding as the default

Permanent, voluntary singlehood should not be treated as a neutral lifestyle choice. It is a failure to form bonds and a refusal to participate in the future. We must stop normalizing it, we must stop affirming it, and we must stop pretending that it is a valid destination.

Pair bonding must once again be treated as the default expectation. Dating should be encouraged and publicly affirmed. Couples should be celebrated. Engagements should be treated as wins, not traps. Marriage should be understood as the goal, not an optional lifestyle accessory. Singleness should feel provisional. Not stigmatized when temporary, but uncomfortable when indefinite.

In functioning cultures, people understand what is expected of them. Pairing off is normal. Building a life with someone is normal. Remaining indefinitely unattached is not. If your friend is dating someone decent, you do not interrogate them like they just arrived at Abu Ghraib, you encourage it. If someone gets engaged, you treat it like progress, not like they fell into a trap. We stop glorifying emotional bachelorhood as if it were a vaunted existence.

Publicly celebrate couples and publicly affirm dating. Treat relationships as achievements, not distractions. Stop pretending singleness is a permanent lifestyle rather than a temporary phase. Pair bonding should be the default expectation, with marriage as the goal and everything else should feel temporary.

Second: shame permanent singlehood

Shame is not cruelty, shame is how cultures enforce norms. A society that refuses to shame destructive outcomes will normalize them, then celebrate them, then collapse under their weight. Shame for permanent singlehood must return. Not ritual humiliation, not sadism, but blunt social pressure that refuses to coddle failure.

In healthy cultures, direct questions are normal. Why are you still single? What are you doing wrong? Why has no one chosen you, or why have you refused to choose anyone? These are not insults, they are social feedback. They signal that pairing off is expected and that opting out indefinitely is not admirable.

This shame should not necessarily sneer, but it should force uncomfortable self-examination. Why can’t you get a guy? Why are women repulsed by you? What about you makes people not want to build a life with you? These are not attacks, they are signals. They communicate that indefinite isolation is not an acceptable lifestyle choice, it is a personal and social malfunction that demands correction.

This does not mean publicly humiliating individuals, rather it means applying pressure instead of endless affirmation. It means refusing to reassure people that nothing is wrong when something clearly is. It means withdrawing status, not sympathy. It means telling people, explicitly, to get your shit together rather than rearranging society to protect you from that realization. This pressure is not aimed at people struggling despite effort, it is aimed at those who have decided that effort itself is optional.

A culture that wants families must enforce family-forming behavior. Anything else is just aesthetics layered over decay.

Third: don’t pervert religion to suit your spinsterism

It has come to my attention that COLlive has decided to jump on the bandwagon of subtley pushing singlehood with an article that uses theology to justify stagnation and dress personal failure up as spiritual insight. The absolutely asinine claim here is that because every soul has infinite value before G-d, no stage of life can be considered lacking, deficient, or in need of correction. This is an error in basic understanding, as equal worth before Hashem is not the same thing as fulfilling one’s role in the world.

As the author knows very well, no one is claiming that an unmarried person is less human, less loved, or less created by Hashem. That is a strawman so obvious that it is embarrassing and the argument exists solely to deflect scrutiny for being overly-picky and refusing to settle down. It reframes communal expectations as cruelty and responsibility as theological heresy, so that no one ever has to ask the uncomfortable but necessary question of why this person has failed to build a life.

Invoking “Ain Od Milvado” to erase obligation is not spiritual depth, it is avoidance dressed up as holiness. Maybe it’s the firefighter part or just another exile inspiring their avoidance. The fact that G-d is present in every moment does not mean every outcome is equally acceptable in His eyes. Hunger exists even though G-d is present, so does illness, so does failure. And so does self-imposed spinsterism.

Chassidus was never meant to tranquilize people into passivity; it was meant to empower action. A theology that teaches people to make peace with stagnation rather than correct it is not revealing Moshiach, it is delaying him. When spiritual language is used to anesthetize urgency, it ceases to be holy and becomes profane.

Here is the part that COL and the author do not want to confront: publishing this worldview in a communal outlet does not merely “affirm inherent worth,” it actively removes pressure, agency, and consequence. It rewards inaction and punishes self-examination. It offers people emotional relief instead of progress and reassurance instead of results. That is why this malevolence is popular and that is precisely why it is destructive. A community that tells its members that nothing about their circumstances needs fixing will get exactly that, nothing fixed. Platforming this ideology does not ease the shidduch crisis, it guarantees its continuation, while everyone involved congratulates themselves on their compassion.

Fourth: restore sexual polarity

Stop lying about men and women being interchangeable. Encourage masculine pursuit and feminine selectivity without apology. Reject the idea that leadership is oppression.

Polarity is not misogyny, rather it is the engine. When you destroy the engine and then complain that nothing moves, the problem is not so mysterious.

Fifth: make marriage aspirational again

Marriage needs status, marriage needs prestige, marriage needs to be framed as growth, not loss.

People do not aspire to things framed as loss. If marriage is marketed as a prison sentence, only desperate people will sign up, and then everyone will point to those desperate marriages as “proof” it is bad. That is not an argument, it is a self-fulfilling sabotage.

Sixth: reintroduce consequences and friction

End the idea that every relationship must feel easy. Normalize discomfort as part of bonding. Teach that commitment precedes certainty, not the other way around.

Most people are waiting for perfect clarity that will never arrive. They want the benefits of commitment without the risk of commitment. That is not wisdom, it is fear pushed by nimrods with degrees hanging on their walls.

This is not a call for kindness; it is a call for a reframe. This entire crisis persists because every corrective mechanism has been neutralized at once. Shame is called cruelty. Polarity is called oppression. Sacrifice is called trauma. Urgency is called anxiety. Theology and therapy speak are weaponized to erase obligation and incentives are inverted so that avoidance is rewarded and responsibility is punished. The result is not a mystery, it is math. A culture that wants families must encourage family-forming behavior in reality, not merely praise it in theory. Everything else is just aesthetics painted over decay, decoration on a structure that has already decided not to survive.

Modern Rashi exists to flip the world right side up.

There is apparently vast disagreement over how Hashem’s name is sanctified. Rather than waste time cataloging what is wrong and stupid, I will explain what is correct. Hashem’s name is sanctified through the public act of doing what He commands, regardless of how it is received. That is it, full stop. It does not matter whether it looks good, looks bad, people boo, or Christiane Amanpour clutches her pearls on CNN. Publicly following Torah and Hashem’s will is a kiddush Hashem. The inverse is equally obvious and everything else is copium.

Let’s take a common example: a member of the opposite gender reaches out to shake your hand in a professional setting. You politely explain that the Torah teaches such physical contact is special and reserved for husband and wife. That is a kiddush Hashem. Shaking the hand to avoid embarrassment is a chillul Hashem. “Looking bad,” “being awkward,” or “making someone uncomfortable” are not halachic terms. Disobeying Hashem in public is. Violating halacha to appear normal, polite, or socially acceptable is itself a chillul Hashem. If your conviction to observance collapses the moment someone raises an eyebrow, you are not practicing Judaism; you are practicing social camouflage.

The Rebbe explicitly rejected the idea that Torah must bend to social pressure in order to avoid embarrassment. On the contrary, public adherence to halacha, when done with clarity and confidence, is itself a kiddush Hashem. In multiple letters and talks, the Rebbe states that fear of what others will think is not a legitimate justification for violating halacha, particularly in public settings. In Igros Kodesh, the Rebbe writes that when a Jew feels embarrassed by Torah observance, the embarrassment is not in the Torah but in the person. When a Jew stands firm with Hashem, even non-Jews respect it.

The Rebbe rejected the redefinition of chillul Hashem as “making people uncomfortable.” One could argue that this clarification was issued as an act of mercy, so that graduates of Yeshiva University could be permitted to appear in public at all. They are, after all, the constituency most invested in treating observance as secondary to social approval.

Rav Soloveitchik is often cited as permitting opposite-sex handshakes under the banners of darkei shalom or kavod habriyos. This is a category error as Kavod habriyos does not permit violating Torah prohibitions. Darkei shalom does not mean assimilation and “normalcy” is not a halachic value. In actual Orthodox hashkafa, a Torah that survives only when it blends in with the dominant culture has already been lost. It is a sociological coping mechanism for Jews whose true religion is earning approval rather than respect from the goyim.

The Rebbe understood something his detractors did not: the nations respect strength and despise apologetics. When a Jew is embarrassed by his Torah, the world learns to disrespect it. When a Jew stands tall without apology, the world adjusts. Not the other way around.

This is why the public menorah battles matter. When the Rebbe pushed public Chanukah parades and giant menorah lightings in city centers, Jewish leaders had meltdowns. Rabbonim warned of backlash, church-state violations, public embarrassment, and the ever-useful incantation of “chillul Hashem.” They said it would look undignified, unsophisticated, even goyish. Jews, they insisted, were being too loud, too aggressive, too visible. In other words, they defined chillul Hashem as being noticed. For people whose religion is respectability, visibility is the ultimate sin.

The Rebbe ignored them entirely, he pushed forward with bigger menorahs, public lightings, public ceremonies. He understood that a Judaism which hides indoors to preserve its dignity has already surrendered it. Chanukah is about lighting publicly, loudly, and unapologetically. Retreat does not buy safety; it buys contempt. The Supreme Court upheld public menorahs, cities normalized Jewish symbols, and the predicted catastrophe never arrived. The Rebbe was not afraid of mockery; he was afraid of invisibility. Once again, fear masquerading as responsibility was exposed as cowardice, and the Rebbe’s clarity reshaped the landscape.

The same principle applies to something as simple as dress. Other rabbis taught their people sheep to tuck their tzitzis in, hide their kippah under a baseball cap, and generally avoid advertising Jewishness in public. The Rebbe rejected this instinct completely. Tzitzis out and yarmulke on. A Jew should look like a Jew from a mile away, not only upon closer inspection of his nose. Only insecure rabbis and communities confuse dignity with invisibility.

The psychology is simple: a Jew who hides his observance teaches the world that Torah is something to be embarrassed by. A Jew who wears it proudly teaches the world to adjust. Respect follows confidence, not concealment. Dignity does not come from invisibility, it comes from unembarrassed truth. Jews who wore their Judaism openly did not become pariahs, we became anchors. The world learned what Jewishness looks like because some Jews stopped pretending it was shameful.

Most of modern Jewish leadership, however, chose apology. Every mitzvah had to be justified. Every practice had to be softened, translated, and reframed to sound reasonable to outsiders. Mr. Sacks turned this instinct into an art form, recasting Torah as well-mannered philosophy for people who already disagreed with it. Judaism became a sequence of disclaimers and throat-clearing reassurances: we do this, but only in spaces where it won’t offend. We believe this, but not in a fundamentalist way. The goal was acceptance, and the price was clarity.

The Rebbe rejected this model entirely. Explanation is fine, while apology is poison. Torah does not need a public relations department. When Jews explain mitzvos confidently, people listen. When Jews apologize for them, people learn to sneer. The Rebbe understood that the moment Torah is presented as negotiable or embarrassing, it stops commanding respect. Kiddush Hashem does not come from sounding reasonable, it comes from being authentic.

Here is the pattern no one wants to admit: every time Jewish leaders incorrectly defined chillul Hashem as standing out, they were proven wrong. Every time the Rebbe defined chillul Hashem as backing down, he was proven right. Over and over again: tefillin booths, menorahs, dress, campus shlichus, public mitzvos. The same fear, the same objections and the same outcome.

What these people actually worship is not dignity or peace or even halacha. They worship approval and they fear being judged more than they fear being wrong. “Chillul Hashem” becomes a useful incantation, a way to sanctify cowardice and reframe anxiety as responsibility. The Rebbe saw through this instantly: fear dressed up as virtue is still fear.

The Rebbe did not guess correctly. He understood something fundamental: chillul Hashem is not being mocked, chillul Hashem is teaching the world that Torah bends under pressure. Kiddush Hashem is not fitting in, kiddush Hashem is standing firm without apology and letting the world recalibrate around that reality. History has already rendered its verdict. The only people still confused are those who mistook cowardice for wisdom and hiding for respect.

However, if you have encountered IFS, or G-d forbid met one of its MLM practitioners, this piece is tailored to deprogram you. Since Richard Schwartz’s mind is allegedly composed of “parts,” we will honor that framing and break this critique into parts as well.

“Don’t believe everything you think.”

Part I: Genesis of a Delusion

So, it has come to my attention that there is this type of “therapy” called IFS, which stands for Internal Family Systems. Being an optimist (in general) against my better judgment in this case, I briefly wondered if maybe this was actually something useful and not just another method (read: scam) to separate vulnerable people from their hard-earned money. So I investigated. What I found was a system built around the idea that your mind is not a mind at all, but rather a diverse cast of characters all chattering around in your head, and that this is not only not concerning, it is perfectly normal.

Imagine my shock when I learned that the creator of IFS, Richard Schwartz, designed a framework that reads like it is attempting to treat Multiple Personality Disorder. It is coded like someone who interprets every flicker of internal experience as a separate person, then exports whatever psychological issues he suffers from to everyone else. Instead of concluding “maybe I should get a grip and be on some meds,” he concluded “everyone else must also have twelve different personalities fighting over the controls,” handed his intrusive thoughts a microphone, and built an entire therapy empire (MLM) around letting them debate each other. Schwartz did not just share his internal chaos, he systematized it. He turned his inner noise into a curriculum. That curriculum is not scientific, nor clinical, and certainly not evidence-based; it is metaphysics dressed in drag, sold as therapy.

“Modern people, especially urban people, think that anything which has got itself printed has somehow passed an examination and received a diploma; has somehow, in fact, shown itself to be true.” - G. K. Chesterton

The entire framework reads like it was built by someone who spent a lifetime suffering from all the various voices in his own head and decided the rest of us should join him in the chaos. And instead of putting a stop to it, and getting this man a padded room with 24/7 supervision, the academic world handed him a Ph.D. Publicly peddling emotional fragmentation as therapy is not enlightened; it is predatory. By redefining thoughts as “entities,” IFS dodges accountability and floods people with identities they never needed. Treating psychological splintering as normal is not compassion; it would be malpractice if the system did not so carefully avoid making clinical claims.

And keep in mind, this is just the premise, the tame part. I have not even begun addressing how Schwartz claims he discovered this system, which on its own should shut down the entire charade. Just wait until you hear where he got it from!

Part II: Revelation According to Richard

So one day, Richard was bored and decided to dialogue with one of the voices in his head that he treated as independent beings. He spoke to a part and was surprised when it answered him. From this, he concluded that these parts had different ages, fears, objectives, roles, and voices, which he proudly describes as having “full personalities.” There is a diagnosis for having multiple full personalities living inside your mind, but Richard somehow managed to reinvent it as a spreadable disease.

It was not only his own inner cast that he treated as real. While working with distressed clients, including eating-disorder patients describing urges, compulsions, intrusive thoughts, and inner conflict, he interpreted their language literally. Instead of considering that trauma, anxiety, self-criticism, and dysregulation can feel like internal conflict, he declared these experiences to be evidence of multiple beings. Their metaphors became data, their symptoms became a cosmology, their private suffering became confirmation of his personal worldview. At no point did he apply any empirical method, testing, or falsification. He did not ask whether these experiences had neurological, cognitive, or psychological explanations. He simply took subjective experience as objective reality and built a system around it.

Richard then layered revelation-coded spiritual language onto the entire process. He described these parts as “sacred,” spoke about them being “revealed” to him, and framed the Self as a “divine essence.” He introduced ritual unburdening ceremonies in which these parts are instructed to release their pains into imaginary fire, water, wind, or some glowing internal light. This is not therapy; it is a pagan ritual dressed up in clinical language and sold as intervention.

“Dumb people use spirituality to give themselves dimension.”

Since he never questioned any of this, Richard concluded that these parts were not unique to him or to his vulnerable clients. He declared that all humans are born with a full cast of personalities, and he ‘verified’ it the same way he discovered it, simply by asserting it. Anything that aligned with his worldview was treated as revelation. Anything that challenged it was reframed as another protector part. The model is a perfectly constructed unfalsifiable catch-22; it cannot be wrong because any disagreement becomes further proof.

What is surprising is not that Richard believed all of this as there are plenty of loonies in the world with mental disorders. What is surprising is that well-adjusted adults institutionalized his delusions instead of institutionalizing Richard. He built a faux-therapeutic system out of conversations with imaginary entities inside his own head, chose to treat them as separate beings who spoke to him, and then universalized that private phenomenology into a global psychological doctrine. Instead of professionals saying, “Richard, this is not how evidence works,” the mental health field absorbed his revelations without demanding any testing, falsification, or proof. When someone builds a clinical modality out of internal dialogues and LARPing fantasy rituals, the appropriate response is not institutional praise. It is collective embarrassment that this was ever taken seriously. Now that the origin story is out of the way, the real disaster is what IFS actually does to people. This is where theory turns into damage.

Part III: The Fracturing of the Self

Sometimes feelings are just feelings. Sometimes they matter, and sometimes they are your brain firing off nonsense. IFS cannot tolerate that distinction. Instead, it creates a paradigm where every spike of anxiety, shame, or stupidity is sacred that must be analyzed as if it carries divine revelation. The more attention and legitimacy you shovel onto your retarded feelings, the more they metastasize, and the more dependent you become on your feelings shaman to interpret them.

Internal conflict is real, thus people experience ambivalence, fear, shame, and self-criticism. Talking about feelings can help, and metaphors can help, and none of that is controversial. The problem is that IFS does not use metaphor to clarify experience, it literalizes metaphor. What begins as a way of speaking about the mind becomes an invented and false doctrine about what the mind actually is. At that point, the damage gets baked in.

IFS asserts that everyone has literal internal sub-personalities. CBT, a legitimate therapeutic approach, treats intrusive thoughts as meaningless static and teaches you not to give garbage oxygen. IFS teaches you the opposite, it tells you that every impulse must be elevated, explored, and given emotional importance. CBT builds resilience by starving intrusive thoughts. IFS builds obsession by feeding them until the noise becomes your identity. The more attention you give intrusive thoughts, the more your brain generates them.

“There is no reality except action.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

Once you treat intrusive thoughts as characters, IFS instructs you to deepen them. You ask what age the thought is, what it wants, what it fears, and what trauma it carries. You rehearse every shame flicker and every intrusive thought until it becomes a permanent fixture in your mind. You turn random cognitive garbage into a full-blown emotional narrative. IFS takes a flicker of mental nonsense and forces you to invent an entire origin story to please your feelings shaman. This does not heal intrusive thoughts, rather it cements them.

IFS rewires people to see every impulsive spark as an individual character who deserves attention. It trains fixation and encourages rumination. It multiplies intrusive thoughts by solidifying them and teaches people to negotiate with their mental trash instead of discarding it. And once impulses are treated as meaningful messages, the next logical step is inevitable: they need messengers, roles, and identities.

IFS teaches people to leave the driver’s seat of their lives so they can conduct interviews with the gremlins they believe are living in the attic. You are instructed to step aside so your “protector” can take control, or so your “exile” can speak. This is not healing, this is fragmentation as a lifestyle. It teaches people to inhabit themselves less, not more, and then applauds them for becoming passive spectators in their own minds.

People in IFS frequently report feeling floaty, hollow, disconnected, blurry, and less embodied. This is not accidental, as the language is designed to anesthetize alarm bells. “Unblending,” “Self energy,” and “curiosity” are linguistic chloroform, terms chosen to make dissociation feel virtuous instead of dangerous. Any normal therapist would recognize this as classic dissociation, yet IFS reframes it as “accessing Self energy.” That is the spiritual-coded scam at the center of this entire ideology. Instead of saying, “You are dissociating; let’s bring you back into your body,” IFS tells you that this numb, distant, out-of-body sensation is actually proof you have reached some higher plane of consciousness. Trauma responses become divine revelation while emotional absence becomes enlightenment.

And once dissociation is rebranded as spiritual achievement, you can keep people in therapy forever. Because the less present, grounded, and embodied they feel, the more “Self energy” they think they’re accessing, and the more they rely on their feelings shaman to guide them through their own mentally induced fog. IFS rewards the exact psychological patterns that disable clarity, agency, and decision-making. The fact that this is sold as healing should disturb anyone with half a functioning brain cell.

Part IV: The Unfalsifiable Idol

From the moment an IFS session begins, you are instructed to identify which “part” of you is present, how old this part is, what it fears, what it wants, and what it is supposedly protecting you from. You are treated as if you are hosting a full internal cast of competing personalities, exactly the way Schwartz describes his own mind. And, conveniently, none of this crap can ever be tested or disproven. Every objection is a protector, every counterargument is a manager, and every moment of doubt is just another part acting up. The whole modality is hermetically sealed from reality by design. Academic language gives the system just enough legitimacy to disguise what is, functionally, a closed belief loop.

This is the “logic” of a self-sealing belief system. Agreement confirms the model while disagreement becomes a protector. Doubt is reframed as a manager, improvement is resistance, and wanting to leave is avoidance. Every possible response is interpreted as further proof that the system is correct. There is no external reference point, no neutral ground, and no way to falsify the claims because every objection is absorbed as content. That is not a clinical framework; it is cult logic with better branding.

“Evil always takes advantage of ambiguity.” - G. K. Chesterton

Part V: The Endless Wilderness

IFS does not heal; it metastasizes. It trains people to multiply their problems indefinitely and rewards emotional fragmentation, while stability gets reframed as avoidance. The system is designed to create more insecurity in your mind, not less, because insecurity is the fuel. Instead of encouraging you to accomplish anything in your actual life, you are trained on endless introspection and instructed to obsess over your feelings like they are holy scripture. If you focused on improving your life, you might actually get better, and then you would not need your weekly Hajjaj to a feelings shaman to decode the nonsensical brain static they implanted in you. In IFS, the only way to “heal” is to discover more personalities in your head, which by cosmic coincidence requires more sessions, more hours, more workshops, and more money. The client becomes the content generator, the therapist becomes the interpreter, and your “healing journey” becomes a lifetime subscription to the mythology. IFS is not therapy, it is an infinite content farm disguised as introspection, a psychological pyramid scheme where your symptoms are their revenue and your progress is their loss.

Here is the part that exposes the scam perfectly: in IFS, nothing is ever resolved. No part ever finishes its job, no emotion ever dissolves, and no symptom ever leaves. If you feel better, you are told parts have “gone into hiding.” If you stop producing material, you are accused of “blending.” If you stop needing sessions, your protectors are suddenly blocking access to deeper wounds. Recovery is reframed as resistance, stability is treated as pathology, and improvement itself is reclassified as a diagnostic failure. And this is not a bug, it is the design. IFS has no discharge criteria, no measurable outcomes, and no definition of success, which means it cannot fail and therefore cannot end.

Once that trap is set, the architecture reveals itself. Every part has protectors, those protectors have protectors, those protectors have managers, and those managers have legacies. It is parts protecting parts protecting parts, the emotional equivalent of a multi-level marketing downline. But instead of selling life insurance, your therapist is selling you new personalities. The more parts you discover, the deeper the “healing.” The deeper the healing, the more sessions required. Infinite ambiguity transforms into infinite billing.

Once the system is in place, the mythology has to expand and IFS escalates your inner world into a full sacred text. Therapists encourage clients to identify ancestral trauma parts, cultural exile parts, society burden parts, and my personal favorite, Earth protecting parts. Yes, the planet itself now gets a psychic security guard assigned to you. At this point there is no endpoint, every session becomes an opportunity to inflate your personal cosmology. There is never closure, never resolution, never integration, only an ever-expanding cast of characters auditioning for roles in the ongoing soap opera that is now your mental “health.”

IFS is not just therapeutic nonsense, it is structurally identical to a multi-level marketing scheme. The product is not healing, rather it is discovery. Every new “part” you uncover justifies the existence of more parts beneath it. Protectors protect exiles, managers manage protectors, legacies burden managers, and ancestral ghosts supervise the whole operation. There is no terminal diagnosis, no graduation, and no finish line. Like any MLM, the system only works if the downline never ends. The moment you stop producing material, you are declared blocked, blended, or resistant. Progress becomes failure, stability becomes sabotage, and the only success state is infinite internal complexity, which conveniently requires infinite sessions.

And just like any real MLM, the internal downline is mirrored by an external one. Clients become trainees, trainees become facilitators, facilitators recruit new facilitators, and everyone pays for certifications, workshops, retreats, and levels. The ideology spreads not through results, but through credential inflation and mutual emotional codependence. Your psyche becomes the content farm, and your therapist becomes the distributor.

Part VI: The Corruption of the People

IFS does not treat adults as adults, it treats them as permanent toddlers managing a daycare inside their skull. Every discomfort is reframed as a frightened child, and every responsibility becomes a threat to safety. The normal demands of adulthood are treated as violence against some wounded inner minor. There is no expectation of endurance, maturity, or emotional sovereignty. You are trained to soothe yourself endlessly instead of strengthening yourself. This is not compassion; it is psychological regression marketed as kindness, and it pairs perfectly with a culture already addicted to victimhood. IFS is the perfect therapeutic ideology for a culture that confuses fragility with virtue and calls regression “inner-work.”

“Most people don’t want freedom. They want comfort, safety, and someone to blame.”

Over time, IFS erodes the most basic requirement of mental health: a continuous sense of self. Healthy people experience themselves as a single agent across time who makes mistakes and owns them. IFS trains people to disown their own actions. It was not me, it was a part. It was not my choice, it was a protector. It was not my failure, it was an exile acting out. This sounds compassionate until you realize it destroys accountability entirely. Character cannot be built if nothing is ever yours. Responsibility dissolves into subpersonalities, and adulthood is replaced with endless internal arbitration. Once bad behavior can be outsourced to a part, the system becomes a moral laundering machine for anyone who wants absolution without change.

IFS did not spread because it works, it spread because it is perfect for incompetent therapists. It requires no insight, no confrontation, no risk, and no responsibility for results. The practitioner never has to be correct, only curious. They never challenge, they “witness.” They never give direction, they “hold space.” IFS turns therapy into guided journaling with a license and a billing code. It flatters the therapist’s sense of depth while absolving them of competence. The result is not healing, but a generation of adults quite fluent in trauma language and equally allergic to adulthood.

Part VII: The Idol Complete

After enough time in IFS, the client becomes psychologically articulate and functionally inert. They can narrate every feeling but cannot execute a plan, describe trauma or tolerate discomfort. They are hyper-aware, hyper-verbal, and paralyzed in stagnation. Decision-making feels dangerous because every choice might anger a part. Strength feels suspicious and clarity feels aggressive. What emerges is not a healed person, but a museum curator of their own neuroses.

At this point, the whole thing stops pretending to be psychology and becomes improv theater. You are no longer a person with problems; you are hosting a full quorum meeting inside your skull. Your anxiety has a job title, your sadness has a backstory, your anger is a firefighter with trust issues. Everyone is negotiating, nobody is driving, and the therapist nods along like the Dungeon Master of your emotional DnD campaign.

IFS is not misunderstood, misapplied, or ahead of its time, in fact it is functioning exactly as designed. It fragments identity, rewards dissociation, infantilizes adults, and guarantees dependency. Its brilliance is not therapeutic; it is architectural. It cannot fail, it cannot resolve, and it cannot let you leave. That is not a therapy model; that is a psychological pyramid scheme with an annoyingly soft voice and a clipboard.

Final Part: Judgment

IFS is a business model built out of an unfalsifiable inner cosplay, which works best when you never get better.

A shidduch resume is generally a PDF with a fuzzy picture of yourself that looks like it was taken on a Motorola Razr then run through six fax machines. Beneath that, you get a curated museum exhibit of useless information that has never once helped anyone decide whether they want to date someone. It proudly includes:

• Your birthday

• Your address

• Where you went to school

• Where you went to seminary

• What you did with your summers

• What college you went to

• Your job history

• Your parents names

• Your parents occupations

• What shul they go to

• Your father’s rav

• Your siblings names

• Your siblings ages

• What your siblings are up to

• Your siblings mechutanim

• And of course, the references who are fully prepared to lie their asses off for you

Notice what is missing.

It is honestly impressive how this list manages to capture every useless detail about a human being while skillfully avoiding anything that would actually matter. All the uninteresting facts that nobody cares about and that would never come up organically on dates, neatly organized for your viewing displeasure. I do not know who invented this format, but I am confident it rhymes with “badchen.”

You’re telling me that you see “his sister does shaitels” and suddenly you are interested? That is the criteria? That is what moves the needle? I genuinely cannot wrap my head around the mental gymnastics required to care about this crap.

You know what is never put on these resumes? Anything about the actual person you’re considering going out with. Maybe include some important character traits relevant to the job you are seeking. Something like “Actually knows how to communicate,” or “Does not freak out when faced with minor adversity.” Instead you get fun facts like her brother is a CPA, which tells me nothing except that she has a boring brother. Imagine applying to Google and submitting a resume that lists your favorite video games and your cousin’s career. That is the level of relevance we are working with.

And why is half the resume about the parents? I guess that many people are into threesomes and plan to date the parents as well, but personally I prefer monogamy. Is shidduchim some warped form of eugenics where we trace family pedigree to confirm acceptable breeding stock? Her parents’ occupations have absolutely nothing to do with whether she can maintain an adult conversation, let alone a relationship. The only purpose this design can provide is to obfuscate who the people actually are until after they already went to the Ohel.

So, as a public service, I am taking over shidduchim and am implementing mandatory resume reforms. Effective immediately, all shidduch resumes must include the following information that actually impacts compatibility:

• How I respond to criticism

• How many SSRIs I am prescribed

• Whether I take 3 business days to answer a text

• Do I weaponize “I’m just tired” during disagreements

• My real conflict style, not the one I pretend to have

• How much therapy I think you need, which is really how much therapy I need

• My real minimum height requirement

• My real maximum neurosis tolerance

• How fast I escalate during conflict

• Whether I actually want to get married or just want attention

• If you will have to drag me into social events or if I show up willingly

• Whether I will respect your time or treat it like a suggestion

• My real financial expectations, not the one my parents think I have

• How needy I get when hungry

• Whether I can take a joke or if everything is trauma

• How often I say “I’m fine” when I am absolutely not fine

• If I can handle a partner with a personality stronger than a paper towel

• Whether I am dating for marriage or going out the bare minimum number of times to please my overinvolved mom

• My willingness to actually show up, not just talk about showing up

This list is not complete yet, but it is at least more honest than the existing shidduch resume, which is basically a glorified family tree stapled to a blurry headshot. I’m not sure how or why anyone is basing their dating preferences of these useless PDFs, but apparently somehow they are. I guess that’s why no one goes on dates anymore these days.

And the only reason this system still exists in its current form is because it benefits everyone involved. Parents get to cosplay as strategic masterminds. Shadchanim get to pretend they are indispensable. Singles get to outsource accountability so they can blame the system instead of doing the uncomfortable work of growing up. Nobody wants honesty, because honesty would force people to confront the fact that the ones running the system cannot manage their own lives, let alone match other people’s.

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

Until then, enjoy your blurry headshots and pedigree charts. Nothing will change, because the system is functioning exactly as designed.

P.S. For those interested in having a normal and functional dating bio, this is a great place to start.

I know this sounds insane to the few of you intelligent enough to have avoided this scam, but it is literally against the rules of therapy for the therapist to give you good and obvious advice. You walk in wanting direction, but your therapist sits down ready to lob the same canned line, “Hmm. How does that make you feel,” with all the enthusiasm of a DMV employee.

So then what is the point of therapy? Well, apparently the point is to have a professional active listener repeatedly spit your own nonsense back at you until you realize how stupid you sound. I’m not sure why this requires licensure or a master’s degree, but the world is kind of dumb in general, so honestly I shouldn’t be that surprised.

“Most people go to therapy to pay for friends.”

The whole premise of therapy is built around a single mission: remove any practical tool that might actually help someone. A therapist is forbidden from correcting you or handing you the obvious missing puzzle piece that would fix your issue, because that would violate their sacred rule of never being useful. Instead, they follow the contrived protocol they were indoctrinated with in grad school for how to look thoughtful while contributing nothing. They watch you flail while repeating your own words back to you in slightly slower monotone until you hear how retarded the whole thing sounds. Therapists love nothing more than watching you emotionally strip down while they take notes like bored voyeurs. Competence is treated as a boundary violation, and clarity is considered dangerous. A functional client would not need them, so the system is designed to keep you dependent and infantilized.

In an effort to further this uselessness, therapy has invented its own dictionary to immortalize its scam. Instead of acknowledging that nothing is changing in your life, you can now call that “processing.” Being stuck is now a positive place to be in called “integrating.” Refusing to make decisions has been transformed from indecisiveness into “sitting with discomfort.” Therapy has essentially taken emotional spiraling and rebranded it as personal development. It has also turned trauma into a kind of social currency, where the more of a victim you act, the more your therapist nods approvingly, contrary to how real life actually is. The more whiny noise you make, the more “insight” you supposedly have. They even teach you how to become fluent in this psychobabble, as if learning fancier words for stagnation will magically turn it into growth. It has transformed negatives into positives and given careers to otherwise unintelligent people who provide nothing to society except a thesaurus for dysfunction.

Action is the enemy of therapy, whilst feelings are the most valuable currency (except for the money you’re paying to your therapist, obviously). Action means your life is improving and changing for the better, which is considered a betrayal of the entire therapeutic model. Rather than encouraging decisive movement, therapists generally discourage it, supplanting it with a feelings-coded experience where the intangible is paramount and reality is an afterthought. Any sign of resilience or strength is brushed aside, while emotional fragility is celebrated as “vulnerability,” the holy sacrament of the profession. Rather than simply stalling adulthood, it reverses it, and encourages emotional infantilization. Therapy replaces the real world with fantastical delusions that hold no weight in actual life, where you do not get rewarded for narrating your emotions; you get rewarded for doing something about them.

Therapy would be merely an embarrassing hobby for bored millennials if it were simply ineffective, but the real damage is that it encourages a worldview where your emotions outrank your actions, your impulses outrank your responsibilities, and your momentary discomfort governs your entire life. It trains you to see fragility as wisdom, overthinking as insight, and avoidance as some kind of deep spiritual practice. This would be hilarious were it not the dominant religion of our generation, convincing millions that their feelings are more real than actual reality. The cultural fallout is literally everywhere you look: adults who cannot cope, cannot work, cannot decide, cannot commit, and cannot move. Therapy hasn’t just failed to help people grow, it has produced a society of psychologically domesticated losers incapable of living their own lives without their taxpayer-subsidized weekly worship service at The Church of Learned Helplessness.

To my readers: do not fall for this scam. Therapy, like bon bons, may make you feel better in the moment, but both are actively damaging to you. Making positive changes in your life, such as regular gym attendance or growing your business, will make you feel not so good in the short term but will grant you long-term happiness and success. Engaging with a pathology that psychs you out of action and focuses endlessly on the intangible will lead you straight into a pit of nothingness and sadness. Whenever you are tempted to “process,” understand that you are being sold a feeling instead of a result. Real growth feels painful and uncomfortable because it is actual change. Therapy simply numbs the discomfort while preserving the dysfunction. If you want a better life, you will get it from action, discipline, and forward movement, not from whatever this 21st century emotional junk is pretending to be. The world rewards people who do, not people who sit in circles talking about why they have not yet.

In a poor effort to compete with the ever-popular Engelson’s shul in Crown Heights, Living Chassidus opened their Temu version of the idea. Billed as a “Chabad House for singles,” this K-Mart imitation exists less to help people get married and more to make sure they never cross paths in the first place. To set the tone for this brilliant strategy, they hosted two separate events for men and women, further reducing the already slim chances of these sad singles finding anyone. It feels like the Weisses believe the best way to get people married is to keep them as far apart as possible.

It’s Chassidic nunhood disguised as outreach, a holiness cult with a singles’ mailing list. And that, in a nutshell, is the Living Chassidus miracle: the first singles community designed to keep you single.

They aren’t building a community; they’re building a convent, a sanctuary for the emotionally sedated, a rehab center for attraction, a space where repression is sold as virtue. They’re raising money for a building that, to me, only deepens the same repressive model. What they call support is really supervision; what they call growth is control. Every dollar they raise feels like another brick in the wall between men and women, another layer of insulation between human instinct and Divine design. What it really is, is a mausoleum for passion, intimacy, and normal human contact, a temple to tznius and a holy asylum for the sexually confused.

They talk about living Chassidus yet flinch every time life shows up. You can’t teach life skills in an environment where life itself is off-limits. Their version of “skills” trains compliant adult-children who thank the staff for scheduling their emotions. They say they help singles “thrive,” but what they really do is help them accept lifelong infantilization under the smiling banner of self-improvement. They’re not solving the singles crisis; they’re doubling it, one “separate event” at a time.

If you want to see the opposite, go one block over. The success of Engelson’s is charisma, not square footage. If Rabbi Eli and Myriam Engelson ran their events from a tent on the Eastern Parkway median, they’d still draw a crowd. The Weisses could buy freaking 770 and still not get a crowd. At Engelson’s there is energy, laughter, and life. At Living Chassidus you feel supervision. Engelson’s builds marriages; Living Chassidus builds dependency. Every event comes off like group therapy run by people who, in my view, confuse control with care. “Life Skills” classes are taught by people who have none, Led by what feels like a spiritual Mother Superior in Michal Weiss, Crown Heights’s own patron saint of chastity. Michal is from heavily-Christian Birmingham, Alabama, and her tone sometimes echoes that same Southern purity culture. The only thing missing is the habit and the vow of silence; oh wait, they already have that, it’s called female modesty.

It’s not religion anymore; it’s therapy with a mechitza. Living Chassidus has the soul of a missionary church wrapped in sheitel branding. The tone is all holiness, guilt, and confession, just without the crucifix. Their “life skills” are a catechism for purity. Their “safe space” is a confessional booth with sushi. It is Christianity with kugel, preaching salvation through self-denial. The obsession with “guarding the eyes” and “purity” is not Chassidus. It is Victorian sexual panic, but Beis Rivka coded. They’ve replaced avodah with behavior management. This is not Yiddishkeit; it is a sanitized morality play imported from the Sunday-school imagination.

Michal Weiss bills herself as a life coach, but in her world emotional regulation means never having a genuine reaction again. Healing means sterilization; growth means dependency. Her brand of healing is prudish restraint masquerading as holiness. It’s the spiritual Lupron of Crown Heights, injecting faux holiness where vitality used to live. Living Chassidus is where passion goes to get sedated. She offers “support,” “community,” and “guidance,” all of which translate to the same thing: keeping you in line. She preaches healing while teaching people to fear their own humanity. It’s Victorian purity culture with a hechsher, “Chassidic” therapy for those who think desire is treif. They’ve hijacked the language of psychology and turned it into a sermon on avoidance, rebranding tznius as lifestyle, repression as health, and emotional paralysis as spirituality.

And when you wall women off from men long enough, they start finding comfort with each other. The culture of Living Chassidus practically invites it. You can’t keep pushing “emotional connection between women” as a substitute for marriage without attachments that mimic it. That’s what happens when you outlaw human instinct but keep all its circuitry alive. And it doesn’t stop there; the damage follows them past the chuppah. Couples trained to flinch at touch do not suddenly turn into lovers because they have a kesubah. The result is cold bedrooms, broken communication, and a generation of frum therapy clients wondering why holiness feels so numb.

They’ve renamed repression to a smile, nunhood to “boundaries,” celibacy to “tznius.” It’s a soft-focus purity cult wrapped in Chassidic vocabulary. They talk about safe spaces and community, but what they really mean is: don’t feel too much, don’t want too much, don’t live too much. They call it “the Chabad House for singles.” What it really is, is a singles retention program. The goal isn’t to help them marry; it’s to make them comfortable enough in their loneliness to stop asking why. They’ve created a support network for eternal waiting, a shidduch cemetery where everyone smiles politely and pretends to be fine.

Their shidduch “events” are especially bleak. Everyone sits around and “shares what they’re looking for” while pretending they’re not dying inside. It’s frum speed-dating, but only with members of the same sex. They claim “many matches” came out of it, but if that were true, why are all the same people still attending five years later?

And now they want to institutionalize the sickness in brick and mortar. It feels cult-like: convincing vulnerable people that safety equals dependence. Living Chassidus baptizes that formula in mikvah water. To me, it looks like they’ve monetized insecurity, turning basic adulthood into a mentorship program. And of course they hold “separate events for men and women,” because nothing says “helping singles get married” like making sure they never actually meet. Imagine running a matchmaking service whose goal is to keep everyone pure, clueless, and alone. That’s Chassidic nunhood.

Now they want a permanent building for all this “holiness,” a brick-and-mortar monastery where singles can come to feel righteous about being alone. They call it a Chabad House, but it’s really a monastery with a Jewish star, a museum exhibit titled Before the Wedding: How We Taught You to Fear Touch.

The Torah teaches that there is a time and place for everything. A time for peace and a time for battle, a time to guard and a time to give. There is a time to separate, and a time to unite. By their mid-twenties, keeping men and women apart isn’t holy; it’s sabotage, cruelty wearing a poorly-fitting sheitel. We do not need more support groups teaching adults how to avoid attraction; we need spaces where Yidden can remember that attraction is not a sin.

Chassidus was never about sterilizing the physical, but revealing its G-dliness. The Baal Shem Tov did not come to erase passion but to sanctify it. If he saw this nonsense from Living Chassidus, he would start another movement just to undo it.

Living Chassidus does not teach people to live; it teaches them to hide. It is not a Chabad House; it is a convent with better branding.

Disclaimer: This essay reflects my personal opinions and interpretations of publicly available information about Living Chassidus and its leadership.

In a race to the bottom of the editorial ladder, CrownHeights.info has blessed us with a new masterpiece that spends 1,188 words saying absolutely nothing. Apparently, vagueness is the 614th commandment and I missed that class in yeshiva. Personally, I can’t think of a more obnoxious way to waste someone’s time, but clearly this Anonymous poster disagrees. To his credit though, he didn’t use ChatGBT, as the typos alone could qualify as a new dialect.

I have been thinking about writing this article for a long time but have refrained because it’s a painful topic. Recently, the pain of writing has been outweighed by the pain of not writing so I will opt for the lesser pain.

In usual pathetic ghetto Jew fashion, Anonymous begins by announcing that he is a weak beta male who always takes the path of least resistance and somehow thinks that’s virtuous. Not sure why he thought that was a bragging point, but okay. The next several paragraphs are spent rehashing the history of the Oral Torah like a Chabad House lecture for beginners, so I’ll spare you that draying monologue.

Then comes this gem:

Average Jews cannot invent new ideas or practices on their own.

Not sure where he got that from as Chassidus was built on creative defiance. The Baal Shem Tov literally invented a new spiritual vocabulary, and the misnagdim lost their collective minds over it. If innovation disqualifies you, then all of Chassidus is treif. Many minhagim we follow today started with ordinary people. If Anonymous read even one book without fear of his mashpia’s disapproval, he’d know that.

If there are any Mashpi’im who validate this perspective, they are definitely not ones who were born into families and raised with our Mesorah.

Sure, in theory, lineage matters, but his argument collapses the second he has to name an actual idea, which he never does. I’m still in the dark here, like every other reader who can’t read minds.

Lubavitch is one path of practicing and preserving the tradition we received on the Mount Sinai.

Once again, one of the biggest complaints against Lubavitch is that we have kinda forged a different path from traditional Ashkenazi Jewery. The difference is we’re proud of it.

For many years now Lubavitch has been tolerant of a group of people with whom we share our community name… These people have taken the liberty to interpret the texts in their own way and implement and promote Jewish practice as such…

OMG, can this guy be more vague? Why doesn’t he say what he is complaining about? Why is this so complicated? Is no one else deeply annoyed by reading this drivel that they still have zero idea what he is complaining about?

There are already members of this group who have given themselves the liberty of putting on 4 pairs of Tefilin without the approval of a Rav...

Okay, so he finally named one thing he’s complaining about, but I don’t know anyone who’s actually doing this, so it’s obviously not be a widespread issue. This whole article is basically him whining about some fringe lunatic no one’s ever met. Can we get some better examples, or did I just waste my time reading all this vague drivel? What a clown this guy is; a thousand words of empty moral panic with zero substance. If narcissistic rambling were a mitzvah, this man would be the next Rebbe.

Presented by an exciting collab between a prude bochur with no friends x ChatGBT, another exciting COLlive op-ed has just dropped. The real danger facing Chabad isn’t all the unmarried spinsters frying out, it’s that they might in fact meet a guy and end up married. Right after Tishrei finished, Berke Chein’s younger self felt the need to reflect on other people enjoying chag and took to the pages of COL to give us a good moral scolding that girls enjoying and being involved in Yiddishkeit is super bad. The silver lining is that if you look at the comments on the article, most of them are justifiably roasting this bochur alive.

You can easily tell the type of bochur who wrote this. The type of guy who calls himself “a bochur who cares” because “a bochur with no friends” sounded worse to the COLlive focus group. He opens with the classic move: weaponizing the Rebbe’s kavod to wage a personal jihad against fun. “Is this the Tishrei the Rebbe envisioned?” Spare me; the Rebbe envisioned mashpiim, not mall cops. Let’s dive right into Paul Blart’s stupidity.

Every Tishrei, thousands of girls pour into Crown Heights, hoping to be near the Rebbe… But what’s been happening lately should make every Lubavitcher stop and ask: what is going on?

What’s going on, my simple-minded bochur, is that women exist. And sometimes, brace yourself, they even laugh in public. I know that’s shocking for someone whose only exposure to women is through the search bar on your browser, but that’s not a crisis, it’s called life.

Because let’s be honest — this isn’t about a few isolated incidents anymore. It’s become the norm. Crowds of young women dancing and shouting in the middle of Kingston Avenue at night, filming themselves for social media as men pass by. Girls pushing and shoving to get on the subway — and yes, stealing rides without paying. Groups laughing and yelling in public areas, with little sense that they are in the Rebbe’s shchunah, in front of the world’s eyes.

Oh no! Women are enjoying the party in Crown Heights! Clutch dem pearls! Wait, girls are filming themselves for Instagram? That is truly an outrage! Oh crap, and they’re even pushing and shoving to get on the subway? That means they’re becoming... gasp! New Yorkers?! And laughing? These women must be sent to Williamsburg immediately, where such behavior is simply not tolerated.

This isn’t the Tishrei the Rebbe envisioned. This is not what being a Chassidah looks like.

What is far less chassidish is how you clearly spent your entire Tishrei functioning as a hall monitor for the girls on Kingston Ave. Had you spent your chag with your friends enjoying and having a good time, you would not have had to spend it ensuring others are equally miserable as you. Maybe next year, you and Berke Chein will fulfill the Rebbe’s vision and set up a hotline for reporting joy in progress.

Crown Heights isn’t a festival ground. It’s not a stage. It’s not a place to perform for likes or to make “fun memories” with friends. This is the Rebbe’s neighborhood — every street, every shul, every step is holy. How can it be that girls come “to the Rebbe” but act as if He isn’t here?

Bro, are you a BT or a snag? Like seriously. You walk around expecting everyone to turn into square, miserable “tzadikim” for a whole month. Where did you get this retarded worldview from? Are you in that yeshiva in Brunoy? Because that’s the only reasonable place I can think of where you could have picked up such inverted, cloistered ideas. The Rebbe didn’t build 770 so you could play TSA agent for women’s skirts. If holiness collapses because someone took a TikTok, maybe it wasn’t that holy to begin with.

It’s the same disease infecting every moral panic: the belief that other people’s joy is dangerous. The secular left bans laughter because it’s “offensive,” the frum “right” bans it because it’s “unholy.” Same control, different costume.

Let’s call things by their name. When girls act in ways that violate basic tznius, when they create public scenes that embarrass the name of Lubavitch, when they come to Crown Heights not for davening, not for inspiration, but to socialize and look for shidduchim — it is a chilul Lubavitch and, worse, a chilul Hashem.

Jewish girls looking for a Jewish shidduch equals chilul Hashem? Bro, what in the hell are you smoking.

As one of the smarter commenters on this trash article noted: one of the biggest problems with the yidden of this generation is intermarriage, so if people are coming to Crown Heights to “find a shidduch,” perhaps this is solving the problem going on with yidden these days.

The Shechunah is not a garbage place.

It’s also not a safe space. Go back to New Square.

If you truly came “to the Rebbe,” then act like it.

Right. Stop checking out the girls and acting as the self-appointed gatekeeper of Crown Heights.

Honestly, this article is such drivel, I’m shocked COL posted it, even with their low standards. The good news is that basically everyone was universally repulsed by this bochur who obviously has struggles keeping his eyes to himself and decided to put it all on us. This “concerned bochur” clearly needs assistance with his pornography addiction and all his other personality issues. This whole piece isn’t Torah, it’s trauma. The precise kind that turns joy into something suspicious and turns the Rebbe into a hall monitor for your insecurities.

The Rebbe doesn’t need security guards. He needs Jews who are alive. Who bring simcha, noise, color, and life into his shchunah. If you think holiness means everyone acting like you, sterile, anxious, and joyless, you didn’t come to the Rebbe, you came to a museum.

So to the bochur who “cares,” go care about your davening, not our dopamine. The girls are fine. The problem isn’t their joy, it’s your jealousy.

Gut Yom Tov, clown. And next Tishrei, instead of writing another tantrum, maybe try dancing. Who knows, you might even find a girl brave enough to look at you.

If you are going to scold the public, at least do it intelligently. But no, this guy dives straight into the usual moralistic gibberish, where half the “insights” are just words arranged in random order to sound holy. So, without further ado, let’s dive right into this drivel, Modern Rashi style!

On Simchas Torah we hold the Torah closed. We don’t start by reading. We don’t start with words. We start by dancing. By carrying it close. By circling together with joy. That picture says something. If the Torah is closed, we shouldn’t need to start with all the bottles open. We certainly shouldn’t need them all empty before Hakafos begin.

Well, this is just illogical stupidity. The Torah being closed and the bottles being open have literally zero to do with each other. The Torah is closed because we finished it, Berke, not because G-d is sending you a coded message about liquor control. This is Simchas Torah, not a Mormon convention. There is no secret metaphysical link between scrolls and screw caps that we need Rabbi Berke Chein to help us reveal. On Shabbos, our siddurim are open, but the aron kodesh is closed yet no one writes 900 words about it. Maybe next week Berke will explain the deep spiritual symbolism of shnitzel shapes by the farbrengen. Still not sure what kind of unsolicited moral instruction garbage CrownHeights.info thinks this passes for, but apparently sanctimony now counts as content.

The simcha of Yom Tov doesn’t come from what is in the glass. It comes from the Torah in our arms. From the circles we make. From the joy we bring with our own voices and feet.

The kind of line that sounds deep until you realize it’s just an strawman wearing a yarmulke. Nobody said simcha comes from the glass. That’s just a pathetic strawman you’re erecting to confuse us. But the contents of the glass can help remove whatever internal chokehold your yeshiva education left on your joy circuits. It enhances the joy. Just because you’re a miserable person doesn’t mean you need to drag all of us down to your sad little level.

Does that mean nobody should drink? No. Kiddush is Kiddush. A Lchaim has its place. Have one or two, celebrate. But keep it mindful. Keep it measured. Never force it on someone else. Some choose not to drink at all for whatever reason. Respect that.

Ah yes, the obligatory “public service announcement” section. Because no sermon is complete without the Rabbinic Safety Tips:

• Do not pour for anyone who looks happier than you.

• Do not dance unless you’ve filled out the Simcha Compliance Form.

• If you see a Jew smiling, call Hatzolah. Could be joy poisoning.

The mitzvah of the day is simchas Torah. Joy in Torah. Not shikrus. Not bizayon haTorah.

No, the mitzvah of the day is simcha in Torah, not your personal moderation campaign. The biggest bizayon haTorah is turning joy into a compliance seminar. The Torah was given with thunder, lightning, and noise. Simchas Torah is the one night a year we match that energy. Some people get sloppy. That’s called being human. Policing joy in the name of “holiness” is how we ended up with Jews who confuse repression for refinement.

Go crawl back into the boring, miserable hole you clearly dwell in every other day of the year. Don’t crawl out when everyone else is about to have a good time just to throw water on their fire. I’m truly sorry that you are such a bitter man that your celebration of yom tov is stomping on the Yom Tov of others. Stop being a whiny little censor and try letting loose once in a while. You might accidentally make a friend.

This is what happens when people confuse holiness with supervision. When joy makes them nervous, they moralize it into submission. The Torah is not afraid of dancing or of drinking, it is afraid of being reduced to a pamphlet for behavior management.

So yes, Berke, we will keep dancing, singing, and maybe even refilling. Because the Torah doesn’t close to shut us down. It closes so we can live it out loud, the way Jews have always done when they actually feel alive.

Gut Yom Tov. L’chaim! (to everyone except Breke, of course)