Jewness levels in this scroll are off the charts. This is not for minim.
As we have discussed in previous kuntreisim, the purpose of the rabbinic project after the churban was not, despite the bedtime story told to schoolchildren and donors, to “preserve Torah.” There were, it is true, some rabbis who believed that, and some of them were even important at various stages, but at the movement level this was hashed out at Yavneh, Usha, Tiberias, Sura, Nehardea, Pumbedita and the various other swamp-towns where normal Judaism went to be cross-examined to death.
From then on, Jews whose primary concern was being a recognizable Biblical people — land, Temple, kohanim, sacrifice, monarchy, prophecy, calendar, purity, family, normal local custom, etc. — were confined to the fringes or reclassified as amei ha’aretz, minim, Kutim, Boethusians, ignoramuses, bad husbands, or whatever other category was necessary that week to make the academy look like Sinai with benches.
Rabbinism, after the Temple, was not about continuity, or at the very least not just about continuity, but about something else: replacing a cultic-national religion with a portable clerisy of hyperverbal men who could turn any human act — eating an egg, opening a gate, marrying a woman, buying a donkey, sneezing near a corpse — into a four-page argument in Aramaic between people who all died too early from either poverty, humiliation, bad vibes, or academy-induced brain damage.
The view is attractive, and it’s not exactly wrong. Jewish civilization was turning a corner. The problem is that the corner led directly into Pumbedita.
Reish Lakish
Let’s start with Reish Lakish, because if you wrote him as fiction people would say it was too on the nose.
Former bandit/gladiator/violent criminal-adjacent hardman sees R. Yochanan bathing, leaps into the Jordan, gets talent-spotted by the prettiest sage in Palestine, is offered the sage’s sister if he agrees to become a Torah guy, and then becomes one of the great amoraim. This is supposed to be inspiring, and in a narrow sense it is. Teshuvah, Torah transforms strength, blah blah. Fine.
But can we notice what is actually going on here? The rabbinic movement is so weirdly desperate for masculine energy that when a violent river-jumping thug turns up, the response is not “security” but “have you considered becoming a rosh yeshiva?” This is what happens when your civilization is run by indoor men who know, somewhere deep down, that the people with swords are cooler than them.
And of course the whole thing ends exactly how it obviously would. Years later they argue about weapons, R. Yochanan makes the crack — what, a robber knows his trade — Reish Lakish gets sick, R. Yochanan refuses to properly fix it, Reish Lakish dies, R. Yochanan goes insane with grief because no replacement chavrusa can wound him in the exact right way, and then he dies too.
This is not a friendship. This is two personality disorders in a beis midrash trench coat.
Item: the great success story of the amoraic movement is a criminal recruited by eroticized male admiration, married into the system, weaponized intellectually, insulted about his past by his patron/brother-in-law, and killed by the emotional blast radius of a sugya.
But sure, tell me again how this is the healthy alternative to korbanos.
R. Yochanan
R. Yochanan is always presented as one of the great luminous figures of Eretz Yisrael Torah, which is true in the technical sense that he was brilliant, beautiful, and constantly surrounded by death.
He is also the most perfectly Palestinian amora possible: dazzling, fragile, theatrical, half-saint, half-disaster. He sits by the mikveh so women will see him when they come out and have beautiful children. This is in the literature. Not in some hostile Karaite pamphlet. In the literature. The man is basically running a holy eugenics thirst trap next to the women’s immersion pool and we are all meant to nod because he had a nice face and said deep things about Torah.
Then there is the beauty discourse. R. Yochanan is so beautiful that the Gemara has to explain his beauty by comparison to silver goblets and pomegranate seeds and whatever else the late-antique male imagination could get its hands on without simply saying “we all fancied him.” He is the bridge between Torah greatness and whatever the opposite of being normal is.
And yet he is also the man who detonates Reish Lakish and then cannot survive the absence of someone who will attack his every sentence. This is not a stable religious personality. This is a man whose entire emotional regulation system depends on dialectical violence.
The academy does not cure this. It gives it a daf.
Pumbedita
Usually, when I rag on Pumbedita, someone will chime in that my perspective is distorted because I live near Sura. Well, yes, I live near Sura, but the point is valid enough. In Sura the split is, if we’re charitable, 40–60 between people trying to understand the Mishnah and people trying to turn the Mishnah into a hostage. In Pumbedita it’s 80–20 at the very least.
Pumbedita is the first place in Jewish history where you can feel the full horror of cleverness detached from wisdom. A man says, “The cow gored.” Fine. A Pumbedita guy says, “But was the cow ownerless at the moment of goring, and if so was the ownershiplessness retroactive, and if the courtyard was jointly held by orphans while one witness was sleeping and the other was a relative through betrothal, do we say lav davka or davka davka?” At which point the correct response is not “teiku.” It is deportation.
Everyone likes to pretend this is rigor. It is not rigor. It is what happens when generations of underemployed geniuses are locked in rooms with each other and rewarded for making the obvious impossible.
Abolish. This. Metivta.
I want to smash my wax tablet now and walk away, but the sugya has barely started.
No one wants to talk about this, because as soon as you bring it up the usual people start whining that the sages were holy and we don’t understand aggadah. OK, but they keep putting this stuff in.
You have Rav Kahana hiding under Rav’s bed to observe his teacher having sex with his wife, and when Rav tells him to get out because this is disgusting, Kahana says, essentially, “This too is Torah and I must learn it.” This is treated as extreme devotion to Torah. In any other context it is called being removed from the premises.
You have R. Eliezer’s marital conduct described in bizarre terms, like he is being compelled by a demon. You have students asking bedroom questions with the energy of men who have never considered that maybe not every act needs to become public pedagogy. You have the whole literature of permitted, forbidden, discouraged, disgusting, praiseworthy, dangerous and demon-adjacent intimacy, because apparently even marital sex cannot be left alone until a rabbinic man has categorized it.
And then, of course, there is the penis material.
The Gemara does not merely contain legal discussions of genitalia, which would be normal enough for a legal tradition. It contains the late-antique rabbinic equivalent of locker-room anatomical boasting. This sage’s organ was like this measure, that sage’s was like that jug, this one like a bottle of nine kav, this one like a basket, and so on. People can dress it up however they want, but the text at some point decides we need comparative rabbinic penis measurements. This is what happens when men who claim to have conquered the yetzer hara also control the archive.
bUT iT’S aBOUT tHEIR sIZE bECAUSE tHEY wERE fAT.
Yes, very good, and I’m sure the Roman matron was only concerned with BMI. Thank you, Artscroll Freudian Department.
R. Chiya bar Ashi
Item: R. Chiya bar Ashi prays to be saved from the evil inclination. His wife hears this and is understandably confused, because apparently he has not been acting like a man overwhelmed by lust at home. She disguises herself as a prostitute named Haruta. He solicits her. Then he discovers it was his wife and spends the rest of his life basically trying to punish himself to death.
This story is meant to teach something serious about hidden desire, shame, temptation, maybe repentance. Fine. It also teaches that the rabbinic imagination cannot discuss marriage without accidentally revealing a world in which holy men are so emotionally constipated that their wives have to catfish them into adultery to find out whether they are still alive below the neck.
Again, not a hostile source. Their source.
Rav Rechumi
Rav Rechumi is a perfect little gem of academy pathology. He would come home to his wife once a year, before Yom Kippur. One year he gets too caught up learning and does not come. His wife waits. A tear falls from her eye. The roof collapses. He dies.
This is always told with the beautiful solemn face people make when the story is obviously condemning neglect. And yes, it does condemn neglect. But it also tells you what the system had normalized before the tear fell. A husband coming home once a year is already insane. Missing the one day is merely the system saying the quiet part loudly.
There is a whole genre of these stories: men leave their wives for years, decades even, and somehow the moral center of the story is usually the greatness of Torah, the patience of the wife, the eventual glory of the husband, or the tragic consequences of getting the balance slightly wrong. Slightly wrong? The whole thing is wrong from the root. If your religious ideal keeps producing abandoned women as collateral damage, perhaps the problem is not insufficient sensitivity training in the academy.
Elisha ben Avuyah
Yes, yes, technically Tannaitic, but if the Amoraim get to inherit the brand, they get to inherit the lawsuits.
Acher is the scandal they never quite manage to metabolize. A great sage goes off, becomes a heretic, violates Shabbos, hangs around prostitutes, listens to Greek music, whatever version of the dossier you prefer, and the rabbinic response is not to ask whether something in the system produces spectacular crackups. Instead they turn him into a metaphysical cautionary tale.
The problem with Acher is not that he left. People leave. The problem is that the literature cannot stop looking at him. He is the bad boy of the beis midrash, the one who knows the secrets and walks out anyway. R. Meir keeps learning from him, because of course he does, because nothing excites the rabbinic mind like forbidden Torah in a dirty coat.
This is the first rule of rabbinic scandal: if the scandal is interesting enough, it becomes aggadah.
R. Elazar son of R. Shimon
R. Elazar b. R. Shimon is another one of those figures who should make everyone pause for ten minutes before saying the words “Chazal” in a soft voice.
He works with the Roman authorities catching thieves. People call him vinegar son of wine, because apparently informing for the empire against Jews is not great optics even when you are the son of R. Shimon bar Yochai. Then he gets into the whole grotesque body-saga after death, with his corpse stored away and not decomposing properly and people treating this as evidence of holiness rather than as a sign that everyone involved needs fresh air.
This is exactly what I mean by amoraic-adjacent Judaism being unable to handle obvious facts normally. A man becomes entangled with state violence, public suspicion, bodily weirdness, posthumous domestic horror, and legal charisma, and the tradition somehow makes it all luminous. If a normal person keeps a body in an attic, that is a crime scene. If a rabbi’s body stays in the attic, it is a sugya.
Demonology
I’ve written a lot about shedim and I shall be writing more. When I do, I usually get a Babylonian telling me to chill out. “If you don’t like demons, just don’t walk alone at night, don’t drink water in pairs, don’t eat food from under the bed, don’t greet people in ruins, don’t annoy the invisible queen of disease, and don’t live in a world where every corner has a spirit with zoning rights.” Very helpful.
The point is not that nobody before the rabbis believed in strange things. Obviously they did. The point is that the Amoraim give strange things a sugya. Once a thing has a sugya, it has won. You cannot compete with this. A normal person says, “I feel anxious at night.” The amora says, “Excellent, let us now classify the beings responsible and determine whether their presence affects the berachah.”
bUT tHAT’S nOT tHE cORE oF tHE tALMUD.
OK, and? The fact that the core of the stew is not scorpion does not make the scorpion pareve.
The Bavli is the most successful disaster in Jewish history.
People think this is an insult. It is not only an insult. It is an explanation. The Bavli is not dangerous because it failed. It is dangerous because it succeeded so completely that later Jews forgot it was a product of particular men in particular rooms in particular Babylonian conditions and began treating it as the operating system of creation.
Do people appreciate how deranged this is? Imagine explaining to a kohen in the Beis haMikdash that one day Judaism will be run through the arguments of Persian Jews in Aramaic about a Mishnah from Roman Palestine, and that the highest religious act will be two teenagers in Lithuania screaming at each other about an ox and a pit. He would not say, “Ah, Torah shebe’al peh.” He would say, “Please leave the azarah before I call someone.”
The Bavli’s genius is that it can absorb anything: verse, Mishnah, baraita, folk medicine, demonology, sex advice, court anecdote, dream interpretation, Persian legal assumptions, insults, death stories, messianic fragments, and animal law. Once inside, everything becomes Talmudic. Nothing can merely be itself. A man cannot have a body; he must have a halakhic body. A wife cannot be lonely; she must become a cautionary narrative. A criminal cannot repent; he must become Reish Lakish. A penis cannot be a penis; it must be measured in kav.
Rabbinic humility
There is, allegedly, a rabbinic virtue called humility. This is very important to the rabbis, who mention it often, usually in texts where disrespecting them gets you excommunicated, cursed, publicly humiliated, or killed by narrative weather.
The system is not humble. Individual sages may be humble. The system is not. The system says the sages are the eyes of the congregation, that their rulings bind Israel, that even a heavenly voice loses to the academy, that insulting a sage is a cosmic offense, and that the ordinary Jew’s job is to attach himself to men who know better.
The Oven of Akhnai is always presented as a triumph of law over supernatural authoritarianism. Fine. It is also a story in which the institution crushes a dissenting sage, humiliates him, burns the world around him through social violence, and then congratulates itself because God smiled at the cleverness of being overruled.
Amazing. The rabbis defeat Heaven and call it process.
The ordinary Jew
The great casualty of the amoraic project is not the priest, or the Sadducee, or the Roman, or the am ha’aretz. It is the ordinary Jew who wants to keep Shabbos, eat kosher, marry, mourn, pray, give charity, avoid idolatry, and not require a working knowledge of torts, purity, intent, agency, doubt, vows, courtyards, and Aramaic sarcasm to understand what God wants.
Rabbinic Judaism takes this person and places above him an invisible architecture of liability, decree, enactment, custom, ownership, testimony, ritual status, boundary, suspicion, and dispute. Every act is shadowed by a sugya. Every object has a status. Every status has exceptions. Every exception has a machlokes. Every machlokes has three dead men, a girsa problem, and someone from Pumbedita making it worse.
The defenders call this sanctifying life. Maybe. It also looks a lot like colonizing life.
Conclusion
There are a lot more sections of this article I wanted to write when I started. A whole section on bathhouses, another on dream interpretation, something on the calendar, and, obviously, the catastrophe of making Aramaic the house style of eternity. But it’s getting late and I feel sick.
I’ll close by saying two things.
The first is that Jewish groups in this era are good precisely in proportion to how much they do not embrace academy Judaism. The best, obviously, are the stubborn local custom people who do what their fathers did neither a jot to the right nor to the left and cannot be moved by any argument, prooftext, visiting sage, or letter from some Babylonian with an overdeveloped sense of his own importance. The various runners-up are priestly, Galilean, village, and old Eretz-Yisrael types who stick obstinately to inherited identity, with its songs, foods, graves, local rulings, and refusal to let Pumbedita turn the whole religion into an anxiety disorder.
The other point I want to make is about the future, which is probably where you’d focus if you wanted to argue in favor of the Amoraim. It’s no secret that Judaism without a Temple is unstable, with a new crop of dreamers popping up every few years asking whether now can we rebuild, revolt, calculate the end, follow a wonder-worker, or become Greeks with better food. In that sense, things are better in the academies. But there’s a catch.
The academies do not preserve Judaism for normal Jews. They preserve Judaism for people who like academies. Everyone else gets dragged along afterward and told this was the plan from Sinai.
And that, in the end, is the negative-sum parasitism of the whole thing. The Amoraim take the energies that would have gone into song, sacrifice, land, memory, craft, family, local dignity, and ordinary piety, and pour them into a machine that produces answers to questions nobody asked until the machine existed.
But the machine is very impressive. So impressive, in fact, that one day people will mistake it for Judaism itself.
1) most of these people, had they lived in Chutzpah Laaretz, would be either assimilated or dead. Not much of an improvement.
2) this screed reads like a typical anti-semitic screed of bad rabbis, but with a veneer that it's not "all Jews".
I've been to Uman many many times. If you think 99% of these people are ok with child sex or even plain rape you are a demented hateful sicko. The people you cited are anomalies who no one ever heard of. (The sole exception being Berland, who besides for being a world class perv was also a noted Ashkenazi genius.) Berland is a sign against Breslov as much as he is against Judaism as a whole.
The same with all the Zohar stuff. Benyomen already pointed out all the crazy stuff in the talmud. Let's face it, those who are pervs will twist anything, and vice versa. There's not a significant difference.
I agree that extremism is bad and it seems likely that being Israeli exacerbates extremism (just compare your blogs to outside of Israel blogs with the level of hatred toward fellow Jews). But I don't think that Chabad, Breslov, Zohar or Litvaks are significantly worse than the rest of your list.
The main point is and should be don't follow a cult.
To use Occam's Razor, if you read through this blog (not specifically this article, but this one is probably the worst), the single logical conclusion isn't "Gavriel (the author's name) is the only person who correctly understands Judaism, and everyone else, no matter how learned, is mistaken, especially in the past 500 years", but either "Judaism has always been inherently irreparable and subconsciously idolatrous, hence why the intellectuals in every single generation become apikorsim and perverts", or "Gavriel is using his rhetoric against things he doesn't like, and these arguments could just as easily be used against the foundations of Judaism, so he probably doesn't actually understand Judaism".
And just one question for the author of this blog - how much long-term damage and death was caused due to Rabbi Akiva's messianism? Are you going to write an article about how respecting Rabbi Akiva or his teachings is 100 times worse than idolising Baruch Goldstein?
I actually don't mind his critiques on Judaism or of the Zoharic texts. I think they are very valuable. It's when he tries to illustrate badness from a few bad people is where I draw the line.
The effect of the Amoraim on the Jewish religion
Bad and, well, just bad.
סתם מתיבתא
c. 430 CE
Jewness levels in this scroll are off the charts. This is not for minim.
As we have discussed in previous kuntreisim, the purpose of the rabbinic project after the churban was not, despite the bedtime story told to schoolchildren and donors, to “preserve Torah.” There were, it is true, some rabbis who believed that, and some of them were even important at various stages, but at the movement level this was hashed out at Yavneh, Usha, Tiberias, Sura, Nehardea, Pumbedita and the various other swamp-towns where normal Judaism went to be cross-examined to death.
From then on, Jews whose primary concern was being a recognizable Biblical people — land, Temple, kohanim, sacrifice, monarchy, prophecy, calendar, purity, family, normal local custom, etc. — were confined to the fringes or reclassified as amei ha’aretz, minim, Kutim, Boethusians, ignoramuses, bad husbands, or whatever other category was necessary that week to make the academy look like Sinai with benches.
Rabbinism, after the Temple, was not about continuity, or at the very least not just about continuity, but about something else: replacing a cultic-national religion with a portable clerisy of hyperverbal men who could turn any human act — eating an egg, opening a gate, marrying a woman, buying a donkey, sneezing near a corpse — into a four-page argument in Aramaic between people who all died too early from either poverty, humiliation, bad vibes, or academy-induced brain damage.
The view is attractive, and it’s not exactly wrong. Jewish civilization was turning a corner. The problem is that the corner led directly into Pumbedita.
Reish Lakish
Let’s start with Reish Lakish, because if you wrote him as fiction people would say it was too on the nose.
Former bandit/gladiator/violent criminal-adjacent hardman sees R. Yochanan bathing, leaps into the Jordan, gets talent-spotted by the prettiest sage in Palestine, is offered the sage’s sister if he agrees to become a Torah guy, and then becomes one of the great amoraim. This is supposed to be inspiring, and in a narrow sense it is. Teshuvah, Torah transforms strength, blah blah. Fine.
But can we notice what is actually going on here? The rabbinic movement is so weirdly desperate for masculine energy that when a violent river-jumping thug turns up, the response is not “security” but “have you considered becoming a rosh yeshiva?” This is what happens when your civilization is run by indoor men who know, somewhere deep down, that the people with swords are cooler than them.
And of course the whole thing ends exactly how it obviously would. Years later they argue about weapons, R. Yochanan makes the crack — what, a robber knows his trade — Reish Lakish gets sick, R. Yochanan refuses to properly fix it, Reish Lakish dies, R. Yochanan goes insane with grief because no replacement chavrusa can wound him in the exact right way, and then he dies too.
This is not a friendship. This is two personality disorders in a beis midrash trench coat.
Item: the great success story of the amoraic movement is a criminal recruited by eroticized male admiration, married into the system, weaponized intellectually, insulted about his past by his patron/brother-in-law, and killed by the emotional blast radius of a sugya.
But sure, tell me again how this is the healthy alternative to korbanos.
R. Yochanan
R. Yochanan is always presented as one of the great luminous figures of Eretz Yisrael Torah, which is true in the technical sense that he was brilliant, beautiful, and constantly surrounded by death.
He is also the most perfectly Palestinian amora possible: dazzling, fragile, theatrical, half-saint, half-disaster. He sits by the mikveh so women will see him when they come out and have beautiful children. This is in the literature. Not in some hostile Karaite pamphlet. In the literature. The man is basically running a holy eugenics thirst trap next to the women’s immersion pool and we are all meant to nod because he had a nice face and said deep things about Torah.
Then there is the beauty discourse. R. Yochanan is so beautiful that the Gemara has to explain his beauty by comparison to silver goblets and pomegranate seeds and whatever else the late-antique male imagination could get its hands on without simply saying “we all fancied him.” He is the bridge between Torah greatness and whatever the opposite of being normal is.
And yet he is also the man who detonates Reish Lakish and then cannot survive the absence of someone who will attack his every sentence. This is not a stable religious personality. This is a man whose entire emotional regulation system depends on dialectical violence.
The academy does not cure this. It gives it a daf.
Pumbedita
Usually, when I rag on Pumbedita, someone will chime in that my perspective is distorted because I live near Sura. Well, yes, I live near Sura, but the point is valid enough. In Sura the split is, if we’re charitable, 40–60 between people trying to understand the Mishnah and people trying to turn the Mishnah into a hostage. In Pumbedita it’s 80–20 at the very least.
Pumbedita is the first place in Jewish history where you can feel the full horror of cleverness detached from wisdom. A man says, “The cow gored.” Fine. A Pumbedita guy says, “But was the cow ownerless at the moment of goring, and if so was the ownershiplessness retroactive, and if the courtyard was jointly held by orphans while one witness was sleeping and the other was a relative through betrothal, do we say lav davka or davka davka?” At which point the correct response is not “teiku.” It is deportation.
Everyone likes to pretend this is rigor. It is not rigor. It is what happens when generations of underemployed geniuses are locked in rooms with each other and rewarded for making the obvious impossible.
Abolish. This. Metivta.
I want to smash my wax tablet now and walk away, but the sugya has barely started.
Sex stuff
No one wants to talk about this, because as soon as you bring it up the usual people start whining that the sages were holy and we don’t understand aggadah. OK, but they keep putting this stuff in.
You have Rav Kahana hiding under Rav’s bed to observe his teacher having sex with his wife, and when Rav tells him to get out because this is disgusting, Kahana says, essentially, “This too is Torah and I must learn it.” This is treated as extreme devotion to Torah. In any other context it is called being removed from the premises.
You have R. Eliezer’s marital conduct described in bizarre terms, like he is being compelled by a demon. You have students asking bedroom questions with the energy of men who have never considered that maybe not every act needs to become public pedagogy. You have the whole literature of permitted, forbidden, discouraged, disgusting, praiseworthy, dangerous and demon-adjacent intimacy, because apparently even marital sex cannot be left alone until a rabbinic man has categorized it.
And then, of course, there is the penis material.
The Gemara does not merely contain legal discussions of genitalia, which would be normal enough for a legal tradition. It contains the late-antique rabbinic equivalent of locker-room anatomical boasting. This sage’s organ was like this measure, that sage’s was like that jug, this one like a bottle of nine kav, this one like a basket, and so on. People can dress it up however they want, but the text at some point decides we need comparative rabbinic penis measurements. This is what happens when men who claim to have conquered the yetzer hara also control the archive.
bUT iT’S aBOUT tHEIR sIZE bECAUSE tHEY wERE fAT.
Yes, very good, and I’m sure the Roman matron was only concerned with BMI. Thank you, Artscroll Freudian Department.
R. Chiya bar Ashi
Item: R. Chiya bar Ashi prays to be saved from the evil inclination. His wife hears this and is understandably confused, because apparently he has not been acting like a man overwhelmed by lust at home. She disguises herself as a prostitute named Haruta. He solicits her. Then he discovers it was his wife and spends the rest of his life basically trying to punish himself to death.
This story is meant to teach something serious about hidden desire, shame, temptation, maybe repentance. Fine. It also teaches that the rabbinic imagination cannot discuss marriage without accidentally revealing a world in which holy men are so emotionally constipated that their wives have to catfish them into adultery to find out whether they are still alive below the neck.
Again, not a hostile source. Their source.
Rav Rechumi
Rav Rechumi is a perfect little gem of academy pathology. He would come home to his wife once a year, before Yom Kippur. One year he gets too caught up learning and does not come. His wife waits. A tear falls from her eye. The roof collapses. He dies.
This is always told with the beautiful solemn face people make when the story is obviously condemning neglect. And yes, it does condemn neglect. But it also tells you what the system had normalized before the tear fell. A husband coming home once a year is already insane. Missing the one day is merely the system saying the quiet part loudly.
There is a whole genre of these stories: men leave their wives for years, decades even, and somehow the moral center of the story is usually the greatness of Torah, the patience of the wife, the eventual glory of the husband, or the tragic consequences of getting the balance slightly wrong. Slightly wrong? The whole thing is wrong from the root. If your religious ideal keeps producing abandoned women as collateral damage, perhaps the problem is not insufficient sensitivity training in the academy.
Elisha ben Avuyah
Yes, yes, technically Tannaitic, but if the Amoraim get to inherit the brand, they get to inherit the lawsuits.
Acher is the scandal they never quite manage to metabolize. A great sage goes off, becomes a heretic, violates Shabbos, hangs around prostitutes, listens to Greek music, whatever version of the dossier you prefer, and the rabbinic response is not to ask whether something in the system produces spectacular crackups. Instead they turn him into a metaphysical cautionary tale.
The problem with Acher is not that he left. People leave. The problem is that the literature cannot stop looking at him. He is the bad boy of the beis midrash, the one who knows the secrets and walks out anyway. R. Meir keeps learning from him, because of course he does, because nothing excites the rabbinic mind like forbidden Torah in a dirty coat.
This is the first rule of rabbinic scandal: if the scandal is interesting enough, it becomes aggadah.
R. Elazar son of R. Shimon
R. Elazar b. R. Shimon is another one of those figures who should make everyone pause for ten minutes before saying the words “Chazal” in a soft voice.
He works with the Roman authorities catching thieves. People call him vinegar son of wine, because apparently informing for the empire against Jews is not great optics even when you are the son of R. Shimon bar Yochai. Then he gets into the whole grotesque body-saga after death, with his corpse stored away and not decomposing properly and people treating this as evidence of holiness rather than as a sign that everyone involved needs fresh air.
This is exactly what I mean by amoraic-adjacent Judaism being unable to handle obvious facts normally. A man becomes entangled with state violence, public suspicion, bodily weirdness, posthumous domestic horror, and legal charisma, and the tradition somehow makes it all luminous. If a normal person keeps a body in an attic, that is a crime scene. If a rabbi’s body stays in the attic, it is a sugya.
Demonology
I’ve written a lot about shedim and I shall be writing more. When I do, I usually get a Babylonian telling me to chill out. “If you don’t like demons, just don’t walk alone at night, don’t drink water in pairs, don’t eat food from under the bed, don’t greet people in ruins, don’t annoy the invisible queen of disease, and don’t live in a world where every corner has a spirit with zoning rights.” Very helpful.
The point is not that nobody before the rabbis believed in strange things. Obviously they did. The point is that the Amoraim give strange things a sugya. Once a thing has a sugya, it has won. You cannot compete with this. A normal person says, “I feel anxious at night.” The amora says, “Excellent, let us now classify the beings responsible and determine whether their presence affects the berachah.”
bUT tHAT’S nOT tHE cORE oF tHE tALMUD.
OK, and? The fact that the core of the stew is not scorpion does not make the scorpion pareve.
Lol. By the way, those grotesque baavliim are turning this place into one giant kutach-stand.
The Bavli
The Bavli is the most successful disaster in Jewish history.
People think this is an insult. It is not only an insult. It is an explanation. The Bavli is not dangerous because it failed. It is dangerous because it succeeded so completely that later Jews forgot it was a product of particular men in particular rooms in particular Babylonian conditions and began treating it as the operating system of creation.
Do people appreciate how deranged this is? Imagine explaining to a kohen in the Beis haMikdash that one day Judaism will be run through the arguments of Persian Jews in Aramaic about a Mishnah from Roman Palestine, and that the highest religious act will be two teenagers in Lithuania screaming at each other about an ox and a pit. He would not say, “Ah, Torah shebe’al peh.” He would say, “Please leave the azarah before I call someone.”
The Bavli’s genius is that it can absorb anything: verse, Mishnah, baraita, folk medicine, demonology, sex advice, court anecdote, dream interpretation, Persian legal assumptions, insults, death stories, messianic fragments, and animal law. Once inside, everything becomes Talmudic. Nothing can merely be itself. A man cannot have a body; he must have a halakhic body. A wife cannot be lonely; she must become a cautionary narrative. A criminal cannot repent; he must become Reish Lakish. A penis cannot be a penis; it must be measured in kav.
Rabbinic humility
There is, allegedly, a rabbinic virtue called humility. This is very important to the rabbis, who mention it often, usually in texts where disrespecting them gets you excommunicated, cursed, publicly humiliated, or killed by narrative weather.
The system is not humble. Individual sages may be humble. The system is not. The system says the sages are the eyes of the congregation, that their rulings bind Israel, that even a heavenly voice loses to the academy, that insulting a sage is a cosmic offense, and that the ordinary Jew’s job is to attach himself to men who know better.
The Oven of Akhnai is always presented as a triumph of law over supernatural authoritarianism. Fine. It is also a story in which the institution crushes a dissenting sage, humiliates him, burns the world around him through social violence, and then congratulates itself because God smiled at the cleverness of being overruled.
Amazing. The rabbis defeat Heaven and call it process.
The ordinary Jew
The great casualty of the amoraic project is not the priest, or the Sadducee, or the Roman, or the am ha’aretz. It is the ordinary Jew who wants to keep Shabbos, eat kosher, marry, mourn, pray, give charity, avoid idolatry, and not require a working knowledge of torts, purity, intent, agency, doubt, vows, courtyards, and Aramaic sarcasm to understand what God wants.
Rabbinic Judaism takes this person and places above him an invisible architecture of liability, decree, enactment, custom, ownership, testimony, ritual status, boundary, suspicion, and dispute. Every act is shadowed by a sugya. Every object has a status. Every status has exceptions. Every exception has a machlokes. Every machlokes has three dead men, a girsa problem, and someone from Pumbedita making it worse.
The defenders call this sanctifying life. Maybe. It also looks a lot like colonizing life.
Conclusion
There are a lot more sections of this article I wanted to write when I started. A whole section on bathhouses, another on dream interpretation, something on the calendar, and, obviously, the catastrophe of making Aramaic the house style of eternity. But it’s getting late and I feel sick.
I’ll close by saying two things.
The first is that Jewish groups in this era are good precisely in proportion to how much they do not embrace academy Judaism. The best, obviously, are the stubborn local custom people who do what their fathers did neither a jot to the right nor to the left and cannot be moved by any argument, prooftext, visiting sage, or letter from some Babylonian with an overdeveloped sense of his own importance. The various runners-up are priestly, Galilean, village, and old Eretz-Yisrael types who stick obstinately to inherited identity, with its songs, foods, graves, local rulings, and refusal to let Pumbedita turn the whole religion into an anxiety disorder.
The other point I want to make is about the future, which is probably where you’d focus if you wanted to argue in favor of the Amoraim. It’s no secret that Judaism without a Temple is unstable, with a new crop of dreamers popping up every few years asking whether now can we rebuild, revolt, calculate the end, follow a wonder-worker, or become Greeks with better food. In that sense, things are better in the academies. But there’s a catch.
The academies do not preserve Judaism for normal Jews. They preserve Judaism for people who like academies. Everyone else gets dragged along afterward and told this was the plan from Sinai.
And that, in the end, is the negative-sum parasitism of the whole thing. The Amoraim take the energies that would have gone into song, sacrifice, land, memory, craft, family, local dignity, and ordinary piety, and pour them into a machine that produces answers to questions nobody asked until the machine existed.
But the machine is very impressive. So impressive, in fact, that one day people will mistake it for Judaism itself.
Abolish. This. Sugya.
I’m impressed, but I’m gonna assume this the work of an LLM
Lol. By the way, those grotesque baavliim are turning this place into one giant kutach-stand.
Two things:
1) most of these people, had they lived in Chutzpah Laaretz, would be either assimilated or dead. Not much of an improvement.
2) this screed reads like a typical anti-semitic screed of bad rabbis, but with a veneer that it's not "all Jews".
I've been to Uman many many times. If you think 99% of these people are ok with child sex or even plain rape you are a demented hateful sicko. The people you cited are anomalies who no one ever heard of. (The sole exception being Berland, who besides for being a world class perv was also a noted Ashkenazi genius.) Berland is a sign against Breslov as much as he is against Judaism as a whole.
The same with all the Zohar stuff. Benyomen already pointed out all the crazy stuff in the talmud. Let's face it, those who are pervs will twist anything, and vice versa. There's not a significant difference.
I agree that extremism is bad and it seems likely that being Israeli exacerbates extremism (just compare your blogs to outside of Israel blogs with the level of hatred toward fellow Jews). But I don't think that Chabad, Breslov, Zohar or Litvaks are significantly worse than the rest of your list.
The main point is and should be don't follow a cult.
To use Occam's Razor, if you read through this blog (not specifically this article, but this one is probably the worst), the single logical conclusion isn't "Gavriel (the author's name) is the only person who correctly understands Judaism, and everyone else, no matter how learned, is mistaken, especially in the past 500 years", but either "Judaism has always been inherently irreparable and subconsciously idolatrous, hence why the intellectuals in every single generation become apikorsim and perverts", or "Gavriel is using his rhetoric against things he doesn't like, and these arguments could just as easily be used against the foundations of Judaism, so he probably doesn't actually understand Judaism".
And just one question for the author of this blog - how much long-term damage and death was caused due to Rabbi Akiva's messianism? Are you going to write an article about how respecting Rabbi Akiva or his teachings is 100 times worse than idolising Baruch Goldstein?
Put simply, he's an autodidact. Which wouldn't be a bad thing, except there's way too much auto and not quite enough didact.
I knew his real name. It's not exactly a secret.
I actually don't mind his critiques on Judaism or of the Zoharic texts. I think they are very valuable. It's when he tries to illustrate badness from a few bad people is where I draw the line.
That dancing video was… something.