The following is a response to Datepalm Discourses. It’s too long for a note, but not really enough for an article, so it’s here, but not emailed.
First of all, it’s mekorism with a k. Cut that out, OQ? I’m loath to pull rank like this, but sometimes you have to.
Secondly, yes, sure, the human capital issue is key. People are policy, cadres decide everything etc. Ironically, given the present direction of attacks, traditionally, a chronic problem weighing down mekorism has been its general association with Kahanism. Machon Shilo literally started off as one of the various Kahanist factions formed after Meir Kahane was murdered, but even the other groups with less of a direct connection were still intertwined. The general assumption was that both mekorism and Kahanism involve going back to some earlier and more pure form of Judaism, so they went together. Not all Kahanists were mekorists, but almost all mekorists were Kahanists. The problem is a lot of Kahanists were obese weirdos with chaotic personal lives, and a lot of the ones who weren’t were prickly and couldn’t get on with each other.
I would like to say that my own ramblings have been instrumental in breaking this connection, but, in truth, I was pushing at an open door. Kahanism in its original sense doesn’t really exist anymore. It has folded into being the violent wing of Religious Zionism. Or, if you prefer, Religious Zionism has folded into being the hinterland for Kahanism. Not only are pre-Kookian Mizrochniks now more or less extinct, but orthodox Kookists are an endangered species too. The Breslov-Chabad-Kook-Irgun synthesis is what Religious Zionism is, and Kahanists are distinguished only in the degree to which they are eager to impose this by unauthorised violence, and barely even in that. To be a Kahanist is to be an active promoter of Zoharism in one of its most extreme forms. This has a lot of implications, but one of them is that you can’t be a Kahanist and a mekorist anymore. They are incompatible things. Not everyone can figure that out on their own, but it’s pretty obvious once it is pointed out.
A little anecdote before we move on. Limor Son Har Melech and some other Otzma MKs wanted to pass a law enshrining Menachem Mendel Schneerson as some kind of official figure in Judaism, the practical implications of which were (even more) public moneys diverted to the movement and also some kind of obligation for schools to teach about him. It likely would have passed because the Left don’t care about this kind of stuff, and there are informal arrangements in Knesset committees according to which each side signs off on the other promoting their respective versions of degeneracy. But, in fact, the law went away. Bentzi Gopstein, who is old school and still takes it for granted that Rambam is the boss, kicked off about it, and Ben Gvir, who is worried about his old mates starting up a separate party that will bleed him votes, made the law go away. So we won that battle, but everyone knows the war is being lost. Gopstein will soon be an old man, and the young guys aren’t interested in monotheism, not interested at all.
Back to mekorism. I know it’s hard for people my age, and even a decade younger, traumatised by too many sparsely-attended meetings where multiple participants had mustard all over their ill-fitting T-Shirt, to accept, but things are going pretty well. One center of mekorism is the Modi’in Yeshiva, Migdal haTorah, where the consensus of the smart kids is that some version of our schtick is obviously true and the rebbeim are kind of resigned to it. These guys all come from upper-middle-class families and, after one or two years in learning, are going to go and pursue an upper-middle-class career. If there’s a danger, it’s that when they settle down they will be too well integrated into upscale ModOx or Yeshivish-lite communities to really make much of a difference. Similarly, the Habura guys in the UK are, if anything, too normie and well-adjusted, and they are on course to basically be whatever remains of Anglo-Jewry that isn’t Charedi.
But neither is really where mekorism is at these days. Check this out:
It probably won’t surprise many readers if I say I don’t really get this. The aesthetics and general vibe … it’s a nope from me. I think I also disagree with the theory expressed, but I’m not sure because I couldn’t make it more than 5 minutes. However, I’m just one guy and 36,000 views is an awful lot for a frummy video, more than most big-name YouTube rabbis can reliably pull in.
Who are these people? Their husbands are middle-class mizrahim from traditional/moderate frum backgrounds who wanted a bit more and would have gone the generic Shasnik route, but didn’t have to because someone bothered to put in a bit of basic legwork promoting Rambamism. They are software engineers, kablanim, air-conditioning installers, that sort of thing. Some of them do pretty well. A few of them are doing really well. I don’t want to get anyone too excited, but proper money is starting to slosh around. Projects people have been thinking about for years are suddenly possible. If you are an Anglo, it’s easy to be completely unaware of what’s happening, because it’s very Israeli. But this is real, and it’s just getting started. The web of lies is thick, it chokes, but for that very reason it is all too visible, it cannot be ignored, no-one can disguise it anymore. And when you stop believing you are bound to these lies, you just blow a little, and it all goes away.
Relatedly, I have decided to stop engaging at all with people who make apologetics, of any description, for Chabad and Breslov. Look at this.
In the same way that everyone instinctively knows that putting a wire on some poles doesn’t make it a private domain, and everyone knows putting a wavy wig on a woman’s head doesn’t make her more modest, everyone who has said Krias Shema even once and meant it knows how wrong this is. You don’t need anything explained to you to grasp why going to Uman to have an invisible man fix your head is the antithesis of every word of the Torah. It’s obvious. The problem is an entire edifice of fake learning designed to intimidate honest Jews into feeling they are inadequate to make such basic judgements until they have spent decades in learning, and when they have done that, their brains are too fried by all the garbage and nonsense to make any kinds of judgements at all.
The job of the mekorist who has the capacity (and the time, time is important too) to read and write is actually very simple. It’s giving these Jews the permission structure to do the right thing. There are various different strands to this. Talmudic and halachic study is obviously the most important, but intellectual history is necessary too, especially for dealing with חבלה, and perhaps philosophy has a role to play too. But while the methods may (and, I believe, contrary to much Rambamist sentiment, do) require subtlety and skill, the end goal isn’t complicated at all. The one God created the heavens and the earth; He gave us a law that is righteous and good; He loves justice, kindness and mercy; He hates idolatry; He will not permit it. And so we must not do it, or allow it to be done.
This is why I disagree with our friend at Datepalm Discourses.
I don’t agree with Maskil. If a person rejects the notion that the talmud is authoritative because of the nature of the institution it came from and that community practices can spontaneously become authoritative, then it becomes difficult to identify why the Yeshivish community isn’t right.
I don’t think it hard, even a little bit, to identify why the Yeshivish community isn’t right (and they, of course, are very far from being the worst offenders). It is trivially easy to point out what’s wrong. Every one who has learned a bit can see it all over the place, which is why so many buffoonish theories of a non-existent ‘halachic process’ have been cobbled together out of myriad gentile (oh no!) philosophies to justify it. What is hard is designing something better. Mekorists have generally got everything precisely backwards: they portray the perfect end state and then try to figure out how to get there. Their end state is based on selective, often incoherent readings of primary texts, but that isn’t even the most pressing problem. The opposite is necessary: just stop deliberately doing the wrong thing. After a while, it becomes a habit. When we get to the end state, we’ll know what it is.
Again, there is no need to explain what is wrong with doing toasts with an invisible man-god. It is necessary, because we are in a hole, to make space to allow Jews to express the justified horror and rage at such things, and we must make that space. There are some, of course, whether because of the way they are born or what has happened to them, who genuinely do not understand, that actually like it. For them it’s the point. They will have to be dealt with in due course, but we have nothing to say to them. Our attention must be focussed on those who, out of misplaced shame, are suppressing their disgust, to give them the words to pour it out.
This brings me to the particular plight of the disagreeable smarty-pants. There are two errors that such a man is prone to. One is to imagine himself as the best human type; the other to think himself uniquely defective. Both are mistakes. Different people are different and it’s OK. The challenges of such a person are not my concern here. Suffice it to say, focus at a young age on finding a remunerative career you can tolerate, go to the gym, and learn to play some kind of game that you can do socially that doesn’t require a lot of talking. I didn’t do those things, but those are the correct things to do. More pertinent right now is what you can do as a mekorist. Probably the least effective thing you can do is write manifestos. The most effective thing you can do is patiently gather and organise knowledge that other men with skills you do not possess can use.
I would be remiss here not to point out that the wider situation is very bad. The Jewish people as a collective are systematically recreating every error and perversion decried by the prophets in minute detail and in such a way that it seems almost deliberate. The Torah is widely believed to be a doctrine of criminality, of race narcissism, of the most grotesque and imbecilic forms of paganism, of nonsense for its own sake, nonsense without end. The most probable future is that it just keeps getting worse until we get the just deserts spelled out in the Torah. Again. But you need to know it isn’t hopeless. In the places you least suspect, hope springs. Doubtless the fact that we least suspected it there means our mental models have something wrong with them. You can help, but probably not in precisely the way that you want to. Likely no-one will remember you for it. Trust me, though, if we somehow pull this off, it will be worth it.
What do you think about Chen Shaulov, who you mentioned as a positive model several times, also being a flat earther? Should we just resign ourselves to a base level of idiocy with ayone who tries to appeal to the proles?