The Litvaks' Pyrrhic Victory

The host gets chatty

The host takes a thoughtful puff and fixes Shloime with an amused stare. "You know what's fascinating, Shloime? Everyone else who ripped apart their world at least tried to build something new. Eden saw the problems with mindless tradition, reached for universal rules. Yoily couldn't stand chassidic romance anymore, went full silicon. But you... you just stood in the ruins of text-obsession."

"What exactly," Shloime asks carefully, "would the opposite of text-obsession be that might still be called Yiddishkeit?"

"The fact that you can't even imagine it," the host exhales thoughtfully, "tells us everything about how complete the victory of the Litvish yeshiva model really has been."

Shloime just stares blankly at the host as if he’s speaking Turkish.

"Hey, lemme explain," I say, the words tumbling out faster than I can organize them. "You know how language works?... nobody sits there making rules about it, it just happens, it evolves… and the Academy of Hebrew Language can publish all the official terms they want, but language follows necessity not authority… same thing with social norms, right?... nobody wrote down official rules about when to bring wine to dinner but somehow everyone knows…"

"What does this have to do with—" Shloime starts.

"No, listen, because this is the thing about halacha that nobody talks about anymore… you can have things develop two ways, right?... either from the bottom up, people figuring things out as they go along, using their intuitions to make incremental adjustments to well-established rules until something catches on and becomes ‘the minhag’… or top down, like, you know, actual law – where judges and legislators sit in their chambers and make official decisions. And halacha?... it used to be more like the first way..."

"Like what happened with language," the host cuts in, grinning through a cloud of smoke. "Nobody plans modern Hebrew, man. It just kind of... happens."

"Yeah, great insight, though it sounds vaguely familiar,” I shoot our host an impatient look, “but anyway, when rabbanim did make rulings, they took into account what people were already doing, trying to understand the patterns, like when the Shulchan Arukh brings various possibilities but then says ‘the minhag is so and so’, and that’s the decisive factor, so in the end the botom-up path and the top-down path never diverged too much, until…" I hesitate ever so briefly.

"Until what?" Shloime asks anxiously.

"Until the Litvaks basically turned themselves into a Jewish version of the university, creating batei medrash that were not embedded in communities, as they always had been, but rather deliberately independent of communities," I'm on a roll now, "um, think about it - same exact thing happened in both places, in yeshivas and in universities – cut off from the broader society, develop contempt for common sense, start speaking this private language nobody else understands, look down at anyone who actually has to deal with real life..."

The host exhales another perfect smoke ring. "Two sets of ivory tower people sneering at all the baalei batim who pay their bills..."

"And the crazy thing is," I say, "this was actually useful in galus. When you're powerless, when yiddishkeit is mostly about keeping yourself socially and ideologically separate from the goyim – and sometimes from the renegade Jews – turning everything into a display of differentness makes a certain kind of sense, just like you said earlier, Shloime, it became about showing how clever you are or how weird you are, mainly because you didn’t think your ideas needed to be applied in the real world..."

"But now..." Shloime starts, then stops.

"But now,” I feel the blood rushing to my head, “we want Judaism to go mainstream!... we need Judaism to work for millions of regular people…. and they can’t all be elitist wiseguys who sneer at common sense..."

“The question is how to get it done and you Shloime put your finger on the problem which is that the Litvaks have convinced way too many of the people committed to halacha that the yeshiva model is the authentic one and that others are just uneducated dregs whose opinions and intuitions don’t matter, I don’t think you exaggerated at all, and I feel your pain, but here’s the interesting thing, every single person here who gave their little speech about what quick fix would save Judaism was actually trying to solve the problem that you finally identified, namely, that most people are not prepared to be be yeshivish batlanim lacking healthy intuitions about what’s right and what’s wrong, so...”

I have a vague sense that I’m repeating myself, but I’m on the verge of losing consciousness now and am pretty much on auto-pilot.

"I mean look at all the crazy ideas we heard tonight and put them in the context of what you're saying – even though you didn't have the courage to actually propose anything yourself so you're just a whiner not a questioner – but anyway think about it if you're just a regular person who wants to do the right thing and Judaism is your default culture and you're willing to invest some effort but not make it your fulltime job and you have no interest in signalling weirdness, what are you supposed to do?... and that's what everyone was really trying to figure out, I mean you could try Eden's standardized simple halacha or go with Baruch's communities that feel right to you or let Yoily's AI tell you what to do or go with the flow with Bernie or treat it like regular law like Zelig or pretend we're in galus like Rachel or try to make the batei medrash more democratic like Itzik wants… they're all trying to solve the same problem which is how do you make this work for regular people who haven’t signed up for a detached cult – which you totally got, but you just lack the imagination to realize that what is messed up is not inherent to Judaism, just a deviation that needs to be overcome…”

We haven’t heard a boom for quite some time. The host checks his phone. "Looks like we can head back up," he says, but nobody moves. The shelter's strange octagonal intimacy has cast its spell, and there's a sense that we're on the verge of something.

Shloime sits silently, his earlier rage seemingly spent. The rest of the room has grown quiet too, each person lost in thought. Even Yoily has stopped snoring on his couch. I notice my hands are trembling slightly, whether from the Balvenie or from the weight of unspoken implications, I'm not sure. The host takes one last thoughtful puff and fixes me with an amused stare. "So," he says, "ready to tell us what Judaism actually looks like when it stops being a counter-culture and becomes a mainstream civilization?"