religious teachers

The main power of religious teachers comes from their pretense of secret knowledge. Especially knowledge of Kabalah. So they are in particular jealous of the Kabalah Institute [founded on the approach to the Ari of Rav Ashlag] as being a threat to their supposed superiority about this secret knowledge. The only way one can really see through their deception is by experience. There is really very little in the way of checking up on them otherwise.
Only people that were believing in them and burnt are the ones openly saying that they are all frauds, and these people that have been burnt are usually not believable because of the fact that they are losers at this game of fraud. Losers tend to have little of no credibility because of the fact that they are losers even though they are the ones in position to have actually seen the truth.

The truth is religious teachers do not have knowledge of the Ari at all. Most have not even read through the entire works of the Ari at all. And those that have learned the Ari in some depth are usually ignorant of Gemara and thus unqualified. The whole thing is  a scam. 

Even the so called Kabalah yeshivas in Jerusalem are frauds, and are just private county clubs for the macho man and his thugs to sit around all day and chat. Beware.



[In any case for actual knowledge of the Ari the Kabbalah institute seems very good. They have a great edition of all the Ari and without pretense of great knowledge of it they study it seriously. It is the best and most honest approach to this that I have seen.]


This should not be construed as a critique on the Holy Torah, not the written Law nor the oral Law. Rather this is a critique on the creeps that pretend to know it an keep it. in so doing the give the Torah and all Jews a bad name. The religious world are more like enemies of the Jewish people and of the Torah than the friends they claim to be.

In fact I think the Oral and Written Law are very important and I think Reb Israel Salanter found the best approach to make this simple and easy--to learn Musar [the Ethics of the Torah.]

The local religious teacher as opposed to a person that learns Torah for its own sake.

The local religious teacher  has a little piece of paper that says “certified ” on it, and that little piece of paper assures him that he will never be cast out among the poors, the middle class. But, you see, he earned it, by being the son of a religious teacher. A legacy. An aristocrat.

Have you ever met a minor rabbi?

A minor religious teacher is a snot-nosed kid who went to some big name yeshiva. What does he have? A piece of paper and a "Shtele" gig. [position] Is mr. minor religious teacher , who couldn’t tell over a Tosphot if it hit him in the head, a particularly talented religious teacher? Could he, in a double-blind test, out-compete the poors, the yokels, the disgusting average Jews of gross, inferior white Ashkenazc background ? If minor religious teacher were hit by a truck, his fat guts splattered into a million giblets across the pavement of his coastal gated community, would anyone care? No. minor religious teacher the minor aristocrat, is replaceable. He is privileged, but he is still insecure.

If you ever meet a minor religious teacher, insecurity will be the most obvious thing about him. 

If you ever meet a minor religious teacher, get him drunk, or at least angry. Wait for him to start fantasizing about, burning down the South with everyone in it, herding Christians into gas chambers. I’ve met my share of that lot, and they usually do. Sometimes they don’t bother trying to hide it. 

. The worst ones are the most assured and the least secure—the second-generation religious teachers so sure that they’re part of the ‘elite’ and the first-generation Brahmin unlike the converts from flyover states. 

 Since the "minor religious teacher" exerts influence over his students, and since the students pay the minor rabbi lots and lots of money to attend their cult compounds yeshivas, the minor religious teacher has a strong incentive to justify their position ideologically (by, for example, setting up a binary opposition between the virtuous “religious teachers ” and the un-virtuous “reform Jews and Zionists”) and materially (by turning their certificates of Spiritual Transformation into certificates of ideological ability to hold a job), and that this incentive is shared by the elite, who have the money and the connections to get themselves and their children into the most Spiritually Transforming cult compounds yeshivas of all for to seekers of Spiritual Transformation.

Presumably, one is to question everything except the religious teachers …

But we could always question the idea that an education is something you get by sitting in a room in yeshiva. 

Minor religious teachers are nervous snot-nosed man-children pushing the interests of their class as hard as they can in the desperate hope that they can hold onto their position.

The reason to expose these frauds is this: If you care about cigarettes. and someone you know is selling something which has no tobacco in it. Just empty packets of paper. Then you say something. But only of you care. So I care about Torah and thus I have to warn people that religious teachers  are selling a false product. Not Torah, but phony Torah 

religious teachers

religious teachers . I never thought they were anything but dressing up like holy people in order to make money. I never thought they knew Torah. Still there are people that go by same name but are in fact devoted to Torah These honest and decent people for some reason have not seen fit to disassociate themselves  from frauds.

There is a custom in the authentic Lithuanian yeshiva world to call people Reb just like you could say Mr Smith. Thus we have even the greatest of Torah scholars being called as "Mr Smith" as in "Reb Chaim" [that is Chaim Soloveitchik] or the "Chafetz Chaim." Or "Reb Moshe" [Moshe Feintstein]. "Reb Aaron" [Aaron Kotler]. But this is only a custom. [That is "Reb" is the same as "Mr."]

Sephardim have a custom that is also admirable. For authentic Torah Scholars they use the name the Talmud gives them: "Rav." So for the greatest Sephardi Torah Scholar we have "Rav Ovadia Joseph."

Gentiles for some reason have not learned to make this distinction, nor have most secular Jews. I have no idea why this is.
But my guess is that the true Torah scholars never made it their business to make this distinction which leaves all us simple Jews in a award position. It is almost impossible to tell who is real and who is putting on an act.
So why do not the true scholars speak up? I could not even begin to guess. It is like unspoken rule.

In the name of all of us simple Jews, I ask the true Torah scholars to help us to make this important distinction. Because without it everyone suffers.

But the silence of Torah scholars is puzzling in more ways than one. Everyone reading this probably knows just what I mean and has encountered this in many other ways. Maybe there is something good about their silence I do not know. But I speak my mind.

religious teachers have found way to mislead the public about Torah

I was naively optimistic about what most religious teachers are. I thought they were sincere and wanted everyone to learn and keep Torah.


Why is a good question which I do not have an answer for. But the fact is there are three main characteristics of most religious teachers. In these three things they are the exact opposite of what they claim. They are anti-Shalom Bait, Anti-Family values, anti-learning Torah. They do everything they can to break up homes and make sure the children are taken from their parents, and they hate it when they see Jews learning Torah. It rubs them the wrong way. They claim to make yeshivas as a public service but all they are in chat rooms for them and their buddies. If anyone actually tries to sit in one and learn Torah they make sure to throw him out.

I know they are extremely dangerous to ones mental and spiritual health. The worst mistake one can make is trust in anything they say.


They are failures when it comes to human decency and sincerity. How can they teach that to others?


However Torah is important. It is not a reflection on Torah the fact that it can be misused. There is no system that is immune to abuse. And it there is any way to abuse a system people will find it.

The problem is that religious teacher have found way to mislead the public about what the Torah says and means. They are enemies of Torah.

I will forever be their enemy because they are enemies of the Torah.
To them Torah is a set of rituals and as long as they are the center of worship they don't care what people do outside of the rituals that have little or nothing to do with Torah. They found some schizo persons that were addicted to rituals and found way and making everyone else do them.

It is not that they are buffoons. It is that they are outright damaging and dangerous.

religious teachers

I had a good wife until psychopathic, religious teachers sunk their claws into her. So it may seem that I am being over cautious about staying away from religious teachers.  But I think I am not.  I think I am not being cautious enough.
When I am critical I do try to point out that they are as a rule as far from keeping the Torah as one could expect from hypocrites that put on religious clothing and make money from doing so.
 I can imagine there are out there religious teachers that sincerely think they are keeping the Torah, but I can reassure them that they are not. They are obstacles keeping people from Torah. It all begins with their using the Torah to make money. After that it is all downhill.
I do not think that they will ever change. So the only point of this is to warn others about the danger  in these people, especially for innocent people that really do want to keep Torah. If you want to keep Torah, the last person you want to be talk with is a religious teacher.
A positive suggestion would be to learn Torah yourself. And if you can find a place that learns and teaches authentic Torah--that is the Oral and Written Law  with no additions masquerading as Torah, then it is a good idea to learn there.  But such places are rare. And most have lost the authenticity. Now they are career orientated. That is they generally are out to make more the religious teachers. May God save us from them.  I wish I did not have to mention this negative aspect. I would rather focus on the positive side of Torah. But I still have an obligation from time to time to mention this important point to warn people.

[I should mention the distinction is simple. There are people in legitimate yeshivas who are sincerely interested in learning and and keeping Torah. And sometimes it happens by mistake they get the name "religious teacher" attached to them. This is confusing. But as a rule yeshiva people are not the kind of monsters that I am referring to here. So this distinction is important to keep in mind. People in straight, Lithuanian yeshivas are  not the kind I am referring to here.

מפסמים את החנפים בשבל חילול השם. The Talmud tells us we are required to shout out the name of the hypocrites to make sure people know about this problem. And the Chafetz Chaim goes into detail about this in chapter 7 of volume I. He makes clear there there are times when one is obligated to say Lashon HaRa, and concerning religious teachers this certainly applies. [In that chapter he deals with the issue of when we are required to warn people.  That is not to only place, but  it is the one I remember off hand.]

I thought about deleting this essay, but for now I will leave it. It brings out an important point. That is that anyone who really cares about Torah, should to get rid of all religious teachers. The only institution that really deserves support are authentic Litvak [Lithuanian] yeshivas where real Torah is learned.

The question is how to get rid of religious teachers? This is highly individual. People have to realize on their own how bad they really are.  There is nothing I can say until people discover this on their own. And by then it is too late.
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The dividing line is not exact. You have supposedly Lithuanian yeshivas that are cults. On the other hand Breslov which tends to be problematic, still has plenty of people that are sincere  and from the Side of Holiness. In fact, outside of the leaders which everyone knows are crazy, the majority of Breslov are in fact simple, sincere Jews.

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So what is the dividing line? How does one tell? It is hard to know. Rav Shach certainly was able to see the difference, but besides him I have not heard of anyone. On the outside appearance there is no difference. The Dark Side  is even more strict in rituals in order to make itself seem kosher.
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The word "religious teacher" is not in itself a proof of evil. After the new kind of ordination started by Rav Joseph  HaLevi from Vienna people started using this term.  But still you have great people that were refereed to as "Rabbi." No one says "Rav Akiva Eiger." It is "Rabbi Akiva Eiger".
So the main indication is probably simply affiliation with the group the Gra put into excommunication.  That seems to be the basic dividing line. The fact that that Gra was ignored in this point is how everything went downhill.

religious teachers

Religious teachers that are psychopaths cause perverted desires fall from the Divine Chariot.  I think this explains the reason why sodomy is so pervasive in the USA.

My thinking is that we find in the Talmud some serious criticism about religious teachers. But furthermore we also find that what happens in Israel is reflected in the larger world. So when our own house is not in order this is seen in the large in the general events of the world.

Now it is a good question about how to tell the difference between good and bad religious teachers. It is important to know that there do exist bad religious teachers and that because of them there are problems because of people that follow them naively thinking they are teaching Torah.


Now this problem does beg for a solution. The only possible solution I can see is individual. That is it is up to each individual to learn Torah on their own and thus not to be dependent on others to know what it says. And if it is too much to ask everyone to know the whole Oral and Written Law then at least Musar--the books of Jewish ethics written during the Middle Ages tell us in a practical sense what the essence of Torah is. [Musar is a well known set of books. I do not need to list them here. Mainly they are divided between books from the middle ages and the later books of the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter that went into more detail in how to apply the lessons of Musar in a practical sense. ] [In my non humble opinion the חובות לבבות Duties of the Heart is the best one.]

I should add that the problem about evil religious teachers is not just in that Torah lesson but begins in the LM from Vol I ch 8 and goes through the entire two volumes. This theme does come up in the Talmud also and even the Mishna. אם אתה רואה דור שפורעניות באות אליו צא ובדוק בדייני ישראל שכל פורעניות שבאות לעולם אינן באות אלא בגלל דייני ישראל I forgot where that particular Gemara is. It is somewhere near the end of Tractate Shabat but I forgot the page number.

So who then can decide a halacha issue? In monetary cases where there are two opposing parties we do know who can decide--מומחה לרבים. someone who has been tested by experts in the Talmud and been found never to make a mistake. But in other cases?

The irony is that the people we would hope and expect to teach us morality and true principles of how to guide our lives are often the source of the most damage. In fact, I think this is so in the majority of cases.

I should mention that none of this is meant to disparage the sincere people who are sitting and learning Torah whether privately or in straight Lithuanian yeshivas.

People of intellect and morality are disqualified and  attacked when the religious  world  is under the control of a tyranny backed by the mob.  Don’t ask where all of the smart people are.  Don’t ask where all of the leaders of men are.  The religious world wants to be ruled by psychopaths and imbeciles. 

The best solution would be to fire all religious teachers. Save the money or give it to yeshivas where real Torah is learned [Lithuanian Yeshivas].