Mussar

For intellectual honesty’s sake, I’ll acknowledge that this cover is a criticism of a specific strain of Jewish culture, namely the Mussar movement and its contemporary expression in (Israeli) Charedi society. It’s important for me to emphasize this because in general my criticisms are much broader, and pertain to Judaism as a whole – from its very roots and at its most basic tenants.

The Mussar movement, and its comical contemporary attempt at “making you a better person” by either instilling terror into your hearts or crushing the remnants of your psyche into God fearing oblivion, simply boggles my mind.

Aren’t we insanely hard on ourselves already? Don’t we already consume ourselves with guilt when we do something we know is not good for us? And yet every week in Yeshivas around the world (or at least in Israel) Thursday evening is traditionally the time for the Rosh Yeshiva / Mashgiach to stand in front of the students and tell them, in no uncertain terms, how much they suck.

There is so much they suck at. They suck bigly.

They suck at not learning enough. They suck at not praying hard enough. They suck at coming on time to things. They suck by having too much fun in general, as can be seen by the presence of newspapers/phones/cocaine (pick your audience) in the yeshiva.

This, the whole year round. Let’s not even get started with Elul.

And I would sit there, at the front of the room, taking notes. Feeling terrible. Taking it more to heart than anyone else did, when really I was the one who least needed it: “I knew I sucked! Thanks for confirming it! I’m only 98% perfect, I promise to tear myself to shreds harder tomorrow.”

What should they really have been shouting? “You’re a fucking awesome person Shalom Tzvi. You try so hard. Are you sure you’re not overworking yourself? Go easy on yourself. RELAX THE FUCK DOWN, PRIVATE SHORE!!!”

Never have I seen an institution less thinly disguised as “being good for you”, than Mussar. It perfectly mirrors that asshole voice in your brain that tells you it’s there for your own good while simultaneously being the force that actually drags you down.

Cue the “we are pathetic beings, Mussar was invented in a timewhen we were stronger” and “that’s not actually Mussar, Mussar is really X, Y and Z (appearances to the contrary notwithstanding)” apologetics.

Why can we not, for once, read the actual abusive words and call the spade a spade? Why does some zelot always need to emerge from the crowd to try to convince me that “Mussar is simply recognizing truth. True mussar is done with lots of love, and in perfect recognition of your unique state.”

*blurgh* That’s the sound of me throwing up in my mouth a little.

Fun Trivia tidbit: The drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, portrayed here and one of my favorite movies, was named Sgt. Hartman. He was played by actor R. Lee Ermey. The combination is the inspiration for this cover’s Rabbi’s nam

Chapter #4: Good and Evil

When I became bar mitzvah, things got intense. I knew that everything until then had been child’s play, just practice for the real thing. Now we were playing for real, and every move I make and every law I break, He’ll be watching me.

I remember breaking down and crying to my parents around that time. I didn’t understand why we studied Torah. What was the point? Especially if the law wasn’t practical or applicable, why study it at all?

It ached me deeply to not have absolute clarity, to not completely understand why I was doing something. I was walking with my parents while asking them this and we happened to bump into Rav Neventzal, the community rabbi. They asked him the question on my behalf, and he smiled and gave some sort of answer. It satisfied me enough back then, but I can’t remember what it was now.

To do this day, I say, “give me a WHY and I can deal with any WHAT.” There were so many why’s missing, but I KNEW the premise was true and it was simply my lack of clarity that was at fault.

So I lived with the pain.

I would wake up at 6:40 am and go pray. I would actually walk to and from synagogue while reading a halacha book, just a to get a bit more in. If Rav Neventzal could do it, why couldn’t I? I would run through the six constant mitzvos in my head on a loop. I would visualize God’s tetragrammaton name in front of my eyes when I walked down the street, the way the Shulchan Aruch says you should.

I prayed longer than anyone else. I would try to let the words affect me on an intuitive level. To become Baruch, to live Ata, to experience Adonai. I would usually finish when chazaras hashatz was finishing up, and then have to rush to catch up.

For several years, I was the official ba’al koreh at aish for mincha. I loved the responsibility and the attention. Here was a chance to be good at something, to play a role, to be indispensable. I would arrive late to my family’s third meal because I prioritized my obligations over them.

I used to experience excruciating stomach pains every Shabbat morning during prayers. It felt like ulcers. I know they were a combination of eating funny the night before and then not eating at all the next morning for hours, coupled with good old anxiety, my lifelong friend.

In general, although I had school on Shabbat, it was only for two hours, and I didn’t enjoy going. But I would feel guilty about not doing so, and the rabbis would try to pressure me to come. Either way, I would try to study on my own for a bit, but the general lack of structure just left me alone with my anxiety.

I would get bored, so fucking bored on Shabbat afternoons that I’d get horny. And without the usual pornography to get me by, I needed to entertain myself in more old fashioned ways. Let’s just say theirs is nothing more creative than a teenage boy trying to get himself off, and leave it at that. Except maybe, for a teenage boy trying *accidentally* get himself off, because to masturbate on purpose, is, to quote the Shulchan Aruch, “the worst possible sin, akin to murder”.

So I didn’t want to be a murderer, but I also wanted to get off, and that vicious cycle of sinning and trying my hardest to counter balance with as much good deeds as I could, is a summary of my entire teenage years and into my early twenties.

And it wasn’t just atonement.

“If you could only be spiritual enough and fill yourself with enough Torah,” the rabbis taught, “these evil thoughts would not come into your head in the first place.” So apparently I was just not trying hard enough. And I could barely live with myself.

You know those plane crashes? Those terror attacks? All the evil in the world? That was me. I had the spiritual power to protect the world, protect the world, and apparently I was sucking at it. And hey, a literal jerkoff like myself, was it much of a surprise?

So I tried harder, and I shuckled faster, and I remember the horrible, helpless, sinking feeling when I heard the echo of the #14 suicide bus bombing come rolling through the beis midrash windows.

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Chapter #5: Gemarah

9th grade came around, which was a whole new level. Yeshiva Ketana is 3 years of “Junior High school”, which meant a different part of the neighborhood, finishing at 9:30 every evening, and studying Gemarah for the first time.

If I thought Mishna was difficult, Gemarah was a whole new level of density, sentences and concepts that didn’t make sense and questions that had no answers. I would dread class every day, because it represented another page that I had to absolutely master, with blood tears and toil, day after day. Again, no one else seemed to struggle as much, mostly because they didn’t care as much.

And I was obsessed with remembering it all. Every day I’d get tested on that day’s material and knew it by heart, but I needed to remember everything I’d ever learned. There’s a phenomena, we were told, that if you didn’t review Torah you’d just forget it (unlike other subjects, which supposedly you studied once and remembered for ever. We knew no other subjects with which to compare it to). That way you’d always be busy and never get into trouble.

So I read most of tractate Shabbat over 24 times, which is the equivalent of reading all the Talmud once. But I could not find happiness, because for everything I remembered, there seemed more that I forgot.

In my second year, I was put in the more advanced class with Rabbi Boaz Kaplinsky. He was a short, potbellied man, who was tremendously entertained by his own intellect and sharpness of mind. He would utter nuggets of Talmudic wisdom and complex logic while smirking in the most self-satisfied way possible, and I did not understand a thing.

This was my first experience with someone who moved their lips and words came out, but for the life of me I couldn’t understand a fucking word he was saying. I became incredibly frustrated, and it was only after my parents threatened to switch me schools was a moved to the lower class, where I did much better. Rav Boaz later died in a car crash along with his wife.

We were all post bar mitzvah, and at my school they didn’t just wear Tefillin during morning prayers. They wore them all day. The kids would run around like animals during recess wearing little leather boxes that were supposed to remind them of God’s constant presence. I never felt worthy of wearing these throughout the day and I found mine, which were larger than average, to be physically uncomfortable. Some rabbis pressured me to do so anyway, but even when I did I would take them off during recess.

It was during this era that I also discovered pornography. I was always anxious, and escaping into porn was a logical turn of events for me. This was the age of dial up, and I’d sneak on to my father’s computer whenever I could get my hands on it. It started out with some innocent searches and spiraled rapidly, and every day saw me compulsively binging, then guiltily running back to school feeling like a terrible human and trying my hardest to outweigh my sins with the virtue of study.

At the time, I harbored a lot of resentment towards my parents for letting me access unfiltered internet. I wished they’d remove the temptation, but of course I could never overtly ask for that – half of me wanted to continue binging, plus it would be an admission of wrongdoing, a mortifying thought. To this day, I wish I’d been exposed to sex in a more healthy way – I learned how babies are made from an encyclopedia entry and cemented my understanding with some good old fashioned porn.

One Friday afternoon, after finishing school at 3:30, I spent my last hour before Shabbat expressing my creativity by creating a religious parody of The Matrix. I was charedi Neo, with a black hat. My sister Tema was Trinity. I cast my Hebrew-speaking neighbors in supporting roles, feeding them their English lines word by word. My father filmed. It was epic. The following week I was called to the principal, who always knew everything, and was told to never do that again. It was years until I did.

I used to miss an hour of school every week to take a guitar lesson. I considered this tremendously open minded on the part of the school, to let me “have an outlet”. I was the nerd who played classical guitar and listened to classic rock while everyone around me listened to the terrible excuse for disco and brass hits that is Charedi “music”.

Overall though, my years in yeshiva ketana were my best school years. There was the right mixture of structure and independence, and I was able to get into a flow. I would spend long hours in self-directed study under the watchful eye of the rosh yeshiva, Rav Yirmiyeh Zilberman.

He would sit at the back of the room, like the train robber with the shotgun, so you never knew if he was watching or even there at all, without turning around. But that was alright with me, because I knew what the right thing to do was, and to the best of my ability, I was doing it.

Full chapter list (Available in eBook Form)

Chapter #6: Yeshiva Gedola

12th grade is the first year of Yeshiva gedola. Literally the big leagues, this is the first year of the rest of your life. You enter a study hall that could literally be the place you sit for the next 50 years. My classmates are still there 12 years later.

Now your hours go until 11 oclock at night, so if you live outside the neighborhood, you definitely need to live in a dorm and come home to visit every couple of weeks.

In yeshiva gedola, all structure drops out from under your feet. No one gives a shit anymore if you are there or not. It’s at this age that wayward yeshiva bochurim start getting into epic trouble because no one is preventing them from doing anything, they just get caught and punished after the fact.

I was not prepared for this total lack of structure. I was not disciplined enough, nor did I enjoy studying enough, to just do it on my own. So I spent a lot of time in my bedroom playing guitar licks and avoiding my mother’s reproachful questions of “don’t I have school?”

Eventually, it became apparent that “it was time for change”. For years my parents had mentioned how one day I would move from my unusual information-focused school and into something more “conventional” where logic and conformity are key.

I’d held out at my school, despite some rocky patches, for 11 and a half years, but now it was time to transition to a “mainstream” school where I would certainly be happy because “I’d get my questions answered”.

Apparently, my entire dissatisfaction with school, according to my parents, was that I was not stimulated enough. If I would only go to a place that studied “B’iyun” surely there I would fly. A bunch of “experts” told them this, so there was no doubt this would be the case. I believed it as well.

In fact, remember Reb Avrohom Cohen from Chapter 2? He, and several other people over the years, was hired to study with me at nights, to prepare more for “mainstream” yeshivas. In those places, they spent years stretching their minds to the extremes of logical debate, and I needed to be up to par with all that practice.

I remember exhaustedly blinking at the page evening after evening as some rabbi tutor enthusiastically tried explaining to me the nuances of in-depth study. It’s only years later that I realize that the exhaustion had nothing to do with physical tiredness.

It was time to move schools, and once I started wandering, I never stopped.

Full chapter list (Available in eBook Form)

Sex

Sample from chapter #1:

Sex in Judaism is a beautiful thing. It’s also terrible. When you do it at the right time, it’s amazing. God himself sits there watching you and jerks off while you’re going at it. When you climax, he does too.

Did you know? The relationship between God and the Jews can be inferred from the relationship between a husband and wife! Look at all those sexy metaphors King Solomon was writing about. All the boobs and the shiny teeth? He was totally referring to God. By examining the dynamic between a man and woman, you can learn how to relate to God: just like a man fucks his wife, so too God fucks the Jewish people.

So sex between a loving husband and wife is wonderful. Except if you do too much of it. Then it’s terrible. Because it’s a really a very physical act, and we don’t want you being with your wife all the time, like a chicken.

You gotta strike a balance, and you’d best consult with a Rabbi on this regard. Bonus points if he actually knows you. Bonus bonus points if you picked him because his opinion aligns with yours.

Judaism thinks sex is so awesome, in fact, that it’s pretty much the first thing you should do when you get married and can touch your wife for the first time. But after doing it once you should wait like two weeks, because let’s not get carried away.

Did I mention that Mikvah night is like, the holiest thing ever in Judaism? Except for Tefillin. And Shabbat. Niddah is like a monthly honeymoon, it’s magical. That alone should make all you ladies in the room become religious. However, after menopause, there’s no more need for honeymoons apparently, so go for it whenever.

But wait. There’s a right way and wrong way to do it. Lots of wrong ways, in fact. Here’s a long list of things you can’t do, but hey, except for those, enjoy yourself! Not too much though, you don’t want to get all caught up in physicality.

Be careful not to use a condom, you’re basically spilling seed because it doesn’t count as being in the woman. But don’t think you can get away with sleeping with random people and using a condom, that totally still counts as adultery – dude, you’re inside her. You’re pretty much fucked both ways, is my point.

Masturbation is the worst sin ever. It’s like murder. Except for sleeping with a Niddah woman, which is obviously worse, duh.

The forefathers are totally a model for how to have a healthy, loving relationship. Except for the four wives part. You can’t do that these days. Unless you’re Yemenite, than you can.

Even King David totally fucked up when it came to sex, see? Everyone is human and no one is immune. Also, Kind David definitely did not mess up in that regard, you need to understand the nuance of what was happening there.

Judaism teaches husbands to treat women with the utmost respect. You gotta make sure she orgasms first! Also, feel free to have sex with her whenever you want, you basically own her, so consent isn’t much of a thing and you can easily divorce her on those grounds if that stuff’s not aligning to your plan.

Ha! The hole in a sheet thing? That’s totally a myth. Except for that one Hassidic group who basically does it. And that one famous rabbi from the Talmud. But still, hey, us normal people? We get to have fun nudge nudge, wink wink.

No, not like that, you’re doing it wrong.

Chapter #7: Ramat Shlomo

The summer that was the second half of 12th grade, I finally switched yeshivas. My friend had moved to this place a year before, and my parents “had heard good things”. This was a place that studid “iyun” in depth, but had a respect for breadth.
They didn’t want to accept me at first, but they finally acquiesced.

It was to be my first time in a dorm, and I have never experienced worse accommodations in my life.

The entire yeshiva was tiny, about 15 guys. About 6 were total bums, and the rest were total nerds. The dorms were a prefabricated “caravan” structure a block away from the yeshiva. The bums had taken over the bigger dorm room and stayed up late smoking and talking with the lights on. This forced the rest of us nerds into a tiny room, where we basically slept one on top of each other.

The guy below me would sleep with all his clothes on, minus his socks. He never cut his toenails, to prevent them from becoming ingrown. Do you know what happens to toenails when you never cut them? Google it. No man should ever see what I saw.

We shared one bathroom amongst all of us. It smelled of shit and mold, and there were these little flies that kind of lived on the walls. They never flew, but they never went away either. The floor was broken, unattached tiles. The door didn’t lock, to keep it closed you dragged a pile of plastic chairs in front of it. The sewage, apparently, dumped itself unceremoniously right outside our caravan, and the most luxuriant foliage was growing in that spot.

At some point, the yeshiva made a feeble attempt at building a better bathroom. They took down the old sinks and started building two new shower stalls. But they never completed them, and now the living area was a bunch of cinderblocks and drywall, and the sinks were more like troughs, balanced on some cinderblocks a few inches from the floor. You had to bend over double to brush your teeth.

Every day I’d study with a tutor to bring me up to the snuff that everyone had from years of “iyun” study. I would constantly fight exhaustion, which would magically disappear the moment the studying was over. My fellow classmates were weird and unrelatable, they could barely hold a conversation and it was like we were from a different universe.

There was some rabbi who would come every day and give a class on what we had learned. He was supposedly a genius, and, once again, I got to experience someone saying words without understanding a word of what they meant.

After just three months of this, as the term was coming to a close, it became apparent that because of some sort of inner politics the school, which had been an experiment to begin with, was shutting down. This was why they hadn’t wanted me to attend in the first place, apparently. It would have been nice of them to actually say so.

Either way, it was time to find another school.

Full chapter list (Available in eBook Form)

The Zebra Effect

Some questions I had about Judaism, I got answers that worked, to a point.

There were explanations that fit within a larger framework. And as long as that framework was intact, the answers worked.

“Why does the Torah tell us to do this or that?”
“Because God said so.”

Fair enough.

I can struggle with accepting or implementing that answer, but as long as I believe that God really did say so, the answer is a valid one.

Other questions, one that are deeper, that question core philosophies, are harder to answer.

And this is one of them. How do we know that God is essentially good? This is the operating assumption behind all of Judaism (and most other religions, I can only assume).

But who says? Even if we experience exactly 50% of both positive and negative experiences in the world, we’ll suffer more than we’ll enjoy because of the negativity bias.

I was never able to satisfactorily wrap my head around the assumption that God is essentially good and all the suffering is there as a lesson, instead of, say, a sadist who occasionally throws you a bone.

“So why did he create this world with all its pleasures, if not for our benefit?” Well, firstly, it wasn’t very hard for him to do, all the pleasure that he maybe threw in just to distract us from the pain he was causing us. Maybe we should rephrase the question: “Why else would he create all of these afflictions if not to make us suffer in creative ways?”

Dunno. I never got an emotionally convincing answer to this one.

Would Your Parents Lie to You?

“No other religion claims to have experienced public revelation. Therefore, it’s a claim that is so outlandish, that it must have actually occurred because otherwise no one else would have been stupid enough to believe in it, or brazen enough to ‘introduce’ it into the cultural narrative.”

Thus goes the claim that is at the heart of much of the “proof” behind the Torah’s metaphysical validity. It’s a huge part of the Discovery Seminar, and it’s the keystone upon which hundreds of outlandish demands are made upon the Jewish psyche in the name of a higher power.

The funny thing about this proof is it makes way too many assumptions about human gullibility, or lack thereof. Look around you – regardless of your religion, I am sure you can see millions of people doing the stupidest things with the utmost fervor.

Think of all the historical assumptions people have that are downright wrong. We have all sorts of stories and urban legends that millions of people assume are true but are absolutely false.

“Ah,” you say. “But public revelation states that everyone was there at once. How do you just ‘insert’ that into a narrative?”

You don’t.

You let things evolve over hundreds of years. It starts with a legend of a few people being there. And slowly people embellish it until it’s “the entire Jewish people”. Or you start with a legend from a neighboring religion, and you slowly adapt it as your own.

There’s a myriad of ways that really dumb practices, beliefs, and narratives have made their way into a culture (circumcision, both male and female, anyone?) and chances are those ideas didn’t make their way in overnight.

Let’s turn this premise on its head.

How likely is it that there were 2 million Jews in Egypt at the time?

And that’s without the medrash that 80% of them died during the plagues. World population estimates are that there were between 27 and 72 million people in the entire world at the time.

You really think that 2.5 to 7% of the entire world population got up out of one country, crowded around a mountain, and then colonized another country 40 years later?

How did someone actually make that shit up in a way that so many people actually believe it?

Because myths are a powerful thing, my friend.

The kiruv world especially, puts human logic on a pedestal when it’s convenient to do so: “who would believe such dumb shit if it wasn’t actually true?”; and shreds it to pieces when it’s unhelpful: “how can our weak minds even comprehend / come up with a valid answer / trust ourselves without a higher power?”

Let’s not break down human behavior to pure facts when it’s convenient, instead of factoring layers of emotion, cultural norms, and time to explain the epic stupidity of many human beliefs.

So to answer the question posed on this cover – would your parents lie to you? Yes, yes they would. But not on purpose.

Someone else lied to them first.

The Big Three

From the back cover:

Are you worried that someone from the secular world will ask you a question about Judaism that you don’t have an answer for?
Are you heading out to a campus to inspire others about Judaism with only a tenuous amount of knowledge of it yourself?
Are you concerned that all the things you do that make zero sense will turn people off to the “richness of their heritage”?

Fret no more.

This simple primer will allow you to dispel any question with one of three simple answers. Use each when it’s most appropriate, or stack them together to create a truly ironclad case.

Here are The Three Answers To All Questions:

THE LOGICAL

Why would God allow a man to keep his wife married against her will?

“You have to understand that it all is a part of a larger framework:

It all starts with a belief in God, because after all, who created the world?
And then He gave specific instructions to the Jewish people, which by the way, no one else has ever claimed to receive so publicly.
So now that’s that out of the way, we’ll do whatever we’re instructed to.”

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL

Not touching your wife while she’s menstruating?

“Here’s the psychological reason why that’s actually a really nice thing, and let’s ignore all the not nice parts of it that don’t make sense (like when she’s giving birth).”

THE SPIRITUAL

Not cutting your toenails in order?

“There’s a Kabalistic idea behind that. I don’t know what it is, but it’s there.”

Now go forth and save the Jewish people.

Chapter #8: Beitar

The way you get into yeshiva is the exact opposite of red tape. It is the absolute shitshow of a free for all.

You kind of stand around the dean’s office and hope to bump into him. You talk to someone who knows someone who might be able to put in a word. You never get a clear answer as to whether you’re actually accepted or not – in fact, one tactic involves just showing up and hoping for the best.

I remember at some point later on, trying to get into the Mir. I am not a haggler. I don’t “know people”. I don’t pull strings. I do things by the book. Take me or leave me. I was forced to try talking to multiple people, who all indicated that they had no interest in giving me the time of day. I finally waited outside the house of Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel for a while. I eventually got in to see him. He had advanced Parkinsons, and when I asked him if I could attend his yeshiva, I could not, for the life of me, understand a word he was saying in reply. I eventually figured out it was a no.

So the search was on for a new Yeshiva. And I had no clue how it was done. I picked one place I wanted to go to, but couldn’t even figure out how to apply. Finally, someone suggested The Shithole Yeshiva in Beitar. “It isn’t the best,” acknowledged my parents. “So you’ll go there for a year or two, get up to snuff, and then upgrade.” Solid plan.

The Shithole Yeshiva was located in the middle of the shithole charedi city of Beitar in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, an hour bus ride from Jerusalem. The bus was armored, because this was the middle of the second intifada and Beitar is in the middle of the West Bank, and it would often break down along the way because its engine was not designed for the extra armor plating that was added to it.

As was usual for me by this point, I was treated differently. They gave me a hard time getting admitted, and I was then placed two years below my grade because of my supposedly feeble logic skills. I had not learned to bullshit my way through the day like most people do in Yeshiva from second grade onward.

I asked real questions, from my own brain, about things that actually mattered to me. Everyone else made pretend they were asking questions, based off other people’s thoughts, about things they didn’t give a shit about.

The Shithole Yeshiva actually had brand new dormitories, which literally felt like a hotel compared to where I had just come from. But everyone pretty much in the school was second-rate, a bunch of misfits who hadn’t made it into a first-tier yeshiva.

I hated it. I was placed in a room full of bums who didn’t care about studying, so I hated that too.

I complained, and was moved into a room with three of the biggest freaks I had ever encountered: the guy who peed all over the toilet seat and ran around the yeshiva avoiding eye contact while rubbing his hands and cackling manically.
The guy who grew a beard just so people would think he was more religious.
The guy whose feet stunk so bad he literally had to hide his socks in an electric closet down the hallway.

It was hell, and I struggled a lot for the first few months. I finally hit my groove around March and lo, that was the month when yeshiva descends into a month of chaos in preparation for Purim and the month-long Passover break.

I was new to all of this, because I had never had a vacation in my life until then. Only “mainstream” schools had month long Passover vacations. I hated almost my entire vacation, feeling aimless and unstructured. I finally hit the vacation groove in my last week, just as school was starting up again. I never recovered.

That year was one of my worst years at Yeshiva. I was exposed to the dark side of the Orthodox world. The people who were non-committal, didn’t give a fuck, and at most just went through the motions. I couldn’t believe that such insincerity existed, and I wanted no part of it. These were people who transformed the process of making a cup of coffee into a half hour extravaganza just so they could burn some time.

And then there was the boredom. School wasn’t cutting it for me. But I was trapped in bumfuck Beitar with no way to stay busy or escape. I remember smuggling a guitar and John Grisham novels into my dorm room, but it was only a matter of time before the Rosh Yeshiva caught me reading in my bed instead of being in the study hall.

It was time, once again, to move on.

Full chapter list (Available in eBook Form)

Freidom Fighter – Mockery Will Set you Free

Mussar

Chapter #4: Good and Evil

Chapter #5: Gemarah

Chapter #6: Yeshiva Gedola

Sex

Chapter #7: Ramat Shlomo

The Zebra Effect

Would Your Parents Lie to You?

The Big Three

THE LOGICAL

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL

THE SPIRITUAL

Chapter #8: Beitar

Current Weather in Hell

Even More Freidom

A letter to my father

Call Me Noah – The Musical

About Face

Conditioning for Pleasure

Salad Bar Religion