Leading With The Head
Can you influence influencers?
We live in a really strange world. Braden Peters, the streamer known online as Clavicular, five months removed from a video that surfaced from a Miami nightclub called Vendôme, where he and a rotating cast of far-right streamers sang along to a Kanye West track built from a sampled Hitler speech, doing salutes as it played, visited Israel this past week with a popular Chabad influencer named Yossi Farro. Before this moment, the 22-year-old Chabad tefillin-wrapper had made a career out of getting famous people to put on tefillin on camera. This visit had the Jewish world abuzz.
It went everywhere partly because Peters had the aforementioned Nazi adjacent incident in addition to being subject to an ongoing lawsuit of sexual assault. Not exactly the type you’d be expecting a Jewish influencer to be accompanying to Israel! There has been a huge outcry online labeling Farro’s olive branch as whitewashing, accusing him of legitimizing someone who trivialized the murder of six million Jews. The major sentiment has been that Farro shouldn’t extend hospitality until Peters offers a real public accounting. Peters still hasn’t apologized for Vendôme.
So: was Farro right to engage him? That’s the question everyone’s shouting about. While that question is interesting to engage in, I think there’s another one that should precede it.
Farro and his defenders have an answer in the form of a precedent: the Lubavitcher Rebbe himself modeled exactly this kind of engagement. In the 1980s, the Rebbe caught a lot of flak after Chabad honored Senator Jesse Helms, a man many at the time saw as hostile to Israel. The Rebbe’s reply was simple1. Beyond noting that he wasn’t explicitly honored but invited, the point of engaging a public figure isn’t to reward who they’ve been; it’s to move who they might become. Years later, Helms became one of the Senate’s strongest voices for Israel. This case has served for Farro as proof for his approach with Clavicular.
The truth is, this instinct has real roots in the Tanya, the 1st Lubavitcher Rebbe’s magnum opus that serves as the foundational text for Chabad chassidut. The Alter Rebbe’s (as he’s also knwon) basis for outreach to any Jew, sinner or saint is that you address the soul, not the deed. The Rebbe extended that logic outward to non-Jews too. Nobody, on this view, is a closed case. It’s a metaphysical claim about what a person actually is underneath their worst moment.
So far, Farro has precedent but the trouble is in the details of the precedent.
The Rebbe’s meeting with Helms was private. There were no viral set ups. Where Farro attempted to, in his opinion, use the public sphere as a mechanism for character change, the Rebbe believed in the power of a private, diplomatic approach. It was designed to produce a measurable outcome, and it did.
The entire economy the Farro/Clavicular encounter takes place in runs on the opposite logic from the Rebbe’s private diplomacy. It monetizes reaction, which may be a success given the amount of views and thinkpieces it engendered (ironic given that I too am part of the speaking into the void!) A commenter wishing Peters ill and a commenter defending him generate the same ad revenue. Farro operates in that same attention economy, by his own admission largely uninterested in politics beyond “a lot of the people I wrap tefillin with happen to support Trump,” which is to say, he goes where the engagement is.
But back to the Alter Rebbe’s approach for a moment, as there is a distinction which I believe undermines Farro’s attempt here. This is the framework the Tanya’s own vocabulary gives us: mochin-mental capacities versus middot-emotional impulses:
כִּי הַמּוֹחַ שַׁלִּיט עַל הַלֵּב [כְּמוֹ שֶׁכָּתוּב בְּרַעְיָא מְהֵימְנָא פָּרָשַׁת פִּנְחָס] בְּתוֹלְדָתוֹ וְטֶבַע יְצִירָתוֹ, שֶׁכָּךְ נוֹצַר הָאָדָם בְּתוֹלְדָתוֹ, שֶׁכָּל אָדָם יָכוֹל בִּרְצוֹנוֹ שֶׁבְּמוֹחוֹ לְהִתְאַפֵּק וְלִמְשׁוֹל בְּרוּחַ תַּאֲוָתוֹ שֶׁבְּלִבּוֹ...
For the mind rules over the heart [as is written in the Zohar] by nature and the way it was formed…every person can, by the will in his mind, restrain himself and rule over the spirit of desire in his heart..."
What I am quoting here is just a drop in the sea of this thought in larger mystical literature. For all intents and purposes, in the Alter Rebbe’s approach, sustained meditation on the mochin, one’s mental faculties, transforms the middot, which then governs action. It’s the mental foundation that shapes the emotional life. Or, in our case, mind versus impulse. Was this thought through with a theory of change, the way the Helms meeting was? Or was it driven by the pull of a viral moment, the animal soul’s appetite for spectacle, dressed as bringing a perceived enemy closer? We don’t know right now but time will tell the answer.
Another layer of text also gives us a way of engaging with the question of this encounter. Maimonides, the medieval sage, gets more useful than the Rebbe-Helms analogy, because he gives us an actual test instead of just a precedent to invoke.
In part of his seminal legal work, Mishneh Torah, he lays down the operating principle behind a whole list of situations where you should stay silent: don’t console a mourner before the burial, don’t talk someone out of a vow mid-utterance, don’t reason with someone in the grip of rage. The principle underneath all of it is:
אִם רוֹאֶה שֶׁדְּבָרָיו מוֹעִילִים וְנִשְׁמָעִים אוֹמֵר וְאִם לָאו שׁוֹתֵק
If he sees that his words will be effective, and will be given attention, he should speak; if not, he should keep silent.
His wording is important here. It’s not “heeded” in the sense of “agreed with”; it’s nishma’im, are the words really heard. And the Rambam’s examples are about hearing it right now, in this state. The test is “can he receive anything at all, in the condition he’s currently in?”
To me, this reframes the whole Clavicular question. Instead of it being about his growth from antisemite…to rational human, it’s: is a person whose entire brand and livelihood depends on performing transgression, in a state where he’s structurally capable of hearing anything real?
That’s the crack in Farro’s Helms analogy that feels most salient. In the Maimonides framing, all of the states of emotion in which he says to wait for engagement are temporary states, which is exactly why the Rambam tells you to wait, not walk away. Silence there is patience.
But what ends Peters’s unavailability, if his entire identity and income are structured around curating a permanent persona? There’s no obvious moment where the state changes, because the persona is the product, and the product doesn’t get retired just because a Rabbi fawns over you in the Jewish state. If the unavailability is structural rather than temporary, the Rambam’s suggestion of silence becomes the actually correct read of the situation. Words aimed at someone who cannot, by the logic of his own business model, receive them are vanity wearing outreach as a costume.
In my humble opinion, this all means something more specific and less comfortable: that the framework built for a private conversation with a Senator doesn’t transfer cleanly to a livestreamed one with an influencer, and that Farro, or anyone doing this kind of outreach, owes themselves the Rambam’s question before they owe the moment their camera.
The question I’d actually put to Farro is less “how could you?” and more, what, specifically, would you have called success here? If there’s a real answer, something as concrete as Helms’s Senate vote, then he may have more of the Rebbe’s precedent behind him than (I) and his critics are giving him credit for. If there isn’t one, then whatever this was, it’s something more pernicious that is quite detrimental to Jewish peoplehood.
Broadening the scope of this incident, the Rambam’s framing is quite apt, especially for this strange world in which we live. When we’re choosing to engage with folks, especially those on radically different ideological points, before we even get into the work, there’s an assessment to be done. Are they a person who can really hear? The answer should guide our actions just as the Tanya asked us to remember that our mochin, that powerful intellect we have, can guide our middot, those pesky emotional impulses we have.
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Weekend!
I am aware that Shmuley Boteach has been explicit in arguing that this comparison isn’t apt here because Helms was never antisemitic in the first place. My argument is different as I think even if he was an avowed antisemite, the Rebbe’s whole argument was explicit about this. From his own letter in response: “I believe, therefore, that the proper approach to such persons by Jewish leaders should not be rigid. As a rule, it does no good to engage in a cold war, which may often turn into a hot war; nor does it serve any useful purpose to brand one as an “enemy” or an “antisemite,” however tempting it is to do so even if that person vehemently denies it.”