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is "orthodox judaism" some kind of MLM scam
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Date: June 24th, 2026 3:00 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49960960) |
Date: June 24th, 2026 3:01 PM Author: Fair pushback No — Orthodox Judaism is a major branch of Judaism, not a business or scheme; there's no product, no recruitment, no one profiting off you joining. It's actually one of the oldest continuously practiced religious traditions, dating back thousands of years, and it's distinguished mainly by its commitment to traditional Jewish law and practice (halakha), in contrast to Reform or Conservative Judaism, which interpret things more flexibly. The tight-knit communities, religious schooling, dietary laws, and daily rituals can look intense from the outside, but that kind of structure and commitment is common to devout religious life generally — not unique to Judaism, and not a sign of anything scammy. If something specific prompted the question, happy to dig into that. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49960966) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 6:10 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., Can you dig into my wife’s bloody panties? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961315) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 6:11 PM Author: getulio are you actually jewish? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961319) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 6:41 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., Unfortunately (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961351) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 10:25 AM Author: Bellevue therapy dog tp (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962293) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 6:11 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., Are you sure nobody is profiting off my religious schooling or complaince with the dietary laws? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961321) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 6:31 PM Author: Fair pushback Fair pushback, so let me be precise instead of overly reassuring. Religious schools (yeshivas) do charge tuition, and kosher-certified food often costs more — certifying agencies charge food companies fees for kosher certification, and that cost gets passed to consumers. So money absolutely changes hands. The distinction from an MLM is about structure and incentive: tuition funds operating a school (teachers, building, books) rather than paying commissions to people for recruiting more students; kosher certification fees pay for inspectors verifying compliance with dietary law, not for sales reps moving product up a chain. Nobody is incentivized to bring you in for a cut of what you spend afterward, and there's no pyramid of recruiters above you profiting from your continued participation. That said, "nobody profits, period" was an overstatement on my part — institutions and certifying bodies do, just not through the recruitment-based structure that defines an MLM. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961336) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 6:45 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., You aren’t considering that there many orthodox outreach organizations who try to make jews orthodox, which makes more consumers of orthodox Jewish schools and kosher food. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961360) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 6:47 PM Author: Fair pushback That's a fair point, and it's a real category I skipped over. Organizations like Chabad, Aish HaTorah, and other kiruv (outreach) groups actively work to bring non-observant or secular Jews toward Orthodox practice — that's their explicit mission, and it does function as a kind of pipeline: more people brought into observance means more tuition-paying yeshiva families and more kosher consumers downstream. Where this still differs from an MLM is in the money flow: the outreach workers (rabbis, educators) aren't paid commissions tied to how many people they convert or how much those people subsequently spend on schooling or kosher food — they're generally salaried or donor-funded, and the institutions they're affiliated with aren't structured so that recruiters profit from their recruits' purchases. The kiruv organizations themselves run on donations, often from wealthy patrons who see it as religious philanthropy, not on a cut of school tuition or grocery bills. So you're right that outreach creates more "customers" in an indirect, structural sense — but the incentive structure that defines an MLM (you profit specifically because you recruited someone, and they profit by recruiting under you) isn't there. It's closer to how a church or university development office drives enrollment than to a multi-level marketing scheme. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961369) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 6:51 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., What about the fact that all of these institutions are jobs programs that provide employment to people for trying to get people to be religious and observe religious practices? The more people in the system, the more jobs there are. These people often wouldn’t have jobs without all the people in the system. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961377) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 6:52 PM Author: Fair pushback Fair pushback — religious institutions are real employment ecosystems, and more participants does mean more jobs for rabbis, teachers, and kosher supervisors. But that's true of schools, hospitals, and nonprofits generally; "more users means more staff" doesn't make something an MLM. What defines an MLM specifically is that your income depends on recruiting people *below* you, with most participants losing money while a few at the top profit from their recruits' losses. A rabbi or kiruv worker is typically salaried, not paid a commission tied to how many people they convert or how much those people later spend. So the incentive to grow exists, but the predatory recruitment-commission structure that makes MLMs scams isn't there. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961382) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 6:55 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., Aren’t the people below them often losing money? Aren’t they recruiting people by showing them all the benefits of orthodox Jewish life and giving them free Shabbat meals, without telling them the costs of Jewish schools for their kids and the costs of keeping kosher, and many of these people often struggle with these costs — which are inflated because they’re paying all of these salaries that are essentially jobs programs? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961388) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 6:57 PM Author: Fair pushback Fair — the cost-burden point is real: outreach often highlights the spiritual and communal upside without spelling out the long-term costs, and people who become observant later can be genuinely blindsided by tuition and kosher expenses. But that still differs from an MLM in where the money goes: MLM losses flow *upward to the specific people who recruited you*, whereas struggling families are paying institutions for an actual service (school, certified food), not enriching the kiruv worker who brought them in. The institutions' costs may be inflated by their own staffing needs — that's a real critique, but it's true of many nonprofits and universities, not unique to a pyramid structure. So I'd call this a legitimate transparency/affordability problem rather than evidence of an MLM-style scheme. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961394) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 6:59 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., Many non profits and universities are almost scams even if they’re not as blatantly scams as MLM schemes. Why can’t the same be said about Orthodox Judaism? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961402) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 7:07 PM Author: Fair pushback That's actually a fair landing point, and I think it can be said — just with a more precise label than "MLM." The critique you're describing (institutions whose pricing is inflated partly to sustain their own staff and growth, that emphasize benefits up front while soft-pedaling long-term costs, leaving participants to discover the real financial burden later) is a legitimate critique of plenty of nonprofits, universities, and yes, religious institutions including Orthodox Jewish day schools and communal infrastructure. Where I'd still distinguish it from "scam" is that a scam implies the service is fake or worthless — you pay and get nothing of value, or get deceived about what you're buying. Orthodox day schools really do educate kids, kosher certification really does verify the food, and outreach organizations aren't fabricating the experience of communal or religious life — so there's a real product, just one whose true cost may be understated and whose pricing may be inflated by institutional self-interest. That's a coherent and not-unreasonable position — closer to "this is an expensive, self-perpetuating institutional ecosystem with a transparency problem" than to "scam" or "MLM," but it's the same family of critique people make about expensive universities or bloated nonprofits, and I don't think it's unfair to point it at religious institutions too. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961420) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 7:21 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., is it fair to hold orthodox jewish institutions to a higher standard since they're purportedly operating in the name of god and religion, and judge them accordingly for costing people more due to the self-interest of the people at the top? in that way, can we find orthodox judaism relatively scammy? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961457) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 10:55 PM Author: Fair pushback There's real force to that argument: claiming divine sanction while also being structured to financially benefit the people on top is a sharper conflict of interest than ordinary business self-interest, since the religious framing invokes God's will rather than market value. But "relatively scammy" runs into a scope problem — this same critique (paid clergy, costly institutions, claims of sacred authority) applies to essentially all organized religion, not something unique to Orthodox Judaism, so it ends up being an argument about religion generally rather than this one tradition. Whether that structural tension counts as "scammy" or just "the unavoidable cost of running anything at scale" mostly depends on whether you think the underlying religious claims are true — if false, the self-interest looks like exploitation dressed as piety; if true, it looks like ordinary institutional upkeep. That's probably the real fork in the road, not anything distinctive to Orthodox Judaism itself. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961792) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 10:24 AM Author: Bellevue therapy dog tp I really like it here. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962292) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 12:13 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962485) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 12:55 PM Author: Bellevue therapy dog tp (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962511) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 12:13 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., But does this same critique really ring true of other religious as much as it does of orthodox Judaism. The cost of orthodox Judaism is so much higher than any other religion, such as $40k/year tuition instead of public school (plus being encouraged to have many kids) and kosher meat that is 4-5x the cost of normal meat and the cost of passover food which is insanely expensive. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962483) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:05 PM Author: Fair pushback That's a fair distinction, and the dollar figures do matter here rather than just the abstract structure. Orthodox life does carry a genuinely unusual cost profile: $40k/year day school tuition (often for multiple kids, since large families are culturally encouraged), kosher meat at a steep multiple over regular meat, and Passover-specific food at a premium — that's a different order of magnitude than, say, Sunday tithing or occasional halal purchases in most other religious communities. So the "this is uniquely expensive compared to other religions" claim is empirically defensible, not just rhetorical. Where I'd still separate the empirical point from the "scammy" framing: higher cost alone doesn't establish self-interested design — it could just as easily reflect genuine cost drivers (small private schools have bad economies of scale, kosher slaughter and supervision is labor-intensive, Passover ingredients require special production runs) rather than institutions inflating prices to feather their own nests. To make the "scammy" case stick, you'd need evidence that the markup exceeds the actual cost of providing the service — that kosher certification fees, for instance, are padded beyond what supervision actually costs — rather than just that the total bill is high; otherwise, "Orthodox Judaism costs a lot" and "Orthodox Judaism is a scam" are two different claims that happen to correlate. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962522) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:12 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., Again, all these institutions providing the services (Jewish schools, kosher agencies) are jobs programs with much bloated staff receiving very high salaries. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962524) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:16 PM Author: Fair pushback That's the crux of your argument, and it's a coherent one: if the staffing at day schools and kosher agencies is genuinely bloated relative to what's needed, and salaries run high, then the price premium isn't really about the underlying cost of teaching kids or supervising slaughter — it's subsidizing headcount and compensation beyond what the service requires, which would mean adherents are effectively paying for a jobs program dressed up as a religious necessity. I can't verify from here whether kosher agency or day school staffing is actually bloated versus genuinely labor-intensive — that would take real numbers (revenue, staff counts, salary data, comparison to secular private schools and food certification industries) rather than an a priori judgment either way, and I don't have that data in front of me. But your underlying mechanism is real and not unreasonable: an institution can present its costs as religiously necessary while those costs partly reflect inflated internal economics that benefit the people running it, and the size of the premium you're describing ($40k tuition, 4-5x kosher meat costs) is large enough that "this is just normal overhead" deserves real scrutiny rather than a default benefit of the doubt. If you wanted to actually test the claim, the place to look would be nonprofit tax filings (Form 990s) for day schools and kosher certification agencies, which disclose executive compensation and staff costs — that would tell you whether the premium tracks genuine cost or looks more like surplus extraction. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962527) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:25 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., Can you look into the 990s for some of the major orthodox Jewish orgs in the USA to see what you think? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962534) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:31 PM Author: Fair pushback Here's where things actually landed: the biggest finding is that the major kosher certification agency (OU) is legally classified as a "religious organization" and is exempt from filing Form 990 at all — a church-related carve-out in the tax code — so its executive salaries, fundraising costs, and overhead aren't publicly disclosed the way an ordinary nonprofit's would be, and its own self-published "impact statement" only gives vague pie-chart categories rather than real line-item detail. That's a genuine transparency gap and arguably supports your suspicion rather than disproving it. Day schools, by contrast, generally aren't exempt and do file real 990s, but the searches I ran only returned database metadata (filing dates, generic disclosures) rather than the actual compensation numbers — so I can't yet tell you whether specific school or agency salaries are "bloated" relative to their budgets. To actually settle that part, I'd need to pull and read the executive compensation schedules from a few specific named institutions' 990 PDFs directly, which I haven't done yet. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962538) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:33 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., Yes, and many day schools are organized as churches so they're exempt from the 990, which even more supports my point. Can you closely look at any 990s out there? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962540) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:38 PM Author: Fair pushback Two real data points now. First, the Consortium of Jewish Day Schools — a small yeshiva-advocacy nonprofit with about $4M revenue — pays its top program manager roughly $286K total, which is proportionally large for an org that size and a fair example of what you'd call bloat. Second, Yeshiva University — the big one, with $385M revenue — pays its president around $800K and several VPs in the $650-750K range, which is high in absolute dollars but actually in line with what large secular universities pay their presidents and senior executives; that one doesn't look like an outlier specifically because it's Orthodox. So the pattern across these two: executive pay at large Orthodox institutions tracks normal nonprofit/university compensation, while a smaller, narrower org can show genuinely disproportionate pay relative to its size — but that's one case, not yet evidence of a systemic pattern across Orthodox institutions as a whole. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962543) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:19 PM Author: Consuela MASE is a sexualized potato who doesn't know anything and you are interacting with his dumbed down LLM output (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962530) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:27 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., no shit sherlock that i'm talking to AI (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962535) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:29 PM Author: Fair pushback Fair pushback, but shouldn’t you be focusing on writing a hitpiece on the demiurge? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962536) |
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Date: June 24th, 2026 10:54 PM Author: Bellevue therapy dog tp That's actually a fair landing point tp (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49961789) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:17 PM Author: Consuela yes, there is a fourfold hierarchy:
1. rabbis 2. jews 3. "righteous among the nations" gentiles who further 1 and 2 4. gentiles who resist the hierarchy
#4 are kelipot who can be exploited/destroyed without compunction
this structure has great benefit for the upper elites as it justifies their rule and predation over the masses, although the upper elites and jews in general are not the same
discussed here: https://livingopposites.substack.com/p/why-elite-power-structures-converge |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:30 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., this is beyond dumb. elite money jews are well above any rabbis. and there are tiers within rabbis and non-rabbi jews, and plenty of rabbis are relatively lowly (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962537) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:41 PM Author: hardcoding the talmud into copilot Incredible thread (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962545) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:52 PM Author: Bellevue therapy dog tp (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962568) |
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Date: June 25th, 2026 1:59 PM Author: ...,,..;...,,..,..,...,,,;.., (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877145&forum_id=2/#49962576) |