What Clavicular Might Learn at a Jewish Table

A kosher lunch won't fix everything. But it beats a screaming Instagram reel.

Yossi Farro is not a rabbi. He does not claim to be one. He is a content creator who has built a following by doing something genuinely unusual: bringing tefillin to celebrities, sharing Jewish practice with people who would never encounter it otherwise, and sitting down with human beings that polite Jewish society would rather pretend do not exist. That is his lane, and he works it with energy and sincerity.

His crime, according to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, was having a kosher lunch in Miami with a 20-year-old internet personality known as Clavicular, a “looksmaxxing” streamer with a large Gen Z following who has been associated with offensive rhetoric, including a “Heil Hitler” singalong. For this, Shmuley declared Farro a “Chabad neo-Nazi whitewasher,” accused him of “stomping on the Rebbe’s grave and the ashes of the six million,” and demanded in all capital letters that Farro be denied a Shabbos meal until a public apology was extracted. His son Mendy piled on via Instagram reel, insisting that Farro and others “cannot host a Shabbos meal” for Clavicular until he grovels sufficiently.

Consider what is actually being proposed here. A young man with millions of followers has somehow found his way into the orbit of someone who keeps kosher, wraps tefillin, and wants to show him a Shabbos table. And the Boteach family’s response is to slam that door shut. To scream at him. To make the price of entry a public act of contrition performed to their satisfaction.

Is he truly better off being screamed at? Is the Jewish community? Is the world?

The answer is no, and the reason is not complicated. Clavicular is, by all appearances, a 20-year-old who has absorbed the toxic meme culture of the internet and has very likely never sat across a table from a Jewish family, shared a meal, or encountered Judaism as a living civilization rather than a caricature. There is a decent chance he has no idea what he is actually talking about. He is parroting edge-lord content for clicks, not reading Mein Kampf by candlelight. The two are not the same, and conflating them is not moral clarity. It is moral laziness.

Farro understood something the Boteach family apparently does not: you do not teach someone by slamming the door in their face. You invite them in. You serve the cholent. You let them see what Jewish life actually looks like. Clavicular has a following (I don’t know why but that’s a different story). If he walks away from a Shabbos table having experienced authentic Judaism firsthand, that experience ripples outward to every one of his viewers in ways no angry Instagram reel ever could. Maybe he learns something. Maybe his followers do too. That is not naivety. That is strategy. It is, in fact, the entire Chabad model that Shmuley now claims to be defending.

I do not agree with everything Yossi Farro does. There are times when his choices give me pause, and I have said so. But when I have raised concerns with him privately, he has always been receptive. He listens. He engages. He does not retreat behind a wall of outrage.

Which brings us to the question of who is lecturing him about moral standards.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who styles himself “America’s Rabbi” and invokes the Rebbe’s legacy with the frequency of a man who has trademarked it, is the chairman of a family-owned company called “Kosher Sex,” which sells adult products including the full range of intimacy toys. It is co-run with his daughter Chana, who operates a physical Kosher Sex storefront in Tel Aviv. Shmuley himself announced the launch of a branded lubricant. This is the man who now thunders from his Substack that Farro is “desecrating the Rebbe’s legacy” by having lunch with a confused young man.

The hypocrisy is not merely ironic. It is disqualifying. This is a man who spent years as Michael Jackson’s close friend and spiritual adviser, insisting he did not believe the abuse allegations against the singer, only to reverse course after watching the Leaving Neverland documentary in 2019 and declare that he believed the accusers were not lying. He co-authored a book lionizing Jackson and released secret recordings of their private conversations. You do not get to invoke the sanctity of the six million in one breath, hawk adult products under a rabbinic brand in the next, and spend years covering for a man credibly accused of abusing children, and then present yourself as the arbiter of who is permitted to sit at a Jewish table.

Shmuley’s Substack piece argues that there is a profound difference between reaching out to the uneducated and rehabilitating those who glorify evil. It sounds serious until you apply it to a 20-year-old whose entire identity is built on internet provocation. Shmuley wants us to believe Clavicular is a hardened ideologue beyond the reach of a Shabbos meal. The evidence suggests he is a lost kid who has never been shown a better way.

Screaming at people does not change hearts. It hardens them. It confirms their worst suspicions about the people doing the screaming and drives them further from any possibility of genuine encounter. The cancel culture that the Jewish right has rightly condemned when practiced by the progressive left does not become virtuous when practiced in a kippah.

None of this means the question is simple. There is a genuine and important line between giving someone a chance to learn and lending them a platform they have not earned. Where exactly that line falls is not always obvious, and reasonable people can disagree. An influencer who has mocked Jewish suffering is not the same as a committed ideologue, but he is also not a blank slate. That tension deserves to be taken seriously, and anyone doing outreach work at this level should be asking those questions constantly.

What is not serious is pretending the line is so clear that it requires no thought at all. The Boteach family has not grappled with that question. They have simply drawn a circle, declared Clavicular beyond it, and attacked anyone who disagrees.

Yossi Farro holds no rabbinic title. He has no institutional backing, no Substack, no branded lubricant. He is a young man with a phone and a pair of tefillin trying to figure out, in real time, how to bring people closer to something worth knowing. He will not always get it right. But he is at least asking the right questions. That is more than can be said for the people screaming at him.