Shalom Brothers: What Men Catch (Emor)

Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed — Executive Director, FJMC International

Shlomo Bardin, the visionary founder of Brandeis-Bardin, famously taught that Judaism is “caught, not taught.” He was right, and also only half right. Judaism is contagious. It travels through melody, gesture, hospitality, rhythm, meals, posture, atmosphere. It gets into a person through the body before it ever settles into the mind. That is why camps, retreats, and living communities matter so much. But Judaism is also taught: in texts, in classrooms, in argument, in disciplined practice, in the patient transmission of wisdom from one generation to the next. Jewish life needs both instruction and infection. It needs teaching, and it needs a culture worth catching. The same is true of masculinity.

Men do not become men only because someone lectures them on manhood. They catch masculinity from the room—from fathers and coaches, peers and podcasts, locker rooms and timelines, jokes and silences, what gets praised and what gets mocked. Some of that teaching is explicit; much of it is atmospheric. Which is what makes Leviticus 22:5-6 such a useful metaphor. In its plain sense, the text describes a priest who becomes impure through contact, whether with a swarming thing or another source of impurity, and then remains in that state until evening. What is striking is that the Torah does not treat this as a moral failure. There is no scolding, no humiliation, no exile from the covenant. There is simply an honest recognition that contact has consequences, followed by a process: washing, waiting, and eventual return But read as metaphor, the verse names a truth many men know in their bones: whatever surrounds you eventually shapes you, and the culture you live in always gets under your skin.

And that is precisely the problem with patriarchy. It is not merely a set of ideas; it is a habitat. It teaches, yes, but it also spreads. bell hooks understood this with unusual clarity when she wrote that patriarchy demands from men a kind of “psychic self-mutilation,” an emotional amputation by which boys learn to kill off tenderness, vulnerability, and the parts of themselves that make love possible. That mutilation does not happen only in formal sermons on masculinity. It happens through ridicule. Through humiliation. Through boys learning very early which feelings get them welcomed and which get them exiled.

Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere shows what that contagion looks like in 2026. The documentary follows influencers and podcasters who profit from spreading a swaggering vision of manhood that Theroux describes as, at its fringes, misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic, and racist. What makes that world potent is not simply that it argues. It seduces. It packages grievance as clarity, domination as confidence, and emotional numbness as masculine poise. It gives boys and men a culture to catch. And because it arrives wrapped in charisma, aspiration, and belonging, many do not realize they are being formed until the toxicity already feels normal. This is why men’s retreats matter so much.

A good retreat, then, is the Torah’s rhythm of washing and waiting. Men who have absorbed a culture of posturing, domination, numbness, or contempt do not need condemnation; they need a place to step out of the atmosphere that formed them, to be cleansed of what has clung to them, and to wait long enough for something healthier to take hold. Retreat is not shame. It is reentry through honesty. It is the patient work of making a man fit again for what is sacred in his own life.

A good retreat is not an escape from responsibility. It is an interruption of contamination. It gives men distance from the swarm. It creates a counter-culture in which a man can begin to notice what has gotten into him: the reflex to posture, or the fear of tenderness, the addiction to performance.

That is also why Bardin’s line matters here. If Judaism is caught, then retreat can help men catch something better. Brotherhood without cruelty. Vulnerability without collapse. Prayer without pretense. Strength without domination. Friendship that does not depend on mockery. The formal learning matters too; men need language, ideas, texts, frameworks, and mentorship. They need to be taught. But if the surrounding culture remains unchanged, the lesson rarely sticks. Men need an atmosphere in which another way of being male feels not only admirable but livable.

Because masculinity, like Judaism, is never merely a theory. It is a world. The question is not whether men are catching a culture. Of course they are. The question is which one.

If they keep catching a patriarchal culture that rewards emotional mutilation, then they will become harder, lonelier, and less free. But if men spend enough time in communities where honesty is honored, tenderness is not shamed, and the sacred is welcomed back into their lives, then another kind of contagion begins to spread: healing, brotherhood, integrity, and what Judaism calls teshuvah—a return to the self that patriarchy tried to amputate. Whatever we call it, more men need to catch it.