Why I built Bar Plugsa
A beis midrash (house of study) for your hardest modern decision.
I am a rabbi. For years I led a Jewish school and synagogue in Los Angeles. Today I run Mallacore, where I deploy AI for mid-size businesses making decisions that matter.
Bar Plugsa sits between those two halves of my life.
For two thousand years, the Talmudic dialectic has been the most sophisticated decision-making technology Jews have inherited. The genius of the beis midrash is not that the chachamim (sages) agree — it is that they refuse to. A young learner walks into a sugya (Talmudic passage) and finds Rashi explaining clearly, Tosafos attacking the explanation, the Rambam codifying it differently, the Maharal extracting the essence beneath it, the Sfas Emes finding its inner point. The reader does not get a single answer. The reader gets a structured disagreement, and out of that disagreement comes their own clarity.
Modern decision-making is the opposite of a beis midrash. We are surrounded by tools that flatter us, frameworks that simplify us, advisors that align with us. Almost nothing in modern life is structured to give us real opposition.
And so we make our hardest decisions in echo chambers. Sometimes alone in our heads. Sometimes among well-meaning friends. Almost never in front of the kind of intellectual seriousness our questions actually deserve.
Bar Plugsa is an attempt to bring the beis midrash to your hardest modern decision.
Twelve of the deepest minds in Jewish history disagree with each other — in real time — about your firing decision, your parenting question, your recovery dilemma, your mission integrity.
They are not impersonating the historical figures. Each lens is a structured cognitive posture extracted from centuries of textual scholarship: how Rashi reads the word doing too much work, how the Rambam locates the principle behind the case, how the Lubavitcher Rebbe finds the shlichus (mission) in what looked like stuckness, how Rebbe Nachman exposes despair disguised as realism.
The lenses argue. They press each other. They press you. And at the end, you do not get a winner. You get a synthesis that maps the disagreement and — most importantly — names the question you have been avoiding.
That is what I think AI should do. Not flatter. Not summarize. Sharpen.
About Me
I trained as a rabbi and led a Jewish day school and synagogue in Los Angeles for many years. I taught Talmud, I gave shiurim (classes), I sat across from CEOs and parents and people in crisis, and I learned that the real work of a rabbi is mostly the work of helping someone hear the question they have been refusing to ask.
Today I run Mallacore. We deploy AI for mid-size businesses — the kind of work where the technology matters less than whether the system is asking the right question of the right people at the right time. Bar Plugsa is one expression of that work, public and personal. The work I do at Mallacore is the same work, made specific to the industries and decisions of each client.
If you have decisions in your business that deserve this kind of rigor — structured opposition, real intellectual seriousness, decision-intelligence built on the wisdom your tradition or your industry already trusts — I would like to talk.