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Talking Talmud on TikTok
Rabbi Shalom Landau has found a large new audience online, some of which isn’t Jewish. He sticks to ancient wisdom and hopes for the best.
Rabbi Shalom Landau at his desk in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.
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Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times
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Talking Talmud on TikTok
Rabbi Shalom Landau has found a large new audience online, some of which isn’t Jewish. He sticks to ancient wisdom and hopes for the best.
Rabbi Shalom Landau at his desk in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Credit...
Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times
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By
Joseph Bernstein
April 22, 2026
For a hype house, the humble wood and brick structure in the shadow of Woodhull Medical Center is unconventional.
Outside, the facade is cracked and peeling, and the blinds are drawn. Inside, young men spend their days hunched over dense texts, and a tiny pool is hidden away in the basement.
Meanwhile, the resident influencer doesn’t use social media and favors a flip phone — and no phone at all from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
On Shabbos, it’s strictly forbidden.
This is the office of Shalom Landau, a 48-year-old Hasidic rabbi in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The young men are his yeshiva students; the pool a ritual bath called a
mikvah.
He’s the spiritual leader of Rivnitz, a group of Hasidic Jews who follow the example of the Ribnitzer Rebbe, a 20th-century rabbi from present-day Moldova who stressed the need to spread God’s divine light amid the anti-religious atmosphere of the former Soviet Union.
He is also, of late, an unlikely star on Instagram and TikTok for videos offering pearls of Torah-based wisdom on topics ranging from business and personal finance to marriage and parenting. The short clips marry self-help and “seichel,” Yiddish for “common sense.” They typically start with a provocative statement — “Wealth is in your wiring, not in your wallet,” for instance, or “A child is not a second chance at your past” — and then move backward to proclamations from the sages of the Talmud.
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