People get a feeling of holiness and power [numinousity] from all kinds of different sources.For this reason learning Torah is important. That is so that one gets accustomed to receiving this numinous power from a source of holiness. Or it also is good to be connected with a tzadik [saint] who is connected to Torah.
This is a large subject. To some degree Allen Bloom goes into it in his book The Closing of the American Mind. [I used to have a link to it on one of my blogs, but it should be fairly easy to find. It is the most important book in Philosophy of the 20th century.]
He makes the point there that religious groups were considered as bad things by the founders of the USA. They wanted to make religion unimportant. I imagine they were not thinking of what could serve as a substitute. Clearly politics did and still does replace religion as a source of that feeling of power and purpose. But if they were thinking in those terms seems doubtful to me.
But there can be many other sources from which people derive their feelings about the meaning of life. E.g., Muslims get their feeling about the purpose of life from murder. This gives them a feeling of numinousity and value for their lives. Others get this from sex and sexual issues.
For all these and many other reasons I think learning Torah is highly undervalued. For learning Torah directs a person's feelings of direction and purpose towards a holy source.
The theory here is actually very simple. Picture a clock. From 6:00 to 12:00 are values starting from all form and no content to all content and no form. But for every area of value there is an opposite place of the clock that is an opposite value. A value of the Sitra Achra--the Dark Side.
See this link for more detail: Origin of Value.
I could go on, but it is best to look at that Origin of Value thesis by Dr. Kelley Ross.
[To get some background about the Origin of Value you need to know a bit of Kant. For a good introduction to Kant see Mattey's lectures on Kant] I should mention say my small knowledge of Kant comes from the two great encyclopedias, the Stanford encyclopedic of Philosophy and also the Internet encyclopedia of Philosophy and also reading Kant in German. (I had to read him in German because I could not understand the English translations.) [If anyone has ever read Kant in English and understood him please raise your hand. No? I thought so.]
This is a large subject. To some degree Allen Bloom goes into it in his book The Closing of the American Mind. [I used to have a link to it on one of my blogs, but it should be fairly easy to find. It is the most important book in Philosophy of the 20th century.]
He makes the point there that religious groups were considered as bad things by the founders of the USA. They wanted to make religion unimportant. I imagine they were not thinking of what could serve as a substitute. Clearly politics did and still does replace religion as a source of that feeling of power and purpose. But if they were thinking in those terms seems doubtful to me.
But there can be many other sources from which people derive their feelings about the meaning of life. E.g., Muslims get their feeling about the purpose of life from murder. This gives them a feeling of numinousity and value for their lives. Others get this from sex and sexual issues.
For all these and many other reasons I think learning Torah is highly undervalued. For learning Torah directs a person's feelings of direction and purpose towards a holy source.
The theory here is actually very simple. Picture a clock. From 6:00 to 12:00 are values starting from all form and no content to all content and no form. But for every area of value there is an opposite place of the clock that is an opposite value. A value of the Sitra Achra--the Dark Side.
See this link for more detail: Origin of Value.
I could go on, but it is best to look at that Origin of Value thesis by Dr. Kelley Ross.
[To get some background about the Origin of Value you need to know a bit of Kant. For a good introduction to Kant see Mattey's lectures on Kant] I should mention say my small knowledge of Kant comes from the two great encyclopedias, the Stanford encyclopedic of Philosophy and also the Internet encyclopedia of Philosophy and also reading Kant in German. (I had to read him in German because I could not understand the English translations.) [If anyone has ever read Kant in English and understood him please raise your hand. No? I thought so.]
