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14.7.16

The Litvak yeshiva is where I found happiness.

Litvish Yeshiva. The Litvak yeshiva is where I found happiness. But I have not been a good advocate of this  system. We can understand what has prevented me from being able to advocate this kind of system.
That is if we look at the gentiles we can perhaps see a kind of parallel. In the gentile world there was a fellow by the name  Ludder. One day he was out walking and a lightening storm occurred. He made a vow to be a monk. He was a schizoid personality type. He could not stop washing. As he put it: " The more I washed, the more dirty I felt". Until one day he broke out of his mental prison, and announced to the word that with faith all things are clean. That was Martin Luther. He changed his name.

The Ding An Sich, the thing in itself, the self is hidden from us. Sometimes inside the self is some amazing new idea or world revolution that is just waiting to come out. But it can't come out because it is trapped inside the personality flaws of the individual.
That is me. I have recognized and known this amazing system for years, but because of my own mental prison I have never been able to advocate it. It is as if Luther had remained Ludder and never broken free.
What prevents me from saying this are the problems I had after the original years when things were going well. And even when things were going well, they were not as well as one could hope for. So there are mental obstacles and people obstacles preventing me from saying openly the Litvak Yeshiva is the best approach,  So instead I surf the internet until I find things that I like, or bother me, but do not spend the time and effort explain what is right and proper and great about the Litvak Yeshiva. [Nor do I spend the time on the Talmud that I ought.]  I live in a world of delusion. Thus, I can't be an advocate of something great and good. [The light and greatness and importance of the Litvak yeshiva are buried inside of me. Unless they break out of their prison, there is nothing I can do.]

In my first yeshiva I had a great deal of problems. First of all my parents were against it. They thought it was an institution that prepared people to use the Torah to make money. And even if that had not been the case, they still thought that Torah with Derech Eretz (Torah with a vocation) is important. But Something clicked inside of me when I got to yeshiva. Some amazing energy just gripped me. I found something so amazing in the Oral and Written Law that it would have taken a thermonuclear device to separate me from the Gemara. And there was no learning Musar there. It was Sola Gemara (Not Sola Scriptura, scripture alone but Gemara alone.) . {The two Talmuds, Sifra, Sifri, Tosephta, Torah Kohanim, Midrash Raba, Midrash Tanchuma}

But I fell into a mental prison. And since then the Gemara is....[unfinished.]


What my approach is today is in fact like my parents held:Torah with a vocation. And  I also go with the Rambam concerning Physics being a part of the Oral Law. So I do not think learning Physics or Aristotle is bitul Torah but rather a part of the Oral tradition. See the Rambam in Hilchot Talmud Torah in the halacah that one should divide his day into three parts. One part for the Oral Law and he says there the subjects called Pardes as he explained in the first four chapters are part of the Oral Law