[1] There is a reason that people resist have their belief system interfered with. The reason is that they do not want to become schizophrenic.
It works like this. People absorb their basic world view and belief system at young ages. Very few people make up their own value system. Most get their worldview from friends in school, from parents, from television, from the movies, from collage professors,  etc. This is all along the lines of putting the circuits into a circuit board. As long as you have not put the circuit board into the oven, you can still correct wires that have the wrong alignment. Once the circuit board has been solidified, there is nothing to do with it. If you find a faulty connection and try to correct it, you end up shorting out the entire circuit board. Similarly if a person tries to correct beliefs that he finds evidence against later in life after his belief system has become hard wired, then he goes crazy--literally.

This also explains why the Orthodox world is especially wary of baali teshuva [newcomers]. They may be brilliant, and also perhaps have accepted full heartily the belief system of the Torah and Talmud, but if done after ones teenage years, then it is all just software that can easily be deleted and replaced with a highly lethal program or even a virus. Soft-ware can be hacked. Hard-ware can't be hacked.

The other reason people do not like their beliefs tampered with is because their circuit board is not alone. It is part of a supercomputer. People need to be part of a super-organism. If you tamper with their circuit board after it has been put into the oven, not only does it get an electric short circuit, but it also becomes useless for the super-organism and has to be thrown out.

Extreme examples of this are: Muslims that find themselves in an airplane driving into a building in order to murder people and themselves. Though at some point human instinct for self preservation kicks in, but it is overwhelmed by the more powerful human need to not tamper with their world view and to remain good Muslims.

The most common example is people in their first few years of college who get indoctrinated into left wing doctrines and then later in life when they see the fallacy if their beliefs simply can't let them go.



 A famous college professor expressed this thus: "Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... You have to be educated in order to be ... a participant in our conversation ... So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable."[sic]

One of the major ways that universities fail when it comes to subjects concerning Jews is that they do not teach Torah, but they teach peripheral issues about Torah. They teach about Jewish history or about Jewish philosophy [which was always of minor interest to Jews].
Even when they teach Talmud, they do not teach Talmud, but they teach about the Talmud.

Even in first class places like Hebrew University,  they also do not teach Kabalah but about Kabalah.

  If you go to university to learn mathematics you want to learn Math right? You don't want to spend all your time learning about mathematics or the lives of mathematicians!

  The way to understand Talmud for university students is not to learn a lot of Talmud but to learn how to examine one subject. This is like when you learn poetry. You learn how to examine one single poem. Having read lots of poetry does not make one capable of examining a single poem.

  The way to understand one single page of Gemara is by Rabbi Akiva Eigger, the Pnei Yehoshua and R. Chaim Soloveithick [i.e. Chidushie HaRambam (חידושי הרמב''ם)] If you can understand these three people on one single page of Gemara then you already know how to learn. If you do not understand them then you ought to start working on them.

  Halacha also has this in common with Talmud. Knowing a lot does not count. The question is are you capable of understanding even one single Halacah properly.
  It is also like Mathematics in this respect. I don't care if you have learned lots of mathematics. I care if you can solve the one single problem that is being proposed. It does not matter if it is a simple Algebraic equation or a problem in Algebraic Topology. You need to be able to solve the problem properly.
  And in spite of what you may have heard there are no two ways of doing Halacha properly. There is only one way. It is to learn the actual Halacha in the Talmud itself and then trace the development of the Halacha down through the Beit Yoseph and then the Shulchan Aruch with the Shach and the Taz.
If you can do that with one single Halachah, then you understand Halacha; and if you can't do this, then you have no business discussing Halacha at all. It does not matter how much Kitzur Shulchan Aruch or Mishna Brura you think you know.

And Kabalah is the same thing. I don't care if you know the history of kabalah or can decipher medieval script.

If you can't discuss intelligently one single paragraph of the Etiz Chaim of the Ari then you don't know Kabalah.

Just a quick example for this last thing. Atik (עתיק) has circles-(עיגולים)-even after the breaking of the vessels(שבירת הכלים). In Mavo Shearim by Reb Chaim Vital vol 2, section 3, chap 4 the Ari says from Keter of Yosher of Atik (כתר דיושר דעתיק) is drawn inner light (אור פנימי) to all the circles of Atik. However he also says that because of the time elapse between the creation of his circles to his yosher, the light of his yosher does not reach his circles! This is a simple thing and yet it would be hard to find a kabalaist who can answer this except in the usual way of evasion which is meant to cover up ignorance.

The God of the Torah is the God of light and reason, and as a life- and form-giving force, characterized by measured restraint and detachment, which reinforces a strong sense of self. But also the  God of wine and music, and  frenzy of self-forgetting in which the self gives way to a primal unity where individuals are at one with others and with nature.

The modern world has inherited philosophy's’ rationalistic stance at the expense of losing the human. We now see knowledge as worth pursuing for its own sake and believe that all truths can be discovered and explained with enough insight. In essence, the modern,  rational, scientific world view treats the world as something under the command of reason rather than something greater than what our rational powers can comprehend. We inhabit a world dominated by words and logic, which can only see the surfaces of things, while shunning the real world  which cuts to the heart of things.  We belong to a culture that’s bound for self-destruction.

The only way to rescue modern world from self-destruction is to resuscitate the spirit of Torah.

We have no direct understanding of Torah anymore, but we always mediate the power of Torah through various rationalistic concepts, such as morality, justice, and history.



 ecstasy stands as a counterbalance to the thoroughgoing rationality that is so prominent in Orthodox Judaism. In most Torah investigations, the importance of truth and knowledge are taken as givens, and thinkers trouble themselves only over questions of how best to achieve truth and knowledge.

 questions where this drive for truth and knowledge come from and answers that they are products of a particular, wrong view of the world. Deeper than this impulse for truth is the impulse to lose oneself in ecstatic frenzy.
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He criticizes his own age (though his words apply equally to the present day) for being overly rationalistic, for assuming that it is best to treat existence and the world primarily as objects of knowledge. this stance makes life meaningless because knowledge and rationality in themselves do nothing to justify existence and the world. Life finds meaning,  only through prayer while alone is a forest or a mountain top. Art, music,   bring us to a deeper level of experience than philosophy and rationality. Existence and the world become meaningful not as objects of knowledge but as ecstatic frenzy  experiences. ecstatic frenzy does not find a role in the larger context of life, but rather life takes on meaning and significance only as it is expressed in ecstatic frenzy .



 Ecstatic frenzy  gains its strength from exposing the depths that lie beneath our rational surface, whereas
Western philosophy insists that we become fully human only by becoming fully rational.
 rational methods cannot reach to the depths of human experience. that philosophy is a shallow pursuit. True wisdom is not the kind that can be processed by the thinking mind, We find true wisdom in the dissolution of the self that we find in Torah and the Talmud, and music.

a purified  Torah culture can rescue  civilization from the deadening influence of  rationalism.

This process however starts in a highly counter intuitive way.The way to ecstasy finds its basis in Gemara, Rashi and Tosphot.
The thing that makes Gemara Rashi and Tosphot interesting is not the intellectual aspect of it.

Rather it seems to be part of a process that leads a person into ecstasy and fulfillment. But  ecstasy --it would seem can come from God or from the Dark Side. So I think that one of the major advantages in learning Talmud is that it directs one's vector in the right direction.The basic process seems to be learning Talmud for a few years with Musar [medieval books on ethics]-- while trying to improve ones character.  And then Kaballah seems to come in. I can't explain what it is about kabalah [Issac Luria specifically] that does this, but it seems to me that when one learns it after proper preparation [Talmud], it has the effect of attaching ones soul to God. I mean specifically the writings of Isaac Luria. At that point if one is properly prepared and comes to Israel, even for a short visit, the Divine ecstasy seems to take effect.

I would here like to defend the idea of sitting and learning Torah [i.e Gemara, Rashi, Tosphot].
I would like to approach this from a few different angles. The first would be philosophy. From the standpoint of philosophy of Plato there are objective moral values that can be perceived by reason. While this should be taken in the larger platonic context of the question of universals at least as far as right living is concerned it is a clear tradition in Plato and Aristotle  and the later rationalist school that moral values can be perceived by reason. Though certainly Nietzsche was right that most of what people call moral values is their Id projecting itself onto their consciousness. But that only proved that it is hard to reason correctly and we knew that before Nietzsche.Even the intuitionist school does not claim we can easily perceive moral values. [well actually it does look like Prichard did hold that but the modern Intuitionist school headed by Michael Huemer does not hold that way.]

Well if we have gotten this far then we have already closed the gap between reason and Torah to a large degree. We know now that there are objective moral vales but these values are hard to see. We agree we can be distracted by our Id. [The Id is an discovery of Nietzsche, not Freud incidentally.]
 We know that according to the Rambam [Maimonides ] that Saadia Geon that the ground and basis of all Torah law is in reason, not divine decree. Both the Rambam and Saadia Geon reject the ground of Divine decree for Torah and say rather it needs to be ground in reason. [The reason they both do this is they did not want the laws of the Torah to be arbitrary].

So far we have now got philosophy and the Torah to be rather close.We know that the project of the Gemara [Talmud]] is to use reason to understand the Divine Will as expressed in the Torah. And the Torah was given as the Rambam says because not everyone is smart enough to start from scratch and find a moral path.

Part of the reasoning here is also based on the idea that morality is hard to decipher and also that there is no mathematical algorithm to decide any issue in moral at all. that means we are all left with the arduous task on using reason the decide what objective morality would have to say about any given issue. this is exactly what the Talmud is trying to do.

It is also possible to defend the idea of sitting and learning Torah from Bava Sali.
The existence of people that did this and did succeed in some way to come to some kind of spiritual levels in which they no only gained wisdom in life for themselves but for others also is powerful recommendation of following the path of Torah.
In this essay I am not dealing with specific question that must arise in people minds when they hear this--in fact the major question that people have on this is an ad hominum argument and not worthy of discussion in the  first place. So not all people that are in their exterior dress are following the path of Torah in their deeds? Is that supposed to be a kashe [question ]on the Torah??

People will automatically use any system they are a part of to get ahead and use it for money, and power.

 People will automatically use any system they are a part of to get ahead and use it for  money, and power. . If we would complain about this, then we would have to complain about Capitalism and Communism and every other system that exists.

But people also have another trait--they want things to make sense. The Love of truth may be the weakest of human  passions, but it still exists.

Because of this last trait, it seems to me that I should show how Torah is justifiable. [That means classical Torah--The Old Testament [Tenach], the Gemara [i.e. the Talmud Bavli].] But to justify Torah we have to go out of Torah into philosophy. This is how the Rambam/Maimonides did it, and Saadia Geon. You can't justify Torah on its own terms. To find a ground of justification, you need an external ground.
Since Reason has been in retreat in the Western World since the rise of Post Modern Philosophy, most people do not think that philosophy can justify Torah, and they also think they do not need Reason to justify it.

Now I should admit that my intention here is not to teach philosophy, but rather to explain why it is justifiable to sit and learn Torah [Gemara, Rashi, and Tosphot.]
To do this I can't use Aristotle like the Rambam did. I have to go to a modified Neo Platonic approach like Saadia Geon and the Chovot Levavot [Duties of the Heart] .

The intuitionist school of G.E.  Morse and Prichard is close Kant school is better.
The Intuitionists are I think ignoring some of the real problems posed by Kant.

Now I get to the meat and potatoes of this discussion.
Frege wanted to expand the "a priori." [Things knowable by reason].  He wanted this to include all possible traits that can be derived from reason about objects of reason. The critique of Wittgenstein on this was true. But it was used by later incompetent philosophers to  backfire on Kant himself and to deny the existence of the a priori and of metaphysics all together.

One example of a priori I would like to suggest is in mathematics. It is the number two. You don't literally stumble over the number two when you walk in the street. But few people would be inclined to deny its existence altogether. At least to deny it it would seem you should have some strong proof. At least strong enough to deny common sense. And it does not seem that my knowledge of the number two is dependent on chemical reactions in my brain. Let me ask you to complete this sequence: 2 is to four as 4 is to eight. Eight is to 16 as 16 is to 32. Then 32 is to 64 as ... fill in the blank. Is this dependent on what I ate for breakfast this morning? If so, then you, my dear reader who ate something different [I had  eggs] would have to come up with a different answer.

[I should mention that one of the major ways that people that learn Torah think of it is as something that is applicable to Jews only. But this is clearly a mistake. Because objective values  are by definition applicable to everyone and perceivable by everyone. And Torah does claim that it is objective.
And though many commandments are addressed specifically to Jews. still the value system of the Torah is universal. and in fact the Rambam says the Torah is for "anyone that wants it." [In the Laws of Gerut. keeping Torah in no way depends on getting other people to accept oneself. This is an open halachah in the Rambam.

Some people keep Torah as a means of social identity. And this is lamentable. Torah should be kept because it is true.

a philosophy program at universities that deals with Metaphysics

I would like to suggest a philosophy program at universities that deals with Metaphysics.

And in particular I am thinking about the nature and origin of Evil.

This is something barely noticed by Western Philosophy up until Schopenhauer.  
But to deal with Evil in a philosophical way my suggestion would be to have a university course that would deal first with the pre-Socratics  and Schopenhauer.

This suggestion could not be made while British and American philosophy departments were still in the Dark ages. Recently the fallacies of post Modern Philosophy have become apparent even to school children and it is high time for some real philosophy to be done. John Searle wrote that L/A linguistic analytic philosophy of the twentieth century  is "obviously false."


Obviously the actual Book of Aristotle, "Metaphysics", would have to be tackled also but that it seems would require it s own separate course.
Obviously Schopenhauer is very important for this issue, but one does need a little background in Kant to understand his basic thesis.
In fact without Schopenhauer it is hard to find any philosophical justification for the existence of evil at all. 

I agree --but I think in a university course, you should need only a few introductory lectures to get the orientation right and then you can go to the actual material after a few weeks. After all you don't need to have learned all of Kant to understand Schopenhauer.]

prohibitions that are from the sages דרבנן if they are intended or not.

It looks like R. Yehuda in the Gemara does not make any distinction in prohibitions that are from the sages דרבנן if they are intended or not.
[This subject is part of a large Tosphot in Yoma. I just wanted to bring up one little point that I think is interesting.]

This approach of R. Yehuda seems to be contrary to the way the Rambam understands Rabbinical law.
To the Rambam, the Torah gives permission to the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem (or people with what the Torah considers ordination--not the ordination that is common today) to interpret the law based on the thirteen principles of how to derive laws from verses and also to make a fence around prohibitions. [Also, they had some traditions of what is considered work on Shabat and other oral traditions that they have to hand down.] This we see in the verse in Deuteronomy "you shall listen to all they teach you." [The whole verse says basically when you have cases in Torah Law that come up, and you can't decide, you shall go to the supreme court in Jerusalem and follow all that they teach you.]

The Rambam makes it clear that it is not up to every individual to decided how to interpret the the law. This is clearly stated in the Torah itself.
But the law to listen to the Sanhedrin is specially a law to not ignore them. And this can't apply to an unintended act. When one forgets the law he is not ignoring anything.

The resolution to this is that the Rambam  in fact decided in a "thing not intended" like R. Shimon and not like R. Yehuda.


I hope it is clear what I am trying to say. We have two arguments between R. Yehuda and R. Shimon. One about work not intended. The other about work done  for a different than purpose the work was done in the tabernacle in the desert. The question here is on R Yehuda. If we understand a rabbinical decree in the way the Rambam does, then how does the opinion of R. Yehuda make sense? That is the question I intend to answer in this short essay.

The big issue I have not addressed here is if there is in fact any authority to make extra decrees not in the Torah and from the commentary on Pirkei Avot from the amoraim it seems there is no such authority. This book is called אבות דר' נתן and it is included in every edition of the Vilna Shas. The basic idea there is on the Mishna "Make a fence around the Torah" and the general approach there is to say that Adam HaRishon added to the command of God [don't eat and do not touch] and that  caused him to fall. R.Yose said there "Better ten hand-breaths high that stand rather than 100 yards high that fall." There the Gra makes a few corrections to the text. I showed this to Rav Eliyahu Silverman the Rosh Yeshiva of the Yeshiva that goes by the path of the Gra in the Old City of Jerusalem and he agreed with me that that is the meaning of that commentary on the Mishna

The basic issue is that often there is a dilemma, Keeping some decree might interfere with some more serous obligation. Or with דרך ארץ קדמה לתורה--the way of the earth. I have in fact found this to be the case often. Instances abound. Being careful about things one is not obligated in often turns out to cause one to ignore real obligation. Just take for instance the morning prayer that is a decree. Though a great thing in itself, it can take time from learning Physics. And to the Rambam learning Physics is in itself the fulfillment of the command to Fear God which is one of the most important commands in the Torah

 I think that the Torah itself is in need of some kind of interpretation in many places where the simple explanation just does not work--like the flood of Noah for example. [The Rambam  has already told us that Genesis chapter one is not to be taken literally. So I say well then let's see what Isaac Luria says that it means!] the female waters..

On a side note-- I have noticed that some people on their own tend to spend more time on Breslov books than on Gemara.
Now Breslov books are inspiring, but they are not the Written or the Oral Law. They have emotional appeal. worship of tzadikim is one basic problem because the Torah tells us not to do idolatry. At least Breslov is honest about this what they are doing. Most other groups put on a nice face to hide the rot under the surface. The Gra saw this and put the whole movement into Excommunication. Which means not to go anywhere near them because when one ignores the excommunication, it goes upon the one ignoring it. See the Laws in חרם in Shulcha n Aruch.

I mean to say that Herem is more strict than nidui (rebuke). And since the herem of the Gra i valid therefore the laws concerning herem ought to be observed

As is known the Kabalah has a highly Neo Platonic approach to philosophy.
I just had one small comment on the issue of the breaking of the vessels (שבירת הכלים) today.
Even though the Ari usually does not give exact reason for this, there are a few places that he does say openly the reason[s]. One thing he always mentions is the fact that the light was only the name 52.(יוד הה וו הה) He says if it had been 52 with 45 (יוד הא ואו הא) or just 45 alone there would have been no breaking. Also he says the "breaking" happened in the circles also of the name 52. [עיגולים דב''ן] I.e. it is not just that the breaking happening in the world of "dots" [נקודים]. Even when the dots expanded and became ten circles of 52 with inner and outer light, the breaking still happened.


I mention this here because I think that metaphysics should be returned to philosophy and as far as metaphysics goes I think the Arizal [Isaac Luria] does  a good job 


Hegel actually discusses  the above aspects of the Ari. He was quite aware of Adam Kadmon where this breaking happened-- i.e. above emanation [אצילות] and in front.--if you go by the simple explanation/peshat in the Ari. You could also interpret the Ari like the Reshash-- but that is extremely complicated and for some reason when the Reshah רשש''ש (Shalom Sharabi from Yemen and later in Jerusalem) came to  Yaakov Abuchatzaira in a dream asking him why he did not learn his book the Nahar Shalom, Rav Yaakov said he had a different path. (And his path can be seen openly in all his books--it is the simplest possible way to understand the Ari.)

I had just two small ideas to talk about today. So I will put them here on the main blog. One refers to the way Reb Chaim Soloveitchik answers for a difficult Rambam. The Rambam says concerning a field that is made an apotiki אפותיקי [a thing that the lender must get paid back from if the borrower defaults]. In short the Rambam says the law of "his hand is on the bottom"(ידו על התחתונה) applies to half the improvement (חצי שבח) and concerning the expenses he says if they are less than the half improvement then the lender pays all. The thing that Reb Chaim says that I could not figure out before was that as far as the expenses are concerned the field is considered as the property of the lender and so the lender pays all. The reason is this neat חילוק-- distinction--that Reb Chaim makes. As  far as an apotiki is considered it is considered as the field is considered as owned by the lender--but this does not stop the law from Bava Batra of half improvements also coming into play because as far as improvements goes we say the obligation comes from the fact that the seller writes "I will  repay the improvements if a lender collects from the field." [I already wrote about this stuff enough on my other blog wine women and transcendence, so I will make this short here.]
the Rambam is in the laws of loans chapter 21 law one and law 6


This is already taking more time than I expected so I will try to make this next idea as short as possible.
It concerns the idea that on Shabat one can't do a work that is done for its own sake. (מלאכה שאינה צריכה לגופה) But if done not for its own sake this is subject to disagreement between R. Shimon and R. Yehuda
I have not written about this before here so I will at least be obligated to bring a little bit of the Gemara. R. Abahu says all types of work that do damage are not obligated in a sacrifice except for causing a wound and lighting a fire. (כל המקלקים פטורים חוץ מחובל ומבעיר)This is because the Torah allows one to do Brit Milah on Shabat. So obviously if the Torah had not allowed it it would have been forbidden [since both are among the 39 types of work that are not allowed on shabat] But why should Milah have been forbidden? It is causing a wound and doing damage! So we see causing a wound even in the case of doing damage is obligated in a sacrifice.That is all just the simple Gemara. The question is is it not also a work done not for its own sake? In fact Rashi says it is! So we see also that work done not for its own sake in the case of wounding is obligated.

What I am trying to bring out here is to nullify the other possibility that it is work done for its own sake. [צריכה לגופה] I can't prove this but I am at least showing how Rashi might answer this problem. For all I know Tosphot might say to R. Abahu that it is work done for its own sake and that is why the Torah has to allow it.

I did not write the above in Hebrew so it was not included in the two blooklets on Bava Metzia and Shas. However  if I was in the actual subjects I might be able to rewrite these ideas. But this minute [8 yeas later], I forgot the subjects discussed here.

Joy as a prime mitzvah, i.e. not a mitzvah to bring to any goal, but being a goal in itself. As a philosophical concept I have  brought objections to this point of view. Plus there is no such mitzvah.
The other trouble is there are plenty of people for whom bringing pain to others constitutes the highest joys in life.



[4] . Bava Sali's primary principle was never to be without a wife. There was even a case where he got married on paper to a girl in Fez who he never saw or had any contact with. It was just in order not to be wifeless for even a short time.

[5] Fear of God solves the problem of short days. For instance I have found my days too short because of events which happen during the day that occupy my time and mental energy which I would have rather that had never occurred. A good solution to it: Fear of God. In my case I understood this to mean to learn books about fear of God like the "Duties of the Heart" and the Or Israel of Israel Salanter [and the Nefesh haChaim of Chaim from Voloshin--a disciple of the Geon from Villna] and I found that in fact by just spending a couple of minutes on these books per day --my entire days stated to expand and all the little things that were getting in my way disappeared.

[1] One remarkable aspect of talking with God while alone in a wilderness or forest setting  is that one  relates to God directly. And the ability to relate to God directly is not something that comes easily. If people try to relate to God at all usually it is in some social setting like a church or a synagogue and usually it comes through some intermediary. The social setting usually takes away the actual event of a relationship with God.

[] Now , Yoga tries to resolve this problem by meditation but it seems to me that this also has several problems.
 The question of effectiveness of Yoga is that its main effect seem to be to get people into the intermediate zone (illusions) where they stay put.


 

[] In most of the solutions of relating and gaining some connection with the Divine, one is going through a middle-man or some Mitzvah, and that even when successful has the drawback of coming through a filtered lens.


[] Some try to resolve this issue by learning Torah.
Learning Torah is a half way solution because it is hearing and trying to relate to God through the inspired medium of the Torah.
  And yet this can be turned into a business in such a way that it in fact has little to recommend it to the general public.
[] I would have to say that from what I can tell talking with God while hiking alone is probably the best solution to how to get right with God.
But I would say this needs to be coupled with learning Torah (i.e. the Old Testament and Gemara) for it to be effective.



[] The Rambam/Maimonides did try to justify Torah practices on Aristotle.


Up until the time of Maimonides there was a tradition of about a thousand years of justifying Torah through Neo Platonic thought. The cumulation of this process was in the Zohar and the Ari [Isaac Luria].
At any rate, it seem to me that after the basic questions of Kant about synthetic a priori one needs some justification beyond simple Neo Platonic thought.






[] On a personal note I should mention that I got involved in talking with God after I had spent a few years at the Mir in NY.  At any rate, for some reason, when I got to Israel and started hiking in the forests around Safed while doing this Hitbodadut [talking with God], something clicked in me.
So I can say from experience that this can be a very effective tool to get right with God. [Besides being good exercise and also being a good way to get in contact with your inner self and find out what you are really thinking and feeling deep inside. People without talking with God /hitbodadut often do not even know what is going on deep inside of themselves.]

Talk with God as you would talk with a friend while alone in some forest or on some mountain top.
[or in your room by yourself.]

 I think it would also be a good idea for people to assemble their own personal Talk with God kit.
This would include the usual things that go into a survival kit along with hiking boots with spikes so one does not slip in the snow. . Since in the U.S.A. people work during the week, the major emphasis of the Talk with God movement would be centered on weekends. [Also there should be a book of normal Ethics (Musar) like the Duties of the Heart or the Mesilat Yesharim. Without Normal Musar, people that concentrate on Breslov books alone often come up with some world view contrary to Torah.

But that would mean taking a long car drive up to the mountains on Friday afternoon and then having to set up camp in the mountains before Shabat begins. [And then one would have to figure out how to keep Shabat in a camping situation. Frankly, learning how to get along on one's own is a good skill to learn in any case.]

This might be hard for some people but I figure that the importance of Private Conversation with God overrides other considerations.

3] The advantage of talking with God is as far as I can tell is that it gives practical way to fulfill the commandment of the Torah "to be attached to God." Attachment to God is one of the  commandments in the Torah. The way it is understood in the Talmud is to be attached to Torah scholars and this is the way it is brought down in all the people that count the Mitzvas. And the way to be attached to Torah scholars is explained by all of them  to mean to patronize the businesses establishments of Torah scholars and to marry their daughters etc.
The way I understand the Talmud is that being attached to  Torah scholar gives one a means to fulfilling the basic command of being attached to God but it is just one possible way to get to true attachment and is is not meant to replace the simple idea in itself. After all it is understood that the Torah scholar himself is attached to God directly  So in theory one could also learn Torah and thus fulfill the commandment directly himself!


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I admit the Talmud is important to define what the Torah says about how to keep the mitzvot.) This may seem completely trivial to most people, but to me this makes a big difference. I want what I am doing with my life to make sense.  I can now easily understand what path the prophets took to reach God . They went out into the wilderness and talking and prayed with God. They did no Talmud learning, and they did no kabalistic unifications.

Talking with God where ever one goes  is a remarkable concept in the thought of
Brother Lawrence in his little book The Practice of the Presence of God.  

Link

{Reb Nachman later took up this theme and it seems unlikely that he got it from Brother Lawrence. In any case there is a slight difference. Brother Lawrence is concentrating on being in the Presence of God and the speaking with God as a side effect. Reb Nachman is concentrating on speaking with God in one's own language with one's own words about one's own problems. The focus is a little different. In any case I think as worthy as this is it tends to take off the focus from learning Torah which is about hearing what God has to say. Talking with God is telling God what you have to say. No wonder that talking with God does not seem seem to improve people's character by a single jot.


 While by itself it does not sound like much but it has the potential to answer a lot of conundrums.
At least I should say it did solve a number of problems that I faced over several years.
I will just mention here a few points without trying to develop this into an essay with one single point.
Talking with God  should  considered  an priori value.  In this concept of speaking with God while alone, it would make sense to take a bag lunch in the morning and go out into some nearby forest and spend the whole day just talking with God.




We find in classical books of Musar that separation from this world is considered a noble goal. [See Chovot Levavot [Duties of the Heart] Shaar Habitachon for one example.] where it says in the old days when someone wanted to fulfill this he went out into a forest and built a hut and stayed there for several years subsisting on some merge diet and learning Torah all day.

Talking with God alone for some time during the day seems to me to be a good way of tasting a bit of separation from this world while still being in a position to fulfill ones other obligations It seems that if one can't do this every day, then at least on weekends one should take a field trip to some mountain top and spend time alone with God.[Get hiking boots before you do this.]

] It seems to answer the question of how to be attached to God. Now in the Torah we do find that attachment to God is one of the goals of the Mitzvas. [I mean to say that most of the mitzvas of the Torah are not considered goals in themselves. The Torah itself says to do the mitzvas for certain reasons that it lists. Attachment to God is one of these goals.  As it says in Deuteronomy: "Do these mitzvas in order to love and fear God, and to be attached to him."]

[] To me it seems unlikely that Yoga can lead to attachment with God. It depends on sitting and thinking. And sitting and thinking can easily become thinking about things that have little or no relationship with God. And also there does not seem to be an reason to say that thinking about God leads to attachment with Him. I should say as a preface that I consider numinous value to be highly connected and correlated with Moral value. Prayer seems to have the value that it is in fact in the category of a mitzvah-- that of prayer which is in fact one of the 613 commandments.Yoga does not seem to have that advantage.



[] It seems to me to be important in fact to follow the Reb Chaim from Voloshin program of learning Torah. The reason is that prayer may open one to hear the words of God, but then one needs to learn them. That is one should not think that since he has talked with God that it is automatic that God has talked with him. One still needs to do the effort to learn what God's Will is in the Torah.

The origin of Evil.

The origin of Evil.

That does not seem like a hard problem. To the Ari it comes from the light that came from the eyes of Adam Kadmon שם ב''ן דאדם קדמון and when that light reached the region that would later become  the world of Emanation (אצילות) the events called the breaking of the vessels occurred (שבירת הכלים).

This subject is dealt with at length in the Ari and I don't want to rehash it here. [In my opinion it is the best rational account of the existence of evil that I  have seen. You can try Hegel if you want, but I think the Ari wins the debate here.  As far as I can see his account is even better than that of Schopenhauer.]
 Israel Salanter:  the evil inclination{the "Yetzer Hara haRa"}  has two components: (1) the physical desire part and (b) a spiritual part [see the famous"Letter of Musar" written by Israel Salanter about this subject ]

He considers the evil inclination to be a continuum from the low physical desires up until the Satan himself. But the former levels of the evil inclination are not  significant causes of evil. Now the main force of evil in people is  delusion.

Divide the problem of evil into two major subdivision. -Kelipot and demons.
Kelipot in this context means delusions including delusions of demons or of grandeur etc. Demons he considers real.
Now in this context it is hard to say what he does with world view issues.

 even good meaning people can have all their good channeled into evil because of evil world views.

There is a deeper kind of evil to the original condensation of the presence of God from the space where later would become the worlds. From there is drawn an evil in which it is impossible to find God because people don't even know that God is hidden

So the best approach to evil that I have seen is that of Isaac Luria. It is based on motifs from the pre-Socratics and the Zohar and builds into a rigorous logical system in the Eitz Chaim and Mavo Shearim.
 For those with limited time the thing to do would be to get the Eitz Chaim of the Ari. and read from the beginning until about towards the beginning of Emanation. That is to do Adam Kadmon, Akudim, Nekudim, Shevirat HaKelim. If possible I recommend doing the Reshash Shalom Sharabi's Nahar Shalom with this. Then the Igeret Hamusar of Israel Salanter. In any case  the whole question of evil gets to be enormously complicated. In a practical sense it seems to have sources outside of a person like his group, religious leaders, bad friends, and internal sources. In any case, it always comes down to either the חלל הפנוי or שבירת הכלים the empty space or the breaking of the vessels.

Question on Tosphot Bava Metzia page 14

This essay deals with the question someone bought stolen land and improved it. When he gives it back from whom does he collect the value of the improvements? The thief or the owner?
And what if



You have a person whose land was stolen, the owner (נגזל)
The thief is the גזלן . The person that bought the stolen land from the thief is  the buyer (לוקח).
The land goes back to the owner (נגזל) with the improvements (שבח). Rav says the buyer (לוקח) gets the money he paid for it, and also the value of the improvements from person th thief (גזלן). [Bava Metzia page 14B]
Tosphot relates this law to the law [Bava Metzia page 103a] that concerns a person that goes into the field of another person and does improvements (שבח). The law stated by Rav is thus: when the improvements are more, then the owner (נגזל) pays for the expenses, and thief (גזלן) pays nothing.
My question is, "Why not?"
Bear with me while I try to say over why I think this is a problem.
First of all I want to make it clear that on page 103a the improvement is independent from the expenses.
On page 14 the law of Rav refers to paying improvements that are more than the expenses. [Of course, in my question there are no such things, so obviously he does not pay the expenses.] My point is that the owner נגזל) pays the least amount because of the law on page 103. The thief pays the improvements because of Rav's law on page 14. This page 14 law does not come from page 103 . And you can ask "From where does it come?" Well, one  option is to say it comes from the deed of sale. But if that is the case then  the thief should pay the expenses also. And in  fact he ought to pay the improvement also if we are going by the deed of sale!
I am not asking a rhetorical question here. I really do not know what Tosphot is doing  on page 14.
Anyone with an answer is welcome to share it here.
Later note: I think after this I wrote some answer to this question in some later blog entry.
Here is what I wrote in Hebrew about this subject:
א) ב''מ יד: יש פה שלשה אנשים: נגזל,גזלן, ולוקח מן הגזלן והקרקע שנגזלת. הקרקע חוזרת לבעלים עם השבח שהשביחה הלוקח. רב אמר שהלוקח גובה מחיר הקרקע ושבחה מן הגזלן. תוספות אומרים שהדין של היורד לתוך שדה חבירו בלי רשות שמקבל היציאה שייך לפה. זה דין של רב בדף קג. ושם רב אומר ידו על התחתונה. זאת אומרת שאם השבח פחות מן היציאה, אז הנגזל משלם את היציאה. ואם היציאה פחותה, אז הוא משלם את היציאה. ועכשיו אפשר להבין כוונת התוספות פה בדף יד:. פה יש שתי אפשריות. א) השבח יותר מן היציאה. ב) השבח פחות מן היציאה. מצב הראשון הוא המצב שרב דיבר עליו. שם הנגזל משלם את היציאה, והגזלן משלם את השבח. [פה כוונת רב היא שהגזלן משלם את השבח היתר מן היציאה, היינו ההפרש. וזה שלא ככוונתו בדף קג. אולי יש פה איזו קושיא?] במצב השני שהשבח פחות, אז הגזלן אינו משלם כלום, והנגזל משלם את השבח. וזאת היא השאלה שלי. למה הגזלן אינו משלם את היציאה? אם אנחנו הולכים לפי מה שכתוב בשטר, אז הוא חייב לשלם את היציאה. אם אנחנו לא הולכים לפי מה שכתוב בשטר (אחריות לאו טעות סופר היא) אז גם השבח אינו משלם.
I see in my Hebrew note that I did have an answer for this problem.