The basic idea of a  excommunication is subject to a debate between the Beit Yoseph and the Rashbatz. The Rashbatz considers it to be in the category of  איסר which has the law of neder (vow). That means it חל (-it applies) on the object and even in the case of a mitzah.
The Beit Yoseph thinks we should consider it to have the stringency of both a  neder vow and a שבוע
The Magid Mishna brings an open Gemara that it has the law of a neder.

[Thus the excommunication that was signed by the Gaon of Villna is still in force and those that ignore it are in the category of transgressing a vow.]]

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I saw there has come out a book on Jews that were in Berlin during WWII. That is they were hidden  by Germans during the war. This I suppose must apply to the grandparents of my wife, Leah. They were definitely German Jews and were in Berlin during WWII. But how they managed to survive I never inquired about except just to ask once and never got any answer. It was like people that go through some kind of hard experience and afterwards cant talk about it.

My wife's mother herself had been on the kinder transport so she did not have any first hand information about how her parents had survived. 

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Schopenhauer said the "thing in itself" is the Will. I would like to claim that two levels of dinge an sich. That is I want to preserve some of Schopenhauer insights. But I also want to have mundane objects to have this aspect also of ding an sich. So I want two or more levels of this as is clear anyway from Kelly Ross--as his objects of value [which have increasing levels of numinosity] as in fact levels of this ding on sich.
But furthermore, I want to Will to be the observer. In this way, I think we come to a unique understanding of Transcendental Idealism. If the Will is the observer, then this boils down to mundane objects being dependent on the existence (i.e. idealism) of the Will, but independent of his experience (transcendent). After he makes them, they don't depends on his watching them every second in order to exist as the Rambam already said in the Guide. They are not a part of His existence though they depend on his existence.


Appendix:

(1) I forgot to mention: the one kind of ding an sich is hidden from pure reason. That is to say there is human reason which is flawed because of our being prone to reason baldly. But there is human reason that is pure. But even that reason (which is called by Kant) pure reason has a limit. Then there is the reason of the Will which created reason in the first place. That Will will have to have a higher type of reason.

And so one kind of ding an sich is hidden from pure perception and another kind is hidden from pure reason. That is the Creator of pure reason is hidden from pure reason.


(2) I am not claiming to have any knowledge of Kant or Schopenhauer. I wish I would have to the time for that. Here I am only making two suggestions based on my merge understanding of some of their major points. At some point I tried to get into Kant but it takes a tremendous amount of time.

(3) The basic questions on what I wrote up above are these: the third man problem concerning reason. and the fact that observation and experience in the above context are the same.
The that means to say I am saying there is a difference between pure reason and the reason of the First Cause. [This is well known from the Rambam.] But then we would have to have a higher reason beyond that to make the reason of the First Cause into Reason. I tried to answer this question in the above essay by the idea that God created reason itself so we don't need to postulate anything beyond that.
The second question is that Transcendental Idealism postulates the existence of the object is independent of experience [beyond experience] but dependent on the existence of the observer. If we say First Cause is the observer it seems hard to say things are beyond his experience. But for monotheism I think we have to say that.

The truth be told the path of Torah is  highly individualistic.

On one hand learning Talmud has this quality of connecting one with the Will and First Cause if done with that intention. That is for it to really work it has to be done like baali teshuva do it--for itself or "Lishma." And there is such a thing as learning all day. I mean in  the view of Reform Jews making money is either or. Either you go to collage and learn an honest profession, or you will depend on charity. That is why most Reform parents are horrified when their children decide to go to yeshiva.
And to a large degree they are right. However in the Torah we do find a third way--a path in which one learns Torah all day and yet depends that God will send to him his living needs without depending on charity. This not just some  opinion of mine. It is a direct Mishna in Pirkei Avot.

But this seems to depend totally on one motivation for learning. In this case we are not looking at teh question if an action is right or wrong independent of intention. Here the rightness or wrongness depends on intention.
In any case I find it difficult or maybe impossible to recommend learning Torah all day. I  can see that this is justified for some people depending on the pureness of their motive. But what usually see is bad results. And I thin the bad results are because the motives are not pure. But who can tell such a  thing? I can't judge other's motives. But the results are open for all to see. One Torah becomes  means for making money then the results seems to be consistently bad.

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closeness to a true tzadik. Leaders of Breslov are and have always been con men. Another example is talking alone with God--hitbodadut. In Breslov this is always a pubic affair with organized trips with fan fare and  a wide public appeal to give charity to make such trips possible. Learning Torah is another example. If Torah is learned at all, it is never Gemara, Rashi, and Tosphot. In terms of this aspect of Torah it would be more sensible to join an authentic yeshiva like the Mirrer Yeshiva or the other great yeshivas of New York.  

Music for the glory of God.

n60

Kelley Ross, -- Kant with the approach of Leonard Nelson.

My value system is based on a Kelly Ross idea. .

e That is to say my value system which works for me is balance between an array of good and great ideals.

That is it is not enough for me to be walking in what I think is the right path. I have to have some way of justifying it or at least defending it.
You could probably guess without my saying the basic values. To speak the truth at all cost, family values, loyalty to family and friends  and towards anyone who has done for me a good turn. To learn every day a little math, a little physics, a little Gemara. To avoid cults.

Getting interested in Breslov means to leave learning Talmud.

And I have seen over the years many people that get interested in Breslov, and the result is always to leave learning Talmud. Always.

In the letter Rav Nachman wrote to his followers in the city of Breslov which starts, "I have become disgusted with the yeshiva of  Breslov"["קצתי בישיבת ברסלב"],  it is clear that he  was giving up on his disciples, and thought that all his efforts with them went to waste.

The claim in Breslov is that they do have people that learn Talmud on some kind of high level. That is unfounded.  It is not true. But rather a kind of pretense that seems to be motivated by less than honorable motives. People that can learn Talmud have always learned how to do so in a Lithuanian yeshiva, or else they can't do it at all.

Side note:
Not all Litvak yeshivas are the same.  When I say "Litvak yeshiva" I refer to: (1) Ponovitch, (2) the Mir in NY (3) Chaim Berlin (4) Torah Vedaat (5) Shar Yashuv which starts at beginning level, but goes as high as the other great Litvak yeshivas (6) Merkaz HaRav of Rav Kook.[You can include upstart places of people that learned in any of these six great yeshivas.]

A Song for the glory of the Creator, the God of Abraham Isaac And Jacob

q7

I wanted to take a minute to explain Quantum Mechanics and how it is local



First you have to start with what happens when you heat a piece of iron to extremely high temperatures. If you have seen this done you notice that at lower temperatures it gets red and at higher temperatures it gets blue. It does not depend on energy but on temperature. This can only work if there is a certain value that the iron can absorb or emit. The Plank Constant, "h". Einstein reinforced this idea with his explanation of the photo electric effect. Photons are quanta.  Then came the Bohr atom. At that point they had an idea of electrons going around in orbits.(Rutherford) But these orbits had to be equal or proportional to nh. (Bohr) Otherwise the atom would collapse. The integral of Pdx (Momentum times velocity) over one period of orbit is  is equal to nh . What Heisenberg was interested in was the fact that the spectrum of the hydrogen atom [Rydberg].
You have a "X sub n" for the position of the electron. You want to get a "X sub nm" to get what happens when it moves from one orbit to a higher or lower one.



 And it is local. The fact that an observer in the Andromeda galaxy with have corresponding measurement to your experiment here implies correlation, not causation.

And what you have here is that you only know something exists, you don't know universals like if it is a particle or a wave until you measure it. Until you measure it it is only a dinge an sich "a thing in itself."
In other words to get to matrix mechanics you need the piece of iron that turns red and then blue, then the Bohr atom and then the time of lines you get when you add energy to a hydrogen atom in a cathode tube. Three easy steps.
To learn this more in detail I think people should learn Matrix Mechanics. Most presentations of Quantum mechanics focus of Schrodinger and that makes going on to Quantum Field theory harder. And it gives people the wrong ideas. There is no traveling probability wave. There is simply two complementary variables. We don't understand this in our human understanding because the electron is a dinge an sich "a thing in itself." What we see and feel and observe tells us only about what we can measure, not what it actually is.

Torah has gotten a undeserved bad name. The reason is simply because a tremendous amount of bad stuff and bad people have gotten mixed up with it and it is all called by that generic name "Torah."

So people that recoil when they see or hear any thing that claims to be Torah are highly justified. As you can see, I don't have a single link that anything that is slightly related that that subject at all. And if I see anything at all on the Internet, I run to the Mikvah. If I want Real Torah, Authentic Torah, I know where to go. I open up a Gemara  and learn. Period. Full Stop. I don't take any substitutes. And From pseudo Torah I run in fear for my life. [The term "Gemara" here I use to refer to the basic writings of the Oral Law that were all written down by the Tenaim and Amoraim.] It far better to go surfing  than to listen to pseudo Torah or to pseudo Torah scholars.

Pseudo Torah scholars are easy to spot because they are not teaching Gemara. They can't teach it, because they don't understand it. They have to teach other things which are nonsense,  but which they call "Torah" and which they claim are harder or more difficult than Gemara which is utter nonsense, They are frauds, and they know it themselves, and fear the person like me that can tell the difference between the real thing and them. 

q6

The wholesome, moral, decent USA did exist all over the USA. Except for perhaps a very few dysfunctional families, America was definitely Norman Rockwell country.

However with my family moving into Beverly Hills, the atmosphere changed slightly from when we had been in Orange County. Still from my travels over the USA and the testimony of many people I have talked with, it seems clear that the USA of the past was highly responsible and moral and decent. And everyone that experienced both has said the same thing--the USA of Today is not the same country. And that is a fact. [Even as compared to that Old America, my parents home was an amazing contrast in terms of the level of love and that was there. Still the general USA was an amazing place ]

But in those days everyone had a slight evil inclination to look into something a little bit unsavory. Everyone including me. Because unsavory things hold a strange fascination for human beings. The only question was how unsavory were you willing to go? And while holding on to the evil inclination people also tried to follow their good inclination to some degree. It was not considered a good thing to do evil. But it was fun. So people tried to limit the extent of their unsavory thing by injecting  a little good into it.






My suggestion is to ship out the socialists  and homosexuals. Maximize immigration from Europe and Ukraine and Russia  and Asia [Pakistan should be considered part of Asia in this context and immigration from there is OK as far as I can tell.] and stop it completely from 3rd world countries. Anyone from the Middle East send back. [I think immigration from Mexico is also good. From what I have seen of Mexicans, I am very impressed at their work ethic.]

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My advice for Americans that are upset about the attack on Biblical values: to learn Torah.
Normally that means the Oral and Written law but in this case an introduction would be in order.
That is Musar (Jewish Ethics). There are classical books of Jewish ethics based on the Old Testament which give a good idea of the basic world view of Torah. There was an actual movement among the Jewish people to learn Musar that was based in Vilnius, and its founder was Israel Salanter. It went into hibernation, but it might be a good idea to awaken this again.

Musar has the advantage that it is not trying to fit Torah into some alternative reality worldview, but is a rigorous evaluation of the texts of Torah. It will not be trying to sell you on believing in anyone except for the First Cause. It will be encouraging to follow all the laws of the Torah. So even if there are people that may learn it and yet not be perfect, it has the effect of encouraging people towards objective morality.


My recommendation is the Or Israel by a disciple of Israel Salanter and the Duties of the Heart [the first Musar book ever]. That was written in the Middle Ages and is the father of all Musar books.
It is a comprehensive view of Torah that draws together the various strands of thought in the Oral and Written Torah.