Murder of white farmers in South Africa. 1554 murders.

A nice film about this problem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=37&v=SKG72AviEFw


There are people that say there have been 3000.

There are about 44 murders per day.

The point is that there is no question that whites are being targeted.

Welcome to the future of Baltimore

[I know this not really a Jewish issue but it seems to me that injustice anywhere affects me also.]
I know there were many people in the international community that were horrified that white farmers in South Africa were defending themselves. They called the system of government there unjust even though they had never even been there and seen up close what the situation was. And pressure was kept up until the government fell,]


The way this could have been prevented is if people would learn The Five Books of Moses along with the Oral Law. That is called "learning Torah." Then it would have been clear to people that farmers had a right  of self defense. But people were too busy working for "social justice" than to care about real justice. 

My feeling about learning Torah is based to some degree  on the approach that I was introduced to when I first got to my first yeshiva in Far Rockaway, NY. That approach was uniform among all NY yeshivas and it was this: the main thing in life is to serve God, and the main way of serving God  learning Torah.

But we also know that the way of Torah is not to use Torah to make money. Nor to accept charity to be able to learn Torah. Nor to force the Israeli government to give you money so that you can learn. Nor to talk to secular Jews as if they are your brothers when you are asking them for money. and then to turn around when they are not looking and curse them.

These later approaches are clearly not the path of Torah. but they are a result of the the insane religious world  life style. For this reason in my previous post I mentioned Rav Kook and Rav Shimshon Refael Hirsh because the later one emphasizes Torah with working for a living and Rav Kook empathizes the settlement in the Land of Israel also. So they both give a balanced introduction to Torah thought and at the same time have a kind of balanced approach that is closer to true Torah than anything else I have seen,  

Reform Jews do not learn much Torah. That is the reason they often support movements that are inimical to Torah.
People that have to work for a living or go to school have little time to learn Torah themselves so they have to depend on people that present themselves as understanding Torah in order to form their world view.

Reform people certainly have their hearts in the right place but they also often are not very well knowledgeable in Torah.

The trouble is that many of the people that present themselves as knowledgeable in Torah have very evil hearts. And Reform Jews know this fact and so are very wary of these evil people. [Or they should be very wary of them.]

 The best advice is to learn Torah yourself or if possible to go to a straight and normal Lithuanian kind of yeshiva where the Oral and written law are learning with no propaganda added. Of course for people in NY or Bnai Brak this is easy. But Jerusalem has a problem of animosity. Religious Jews there might like the money of secular Jews, but of one actually tries to settle in their neighborhood they will stop at nothing to get rid of him.


Obviously the the insane religious world  haג nothing to do with Torah.



What one can do is to learn on one's own. The books of Rav Kook I think are very excellent.

This is a nice comment I saw on some news item about junior high students being taught about how to become perverts

Public Schools Teaching Children to be Perverts This is the comment

This is what hath been wrought from your passive support of homosexuality. This is the fruit you purchased with every "not all gay people". Every excuse you made for them, every time you felt sorry for them. This is the beginning of unchecked perversion influencing our children. Congratulations, Christians. Your misguided "love thy neighbor" philosophy has you opening your doors to perverts. Those perverts are going to great lengths to corrupt the youth. If they can corrupt our youth, how much easier will it be for them to corrupt the subsequent generation? They are NOT "just like everyone else". The LGBT community must be met with formidable resistance. Not violence (unless you are attacked, then defend yourself until they can't attack you anymore) but they should be shouted down. They should be silenced. They should feel the shame of defying nature. They should be reminded of the fact that they are nothing more than an evolutionary dead end. They are not "special", they are freaks, perverts, molesters, and degenerates. Being friends with homosexuals, even being friendly towards them, does NOT make you a "good person" or "modern" or whatever p.c. term de jour "ally" or other such nonsense. It makes you a traitor. When you tried to overcome that feeling of disgust you had in the pit of your stomach when you first found out what homosexuality was...that moment you spit in the face of nature. Look around you. Was it worth it?

I have had a hard time trying to convince people about the importance of learning Torah. One thing that is often thrown back at me is, "what about keeping Torah?"  To that I say the only places I ever saw people that kept the Torah was in places that were devoted to learning  Torah.
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That being said I want to tell you how to start your own yeshiva in several easy steps.
First you need raw material--that is a person that knows "how to learn." Knowing how to learn means knowing that you can't know a halacha without knowing the Gemara, Rashi and Tosphot that it is based on. And it means knowing the actual Gemara, Rashi, and Tosphot on the basic seven tractates.[the three bavas and the four on nashim.]
Second  you need Musar. That is ethics, not just Talmud.
After that you need to learn yourself about an hour or more a day and then things will just happen.

Yeshiva has nothing to do with money. If people ask you for money to support their yeshiva be assured they are not learning Torah. 99% of all places that call themselves yeshivas are scams.

q16 [mp3]  q16 in midi format

Sex in the Five books of Moses is not symmetrical. A woman can be married to only one man. A man can be married to many women.  ניאוף  adultery is when a man has sex with a woman who is married to another man. That gets the death penalty. It is in two lists in Leviticus  that go though the עריות.
Sex outside of marriage is  not ניאוף-adultery. It comes under the category of פילגש concubinage.

עריות in Leviticus are generally close family relations. But adultery gets thrown in also in both lists.




There were a good number of people in the Old Testament that had concubines. One well known such person was the friend of Joshua the disciple of Moses. [כלב בן יפונה ] He was not considered a sinner because he has a few wives and few concubines. In the Five Books of Moses he is praised with a kind of praise that is not applied to anyone  else in the Torah, וימלא אחרי השם "He was filled with God."

I am not saying this is the best option. And we do have the Rambam who says a concubine is forbidden to anyone but a king. All I am saying is that there are plenty of opinions to depend on here that allow a girl friend.
Still if you can get married in the traditional way that is best. But for some people it is hard to find such a  situation.

The issue of the borders of Israel is difficult.
For one thing we have the Tosphot in Tractate Yevamot 16a.To Tosphot you have either full holiness or nothing. There is no "in between" state.

The first answer of Tosphot is OK as far as I can see but how can we explain the second answer?
The basic Gemara there says that Amon and Moav are obligated in the tithe for the poor. Later on that same page the Gemara explains the reason being: הרבה כרכים כיבשו עולי מצרים והניחום עולי בבל כדי שיסמכו עליהם עניים בשביעית. "Many cities were conquered by the Jews that came up from Egypt but were left by the Jews that came up from Babylonia in order that the poor will be able to depend on them in the seventh year."
 Tosphot asks from, "There are three lands concerning ביעור." One of those lands in עבר הירדן. So the land beyond the Jordan River is obligated in the seventh year laws.  The first answer of Tosphot seems OK. There was an area of Sichon and Og that was originally of Sichon and Og [lets call it Area I] and there was an area that these two kings had conquered from Amon and Moav. Area II. Tosphot suggests that Area I was settled by Jews returning from Babylonia, --not area II. The next answer of Tosphot is the one I can't understand right now. There Tosphot says the area that is obligated in tithes to the poor in the seventh year was not even part of the area settled by Jews coming out of Egypt. Or at least that is how I understand Tosphot. But if that is so then how does it fit with the Gemara?

This is only the tip of the iceberg. There are many more questions. For example the Rambam in the beginning of the laws of Truma seems to make no sense. In one Halacha he says everything on the right from Aco until Kaziv is outside of Israel. and then in the next halacha he seems to contradict this. And in the end of that chapter he says the whole area even of עולי בבל is obligated in tithes only by rabbinical decree. But this last question I might have a kind of half way decent answer for. Maybe--I am suggesting- the Jews returning from Babylonia sanctified the land but the sanctification does not set in until all the Jewish people return to Israel.

The so called leaders of Breslov are all dangerous con men. The only group I like is the Na Nach group that rightfully suspect any religious leader of nefarious motives. They may go a little too far in that direction but their approach lends a healthy balance to the playing field. I never met a religious teacher  who did not lie all the time and the Na Nach people are aware of that. They lie because they have contempt for everyone outside of their group. That makes them incapable of telling the truth ever.
[I mention this because recently I was looking at the Musar book אורחות צדיקים and that book warns not to flatter. I am afraid if I discuss the greatness of Torah but don't warn people about the con men then I would be guilty of flattery.

They lie mainly to fill in the gap between what they want to think about themselves and the reality and also to make their institutions seem to be about charity. But then they get so used to lying they do it out of habit. And eventually the habit gets to be malicious. They lie about people not part of their group that they don't like in order to hurt them.

Without any idea of obligation  at this point, let's just try to think of what a Maimonides kind of program of living Torah would be like. If we try to mix obligation with it at first, that might damage the clarity.

We might not want to do want the Rambam says, and that might cause us to not recognize or admit to ourselves that he is saying certain things.

We want to separate the variables.

The Rambam's idea of an education is the Oral and Written Law, Physics and Metaphysics. He is not describing Kabalah because he openly says he means Physics and Metaphysics as understood by the ancient Greeks. Physics and Metaphysics have both made some progress since Aristotle, so a Rambam kind of program would have to include modern Theoretical Physics and Kant' Critique of Pure Reason.

But you see right away what happens when we think about the Rambam. Immediately there is resistance to anything he says that one's social group does not approve of.  That is why I say it is easiest to think of what he actually said, and only later to think about how to accomplish it.



The advantage of this approach is if we can get a clear idea of what Torah is, then we might be able to keep it. But without a clear idea of what it is, it is hopeless to imagine we can fulfill it.

Also we need a certain degree of confidence that he understood the Torah fairly well. Faith in the wise.

This approach to Torah cancels out a lot of things that present themselves as Torah true concepts.
Because of the Rambam's clarity many issues become clear in this way.

I would like to suggest to make a Lithuanian yeshiva in every town.  The idea would be that you would have a regular normal Litvak yeshiva program for four years but it would be open house for people to come in and learn just like in the great Lithuanian yeshivas in NY.  The basic program would be an in depth session in the morning and a faster session in the afternoon. Plus it would have the regular Musar Jewish ethics books. That is it would be following the basic orientation of the Gra.

This would not be teaching people to use Torah for money. It is not a kollel. Nor would it be to get people to repent. It is rather to teach people to get to the level of proficiency that an average guy needs in order to be able to learn Torah on his own.  And that takes about four years about 10 hours a day.

And it is clear that Christian civilization can't survive without yeshivas. They lose track of what the law is.

The borders of Israel as defined in the Torah are further north than what most people are aware of. That is in Parshat Masei you have areas that are described by various names that some of which are ambiguous. Antioch however is known to be one of those names because of a "Targum" {Translation of Onklus} and a few open Gemaras. Those areas, however, were not conquered by the Jews that came of of Egypt. In the book of Joshua that land  is called ארץ הנשארת "the land left over." That is it was promised but the children of Israel at the time, but they did not have the where with all to be able to conquer it from the Canaanites. And what makes things worse is that when the Jews returned to Israel from Babylon, they left even more land unsettled. And only the second sanctification sanctified it. קדושה ראשונה קידשה לשעתה ולא לעתיד לבא, קדושה שנייה קידשה לשעתה וקידשה לעתיד לבא

See the Gemara in Yevamot 16a and the two mishnas in Sheviit שלש ארצות לביעור and one of those three lands is עבר הירדן. So beyond the Jordan river was conquered by the Jews coming out of Egypt but not by the Jews returning from the exile in Babylon.  And the other Mishna I don't remember but the way the Rambam brings it it comes out that from Akko and north up to a certain city is Israel on the left but not on the right and after that is all land conquered by the Jews coming of of Egypt but not by the Jews returning from Babylon. In any case the actual land promised in the Torah extends much further north that either of these two areas.

Most of the time I was in Israel this was not an issue, but the last time I was in the southern city of Netivot which clearly was under כיבוש עולי מצריים  but not כיבוש עולי בבל.  So what was its status? Well to Rashi and Tosphot probably nothing. With them you have either כיבוש עולי בבל or nothing at all. However it seems that to the Rambam something can be part of Israel even if it has not been sanctified.  That seems to be the only way to understand how he can say on one hand  קדושה ראשונה קידשה לשעתה ולא לעתיד לבא, קדושה שנייה קידשה לשעתה וקידשה לעתיד לבא and on the other hand say that areas conquered by the Jews coming out of Egypt is נאכל ואינו נעבד the fruits are eaten in the seventh year but the land is not worked and he says the fruits in this context means  ספיחים

Sometimes God is hidden from  me. But I know he is hidden. But sometimes the fact of His being hidden is also hidden. That is he is so hidden from me that I think he is not hidden at all and I imagine myself close to him. This is not just me but you find this with people that are convinced they are on the right path. They don't have a sense of ontological uncertainty. They think everything is permitted. They are convinced that God loves them,-- no matter what they do. That is: the fact of God being hidden from them is hidden from them.   ואנכי הסתר אסתיר פני ביום ההוא {See Deuteronomy in the Song of Moses in which Moses prophesies  that God says, "I will hide my hiding on that day."}

But even when God is hidden in הסתרה שבתוך הסתרה "hidden-ness that is hidden," it is still possible to reveal the presence of God when one  seeks Him. You seek God by Torah. Torah is the interface between God and his creation. This inserts an intermediate step that you don't have in Schopenhauer.
With Schopenhauer there is only the Will (the thing in itself, the dinge an sich) and the entire creation is the representation of that Will (i.e. conditioned reality).

Torah is the Representative of God and the creation being the representation of Torah. . For it is the open aspects of Torah that are represented in the world. But it is the hidden aspect of the Torah  that is contained in the hiding of the hiding.

The idea here is that God has an interface with the world.  Torah is that interface. That is the Written Torah and its explanation that was written down by the Tenaim and Amoraim. [That is like how you interact with your hard drive. You need some interface in order to do so.]


What I suggest then is a yeshiva in which the Oral and Written Torah are learned and practiced. But the Torah learned has to be authentic. Way too many pseudo yeshivas exist. I can count the real yeshivas in the entire world on five fingers. Three in NY: Mirrer, Chaim Berlin, Torah Vedaat. And two in Israel: Ponovitch and Brisk. Most so called "yeshivas" are actually evil cults.

q10  q10 midi q10 nwc

q13 q13 midi I do not see a nwc file for this,  but if one wants the notes, he can get them from the midi file; just not the instruments.

q14 q14 midi  q14 nwc  



q12  q12 midi q12 nwc

It is on the Jewish calendar the yarzeit of the Ari. And in a kind of environment in which Talmud is learned all day long I think the Ari is important. But from my point of view the reason the Ari is important is more as  good explanation of Torah. The Ari helps me at least to deal with problems of interpretation.  Arguments from authority aside I should mention to that Yaakov Abuchaztira the ari was simply "rabbainu". That is if you find in the writings of Yaakov Abuchatzaira simply "our teacher" that always refers to the Ari.

But the problem is that we have a definition of "outside books"  as the Rif defines it. The Rif says those are books that "explain the Oral or Written Torah with new foundations or principles that are not already contained in those books." And most of the ideas in the Ari don't seem to have a source in the Talmud. I think the answer to this is that in fact in the agadic parts of the Talmud, you do find things that hint to the basic principles of the Ari.

At any rate, never learn Kabalah with Ashkenazim. They always get it wrong and it has serious consequences when they do.

The best approach is this: If you have a daily session in Gemara in depth [about a hour] and  one learning quickly [also an hour] then the Ari is a good idea to supplement to your daily routine.

Even though I have  a great deal of respect for Isaac Luria, and I was very inspired by his writings, still I think that it makes more sense to learn Talmud. This is a shift in my thinking. For  a few years back I used to think learning the writings of the Ari  was the most important kind of learning Torah one could do.

That thinking was based on various statements in the introduction of the Eitz Chaim itself and also the Ramchal's Pri Eitz Chaim. At some point I saw the statement of the Rambam that just  as one can't add or subtract from the written Law so with the Oral Law.  So I realized that although the Ari is an important interpretation of the Torah still it does not count as the Oral or Written Law.
That is just as the written law is fixed--the Old Testament, so the writings that constitute the Oral Law  that were complied during the period of the Tenaim and Amoraim constitute the Oral Law.

q9 in g major  \\[q9 in midi format]

q9 in nwc format

\q14 in mp3 format  q14 nwc

q14 in midi

q12 in mp3  q12 in midi  q12 nwc

Baali Teshuva [Newly religious] in the USA are animated by Torah. The Torah literally gives them a kind of high--but more powerful than a drug high--because the Torah high has numinousity and meaning. It has ontological significance.
Baali Teshuva in Israel are animated by group identity, by animosity towards the State of Israel and by the particular Charismatic leader they happen to be following.

How this sad state came about I don't know. But there is a cure. That is to learn Torah in the straight Lithuanian way--and stop the nonsense. At least the police are looking for the con men that are the leaders of Breslov. But why it took the Israeli Police this long to start an investigation is beyond me.
The rule is anyone under the excommunication of the Gra is a con man.Take it or leave it. But that is a fact.