the religious world

At this point in time I want nothing that has the slightest connection with anything to do with the cult that the Gra signed the  excommunication on. I made a terrible mistake getting involved in this terrible kelipa [evil] and I am super sensitive to anything that could even vaguely remind me of them. So when I say only Musar and the Gemara or Sidur HaGra I am being very specific. No offence intended for the sincere and good people whose names got to be associated with this movement. Still there is something very wrong with it. I am sure there are plenty of sincere and good people involved in Hinduism also but that does not make the religion kosher.
Not only that but I feel that the influence and infiltration of this movement into the religious world itself has ruined everything it has touched. Just saying.

Schopenhauer  dealt with the fact that women can have a negative side. And he saw the problem that England was worshiping women. He thought nothing good can come from that. Since I saw that the subject seemed uninteresting to me since he saw and explained the issue clearly. There is what to discuss however in terms of his concepts of the Ideas in the subject and how that relates to this but it seems off topic for this blog.

What I mean is he did not see fit to put a good deal of the positive traits we see in people into the ideas and the world of unconditioned reality [the dinge an sich]. Nor even into the subject.

So he did not put the ideas into the Will. A great move. But he did put them into the subject which he does not identify as the Will but rather as the opposite side of the coin of representation.


But let'stake a look at Jung. He at least saw fit to out human archetypes into the subject.

What I mean by a "great move" is that Schopenhauer thus solved a puzzle that existed since the middle ages. Divine simplicity. You could say the Ari also dealt with it in the same way, but Schopenhauer shows more in detail why his approach is necessary form a metaphysical point of view.
The Ari is simply mystical and does not concern himself with metaphysical aspects of his system 

Ideas in Bava Metzia   Ideas in Talmud

Tractate Bava Metzia page 14 and page 101

.בבא מציעא יד: קא

I think the רמב''ם held that if someone buys a stolen field from the thief and plants it he gets only the money he paid for the field back, not the expenses.



 He  looked at page י''ד and said it is not the same case as the case on page ק''א. On page י''ד someone stole a field and sold it and the buyer did work on it. The רמב''ם wrote the law just like Samuel קרן יש לו שבח אין לו he gets reimbursed for the amount he paid for the field from the thief   but does not get reimbursed for the improvements not from anyone, not from the thief and not from the owner.

And when the רמב''ם looked at page ק''א he saw a completely different situation. Someone went into the field of his neighbor and planted crops or did some improvements. There the רמב''ם decided as our גמרא does that ידו על התחתונה he gets the least amount either the improvement or the expenses.
In other words the property was not stolen. And even though קרקע אינה נגזלת still there was not even an attempt to claim the property as his own.


In other words what I am saying is that I think the רמב''ם must have looked at this סוגיא completely differently than רש''י or תוספות.



בבא מציעא יד: קא . אני חושב שהרמב''ם קבע כי אם מישהו קנה שדה שנגנב מן הגנב ונטע צמחים  שהוא מקבל רק את הכסף ששילם עבור השדה בחזרה, לא ההוצאות. הוא הביט בדף י''ד ואמר שזה לא אותו מקרה כמו המקרה בעמוד ק''א. בדף י''ד מישהו גנב שדה ומכר אותו והקונה עשה עבודה על זה. הרמב''ם כתב החוק בדיוק כמו שמואל "קרן יש לו, שבח אין לו", שהוא מקבל החזר עבור הסכום ששילם עבור השדה מן הגנב, אבל הוא לא מקבל החזר עבור השיפורים לא מאף אחד, לא מן הגנב ולא מן הבעלים. וכאשר הרמב''ם הביט בדף ק''א ראה מצב שונה לחלוטין. מישהו נכנס לתחום שכנתו ושתל גידולים או עשה כמה שיפורים. שם הרמב''ם החליט כמו הגמרא שלנו אמרה בפירוש כי "ידו על התחתונה", הוא מקבל את הכמות המינימלית או השיפור או ההוצאות. במילים אחרות הנכס לא נגנב. ואף על פי קרקע אינה נגזלת, עדיין לא היה אפילו ניסיוןשל זה שנכנס לתבוע את השדה כשלו. במילים אחרות מה שאני אומר הוא  שהרמב''ם בטח הביט בזו הסוגיא בבא מציעא י''ד אחרת לגמרי מאשר רש''י או תוספות



Link to Ideas in Bava Metzia
Link to Ideas in Shas

"Where can one be?"

"Where can one be?"  This is the question that needs to be answered for people that want to learn Torah? Some of the really great yeshiva like Ponovictch or Brisk are for smart guys. What if one is not so smart but still want to learn Torah?

Sadly most yeshivas nowadays are scams and pretend to answer this question when they go around to rich Jews trying to charity for their supposed public charitable  works. The general run of the mill yeshiva is a private club for the mahco man and his gang of thugs and has nothing to do with learning Torah.
So the question that a simple Jew asked me, "where can one be?" goes unanswered.  There simply is no place for a guy to go to sit and learn Torah for a few hours per day.  Not if he is sincere. [Mea Shearim he called "מאה רשעים"  "a hundred wicked" Mea Reshaim]

This question has bothered me for  along time. To some degree the Shar Yashuv Yeshiva in Far Rockaway was an answer for this dilemma because it was not specifically for smart guys. Nor was it a scam to make a slave population for the rosh yeshiva. It was genuinely for the sake of learning Torah for whom so ever wanted to do so.

r70 g major   r70 midi  r70 nwc

anchoring-bias
I think the ideas in this essay ought to be expanded on in detail in several directions. Some important points like daily schedule [what one does every day without fail is an anchor]., the person one most admires and tries to emulate,[making a conscious decision whom to emulate], with what kind of group to hang out with. And the effects of all this on one's inner self.


() Reb Shmuel Berenabum was thinking along these lines almost certainly when he would consistently point out the importance of learning the oral and written Law. [This is called learning Torah and it means Torah in a slightly expanded form. It does not mean strictly the Five Books of Moses. It includes the Oral Law also which means the books of the sages of the Talmud. I have not counted them. There must be at least ten in all. The two Talmuds, Tosephta, Midrash Raba, Midrash Tanchuma, Eliyahu Raba and Zuta, Avot DeRabbi Natan,   tractates not included in Talmud like mesechet Gerim,  Sifra Sifrei, Torah kohanim.

Reb Shmuel was the Rosh Yeshiva of the Mir in NY.



[]I should mention that in some ways I have tried to retain certain anchors in my life without using that exact terminology. My model of human perfection is my father, Philip Rosten. That means for people that did not know him balance and valence [connection] between different areas of value. That is take certain areas of value, Math, Physics, Mozart, Torah (the Oral and Written Law), Family, Survival Skills, etc and you create a valence between them. This hard to describe but I am pretty sure that people that grew up in older times  remember this kind of thing in their own parents. It is just that my father and mother embodied this kind of balance and valence better than anyone I have ever seen or heard of among the living or those gone.

chapter 6 in Pirkei Avot.

chapter 6 in Pirkei Avot. I do not have  a lot to say about it except in the Mir Yeshiva I heard from that the Mashgiach of the Ponovicth Yeshiva in Bnei Brak considered נושא עול עם חבירו to bear the yoke with one's friend to be the most essential of all the traits. 


I also think that I misunderstood that chapter (which is about the importance of learning Torah). For when I was in Safed,  I understood that chapter to mean I should be doing more learning Torah than I was doing. And since everything in this world has a limit, I probably over extended myself in that direction. 

The reason I say this is that I had a kind of attachment to God in Safed, something that is hard to describe. And I thought at the time this attachment was interfering with Torah study. What I did not realize at the time was that attachment to God is one of the goals of the mitzvot. This you can see in the anonymous commentary at the being of the Mishna Torah of the Rambam. He asked a question. One verse says,  "Do the commandments in order to love and fear God." The other verse says "Love and fear God in order to do his commandments." He answers there are two kinds of fear of God. The lower fear of punishment, and the higher awe of God's greatness. The lower fear is to bring to doing all the commandments, and the commandments are to bring to the higher fear and awe of God. So learning Torah according to this view is not the goal but it is to bring to the goal of attachment with God.

Bava Metzia page 14. The argument between Rav and Shmuel

Ideas in Shas updated  I had some idea that I wanted to add about the argument between Rav and Shmuel in Bava Metzia page 14. Mainly it is the thought about what Shmuel must have asked Rav, "Why would thief pay for the improvements to the buyer when it is the owner who is getting the benefits?" And I think it must be that Rav answered to him, "The owner gives the money for the improvements or the expenditure to the thief and the thief to the buyer." That is I am thinking that Rav must have said that the owner has to do only with the thief and the thief with the buyer. At last that is how I think Rashi and Tosphot both must have looked at this sugia.[That the owner can tell the person that bought the field from the thief דין ודברים אין לי אתך. I have nothing to do with you.]

It is important to see how the Rambam and Rav Shach deal with this sugia, but I do not have their books available at this time.

Later it occurred to me that this is not necessarily so. I was doing some sit-ups and it occurred to me that if the thief made the improvements then when the buyer bought the field he paid for the field and the improvements, [like if a fence was built on the property.] Therefore it does make sense for the thief to pay the buyer for the field and the improvements. So maybe my original scheme was right.

[See the original scheme in the link up above on ideas in Shas or at this link  on ideas in Bava Metzia itself on page 101 of Bava Metzia.]


זה עלה בדעתי שאם הגנב עשה שיפורים אז כאשר הקונה רכש את השדה ששילם עבור השדה ואת השיפורים, כמו אם גדר נבנתה על הנכס. לכן זה הגיוני עבור הגנב לשלם הקונה עבור השדה ואת השיפורים. אז אולי התכנית המקורית שלי צדק.

________________________________________________________________________

The Closing of the American Mind

In the book The Closing of the American Mind, Allen Bloom made a point that the project of the enlightenment [classical liberalism ] was at a stage of crisis. He did not offer much in the way of resolution.

It might seem a small consolation   but Allen Bloom did have two ideas that he suggested. Learning the Republic of Plato seems to have been the top priority. "Great books" after that. He also did mention learning Torah in the beginning chapters as a kind of hint but nothing that he explicitly advocated.[I mean to say he mentioned his relatives that had in their background, basic learning of the Oral and Written Law and that that gave them a depth of understanding of the human condition that the NY Times and other modern writings could not compare to.

He also mentioned Hegel in a very positive way, suggesting he might have seen something important there. It is hard to know what though. Allen Bloom in fact had been taught by a Hegelian professor so you you count this as bias towards his teacher. Or it could be he saw something important there.

The truth be told , Thomas Jefferson in a similar vein held the only way the American Republic could survive was by education and for that purpose he founded the university of Virginia. He knew the system of the American Constitution was only workable for a certain kind of person. Not all people.
Only people with a Judaic-Christian orientation.

[My own opinion about this is similar to Allen Bloom and Thomas Jefferson. It is learning Gemara, Musar (Mediaeval Ethics), and Math.] That is to say I do not think all and any education is worthwhile. So in that sense I am disagreeing with Thomas Jefferson. Education yes but only a certain kind of education. Also I am not thinking of the Republic of Plato as being the best of his works but rather the middle dialogues. Also I am thinking Gemara [as shorthand for learning the whole Oral and written Law] Musar Ethics and Math as connecting one's inner self to the Platonic Forms.

[Not that I presume to be anywhere near the greatness of Allen Bloom of Thomas Jefferson. Rather it is my opinion that their ideas need to be modified a bit in because of hindsight.]

I mean to say here that if you look at Allen Bloom's middle chapters about the "self" he is is skimping on the  Kantian approach. [He was quite aware of Kant but in his treatment of the Self he had a lot of material to cover before he could get to Kant.] So what I see is the self of Kant, the "ding an sich,"the thing in itself is something Schopenhauer put the Platonic forms into. Thus all one needs to do in theory is to awaken those Platonic Forms.

religious teachers

The main power of religious teachers comes from their pretense of secret knowledge. Especially knowledge of Kabalah. So they are in particular jealous of the Kabalah Institute [founded on the approach to the Ari of Rav Ashlag] as being a threat to their supposed superiority about this secret knowledge. The only way one can really see through their deception is by experience. There is really very little in the way of checking up on them otherwise.
Only people that were believing in them and burnt are the ones openly saying that they are all frauds, and these people that have been burnt are usually not believable because of the fact that they are losers at this game of fraud. Losers tend to have little of no credibility because of the fact that they are losers even though they are the ones in position to have actually seen the truth.

The truth is religious teachers do not have knowledge of the Ari at all. Most have not even read through the entire works of the Ari at all. And those that have learned the Ari in some depth are usually ignorant of Gemara and thus unqualified. The whole thing is  a scam. 

Even the so called Kabalah yeshivas in Jerusalem are frauds, and are just private county clubs for the macho man and his thugs to sit around all day and chat. Beware.



[In any case for actual knowledge of the Ari the Kabbalah institute seems very good. They have a great edition of all the Ari and without pretense of great knowledge of it they study it seriously. It is the best and most honest approach to this that I have seen.]


This should not be construed as a critique on the Holy Torah, not the written Law nor the oral Law. Rather this is a critique on the creeps that pretend to know it an keep it. in so doing the give the Torah and all Jews a bad name. The religious world are more like enemies of the Jewish people and of the Torah than the friends they claim to be.

In fact I think the Oral and Written Law are very important and I think Reb Israel Salanter found the best approach to make this simple and easy--to learn Musar [the Ethics of the Torah.]

I know on a blog with the Gra in the title it is hard to understand why I would put being in the Armed Forces as good thing. While being in the Armed Forces could cramp your ability to keep all the Mitzvot with all the details. 

Still getting married takes precedence. If a Litvak (Lithuanian) Rosh yeshiva's daughter is a possibility I figure then those people  are not looking at this blog anyway, and that would have happened already.  So obviously you were by-passed. 


 And the religious world is a disaster zone when it comes to shiduchim. [It is  a cheat and a racket for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many  baal teshuvas.]
The main thing there is the fraud and scams. This is besides the fact that the religious world outside the yeshivas is simply a fake religion. It pretends to keep Torah, but worships their human gurus. 

So to be man, it seems to me there is little choice but to  do the Armed Forces thing. [Unless something clicks in university.]

War is justifiable if it is to protect one's home.

Slavery is a biblical law. There are many laws concerning how to deal with slaves. See the laws of slavery in Maimonides. It is a whole book. And the laws of the Bible are forever. There is nothing to indicate that the laws were temporary. The very last of the prophets Malachi ends his prophecy with "Remember the Law of Moses." The whole idea that the Law can be abridged when it says openly that it is forever is ridiculous.  Besides the fact that it says by the laws that they are forever like Tzitzit and Chalah, there is the verse  הנסתרות להשם אלהינו והנגלות לנו ולבנינו לעשות את כל דברי התורה הזאת

And for what purpose would there be a document that you can change its meaning at will? There would be no function for such a document except to give power to the people that claim to understand it and represent it and get money because of their supreme holiness.
A document that's meaning can be changed has no legitimate function in the first place.
We have to say the the Torah has a meaning that is independent of interpretations. And it is only upon us to discern than meaning, not to change it. 

the religious world

c An religious teacher will be the first person to betray you to the enemy.Much less be trustworthy.

The main profession the religious world learn is how to ask others for money. That is their main goal in life. How to get money from others. 


The way they do this is sneaky. They pretend to be doing public service by getting people to  do meaningless rituals and then expect to get paid for that. They also make yeshivas that are frauds. They pretend we are all one big happy family but then when one is on board the ship and no longer is able to learn an independent livelihood they throw off the pretense and it becomes about being their slaves.

This is not Lashon Hara (slander) because just think fora minute if I am right. Lets say all religious teachers are this exact way. Then anyone who knows this and is quite about it is transgressing every second the prohibition אל תעמוד על דם ריעך Thou shalt not stand by and see the blood of your neighbor spilled.

r68 F Major

I am very happy about the improvement to the American military that I have seen recently. My Dad had invested a large amount of his life towards improved and upgrading the military might of the USA. While in the US Air Force he served in the European theater of action. Later literately invented night vision.[At first it was telescope that focused infra red waves. Later the US Army did its own modification to make it small and portable as we see today in night vision helmets. After that he was the head of one of the teams that developed  cameras for the U-2. Then he was recruited to build laser communication for the Strategic Defense Initiative SDI (Star Wars).

Isaac Luria has a modification of the theory of ideas of Plato and the Neo Platonics. Just because some people take the Ari in wrong directions does not mean there is nothing to be gained from him.
I was troubled for some time by the fact of the Zohar itself not being from Rabbi Shimon Ben Yochai but I think there is much to be gained from the Ari himself.
I will try to take a minute here to describe my own world view in short terms. In short I take the idea of Kant that there is a limit to pure reason. Beyond that there is the world of the form, [or ideas as Aristotle called it.] That realm has a hierarchy.  Forms of necessity. Areas of more human interest with have less strict forms and more numinous content. But there are areas of the world of forms that are more formal like Mathematical logic. These areas are not completely of bound to human reason because of their formal content.
But even those areas of formal content depend on a kind of knowledge which  reason perceives

Organized schizophrenia is not the same thing as being careful in keeping the commandments of the Torah.

Organized schizophrenia is the over emphasis of rituals in the religious world.

This is not the same thing as being careful in keeping the commandments of the Torah.
Organized schizophrenia is when you have had in the past some charismatic figure who was a schizoid personality type obsessed with ritual preparation of food and cleaning rituals and sex.
And because he was in control enough of his obsession to make sure to do them only at the right times and places he gained a following as being a holy man. [That is he was only schizoid, not schizophrenic.]
So these rituals gained acceptance and became obligatory.
So far this is well known. I have added nothing here to what is well known and commonly accepted.

We can see this tendency in the religious world. Mainly with the groups that are obsessed with rituals and  sex and food preparation and cleaning rituals. But this can be traced back further. See the Sidur of Saadia Gaon and the order of prayers of the Rambam. We can see how things just kept getting added on and added on until there is no time left in the day to do anything,-- especially not learning Torah.

But what I wanted to add today is an idea from the מסילת ישרים Paths of the Just by Rav Moshe Chaim Lutzatto. That is that the outer affects the inner. Thus by extra strictness in חומרות added restrictions which were added on by some schizoid personality and became accepted by the whole social organism one becomes himself schizoid.

Appendix: This is well known concerning Pesukai DeZimra--the part of the morning prayer before the blessings on Kriat Shema. But the reason I mentioned the sidur of Saadia Gaon is the the first blessing of Kriat Shema itself is about three lines. The opening blessing, a short sentence, and the closing. ברוך אתה ה' אלקינו מלך העולם יוצר אור ובורא חושך then about ten words after that. And then ברוך ... יצר המאורות

So the problem seems to be be that the leaders of the religious community tend to be schizoid personalities that gain their fame from their fanatic addiction to rituals. It is a great thing that the Na Nach groups have noticed this problem. And in fact Reb Nachman himself made a note of the fact that often the leaders of the religious are demonic and so urged caution in this regard. My own approach is that I have been hurt so much and so often by the religious community that I simply refuse to have anything to do with them because I figure at this point the Sitra Achra has just taken over the whole thing lock, stock and barrel. I get panicky just by seeing them because of the kind of damage they have already caused me.