The Path of Bava Sali

I had a session of learning the Eitz Chaim of Isaac Luria with Shimon Buso [the son of the daughter of Bava Sali]

There is a long story involved in this. I met him in a Beit Midrash in Ramot Gimel and he brought me to see his mother and for some reason she was immediately impressed. While there I saw a copy of Shimon Shkop’s book on Yevamot and picked it up out of curiosity and opened up to one essay on Tzarat HaBat.

At any rate that began a long relationship with that family. In Those days I was spending all my time by what is called “Navi Shmuel” which is a beit midrash built over the tomb of the prophet, Samuel. And the daughter of Bava Sali brought her entire family every week there to pray, and then would ask me to give to her and each of her children and grandchildren a blessing.

I did not know what she saw in me. Only after many years that was in NY and then returned to Israel by the Western Wall did she reveal the secret within the hearing of her son, Shimon.

I stayed by Shimon Buso's home for a few months until I moved back to Safed.

I had long involved discussions with Shimon and his mother over a period of several years.

I should mention that she held very strongly about what could be called the basic Lithuanian yeshiva approach.

As for Kabalah, Bava Sali never allowed any “Mekubal” to see him. His Shamash [servant] was under strict instruction when Bava Sali came to Jerusalem not to allow any Mekubal in, under any circumstances.

The grandchildren of the older brother of Bava Sali, David Abuchatzeira עטרת ראשינו, go to a yeshiva in Bnei Brak called Yeshivat Avraham Kalmonovitch. That should already tell you enough. Avraham Kalmonovitch was the founder of the Mir Yeshiva in NY, pure Litvak from head to toe.
And Shimon Buso himself taught Gemara at the branch of Ponovitch in Jerusalem when Rav Shach was the Rosh Yeshiva

The daughter of Bava Sali also mentioned a few books that she recommends by name The Obligations of the Heart [חובות לבבות] the first Musar book and Rav Joseph Karo’s Shulchan Aruch. She was referring to it more along the lines of keeping the laws of Written and Oral Law. She was not referring to learning specifically. Rather it is a shorthand way of saying the law as explained in the Gemara and later Rishonim as brought down in the Tur Beit Yoseph and redacted into the Shulchan Aruch. That is kind of a mouthful. 

Criticism is hard to take but necessary for us to rise above our limitations.

My knowledge of American History is very small. I was in a Advanced preparation American History in High school and did not do very well. The teacher gave me the most seething review of a paper I had every received until then. I found it discouraging. Later I find myself grateful for the very harsh criticism I received from my teachers and Roshei Yeshiva but at the time it was hard to receive and accept. Of course they were right.

In hind sight I realize I gained a lot by my teachers being critical of me. This is a general fact about human development. Criticism is hard to take but necessary for us to rise above our limitations.

I was very used to being the best at anything I would try to do. I can still remember almost every little bit of criticism that anyone gave me because it hurt so much.

The US History teacher wrote a long note in Bold Red Letters a whole two paragraphs that I was not a scholar and that my essay was a poor piece of scholarship. I was comparing the policies of two different presidents in that essay. One was Andrew Jackson.

My first Rosh Yeshiva made it known publically that I did not have gratitude- which of course is true.

   I spoke once to a police officer in my usual arrogant way He said “You have an attitude problem.” I answered "Attitudes change." 

A Police officer in Israel in  told me I have a problem that I don’t treat people with respect.

The director of Star Wars with Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi has this very same theme. And the director of that film mentioned that that was part of his intention in the film to bring out this point --how hard it is to accept criticism from our mentors and yet how necessary it is.

People judge criticism by the intension of the critic. That is not good. Even if the intension of the critic is not positive still we should accept as much possible 

]

The Jewish part of Western Civilization is I think Old Testament, plus the witnessing of people that take the Law seriously has an effect on Christian society. There is a kind of symbiosis. Plus there is the contribution of individual people. The general effect of Western civilization is to grow up in a world in which self improvement and character improvement is important.

Some of the things which were contributed by Jews were the polio vaccine, the process to make nitrogen [ammonia] on a large scale which makes growing large crops of wheat and grains possible, Relativity, String Theory (Susskind, Witten).  Saadia Gaon and Maimonides laid a framework for natural law that was later developed by Aquinas and that in turn provided the basis for John Locke and natural rights which formed the basis of the Constitution of the USA.

Atomic Energy still provides most of the electricity. The list of scientists at Los Alamos read like the morning role call of the Mir Yeshiva.

A great deal of American engineering is from Jews. In my Dad's lab at the Army base at Monmouth, NJ there were about 49 Jews and one German. That is when he developed night vision. And later he created laser communication between satellites for NASA. But these were just two small projects that I am aware of.

Production of radio waves, Hertz.

Neils Bohr, Emmy Noether, Grothendick. 

There are good things about the West. In particular I see the Middle Ages as a period of intense and important philosophical thought and innovations. Also the Renaissance was a great period of innovation. To the degree that the West takes these two periods and builds on them it is very good.
Medieval Thought builds on the strong connection between faith and Reason. The Renaissance builds on the idea of testing and going beyond human limits.

There is a Old Testament aspect of Western Civilization and the Jewish emphasis on fulling the the Law of God. There is also a NT aspect to it along with Roman Law and Greek philosophy.

not to add to the commandments.

In the Torah there is a mitzvah not to add to the commandments. [That is don't add and don't subtract. That excludes groups that add mitzvot and say "Yes keep the mitzvot but in order for you to come your Tikun {soul correction} you need to do this added mitzvah." Even though the added mizvah is not one of the commandments in the Five Books of Moses.  Eg belief in some tzadik is not one of the commandments of the Torah.

But to emphasize one particular mizvah is something we do find in Chazal [the words of the Sages].

And the Torah itself does in fact have one particular mizvah that it considers to be the most important one -not to worship any other god besides the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Thus worship of any tzadik would seem to be excluded.

Another problem with making up new mizvot is the law of Conservation of Morality. People by nature have only a certain amount of energy they can spend on being moral, It is like the law of conservation of Energy. If one adds rituals and mizvot, there is no energy left for real obligations.
And once people are strict in food preparation or other rituals then when it comes to  actual obligations they feel they are already good enough people and don't have to worry about these other obligations.
Thus we find that the most immoral people are ultra religious. This is because they have no energy left to be decent human beings after spending all their mental energy and time on rituals.

Therefore we find in Litvak yeshivas the emphasis is on "learning Torah," and avoiding Bitul Torah so that one knows his real obligations.



What the Torah is essentially doing is to limit the number of possible things you can do to make your life better. When the Torah says don't add to the commandments  it is saying in essence that there is no conceivable ritual you could add to make things better. The reason is that no matter what you would add it would be by definition going against the express command of the Torah not to add. So it might promise great reward but it is a lie. And that is in fact what I think about all cults. They promise things they can not deliver.

frivorce-Divorce

My impression of women in the USA is that too much feminism got to them. That means as some comments have said slavery of the man. Some men do not accept slavery willingly.  I was one like that. Especially growing upon traditional American Jewish values, the prospect of being someone slave seemed less than the best option.

"Taking on the roles of responsible husband and father has always been a tremendous sacrifice for men. However in the past society acknowledged those sacrifices with some perks: respect, a certain amount of deference, male only spaces, some authority over family matters, and property rights. Those benefits are all gone. Yet men are still expected to live up to their historical responsibilities. The amazing thing to me is that men continue to get married at all. "

The woman launches a frivorce  with cash and prizes in virtually every case. Who needs it?

Likewise divorce and court administration officials simply do not care HOW court-ordered quota dollars are ultimately used for the support of the children, if at all. No receipts or accountability required.
All they care about is that the subject (ex-husband) “hits quota”.
Because hitting quota is a good thing.
Never mind that the ex-wife’s new live-in boyfriend has taken the quota dollars to place spinning gold rims on his 2010 Honda Civic.

More and more men are coming to the conclusion that being a woman’s slave (thanks to her daddy the state) is not for them. Why do something that has a really good chance of destroying your life? It’s just not worth it.

Female initiated frivorce for cash and prizes constitutes a kind of tax that is only paid by married men. The fact that frivorce looks random from the outside doesn’t change this.

I repeat: frivorce constitutes a tax that is only paid by (some) married men. It is easy to avoid the frivorce tax; just don’t get married.

The frivorce tax is only paid by married men. An economic fact no one dares to notice.

My advice: I am aware of problems in the West. My answer for this is to learn the Old Testament, the Two Talmuds  and works of Ethics written during the Middle Ages. 
And avoid all cults.

The clash of ferocious Islam against Judaic Christian civilization.

I think that people in the West are not aware of the power that numinious values play in people's lives. Because they are not religious they cant see how religion can be the major motivation.
The Enlightenment intended this. The idea was to create secular societies where religion was a minor trivial play thing. So when people encounter  ferocious Islam, they simply can't comprehend from it comes. Did not Walt Disney tell us "It's a small world after all?" And everyone is the small on the inside and we should all sit around the campfire singing kubaya?

It is a clash of Islam against Judaic Christian civilization.

I used the term Judaic Christian civilization because it seems to describe the Civilization that arose in Western Europe-- that is the “meme” that was the seed of that civilization.
If the term was coined late, that does not mean it is inaccurate.

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I still really believe like the Madragat HaAdam מדרגת האדם that with the right amount of trust in God things would work out for me. Most of my problems I attribute not to lack of God's grace, but to lack of trust. That is: I see lack of trust in God as my own most serious problem,- because it is at the root of all other problems.

Trust in God is incidentally the major theme of the school of thought "Navardok." [that is part of the title of this blog]

 The idea of trust gave me great strength to do things that I felt were right to do, but I would have been scared to do them if I had thought about them too much. For example, going to Israel to live there at a time when it was  very dangerous. Also sitting and learning Torah, though I had no idea where a making living would come from. Both of these things I did because of trust in God along these lines "I will do what is right and God will help me."

Of course later on I fell from learning Musar [Ethics] and trust. Slowly but surely. And as I fell so did God's help.

An advantage of trust in God is you can speak the truth and never be afraid of bad consequences. And speaking the truth always even by itself is an amazing thing. It provides one with a protective shield that nothing can penetrate. And it is a spear that can pierce tall mountains. I found for myself that a commitment to speak the truth always under all circumstances is an anchor that keeps me safe in stormy seas.


Therefore what I suggest is something along the lines of a Navardok yeshiva. That is a regular Litvak  Musar yeshiva but with a emphasis on trust in God. This in fact the basis structure of the Mir Yeshiva in NY when I was there. There was a whole shelf in the Ethics section of only the Madragat HaAdam.

Every yeshiva seems to have a meme. A unit of social information. That is even among the really great yeshivas that I have seen there are differences.  We already know that each school of thought after Reb Israel Salanter emphasized a different character trait. So Navardok was just one approach of many. Slobadka was גדולת האדם the greatness of man. The Mir was more modest. The Mir in NY where I went to seemed to pride itself on being second best. In any case among all Litvak yeshivas that I have seen there is a basic emphasis on worship of God alone and good character traits. Personally I can't think of any one Litvak Yeshiva that is not worthy of support even though there are some I am less happy with.

Still I would have to say one should learn Physics and Math along with the regular Gemara and Musar program. That is the basic modification I would have to say is important.

Ideas in shas  Ideas in Bava Metzia  with editing and some additions.

The truth is I see most of Shas as virgin territory. The types of basic questions and issues that I see in every Tosphot look to me to be things no one has ever touched on..

I am on one hand sad that I was not able to write a similar kind of book like the Ideas in Bava Metzia on other chapters and tractates. But maybe someone will come after me and do the work. I hope so.

The yeshiva model of depending on charity does not work. It ends up baiting naive college students making them think "we are all one happy family" while spitting them out when they are no longer useful or their rich parents no longer want to support them. And it shames the name of Torah to have the disgusting creatures at the head of the hierarchy.

Whether using the Torah for money like kollels do is permissible according to the Torah [or not] is not the question. Maybe they can find support for this practice in some achronim [later authorities]. Fine. The point  is that it does not work. It makes a highly perfidious system with the worst kind of slime at the top of the hierarchy.

Yeshivas should make it clear from the start that Torah is not to be used for making a living. Everyone should learn a decent vocation as part of the program.

Trust in God has to be trust in God--not in the system.

I have tended to "conflate" {mix up} trust in God with trust in the yeshiva system. I went to yeshiva thinking that God would provide for parnasa issues [making a living issue].
This probably would have worked if I had stayed inside the system. But to some degree I think I lost this confidence in God and instead started trusting in the system itself. I might have continued in this illusion if not for the yeshivas themselves proving untrustworthy. [Or the people running things.]

The Lakewood Kollel did not throw me out, but very much encouraged my wife to leave me because of my sin of learning Torah for its own sake and not using it to make money. So we see we ought to make a distinction between מתיבתא דרקיע and מתיבתא דארעא- The world of yeshiva in heaven and the word of yeshivas on earth. [Very often religious people have megalomania. A kind of insanity in which they are the center of the universe and control the universe.]
That does not mean any of the principles of the Torah ought to be doubted. Rather that "people are people." That is: a highly degenerate offshoot of primates.

Still  there are great lessons to be learned. Lesson One is: Trust in God has to be trust in God--not in the system.

Lesson Two: That it is important to learn a vocation for the times when one falls from absolute confidence in God or when God hides his Face and things do not work out as well as one expects.

It is possible also to make  a note that the yeshiva system as such is only a loose confederation and depends on charity. As such, the rules are fluid, and each institution itself depends highly on the actual person running it.

One suggestion was made to me by Avi Preder to simply have "Batei Midrash" houses of study.  But that  would seem to lack the benefits of having an authentic Lithuanian yeshiva. The truth is I do not know what it all means, or how to fix things, or if things can be fixed.

So for myself, I would like to have my own personal space where I can learn Gemara (Talmud) and Musar (Ethics) in private, and not depend on people's kindnesses. But even getting to that point, I have found is hard.
 And just walking into yeshivas to learn did not work out very well (to say the least). And the further problem is the whole yeshiva model has given rise to numerous cults that pretend to be real yeshivas, but are in fact destructive cults.

In short, I have found the whole yeshiva world to be highly troubling, and in fact it raises many more questions and problems than it seems to solve. It might be an idea to take money out of the equation. But I wonder if that would help much. The places that are authentic probably should be supported like Ponovitch.

It could be the Mizrachi types of places are the best idea: Torah with a vocation.

To make a general rule seems impossible. The best bet is to sit and learn Torah yourself Gemara and Musar-and forget about institutions.

[I am not recommending any particular path or yeshiva here. Just sit and learn Torah and try to keep it as best you can. And avoid the cults and their leaders at all cost.]

group identity

I noted that in fact some people consider group identity to be national and ethnic. I understood this about two days ago when I saw someone mentioning this on a blog. For myself, for as long as I remember, I always thought keeping the Law of Moses was the most important thing. The Five Books of Moses. Not any kind of  identity. Identity did not seem like much of an issue in the Five Books of Moses  and its Oral Commentary, the two Talmuds.

Furthermore, I see group identity is very important to a lot of people, much more so than to be moral, decent people.  This group identity thing seems wrong, and to be a evil inclination, a trick of the Sitra Achra to get people to forget about simply, basic morality; and get distracted so as to obey some charismatic leader or to follow the herd.


Of course, I am not alone in this. The general approach of the Lithuanian yeshiva world was in essence to find out in a practical way how to keep the Law of Moses. In fact, that was the only thing that mattered there.


But outside of that particular environment, what drives religious people is group identity. And most of them are insane. That is not completely insane but insane to a certain percentage.

The nice thing and important thing about the Talmud is it give the only practical way to keep the Law of Moses.

NATO Nuke Base Surrounded By Heavily Armed Turkish Police; Houses Up To 90 Thermonuclear Weapons

Turkish President Recep Erdogan has deployed 7,000 armed police and heavy vehicles to the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. The base is a NATO asset and reportedly houses between 50 and 90 B-61 variable yield thermonuclear weapons. The base is the largest nuclear weapons storage site in Europe with some 25 underground vaults.

Via Sputnik News:

All inputs and outputs to the Incirlik Air Base located in Adana have been closed as Turkish Minister of European Affairs cautions that it is just a “safety inspection” while local newspapers speculate that a second coup attempt may be underway.

Some 7,000 armed police with heavy vehicles have surrounded and blocked the Incirlik air base in Adana used by NATO forces, already restricted in the aftermath of a failed coup. Unconfirmed reports say troops were sent to deal with a new coup attempt.

According to the Turkish Minister for European Affairs, Omer Celik, this is just a routine “safety inspection.” Hurriyet, by contrast, reports that anti-terror police received reports of a second attempt by Gulenists to overthrow the Erdogan regime.

This goes to show it is not good to have nukes around where there are muslims. Maybe it is time to tell NATO to get out of there.

I am not thrilled at the idea of 50-90 thermonuclear weapons in the wrong hands. Especially people that think killing Jews and Christians is a means to gain paradise. It seems like a bad combination.

The Rambam does include Physics and Metaphysics in the category of the Oral Law.

In his terminology this means these two subjects as understood by in ancient Attica in Greece.

Philosophy however since Aristotle has gone down hill while Physics has gone up.

So to fulfill this idea one would have to ignore all philosophy since Aristotle's Meta-physics, but he would have to do Physics. Physics is hard. My advice is to have a coffee, fresh ground, just mix with water and a raw egg yoke, right when you wake up. I was doing this idea of learning right when you wake up for some time and I heard also from a KGB agent that that is how he learned English.

When it was possible for me to cook I borrowed an idea from Bava Sali to cook coffee and tea together and boil for 30 seconds.

[Where do you see this in the Rambam, in the beginning of the Guide along with the parable of the king circa the end of Vol III. Also in laws of learning Torah. He hints to it in other places like the commentary of the Mishna. It came from previous sources. You can see it in the Musar book Obligations of the Heart.

link  Here is a link to a discussion about religious fanaticism

And here is  comment on that site  I thought makes sense in a lot of different contexts:

"As a former Christian fundamentalist, I can tell the person who wrote this is a Christian fundamentalist who is trying to "witness" to the Gamesters. Whether he actually believes it or not is beside the point, all he is trying to do is persuade people, the gamesters in this instance, to "Accept Jesus as their personal savior" or "Confess Jesus as Lord and Savior." That is all that's happening here.

People like this who "Know Jesus as their personal Savior" are unwilling to interact with others outside their belief system on a human level. All they do is "witness." In their argot that means persuade others to "Accept Jesus as their personal Savior." In practice, it simply means persuade people to join their movement. Everything they say to others outside the "fold" is pure advertising; it isn't supposed to make sense, but only influence. 

The fundies do take an approach to dealing with everybody that the gamesters do in dealing with women."

"Fundies" I think means religious fanatics. In any case I can see this comment applies to a wider context than the one he is writing for.

This must have something to do with Sapolsky. While Sapolsky limits his treatment of the schizo typal personality I wonder if it could be expanded towards the idea of religious evangelicalism? Not just Obsessive compulsive personalities?

Locality The reference frame

Locality has come upon The Reference Frame again. I was looking for some old comment by the author that said in the most clear way possible that nature is local and there is no action at a distance but still could not find it or forgot how he said it and so maybe I saw it but did not recognize it.

At any rate, the knowledge of Nature is unavoidably subjective 




Lubos

"Nature is local, at least whenever a quantum field theory is a sufficiently good description. String theory is local in some respects, subtly nonlocal in others. But no nonlocality is ever needed to explain the results of EPR-like experiments. The experiments testing entanglement have nothing to do with nonlocality."


What I think he meant by this comment was that Field Theory is local but it gets that locality after there is a propagator. Kind of like a Hamiltonian description of a system. The fact that you describe it as a system does not mean non locality. 

I was looking for some comment by Lubos that said this idea that nature is radically local but I still can't find it. [That is nature is subjective and local. There is no objective state of affairs until you make  a measurement]


[Maybe it was this blog entry] I wish I had made a link to it when I first saw it.

Locality correct. Realism incorrect.

"Realism" means the assumption that the state of the Universe is described by the choice of - possible time-dependent - information about the "right points in the phase space", the space of possible states, and this information is objective and in principle, every honest observer would have to agree with any physically meaningful statement about this information if he tried hard.

Realism, in this valid definition, doesn't imply determinism or causality.

"Quantum mechanics says that there is no underlying objective state of affairs.

One can still say that "the existence of Nature" itself is an objective fact. But it's an empty statement and none of the detailed properties of Nature are objectively well-defined (before the measurement)."

[from this link]


" But I'm saying just the opposite! You can have an objective world that is fundamentally probabilistic." [from this link]

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