I had a few little pieces of advice I wanted to share. I had lost everything. And yet God still kept me and protected me. The religious world was truly full of snakes and scorpions and I had put all my eggs into that basket. So when the true nature of the religious world revealed itself in all its nasty, perverted glory I found it necessary to hold onto certain basic things.

These are the two things I recommend. (1) Speak the truth at all cost. (2) Say the 13 principles faith of the Rambam every day. I used to do  this right when I got up in the morning.

So I believe hanging on to faith and truth are sufficient to bring others through their difficulties also from my own experience.


The religious world should really be called the world of delusion. They keep telling you and themselves everything will be fine if you listen to them. First of all they are lying. They do not have the holy Torah. 
[I do make an exception for the authentic Litvak yeshivas like Ponovitch and Brisk. If you are not in the area of a place of real Torah then the best thing is to learn Torah at home. That is the Tenach and the two Talmuds. [If you have been through it once then to do Tosphot.] [I should add that my general approach is that of the Rambam to emphasize the learning of the Oral and Written Law and Physics and Metaphysics. The short way to do that is to do the Mishne Torah with the Keseph Mishne and modern Physics and the Metaphysics of Aristotle.]

There is nowadays a great need to discern what is true tradition and what is false. With the great profusion of false Torah from teachers of the dark Side, it is necessary to limit the set.

learning Mathematics

For me in learning  Mathematics, I found a lot depends on understanding certain key concepts. I was in Hebrew University trying to restart math [because of the Rambam's opinion as I mentioned earlier] and I was looking at math and physics books.  A certain girl, Michal, came over to me and explained the basic concept of a derivative. That is, she showed the basic way that Newton had come upon the concept, and then showed how it in fact worked to get the derivative of x^2 to be 2x by taking the limit. [She actually sat down with me and showed me step by step the exact derivation.] 

That one basic concept turned out to be the key concept that later made Calculus  clear to me. 
Same went for Algebra. It made no sense to me either until I think it was the same girl that showed to me how 2 (x+y)= 2x+2y. Again it was one simple key concept that made everything clear. 
Again in Quantum Mechanics I really had no idea what was going on on until one day I stumbled across a book by Eyal Buks from the Technion in Israel that said simply the inner product is equal to the delta function (that is one when both vectors are equal, and zero otherwise.).

[I am not saying one should be stuck until he understands every concept. Just the opposite. I hold from what is called דרך גירסה-to say the words in order, and go on. Eventually, one will understand. And even if he does not get it, he still has the mitzvah of listening to the Rambam and having אמונת חכמים belief in the wise.

[Using Torah to make money made no sense to me, so I decided to start afresh with learning an honest occupation like Physics. I also had seen most people that make money by using the Torah, just do not seem kosher or decent in any sense. Seeing that people using Torah for money turn out really nasty, gave me a lot of incentive to find a different path. This is in any case exactly what the Torah itself says. Take a look at Pirkei Avot ch 4 ולא קרדום לחפור בה מכאן אמרו כל הנהנה מדברי תורה נוטל את חייו מן העולם and the Rambam explains there מן חיי העולם הבא.  [Pirkei Avot brings the statement in ch 1 "Do not use Torah to make money." Then it repeats it in ch 4 an adds, "From here they said he who uses Torah to make money takes his life out of the world," and the Rambam adds "from the life of the world to come"]. (For the majority of people in yeshivas, learning Torah is a career choice. It is a way to plan ahead by using Torah to make money and get a shiduch. Outside of the implausible excuses, it is exactly what the Mishna in Pirkei Avot says not to do. Another thing they do is to make as much as they can to be forbidden unless under their control. By adding countless restrictions they get everyone under their thumb.]I wish I could say otherwise but the truth needs to be told: yeshivas are disaster zones. Even the best. It has gotten to be just a business. A business that produces nothing but heart ache for those people naive enough to think the products of yeshivas have anything to offer but the swiftest way to break up homes and families. [It was not always like this and it does not have to be. I remember a time at the Mir in NY and in many places in Israel learning Torah was in fact known to be the highest goal and people did it with sincerity.]




 In any case. it was kind of late to start a new career, but I did have some nice experiences  in math. As I wrote on this blog, I did have a nice opportunity to give a few seminars in HU on Differential questions, and to spend time at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU.

the holy spirit schechina

My own experience with the holy spirit schechina went in stages. That it it had definite stages going up and definite stages coming down. The beginning I think was really in my parent's home where there was an amazing atmosphere of wholesomeness and love. At some point I felt an intense need to learn Torah and that was still while in California while I was a junior and senior in BH High School.  Then in Far Rockaway that same level of interest in Torah continued. But when I got to the Mir in NY then there was kind of step up. Then at some point I decided to make aliyah to Israel and then the first step out of the airplane, the shechina was already felt in the air. Next was in Safed where there were definite stages. First a kind of cleansing for a few months and then a kind of intense light started shining all in and around me along with a kind of powerful {almost electric pulsing}. That was while Bava Sali [Israel Abuchatzeira ] was still alive. Then the slow but definite fall from grace also came in definite stages. After around 1985 the light got less. The main thing was when I myself pushed off the Divine presence shechina. Then after I left Israel that was the end. But again all that went in stages that I would rather not get into. . I realized by personal experience that there is such a thing as knowledge that come not through thinking an not through sense perception.

In any case what you get from  all this is the importance of the Law of Moses in an general way. But in a practical sense how should we understand this? What I see after all this is that my parents were actually on the right path. That is a kind of menchlichkeit human decency that is at the core of Torah.

T8 B flat major  T12 E major

T8 in midi format  T12 in midi format

the laws of the Torah are the life and the good.

I am surprised that people think the laws of the Torah are temporary. I certainly never understood this until I read the letters of Paul. After seeing him disparage the the laws of the Torah in really shocking ways, I got the idea from where people got this idea. Of course, Rav Saadia Gaon also noticed this, but to me it seems clear the laws of the Torah are forever. One place you see this is in Deuteronomy 5:29 (הבט משמים" סימן") [The verse says keep these laws "כל הימים" all the days.] If people start out with Paul, no wonder they do not tend notice the differences between him and the Old Testament and between him and Jesus. [That is of course the very reason that Martin Luther stressed the letters of Paul above anything else in the NT, even the four gospels.]
But even without that place in Deuteronomy, it is implicit  in the entire book of Deuteronomy. There is a constant emphasis that keeping the laws of the Torah are the life and the good. And not keeping the laws of the Torah are death and evil.

The thing that makes this difficult is the teachers of Torah tend on the whole to be demons. I am not really sure why this is, but it has been obvious to me for a long time. Even from the very beginning of my learning Torah intensely, I was quite aware of this problem. But I was certainly the only one.  Everyone else in yeshiva thought the supposed teachers of Torah outside of the yeshiva world were perfectly fine people. I had no idea why people were not able (or not willing) to see the difference between the roshei yeshiva [teachers of Torah in authentic Litvak yeshivas] that are sincerely devoted to the holy Torah, and the supposed teachers of Torah outside the yeshiva who are satanic demons as a rule. [I have never seen an exception to this rule.]

Even in Torah literature you find this willful ignorance.

In any case, the simple way to make the distinction is plain and simple. People connected with an authentic Lithuanian yeshiva are in general very good. But in the religious world--the minute you walk outside the door of the authentic yeshivas, one encounters the Sitra Achra [unclean and unholy Dark Side] immediately.

Reb Nachman

In spite of my critique on Breslov, there are an amazing amount of things that Reb Nachman got 100% right. Some of them were mentioned before him,  but some were pretty unique to him. One thing he got absolutely right was the problems with those that set themselves up to teach Torah. He called them "demonic Torah scholars." That is however just one area that he hit the nail on the head. Maybe I should go into the other areas also, but for now I wanted to dwell on this because it comes up so often in the Lekutai Moharan. The thing that you see in the LM is that the one and most major obstacle on the path of Torah is the Satanic  teachers of Torah.
In a way this is quite an elegant way of putting it, because it corresponds to what Reb Nachman thought was the greatest help toward coming to Torah - and that is finding a true tzadik.

But my basic feeling is to stay away from all Satanic teachers of Torah. I would rather not risk my immortal soul by going anywhere near them. And nowadays they have penetrated the entire religious world. There is no where safe in the religious world that I know of that has not been infiltrated,-- and that includes most Litvak yeshivas which you would suppose to be immune and the very best, and this includes Breslov itself.

[I would like to go into this a drop, but this is one topic that causes me to lose all my readers. Still it seems important enough for the few that care to listen. Mainly this comes from famous verses in Jeremiah and Isaiah about God giving false teachers to Israel since we did not listen to true teachers.
This topic comes up in the Mishna, and quite often in the Talmud itself. "All the problems that comes into the world are from the judges of Israel,"[at the end of tractate Shabat].  But Reb Nachman himself brings the idea from the Zohar. In any case, unless you have a yeshiva of the stature of Ponovitch or Brisk in your area, I suggest just avoiding the religious world.  You might pick up one or two mitzvot but lose your soul. It is not worth it.
[This is not just in theory, but experience shows this to be true. The religious teachers leave long trails of broken lives where ever they go. No wonder the Rambam had a simple solution for this problem. Simple and radical--fire them all. Stop giving them money. After all, they are not allowed to teach or learn Torah for money anyway. So why pay them to ruin our lives? It is not as if we do not have enough trouble without them. Where you can see this is in the Rambam in Mishne Torah and his commentary on Pirkei Avot I think around chapter 4 where it says, "One who uses the crown passes away," and also the Mordechai on Bava Batra at the end of the first chapter where he brings the law that one is not allowed to teach Torah for money. "God said, 'Just like I taught Torah for free, so you must teach Torah for free.'" And there the Mordechai brings the problem of "Melamdim"--teachers of children. That is in a practical sense how do you have any schools, if you can not pay the teachers?  I forget how he answered this. In any case, are not they saying to keep Torah even when it seems wrong in our eyes? Is it not true that the Torah knows better about right and wrong than our limited intellect? Fine so lets start keeping Torah by not paying people to learn or teach it which is an open Halacah for all to see.
[Just as a side point Reb Nachman was amazingly insightful and most of his advice and ideas are great. The problem tends to be Breslov.]

Religious fanaticism and the placebo effect.

Religious fanaticism is so bad that even with knowledge it just becomes worse. in itself is a form of OCD and insanity. This applies also to political fanaticism. 

While basic faith is important some prayer also, but still I have seen people that think the reason they do not get their problems solved is from lack of faith or prayer. My approach is rather to learn Torah--the word of God, to seek God, and then all good things will come to one. But my approach to learning Torah is a bit different from way the Lithuanian yeshiva world understands it. For as per the Rambam, I include Physics and Metaphysics along with the Oral and Written Law.

[Take philosophy out of the set and you end up with fanatic ideology. Thinking comes before believing because belief is nothing else than thinking with agreement.]

The trouble is the Jewish religious world is solely that of fanaticism. Even the groups which are apparently  are moderate are simply moderate  as a result of being fanatic about moderation. Their moderation is just as sick.

Most of the writings in the religious world are placebo religion.[Plecebo is the sugar pill you give to a patient that they believe is a real pill and it in fact makes them feel better.]

In placebo religion all the benefit comes from the belief of the believer. Not surprisingly there are psychological benefits, just like there are with a placebo pill, but there is no evidence that there's any spiritual benefit in the writing itself. For example, there is no evidence that in it there is an 'absolute Truth' or that finding it will lead to some sort of miraculous change in one's life. Without belief a placebo religion, just like a placebo pill, has nothing substantial to offer. And to offer placebo religion as though there's something substantial in it is clearly deceptive and immoral.

Frankly I think pretty much or all religious writings is all placebo pills that make people feel good and holy without having any real benefit, spiritual or otherwise. I do not deny that most religious writings make people feel good--very good and part of their group just like the sugar pill gives real positive effects when people believe in it. But in the long run it is a lie.
However the basic set of the Tenach and Two Talmuds with the Halachic and Agadic midrashim with the rishonim I believe to be of real objective benefit. Sola scriptura sola talmuda. אין לנו אלא דינא דגמרא ("We only have the law of the Gemara.") [That is a statement from Reb Chaim from Voloshin a disciple of the Gra. But it is obvious to anyone whose has learned any poskim [legal authorities] at all. All poskim [legal authorities] without exception are looking for דינא דגמרא (law of the Gemara). For example the Magen Avraham, Shach Taz, חלקת מחוקק, 
 בית שמואל ר'עא ונתיבות etc. always look for (law of the Gemara) דינא דגמרא. If that is how the Shulchan Aruch come out then fine. But if not then they have no trouble throwing out the decision of the Beit Joseph in the Shulchan Aruch and going by the Gemara.

D Minor T7 mp3 t7 midi  t7 nwc

Gra based Musar yeshivas

 The most curious phenomena in religious history; the bright and dark sides are almost invariably found together. Whenever an attempt is made to shed some light on the mystery of the world and of man, the whole nature is pulse of nature is accelerated , and if the animal nature  is the stronger, it becomes all the more uncontrolled.  Every area of value when it deteriorates it deteriorates into its opposite.

I should mention that in Israel I felt a tremendous outpouring of God's light on me, but it did not give me understanding. I do not know what it was all about, but at some point I pushed it away for invalid reasons. In any case, I believe pushing away God's light was a mistake based on a commentary with no name on the first four chapters of the Mishne Torah of the Rambam. In any case, my basic approach based on this experience is that the basic path that had led me to God's light is the best of all paths. And that is the basic learning of Torah in the straight and simple Gra way. For all other paths I believe are paths of deception and evil. No sooner does one come to an authentic yeshiva like the Mir or Ponovitch that someone comes long to seduce him to some path of the Dark Side. In religion light and darkness are sadly mixed.
{I hold from Reb Israel Salanter, but I do not want to knock yeshivas like Brisk that learn Gemara only. After all, my first yeshiva, Shar Yashuv, of Rav Freifeld was a Gra based non Musar yeshiva. But if you would ask me, I would say it is important to have two musar sessions per day. And Rav Shach (Elazar Menachem  Shach) also says Musar is important as you can see in one of the introductions to the Avi Ezri.}

 That is that a synthetic priori knowledge is known through knowledge that is known not through sense perception nor through thinking]. That applies also to the dinge an sich (things in themselves) through Schopenhauer. That is that the dinge an sich can be known until we get to the Ding An Sich (God). 


One fundamental advantage of Kant is that he provides a good account of light and the electron. As far as light goes the principle of Einstein that its speed is the same to anyone watching it, whether moving or not means that space does not exist except as a way of measurement. The electron also we know depends on the observer in order to decide whether to be a wave or  a particle, so its existence is independent of the observer but its characteristics are not

Stop. You are going to Hell. Turn around and go back. Reb Israel Salanter

I have given Hell a lot of consideration, and I would like to divide the topic into two parts. One part is "What actually gets a person out of Hell?" and the other is "What is sin?"  

First I want to give my perspective and then mention other points of view.

My own perspective on this issue really came to me one Rosh Hashanah at the Mir yeshiva when I was already married. During Musaf during חזרת הש''ץ (repeating of the prayers) I spent learning the אור ישראל Light of Israel of a disciple of Reb Israel Salanter, Isaac Blazer.  

That book is really a collection of several books but the one I opened up to dealt with the difficulty of getting out of Hell.[I have zero sefarim with me so I can not look it up to tell you which book it is. I vaguely recall that it is the first section.] His point is simple. It is hard to get out of Hell. He brings lots of proofs from the Talmud. Thus, even if one is thinking he keeps the entire Torah properly, (or thinks he has some other guarantee), in all likelihood he or she is deciding based on lack of evidence. 
To a lesser degree you can see this same in the books of the Chafetz Chaim, Reb Israel Meir HaCohen.

What bears on this issue in terms of an answer I want to bring the Reshash (Shalom Sharabi) and the Rambam.
The Reshash in Nahar Shalom נהר שלום says the soul is the character traits. Mitzvot are only the clothing of the soul. Learning Torah is nourishment of the soul. Thus a sin one can repent on. Also lack of Torah. But a lack of a good character trait is a basic limb of the soul that is missing. On that little can help. מעוות לא יתוקן
Proverbs "What is crooked can not be made straight." [The Chafetz Chaim says the same in שמירת הלשון.]


The Rambam says in Mishne Torah that one's portion in the next world depends on גודל המעשים וגודל החכמה deeds and wisdom.
[Thus what matters in the long run is not one's standing in the superorganism nor one's social group. Nor commitment to religious or political movements.]

[During the Middle Ages the issue of Hell was in the forefront of most people's mind. See Dante for example. Dante for me was גירסה דינקותא the learning of my youth. I had it with me all the time in high school. One thing you see in Dante is this same opinion expressed by the Reshash--that Hell depends on character traits. Each circle of Hell is for one particular character trait. I forget the order. I think the top is for excess desire, then anger, greed, lying, stealing, and being traitorous to people that trust one.

The christian perspective also relates to the issue of how not to go to  Hell and instead go to the Garden of Eden.[called salvation]. (Soteriology). To the Catholic baptism is a sine qua none for salvation. But it apparently is not sufficient. One can wreak it up as we see in Dante lots of people in Hell even after being baptized including a pope.  [That is there are things  that take care of Purgatory. But that is not baptism. But baptism does not save from Hell proper if one does any of the deadly sins like lying etc.]

  Protestants  don't believe in that but rather say faith alone saves, but good character is an epi-phenomenon of being in fact saved.
In any case, there is also the basic fact of salvation and good character [human decency] as being closely tied. [There is some degree of tension here. Catholic are trying to have their pie and eat it too. They want sin to be forgiven by baptism but then to still need repentance. And Protestants want to have no sin after one says a few words about faith. This trivializes sin.]

Now there is another subject of what is sin. Protestants mainly want to define this without reference to the Bible. This  has some justification since they are looking for what you would call wholesome living  along with kindness. That is the exact same things I was discussing above about having good character. Still the ignoring completely the laws of the Torah and making up their own set of what is called sin is disturbing to me and apparently also to Peter and James in The Recognitions of Clement. [Baur was the first to point  out, and his followers in the Tübingen school elaborated his views into the theory that Simon Magus is simply the legendary symbol for Paul. The remarkable similarity of the doctrinal points at issue in both the Petro-Simonian and Petro-Pauline controversies cannot be denied, and the scholarly reputation of the Tübingen school is such to make this probable..] Apparently Paul came up with this doctrine and as we see in the first Corinthians his followers took him quiet literally which left him aghast and caused him to backpedal.

To make a long story short what my approach is is mainly that of Reb Israel Salanter in the sense that I accept this idea that midot is the main and primary thing. However I also can see the idea that midot is an epiphenomenon of some internal state of the soul. This was note by the Chazon Ish --that midot do not come differentiated. One is either a good and decent person and that is that or not. Kant noticed the same thing and he called it by some name that I forget. The idea is that one is either radically good or radically bad based on one thing alone--the acceptance of the moral law.

T4 F major

The arrow of causality is from faith to reality. This is what Kant said that reality has to conform to our a priori knowledge. That is that reality has to conform to your faith. [I am saying that faith is a kind of a priori knowledge.] [That is the electron has to conform to how you measure it, with one or two slits, but the laws it follow are objective.]

But there is also free will. Thus the decision to have faith is dependent on one's will and it is part of the nature of the world to have this faith tested many times. But if one falls from faith because of some test and then his faith becomes less, then reality will conform that that lesser amount of faith. And then when things stop going right, then one's faith gets even less. And then things get worse and worse because they have to conform to his lack of faith.
At some point you have to stop the process and make a distinction between faith and trust. That is, you have to no longer trust that things will go your way-- so as to be able to hang on to simple faith in God that he is One, and he made the world ex nihilo,  and he has no reason or obligation to be concerned with you at all. Because at that point, you do not want to lose faith in God because of things getting even worse.
The best solution to this problem is simply not to fail in the original test of faith. To stick with trust in God, even though things are obviously not going the way you want and need. The trouble is that there is no simple formula for how to stand in a test of faith. [I should know..]

Appendix and thoughts.

(1) The arrow of casualty is actually determined by intention. Otherwise it is undetermined.
(2) בטח אל ה' בכל לבך ואל בינתך אל תשען היינו שיהיה לבך שלם במדת הבטחון ואל בינתך אל תשען שלא תאמר אבטח בה' אלא  אני מחוייב לעשות ולהשען

גם על שכלי ולכן אמר לא תשען על שכלך אפי' בתורת משענת וסוד העניין שתהפוך לבך לבטוח בה' בכל אז יברך אותך ה' בכל
That is: the Gra also said that reality has to conform to your trust in God.
(3) Just in the way to make it clear what I am saying. If you are in a situation where you are able to learn Torah [That is the Tenach and Two Talmuds], then unlike me, you should not leave. It is hard to find a situation in which one can learn Torah and if one leaves it, it is impossible to return. [By this I do not mean to exclude two topics the Rambam thought were part of the Oral Law, Physics and Metaphysics. It has always been the custom in the Lithuanian yeshiva world to gain expertise on the side, but not during the regular yeshiva session in the morning. However since Physics is hard I recommend the opposite--that is to do the Physics session  first thing in the morning and then later the sessions in Tenach (Old Testament) and Gemara.]




(4) Just in the way of explanation: Kant wants to justify universals (synthetic a priori) by means of the fact that reality has to conform to a priori knowledge. This really all started with John Locke and his primary qualities and Descartes. Then it dawned on Kant and even things we consider primary qualities like number quantity and extension depend on the observer.

Thus God can do miracles by means of people that we would not consider as worthy.

Kant said the most profound and important fact about spirituality: that when pure reason ventures into the area of uncondioned reality, it comes up with self contradictions.

This  you can see in the Torah itself in the verse The hidden things are to the Lord our God הנסתרות להשם אלהינו והנגלות לנו ולבנינו לעשות את כל דברי התורה הזאת [note 1] 

Thus God can do miracles by means of people that we would not consider as worthy. And thus all the questions that people have about spirituality  fall away because we simply cannot know. Not just human reason, but even pure reason can not go into areas of spirituality, -- because if it does, it will destroy itself.

All we can do is to learn and keep the Torah. 

So when I hear about miracles, my tendency is not to dismiss anything because I know God can and must work in ways that if we try to understand them will cause self contradictions. He works in ways on purpose that to us must not make sense.

On a related note I must mention that sometimes people make exaggerated claims. This undermines their credibility. The best thing is the old traditional Litvak approach "Learn Torah," and not to make claims beyond what the Torah says. 

In my opinion this applies to everyone. I have heard that Christians think they do not have to keep the commandments of the Torah because of the phrase, "until it will all be fulfilled." In any case they are depending on Paul against the testimony of Peter and James to support and interpretation that is against the simple explanation. See the Recognitions of Clement and you will see that Peter and James and all the in fact disciples were all holding the Law of Moses is forever and obligatory. They were not Judaizers. They were simply being as loyal to their teacher as they could. Saying the not one jot or tittle of the Law will be nullified means that when it says,  "Thou shalt do such and such" that  obligation continues.

[I also do not hold by individual interpretation. Laws mean something. And they way to understand the laws of the Torah is by rigorous analysis, not by feel good emotions. But to do the rigorous analysis is hard. Therefore there is a short cut. That is the מורה נבוכים, חובות לבבות, שערי תשובה, אורחות צדיקים and the other classical Musar books from the Middle Ages.

The Middle Ages were characterized by the rishonim that did painstaking and rigorous thinking about what exactly does the Torah require.  

[This is not to knock Paul entirely. Rather it is in order to get some perspective. I can see the points of Paul as related to the people he was addressing.]

I should add that there is an obstacle to keeping Torah and that is תלמידי חכמים שדיים יהודאיים false teachers. Since false teachers are all to common in the religious world. The trouble is that the Sitra Achra [Dark Side] has gone deeply into it. Thus  avoid the religious world completely, and learn Torah at home or make sure the place you learn Torah at does not teach Torah from the Sitra Achra. 



[note 1] ["The hidden things are to the Lord our God and the visible things are to us and our children to do all the words of this Torah."]

Robert E Lee.

State rights makes a lot of sense to me. I could never figure out what the war was about. The Constitution was a contract. The South felt the North had violated the terms of the contact by interfering with local laws.{And the Sumpreme Court agreed. That should have been the end of the diagreement. } So they thought they were justified because of breach of contract.
I think we ought to celebrate the birthday of Robert E Lee. January 19. It should be a national holiday not just for the South but the North also because it means the great importance of the  Constitution of the U.S.A..

[Dred Scott was decided in 1857. And after all, that is the job of that court to decided what is constitional. The North decided to ignore the Constitution.]

The theory of the Background.

The way that Torah is interpreted in the religious world is that the foremost obligation is to be part of the religious world. But that seems to me to be highly inaccurate. But I can not disprove it except because of my own background. My feeling based on my own experience is that joining the religious world is the worst possible thing to do in terms of actually keeping the holy Torah.
The closest I could see to a sincere effort to actually learn and keep Torah according to its own background and core assumptions was in the two Litvak yeshivas that I was in in New York, Shar Yashuv and the Mir. But outside of the yeshiva world based on the Oral and Written Law of Moses, I found the religious world to be a hot bed of קטנות המוחין triviality and backbiting and a kind of living nightmare while awake.

The only way I could understand this was by means of Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle which he bases on Hobbes. The idea of the super-organism as being Lucifer.
Though he does not look at it in the same way the fact that he uses the term Lucifer to me implies a lot. That is by joining a larger community one gets to be sacrificed to Lucifer.










[The theory of the Background

John Searle: "What philosophers like Quine and Wittgeinstein got right, however, is the fact that verbal expressions underdetermine meaning, i.e. the number of ways that a given sentence could be misinterpreted is so great that, in their view, an interpretation or an assignment of meaning is something that doesn't even happen, because meaning in the traditional sense doesn't exist."


Sentences express abstract features, but these are always in a context of other abstract features (what Searle calls the "Network") 


The theory of the Background of Searle


"The thesis of the Background is simply this: Intentional phenomena such as meanings, understandings, interpretations, beliefs, desires, and experiences only function within a set of Background capacities that are not themselves intentional."]

Lawsuits and Affirmative Action.

Companies are generally trying to avoid lawsuits. If they  are openly not hiring incompetent people, then they are guaranteed to get lawsuits piled onto them. So they have to make  a show of being interested in hiring  people that got their degree because of Affirmative Action. 
But then they need to have competent people to do the actual work, so they have to hire only whites or Asians.

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Old Testament

My feeling is if the Old Testament occupies a central place in national life, then God, home, school and government are kept together, everything else good and right will happen. Remove the Bible, and civilization topples and crumbles into dust.

Brett Stevens: The question then becomes whether the Bible is the cause of that unity, or merely a common conduit that unites the other necessary parts.

Avraham Rosenblum says:

1. I would have to go with the former option based on the little I know about European and Roman History. I know this can be argued both ways, but it is simply my impression. Personally, I just can not see Western Civilization without the Bible [and Plato and Aristotle] as the foundation stone.

Early America felt also the Bible to be the main thing.  Americans up until 1920 saw the USA as Bible territory and wanted to defend it in that way. 

The trouble is with people that want to wipe out God and the Bible from the Earth.

[Just for the record, I am not against the New Testament. I think rather that Christians have misinterpreted Jesus. That is they go with Paul instead of with Peter and James as you can see in the Recognitions of Clement, the first pope of Rome. Furthermore, I see Jesus in a positive sense. This positive sense is not hard to define for myself because I learned the books of Reb Nachman from Uman, so I have a idea of what a "tzadik" (Jewish saint) means. But that concept can be hard to explain without that background.  In short, let me try to explain. It means a person that is in connection with some Divine trait in the world of Emanation. Thus, that person brings a certain kind of light or revelation into the world. Thus, I see Jesus as being a kind of Jewish Tzadik along the lines of Shimon Ben Yochai, Chanina Ben Dosa, or the Gra.

This idea I base mainly on a mystic Avraham Abulafia. [The favorite subject of Professor Moshe Idel at Hebrew University.] It has been awhile since around 1992 the first night of Hanuka that I was going through the micro films that had the writings of Avraham  Abulafia, and I came across this opinion of Rav Abulafia. I was so shocked that I could not move out of my seat, even though I had to go and light the Hanuka lights. [I was aware that Rav Abulafia himself was subject to debate. Still the opinion of Reb Chaim Vital (who quotes the books of Rav Abulafia at length) weighs a lot with me. And besides all that,-- I was aware of the opinion of Rav Yaakov Emden in his famous essay on this subject. Another important consideration is: acta non verba, deeds not words count. That is to say,-- that if I had not gone through a whole set of difficulties before that time, I would probably not have been open to the ideas of Rav Abulafia. I had to have seen where  deeds  did not correspond to words, and then seen where deeds corresponded to words. After seeing that clearly on a statistical significant basis, not a random basis, then I was much more open to accepting the words of Rav Avraham Abulafia.


Appendix: (1) I am aware that the Recognitions of Clement has a good deal of debate on it. But I am basing my opinions about this on much more. In my opinion you can see this in the NT itself.

(2) You can nowadays check up the opinion of Rav Abulafia since in the meantime someone made a printed edition of all of his works. You could also simply get the first book of Professor Moshe Idel at Hebrew University which  was in fact his Ph.D thesis. 

(3) The literal meaning of verses of the Old Testament is important. אין מקרא יוצא ידי פשוטו. Still sometimes its meaning is not literal. Like when Kind David said in Psalms "I am a worm and not a man."

(4) For what I mean by Emanation: the idea is based on the Ari Isaac Luria, but it is rather simple. It means a higher world (or pipeline) of God's holiness. One should not worship any tzadik, however belief in a tzadik brings a kind of blessing or flux into oneself. It is the same kind of thing that we believe in the prophecy of Moses or Samuel, but we do not worship them.

Some people are not very happy about Jesus because of the massacres of Jews during the Middle Ages,[e.g. 1240-1246 in Germany until stopped by Innocent IV on July 5, 1247 by letters he wrote to all German and French bishops demanding a stop to the persecution and redress of the wrongs..] There were a lot and they were horrific. Still abusus non tollit usum. If not then little could be justified.