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.

s9 g minor

s9 g minormp3 s9 midi   s9 nwc

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]

s8 F Minor

[The sages of the Talmud were aware of the problem with people that use Torah for making a living.

In some way the world of Torah [the world of Yeshivas] was at least in my own mind a kind of representation of heaven. But at a certain point the organization itself lost credibility to me and I think many others. Not in the same way as the Catholic church lost its credibility but in a somewhat similar way.
They can not just make mistakes. But even worse. Do real evil.

I have seen enough to show me the unspoken truth about these things.
religious teachers are home wreckers. The are the most destructive thing for marriages and families.
The Zohar refers to them in this unique language, "Torah scholars that are demons." I have found that to be appropriate and not an exaggeration.

 I  uphold the Oral and Written Law the Law of Moses and the two Talmuds, but in contrast to the world of yeshiva, I have to do it in opposition to the official Establishment. [Lithuanian yeshivas however I do support as long as I get the impression they are authentic. But that is rare. The best are (as is well known) Ponovitch, and after that Brisk. I would have to say they are probably in fact very good. After them I think the three great NY yeshivas are important, Mir, Chaim Berlin and Torah VeDaat.] [There are offshoots of these great places which are also good. That is people that learned in these places sometimes started small Batei Midrash [study halls] which I would consider to be authentic and good places.]

[The sages of the Talmud were aware of the problem with people that use Torah for making a living. I only quoted the Zohar because it makes the point a lot more clear. I mean to say Torah scholars are doing wrong when they use the Torah to make money is not the same thing as saying they are demons from hell sent on earth to destroy human life. You have to admit the Zohar makes the same point but in a more powerful way. ] But it still does not get to the major problem today which is a bit worse because of worship of people that are assumed to be righteous. This is definitely not in accord with the Torah. And the power they weld is beyond anything that a politician could dream of. They have the kind of power you see only in gurus that command willing followers. These followers will do anything for their guru, die for him or commit murder for him. This problem is largely unspoken. People can criticize gurus all they want. But the kind of worship of humans I have seen in the religious world out shadows  that of gurus.

Giving to most yeshivas is not giving to charity. It is giving to parasites.  Yes, the poor are mostly parasites, but so are many of the “successful” who knowingly take on useless jobs for the salaries and power. And the religious teachers, self-help instructors, populist priests and psychologists? What  they do is  parasitic, but thickly disguised.

נפש החיים The Soul of Life by the disciple of the Gra [Eliyahu from Villna]

נפש החיים The Soul of Life by the disciple of the Gra [ Eliyahu from Villna] (Reb Chaim from Volloshin) is a very good book. It was included in the list of Musar {Ethics} books recommended by Israel Salanter.

It deals with vital and urgent issues that are modern.

I mean to say the basic set of ethics books from the middle ages are very good, but they tend not to deal with some issues that came up after that period.

Some of the issues are Bitul Torah. That is not just the mitzvah of learning Torahת but the sin of not learning Torah when one can be learning. A detailed discussion of what is idolatry. It also shows the way of prayer and service in the way of the Arizal (Isaac Luria).

I think it is, possibly, the most important Musar book ever to be written, because of its dealing with the issues that are urgent, but just were not relevant during the Middle Ages.


The actual books of Musar that are best are the known set of Mediaeval ones, plus the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter who wrote more modern approaches like the Madgragat HaAdam [מדרגת האדם] about trust in God and Isaac Blasser about fear of God. That was the general tendency of the Musar movement for each person to find some trait the felt they needed to work on and to hold onto, and often they would write a lot about that particular issue. I myself did not really go for any of that and went off in different directions, but I did find one trait that I have tried to hold onto at all cost--to speak the truth always no matter what. This actually had an early beginning when I read the Musar book אורחות צדיקים  The Ways Of The Righteous.

[There has been good stuff in terms of Musar. Recently someone found more writings of Isaac Blazzer, the major disciple of Reb Israel Salanter, and printed them. It is almost impossible to find, but I saw a copy in Netivot. [So from him we have two books- אור ישראל and this newer book.] There is a new and well researched biography on the Gra also that came out about 7 years ago- which I have heard is very good. It must be good judging by how many people were enraged at it. 
Everyone in some official position condemned the authors even though they had done meticulous research.You can see it must be the best book on the subject of the Gra.

I did not see the book myself but from what  I understood the conclusion of the authors was that the Gra meant what he said about the excommunication. This apparently got everyone in Israel very angry at the authors, and now you can't find this book anywhere. [There were previous books about  this issue. But this was a modern book that took the stance that the Gra meant what he said. and that the cherem has halachic validity.

I should however mention that when growing up I only liked classical music, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven. Only about ten years ago I discovered Renaissance Music. But I have always had an appreciation for the Renaissance period.

My Dad gave me Mozart Symphony 19, 24, the Magic Flute by Mozart, Mozart - Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Egmont Overture by Beethoven.

Rifle-Wielding North Carolina 13 Year Old Girl Scares Off Home Invaders

According to wikpedia.org, Snow Camp, North Carolina is a small unincorporated community with a large Quaker population. It doesn’t seem the kind of place where violent crime would threaten innocent life. Then again, who knows? Snow Camp is surrounded by larger cities and even the smallest towns in America are home to drug abuse, and attendant crime. Like this [via wncn.com]:

Kirk Puckett, a spokesperson for the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office, said two sisters, 12 and 13, were inside the home when they heard knocking on the front door.

Puckett said when they looked outside, they saw three unfamiliar men. He said the older sister grabbed her dad’s rifle.

The suspects then broke in through the back door. Puckett said the 13-year-old pointed the rifle at them, causing them to run away without taking anything.

The Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.

In this small paragraph I am depending a lot on the analysis of Howard Bloom in The Lucifer Principle and Allen Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind both.


The details are mainly in the book by Allen Bloom about problems with the Enlightenment. But in terms of a solution --the meme-I am thinking of Harold Bloom.

That is I am thinking the solution is in bringing back  a certain kind of Meme--unit of social information.--The Law of Moses.
The Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.


I should mention that there is much in the Catholic Church that I think does not agree with the Oral and Written Law. Still I see the church as an important ally in terms of upholding the Law of Moses.
Whatever brings to the Law of Moses is good as far as I am concerned.

Most of what is called soft science is pseudo science. See the Feynman discussion on utube

This same problem plagues the world of Torah. Anyone with enough Charisma can claim to know Torah. There is no objective test and no checks and balances. Thus it is  a world full of fraud and scams.
You can see why the Rambam included Physics into his conception of what the Oral Law is. Not just because of the objective reality part of מעשה בראשית [the work of  creation] but also to connect to the דעת of God in a objective way.

The connection between the Litvak Yeshiva approach and the family of Yaakov Abuchatzaira

I had some connection with the family of  Yaakov Abuchatzaira. This was mainly through a grandson of Bava Sali, Shimon Buso.
This connection gave me a certain amount of clarity about the importance of Torah--that is the oral and written law and Musar [Musar in the sense of Reb Israel Salanater.] and the general path of Reb Chaim Soloveitchik. Or said simply the Lithuanian Musar yeshiva approach.

I  mention this because of the clarity that came to me on these issues through my connection with family of Bava Sali [i.e. Israel Abu-cha-tzei-ra ישראל אבוחצירה]
This is a Sephardi family but this clarity about the Musar Litvak approach was  very clear to them as expressed to me by many years of involvement with this family.

I had in fact been impressed with this path before that. In fact, you could say I really found happiness and fulfillment through the Litvak Musar Yeshiva path.

But not everyone can be in a Litvak yeshiva. So what some people do is they try the "kollel thing" or Beit Midrash [study hall for anyone that wants to learn Torah].

The basic ups and downs about this path- I have written about in other blog entries. But here I wanted to mention this Bava Sali connection because of the clarity it helped me achieve concerning this. That is, -almost all of the issues I have brought upon this blog, I discussed at great length with Shmon Buso, and also had discussion with the daughter of Bava Sali, Avigail Buso.

There is no question that this basic Musar Litvak approach is what Mrs Avigail Buso was thinking as the right approach. I also had some connection with the direct descendants of the older brother of Bava Sali known as עטרת ראשינו. [David Abuchatzira]  Looking back on it there is no question that all held from this basic Litvak Approach. It definitely was not the "sefardi pride" approach of the many Sephardi Jews. It was as Litvak as you could possibly be.

[I would also like to suggest the books of Reb Yaakov Abuchatzeira as an addition to the traditional books Musar.]

 I can still see the need for people to learn morality from the Law of God, (the Five Books of Moses)
. 
I can see that even with learning Torah (the Five Books of Moses), people can be morally challenged, [or sometimes even worse.] But still, as much as the Oral and Written Law that people learn, the better. 



I have seen often people think that belonging to their group makes them righteous. But to me that seems like a mistake. The main thing to me is the Law of Moses, the Oral and Written Law. Not what group one is a part of.


[I have seen enough of the world to show me that without the Torah people are lacking morals. When the whole society is without Torah,  things looks pretty bad. ]

So my basic approach is this people should learn the Old Testament, the two Talmuds, Physics up to and including String Theory, and Aristotle's Metaphysics.
THE WAY for this is to do 1/2 a page per day with Tosphot and Maharsha [i.e. one whole side of a "daf".  ]

The general way I try to learn is by having fresh ground coffee and doing the learning as early as possible in the morning after a good night sleep. It is also important to be motivated. No matter how much energy you have if you do not have desire and will to learn Physics and the Talmud and Musar then nothing can help. You need to have the will. But if that essential ingredient is there, then you need coffee. Fresh ground  in the store. You do not need to cook it. You can mix it with water and and egg and drink it with Russian Halvah.

You also need a good night sleep before hand and as much as possible to guard that first hour when you wake up that it should be for learning alone. Nothing else.

[The basic idea in this is that there is an aspect of holiness that comes into one's soul by means of connecting with God's wisdom as revealed in the work of Creation. So there is the idea of learning Torah which includes the work of Creation and the work of the Divine Chariot as defined by the Rishonim like Ibn Pakuda and the Rambam and the Gaon Saadia. [They were aware of mysticism but held that the command to learn the work of creation and the work of the Divine Chariot did not refer to mysticism.]

Even though there are people in Islam that are not violent they seem to simply be like a Trojan Horse. Salad dressing on top of a poison salad to make it seem tasty.

The French are now under attack by Muslims. The French should not have killed Joan De Arc, nor their last king. The best repentance is bring back Throne and Altar.


My impression is violence is  a direct result of Islam. I do not think this is work place violence. That is I mean to say it is the result of  a certain kind of social meme that gets incorporated inside a persons personality at a certain age. If the social meme is bad, it will result in bad deeds regardless of the inherent disposition of the person.


I have seen this a lot. People can start out with good or bad dispositions, but if they are taught an evil belief system, the belief system will take over.

Thus we see why learning Musar is very important. [Mediaeval Ethics]

The Left really does not like the Second Amendment.  I am not sure why this is? Maybe because it was designed to protect the American people from the American government. We see in the Federalist papers the importance of limiting the government. [The 2nd amendment was made as a limit on government.] I think since the Left sees government as the greatest good, and people as worthless, thus the 2nd Amendment must bother them.

I wanted to mention that I think limited government was foremost in the minds of the founding fathers as the sole way to guarantee freedom. 
They must have taken note that Sparta considered themselves free even though they were not a democracy. {See Herodotus the discussion between Xerxes and the exiled king of Sparta who warned Xerxes what kind of men he was about to encounter at Therma. 1.7 million men against 300 Spartans was simply no match. According to the exiled king of  Sparta, the reason was because the Spartans considered themselves free and would guard that freedom at all cost. And this freedom was not because of loyalty to Sparta, but loyalty to the Law. And the Law required only one thing. Never retreat.} The reason is the government was limited by the fact that each of the two kings and the Ephors limited the power of the other.


1.7 million against each Spartan was 5,670 men against one Spartan.

Are the refugees "fleeing from terrorism" or fleeing towards terrorism?

Are the refugees "fleeing from terrorism" or fleeing towards terrorism?

One who is kind in a place where he ought to be cruel in the end will be cruel in  a place where he ought to be kind. [I forget where that is I think it is in tractate Shabat. about king Saul. Saul was kind in a place where he was told to be cruel--Amalek. Thus the Talmud says the result of this is he was cruel in  a place where he ought to have been kind [The city of priests which gave David refuge. Saul wiped out that whole city.]

How to consider Joan of Arc? I brought that up with my learning partner years ago when I first saw the transcript of her trial. I found that transcript to be more compelling and shocking than anything else I had read about her. It was like I was in the courtroom with her.
But as many other issues my learning partner did not relate well to what I was asking.
He was thinking that whatever is Jewish is good and right and whatever is not is the Sitra Achra.

That approach seems to me to be highly inaccurate. While I do think there is a Sitra Achra [Dark Realm] I do not think the dividing lines are drawn according to those specifications.

Part of my reasoning is the Gra at the beginning of Shir Hashirim but also the Arizal.[about the higher root of the children of Noah].

But also I have a kind of Kantian view point about unconditioned realities. [Reason does not work there and when it tries to it comes up with self contradictions.]

The best way I think to consider Joan de"Arc is as the Rambam. I mean to say that he would not be willing to cut any slack to any kind of approach that is not a part of the Oral and Written Law of Moses, but he would also see a preliminary stage bringing to the Law of God.

[You would have to see his approach to  Ancient Hellas (Nemusai HaYevanim")

Appendix:
(1) The laws of the ancient Greeks [as known to Avraham the patriarch ] was considered by Maimonides to be  Natural Law that needed to be revealed in order for the higher level of the Law of Mount Sinai to come into the world.

(2) The Rambam would not cut any slack to Joan De'Arc as being part of the Catholic Church. He would in spite of the good and worthy aspects still consider the basic structure as wrong. According to the Torah we are commanded not to worship a person even as a mediator. And this applies to gentiles as well as to Jews. That is the faith of the Law of Moses in Ethical Monotheism. No mediators. And that God is not a composite and he is not the world. That is the Rambam (and Aquinas also for that mater) considered these things objective morality.

There is a good way to defend the Musar Movement of Reb Israel Salanter. This way would have to start with an unspoken premise of all authentic Lithuanian yeshivas that the rishonim are always right. The achronim however can and do makes mistakes, This premise is based on objective facts.
But it is not widely known. The Middle Ages fell out of favor in the secular world.
The thing that makes rishonim so important is hard to tell. On one hand it looks like that entire age--especially in France was exceptional in logic. That is logical thinking. A book like most achromim write filled with fuzzy circular logic would have never gotten past first base. It would have been laughed out of court. There is something more however about the rishonim that is more than just logic.[rishonim might not be infallible but in terms of logic they always are]

But it is all I need to defend Musar. That is the idea that only the medieval writers had the capacity to  understand and describe in a logically consistent way the world view of the Torah.

Rishonim are medieval authorities. [Anyone from Hai Gaon and onward up until Rav Joseph Karo. ]

Achronim are people after Joseph Karo, including Joseph Karo. Rishonim also include the Gra.

Torah with Derech Ertez [a vocation]

My basic path in a nutshell is to learn The Oral Law, the Written Law, Physics and Math and Aristotle Metaphysics. This is a slight modification of Maimonides. While Maimonides did include the two sets of books of Aristotle The Physics and the Meta-Physics into his program of how to learn Torah he was referring specifically to the books of ARISTOTLE. In my modification of Maimonides I would instead put String Theory and Abstract Algebra and Algebraic Topology instead of Aristotle's Physics.




I should mention that Torah with Derech Ertez [a vocation] was the path of my parents. They did not think that being a position to use Torah for money was a good idea. If I could have done yeshiva in the morning and then learned some vocation in the afternoon they would have been overjoyed but as it was I was in Far Rockaway where the closest college was Brooklyn College and it was a few hours on the subway.  Even my own Rosh Yeshiva Reb Shelomo Friefeld was telling me to go to college.

At the time however I do not know what I would have majored in.  I did not know how to learn Physics in those days in a way that I could do well in it.   Even today years later it takes me a whole long kind of round about way to get anywhere. I have to read the words in order --just saying the words straight and going on. Then after about 50 pages or so I go back reading the last paragraph and then the one before that etc until I get to the beginning of the book. It takes a lot of time.

But just for the record this is what the Rambam advised and my parents and also from what I have seen this makes the most sense. Torah with Derech Eretz.

[I imagine I could have learned Kant or Music, but as it was I was pretty involved with Torah. And I think at least for those years I needed to be involved with Torah all day in order to make any progress at all.]


I also should mention that unless the Rambam had specifically included Physics in the mitzvah of learning Torah, I would not have much motivation for learning it. It is rather the combination of the Rambam along with my parents that convinced me to spend time on it. Otherwise I would have thought it is bitul Torah.

[Bitul Torah is the sin of spending time on anything when you could be spending it on learning Torah. This sin is considered very severe in the Torah and it was certainly a major part of the thinking of the yeshiva world]

One of the best books on Physics I have found to be free. You can find the links on my blog.
As for Musar and Torah the best books of Musar are the Nefesh Hachaim which go into more modern issues like bitul Torah and idolatry. And the Chovot Levavot. But the best idea in terms of Musar is to have a Cheder Musar {Musar Room} like I saw in Netivot. One room that has only Musar books and to get the basic set of Mediaeval Musar and the books of the Gra and the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter.

[I am not saying I have no doubts about this. In fact if I could I would be sitting and learning Torah all the time. Every second. But there were many factors preventing me from this-enough in fact for me t begin to wonder if sitting and learning Torah all day is in fact the best path. But I admit I could be wrong and that the sitting and learning all day is the right thing. I am just saying that for me that path did not work out so well and at some point I found it impossible to follow. So I concluded that the Rambam was right all along. But that might simply mean I was not on the kind of spiritual level necessary to learn Torah all day.]

s4 G major

The barbarians

The barbarians are not at the gates. They are in the gates.

Breaking news out of the town of Ansbach, Germany where authorities have confirmed that a device was responsible for a blast that killed 1 and injured 11 12 at a restaurant near a music festival which may have been the target:

 Suspect in #Ansbach bombing was Syrian refugee denied asylum

The Jewish people are going through a very difficult time with cults and false teachers. There is only one thing that can help now. A Miracle. 

I think it can be said that libertarian-ism and also Marxism had the advantage that they seemed to have intellectual basis. You can't accuse everyone of having bad hearts. No. It must be that they sincerely thought they were on the side of truth and justice. It is only the result of Time showing these movements for the ill-founded delusions of madmen that now traditional Judaic Christian values are on the rise.

It is common among the  Right to look at Marxists as having evil hearts. This seems to me to be unfair. While they are correct for identifying Marxism as  a bad thing, but we have to give people the benefit of a doubt. With the kinds of thinkers involved in that school of thought, we can't assume everyone was trying to do evil.
Rather it was time alone that showed Marxism to be  a poor system. Libertarianism also needed time to sort out the problems in that system.  

Medieval Ethics --Fear of God and instilling good character

The basic approach of Reb Israel Salanter learning the books on Medieval Ethics --the Musar movement- was directed towards Fear of God and instilling good character. But there is a side benefit that I found very helpful for myself in Musar. The basic set of books helped me get a general idea of the world view of Torah.  That is to say I realized that the Torah had a world view. The Torah is not an empty bottle you can put any worldview into that you want to. But I was not clear about what it is. The "Paradigm."  The benefit of Musar --at least for me-was to get a clearer view of how the Torah looks at the world and human life and everything else. It helped clarify many issues. Of course it also was saying things I did not want to hear. But that is what character correction involves--hearing things that you do not want to hear.

But I also realize there are more modern issues that came up after the original set of Musar books was written. Thus I found the Nefesh Hachaim from a disciple of the Gra to be very helpful.

I did notice in Israel that some people still take the idea of the Musar Movement seriously. For example in Netivot, I saw the yeshiva of Rav Montag  had an actual "Musar room" --the first time I had ever seen such a thing.
I also heard from Shimon Buso [a grandson of Bava Sali] and the daughter of Bava Sali, Avigail Buso a lot about the importance of Musar. But that was really just confirming what my impression already was about the importance of Musar. [The daughter of Bava Sali also mentioned to me about the importance of the books of Joseph Karo, i.e the Tur with the  Beit Joseph etc. ]
 There is also a promise of healing [physical and spiritual] that Isaac Blazzer said in the beginning of his book אור ישראל which he brings from the Rambam.

I imagine some people feel they are born perfected, and thus do not need to hear rebuke. But for the rest of us mere mortals, this seems to me to be the best way to go about character correction.

Why you   might ask is all this necessary? Why not just open up the Old Testament and see what it says? The reason is that any text without background is infinitely under-determined. It can mean anything you want. See John Searle in his theory of the Background and Kelley Ross's critique in which is shows the importance of John Searle's idea.

[This is relevant for anyone who cares about the Torah. The truth is without the background, it is radically undetermined. The nice thing about the Middle Ages was that understanding in a complete and logically rigorous way the entire written and oral law was of the greatest importance for people. So the books of Musar then were written with the whole picture in mind.  ]

Munich

The motive was clear. It was to kill infidels. They were to him “foreigners.” This was done in the name of a false god. How much clearer could it possibly be?

I think Harvard and Yale were penetrated by the KGB somehow. Probably not by hard core bribery, but by the soft sale. That is, the KGB probably had their best and brightest wine and dine and discuss polices and political philosophy  with the best students from those places. This should not have been all that hard. Based on reason alone one could argue from Hegel and a whole long list of great thinkers.

All the KGB needed to do was to send over people that could argue convincing from Hegel and the whole long string of Leftist philosophers and talk to the most impressionable and brightest students from the 1970 and on. See the utube by Bezmenov. They did not need to convince all of America's youth. All they needed to do was to penetrate the top universities. And they had plenty of funding for this kind of operation. And there is no question they spent most of their funding on disinformation;- and most of that on the "Glavni protivnik," the top enemy- the USA.

So that leaves two questions. How to argue from Schopenhauer and Kant? This would be better than Hegel. Second-what if Hegel had some good points?

I do not find Kant to be any less than Hegel, and I think good arguments could be made. But the Right is not as interested in power as the Left. The Right wants nice neighborhoods, and to go to school, and pay its bills. and go to church on Sundays.

The Left wants pure unadulterated power. There is no contest when it comes to passion. The Left is foaming at the mouth. The Right is nice sedate old guys in country clubs.

I should mention that I am on the side of traditional Judaic-Christian Civilization and values. But I realize you have to argue for this from the side of Kant. You can't simply argue from faith, or even from the Rambam. You need to have a rigorous intellectual basis for faith.


There are problems in Christianity, but the vector is toward Torah. See the Guide of the Rambam about the parable of the king where he shows that the vector is everything. [That is I think in the last chapter before volume 3 or 4 in the Guide.]

The Sages of the Talmud said: "For anyone that looks at three things, it is better that they were not created: (1) What is above, (2) What is below (3) What is inside." This goes along with the idea of Kant that when one tries to use reason in areas of unconditioned reality contradictions are created. The practical lesson from this is not to think about spiritual things because that creates contradictions in one's soul.

s3 F Minor   s3 in midi

Gra and cults

The Gra tried his best to stop the cult that ruined Judaism. with no success.

In spite of his signature, on what should have status in Halacha, it is totally ignored. It is my opinion that ignoring this was a terrible mistake. Not just from a Halachic standpoint, but from an objective standpoint. If one can avoid evil, that is the best thing. But if one is confronted directly, the best option is to stand and fight.
This is in fact how Western civilization began. The Persian empire was on its way to destroy Athens and enslave its people. They had already done so to another important city in Hellenes. {Herodotus spells it "Hellas."} The reason the Persians succeeded was that city was divided in counsel. Many escaped. Those that remained were easily defeated.
The 10 Athenian generals were divided equally whether to stand and fight or run. One man the leader for the day cast his vote to stand and fight. The Persians were defeated at Marathon. After that Athens became the source and birthplace of art, music mathematics, philosophy, literature, political thought and everything else good that signifies Western Civilization.  Sometimes you have to stand and fight.

How did the Gra get pushed out?
People are no longer motivated by inner choices — duty, honor, pride, creativity, wisdom — but by what the rest of the herd is doing. For this reason, they are losing out if they do not get in there and force others to pay attention to them, which creates the stunts-based attention whoring that is the basis for radicalism and fanaticism.
With this center of attention,  Crowdism is born.
And the crowd has an insatiable appetite for nonsense. They love to hear the Guru talk hours on end which if you look at what he says is simply "B.S." 

cults and gurus

The best way to deal with a group you are involved with that you think might be a cult- is to learn about other cults, and you start to see the beliefs are not unique or original, but rather the things you thought were special- are shared traits with all cults.
Besides that I  want to focus on the Guru or Shaman. Human have a strong need for  a shaman or Guru. All human groups throughout history have shown this need for some meta magical personality. This goes for groups of the most primitive, vicious type and upward. And their beliefs about their Shaman  are if you look into it are about the same as what any modern cult group thinks about their leader. It is  basic human trait and need to have  a Shaman. These shamans are not schizophrenic but schizo-typal. They control themselves so the visions and hallucinations occur at the right time and place.

Meta magical thinking is the major characteristic of these schizoid gurus and shamans. They believe in strange things. They are really into fantasies in a "frenzy" kind of way. Maybe it is New Age or whatever. What ever religious structure they have it is very literal and concrete. They tend towards extremely literal explanations of religious events or writings.

When you see this you should know you are dealing with a person that has a mild version of schizophrenia. He or she is Schizotypal.
 Nowadays in secular society such people get jobs that fit this kind of personality. But in more religious societies these people tend to go to the top of the hierarchy.

Nefesh HaHaim and learning Torah

Probably the most important Musar books to learn are

 The Nefesh HaHaim and a Musar book of collected ideas from the Gra called Even Shelma אבן שלמה  "Perfect Rock" or Perfect Measure".. The first one is rather important . The Nefesh HaHaim is very important in so far that he explains a lot of issues- for example-the importance of learning Torah, how to pray properly and a lot of other stuff.

Both are considered classical Musar books. Neither are medieval but even so they are considered part of the classical cannon or set.

The trouble I found with the Nefesh Hahaim was it made me feel guilty when I am not learning Torah. And that is confusing to me because my parents and the Rambam were more along the lines of Torah with a vocation plus Physics and Metaphysics. Still I admit the Nefesh Hahaim might in fact be the most important of all Musar books.

There was a later Musar book that was saying to give your children the Nefesh Hahaim and on their bar Mitzvah [or Bat Mitzvah] to have them read the 4th part which talks about learning Torah. I had hoped to do that- but the truth be told- I got distracted from learning Torah. I am not proud of that. If I could go back today I would try to stick with the path of my parents as close as possible תורה עם דרך ארץ Torah with a vocation. That is to learn Torah half a day and to learn an honest vocation for making a living. That is I would learn Torah but do my best not to be in a position of using Torah for the sake of a livelihood..


So what makes it so hard for me or others to learn Torah. The problem is clearly half and half. That is half the problem is in me. When I or anyone walks away from Torah it is no surprise that when we try to come back into the world of Torah that we find the door is  locked.

The other half of the problem is the Dark Side the Sitra Achra now has taken over a large part of what used to be called the world of Torah. Nowadays the leaders are the villains. That means to learn Torah you have to get a Gemara and  a book of Musar and the sidur HaGra and do your thing at home. There are very few authentic Litvak yeshivas around anymore. There obviously are in New York like the Mir and Torah VeDaat and Ponovicth in Israel. But besides the great Litvak yeshivas it is hard to find anything authentic.