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.

t6 b flat major

t6 midi t6 nwc

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.

The approach of the Rambam (Maimonides)

The approach of the Rambam (Maimonides) is pretty clear. The Oral Law, the Written Law, Physics and Metaphysics. I mean that it is easy to miss this message if one learns only the commentary on the Mishna and the Mishne Torah יד החזקה. But you can not miss this message in the Guide for the Perplexed. (It is in the Mishne Torah also but you have to know where to look.) The thing that makes this hard for people is they think if they do not understand every word they can not go further. Or they think it is only for smart people.
But as the Rambam makes clear, the mitzvah of learning Torah is for everyone young and old smart or dumb. The only way I can see however that this is possible for myself is by the method of learning brought in the Gemara Shabat,, to say the words and go on and not even care of you understand on the first reading. For you will understand after reading the material a second and third time etc.

[What I do with some texts is to get to some point in the middle an then do the chapters in reverse order as a kind of review. That is let' say the book has 600  pages. What I do with some books is to get to page 100 and then do the section in reverse order but still in the way of just saying the words and going on. For example lets say the last chapter I did was chapter 10 with ten sections. What I dd is 10.10. Then 10.9; then 10.8, etc. This I found best for texts in Math and Physics and I also did this for the writings of Isaac Luria.

T3 E flat major  [T3 in midi]

objective morality and Torah

My approach to Torah mainly depends on the idea of Kant and Schopenhauer of the Ding An Sich. That is an area of value in which pure reason [un -derived from experience ] can not enter.

That is to say that there is an area of objective morality that is not dependent on the observer. That is to say,-- that even though this world is radically subjective [The electron has no value, spin or otherwise, until measured.] that does not bear on objective morality. Objective morality is rules --universals. Those are objective.]

Thus I look at any person doing an act that is objective good and moral as a good person. So I look on Torah as revealing morality, not as creating morality. This is very much along the lines of the Rambam that has two levels. First Natural Law as revealed to Abraham and then later to the Ancient Greeks. Then the Law revealed at Mount Sinai.--That is a higher degree of Revelation.

But that also means that I do not negate all spiritual experiences at all. Rather I believe that sometimes God can inspire a person in unforeseen ways in unforeseen paths. Prophecy and the Divine Spirit do not have to follow human ideas of what is proper. Just the opposite. However as I wrote in the last few essays, most of spiritual experiences are from the wrong side of things. Still there are such things that are real and from God.

religious world

In the religious world there is something seriously wrong.  What it is, is not at all clear,, but there seems to be some underlying problem that many have noticed, but offer different suggestions about what is the problem and what to do about it.  That makes it hard to recommend Torah as a practical path since keeping Torah for most people means to join the religious world and that is clearly a terrible mistake because of the aforementioned previous problem that no one seems to be able to define. 

I myself have offered a few suggestions, but I have not really gotten to the basic problem. The best suggestion I can see is to stick with authentic Torah as taught and practiced in the well known great Lithuanian yeshivas, like Ponovitch, Mir, Chaim Berlin, and Torah VeDaat.

If you are not in the area of an authentic Litvak yeshiva, the best thing is to stay home and learn Torah on your own. That is getting through the Old Testament, Two Talmuds, Musar books [medieval ethics based on Torah]. 


But even though the religious world claims to be doing Torah, there is something under the surface that is clearly not kosher and very very wrong --even though there is no clear indication of what it might be.


Part of the problem is fake religious organizations which undermine authentic Torah values.  [Most Jewish religious organizations are pure poison, and thoroughbred cults of the most pernicious type.]

[Once I was part of the yeshiva of Rav Freifeld, Shar Yashuv in NY, and later the Mir. I soaked up the words of Torah like a fish that can not be out of water. But that world is what is called the "Yeshiva world." It is very different than the religious world that is the home of the Dark Side. But there is no well defined border between them, so the demonic forces of the Dark Side have also penetrated in to many yeshivas.] Nowadays I go to no synagogue, since I think they have been taken over by the Dark Side.
[New comers are largely unaware of this, and thus become victims of the cult by not being street smart.  תקרובת ע''ז אסורה בהנאה. By becoming victims of the cult or the Leviathan, they no longer can escape and their lives are finished even if they do manage to escape in time. As the Sages said "things sacrificed to an idol remain forbidden forever."]

 In fact, most yeshivas today I would have to say are cults. The best thing is to follow the basic path of the Rambam at home on your own- learning the Old Testament, and the Oral Law [the Two Talmuds plus the books of Musar {Torah ethics}, Modern Physics and the Metaphysics of Aristotle.] 

For an introduction to the Law of Moses it is good to learn the Mishne Torah of the Rambam page by page along with the Keseph Mishna of Rav Joseph Karo, and in a separate session to go through the entire Avi Ezri of Rav Shach.  As for the ethics of Torah, the main thing is the book of the Middle Ages, Obligations of the Heart חבובות לבבות by Bechayee Ibn Pakuda.

As for Physics, the main thing is String Theory, but it takes some background to get there. The main background is Quantum Field Theory. (The best way to get to that I am not sure of. As for myself, I learned a lot of Joos's book Theoretical Physics, and I think it was good preparation for me, because it did a very thorough job on waves, and in fact I used it to help me in my talks  at Hebrew University on Differential Equations.)

Concerning Metaphysics, obviously the Rambam was referring to the books of Aristotle by that name, but I also recommend the books of Kant and Schopenhauer.

The Torah itself--the Old Testament should be read in Hebrew and finished at least once. 
In fact that is my idea about mitzvot. That there is such a thing as doing a mitzvah completely. Thus the mitzvah of Torah learning means to finish the entire Oral and Written Law at least once. [Tenach, Two Talmuds with Tosphot and Maharsha, Tosephta, Sifra, Sifri, Torah Kohanim, Midrash Raba, the Rambam with Avi Ezri and the Keseph Mishna, Tur, Beit Yoseph and all the books of Musar of the Rishonim and the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter

All the above I believe ought to be in every public school and be taught as part of the curriculum. [They already teach The Book of Job  very well, but the whole Old Testament should be taught as they do in Israeli public schools.] The aspect of the Oral Law that should be in public schools is mainly Tosphot. That is to learn how to analyze a sugia with Tosphot. [That is "to learn how to learn."] But I do not believe in tests when it comes to Torah, because I believe that is using the Torah for personal gain. [Most everything else they teach in public schools should be thrown out. Especially the Humanities and Social Studies departments as already mentioned by Allen Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind.]

So I foresee  a kind of religious revival that is necessary, but not one based on the Bible alone but rather this Four Part System: The Old Testament, the Oral Law, Metaphysics and Physics.  But this revival would have nothing to do with the present day religious Jewish world which is pure poison. Rather it would be in connection with Reform and Conservative and Zionist Judaism.

But the world of religious Judaism is totally wicked and depraved. The Torah is desecrated there in deed while honored in word.

Witchcraft and heresy and political desire to overturn the government are related.
The rise of witchcraft was oddly enough after the middle ages at the beginning of the age of Enlightenment and was highly connected with the desire to undermine the rule of kings and princes.

To see this documented look here

What I wanted to bring out is that this was highly related to the enlightenment project of overturning the rule of kings.

That is witchcraft became subsumed into political movements which were directed to overturn the established order.

And this has continued until today. The KGB in fact was very aware that in the USA and in any society there are always a good number of malcontents that want to overthrow the established order.
The policy of the KGB was to encourage these elements in the USA and to give them funds in the hope of overturning the USA.

In any case even after the KGB is no longer around their effects are still apparent.

crackpots

The main trouble in the religious world is crackpots that try to bring you into their "thing."
And they always target people that are interested in that particular area, but not able to tell the difference between authentic value and pseudo value and fraud.
But this problem is pervasive and ubiquitous in the religious world.  

The main job of  a Jew is not to get fooled by these charlatans and their groups, no matter how respectable they try to make themselves seem. In fact, the more respectable they try to make themselves, all the more dangerous they are. 

Some groups, which are  content   with being  fringe  groups are  mainly OK, because they do no pretend to be other than what they are.

But in any case, for the sake of one's soul, it is best to avoid all the crackpots.
[The religious world  is prone to this for the exact same reason that make them religious. Most religious people have schizoid personality disorder. That is they are sensitive to that area of value of holiness and unholiness. But since most of this world is evil as the Ari (Isaac Luria) says therefore the vast majority of the religious are open to the areas of value of unholiness that they mistake for holiness. Thus their favorite slur is to call someone they do not like as "insane." Not "evil". It is  a classic case of projection." 
The best approach to Torah is balance. That is,-- one ought to learn and keep Torah, and be sensitive to the holiness area of value. But with balance along with the other areas of value.

T1 D Major  t1 in midi

nationalism

 I really hate to be arguing for Hegel, but nationalism makes sense in his context and only in his context. I just can't see it anywhere else in Kant or anywhere in the German idealists. But since Hegel has limitations the only way I can salvage him is with Howard Bloom and his ideas about the social meme and the super organism. That is nationalism built around the basic set of values of Judaeo-Christian Civilization. [That is revelation in the Bible and reason {Aristotle}.]




That is nationalism based on a certain social meme is justified. But nationalism based on evil is not justified.  --So it would not be like Hegel. It might what Hegel was really thinking but it would not be that the "State" is the Divine ideal embodied on earth. Rather it depend on what the state is built on. Moral principles? Then fine. But if built on some false or evil meme, then No.

In other words, there is no idea here of self determination. Rather people that are savages should be set far away.


[I have no idea what the power that Hegel has over people is. I can see a  lot of good. I still feel he is an important part of German idealism. I would not dismiss him so off hand like Schopenhauer did. That is to say when he says things that seem to make no sense, I would prefer to try to find what he was getting at instead of dismissing him.]

So I am really arguing for states that are based on Torah principles. For example  Israel, the USA. That includes states that have a balance between church and state like Russia and England where Torah principles are embodied in the fabric of the state. 

But people whose sole ambition is the destruction of Western civilization ought to be sent far away. That pretty much means any groups that are against Western civilization.


Or as someone said on the blog Amerika: When someone comes for you, you have a moral responsibility to your woman and your offspring to put their asses in the grave 1st. But before it gets there, do everything possible to maintain peace without being enslaved yourself.

I can not speak for Communists. I think they were thinking in terms of “progress” and Hegel. I just do not think that the flaws in communism were all that apparent to good hearted people. At any rate, I did notice people like Richard Epstein, and Pamela Geller that are on the right track. They seem to be are invincible when it comes to defending Western values.

s100 F major  [S100 in midi]

a mark of the spiritually deceived

As a principle a kind of spiritual deception is a accompanied by a material, passionate warmth ; the behavior of  religious fanatics embraced by deception, has always been ecstatic, by reason of this extraordinary material, passionate warmth. This warmth, a mark of the spiritually deceived, is to be
distinguished from true attachment with God.

These people are merely reacting to the
presence of an invading spirit, [a result of the Intermediate Zone].  Thinking to find  God in consoling feelings, they are seeking not God but themselves, that is, their own feelings of a spiritual "high", while they avoid the path of authentic learning and keeping Torah. To give several examples of such physical accompaniments of spiritual deception: one person trembled and made strange sounds, and identified these signs as the a sign of spiritual awakening ; another  as a result of his ecstatic method of prayer felt such heat in his body that he needed no warm clothing in winter, and this heat could even be felt by others.

{I suspect that this kind of deceiving spiritual high got to be accepted as a sign of true spirituality in the religious Jewish world because of being affected by the Charismatic revival where it is considered an essential aspect of spirituality.}


Such phenomena of the experience of a spiritual high are undoubtedly provoked by an attitude of extreme spiritual expectation, maybe of remorse, or fear of hell, accompanied by a repetitive, yet inspiring singing, by the cadence of the teacher's words, and by the general ambiance and atmosphere of spiritual expectation in the crowd. This is merely a universal pseudo-religious experience. Such things can be observed happening all over the world, in quite distinct circumstances. The nature of such events, both then and now, would from all appearances seem to be identical. This is true whether we are discussing Samadhi of Hindu Yoga or the so called "fire baptism" of Protestant charismatics or the so called "stirring of the Spirit" or "rekindling of the Spirit" of the present day Catholic Charismatic theologians. Such happenings bear little or no
resemblance to the  true and sanctifying presence of the God, anymore than do the almost identical manifestations among the Kundalini yogis of Hinduism, or those of cult Adi Da or Muslim cults.

Still I do not want to negate any and all manifestations of God. My basic approach is that of Kant that God is the area of the dinge an sich or as Schopenhauer puts it the "Ding an Sich." Thus I am aware of true and an authentic attachment with God. 

Maybe the fall of Rome I think is a good example of total collapse. I learned in history that that is the reason for the rise of the Feudal system of the Middle Ages that I think deserves a lot more study that it gets. Even on this blog the emphasis seems to be on kings but the Feudal system was certainly not Monarchy. Rather a very complex system of balances between princes kings and the church.


Many on the Alt right think Western Civilization is on the verge of collapse. While I am encouraged by some good signs, I still think it is important to learn survival skills and to be prepared.

I think the American system was mainly meant for Wasps. I mean to say from the beginning with Hobbes and John Locke I think all their thought was based on the idea that their system would be for people that accepted the Old Testament and the New. Maybe not openly but I think that underscores everything they wrote as an unconscious assumption. The trouble with some blacks I have noted is they do not accept that basic moral system. Many seem to believe it is their moral obligation to bring down the USA.

The Constitution simply was not designed to protect against a population intent on its destruction. That seems to be the main problem with blacks and Muslims.

There is a need to define a specific set of writings as being fundamental  Torah.  Most of the set is well known.The Old Testament. The Two Talmuds. The Rishonim (medieval scholars).

It is just for the record I wanted to write here the basic achronim [later authorities] that are considered a fundamental part of Torah and are important to learn. R. Akiva Eiger, the Pnei Yehoshua, the Kezot HaChoshen, and the school stemming from Reb Chaim Soloveitchik that forms a commentary on the Rambam: Reb Chaim, Shimon Shkop, Baruch Ber, Naphtali Troup, Rav Shach.
The best of this last list is the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach which one can more or less learn straight. It is a very deep book but it is self contained. In fact it is so well done that I wonder if perhaps I could make the two books that God granted to me to write on the Talmud a little bit more self contained also.

You can see that there is some way to do this even with the kind of comments I did on the Talmud. for Rav Yaakov Abuchatzeira also wrote a book of learning on the Talmud that also you can simply pick up and read straight without having to look up anything. [I used to read it in Israel. but no longer have it.]




[This list should not be needed except for the fact that outside of the Yeshiva world it is virtually unknown. Also I have seen an enormous amount of confusion about this very issue so it seems like a good idea to make it known to the general public.]

S99 D major  [S99 in midi]

כישוף [witchcraft 'kishuf'] has become accepted. It goes by nicer names. Euphemisms. As סגולות. I mean to say we don't call it witchcraft anymore. We call it magic. Or even further we consider it kosher by naming it segulot--charms.And we turn commandments of God into lucky charms.

How this got to be so widely accepted is beyond me. Once it was well known that witchcraft, magic charms, astrology were forbidden by the Torah.
Nowadays you can find the religious world is filled with such things. [Whole books are devoted to segulot and charms and magic, but are considered kosher because they are in Hebrew.] You find that even mitzvot are made out to be charms.


If it could be proved that one had used a charm, he  was burned at the stake in England under Elizabeth I-- if the intent was to cause death. If it was  to find a lost object, the punishment was a year in prison.

However, I consider Reb Nachman to be one of the  best and most sincere. He was not a part of the group that the Gra put into Cherem [excommunication] as you can see if you look at the original documents. Rather, is a mild critique on the group that the Gra condemned  though the real facts of the matter are that that criminal group is infinitely worse than anything I care to describe since for my own mental balance I try not to deal with groups that are truly evil and criminal. There are good blogs that deal with that side of things and they are very good if have the stomach for that type of thing.

Worship of dead people is not a new form of idolatry. We are used to thinking of ancient idolatry as being directed towards images, however kivrei tzadikim [graves of the righteous] was also an ancient form of worship as we see in the Clemintine Recognitions [Book 10: 25]:
Chapter XXV.-Dead Men Deified.
"But if they choose to argue, and affirm that these are rather the places of their birth than of their burial or death, the former and ancient doings shall be convicted from those at hand and still recent, since we have shown that they worship those whom they themselves confess to have been men, and to have died, or rather to have been punished; as the Syrians worship Adonis, and the Egyptians Osiris; the Trojans, Hector; Achilles is worshiped at Leuconesus, Patroclus at Pontus, Alexander the Macedonian at Rhodes; and many others are worshiped, one in one place and another in another, whom they do not doubt to have been dead men. Whence it follows that their predecessors also, falling into a like error, conferred divine honor upon dead men, who perhaps had had some power or some skill, and especially if they had stupefied stolid men by magical fantasies¹¹

When I got to the yeshiva of Rav Freifeld, Shar Yashuv, Motti Friefeld [Rav Freifeld's son] always stressed review and learning in depth.
And thus until this day I am always torn between review and going on.
In the Mir Yeshiva there was already a system in place of doing in depth learning in the morning [10 A.M.-2 P.M.] and fast learning in the afternoon [i.e. 3:45-8 P.M.].

The Gemara in tracate Shabat 63 talks about the importance of just saying the words and going on. And this is discussed in depth in the Musar book אורחות צדיקים.

For others I can't really say. For me I find different methods seem to apply to different kinds of learning. For example once you have finished Shas at least once I have found it helpful to stay on one Tosphot for weeks and even months. In the Ari that was printed by Rav Ashlag with paragraph divisions I found it helpful to repeat every paragraph twice and then to go on. That was very similar to the way I was doing the Gemara the first time around. I would repeat the section of the Gemara twice with Rashi and go on.
[Later the way I would do the Gemara is this: every sentence together with Rashi. That is I keep one finger on the gemara and one on Rashi and read them in exact correspondence.]



[I have mentioned before the importance of Physics and Metaphysics so here I wanted say what I found helpful in these subjects. In Physics I found it helpful to do about a hundred pages and then go back to do review in reverse order. [that is backwards chapter 10 then 9 then 8 etc.] I might explain this in more detail but I figure you anyway have to find what works for you best.  Reverse learning I found in three places, the Ari, a medieval book of Musar from the school of the Jewish German mystics, and also the Ramchal [Rav Moshe Chaim Lutzatto.].

In the prayer book of Rav Saadia Gaon the first blessing of the Shema is about two lines.

In the  prayer book of Rav Saadia Gaon the first blessing of the Shema is about two lines. That is the opening יוצר אור ובורא חושך and then the next sentence. And then it finishes יוצר המאורות.

This is just one example of how over time, people just keep adding and adding things that were optional, but eventually people that came later thought they are obligated.

One source of misunderstanding is the statement of the Chazal {sages} כל המשנה מטבע הברכות אינו יוצא ידי חובתו. ["One who changes the form of the blessings has not fulfilled his obligation"].
This does not mean one who adds or changes words. It means that when a Bracha starts and ends with a Braruch, it always has to start and end that way. When a bracha has no 'baruch'' at the end,  it has to always end that way. It has nothing to do with the middle. However sometimes Chazal specifically state what has to be in the middle.

An example in Birachat HaMazon. The blessing after bread. In that the second blessing has to have ברית ותורה and the third has to have מלכות בית דוד.
Thus ברכת המזון could be said in short: ברוך אתהה'..הזן את העולם כולו בטובו בחן בחסד וברחמים הוא נותן לחם    לכל בשר כי לעולם חסדו. ברוך  אתה ה' הזן את הכול. נודה לך ה' אלקינו על ארץ חמדה טובה ורחבה שרצית והינחלת
לאבותינו ברית ותורה. ברוך אתה ה' על הארץ ועל המזון רחם ה' על ישראל עמיך ועל ירושלים עריך ועל מלכות בית דוד משיחיך ברוך אתה ה' בונה ירושלים ברוךאתה ה'  הטוב והמיטיב
four short lines

s98 C major   s98 in midi