Reb Eliyahu from Villna. The Villna Geon

Today a learning Talmud partner of mine mentioned to me about the Kol Hator [קול התור] of the Geon from Villna. He had not seen the book before so he was unaware of a lot of the history about the Gra. He wanted me to fill in the details.I will try to be as brief as possible. I said "the nice thing about the Gra is he is Kosher."
The Gra (the Geon Eliyahu from Villna) had an unusual way of learning. In general he has a completely different way of looking at any subject and only mentions it in hints. But sometimes when he is more explicit he surprises you. Like on the Mishna "aruga which is 6^6" his commentary looks at it from a completely different perceptive than anyone else and answers all the questions on the Mishna perfectly and it is a way of looking at it which seems to be impossible to think of on one's own.

This seems to be characteristic of the Gra.

This conversion got in the question of the excommunication. I said that it is clear to me that the Gra was right. I mentioned that one reason for the excommunication was due to  teaching Shabati Tzvi's version of Kabalah and also pantheism. I am pretty sure that the Besht did not know that the teachings of the silversmith from Villna that the Besht praised so highly  were from a false prophet of Shabati Tzvi.
(He said that one that learns them will merit to true Divine Spirit.)

But ignorance people say is no excuse. The fact of the matter is that in Orthodox Judaism today are  teachings that are  based unintentionally on Shabati Tzvi.


Pantheism: Now I have nothing against pantheism. If Spinoza would have proved it, that would be fine by me. But that is not the issue at all. The issue is that the Torah does not hold from pantheism. It holds from monotheism. So to lie about the Torah and to claim that it teaches Pantheism is a problem of fraud and lying.

And it does not help to make a difference between Pantheism and Panetheism since the difference is meaningless since the word "pan" means everything. To say you mean that God is everything and beyond everything is simple expanding the word "everything" to include "everything." [It is just a word game to try to get out of the fact that they are teaching pantheism.] But that is what it meant in the first place. So Orthodox Judaism is playing with words. Also the Torah does not teach either one. not pantheism nor panetheism. The faith  and world view of Torah is Monotheism.

In Israel I saw a lot of kabalists. There was never anything about them that indicated any higher type of person.

In fact, if I could I would today change the whole way I went through the Talmud.
The things I would change would these: I would have gone to university 1/2 the time like Reb Shelomo Friefeld [the Rosh Yeshiva of Shar Yashuv in Far Rockaway] told me to do. I would not have ignored the advice of my parents and teachers. (But at the time, I did not see much I liked in university and was not up to learning Physics. Nowadays I have discovered a way of learning Physics, I just say the words and it goes in. This is no joke. It actually worked when I was in Polytechnic Institute New York University. But there I modified this system a little  to say the words forwards and backwards.)
In terms of learning Torah itself, I would have one daily period of Talmud with Tosphot and the Maharsha in order from the beginning to the end of the Talmud. The other daily session I would have would be Chaim Soloveitchik's masterpiece, the Chidushi HaRambam. This means in plain English that I would spend much more time of the so called in depth type of learning which I ignored at the time.

In Israel I saw a lot of kabalists. There was never anything about them that indicated any higher type of person. This in fact would be a great subject for another essay. 

I want to mention a serious problem with package deals.

I want to mention serious problems with package deals. One major problem with package deals is that one rejects things that are good because they are part of some package that has some flaw. A good example of this is the Talmud. The Talmud can be taken as one package, and then rejected because it has some areas which it is flawed in. Or it can be accepted as one package and then one accepts doctrines which are in fact "not very good" as my dad would have put it. The usual example of a part of the Talmud which is not so great is the attitude towards gentiles. However if we look at the Muslims that are devolving, we can see at least a little of the point of the Talmud. Clearly the human race is breaking up into two distant parts--Western civilization (the Judeao-Christian West) and the Muslims on the other side (with some nations like China and Japan being part of the Western part because of their orientation.)
The problem is that obviously gentiles from Christian nations are not the worshipers of the stars [Akum] of the Talmud. They are not idol worshipers in any sense of the word because to be qualified as an idolater, one has to be worship a different god than the God of the Old Testament. Christians simply do not qualify because their God is the God of the Old Testament, even if they worship him in a different way than we would consider kosher.


Further examples are numerous. Christians also taking the New Testament as a package deal get bogged down in the quagmire of internal contradictions.

However there are times that one should take a package deal and just try to sort out stuff after he has bought the product. I got born into a great package deal--the home of my parents. This was--it is true a Jewish home-but it was also much more. It was a home that had too much love that is possible to describe. The powerful principles that was there are not possible to put now on paper. They can not be described. Torah was a part of our home' and so was Physics and the other natural sciences. Classical music was important there even though my brothers listened to modern stuff that shall remain nameless. But all this was external. There was something about the very essence of our family which made it one package deal that I can not describe.

At any rate, some package deals are pretty good.

()  Let me just say that the Talmud is great package deal if you decide to just accept the good things which are three basic things. One is rigorous evaluation of individual laws of the Torah, second is the structure of the laws--how they all fit together; third is the rigorous evaluation of verses.
Of course people that say they are taking one whole book as a package deal are never really doing so. They are taking some issue- usually a completely trivial issue that has little of nothing to do with the basic message of the book and elevating this trivial issue to Divine status. [However it does seem to me that some people in fact do get close to the basic message]

Of course sometimes Talmudic scholars are not very good examples of  Jews. In fact often they do not provide good examples. This is to be expected as the prophets themselves cursed the Jewish people with the curse of having bad leaders. When we did not accept true prophets we were cursed with accepting false prophets and following them.

Even today the the group known as Na Nach  assume that any famous teacher of Torah is a phony. They can be a little extreme in this but it is often quite true. ("Arrogance of office" as Shakespeare put it.)




() Another example of a package deal is racism. Sometimes based on game theory this can be justified.
I quote: Geoff's Blog (Geoffrey Falk):" For example: Kirsten Brydum was traveling across the country with an Amtrak pass and an old bicycle. She was meeting with fellow Marxists around the country and campaigning for Obama. Fresh from protesting the RNC National Convention, she arrived in New Orleans by train. While bicycling around New Orleans’ all black 9th ward ghetto to campaign for Obama, she was shot in the head. Residents would not even call the police to notify them that a dead white girl was laying on the sidewalk. Her body laid in the streets for hours until a construction crew drove by and noticed her.

Even the New Orleans police issued a statement saying “robbery does not appear to be the motivation.” All evidence suggests that she was murdered simply because she was white.

That girl would still be alive today, if only she had believed the “racist” stereotypes about black violence.

We have no qualms about being treated as “numbers in actuarial tables” when it comes to paying for health insurance, split down by [the different life-expectancy of] men vs. women, or by smokers vs. non-smokers … and we certainly don’t consider the (actuarial tables) practice itself to be the least bit immoral … yet if you judge others by their membership in, say, a high-crime group (e.g., poor blacks), you’re guilty not merely of judging individuals based on the characteristics of their group, but of a moral fallacy (and a moral failing).

If racism and sexism are morally wrong (for judging people by the characteristics of their group), then group-characteristic-based insurance must be equally morally wrong. And so are all other forms of mechanical prediction, even though they work better (i.e., “as well as or better,” which on average is better) than the “clinical method” of treating people as individuals.

That is, the most-efficient way of doing things, which causes the least total suffering, and the greatest benefit for the greatest number, is also morally wrong.

Actuarial tables are “formal, statistical stereotypes,” based on simple things like sex, smoking, diet, race, etc. They provide more-accurate (and thus more fair) judgments about the individuals they represent, on average, than do one-on-one, individual evaluations of the same people. What makes you think the same thing wouldn’t be true for other characteristics, outside of life expectancy? And if it would, what makes you think that that superficially unfair approach wouldn’t be the best way we have available to minimize suffering (or alternatively, create the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people)?"

 Descartes. When one sees a mountain the mountain is contained in one's mind. The actual mountain that one sees being in one's mind. Descartes said basically the same thing but there are several ways some people interpret him.
Decartes: "There is an ambiguity in the word "idea". "Idea" can be taken materially, as an operation of the intellect, in which case it cannot be said to be more perfect than me. Alternatively, it can be taken objectively, as the thing represented by that operation; and this thing, even if it is not regarded as existing outside the intellect, can still, in virtue of its essence, be more perfect than myself"



Dr. Michael Huemer An essay on Descartes ;-- That the actual mountain is in ones mind. The way Huemer understand this in Descartes is by another idea of Descartes that there are different levels of existence. Existence to Descartes is not an all or nothing proposition. [A good example of this is universals.] [This levels of existence thing I remember seeing in either Plato or Aristotle--I forget which.]
Huemer: "But in Descartes' ontology, things are capable of having different grades of existence (165) (he considers this "completely self-evident" (185)). Further, he makes it clear that the way in which things exist in the intellect is one of the lower grades of existence."




The other way to understand this is by the representation theory of ideas. This is how Thomas Reid understands Descartes.

also had a representation theory of ideas, based on what he says about vision in which he closely rephrases the Aristotelian idea about how vision works, but with subtle differences that make it more in accord with quantum mechanics}. Its seems to me that he would go with the idea of direct perception and not with the neo-Kant idea of representation.
a value creator  like Moses or Socrates; - a civilization founding person. A bringer of new values into the world.  The things that are particularly interesting about him are the seminal ideas-- ideas that he just hints at, but which open new horizons of thought. The originality of his thought also is indicative that we are dealing with a real mystic, not not a good copy cat of other people.



Appendix:

1) In short what Professor Huemer is getting at is that for the rationalists the idea of the mountain is more perfect than the mountain itself and thus  is more real. It is a modified version of Plato.



2) Prof. Michael Huemer is located at
Philosophy Department, CB 232
University of Colorado

3)  The area to think about here is the idea of Kant--the thing in itself-the dinge an sich. And this he applies to objective objects just as much as to objective ideas. Could this dinge an sich be more real than this reality in the cave? Surely Schopenhauer thought so. Schopenhauer wanted the real dinge an sich to apply to the Will--certainly the most real thing to Schopenhauer. 
 [What I mean here is that the dinge an sich can be understood to be on a different plane of existence than phenomenological reality.]

My father served 8 months in the European Theatre of Operations ( France , Germany and Switzerland )

I know I should have posted something about my fathers military record on June 6, D-day. I am sorry I did not so at least for today I am putting it here. The reason I have not mentioned it much is that it always seemed to me that what he accomplished after World War II eclipsed what he did during WWII.

He enlisted on October 12, 1942 when he was 24 years old. He attended the Yale Airplane Maintenance Engineering Class 44-33. According to his enlistment record, he was qualified in arms—carbine and was an expert with a pistol and a sharpshooter. He was an aviation cadet for maintenance engineering. He was discharged so that he could receive a commission as a second lieutenant. This record indicates that he was called to active duty on November 4, 1943.


He entered active duty on July 20, 1944, and was an aircraft engineering officer 4823. His medals were the American Campaign Medal, Army of Occupation Medal and World War II Victory Medal. He served 1 ½ years in the US and almost 8 months in Europe. He left active duty on September 29, 1946. His serial number was 0 872 281. He was promoted to captain just before he left the US Army, and served in the US Army, Headquarters and Base Service Squadron 413th Air Service Group 40th Bomb Wing United States Air Forces European Theater. In the US, he served at Great Bend , Kansas and was in charge of maintaining 6 B-29 aircraft for the unit. He supervised the work of 75 enlisted men. In Europe, he was a civilian personnel officer. He served 8 months in the European Theatre of Operations (France, Germany and Switzerland ) with the 413th Air Service Group and was in charge of 1500 German civilians, supervising 1 officer and 20 civilians. He spoke German fluently at the time.
[He was responsible to decide whether to hold a German for war crimes or not. So besides the specific Germans that he was in charge of, he had to sign the release forms of thousands of Germans. That he why he decided eventually to shorten his name from Rosenbloom to Rosten. I think this was someone's idea of a great joke--to have a Jew sign the release papers of  Germans.


He had a base in France in which damaged aircraft could come in and be repaired within minutes. He trained different personal to how to check and fix only one small part of the plane. So when a plane came in with damage his whole crew swarmed over the ship and fixed it up in minutes and sent it on its way. This was the reason for one of his medals.



The most interesting time of Dad’s professional career was when he returned and was at Fort Monmouth and then his very secret work at Hycon, and created the camera of the U-2, and on the highly secretive SDI Star Wars project.

Much of this information I found out after he was gone. As a father I knew him as a very simple person that loved me, my brothers and my Mother very deeply.
He never talked about his work of his WWII experiences. The peak of living for him was taking us all to the beach on Sunday, and going into the mountains of Southern California skiing once or twice a year. We could not go to the beach on Shabat because I had to spend my time learning Hebrew and Torah.

After seven years working on SDI [star wars] he left TRW and began private business and also he invested in the Stock Market.

His was the general path  Torah with "Derech Eretz", (the path of the world). Torah and work as two sides of the same coin--but not  any work but some work for the benefit of others. I can't explain this but my brother used the word that I think describes it best "Balance."
A word that describes it is Yiddish is to be a "mensch"
He invented a machine called the "copy-mate" which was an extra sharp kind of zerox machine based on focusing of x rays. And he marketed it for about five years until the American military swooped down and recruited him for SDI. So from what I can tell it seems his major contributions to the American Military were night vision and focusing of infra red -- and laser communication between  satellites. He might get honorable mention for the U-2 camera but there apparently were two teams for that and I am not sure whose actual camera was used in the end.

Most people are sensitive to spiritual things to more or less degrees but can't tell when it is real and when it is not.

I have said it a million times. The Torah as it stands with the Talmud is a neat system.


But if we think further into this issue we can see that it is a common feature of cults to have great public faces and hide and a whole string of hurt and broken lives that it leaves in its wake. This has to be at least a warning sign that religious Judaism is has become a cult. It is not just because some people abuse it that it is bad. In what way is it any different from the Divine Light Mission or Adi Da? In what way is it different that any Eastern Cult?

The warning signs are there.

The way  cults work is by a process called Confabulation. This means that there are spiritual phenomena. But even normal sane people can confuse spiritual phenomena with illusion. You don't need to be mentally ill to do this. It is in all people. Because most people are sensitive to spiritual things to more or less degrees but can't tell when it is real and when it is not.
This is where the leader come in. He can create in people the illusion of spirituality. This is a collective venture.
(This was like the type of things that Adi Da would do.) This does not imply holiness. Doing miracles or giving people powerful spiritual experiences does not imply holiness.

Pseudo-Torah

Pseudo-Torah just has a distinctive tone and structure. If there was a debate about something I know nothing at all about, like the metrical structure of Tang Dynasty Chinese poetry, I'd be able to tell in ten minutes who were the real scholars and who were the charlatans. Real scholars look at the totality of the Talmud; charlatans rely on stories and anecdotal evidence. Real Torah scholars know what constitutes being an expert (I will not write that here right now), and rely on the findings of experts. Charlatans cite people with irrelevant credentials, or marginal credentials as if they were on a par with the real Torah scholars on the other side. Charlatans pile on accusations that they were being unfairly treated and complain that important questions are not being addressed, when even a cursory examination of the literature shows that they are.

Since this is a little abstract I should probably give a few examples. The best examples I knew were the Roshei yeshiva of the Mirrer yeshiva in NY. The knew the Talmud inside and out with an amazing level of expertise and depth. Shelomo Haliua the acting Rosh yeshiva of Chaim Berlin also.
I also met a lot of people that were far from that high level but were aspiring towards it and working towards it.

Usually the roshei yeshiva of Litvak yeshivot are very good. Both in character and in Torah knowledge. The Litvaks are the Gold Standard.