I in general do like like the excuses made to turn Torah into a frum document. but i can't resist mentioning this one thing about Ezechiel  (Apologetics Press) .


"Tyre in Prophecy. The city of Tyre had a rather interesting and beneficial geographical arrangement. About half a mile off the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea stood a small rocky island on which the original city of Tyre was most likely founded. Some time after the founding of this island city, the mainland city of Tyre was founded, which was called Old Tyre by the Greeks (Fleming, p. 4)"
  Apologetics Press[http://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=13&article=1790]
I mention this here because I know most people do not like my blog because it is neither secular or religious It seems I sometimes argue from a secular standpoint and sometimes I seem deeply religious.. The reason for all this is that my viewpoint is Neoplatonic. and that in a certain respect I think that Neo-Platonism made a few false moves away from Plato,--especially by assigning too much power to Reason. I think that the way synthetic a priori knowledge is acquired is not by reason by by a third type of perception which Plato calls memory of the eternal world before we were born. Now this might not be actual  memory but it is close to the idea of internal perception that Kant developed. This is a move away from the secular world. It is deeply religious. But this religious viewpoint does not make it a mitzvah to deny facts like the  the  Ultra Orthodox world does.
  And this religious point of view believes  that the person that wrote the Torah and all the prophets had a highly developed sense of this non intuitive immediate perception.




Just to mention some examples that show the Torah is not frum: (1) King Shelomo had a woman's choir.
(2) Sukkot was not celebrated during the First Temple period, and people in the Babylonian Exile had not even heard of it.(3) Tamar said to Amnon that with the permission of king David she could be his wife.
(4) The idea of Hillel II making the Jewish calendar is a falsehood. It is no where mentioned in the Talmud. Other decrees of Hillel II were mentioned. You would expect a fundamental decree that the entire future of klal Israel depended upon would merit at least a mention! The Jewish calendar is in fact the ancient Greek calendar of Meton. According to the Torah the day of the Rosh Chodesh is the day of the new moon. Not before or after.


[I should admit by Neo Platonic point of view was developed a long time ago way before i started any Talmudic studies, when other kids were playing basketball or baseball, I was studying Plato and Spinoza]
This was not because I was studious. The thing was my home was very far away from school so I had no place to hand out except at the public library until my Dad picked me up at 6 PM. So I was too far away from other kids homes,es to be able to play sports and by the time I got home I was exhausted.

two types of tyranny

We should distinguish between two types of tyranny: (i) the tyranny of those who abuse authority they legitimately acquired and hold; and (ii) the tyranny of those who obtained and hold power by usurpation.Usurping tyrants  (level two)—as, in effect, parties making war against the political community—may legitimately be resisted and even killed by anyone who has the effective power to do so.  By contrast, where legitimate rule has degenerated into tyranny, the tyrant  is entitled to something like what we might call “due process of law.” It is up to other public officials, operating as such, and not (ordinarily) to private citizens, to overthrow their regimes and, if necessary, bring them personally to trial and punishment.

In the present day this seems to apply to the government of the USA as a whole. You can't really point to any one person who has created the monstrosity the vast government of the USA. But it is clearly against the Constitution which calls for limited government

The conflict is between Divine simplicity and the reality of the ideas.

  I want to make clear the problem that the Pre-Scholastic Christian thinkers struggled with and how this caused a radical shift towards Aristotle in the 1200's. And I want to deal with how the later Jewish thinkers dealt with the same problem.
  The problem is simple. In Plato and Neo-Platonic the ideas are the really real. This world is a reflection of the higher spiritual worlds. So all the multiplicity in this world is really in the Mind [Logos] of God.-- and that creates multiplicity in God.
  Understandably this is not acceptable in any approach based on the Torah. The conflict is between Divine simplicity and the reality of the ideas.
  The general move of Maimonides and later Jewish thinkers was towards Aristotle that universals and the ideas are real, but depend on particulars. In the Christian world this same problem led to the ideas being considered less and less until we get straightforwards Nomalism [that the ideas don't exist].
Shalom Sharabi (הרש'ש) (in his book Nahar Shalom) developed an approach that is dynamic. His claim is that spiritual reality is itself in a process of change from universals being independent to their being dependent. (This is a problem in itself because the ideas were originally conceived as answering the problem of Parmenides "What is must be and was is not can't be;" so the Ari making change in the world of ideas in itself is already a radical departure from the original concept. so you have to posit higher levels of spiritual world in which there is no change --like the Remak הרמ''ק)
  I should probably mention Isaac Luria. It always seemed to me that his major point was simply to put God beyond all processes of creation. In his thought even though Emanation (אצילות) and Adam Kadmon (אדם קדמון א''ק) are Divine, there still come after a long process of contractions and lessening on the Divine light.

 To the Ari and the Zohar all lower worlds after emanation are not Divine. And also the Zimzum  [contraction] is specifically in God himself the Arizal states many times at the beginning of the Eitz Chaim.
The sad thing is that people that supposedly teach Kabalah are never doing that. They are always teaching some corrupted version of pseudo  Kabalah

A Jewish approach to politics

This would not include the Democratic Party in the USA which is positively hostile to America and which has imported  Sharia law to the American  mainland and supported a takeover of the Middle East by Muslim fanatics. Today the Democratic Party is the Muslim party.  Anyone who hates America has a home in the Democratic party.
The problem is that in a democracy, people have realized they can vote for themselves other people's money. This is what Americans are doing when they vote Democrat.. The fact that they are destroying America, one brick at a time, does not bother anyone because there is no longer any national spirit.
It was suggested to me that  America is on its way down because of the Muslim president,




But a Libertarian also would not be an option because of the the conception of natural law of Maimonides and Saadia Geon is not compatible with the thesis of self-ownership -- which is the very heart  libertarian-ism


The Torah is a natural law approach to ethics.

Also self ownership makes no sense.  We cannot plausibly be said to own ourselves in a substantive way. We don't own ourselves in the same way as a piece of property.

This really leaves only the Republican party which is compatible with the world view of the Torah.


An argument against self ownership by [Edward Feser.] : Suppose, for example, that you and I are castaways and wash up on some tiny island upon which no human beings have ever trod. You immediately pass out on the beach, while I get to work constructing a bamboo fence whose perimeter happens entirely to enclose your body. Upon waking, you accuse me of imprisoning you and thereby violating your self-ownership rights, and demand to be released. Suppose I then respond as follows: “I have not imprisoned you at all! I’ve simply homesteaded all the land around you -- which you had no right to, since it was virgin territory -- and I’ve built a fence around it, to make sure you don’t come onto my land and take any of the resources I’ve justly acquired. True, you’ve got nothing in the way of resources in the seven-foot by four-foot plot of sand I’ve left you, but that’s not my fault. That’s just your bad luck, sorry. I suppose it would be nice of me to give you some of mine, but at most I’d be unkind rather than unjust if I decide not to do so. And I was very careful not to touch you as I built my fence. I do respect your right of self-ownership, after all!” 

Before the 60's fascination with crackpot religions there was a warning
Hoffer argues that all mass movements such as fascism, communism, and religion spread by promising a glorious future. To be successful, these mass movements need the adherents to be willing to sacrifice themselves and others for the future goals. To do so, mass movements often glorify the past and devalue the present.

The reason few people heeded the warning of Hoffer was that there was an opposite tendency. Nietzsche had glorified authenticity and this somehow became a part of the young American mentality. So people that were interested in joining a cult  simply ignored questions of truth and preferred authenticity. And then when they get disappointed and leave they are still fascinated by authenticity instead of truth. The Mentality of the Fanatic never changes. So they become obsessed with attacking what they believed in. The truth is the great books of Talmud and Mishna are good books. Abuse does not cancel use.
The Old Testament [Torah], and Talmuds, the Babylonian and Jerusalem, connect one to a plane of existence-- an "a priori" transcendental plane of moral and numinous value.

 Nachman of Uman deals with the question which bothered philosophers: "How does multiplicity come from One." This was originally answered by Plotinus  [the founder of Neo Platonism] and then developed in Christian thought by pseudo Dionysus. [The reason Plotinus is not sufficient in this question for people of Jewish or Christian background is that there is no problem of potential multiplicity in the Nous. But for Torah based people, we have to have absolute simplicity in the One.] The one person who addressed this question straight on was the medieval prescholastic thinker, John Scotus Eurigena (c.800 - c.877). This indicates that  Nachman was familiar with Medieval Pre-Scholastic thought. [This is not news in Breslov. Everyone know he borrowed from medieval kabalists. and was familiar with philosophy.]
The problem which bothers me here is: Did  Nachman know that this question bothered Christian thinkers for about a thousand years until finally they just gave up on Neo-Platonic thought during the 1200's and decided to switch to Aristotle?" However neat and clean Aristotle is for all the problems that bothered the Neo-Platonic philosophers for a thousand years, still for people that want to continue with Neo-Platonic thought like the Ari [Isaac Luria] and  Nachman and the Rambam {Maimonides} himself this seems to present difficulties.
 Just  two of the problems for people in Neo-Platonic thought. Problem (1): For the personal God of the Torah, there does not seem to be any reason to create the physical world. If people here are mere reflections of a higher person in the Mind of God then why bother creating this flawed world? [And the Ramchal (Moshe Lutzato) does not much good here. No reason why God could no bestow good on people without there being the option of bad. If I had no chose but to accept a million dollars tomorrow would that make it worthless to me?]-  Problem (2) The reality of Divine idea introduces multiplicity in God -- a big "no."
I admit, a lot of the problems that bothered the Neo-Platonic people like the pre scholastic Christian thinkers never bothered me much because I accepted the Neo-Platonic system of Isaac Luria which deals pretty well with a lot of the basic problems. [Or maybe not as Rav Nelkenbaum pointed out to me at the Mir  in New York, Issac Luria  does not really deal with the "Why?" but the "How?"]  Rav Nelkenbaum did not put it that way but that is what he meant. At any rate, with "shevirat hakelim" שבירת הכלים [breaking of the vessels] you get a whole bunch of answers for the Neo Plato people.
Of course, Christians ever since the 1200's have an extreme aversion to anything which smacks of neo Platonism. I don't think they are right about this. As many problems the neo Platonics had, still the move towards Aristotle and Nomalism has not done any better and has lead to plainly anti-Torah philosophies and false philosophies. I mean the one thing that characterizes post Renaissance philosophy is its reliance on circular reasoning starting with Hume and ending up with the modern trash that goes by the name of philosophy.
The delicate balance that  Nachman walked between Neo Platonic thought and Maimonides shows he wanted to preserve Divine simplicity and divine ideas.{even though creation ex-nihilo is not a proof of  Nachmans'  type of thought. For that is a theme in Neo platonic thought also.)


It is strange that Reb Nachman asks the question of the Philosophers and then uses their answer and at the same time as he uses their answer he disparages them for asking the question.-The Platonic Forms along with the whole scheme of Emanation of Plotinus.