Evil.

I would like to take the opportunity here to discuss Evil. [Not "evil" with a lower case e, but rather Evil with a capital E.]  I know where I want to get to in this discussion but the track is long. It takes us through Plotinus, Schopenhauer, Job, Kant,, Israel Salanter,  and Isaac Luria.
The most thorough analysis of this problem is in Isaac Luria.

 
1) The first place to start from is clearly Plotinus. He has  identified the Good with the One of Plato. And in his framework it is easy to get to the idea that the farther one is from the One, he is closer to evil. This make physical desires closer to evil than is generally understood in the U.S.A.. At least with Plotinus we do not get the fulfillment of ones physical desires to be identified with the good. That is something Plato already knocked clear out of the water. Isaac Luria does us all a great favor by putting Plotinus together with the pre-Socratics to have a highly powerful self consistent system.(Its flaw is it is dressed in highly mystical terminology. But as a philosophical system it is as sophisticated as Hegel and maybe more so. And I think Luria avoids many of the pitfalls that Hegel fell into.)

 So with Luria we get what looks much more like a realistic account of evil that the simple physicality approach of Plotinus which frankly is a powerful system but does not take into account that Platonic forms might also account for evil.

  At any rate, with Isaac Luria at least we are finally getting somewhere. We have got the Tzimum [(צמצום) contraction of the Infinite Light] plus the Kelipot ("shells" forces of evil) caused by the breaking of the vessels [of nekudim (נקודים)][which as part of the correction eventually became Emanation (אצילות).]
This results in two separate types of evil, one from the contraction [tzimtzum] and the other from the kelipot. [Kelipot are basically when the light hit the vessels of emanation and broke them and the pieces of the  vessels fell.]  three major groups of evil: Dimion [delusion], physical animal desires that have not be absorbed into holiness.  [Desire for honor is also an animal desires as we see by all groups of primates] (3) Evil that stems from the original contraction of the Light.

The there is the holy angel [Satan] which in this scheme seems to stem basically from the world of the Kelipot.

 the higher one goes in spiritual growth, the stronger is the evil inclination.

[Schopenhauer has a different account, but I did not find the time here to go into his account. Schopenhauer in any case is best as a modification of Kant. They both ought to be learned together.

In any case, Schopenhauer puts evil right smack into the Will. And only in a latter letter admits that in the final analysis the will itself has a higher aspect of the Good like Plato thought..



  At any rate, this brings me to the end of this discussion and the question of how to deal with evil. \ the higher one grows in spirituality the stronger and more subtle his evil inclination becomes, he can't give much of a solution except to go to a a wise man and get advice. [Now this might sound like a "cop out" but it is not. . To him, getting advice from people that are not themselves holy is the cause of  evil in the world.]


But how does this help us? We already know people that claim to be holy or whom their followers claim to be holy are often the exact opposite.

Israel Salanter's idea might be more practical.

But Israel Salanter may have hit upon the germ of an idea that can answer this question. He noticed something unique about books concerning fear of God that were written during the Middle Ages. Books concerning philosophy during the Middle Ages have something that books written  do not have. They avoid circular reasoning. Circular reasoning seems to be a plague affecting all  philosophy from David Hume  and onward. [Hume excelled in circular reasoning. (Taking apart Hume) Not only does it affect all is major ideas but he seems intent on putting it into every single chapter that he writes.] On the other hand Medieval books do have a problem of accepting as axioms things that today we would consider not  true.

Now gaining Fear of God is not directly related to the question of evil since we know Satan disguises himself in mitzvot. He never comes and says lest do something wrong. When Satan wants to trap a person in some scheme he comes and says lets do a mitzvah and then shows you why it is a mitzvah.
However Medieval books about the fear of God do one very important service- -the issue of world view. and we already know that world view issues are even more important that issues about physical pleasures.

 I think one needs the Torah to open up ones soul to the objective moral universe. And when I say Torah I mean the Written and Oral law [Gemara, Rashi, Tosphot]. I do not mean the many many books that were written after the Talmud that people claim they also are Torah. It is not the right of any individual to write some book and then claim it is Torah.


Central contrast is between knowledge and life: the study of  knowledge concerned with the collection of data is opposed to the study of the Torah as a tool for promoting life.

Every person have have a direct connection with God by going to a place where no one else is like a forest or some other place in nature an talking with God as one talks with close friend.
Sex as something very holy and precious when between a man and his wife, but something bad when not so.
If one sees his days have become short and full of wasted time, he ought to try to gain fear of God.  books of ethics written during the Middle Ages --i.e. the standard Musar books.

But before I could reject empiricism and or rationalism, I needed to spend plenty of time going as deep as I could into both approaches and to see if there were any flaws. Well, to some degree with Spinoza it was easy to see the flaws, since some were obvious and some were pointed out by later philosophers. Leibniz was more difficult to deal with. There are no flaws but it just does not click.


The problems with John Locke are the same flaws that are a part of any of the empirical schools like Hume. Obviously I was going to need some kind of Kantian approach --- or Hegel. Later I learned about the intuitionist school of thought. There is something good to be learned from all these schools of thought.




 But my conclusion is that learning Torah, Gemara, Rashi and Tosphot has universal objective value for all human beings.  I have to conclude that learning Torah and private conversation with God are better than democracy and capitalism and communism and pretty much beat every other proposed solution

But back to my original questions. This is complex. There are reasons to think that this question is complex.
First question "Test". Are you worthy of learning Torah? Perhaps some person has joined some cult that tries to turn people to a evil path and by that has come into the category of those that are not allowed to repent and are prevented from repenting from Heaven.

Talmudic Wisdom

What people have looked for in Talmud sages  is wisdom.
--not Talmudic ingenious ideas, and not moral lessons.
  

The Hebrew sages were all monotheists who held that God fashioned the world, but remained outside it [God and the world are two radically different things]


  When people ceased to find wisdom Jewish teachers there began the mass movement of psychology which dressed itself in the respectable garments and academic gowns of Science.

When people today look for  sound and serene judgment regarding the conduct of life they can't find it anywhere  except among charlatans that claim this knowledge.

Some people still make good money by pretense to this deep knowledge, though they have no idea about the truth in human life.

This creates a sense of outrage in people that feel they have been defrauded.



[1] Learning Torah is important. The main thing is Rav Shach's Avi Ezri which combines all aspects of Torah and  puts them into a simple to swallow pill form.
The reason the Avi Ezri (אבי עזרי) of Rav Shach is important is the same as when you do math you look at the proofs. You see how it is derived and then you get a true understanding of what is going on. It is like when I read the Handbook of Mathematics which gave me a general picture of the theorems, but not an understanding of any one theorem thoroughly. You need to learn how the law is derived.  

The final result of Torah is as it relates to actions and being a mensch. Get  Musar [Ethics]. 



(Torah in this context means the Old Testament (תנ''ך) and Gemara, Rashi and Tosphot). It is a gateway into the real reality hidden outside the cave.
You have to learn Talmud at home. There are exceptions to this rule. There are sometimes places [like Ponoviz in Bnei Brak and the great Litvak yeshivas of NY] where people have no agenda, and are just there to learn Torah. But these places are rare. In general, it is best to play it safe, and stay home and do your learning without bad influences around. [It is a problem today that the Sitra Achra (סטרא אחרא Dark Side) has penetrated most places of pretended Torah. Torah of the Dark Side/Sitra Akra.]


[2] One aspect of my wisdom for the world are ideas about the conduct of life that I received from my parents. One is "Balance." That is that even though it is true that we all need to sit and learn Gemara, but this needs to be done with balance. You still need to go to a technical collage or university and learn an honest profession.
You still need to go to the  learn survival skills and learn how to work together with others.

You need to be self sufficient. and self reliant. It is nice if you have  a community around you to support you, but self reliance was the first commandment of my Dad.

[3] Musar. Ethical books written during the Middle Ages concerning the acquiring of fear of God. The Middle Ages  was a time when fear of God was a primary topic, and the books concerning this aspect of life written during that period are better than anything written later. [Simply because it mattered more, -and because logical reasoning was more valued. Medieval books  never have the problems of circular reasoning that all philosophy and theology books have after that period.] And fear of God is an essential ingredient for human life.


[4] Natural Sciences.  Learning of natural sciences was an important part of life to Maimonides and my parents. I can't account for why they thought this to be so. [Physics is the hidden Torah inside of the world.

That is to say: There is no reason for anyone to say they can't learn Physics or Math. All you need to do is to say the words in order (see the Talmud Tractate Shabat page 63a that says to learn like this. לעולם לגריס אף על גב דמשכח ואף על גב דלא ידע מאי קאמר) and go on until you have finished the whole book four times. The ideas will automatically be absorbed into your subconsciousness. And then they will grow and one day you will wake up and discover that you understood all the material you thought you did not understand. I hold that learning Physics and Math is as important as the Oral and Written Law. When it comes to learning Torah we do not make a difference whether one is good at it or not. We say everyone is required to learn Torah. Once the Rambam included Physics in the category of the Oral Law, the same idea applies. We do not make a distinction whether one is good at it or not. Therefore my idea of saying the words and going on is important because it is the only way for some people to get an idea of Physics at all.

[5] Stay away from cults and false leaders that sprout up like mushrooms. Especially the world of Religious Judaism today is filled with them. And they never go away even when they die. They just get stronger.
[6] Outdoor and survival skills.
[7] I am a fan of sit-ups. There is something about sit ups that helps me concentrate afterwards that no other form of exercise can do.
[8] Hydrogen peroxide with toothpaste for brushing.
[9] Iodine  for wounds and cuts. This was well known in the USA and the USSR. The reason is it stays there and continues its anti bacterial action for longer periods than other kinds of medication.
[10] Boric acid for bacteria on feet or fungus.
[11] Obesity? Have a coffee [or tea] first thing in the morning with one whole raw egg mixed in. Beets with black bread in the morning for breakfast. [These are just my own ideas but based on the Talmudic idea of פת שחרית bread first thing in the morning.]
[12] I used to jog. I found that not convenient any more but I still think it is the best. I think for me sit-ups are important also. At least these are things that do not need a gym.
[13] The Talmud warns us about people that make a show of being religious. Especially people that put themselves forward to show they are teachers of Torah. The Talmud derives this warning from a verse in Tenach. The basic subject in in tractate Shabat "When ever you see troubles come on a generation check out the judges of Israel for all the trouble that come into the world only come because of the judges of Israel." In short that means the religious world is to be avoided at all cost. There is there some kind of unspeakable evil that parades itself as Torah.

() The Gra went did a kind of repentance called "Galut" that is wandering from place to place where people do not recognize you and not to spend much time in  any one place. This kind of teshuva has the aspect to it that it is not good to always be hidden from the way the world really is. people can get disconnected with reality when they are too sheltered. And a lot of the world revolves on status. You can't get married or get a job without status. but too much status tends to be harmful. One forgets his own faults and failings. Thus this idea of Galut is very important.

Torah stands at the door: The Will To Torah. or The Tragic Torah

The Tragic Torah

Torah Tragedy.

In the Torah and Gemara Rashi and Tosphot [Talmud] we find  Tragedy at every turn. We find the lonely individual Moses in the wilderness took the wrong step in life and hit the rock instead of speaking to it , abruptly finding himself cut off from the land of Israel forever. David after being anointed king finds himself a hunted fugitive. in the life of every Talmudic sage we find some tragic event and inexplicable mysteries.


 For Torah, the truth about life is in tragedy. True Torah, must reveal the essence of life [the ten statements by which the world was created] and thus be amoral, because life in its very core is not moral.
We know the Rambam [Maimonides] was not a particularistic. We know he held that behind every law of the Torah there is a principle at work that are  life, love, and natural law.



And as the Torah is not moral guidance but rather primal natural laws, through which the Torah both creates and destroys lesser life such as human beings and animals, Torah must be regarded as "anti-life" to morally condemn natural things such as death, pain or tragedy.

Torah life unconditionally and captures its essence of existence without flinching or defending itself with morality but with natural principles.


For the truth of Torah we need not look into historical documents but into the Platonic realm of myth and magic. and  without a strong and rich life of myths and magic , the people slowly decay from within.

 Torah is not  is not created from moral or rational principles, but from the depth of the soul of a people. The myth is the expression of that unique soul, but as soon we try to "objectify" or rationally explain its relevance, we slowly kill our cultural life and replace it with a clinic, materialist worldview. This worldview is the modern one, where we have literally killed the belief in religion, passion, magic and myth, because we no longer understand their function. We search for "objective" answers to the myth itself and unsurprisingly we find none, because the truth about life,  does not lie in the Torah  itself, but in its metaphorical expression of life.

 There is a correlation between Torah and perception of reality. We cannot gain direct access to any "dinge an sich"  objective truth, the "thing in itself"; instead, we interpret it through Torah symbolism

The Nefesh HaHaim puts learning Torah on a level that was unprecedented.

The Tragic Torah

Torah Tragedy.

In the Torah and Gemara Rashi and Tosphot [Talmud] we find  Tragedy at every turn. We find the lonely individual Moses in the wilderness took the wrong step in life and hit the rock instead of speaking to it , abruptly finding himself cut off from the land of Israel forever. David after being anointed king finds himself a hunted fugitive. In the life of every Talmudic sage we find some tragic event and inexplicable mysteries.


 For Torah, the truth about life is in tragedy. True Torah, must reveal the essence of life [the ten statements by which the world was created] and thus be amoral, because life in its very core is not moral.
We know the Rambam [Maimonides] was not a particularistic. We know he held that behind every law of the Torah there is a principle at work that are  life, love, and natural law.



Torah life unconditionally and captures its essence of existence without flinching or defending itself with morality, but with natural principles.


 Torah is not  is not created from moral or rational principles, but from the depth. The myth is the expression of that unique soul, but as soon we try to "objectify" or rationally explain its relevance, we slowly kill our cultural life and replace it with a clinic, materialist worldview. This worldview is the modern one, where we have literally killed the belief in religion, passion, and myth, because we no longer understand their function.

 There is a correlation between Torah and perception of reality. We cannot gain direct access to any "dinge an sich"  objective truth, the "thing in itself"; instead, we interpret it through Torah symbolism

The path to the dinge an sich, the Will, the real reality is through the long arduous process of finishing Shas [Gemara, Rashi and Tosphot.]

[1] There is a reason that people resist have their belief system interfered with. The reason is that they do not want to become schizophrenic.
It works like this. People absorb their basic world view and belief system at young ages. Very few people make up their own value system. Most get their worldview from friends in school, from parents, from television, from the movies, from collage professors,  etc. This is all along the lines of putting the circuits into a circuit board. As long as you have not put the circuit board into the oven, you can still correct wires that have the wrong alignment. Once the circuit board has been solidified, there is nothing to do with it. If you find a faulty connection and try to correct it, you end up shorting out the entire circuit board. Similarly if a person tries to correct beliefs that he finds evidence against later in life after his belief system has become hard wired, then he goes crazy--literally.

This also explains why the Orthodox world is especially wary of baali teshuva [newcomers]. They may be brilliant, and also perhaps have accepted full heartily the belief system of the Torah and Talmud, but if done after ones teenage years, then it is all just software that can easily be deleted and replaced with a highly lethal program or even a virus. Soft-ware can be hacked. Hard-ware can't be hacked.

The other reason people do not like their beliefs tampered with is because their circuit board is not alone. It is part of a supercomputer. People need to be part of a super-organism. If you tamper with their circuit board after it has been put into the oven, not only does it get an electric short circuit, but it also becomes useless for the super-organism and has to be thrown out.

Extreme examples of this are: Muslims that find themselves in an airplane driving into a building in order to murder people and themselves. Though at some point human instinct for self preservation kicks in, but it is overwhelmed by the more powerful human need to not tamper with their world view and to remain good Muslims.

The most common example is people in their first few years of college who get indoctrinated into left wing doctrines and then later in life when they see the fallacy if their beliefs simply can't let them go.



 A famous college professor expressed this thus: "Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... You have to be educated in order to be ... a participant in our conversation ... So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable."[sic]