I have thought for a long time if you are learning, you don't need to interrupt for kadish and Kedusha.
This was because I learned in (Tur טור ארח חיים laws of Suka תר''ם) the Beit Yosef who brings down this idea that one who is involved in one mitzvah does not have to interpret for another mitzvah even when he can easily do both.
I found some support for this idea in the Gra that when one is learning Torah he can interrupt to do a mitzvah that no one else can do--but he does not have to. [See the Mishna in Peah]


For the general public I want to explain what I mean here:
In general, a person that is involved in one mitzvah is not required to do another mitzvah.
For example if a person gets married, then he and the groups of friends that are there to make merry are not required to sit in a suka for the whole seven days of marriage festivity [according to the Rambam.]
Another principle is learning Torah is a mitzvah. Torah in this context means the Old Testament or the Talmud.When one is learning Torah, he is allowed to stop to do another mitzvah, but he does not have to.{Gra}. Thus in a synagogue when people get up to say kaddish or kedusha if you are learning, you don't have to answer. All the more so since this usually happens after the time for prayer which is from dawn until 4 hours later.  After that only if one had an unforeseen emergency can he pray until noon. Other than that the pray (blessings in vain) and one is not even allowed to answer Amen.

This came up because of my learning partner who often has to interrupt to answer, and I told him he does not have to answer.

The truth be told there is a much better support for this idea. It is in the Talmud Shavuot pg 43 and 43b with the whole idea there of the "penny of Rav Joseph". [Pruta shel Rav Joseph]. That is when one is in possession of  a lost object, he is not obligated to give a penny to a poor person because he has to watch the object. And Tosphot explains there that even Raba does not disagree with this. Rather he says that just because a poor person might come, we do not say that he is a guard that is paid. The reason is a poor person might not come. So we see everyone agrees העוסק המצווה פטור מן המצווה one involved in one mitzvah does not have to stop in order to do another mitzvah even if the second mitzvah is much more important and even if not doing it involves a prohibition of לא תתעלם

 Now I am Jewish and prefer the Oral and Written Law [the Old Testament and the Talmud] as a working system.

I should mention that a lot of the  work that goes into the Talmud is because we assume the Law of God is meant to be obeyed and that it is self consistent. So ironing out the difficulties is important--it is not just an intellectual exercise but it comes from the fact that we Jews are interested in obeying the word of God.

So what I have suggested is an idea based on Hobbes. You a  government that is allotted only certain powers [as the US Constitution was originally conceived] and within that context there is a voluntary  area of people that accept on themselves to keep the Law of God.]

Is "Don"t serve false gods" a prohibition that includes many sub categories? I mean take the verse לא תעבדם "Don't serve other gods." That seems very specific.

"Don't eat on the blood"לא תאכל על הדם is used for everything except the kitchen sink.
For example the rebellious son. We know the punishment is stoning but where is the prohibition? We use, "Don't eat on the blood." Prohibition on blood from a living animal? Dito. You have a whole list.

So the question raised by my learning partner is why in Sanhedrin 63 is "Don't serve idols" considered to contain many sub categories? It does not seem similar at all.



One thing to consider here is that Rashi says this particular "Don't serve" is not the same one as for regular idolatry. The regular one is in the Ten Commandments. The one the Talmud here is dealing with is in Mishpatim [circa Exodus 30] talking about when the Jewish people enter the Land of Canaan not to serve the gods they find there. This might help someway, but I am not sure of how.

The thing which makes it hard to stick up for the Talmud is Talmudic scholars that are demons. תלמידי חכמים שדיים יהודאיים The Talmud itself deals with this problem and it in fact even comes up in the Mishna. But after that it is largely forgotten. I imagine because it was not much of a problem during the Middle Ages. During the Middle Ages  to get to be called a Talmudic scholar was so difficult that the process automatically weeded out the bad apples [sorry for the mixed metaphor.]


The best way around this problem is thus to go to any one of the basic set of straight Lithuanian  yeshivas--the three in Brooklyn, NY. (Mirrer, Chaim Berlin, Torah VeDaat), or the ones in Israel Ponovitch, Brisk {and many others in Israel built along the same lines, e.g., Tifrach, Silverman's Yeshivat HaGra in the Old City, etc.}


One reason why it is important to avoid the Dark Side teachers of Torah is because they teach Torah  from the Dark Side.
In summary:  avoid Talmudic scholars that are demons and also the Torah of the Sitra Achra [Dark Side].

Power, money, politics should  to be considered as meaningless. And the more people get into his teachings the more these things lose their significance.

So what to take out of all this is that there is nothing wrong with loving heroes. Everyone love heroes and Jewish people are no different in this regard. The point is to choose your heroes wisely.

What is happening in Renaissance Music is you have the basic song. But what the author does is change the chord of as many notes as he can from what you would think the chord is supposed to be to something else. This is different from Bach. Bach many times makes it a point to change the actual key as often as possible and as soon as possible. That is why it is hard to sing along with Bach. But in the Renaissance, the author leaves the song intact, and changes only the chords. This idea started during the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages also had a few characteristic chords but that is a different topic.
Bach had a few ways to change the chord. Mainly to go to the dominant of the next key he is trying to get to. E.g. he is in C major and wants to go to D major. He will thus go  to A major and then to D.
[This does not work for half steps. But it does work for major or minor keys. I.e. in this way if he is in C major he can go to D Major or D minor.(But not D flat major or minor.)]

 He will also revolve around a certain note like they did in the Renaissance.
I have not really been able to use these ideas for myself, but I thought in case there are talented people out there that might find this useful I thought I should let them know.

[If I could I would share my own music with people, but I have not been very successful in finding a way to do that.]

The only proper sex is between a man and a woman. and that sex in that way is a good and holy thing. And in any other way is bad.

It is in some sense based on Isaac Luria. The idea is that there are letters of the Torah in everything. For the Torah is what gives life to everything that exists. So in the seed of a man is a high concentration of holy letters. And these letters need to be brought to the place that is right for them that can bring new life into the world. So when one brings these letters and holy sparks to the wrong place of an empty space that gives power to the dark side.
And then the Dark Side has power to cause terrible things in the world, death and destruction and war. So this needs to be corrected by the mikveh and the ten psalms.

 That when that happens one should go to the mikveh and say ten psalms. In particular if possible one should say the specific psalms that he said were a correction for this sin. 16,32,41,42, 59, 77, 90, 105, 137, 150.

You can see this in Leviticus 18:22 in which homosexuals are said to be the cause of the destruction of the Canaanites nations and that the Jewish people should be careful to stay away from such practices so that they also do not get destroyed. You can see that in this area of values the Torah is not making distinctions between Jews and Gentiles. If the Torah would make a distinction then what it says would make no sense. Rather it is saying that the Cannaties will be wiped out because of such practices --so obviously the Torah thinks there is some kind of inherent guilt in such actions. Nor does the Torah preach tolerance about such things.


 source material  Eitz Chaim of the Ari. the Mavo Shearim .Then the basic place in the Ari that talks about sins and corrections for sin is Shaar Ruach HaKodesh which gives a lot of unifications and a number of fasts for sins.

Is "joining" שיתוף (Joining something to G-d) more serious than idolatry or less?
This is an argument between R Meir of the Mishna and R Shimon Ben Yochai

But the Rambam says one must not join the name of God and something else in an oath because one who does this is uprooted from the world.[Thus going with R Shimon and confining the law of joining to oaths. Two things that need answers.]


The argument is in Sanhedrin 63.
R Meir said, "If not for the letter vav in 'These are your gods,'
(which was said to the Golden Calf) Israel would have been liable to be destroyed."

R. Shimon said, "But anyone who joins the name of God with something else is uprooted from this world as it says 'to God alone.' Rather the vav is to tell us they desired many gods." [In Avoda Zara it is explained that that means they accepted the Golden Calf but were open to accepting other god also. But they did not join God with the Golden Calf. And if they had that would have been worse.  ]

The Maharsha says that joining is what the Rambam describes at the beginning of the Laws of Idolatry. And there the Rambam says the main idea of idolatry was they saw that God put the stars in Heaven so it is his will that we should honor them just like he honors them, and by that they will be advocates for us. [The Rambam  goes into detail about this also in his commentary on the Mishna. This is known in the  as the problem of the אמצעי intermediate. That is people know God is the creator but they feel they can't approach Him directly so they go through a middle step like a person or anything else to serve as a middle step.]
Then the Rambam says  the actual idolatry that we know came after that. It seems the Rambam is saying the later step was worse. That is the אמצעי (emtzai) (using an  intermediate) is less serious.

But then when you look at the Rambam about actual שיתוף joining --in the only place he actual brings up our Gemara-he says one who swears by God and something else will be uprooted--that is the opinion of R Shimon. Not like R Meir!

So what we have here is what seems like a contradiction in the Rambam.

Joining is not necessarily the same problem as an intermediate. But it might be.

At any rate, I thought by mistake that the Rambam  thinks that an oath is a deed. It is the same as when one exchanges one animal for another in which there is a deed accomplished by his words "this is in place of that."
But my learning partner pointed out that this really does not help. The Rambam does not mention anything about lashes in laws of oaths 11 where her brings this law about "Shituf" שיתוף joining. It matters only in laws of idolatry where one who swears by a false god gets lashes.
And  a person could bring a sacrifice to God and an idol together. For example take a regular sacrifice a person is bringing to God in the Temple and the person bringing it has intention to serve some false god along with God. Either just intention of he could say something, or have originally sanctified the sacrifice to God and to his false god. Hasidim do this all the time. There is nothing unusual about it. Hasidim do everything as a kind of service to their false god. Not just sacrifice.

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Post Appendix: In any case my idea that the Rambam holds swearing seems to be incorrect. The actual issue is brought up in laws of idolatry.
Rambam: "One who swears by a false god gets lashes."

 Raavad: "Only to R Yehuda who holds lashes are given to one who does a prohibition even if there is no act. But we (and the Rambam) hold lashes are given only when there is an act except for swearing, replacing, and cursing."
And our case of swearing by a false god is not in the list of three exceptions.
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At any rate, I just wanted to say that my learning partner decided that we should not spend any more time on this Rambam. And I would not have said anything about it if I did not have this idea of an oath being an act which I think is wrong now. but when I had the idea I thought it might provide a hint to understanding the Rambam. [It is a fact that the Minchat Chinuch does say that that is how the Rambam holds but I don't think it could be right.]
See Rav Elazar Menachem Shach's Avi Ezri  on laws of idolatry  about teh halacha where teh rambam says one who swears by an idol gets lashes.