Reform Judaism

My parents raised my brothers and myself as Reform Jews. But not exactly like Reform. I am not sure what the Reform doctrines are today but in my home it was considered that keeping all the Torah and mitzvah with down to the last drop was  a great and wondrous thing.-- but it was voluntarily.
Of course there are many aspects of Torah that are not voluntary but in fact law. But still this was how things were in our home.You can do all the mitzvot you want but you can't force anyone else to do them and you can't ignore your obligations because you want to be frum.

Fear of God I began to consider to be a goal after I saw this idea in the book אור ישראל the light of Israel by a disciple of Israel Salanter.
In some way this was a natural result of my environment. I had been in Far Rockaway in the yeshiva of Shelomo Freifeld and they were not learning Jewish Ethics there. It was solely for the purpose of Talmud study. But I felt I needed some time with Musar  and also for other perhaps subconscious motivations I decided to go to the Mirrer Yeshiva in Brooklyn. And that is  Musar yeshiva.

So one day I picked up one of the classical Musar books the Light of Israel and I saw this idea that coming to fear of God is a goal in itself. And that in fact is a little different than the idea that they were telling you in yeshiva that learning Torah is the goal in life.

Based on the Rambam of what leads to Fear of God [learning Physics and Metaphysics] I changed my schedule a little bit. Though learning Talmud I still feel is an important thing to do every day I do think that learning Physics and Metaphysics leads to some kind of internal transformation that the Rambam was talking about.
I know most people don't associate fer of God with learning the natural sciences but I have a "faith in the wise" אמונת חכמים  in the Rambam when it comes to this matter.

What I suggest is a daily schedule that roughly divides one's learning period into (1) Musar [Jewish Ethics] (2) Natural Science (3) Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud. That is on a personal level and this I think is a good idea for universities also. [In Chaim Berlin yeshiva in NY there is no secular program but it was understood that people would go to the nearby Brooklyn collage so that they don't have to spend their whole lives collecting charity. For this is a serious flaw in the the insane religious world  system. That it makes collecting money from rich reform Jews as a goal in life. And that method of keeping Torah is clearly flawed. And I don't think it has much to do with learning Torah or fear of God either.]

Isaac Luria is also important but I am not sure how to fit him into a learning schedule. One thing about Lurianic Kabalah is that it is hard to justify Torah without it. This even came up yesterday when I was learning Torah and the issue of how people were keeping Torah in the first Temple period. I would rather not go into the subject right now but this is for a a general principle. When I find contradictions between science and Talmud or some problem of interpretation of Torah I run to Isaac Luria's writings. For example we find they did not keep the Passover until Hezekiah or Sukkot.
What you have to do is to say to have the light of Torah תפארת "Glory", and that is a column of light.
Prophets during the first temple period were receiving light from a different source נצח  or  הוד. In order to but in a case where the light of Torah was lost a prophet  could move over to the column of light of Glory and receive what had been lost or forgotten. You don't have to agree with this. But you can see how the Ari can help solve problems in Torah thought amazingly easily.

Music for the glory of God

l97

Reality is subjective and objective.

Reality is subjective and objective. But it is also local. It is surprising that people have not noticed the fact that Kant provided a good framework to understand Quantum Mechanics long before QM was discovered. Utube videos of Murry Gellman. In one of those he explains breifly why the double slit experiment does not prove non-locality

It is in fact easy to understand Islam. You need to study the Eitz Chaim of Isaac Luria and you will see that the Dark Side has many aspects to it. It has an open aspect  That is what is called the Satan or male aspect of the Dark Side. That is Islam. That is the male aspect of the Sitra Achra. And there is a softer aspect the Female Dark Side, i.e. the side that disguises itself as a mitzvah.

We find in the books of Jewish Ethics [Musar] that there is a problem in joining evil people So it is important to be able to discern if some person or group is perhaps the Dark Side [Sitra Achra] in disguise. Books of Musar commonly bring this from the verse where the prophet Isiah told king Hezekiah "" when you joined together with Achaz, God made a breach in your works."
בהתחברך עם אחזיהוא פרץ ה' את מעשיך 

Music for the honor of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel.

q1

Some people are attracted to the Dark Side. And others try to avoid it but get caught in it by trying to do mitzvot and good deeds. This is not news. We find in several spiritual disciplines the fact that evil disguises itself as good in order to trick people. And sometimes people want to do good and simply have  a strong urge to do evil even while knowing that it is evil. But they don't try to justify it. They excuse it saying it is not that bad.

I don't have a good answer for the problem of the Sitra Achra. But some of the practices i talk about on my blogs are meant to help myself avoid the Dark Side.

My main model of goodness is what I saw in my parents home. And my parents were Reform Jews. And our home was one of wholesomeness and decency. So to a large degree I try to emulate them.
But I think we were not careful enough in the commandments, so I do try to keep the commandments of the Torah more than what was done in our home. But I try to do this with balance. For I see people that accept some ritual commands of the Torah (which in itself is good), but that leads them to ignore more important aspects of the Law--like loving one's fellow man  or honoring ones parents.

In any case, my basic ideas about avoiding the Dark Side are to talk with God like one talks with a friend, and be especially careful about never saying a lie or anything not even slightly not true. When I found myself sinking, I decided to hold onto this trait with all my might--never to say anything not true under any circumstances, and I believed that the strength of the truth would help me get through everything and hold me up.

A good link to this subject by Kelly Ross attack on morality