Learning Torah,

I have been trying to figure out a good argument for learning Torah. And I don't want to go the way of the Nefesh HaChaim to do so.
That is I am starting out with a conclusion and trying to figure out a good argument to bring to that conclusion.  X therefore Y. Y is "It is good to learn Torah." Solve for X.
The arguments against keeping or learning Torah seem infinite  and some seem convincing.

One argument against learning is when people see what happens when people overdo it. It is like eating too much. You can see what happens to people when they eat too much. But no one uses that as an argument not to eat.

One argument against it is to notice that Reform Jews support the State of Israel and clearly have the  benefit of mankind as the major goal. Yet they do not learn very much Torah. Just a drop.

I could try to point out that this good will of reform Jews while a great thing in itself can go over a line into over-tolerance.


What I can say as an argument for Torah is my own parents home which was an island of wholesomeness and decency and holiness and our home was based on Torah even though we were Reform Jews--in name at least. I am sure my parents held from Torah much more strongly than  the Reform Movement.

There is an aspect of numinous of Torah that I think is the best aspect of it. It connects one to the Divine.

For that reason I suggest having two sessions ever day in Torah. One in the Oral Law and the other in Poskim [i.e. people that sifted through the Talmud to come up with one law on each subject instead of  an argument on each subject.] That is to go through the oral law from start to finish Talmud Bavli Yerushalmi, Tosphta Sifra, Sifri, Mechilta, Torat Kohanim. And the Poskim: Rambam, Tur, Shulchan Aruch with the commentaries.

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In the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

There is a sort of ambiguity when people discuss QM as being subjective. It is not "subjective" in the same way that word is used in general language. There is nothing subjective about the fact that the two slit experiment results in interference. It has nothing to do with who is watching it. It has to do with what happens when a particle interacts with another particle. That creates interference.

The word "subjective" is already ambiguous. A "subject" in Kant is the observer. A "subject" in England is a subject of the king--as in the "king's subjects."

So what is meant by subjective when people use the term in QM? It means probability. You have a state of a system and then you have something that acts on it. Then you get a new state. The probability of the new state occurring is what people mean by the word "subjective."

It is better not to read what philosophers write about Quantum Mechanics. Kelley Ross is right that Kant provided essential insights, but since then there have been very few people that work in philosophy that understand Physics well enough to say anything intelligent about it. And that means that few philosophers are competent to comment about reality. They might be able to give a course in philosophy, but to say anything intelligent about the nature of reality they are far away from.

[I should mention that Quantum Mechanics (Heisenberg) deals nicely with interference and you don't need the Schrodinger picture for that. See this post by Lubos that does the actual calculation To derive interference from the Heisenberg Picture


Here is an important quote from Lubos: http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/11/why-subjective-quantum-mechanics-allows.html?m=1 

Are there many universes? Reference Frame

What this means is amazingly simple if you want Fear of God  then you can't join any organization. Especially one that presents itself as fearing God, [any so called "the  religious world " that is]. They will turn out to be the biggest obstacle that prevent you from fear of god because of their amazing and shocking levels of hypocrisy. That includes Breslov sadly. That is the path to Fear of God is clear learn Torah--that is the Oral and written Torah and Musar--but don't dare venture towards any organization that is claiming to represent that path. The is no possibility that it will not turn out to be false. For that is the state of things today.

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.