(1)The God of Maimonides and Aristotle tends to lack personality. (2) The omnipotence and benevolence of God, while happy and comforting to contemplate, generates the Problem of Evil, that the evidence of the world and of events frequently would seem to contradict an omnipotent and benevolent agency.
(3) It seems to me that Yaakov along with Job and King David found some way of dealing with these issues. The way they did this was to project God's goodness out over a longer period.
(4) Schopenhauer started out that "the Will" is essentially irrational and not benevolent in any sense. Later he indicated that the Will is multi dimensional.
To me it seems that this was the opinion of Job and God himself who agreed with Job.
The friends of Job said: "God is just". God said they were wrong. Point blank. At point blank range. There is no way to misinterpret this because the entire Book of Job shows this.


 The first statement is that Job was without sin. So trying to fudge the variables here does not work. Trying to make it that there were other faults is clearly not what it says. Then the whole story of how God caused him to suffer in order to win a debate with Satan just shows the point. Because you want to win a debate with someone does not give you cause to make someone else suffer. This is the clear position of the narrator.    The Book of Job and Schopenhauer are in clear agreement.


( People ignore the fact that if God is good then he is not just. You can't have it both ways.)


Schopenhauer also had a chance to put the subject into the Will. But like the Rambam he refused to take that route. Furthermore he also decided not to put the ideas into the Will either. In these ways he seems to be very much like the Rambam.


What enrages people is that the Rambam understands the Torah thorough the eyes  and world view of Aristotle. And that he is not embarrassed about that makes it worse. At least he could try to hide where he gets his ideas from like everyone else. And what makes it even worse is that no one can claim to understand the Torah better than the Rambam unless they want to seem like an arrogant, ignorant fool. Thus people just ignore the Rambam when it comes to the world view of Torah.

My approach is different than the generally accepted approach. I say the Rambam was right, and everyone else simply does not understand the Torah.

In any case  the Rambam's approach to Torah is I think about as close to the actual Torah approach as possible. In another approaches there are strong elements of polytheism. They may not reach pure polytheism but they certainly come close. Today  Torah practice often contains polytheist beliefs. In fact it is almost an axiom that the more strict one is in practices the more likely there are underlying polytheistic beliefs. Monotheism is not the same as polytheism except in number. There is more than a quantitative difference. There is a qualitative difference. A difference in world view. And the world view of Torah could not be further away from what people think it is today. It presents a reality that is radically different than what people think the Torah is about.

A Rambam Yeshiva would not be anything like the yeshivas we see today. The books there would be the Mishne Torah and Aristotle's encyclopedic work "Physics" and his other encyclopedic work the Metaphysics. He writes clearly in several places the the Mishne Torah contains the entire Oral Law and if he has that book he does not need Talmud or the writings of the Geonim. He could not be any more explicit if he tried.  In the beginning of Mishne Torah he writes that the Mishne Torah contains all the Oral Law and take a good look at his language there when he says one does not need any other book "from among them." That is one reads the Old Testament and then the Mishne Torah and one does not need any other book from among the books that he just mentioned in that paragraph. Look at that paragraph and you will see he does not mean to learn Mishne Torah and then Talmud. He clearly meant his book to replace the Talmud. Period.

So you can ask then what to do after you have read the Mishne Torah? You can finish it in one month easily. Start at 9:00 AM and go until 5:00 PM. A normal working day. You can finish it in two weeks. Then he explains you learn "the work of Creation and the Divine Chariot which are the Physics and Metaphysics of the ancient Greeks." Here too he explains this clearly in several places in the Mishe Torah and  Guide. And he not ambiguous in any way. You can see what enraged people about the Rambam. He says after one has finished reading the Written and Oral law (as he defines Oral Law to mean his book the Mishne Torah) then he spends all his days learning Physics and Metaphysics.
And don't think that was the major thing that caused the controversy about him. In fact in the very first controversy these outrageous statements did not even come into play as a factor.
The thing that condemned him in the eyes of the Jewish world was that he said not to give money to yeshivas. He wrote that the heads of yeshivas that say it is a mitzvah to give money to yeshivas are liars.  And this was in the commentary on the Mishna which was read by all Jews everywhere. He writes that on Avot chapter 4 Mishna 7.

So clearly a Rambam approach to Torah  would be a radical departure from what people think today compromises a Torah approach. And he writes in a letter that the only reason that his book was not accepted as the final decision is because of the arrogance and pride of people wanting honor and power. So when the final redemption comes and arrogance and the evil inclination will be eliminated from the world then his book will be accepted as the objective truth. In the future, the Mishne Torah of the Rambam will be considered as the truth and final decision. The son of the Rambam who became the Rav of the city after the Rambam in fact taught the Mishna Torah instead of Mishna or other things that had been customary to teach between the afternoon and evening prayers.

 My personal opinion is that Physics today (and MetaPhysics) has gone considerably beyond Aristotle and that today the Rambam would hold to learn the Old Testament, then the Mishne Torah and then modern Physics and Kant.

And I should mention that this is the way I have accustomed myself to be learning for some time now. The only thing is I admit I do learn Talmud as I thing it is the only way to understand the Mishne Torah. Without knowing from where the Rambam gets his decision, people always misunderstand what he is saying. [And they think they understand.] For that reason, one should also learn Talmud and Rav Shach's commentary on the Rambam together with the Rambam after finishing it at least once.

People get a feeling of holiness and power [numinousity]  from all kinds of different sources.For this reason learning Torah is important. That is so that one gets accustomed to receiving this numinous power from a source of holiness. Or it also is good to be connected with a tzadik [saint] who is connected to Torah.

This is a large subject. To some degree Allen Bloom goes into it in his book The Closing of the American Mind. [I used to have a link to it on one of my blogs, but it should be fairly easy to find. It is the most important book in Philosophy of the 20th century.]

He makes the point there that religious groups were considered as bad things by the founders of the USA. They wanted to make religion unimportant. I imagine they were not thinking of what could serve as a substitute. Clearly politics did and still does replace religion as  a source of that feeling of power and purpose. But if they were thinking in those terms seems doubtful to me.


But there can be many other sources from which people derive their feelings about the meaning of life. E.g., Muslims get their feeling about the purpose of life from murder. This gives them a feeling of numinousity and value for their lives. Others get this from sex and sexual issues.

For all these and many other reasons I think learning Torah is highly undervalued. For learning Torah directs a person's feelings of direction and purpose towards a holy source.

The theory here is actually very simple. Picture  a clock.  From 6:00 to 12:00 are values starting from all form and no content to all content and no form. But for every area of value there is an opposite place of the clock that is an opposite value. A value of the Sitra Achra--the Dark Side.
See this link for more detail: Origin of Value.

I could go on, but it is best to look at that Origin of Value thesis by Dr. Kelley Ross.

[To get some background about the Origin of Value you need to know a bit of Kant. For a good introduction to Kant see Mattey's lectures on Kant]  I should mention say my small knowledge of Kant comes from the two great encyclopedias, the  Stanford encyclopedic of Philosophy and also the Internet encyclopedia of Philosophy and also reading Kant in German. (I had to read him in German because I could not understand the English translations.) [If anyone has ever read Kant in English and understood him please raise your hand. No? I thought so.]

Music for the glory of God

h9   h9 in midi  h9 in nwc

Ideas in Talmud


Ideas in Bava Metzia with some editing

One major critique of Lithuanian yeshivas is the problem of emphasis on status. Also there tends to be forgotten why we are learning Torah. These are at least two of the complaints that I have heard and I think they are accurate. But to upgrade yeshivas seems impossible. All attempts to modernize and make them more relevant or more spiritual results in the creation of cults.
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The first thing that happens when one gets interested in Torah is he of she is confronted by various cults that represent themselves as teaching authentic Torah. Because of this danger it is almost better not to teach Torah at all and not to try to bring people to Torah. The problem is that Torah has become contaminated.  While one thinks he is learning Torah and doing more in terms of mitzvot on the side he is losing his humanity and his soul and getting involved in sexual sins that he would not normally be doing. So the problem of cults in the Torah world is more than just serious. It almost makes it better not to keep Torah at all.

But what I suggest is to first get rid of the cults, and then in fact come to Torah authentic Torah.



The  challenge is to come up with an approach to Torah  that can both enter into the theater of historical change, as did Stoicism or Marxism, and at the same time provide a genuine alternative to a hopeless historical oscillation between an essentially sterile scientific universe of atoms and the void and  religious fanaticism and repression. If what is lacking in the scientific worldview is the dimension of value, and if what constitutes religious oppression is the imposition of a dogmatic system of value, then clearly what we must originate is a positive, constructive  discipline of value.-and to be rid of the negative destructive cults.


Whether learning authentic Torah is equal to this is not an abstract puzzle for a distracted few.

Reflection gives rise to fundamental questions about our very existence and purpose in life. Such reflection is not  idle curiosity: Most people that come to Torah come not through the traditional awe and wonder, but out of the perplexity and pain that inevitably disillusion us with the innocent confidence in the world we so often begin life by having. Torah is the attempt to deal with  solitary unhappiness with the blank mystery, the cruel fates, the tragic good intentions, and the bittersweet beauty  in the world.
It is the beginning is of self-discovery of doubt and ignorance.

Music for the Glory of God.

q49   q49 in midi