In Bava Metzia page 110 we have  a case of נכייתו or משכנתא דסורא. You have a lender and borrower that come to court. Just to make this concrete lets say it is  a case of משכנתא דסורא. That is when a person borrows money and as a guarantee for the loan he lets the lender use his field for some period and after that time the field returns to the borrower even if he did not pay back the loan.
The lender says the period was five years (and has been there three years) and the borrower says it was only for three years. Rav Yehuda says we believe the lender. To Ravina we believe the borrower. (I am saying this according to Tosphot.) Rav Yehuda says we believe the lender because he could have said "I bought this field."
The normal way of a migo is one person could have said a plea and be believed so we believe him when he says a weaker plea. So at first glance this looks like Rav Yehuda and Ravina are agreeing that if the lender would in fact say "I bought it he would be believed". But Tosphot asks on this and says that Ravina disagrees with very premise in itself. He would hold if the מלווה said "I bought it" and the other says it is משכנתא דסורא the borrower would be believed.
On this Tosphot asks according to this way that we understand Ravina then in the normal case in Bava Batra 28 side a of one person says I bought it and the other says you stole it that we would believe the one who says you stole it because he has  amigo and he could have said it was aמשכנתא דסורא.

This question of Tosphot is going only to Ravina. To Rav Yehuda in fact the one that says "You stole it" does not have any option of saying it was a משכנתא דסורא.

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In בבא מציעא page ק''י we have  a case of נכייתו or משכנתא דסורא. You have a לווה and מלווה that come to court. Just to make this concrete lets say it is  a case of משכנתא דסורא. That is when a person borrows money and as a guarantee for the loan he lets the lender use his field for some period and after that time the field returns to the לווה even if he did not pay back the loan.
The lender says the period was five years and has been there three years and the borrower says it was only for three years. רבי יהודה says we believe the lender. To רבינא we believe the lender. I am saying this according to תוספות. In this case רבי יהודה says we believe the לווה because he could have said לקוחה היא בידי.
The normal way of a מיגו is one person could have said a plea and be believed so we believe him when he says a weaker plea. So at first glance this looks like רבי יהודה and רבינא are agreeing that if the lender would in fact say I bought it he would be believed. But תוספות asks on this and says that רבינא disagrees with very premise in itself. He would hold if the lender said לקוחה היא בידי and the other says it is משכנתא דסורא the borrower would be believed.
On this תוספות asks according to this way that we understand רבינא then in the normal case in בבא בתרא כ''ח ע''א   of one person says I bought it and the other says you stole it that we would believe the one who says you stole it because he has  a מיגו and he could have said it was aמשכנתא דסורא.

This question of תוספות is going only to רבינא. To רבי יהודה in fact the one that says you stole it does not have any option of saying it was a משכנתא דסורא

בבא מציעא דף ק''י יש לנו מקרה של נכייתא או משכנתא דסורא. יש לך לווה ומלווה שמגיעים לבית המשפט.  מקרה של משכנתא דסורא הוא  כאשר אדם לווה כסף וכערובה להלוואה הוא מאפשר למלווה להשתמש בשדה שלו לתקופה מסוימת ולאחר שהזמן חוזר השדה ללווה בלי כסף.וזה נחשב כמו ששילם את החוב. המלווה אומר התקופה הייתה חמש שנים והיה שם שלוש שנים. והלווה אומר שהתקופה הייתה רק לשלוש שנים. רבי יהודה אומר שאנחנו מאמינים המלווה. לרבינא אנו מאמינים המלווה. [אני אומר את זה על פי תוספות.] במקרה זה רבי יהודה אומר שאנחנו מאמינים המלווה כי הוא יכול לומר לקוחה היא בידי. הדרך הרגילה של מיגו היא אדם אחד היה יכול לומר טיעון ולהאמין. ולכן נאמין לו כשהוא אומר טיעון חלש. אז במבט ראשון זה נראה כמו שרבי יהודה ורבינא מסכימים שאם המלווה היה למעשה אומר שקניתי אותו הוא היה נאמן. אבל תוספות אומר שרבינא לא מסכים עם הנחה  בעצמה. הוא יחזיק אם המלווה אמר לקוח הוא בידי והלווה אומר שזה משכנתא דסורא הלווה יהיה נאמן. תוספות  שואל שעל פי דרך זו שאנו מבינים רבינא, אז במקרה הרגיל בבא בתרא כ''ח ע ' "א של אדם אחד אומר שקניתי אותו והשני אומר שאתה גנבת אותו כי עלינו להאמין האומר "גנבת אותו" כי יש לו מיגו והוא היה יכול לומר שזה היה משכנתא דסורא. שאלה זו של תוספות היא רק הולכת רבינא. לרבי יהודה זה שאומר "אתה גנבת אותו" אין לו שום אפשרות לומר שזה היה משכנתא דסורא .

Education

How to teach children? What subjects should they learn? In particular Jewish children? I have not thought about this much. From what I can tell the Mir yeshiva in New York had the right idea. [I did not go to the high school there but I saw what they were doing.]

In the high school they were learning secular subjects in the afternoon. The morning was devoted to Talmud. And from what I could tell the secular aspect was just as strong as the Talmud aspect. I had friend there in the Mir, Shelomo Berger, and his son was going to the high school there and he got amazingly high scores on the State examinations that they give in NY for each subject desperately.

What it also seems to me is that parents nowadays are kind of messed up. They can't help that. But at least I would say they must to give their children a good education like I saw at the Mir.

In New York I assume there is not much choice about what they teach the kids. But as far as secular subjects go I would stick with natural sciences and the arts. That is things that have value in themselves besides the "parnash" (making a living) issue. If a kid wants to college they could pursue a law degree or go to a technical school. I don't think people should be taught to use Torah for money. Nor should that be held up as a proper example of how to live.
 [In fact in NY you don't see that much, but in Israel, it is considered the highest ideal. That never sat very well with me.]

I see today parents are interested in all kinds of nonsense that it will take them years to see that it is nonsense. At least I suggest to them not to subject their children to that. And some of the know just what I mean--because they  were subject to crazy stuff when they were young and now they know the damage this causes.

Maybe a better way of putting is: Don't go to cults, and don't put your children in one.

But I can understand parents that are confused about education for their children. What sometimes happens is people get sore at the the the religious world for good reasons and so they don't feel there is any worth in teaching their children Talmud. I admit I fell into this trap myself. That is what happens when you have nasty people pretending to keep Torah. It gives Torah a bad name and makes it hard even for simple Jews to give their children a proper Torah background.

In any case if your children are gong to a cult, then get them out now.

Songs for God

mathematics
Orchestra Piece

BH
q1

CHS

q3

l51

q4  exodus 4


L50

Sometimes people get involved in books that are pseudo Torah and this slowly draws them away from Torah. And then they get to be experts in pseudo Torah and then get called תלמידי חכמים Torah scholars, though they can't learn legitimate Torah.

The Gra I think was advocating a kind of system in which people would learn Torah all day. And in his commentary on Pirkei Avot he says that learning Torah is a mitzvah in itself even if one does not keep anything at all--zilch of what it says. This is on the Mishna  [ch. 5] that one who goes to the Beit Midrash to learn but does not keep Torah gets the reward for learning.

In the Lithuanian yeshivas today that are built on the model of the Gra you can see this attitude played out in life.


The Gra did not write Musar, rather he wrote commentaries on every part of Torah. So you can't really find direct statements of what he holds on lots of issues. But you can see something of what he must have been thinking in the writings of his disciple Chaim of Voloshin. And in his writings you find this statement דבר מנוסה כשישכים אדם בבוקר ויקבל על עצמו עול תורה באמת היינו שיגמור בליבו שלא ישמע לשום אדם, ולא יבטלנו שום טירדה, אזי יצליח ביום ההוא בתורה. וכפי גודל ההסכמה ותוקף הקבלה כן יסירו הטרדות
והביטולים ממנו

The literal translation of this is this: It is a tested fact that when one gets up in the morning and accepts on himself the yoke of Torah in truth, that is, he decides in his heart that he will not listen to any person and he will not allow anything to distract him, then he will succeed in Torah that day. And according to how strong his conviction is and the power of his commitment, to that same degree there will be removed from him the distractions and everything that is wasting his time.





Personally I have found an enormous amount of obstacles in reaching this goal. I still spend practically all my day not learning Torah. And I don't have much of an excuse either.
There is very minor part of my day that I try to do things that might be considered as reasonable excuses for not learning Torah. But if you add them all up they would amount to minuscule amounts of time. Most of all the obstacles are mental and physical.

There are in my mind lots of reasonable things that would require me or others to stop  learning Torah for  a few minutes in order to attend to these matters, and then return to  learning Torah. But what seems to happen is the entire idea of  ביטול תורה (wasting time from Torah) gets thrown to the winds.

While I agree that one should learn an honest profession, get a real job, and not depend on charity. But what happens is that Torah is thrown out completely. Guys are  capable only of concentrating on one thing at a time. If it is Torah, then it's Torah. If you try to combine that with something else, the "something else" becomes primary, and the Torah get shoved to a very secondary place. [I think the Gra was defining Torah in  a limited sense. We find the Rambam also saying this remarkable statement, "Just as anything that one adds to the Written law is not Torah so anything that one adds to the Oral Law is not Torah." Today it is common to teach things that are not a part of the written Law or the Talmud and to say that one is teaching Torah.

Part of the problem is mental. I have  a hard time along with many other people in seeing the point. It takes a large degree of faith to believe  that one is accomplishing anything at all by learning Talmud which at first glance is about as interesting as the New York Phone Book.
It is tempting to learn other things and call them "Torah" --even if for no other reason that they are more fun.

But there are many other reason to not learn Torah. It does happen that just when one starts to learn that the obstacles gain in strength. And people come up to him and say, " Let's go and do some mitzvah." You can't see the effect of learning Torah until a lot of time has passed.

It is funny that there are so many distractions that seem  perfectly legitimate. Sometimes people get involved in books that are pseudo Torah,  and this slowly draws them away from Torah.  I see this all the time. Then they get to be experts in pseudo Torah, and then get called תלמידי חכמים Torah scholars, though they can't learn legitimate Torah.

So what I suggest is this: learn Torah. I can agree with an hour a day of learning a profession in order not to have to use the Torah for money as is so common. And a certain amount of Physics and Metaphysics is also important to the Rambam. But that is not an all encompassing excuse to spend the whole day in extracurricular activities. And drop all pseudo Torah. You know exactly what I mean. I don't have to spell it out.


The justification for this is this learning Torah produces a type of consciousness. And this consciousness is the source of one's deeds.
In any case I got involved in extra curricular activities a long time ago and so it makes plenty of sense to me that I have found so many problems in my life. I think it all flows from ביטול תורה--wasting time from learning Torah.

Trust in God according to the Gra means not to do effort and not to depend on one's own thinking.

I would not say this except that I have found that when I do effort and or depend on my own thinking --either things don't work out or they get worse. To some degree I imagine that some people have a kind of ability to put their minds to something and it gets done. They have success embedded into their fates. But that does not seem to be the case for me. Rather I have found that when I in fact put my trust in God, and do no effort, things work out.

Moving from place to place seems to be an example of this. Once  I went to yeshiva with the idea in mind that God would take care of me. And  that is exactly what happened. God granted to me a wife and children and a living also. Other times I moved from one place to another --not based on trust, but based on the fact that I felt the first place was intolerable and the second seemed to be great.
This type of thinking just got me from the frying pan into the fire.

[See Proverbs chapter 3 at the Gra's comments. Also check  out the Alter of Navardok's book the מדרגת האדם ]. Don't take this the wrong way. I am not giving advice here because I have never managed to walk this fine line very well. Usually when I was trusting in God I was not doing so consciously. I simply did what I believed was God's will -and  I could have been mistaken- but still for some reason God still blessed me.  When I went to Israel I also was doing what I felt was God's will, I certainly was not thinking of how I would be making a living. Yet that was either the peak of my whole life or at least one of the major great periods.

What I suggest from all this is highly personal for each person according to their best understanding. It is not like a kind of thing that you can define well.

connection between Kant and the Ari

Just to give an idea of why I think there is a connection between Kant and the Ari I think it wise to show what Kant is thinking by these simple diagrams. And to mention some aspects of the Ari that reflect this system. The most obvious thing is the תשעה היכלין. The nine palaces. This is clearly here in which each power of the mind creates a representation in the order I have presented here.  [that is 1 to 1; 2 to 2; but reason leads to knowing  synthesis of representations-a kind of perception that does not come from sensibility. ]

. [This is a long subject in the Ari .]

At this point Kant does not stop, and nor does rabbainu the Ari. The mind has this further power of synthesis or Daat that acts on the representations that are given by the male aspect of the Mind.

Kant is going to make a difference upon what kind of representation the Daat {synthesis is going to work on.} This is what produces universals. The Ari himself does not put it in this way but it still is fascinating to see the connection between the Ari and Kant.

Synthesis/Daat is known to have two aspects דעת עליון and דעת תחתון. There is a essay by Reb Chaim Vital about this subject that formed the basis of the Reshash's interpretation of the Ari. But the interesting thing here is that Kant also sees two aspects of Daat. This forms the most fundamental idea in Kant; the Transcendental deduction. That is this synthesis perceives the self and also perceives  and combines universals. This forms the idea of Kant that we can trust synthesis because it gives us our own sense of identity.

[I might mention here that Hegel is most definitely basing himself on the structure of the Ari. He was quite aware of the Ari and even brings down the idea of Adam Kadmon. But he sees a dynamic aspect in the Ari  where each category [sephera] is unfolded. [This is the same as a logical progression of Aristotle's  logic where there is an unfolding - but not in time.] 

See here 

A Map of Hegel's Science of Logic

 http://autio.github.io/projects/scienceoflogic/     

Gra was going with Aristotle.

I have known for a long time that the Gra was going with Aristotle.  You can see hints of it here and there. But it is clearest when he says Genesis chapter one is all potential until the last word  לעשות.
That is God created everything in potential during the six days of creation. The everything in its proper time came into actual existence. A better way of putting this is there is  a ground of existence and there are existing things. When things that are only existing in potential hit the ground of existence they become actually existing things.
Clearly this is how he understood the Ari also. And you can see a hint of this in Shalom Sharabi.
[That is the רש''ש has the sephirot conforming to an Aristotelian pattern in the future after the final correction of all the worlds. He writes about this very little so it is not well known.]


In any case this gives us an idea of what the Rambam must have meant when he said Genesis chapter one is an allegory. We can be fairly sure he did not mean the sephirot like the Arizal. I suggest he meant it like this statement of the Gra.
So when it comes to explain Genesis we now have two ways. The Gra. This would mean that 15 billion years would just be the natural unfolding of potential that was put into place during the six days of creation. The other way is the Arizal.
I should mention that the Ari seems at first glance to be neo Platonic. He builds on concepts of the pre-Soctratics and  then adopts the answers of Plato to the problems they raised and then uses the Neo Platonic interpretation of Plato of Plotinus and then based on that framework he builds his vast and complete system. But the Gra held that the Ari in fact on a deeper level was going with Aristotle and the surface level was just allegorical.

I should mention that to me the Gra presents the path of Torah in an  authentic way. That is in a way that is faithful to original sources. He has no interest to pervert or change the message of Torah to his own liking. And that is rare. This is why I have recommended Lithuanian yeshivas from time to time on because I see them as presenting authentic Torah.

But just in case this is in doubt--I want to make sure no one thinks I am on this path. For reasons unknown to me I have not been able to stick with the path of Torah and my efforts to get back to it have always backfired and made things even worse. I simply do not have the merit needed to be able to stick with Torah. And my life style is completely contradictory to everything the Torah says from the first to the last words. But God has at least granted to me the privilege of recognizance the greatness of Torah and also of knowing what the Torah says. So at least I know how far I am from it. But not just that--I can see when others are far from it also but make a show about how they are keeping it.

I should mention that there is no reason to assume Kant would disagree with the Ari. For example: "In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant is primarily concerned with “pure” [rein] intuition, or intuition absent any sensation, and often only speaks in passing of the sense perception of physical bodies (for example A20–1/B35)." [From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.] That is Kant's anschauung is not the same as sensory perception.

And I should mention also: "All of the mental faculties produce representations." [From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.] That means even what Kant calls intuition produces representations.
We see Kant could easily be with parallel the Ari. And in fact it was my experience with learning the Ari and being in Israel that convinced me that Kant was better than Hegel.