A nice thing about the Lithuanian yeshiva approach it that it tends to combine numinous holy and powerful experiences of learning and keeping Torah with great intensity along with a remarkable lack of religious delusions.  In fact, anything that even seems like  grandiosity is rigorously exuded.
To some degree this maybe over done. They tend to err on the side of caution. But judging by how many delusional religious fanatics there are than wander into Litvak yeshivas it seems that they are justified.

This leaves us with the question how to discern between delusion and authentic religious experience?
Probably there is no way.   

It is impossible to come to authentic Torah without a connection with the Gra. Each tzadik has his special area.

 I don't think  any saint/tzadik comes into the world for the same  reason as another. We try to define these people in certain ways and fit them into some pre-defined category.
But they cant be defined because each one receives a different ray of light from the Divine source.

What makes this confusing is the are the charlatans that .act the act and  other types that get their powers from the dark side.

But in any case the concept of a tzadik is a great conceptual tool--especially because there were in the past some people that fit the bill.
There were prophets that received one kind of ray of divine light. sometimes prophecy. sometimes miracles.there were people like the Ari that had a different kind of divine light. The Gra had his kind of special connection with Torah. It is impossible to come to authentic Torah without a connection with the Gra. Each tzadik has his special area.

I am looking for an argument that can justify learning Torah for its own sake. (When I say Torah I mean authentic Torah. Not what is always presented nowadays as Torah. By "real Torah" I mean the Old Testament and the פירוש המקובל--the traditional books that actually explained the written law according to the way the had been understood--that is the two Talmuds). You can bet that nowadays when ever you hear about someone giving a class in Torah that it is never about authentic Torah. It is always pseudo Torah.

In any case I am still looking for an argument to present here to justify learning Torah for its own sake.--That is to learn Torah without being paid for it. As we find by a guard of a lost object that when he receives  a monetary reward for it it is not a mitzvah. That is I am not trying to justify kollels. But I am also not trying to attack kollels.

Consequential-ism claims an act is justified if its consequences are good. But that is not what  I am looking for here. I want to claim learning Torah is good- regardless of consequences. This can be hard to say. Do I think even if it has bad consequences that it is still overriding? That seems a bit too far to go. Still what you see in the Gra and his disciple Reb Chaim from Voloshin is that Torah for its own sake is the highest of all mitzvot. 
What I am suggesting is that learning Torah for its own sake is, in fact, the highest mitzvah, but that making yeshivas might not be. For all we know someone might be learning Torah for money or some other reason. And that makes it not Torah for its own sake.  But if you are learning Torah at home and not for money, then you know why you are doing it. 

What is also possible to to take the local place where people congregate, and to make it  a place of Torah. That means to set it aside for authentic Torah. 
The religious world believes in in its superiority because stringent adherence to rituals but in the meantime forgetting  what Torah is actually about.

Cults are a direct result of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment point of view was that the scientific method could be applied to human problems to obtain solutions as rigorous and exact as mathematics. This idea lead to the development of pseudo sciences like psychology.
When people start to ask questions about the meaning of life it is almost inevitable for them to to be approached by cults.


Cults are relatively easy to spot. If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck then it probably is  a duck. One of the most telling ways is the emphasis on the  appearance of being a part of a legitimate religion and the rituals.

False Leaders מנהיגים של שקר

leaders that lead people astray are very common.  they have spiritual power to hurt people that do not want to be their followers.
You can see this idea illustrated most clearly in the events surrounding Adi Da [a guru]. He was one of the best examples. He had great spiritual powers and was also a jerk and quite evil. One of his closest disciples broke away and exposed the events that were going on there.  That disciple was killed in a plane crash a short time after that.

How do people get involved in cults? There are consciousness traps. There is some idea that get inside one's head and acts like a seed. It grows and absorbs collects all the surrounding material and it grows.

I don't have a general answer for this cult problem. And I also do not even know the general conditions for an answer. However I might as well explain my own approach that is my own answer to the cult problem. My approach is that which you can find in authentic Lithuanian yeshivas. That is Talmud with traditional books of Musar. This path is connected to the path of the Gra. It is holistic. It encompasses everything about a human being.

 This is not a blank check for Litvak yeshivas . It is just my own approach and also I suggest this to others. But I mean this suggestion  in a tentative way. I know that in complex human relationships and change of variables is bound to have unforeseen consequences.

 I think today learning Jewish Philosophy is very important. [That mean medieval Jewish philosophy, Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, etc. However the actual book of the Rambam in philosophy I found too hard. But David Hartman wrote a great introductory text.]

I should mention that Lithuanian yeshivas were tailor made to be safe havens from cults. That explains the reason they are so ready to throw out anyone that does not fit into the mold. They are not just into learning and teaching authentic Torah. They rigorously exclude pseudo Torah. And the more successful they are in excluding pseudo false Torah to that same degree they succeed in learning and keeping authentic Torah, This is the reason why Ponovitch is the top yeshiva in the world, Rav Shach would not stand any nonsense.

 The trouble with Litvak yeshivas is the aspect of depth. To stick with Torah one needs some kind of justification that goes beyond Jewish philosophy. That is one needs more that intellectual justification. It has to be holistic. The trouble with philosophy especially after the Middle Ages is that it is all about "I" (the self). It's entire domain is the region between the empirical I and the abstract metaphysical "I". And God is a reasonable postulate. God is the beginning and end, the first cause and the final teleological cause. And the existence of the "I" is a reasonable postulate.

I wanted to re-post this about my Dad. I wanted to put in on my site here on his yarzeit but better late than never.

I know I should have posted something about my fathers military record on June 6, D-day. I am sorry I did not so at least for today I am putting it here. The reason I have not mentioned it much is that it always seemed to me that what he accomplished after World War II eclipsed what he did during WWII.

He enlisted on October 12, 1942 when he was 24 years old. He attended the Yale Airplane Maintenance Engineering Class 44-33. According to his enlistment record, he was qualified in arms—carbine and was an expert with a pistol and a sharpshooter. He was an aviation cadet for maintenance engineering. He was discharged so that he could receive a commission as a second lieutenant. This record indicates that he was called to active duty on November 4, 1943.


He entered active duty on July 20, 1944, and was an aircraft engineering officer 4823. His medals were the American Campaign Medal, Army of Occupation Medal and World War II Victory Medal. He served 1 ½ years in the US and almost 8 months in Europe. He left active duty on September 29, 1946. His serial number was 0 872 281. He was promoted to captain just before he left the US Army, and served in the US Army, Headquarters and Base Service Squadron 413th Air Service Group 40th Bomb Wing United States Air Forces European Theater. In the US, he served at Great Bend , Kansas and was in charge of maintaining 6 B-29 aircraft for the unit. He supervised the work of 75 enlisted men. In Europe, he was a civilian personnel officer. He served 8 months in the European Theater of Operations (France, Germany and Switzerland ) with the 413th Air Service Group and was in charge of 1500 German civilians, supervising 1 officer and 20 civilians. He spoke German fluently at the time.
[He was responsible to decide whether to hold a German for war crimes or not. So besides the specific Germans that he was in charge of, he had to sign the release forms of thousands of Germans. That he why he decided eventually to shorten his name from Rosenbloom to Rosten. I think this was someone's idea of a great joke--to have a Jew sign the release papers of  Germans.


He had a base in France in which damaged aircraft could come in and be repaired within minutes. He trained different personal to how to check and fix only one small part of the plane. So when a plane came in with damage his whole crew swarmed over the ship and fixed it up in minutes and sent it on its way. This was the reason for one of his medals.



The most interesting time of Dad’s professional career was when he returned and was at Fort Monmouth and then his very secret work at Hycon, Ford Areospace and created the camera of the U-2, and on the highly secretive SDI Star Wars project.

Much of this information I found out after he was gone. As a father I knew him as a very simple person that loved me, my brothers and my Mother very deeply.
He never talked about his work of his WWII experiences. The peak of living for him was taking us all to the beach on Sunday, and going into the mountains of Southern California skiing once or twice a year. We could not go to the beach on Shabat because I had to spend my time learning Hebrew and Torah.

After seven years working on SDI [star wars] he left TRW and began private business and also he invested in the Stock Market.

This was the general path in those days of Torah with "Derech Eretz", (the path of the world). Torah and work as two sides of the same coin--but not  any work but some work for the benefit of others. I can't explain this but my brother used the word that I think describes it best "Balance."
A word that describes it is Yiddish is to be a "mensch"
He invented a machine called the "copy-mate" which was an extra sharp kind of zerox machine based on focusing of x rays. And he marketed it for about five years until the American military swooped down and recruited him for SDI. So from what I can tell it seems his major contributions to the American Military were night vision and focusing of infra red -- and laser communication between  satellites. He might get honorable mention for the U-2 camera, but there were two teams for that. The team of my dad made a more heaavy one but with more resolution. It wa not used as often a the camera which was lite but enough for most usage.

Israel Salanter

The main idea of Israel Salanter was to start a movement in which people would learn books of ethics (i.e specifically Medieval ethics). My complaint about this is that ethics without world view is nothing. The reason is I think what ever people do right or wrong stems from their world view. Therefore I suggest adding one ingredient to Rav Israel's program and is the books of medieval Jewish philosophy. That would be mainly Saadia Gaon's Emunot VeDeot, the Guide, Joseph Albo and Crescas's Or HaShem, Ibn Gavirol.

But this is just a suggestion. When it comes to complex situations the effect of some policy change will always be unforeseen. When policy changes are suggested it is rare to find people that hold the change to be provisional. But here I want to make it clear that this is just a suggestion. And that negative and positive effects will always result from any policy. My suggestion her is based on the idea that the benefits outweigh the risks.
Also my idea seems very obvious to me. I can't see how people can learn Talmud and Musar without having some kind of ideas about the basic justification for that system.  Or how that system applies in practical daily life.

What I have seen is that people that teach Musar supply world views that come from the crowd rather than from the Torah.
   Today I think these medieval books of Jewish philosophy are worth more than any books of mysticism or השקפה Haskafa.