The Lithuanian yeshivas are afraid of the Trojan horse effect. They are worried that a newly religious person might contain a hidden virus. Often this is correct. But from what I have seen the effect goes the opposite way also. Often people try to attract rich secular Jews  by bearing gifts and seeming nice.
שונא מתנות יחיה It says in Mishlei, "He who hates gifts will live.". It seems to me to be wary of gifts. I also see that the Lithuanian yeshiva world is right for largely ignoring baali teshuva or marginalizing them. The truth is there often is something that is a bit off. Leaving their parents to find the light and the truth and the way seems to by definition indicate something wrong.

Though I am a baal teshuva in the way that I was born into a Reform home and began to learn at Litvak yeshivas. But a  good deal of my troubles came from fanatic baali teshuva. But not all my problem were from that direction. A lot came from sanctimonious religious teachers. {U know what I mean.} But by an large they were also baali teshuva that just sucked up to the system.

In any case, it is difficult to understand how to learn and keep Torah. But you know something is off when people ignore the fifth commandment in order to join some cult.
That is not keeping Torah by any definition.

So what I recommend is for people to learn Torah and keep Torah. But not to support groups that ask for money to make people do teshuva [become religious] because by and large they are doing great evil and harming families and lying about what the Torah says. I think these organizations should frankly be banned as being cults.

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My idea of a proper learning environment is mainly based on the approach of my own parents plus that of the Mirrer Yeshiva in NY. Torah with Derech Eretz (vocation). But Derech Eretz to me does not include any kind of vocation. What I suggest is from the religious standpoint is to avoid religious cults like the Black Plague and as the Gra already noted. Then from the standpoint o vocation I mainly think learning some kind of manual work is important plus natural sciences and outdoor skills. Most of secular education I am against. Only STEM or basic Blue collar work preparation is OK plus survival skills.

Sometimes an idea is like a seed. You can plant it into someone and it takes root over time. It can be a trap

Sometimes an idea is like a seed. You can plant it into someone and it takes root over time. It can be  a trap or it can be fruitful.



You see this also in philosophy or any of the social pseudo sciences where people hear one idea and that idea acts like a seed that all subsequent ideas gather around to support and provide structure for.
 

 


But  to see why pushing off Devekut in order to learn Torah is a mistake see the anonymous commentary on the first four chapters of the Mishne Torah of the Rambam where he explains that the purpose of the mitzvot is to come to the higher fear and awe of God. Later I learned that people can learn Torah and still be bad. So I realized my mistake, but it was too late to return to Devekut.)


The orbit of different charismatic lunatics:
The basic layout of the religious world is god-kings. That is people that think of themselves as divine  and create a following of groupies  naive people. ]


I did have to figure out a basic approach that would make sense to me and what I found was the basic approach of Maimonides and the general constellation of Jewsih philosophers that agreed or  disagreed with him. That kind of Monotheistic approach --Reason and Revelation made the most sense to me. And this approach seems to encompass all good things .



I should mention that it is not that I figured this all out on my own. Rather I had great parents and teachers who had a kind of balanced world view. In what I saw in my home and at the Mir Yeshiva I saw a kind of approach to life that I think made the approach of Torah with menchlichkeit much more real than I would have been able to figure out on my own.

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There is a lot to discuss here. Examples of ideas that are like seeds are a dime a dozen. Every major system is based on one or two basic ideas and then the whole system is made around them.
(Sometimes a system is based on a few conflicting ideas.) Some examples off hand.

(1) Learning Torah. This was the central idea at Shar Yashuv and the Mir in NY.
(2) Secular Education is the redemption of Mankind. That is the Enlightenment idea.
(3) The Golden Rule.
(4) Ding an Sich. The modest idea of Kant that there is a difference between what things really are and how they seem to be. This idea gave birth to German Idealism and that contained great things and terrible things.

Songs for Hanuka

q76  q75  b105 m C    b101 b100 n5    n8  B Yochai  Exodus4 n7 bh  q78




What I recommend for Hanuka is to begin a session daily in the Written Law and the Oral Law. That is to start a session going through the two Talmuds page by page.  After that it is possible to start a more in depth kind of session.

Mainly it is best to learn at home unless you have an authentic yeshiva nearby.
The world of Yeshiva is unlike any world that you can imagine. It hearkens back to the world of Eastern Europe.  There is in the great NY yeshivas an amazing atmosphere of Torah. But as a warning to the wise I should mention most places that go by the name of yeshiva are frauds. They might have books and students. But there is a spirit of Torah that they just can't duplicate.

Often yeshivas have a charismatic leader who is the object of worship instead of God. These places should be avoided.


I should mention that I have been looking at blogs on public affairs recently and from what I can tell the problem with the world is that people don't learn the Written and Oral Torah (Talmud). For example I don't think rights for a person to have private property would be an issue after learning Bava Mertzia. I also think that a lot of people's attitudes towards a large variety of topics would be changed for the better by an hour a day of Talmud. [I admit I don't do a fast session anymore. The time I spend is usually on a more in depth kind of learning. But that is because of constraints. If I could I would have a fast session and an in-depth one both. And I would do the same for the natural sciences. But there also my time is constrained. So mainly in the natural sciences I have  fast session. And I hope someday to a more in depth kind of learning there also.

I don't think the Rambam would have agreed with using Hanuka as a reason not to learn Physics or Metaphysics.
He was pretty clear that learning these things is a fulfillment of the commandments to Love and fear God because they bring to an appreciation of God's wisdom that he put into his creation.

One of the lessons however he would have seen in Hanuka was not to do idolatry. That was after all the cause of the original rebellion of the Maccabees. And saying that God is contained in some person in a specific kind of way would be in his view a kind of idolatry. You can hear people saying this and yet they do not think that they are idolaters. I sometimes do not know whether I should speak up or not. While it is true that God made space and time so in one sense there is no place empty of God. But that is simply because space does not apply to him at all. His is מקומו של עולם the place of the world. 

misgendered  Here is a letter form that mentally ill people can use to hurt other people that treat them as if they are in fact mentally ill.

One thing this shows is that the Oral Law is necessary to understand the Written Law.


While it is admirable that in Western society,  great value is placed on compassion for the mentally ill. But this can get out of proportion when power is given to the mentally ill to hurt normal, healthy people.



Appendix: The idea here is that the Oral Law does a good job in explaining the basic meaning of many of the commandments in the Bible. Without the Oral Law it is very easy to get confused about the simple explanation. One can make it all into an allegory if he wants to.

I know that even with the Oral Law, people do this anyway. But with some knowledge  of the actual explanations of the Laws of the Torah it is harder to allegorize  the commandments into touchy-feely "Be a nice guy" kind of thing.

The best advice that I can think of for this kind of problem is to learn Torah. That is every day to set aside a set time  for fast learning [to get through every single last word of the Old Testament, the two Talmuds.  That is the way we, the Jewish people, were taught to keep the Law by Moses and the Prophets. That is to say when we were told by the prophets to keep "the Law of Moses" they meant this in a very specific kind of way. That is, when the prophets told us to" keep the Sabbath" they meant a very specific day of the week. They did not leave it up to our discretion. The same goes with all the commandments. Another example is to "honor your parents." The prophets in telling us this, did not mean for us to choose who we want to be our "spiritual parents." They meant our physical flesh and blood parents.

Moses [Moshe] received the Torah from Sinai

Moses [Moshe] received the Torah from Sinai and gave it to Joshua. That is how Pirkei Avot begins.

The Gra explains "he gave it to Joshua" comes from the verse ונתת מהודך עליו and you will place from your glory upon him.  This is because it never says anywhere in the Torah that Moses gave the Torah to Joshua. [Rather it says he wrote the Torah and gave it to the priests.] Rather the Mishna has to be referring to the אור אין סוף the Divine light.

The idea here is this. The way I explained this a few years ago was in reference to the First Temple.
In the period of the First Temple, the Divine light was shinning without differentiation. When the Temple was destroyed most of it went to Athens and only מלכות שבמלכות royalty of royalty remained in Israel. This is how I used to explain this idea of how the light can shine on a person or a people but it not becoming differentiated until later.

This is also how to understand how the Torah was given to Moshe. It means the undifferentiated light.

Irrelevant variables. These are variables that when the size of the population is increased vanish in effect. Relevant variables are variables that increase in importance when the sample size is increased. I have tried to isolate variables that I think help me over long periods of time. Part of the way I do this is to look at large populations that follow some particular doctrine and see the long range effect of those doctrines. {This is a subject that comes up in Atomic Physics regarding the renormalization group.}

Though you could say this is a subjective process but still it makes sense to me.
Learning Torah [i.e. the Old Testament and Talmud.] I think are relevant variables based on effect on  large population sizes.

Some other variables seem to approach zero in significance as the population size grows. That is most cults say if you just do such and such a practice or believe in such and such a doctrine or such and such a person that your whole life will change for the better. Without this process of evaluation it would be impossible to measure the success of these claims.

I should mention that this is not a simple process. There are aspects of Lithuanian yeshivas that do learn Torah that are questionable. Problems do arise that seems to be relevant to the actual system more than to the individuals involved. You do find that when the system does not work for one person or another that the individual is blamed, not the system. And to me that seems intellectually dishonest. I say rather the fault is with the system, not the individual because there are too many people that are disenfranchised by the system for it to be their fault.
 That is the reason I focus of Torah with a honest vocation instead of Torah alone. That is I think the system needs modification.

There are variables that are relevant on the individual level and approach irrelevance on the large scale. A person's parents are like that. As a rule they are worthy of gratitude and respect but there are some that are downright destructive.



Some variables work in moderate sizes. Talmud seems to work best in small populations--yeshivas or communities built around a yeshiva. And that is a good thing. Take away the Talmud and the social glue disintegrates. People without Talmud find some charismatic leader to follow who makes them into his groupies and zombies.

But you can't expect a large society to be like that. First of all one of the most precious values is missing--freedom.

And some variables work only on a large scale. On a small scale they vanish into insignificance. It is rather a whole large society built on some great ideals can display amazing compassion which each  member would not do.