Ideas in Bava Metzia chapters 8-9 updated   Title page of Ideas in Bava Metzia


Ideas in Talmud  Title page for Ideas in Talmud


I was reading Bava Metzia page 81 and noticed that Tosphot did not seem to hold by my ideas on Bava Metzia page 104. Then when I read page 82 I realized that Tosphot was definitely against me. So I thought to salvage my ideas with Rashi. Then when I read Shavuot page 43 I realized that Rashi was not going to help me. So I had to correct my ideas on Page 104. While clearly it is true the lender owns the guarantee, but the document does not turn the whole thing into a sale. [You could say I was half right.He does own the guarantee but he cant keep it when the money is repaid.] In any case up above are the corrected versions.


I also see that the beginning on chap. 9 needs work. One idea was that David noticed the difference between the Rambam and Rashi about what is required on the worker. But that whole idea I think needs to be re written. 

I see that the issue of the Enlightenment in the Jewish world [i.e. the 1700's until the 1800's] was  related to the original Enlightenment. And at least in one issue they were identical--Secular Learning. Allen Bloom makes a good point that the original Enlightenment had a political agenda also. But that was clearly not all there was to it.

My experience is such that I have a good deal of sympathy towards authentic sciences  and have a great deal of antipathy towards pseudo sciences.


For example I have seen that where you find supposedly rigorous application of Torah principles with complete exclusion of  anything secular does anything but help people be moral or decent in any sense. In fact, just the opposite. Yet opening the door to the secular in the Torah world always leads directly to pseudo sciences and never towards the real thing.

So the quandary remains and I have to go and learn Talmud because I am already late, and I don't think this 600 year question is going to be solved on this blog this minute. Or rather I don't think I will solve it any better than my own patents and grandparents who held from  balanced approach--Torah with wisdom.


If we go back further to the argument about the Rambam's Guide we can see the issue of secular learning also was raised.
In any case, I hold learning authentic natural science is important and learning a kosher vocation also. But I also believe that there is something one gains by learning Torah that the secular world has not touched. There was some kind of amazing energy in the Mir Yeshiva in NY and also in Shar Yashuv. But i realize today that that energy can't be harnessed at will. It takes a very special kind of individual to make an authentic yeshiva.  The authentic yeshivas I can count on two hands. Three in NY and two in Israel. [That is in NY: Mir, Chaim Berlin, Torah VaDaat, Shar Yashuv. Israel: Ponovitch, Brisk.

Due to decrease in cookie sales, The Girls Scouts switch to a more aggressive sales approach.

Songs for the glory of the God of Israel

q77 [q77 in midi]  n64 [n64 in midi] n63  [n63 in midi]

 n62 [n62 in midi]n60 [n60 in midi]n58 [n58 in midi]

n57 [n57 in midi] n56 [n56 in midi] n55 [n55 in midi]

 n54 [n54 in midi] n53 [n53 in midi] 

n51 [n51 in midi] n52 [n52 in midi] q79 [q79 in midi] g4 [g4 in midi]

g1 [g1 in midi] b100 [b100 in midi]

b101 [b101 in midi] b104 [b104 in midi] b105 [b105 in midi]

k16 [k16 in midi]

m  [mathematics in midi]  h4 [h4 in midi]

h7 [h7 in midi] h9 [h9 in midi]  h24  [h24 in midi]  C [chs in midi] bh [bh in midi]

 e33 [e33 in midi]

 e64 [e64 in midi]

e69  [e69 in midi]

I thought Schopenhauer took care of the problem of Evil by simply saying human good is not on the agenda of the "Will." And later he had some kind of second thoughts in which he added that the Will has some kind of higher agenda in which the Good is the goal.
Personally I think the Rambam did the best job by having השגחה פרטית "Divine watching out for" be directed towards higher intellects. It is an elegant solution which is Neo Platonic in showing how gaining the higher intellect is important. (This was the basic idea during the Middle Ages and was abandoned I think for poor reasons.)

God and Job obviously agreed with Schopenhauer as is seen from the end of the book of Job. In fact that is teh whole point of the book. Also I saw this in Psalms. I forget where but one obvious place is Psalm 72 [in the Hebrew and English numbering. In Russian and Ukrainian it would be Psalm 73.]







I wrote about this before but I saw a certain Mark Friedman also wrote what looks like a good treatment of this problem so I thought to mention the issue again.

Mark Friedman says: "Many philosophers, especially those working in the Kantian tradition, hold that persons have dignity as a result of their personal autonomy, and that respect for this attribute is a paramount value. At least for them, a world with free will is “better” than almost any possible world without it."
This seems to me to be  a good answer to this question. I think Leah a friend of mine mentioned this answer once when she was talking with her mother in Safed. At the time I did not think much of it but now it makes a lot more sense to me than it did then.

An interesting essay about Israel  I do not comment on this for many reasons. One is that people's minds are either pro Jewish or anti Jewish before any argument. And immune to argument. This divide has little to do if the person is actually Jewish or not. Being Jewish is perfectly compatible with being anti-Jewish, and being gentile is perfectly compatible with being pro-Jewish. These are independent variables.

Another reason is I am trying not to look at news anymore. It just makes me upset. Also I think it might be forbidden.

I should mention that I try to judge people based on their actions. The groups they are  apart of can provide some initial data, but that is not determinate. 

 against science

And to some degree this was an attitude that was common to yeshivas in NY when I was there. Rav Miller wrote a few books attacking evolution that showed that he felt comfortable attacking science though he certainly did not understand it. And that attitude is still common among philosophers of science.
Other people threw in the towel and developed strong cases of Physics Envy. So they created pseudo science that go by the name of real science like psychology or economics.

I am not comfortable with any of these attitudes. And yet this anti science approach did help me stay in yeshiva and learn Torah. That is this attitude gave me a kind of justification that i needed to concentrate on Talmud and later on Luriac kabalah.

Still at some point I started suspecting that this attitude was not Torah based.

This may have started when I saw the frum world is crummy. I thought then that it must be they are not really keeping the Torah properly. The attitudes of the frum no longer interested me unless they could be shown to be derived from the Torah.
I learned in Israel that this anti science attitude was not a part of the Lithuanian yeshiva world there.

I also became aware that this attitude was not that of the Rambam either. Then as far as I recall I looked at the Duties of the Heart and saw that his attitude also was one with the Rambam. So I decided this attitude of being anti science was mistaken.
One woman,  Chaya Tova told me  that her son (who had diabetes and was learning in kollel) on the side had become expert in all the texts relating to diabetes.  She was from a regular religious home and her father taught Talmud in Bnei Brak. She was no baalat Teshuva. And she said this anti science attitude was not at all accepted in Litvak communities.

However I should mention that the years of concentrating on Talmud were well spent. Even with the time and effort I put into it I never could have come to any kind of basic understanding until many years later. Talmud is not a four year program. It is more like a twenty year program to become even barely proficient.