The basic idea of Paramenides I paraphrase like this "What is must be. What is not can't be"
This was later contradicted by Herculitus who said the very essence of the world is change. Plato resolved this with dividing reality into two realms. The unchanging real world of ideas and the shadow world of changing things. Kant also divided things into the dinge an sich and phenomena. But to him you cant know the dinge an sich."Things in themselves." This was the opposite of Plato.
Schopenhauer accepted there are two separate realms. But to him there is only one Ding An Sich: the Will.
This can help us understand the verse אין עוד מלבדו. That the First Cause, God, is the only thing that must be. Everything can be or might not be. Their existence depends on him. But they do exist. This is how the Rambam explains the creation. He says it is יש מאין  ex nihilo. Not from himself.God willed the world to be. He did not make it from himself, but from nothing.

This idea of something from nothing is so important to the Rambam that he spends a good portion of volume 2 of the Guide to defend it and he says if one does nothing believe in this the the foundation of the whole Torah falls away.  I should mention that to disbelieve this would take more evidence that is available either to reason or to our senses. Also the Nefesh HaChaim cant be used against this because if you look carefully at his language you will see he says that אין עוד מלבדו means there are no other powers in the world besides God

Ideas in Talmud  Ideas in Bava Metzia  [I did a few spelling corrections and also I did not want to get into a halacha issue too much about if you are learning Torah and there is a minyan davening. I do not think you have to answer but I did not want to get into this subject in a book about Bava Metzia


Title page for Ideas in Talmud  Title page for Ideas in Bava Metzia

Guide for the Perplexed by Maimonides

I had come to appreciate the Guide. When I returned to Israel the second time I ended up in an shul in Ramot 3 [a suburb of Jerusalem]. There I opened up the Guide and saw one short chapter that had this remarkable sentence in it לא הצם והמתפלל הוא הנרצה, אלא היודעו. ["Not he who fasts and prays is desirable, rather he that knows Him."]

The Rambam sees Faith and Reason as interacting. That is each informs the other. Reason guides Faith and visa-versa. Each is lacking without the other.

This is a key insight. In the original צמצום contraction of the Ari we find the Infinite Light was contracted. We find this contraction was in each of the מידות (ten sepherot).
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 This is the idea of Kant that not just human reason, but pure reason is limited. 

(I am here depending on the intuitions of Isaac Luria. And I believe there are sufficient reasons for doing so. What makes him important is his own intuitions of the higher worlds, not the Zohar that he was using to express his ideas. As we know from Kant every representation is given half by the subject and half by the object. So his ideas were half of how he saw things and half of objective reality.]
 [The Reshash רב שלום שרבי Shalom Sharabi gives a good account of this in the  Nahar Shalom.

At any rate, we see the importance of balance in life. This is because one can go over the boundary of wisdom and thus lose faith. And when that happens then wisdom itself becomes stupid because it has faith included in it. Similarly faith we it goes beyond the boundary of wisdom stops being faith of side of holiness but becomes faith of the Dark Side.

This idea of the Rambam is expressed throughout the Guide. But it shows up especially in the parable about the King and his country.  There are people outside the country and people inside. There are people closer to the capital city and people inside. There are people close to the palace and people inside. There are people close to the king's chambers in the palace and people that are in the ouster chambers.  The people outside the country are the barbarians. The people inside keep Torah. The people close to the palace know and keep the Talmud perfectly. The people inside the palace are the מדעים [Physicists in the language of the Rambam]. The inner chambers are where the prophets and philosophers are. The Rambam starts that chapter saying he is not saying anything different there than what he already explained. In this parable we see the idea of a balanced life where people learn the Oral and Written Law and Physics and Metaphysics together.

Bringing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem

Bringing the Ark of the Ten Commandments into Jerusalem  The music was written circa 1996



Moses being drawn from the Nile by the daughter of Pharoh    music written around 2012



Joseph and his father music is j33 written about 3 years ago  


David the Shepard turned Warrior  



Jeremiah the prophet mourning over the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem    The music here was written in NY.


Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah music is q92


i1 b98    

avraham and isaac  The music here was made while waiting in the Borispol Airport to return to NY. [that was probably around 1995]. I think that was the year I had lost my papers. Usually when I go through a lot of suffering, God gives me some kind of great song afterwards.[There is a kind of song towards the end which God gave to me when I first went to yeshiva in NY]


Joseph with his father Music written around 2011 around the time I discovered an answer to a question in Bava Metzia page 97


Moses drawn from the river by the daughter of Pharoh

A large majority of religious teachers are possessed by forces from the Dark Side. A



 The power that the false tzadikm and false messiahs have over us is because of the the support they get from religious teachers. If we would simply learn and keep Torah simply none of these problems would be plaguing us.

It is true that a מומחה לרבים can decide a halachic issue in civil laws. But the qualifications to be a מומחה לרבים are not qualifications that any religious teachers have. They are just innocent idiots that give qualifications one to the other. 

Reb Natan I assume was a gilgul of Natan from Gaza and corrected his sin of supporting a false messiah by supporting a true tzadik. But in doing so he overdid it.

[The main criteria  for a מומחה לרבים is not that he has been accepted by the crowd but he has been tested by people who themselves experts  in the whole Mishna and Talmud and has never been found to make  a mistake or not know a halacha. So who would that be. I would have to say people who in fact were known to know the Talmud well. Not people who had their reputations built of other criteria. So if we look at the true criteria that the Chazal give us it is fairly easy to see that there were people and probably still are a few who do qualify. Rav Shach, Reb Moshe Feinstein, Shmuel Berenbaum. The trouble begins with Baali Teshuva who find some Chrismatic lunatic and decide to call him a "Baki BeShas" expert in Shas. So the idiot gets a reputation for knowing the Talmud because people want this to be so. Not because it is in fact the case.

Moses the Law Giver
Michelangelo's Rachel the music is n1  black hole  i3