When do you need ordination from Sinai to make a halachic decision? Actually not often. But it does need to come from the Gemara. One of the advantages of the real authentic Shulchan Aruch  is it gives a clear picture of the sugia in the gemara and how it develops into the halacha. But if one does actually know the Talmud well enough to be a מומחה לרבים  [a expert that has been tested by other experts and never found to make a mistake, and whose decision has been accepted by other experts] then he is allowed to decide cases involving money as long as they are not cases of wounding or theft. These last two need ordination from Sinai.


The idea of the halachic based on דינא דגמרא the law of the Gemara is well established even in the Rambam. The Maharshal  wrote it is better to decide from the Gemara itself even if one is wrong than to decide based on the Rambam even if one is right.

The basic idea is this. The mishna says one needs three people to judge monetary cases and three [later Rava will explain this to mean  people with the authentic ordination from Sinai] in order to judge robbery and wounds. It is late here but in short according to the Torah we need three people with authentic ordination for everything but the sages made an exception for loans and cases of admissions. What comes out is that the requirement for authentic ordination is not required in  MONETARY CASES. So far the gemara has not said anything about more general halachic rulings.

The people that present and teach Kabalah are caught in a delusional world called the Intermediate Zone that gives those who enter it a feeling of great power and insight.

Every wisdom has a אבן ניגף stumbling block in it. That is you can get so deeply into it that you are doing OK and then you trip over the hidden wire. This applies to what is  taught in Humanities and Social Sciences Departments of universities as is clear from that fact that the students of professors in those department lose common sense and  enter in worlds of delusion. But I wanted to bring up the issue of Kabalah which is known to have a similar kind of stumbling bock in it.

The people that present and teach Kabalah are caught in a delusional world called the Intermediate Zone that gives those who enter it a feeling of great power and insight.

But I get the idea people are interested in numinous reality. Maybe I am also. After all I was at two amazing places in NY which were learning Torah the Oral and Written Law- and yet something inside me felt I was missing something. Where does one go to quench his or her spiritual thirst?

I would avoid Sitra Achra {Dark Side} places as much as possible. The Dark Side is seductive and inviting and seems full of light and love and Jewish rituals to make it seem kosher.

One nice thing bout the Kabalah Center is they do concentrate on the Ari alone and avoid all the Sitra Achra Kabalah that came after the Ari.  That is the best option for those interested in that area of study. Besides that I have not seen or heard of any place that deals with the mystic side of Torah that is not simply the Sitra Achra in disguise.


Now I should mention what the Ari was intending was to get a mental picture of the spiritual worlds above and by this to be attached to God. The problem is most people do not get attached to the Side of Holiness by this but rather to worlds of illusion.

And for laymen it is hard to discern who knows what they are talking about and who does not. Even I have this problem when it comes to other things that I have  knowledge of but not enough to tell who really knows it well and who is a quack. But at least in kabalah I do know enough to tell who is from the side of holiness and who is not.

The Gra brings up the point that a case brought before a judge might require a decision based on the pleas but the truth might be elsewhere. In such a case he said the judge must remove himself. This occurred to me when learning the Rambam concerning civil cases. The Halacha might require one decision but the judge might be aware that it is  a דין מרומה. There is something under the surface that is not being presented. See Shir Hashirim on the verse הנה מטתו של שלמה.
If the judge decides like the truth against the law of the Torah then there is the sword on his neck. If he decides like the law of the Torah against the real truth then Hell opens up beneath him.

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


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