There are a good deal of Aristotle's  concepts bantered about in mystic books that at the same time claim metaphysical knowledge of the world. And which tend to knock Aristotle as a know nothing ignoramus. The Ether, the four elements, substance and form. The Ari himself I can excuse for just placing his revelations in the mental structure of his time. He does not claim anything beyond his own formulation of the metaphysical structure of the world. But books that knock Aristotle while at the same time using his concepts seem to be ill informed.
[We can make a good guess from where the concepts come from since there are many possible ways of understanding the metaphysical and physical nature of the world. It does not have to be four elements and ether and substance and form. For example you can have the 1000 systems of totally different metaphysics from China, none of which have any of the above concepts. Or you can have Buddhist philosophies of no substance, or the 6 schools of Hindu thought. Once people are obviously borrowing from Aristotle, you might think they would have the manners not to insult him, and claim that they themselves came up with the ideas on their own. It is like cheating on a test and then claiming the other guy stole it. There is little that is more despicable.


If they would have some deep knowledge of the world you would think they might have noticed things like atoms!

I had some ideas about yeshivas which I thought to share . The idea is that I see the Litvak yeshiva as a great and important ideal but it saddens me that the ideal have been perverted into bureaucracy and cults. My suggestion is to revive the original idea. So here are my thoughts:

The basic idea of a yeshiva is the Oral Law. That is the purpose is to get a decent idea of how to keep the Torah.The way I see it the best approach to this problem was formulated well by the Lithuanian kind of yeshiva. That is I expect there to be flaws and bureaucracy and all the normal human problems that go along with any human institution. But overall I think the idea is sound. And you do not need a large investment for such a thing. You can put tons of money into Jewish institutions and come out with nothing but rot. The reason is the most important thing is missing--the Idea.
Without the idea or with the wrong idea all you get is a cult or tzadik worship,
It is the idea of a yeshiva that makes it what it is.

So what is the idea? It is Gemara, Rashi, and Tosphot. Period.
In a practical vein this means a morning session from 10:00 to 2:00 and and afternoon session from 3:30 to 8:00.  About a hundred years ago the question of adding a little bit of learning Ethics came up. And also at some point someone decided to add a small Halacah session. But these were additions onto the main idea.

Kollel is a perversion of this idea and something that all gedolai Israel would have opposed if it had been brought up during a time when there were still people around that knew better. [That is you never pay people to learn. The whole concept is as absurd as paying someone to pray.]

What people did in NY was to go to Brooklyn Collage in the afternoon. This was sanctioned by Rav Hutner. This was in order to learn a vocation. Torah with Derech Eretz.

So in any case what you need is a straight forward Litvak yeshiva in every town and hamlet. Where there is Torah then there is everything of value.

On the other hand the lack of authentic Torah opens the door to cults which mimic true Torah but whose inner essence is satanic. These cults are sadly the main body of religious world today.
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I should mention that the ideas here took me a long time to come to. I admit I was part of the kollel at the Mir Yeshiva in NY. But on the other hand there really was nothing wrong with that. They were simply accepting government grants. No one was claiming that learning Torah could be used making money. It was clearly charity. If the yeshivas in Israel would be run the same way I would have no objection.

Unconditioned realities. The trouble with understanding morality is that of knowing any unconditioned realities. This is the source of moral contradictions. Just as Kant said that when pure reason ventures into the real of unconditioned realities contradictions automatically pop up.


The objects of experience are individual, particular, and concrete, while, on the other hand, the objects of thought, or most of the kinds of things that we know even about individuals, are general and abstract, i.e. universals.

So he shifted from the regular Neo Platonic approach which had been begun by Saadia Gaon and went to Aristotle. That gives knowledge of individual things since universals are in the individual. From there there will be higher levels of pure reason that can conceive of higher things.


Appendix. Aristotle by putting the forms inside of things helped bridge between objects of experience and universals. And other levels of knowledge that are concepts alone. It goes from the Oral Law, to Maase Breshit מעשה בראשית and from that to Maase Merchava מעשה מרכבה

Letter to a friend

Dear ...: That is a long letter with lots of points. As for the first point. Dale Martin is getting all of his material from other sources. He just puts it together very well. Better than I could ever do. But the actual sources are difficult. At Polytechnic I saw a few books in the library about the hypothetical documents.  But this is a long and involved study.

The Rambam [Maimonides] concerning Maase Breishit is also a difficult subject. I think looking into the Ramban [Nachmanides] is a good area of investigation. All the Rishonim are worthy of study. I do not think there will be any great kashe about the Rambam however because he seems to be uniform in his opinion from the beginning of his life until the end and hinted at it in many places. You are right that without the Ramban (Nachmanides) the Rambam (Maimonides) would have been forgotten and marginalized to the point of vanishing.

Besides that I think that it is helpful to get a general idea of all the rishonim in order to understand any particular one. Context makes a difference.

[I should add that Yaakov Abuchatzeira and the Gra clearly held from the Ari.]

the belief system of Torah is Monotheism

The Sages asked why was Mordechai called a "Yehudi". Today we understand the word to mean a Jew (or Jewish). But it means from the tribe of Yehuda [Judah].
He was from the tribe of Benjamin. So what could it mean?

They answer because he denied idolatry -- because anyone who denies idolatry is  as if he confess to the whole Torah.  Anyone who admits idolatry is as if he denied the whole Torah. [Yehuda comes from the word admit.]

Thus I decided to stay away from idolatrous cults that seem to infest Orthodx Judaism like lice.  Even if they are the only show in town. To me it is more important to stay away from idolatry.

This clarity only came to me after learning Sanhedrin 63 fairly well. Before I learned that page in Sanhedrin the whole concept of idolatry was fairly ambiguous to me. I wrote some of my ideas about that Gemara in my little booklet on the Talmud. Mainly I was concentrating on the Tosphot there. But learning it in depth helped me understand the subject better.

An example of idolatry a person says any created thing besides God, "You are my god, save me" that makes the thing itself into an idol. The person himself gets the normal penalty for idolatry.

I should mention in this context that the belief system of Torah is Monotheism.  That is that God made the world something from nothing. That is Torah belief excludes pantheism. And it excludes worship of tzadikim.

God also is a simple One. He is not a composite of substance and form. He has no form nor substance nor anything that we can conceive of. There is a limit to human reason and even to pure reason in this regard. We can know he exists and that is all.

Also in the Torah there is no sense that God is imminent in nature or tied to natural substances or phenomena.  Nature also is not divine. It's  de-divinized; the created world is not divine, it is not the physical manifestation of God. The line of demarcation therefore between the divine and the natural and human worlds is clear. 


Nature isn't God himself. He's not identified with it. He's wholly other. He isn't kin to humans in any way either. So there is no blurring, no soft boundary between humans and the divine. 

So, to summarize, the view of God is that there is one supreme God, who is creator and sovereign of the world, who simply exists, who is  incorporeal, and for whom the realm of nature is separate and subservient. 

Indeed, creation takes place through the simple expression of his will. "When God began to create heaven and earth," and there's a parenthetical clause: "God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light." He expressed his will that there be light, and there was light and that's very different from many Ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies in which there's always a sexual principal at work in creation. 

r22 g minor  r22 in midi  r22 nwc

Why do you need to speak out against cults?

Is it slander to speak about cults?

The illusion of being careful about Slander.


Selective enforcement.


Force includes relying on the legal system, which ultimately rests on the use of force as a last resort. Goading your opposition beyond endurance to the point where they respond violently is non-violence only in the most hypocritical, specious sense.

Putting people in the position where they either have to yield to your demands or resort to violence to stop you is emphatically not non-violence.


The three items on the list are calculated, manipulative, and deceptive practices.
 Can you really claim to be non-violent if you threaten someone else's position to the point where they feel they must resort to violence to protect their interests?


Forms of  peace



The only truly non-violent tactic, in the sense that it neither commits nor provokes violence, is complete non-resistance and submission to the demands of the power elite.


Women would have to submit meekly to rape rather than struggle to resist. And no "pacifist" I have ever heard of advocates that.

Generally, what passes for "non-violence" or "pacifism" is one of the following: Relying on the law. This is not non-violence because if all other measures fail, the legal system will use force to achieve its ends. That's why we speak of enforcing the law.

Maintaining a facade of pacifism while provoking the opposition to violence, or creating an intolerable obstruction that can only be removed by force, or threatening their position to the point where they feel they have to resort to violence to protect their interests. This position, as already noted, is hypocritical, manipulative, and deceptive.




The Cycle of Violence


Before we go any further, take your mouse and put the cursor on the bold lettering above.Now, notice what you did. In order to move the mouse, you had to exert force, and very precise and gentle force at that. You didn't rip the mouse cord out of the computer, or crush the mouse in your grip, or push so hard on it that you mashed the trackball flat. The notion that force inexorably spirals out of control is precisely that trivially easy to refute. Now it's probably true that resorting to unnecessary violence may very well lead to retaliation. So restraint in dealing with confrontations is usually a good idea.




Most pacifists react to this issue by simply pretending that it doesn't exist, that people either never deliberately choose violence, that violence always stems from earlier violence, poverty, or injustice, or that if people do deliberately choose violence, it's in rare cases that are not really of great importance. But history abounds with examples of people who have deliberately chosen violence. The ease with which people from non-violent backgrounds have been induced to commit atrocities in wartime shows how easy it can be for the violent to recruit assistants, and for the gratification factor to take hold. Thus, a single individual who opts for violence because he enjoys domination may succeed in recruiting many others less bold than he is.







How do we respond to people who have opted for violence? Appeasement merely reinforces the conviction that violence gets results. Moreover, it provides gratification by reinforcing the feeling of dominance. When confronting people who have already opted for violence, non-violence has a very good chance of perpetuating the cycle of violence. Retaliatory force, on the other hand, makes the results of violence a lot less simple, a lot less effective in getting results, and a lot less gratifying.



Furthermore, violence is only the far end of the spectrum of force. Every screaming brat who throws a temper tantrum in public is testimony to the fact that children do not need to be taught the use of force. And regardless how loving, benevolent and diligent a parent is in meeting and supplying the child's needs, every child sooner or later runs into the fact that other people, much less the physical universe, will not. Sooner or later every human being has to face the fact that some desires will not be gratified.



Throwing the First Punch



Pacifists are vociferous in denouncing "aggression." I can think of a number of cases where "aggression" either shortened a war or ended genocide. None involve the United States, by the way.In 1971, civil war broke out in Pakistan, which was then made up of two ethnically and geographically separate areas. A million people died and ten million fled into India. Faced with an overwhelming refugee crisis, India invaded East Pakistan, which became independent as Bangladesh.







Not only is it morally permissible to commit aggression, sometimes it's morally obligatory.







So What's Your Plan?





There are intellectual pacifists whose real though un-admitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism.
Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States.

 Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty....


 Those who "abjure" violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.