An article about Black anger towards white people


This is explained clearly in Howard Bloom books about the power of the meme. People get a certain meme inside them and it stays there. If people get it hardwired in them that the White person is teh cause of all their troubles this idea will not be defeated by contrary evidence. I think further that this has something to do with Kant's dinge an sich. I think it is a kind of collective consciousness type of thing.

 What does it mean to "know how to learn?" This is hard to say. When I was in Shar Yashuv in NY the rosh yeshiva told me that I would know how to learn within a  year or two years. I forget which. To some degree that happened because of a combination of factors. First I was doing the work. Next is after I would do the work I went up to Naphtali Yeager with what I thought was a good question. And before I could ask the question he would have me recite the entire Tosphot [in my own words] to see if I understood what Tosphot was saying. While doing so often something would feel a bit out of place. There would be some extra word in Tosphot that one would normally look over and go on. But then Reb Naphtali would show me the deeper questions that Tosphot was meaning to ask there. 

So the question of how to introduce one to the concept of knowing how to learn has come up. I wrote a small essay on this. But in short the best thing is to get an Avi Ezri of Rav Shach and by that to see how to learn. In the meantime you do not have that you might just take a page of Gemara with Rashi and Tosphot  with the Maharsha and try to do some  work. 

This is just the short and simple of it. But if possible I suggest getting the entire set of Reb Chaim Soloveitchik, Baruch Ber, Shimon Shkop, Rav Shach and Naphtali Troup and plow through them word by word.
[I mean you do have to learn the Gemara that their essay is written on, and look up the Rambam and what ever else they are bringing up in their essay.


OK I have gone over the mechanics of it. But what does it mean? It means you cant know the law unless you know the source of the law and its context and the entire framework from where it comes.
The law is an abstraction and as such can mean almost anything anyone wants it to mean anytime unless it is understood as part of a network. Thus memorizing the whole Shas , being able to recite a law by heart is less than meaningless. It is negative. It gives the false impression of knowing a law of the Torah when in fact shows no understanding at all.

But memorizing laws is what most people are impressed with. They have not the foggiest idea of what it really means to know how to learn. Even if the person knows what the law means it still is nothing because without knowing the Background and context he has no idea of how it applies. 

Change can come by small sparks. The fall of the USSR was unexpected by most people. Maybe no one at all saw it coming.  But sudden change usually come by some pressure buildup. When people get frustrated enough with hypocritical religious teachers especially that destroy families while building up their own,-- they will react.
 But change can go in different ways. My suggestion is to get back to authentic Torah. Gemara Rashi Tosphot. But this can only come by recognizing that the rot of the religious teachers came not from Torah, but by impersonation and deceit.

The reason for this state of affairs is difficult to know. But there is still the Noah;s ark of genuine Lithuanian yeshivas. Few and far between though they may be.  So when I suggest coming to authentic Torah I mean to say to also get rid of the charlatans. And make it clear the charlatans do not represent Torah.

Pirkei Avot is most unusual in that it is part of the Mishna. Why would a Musar book be made part of the Mishna by Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi?
What I think is Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi was codifying objective moral values, not just writing morals, but claiming that this book codifies morality in the same way the rest of the Mishna codifies halacha.

 It seems that there is a moral aspect to Torah outside of the legal aspect of it. Some things are moral but not legal and somethings are legal but not moral.
The trouble with the commentaries on Pirkei Avot is the same trouble that you have in all of Tenach. The commentaries obscure things instead of making them clear. Just like if you are looking for the  meaning of verses in the Torah, the last place you look is in Rashi so in Pirkei Avot. The more you read the commentaries the less clear it becomes.

Rashi's main job is to bring Midrash, never the simple explanation -except in the one place he says he is explain the verse according to the simple explanation. A whole world of myth has grown around that Rashi as if Rashi is to tell us the simple explanation of every verse; and that is palpably false. [He says on one verse alone that there he is explaining the simple explanation--that is on just that verse.] Rashi always brings the Midrash; and in places where there is no midrash, he brings the Halachic Midrash Sifra and Sifri.

The same goes for Pirkei Avot. Every one explains it according to what they want it to mean. Like when everyone says Islam is a religion of peace. They are expressing what they want to be true. Not what is true.

What ought to be done with Pirki Avot is to expand the commentary of the Gra which simply brings the sources for each statement from the Old Testament and also to learn it with the commentary of the sages themselves that is Avot DeRabbi Nathan and the perush HaRambam.

 I am wondering if an authentic, Lithuanian kind of Yeshiva would maybe be the best thing for California [Ukraine, etc] . Something like  the Mir Yeshiva in NY? Would it not make sense to have such  place near your home where you could learn  Torah? What I mean by authentic Torah is the kind of that was in the Mir in NY and in Far Rockaway with Reb Freifeld.

The trouble is there are too many cults, and not enough of the real thing.

I know there are cults that claim to represent Torah. But that is not what I think is positive. Rather what interest me is the real authentic thing.

The authentic thing is hard to come by. I think it is the responsibility of secular Jews to be educated enough to tell the difference between authentic Torah and charlatans. The reason there are cults is the fault of Reform Jews that do not know enough Torah to stop supporting evil things. They get fooled by what looks in appearance to be religious so they throw money at it. That is what comes from not learning enough Torah. people end up supporting bad stuff.

I claim that this kind of system [Lithuanian Yeshiva] is good because I have a basis for comparison. That is,-- if one would be familiar with only one system of thought and one way of life, he could never claim to know that it is best. It might be the worst - for all he knows. Even if one is following it faithfully because that is the system he was born into. But I do have a basis of comparison. I have been sociably mobile, and have fit in with many systems and societies. So I know ways of life not just by book reading, but by being there and a part of those systems, and seeing how they work from the inside.
 I am genuinely curious about other systems. But when I go there with no pretense at all, somehow I manage to fit in well enough to see what is going on. And then I confront the elders and leaders with the facts of their corruption and immorality, and see their reaction.

What is the intellectual basis for the Oral and Written Law? Mainly the synthesis of Torah and Aristotle/Plato of Maimonides and Saadia Gaon. [All the more reason to look into both more thoroughly than I have done until now.]

In any case, there is a problem of infiltration of yeshivas by cults. You need to police the institution. But in fact this is too late. Already most even so called Litvak yeshiva have already been taken over by cults.


So when I suggest Torah is the best thing out there, I do not mean religious world which is clearly a satanic cult. Not that it has the wrong ideas, but because it has been taken over by religious teachers that have taken over the narrative. That is it is all completely sitra achra [dark side] nowadays. religious teachers are the enemies of Torah. They want to turn the Torah into a forum for their idolatry-worship of their "tzadik." They suck the essence of Torah and replace it with a spirit from the Dark Side. But they dress and play the game so as to make people think they are the authentic thing.

religious teachers are the head of the snake. They are the ones that could have known better, but instead chose to follow the path of the Devil. The damage they do is in exactly the areas they claim to defend-family values. Talking to a religious teacher about family problems is exactly the same thing as igniting an atom bomb in your living room in terms of the damage it will cause to your  family.

So while we need true Torah-we  need to be rid of the cults.
You get see the change in their faces when people join a religious teacher's cult. The face changes to: a)  dog face, or b) zombie face. There is also a "c)" which I have not yet been able to identify. Stick around long enough with them and the change is inevitable. On the other hand stick around with authentic Torah, eventually one gains, "And He created man in his image"

Ideas in Talmud

(1) The emphasis in the West on words. People tend to take the meaning of the words as the essence of their belief. [text based faith.]  The words of the Torah  and the Talmud are what defines our faith. Even if we do not understand the words.
For this reason it does not seem to me to be  a good idea to engage in  criticism or attacks on someone's faith. That is usually not a good idea unless it is  a case where there are no redeeming characteristics of their faith.

(2) The problem of universals in the West morphed into the problem of meaning starting with  Frege.


(3) One of the problems with Kabalah as a rule is the emptying of words of their meaning and putting in something else. I do not mean this as a critique on the Ari, but later supposed "mystics" that thought they were explaining him while in fact just explaining their delusions. I always found them annoying in their claims of grandeur with nothing to show for it but their own delusions.





[ So let me try to give a brief explanation. Knowledge that we have by our senses cant be checked and verified. Knowledge that is not by the senses might be right but how can we double check it? That is called A priori. If it is by definition then OK. Kant said we have a priori knowledge that is not by definition. How?  But we know it. This refers to the dinge an sich. Things that are but take away all their adjectives what is left? The thing in itself. [As Kant put it: things in themselves. In this realm of things in themselves--reality that we know but we do not know by reason nor by senses there are different areas of value. All form and no content as in mathematical logic. Then all content and no form--God. I hope this leaves my readers satisfied. 










(5) Now for how this relates to me personally.  My own approach is what I learned in the Mir Yeshiva in NY. That is in a nutshell: I go by the Written and Oral Law. That means I go by the Old Testament. But I do not say that I can understand it on my own. I use the Oral Law as my guide for interpretation. But since the Oral Law is a lot to read and understand, I listen to the Rishonim and Geonim as to what is the big message. That is I listen to what Saadia Gaon and Maimonides said it means. That is I defer to argument from authority when it comes to these larger issues. So in  nutshell you now know why the Duties of the Heart  (and other books of Musar of the Rishonim) and the Guide for the Perplexed of the Rambam are important to me. The reason is that they settle the issues of interpretation.
So for example I think Monotheism is the approach of the Torah. That is that God is the First Cause and simple. Not a composite. And he made the world something from nothing, not from Himself like a spider weaves a web. From Nothing. Ex Nihilo. And the world is not God. Nor is it any part of God. The reason I think this is not just the literal sense of the Torah. It is I confess because that is how all the rishonim (and the Ari himself) said it means.
But even more so. Now you know why Musar is important to me.  Because more clearly than anything else it clarifies these issues.