Learning Musar [Ethics] has made me a better person.

Learning Musar [Ethics] has made me a better person. There was an implicit message in the Ethics movement of Reb Israel Salanter;.

It was not that it is good idea to learn Musar [Mediaeval Ethics]. That was not news. The unstated message was that Fear of God is contained in the classical Musar book.
I do not think anyone ever expressed the idea in that way but it seems to me after I spent time reading the books of his disciples that this is what they were thinking.
That means they were thinking like this: If you want fear of God, then go through the entire set of Musar from beginning to end. That is a good deal of reading.

Why this is interesting is this. The more one fears God they he fears people or anything else. Nor does he have any reason to fear anything else. People I noticed can have fears that they are not happy with. Sometimes they know their fears are irrational. Other times they do have something real to be afraid of. Sometimes they can not tell the difference. It seems to me the best way to deal with this is to learn Musar.

generation gap

generation gap

How does a culture unwittingly sow the seeds of inter-generational mistrust? When does youth begin to suspect that adult camaraderie may be deeply flawed? Revolutions begin in the younger generation, rather than the seasoned adults. Something in the cultural soil goes bad.

One variety of these seeds of mistrust and reveals that they usually begin to sprout informally, even playfully, in arenas like the Beit Midrash or Synagogue   where young men mixed as freely with adult men. The young are always watching and wondering what makes adults tick. Their natural inclination to imitate the ways of adults is a deep source of cultural stability because it tends to ensure that what an adult does today will be emulated by a youth tomorrow.

I have had people ask me questions in Halacha because they knew they could not get an honest answer anywhere else. Everyone seems to have an agenda. Halacha means what they want it to mean.

The hard thing about halacha is that one needs to know the source before he can understand it at all. But in essence that simply means to sit and learn Gemara like Lithuanian Yeshivas do anyway.


The issue is not adults verses teens. It is young married adults that still need guidance for older people. They need to know whom they can trust.
This is hard to know. Usually you need to know a subject really well to be able to tell who else knows it really well.

I any case for the sake of the record there were people I knew that really did know Torah well. mainly they were in NY. Some are today Roshei Yeshiva in the Mir and Chaim Berlin. Rav Nelkenbaum in the Mir. Shelomo Haliua in Chaim Berlin. Shimon Buso in Netivot in Israel. Clearly Rav Elezar Menachem Shach was the greatest Torah scholar of the last generation.

music

r29 a minor

I love Avraham's Music

When the world I knew was caving in around me I needed a basic rule for living. That is to say the truth at all cost.

What determines what a human being is one thing that is really three. Commitment.long term. short term and if these two correspond one with the other.
The inner self is hidden from view. We think we know it but we know only the surface like the surface of a ball. We know what we are thinking. The stream of conscious. But what is motivating us is hidden. But we can know to what basic rules for living we are committed to. Alexander the Great was asked how he accomplished so much. He gave  a rule of living. What needed doing he did right away without delay. That is he had  a short term commitment that corresponded with his long term commitment to take over the entire world.
 When the world I knew was caving in around me I needed a basic rule for living. That is to say the truth at all cost. These kinds of rules we choice for how we live determine in the long run who we really are. 

The problem is Islam is the greatest threat to the survival of the human race.

There are many verses in the Q'ran calling for violence against unbelievers, the jihadists quote as they behead and enslave. There is a long tradition of scholarly interpretation and military implementation of those verses over centuries - not only by 20 year-olds but by imams, mullahs, sheikhs, and great Islamic empires. 

Those who persist in claiming that Islam is a religion of peace at the least have a lot of explaining to do. They have a huge weight of evidence, textual and historical, to contend with. 


Good luck to those who seek to persuade other Muslims of their "religion of peace" view! I pray for their safety and success. Those Muslims that really believe in the golden rule, I wish them well and pray for their health and success. But they are not following Islam, they are following Western ideals.

The problem is Islam is the greatest threat to the survival of the human race since that volcano eruption 75000 years ago almost wiped out our entire species. That was just one volcano. Imagine what the Islamic Atom Bomb could do to us. People that do not realize this simply have their heads in the sand, teh sands of Saudi Arabia money buying off our politicians.
 Believe me when i tell you the reason Germany has let in the new Islamic invasion, the reason George Bush claimed after the deadliest attack on American soil that Islam is a religion of peace--believe me when I tell you is is all about the Billions of dollars that Saudi Arabia buys our politicians with. Follow the money trail.

Girls, be smart and get a Litvak!

Girls, be smart and get a Litvak! A man who has learned in Ponovitch.

In the Jewish world, the Middle Ages have a different reputation than in the Christian world. In the Jewish world the Middle Ages are looked upon as the peak of Enlightenment. That is to say the "rishonim" are considered unsurpassed and also un-surpass-able.  The best thing we can say about the Gra is he qualified as a rishon. It is considered that rishonim cant be wrong--at least in Torah subjects. But we admit they can be wrong about scientific issues.

This relates to Christians because it has become customary in Christian circles to look at the Middle Ages as the "Dark Ages." Nothing in Christianity has come anywhere near the quality of thought of Aquinas nor Anselm. Not within a million light years. And yet Christians still insist on thinking that they have somehow out-grown the Middle Ages. If only they were smart enough to see the brilliance of the Middle Ages. That would already be a step up.


I should add the the "rishonim" well deserve their reputation. But to see this takes years in yeshiva. Mainly the problem with achronim is fuzzy logic. This is mirrored in the Christian world where the best of philosophical thinkers after the middle ages  show circular logic consistently.







David Hume wrote: The order in nature could equally well result from the intrinsic properties of matter itself. This he thought was an argument against intelligent design. The issue to be decided is whether the order in nature is the result of intelligent design. If it is, then the properties of matter (e.g the bonding properties of carbon and hydrogen) are also the result of intelligent design. Postulating a dichotomy between intelligent design and the properties of matter therefore amounts to postulating a priori that there is no design in nature. Hume (and all who follow him) essentially follow a grand circularity. That is called circular logic and proves nothing since anything can be proved if one is clever enough to conceal the circular nature of his arguments 

Kant

The greatest consideration should be given to the possibility of  graded levels of reason. I mean to say that we have different levels of unconditioned realities. Modes of necessity. So in knowledge of these modes we ought to considered different levels of non intuitive immediate knowledge.

In short: How is a priori synthetic knowledge possible? you could say like the intutionists [Prichard G.E. Moore, Huemer, Bryan Caplan] that it is by reason. They are expanding the areas that reason knows for good cause. They look at Hume's argument that reason has only one function--to `perceive  contradictions.They know that that is wrong. But we do have to admit the kind of reasoning we use to advance a mathematical series is different than the other kinds of intellectual perception that they suggest. That is they ignore Kant's arguments, not just Hume.

So Plato could have answered the question how the forms participate with individuals -he could have answered the representation makes the object possible and the object makes the representation possible.