talmud ideas

Ideas in Tractate Bava Metzia 

Ideas in Shas I have to say that a good deal of credit goes to my learning partner for these two books. He asked that his name not be mentioned publicly.. But it is not just his ideas that I mention but also the motivation for writing. The most rigorous type of learning Talmud I saw in NY in Shar Yashuv and the Mir and had almost forgotten about this kind of learning until I encountered it again in my learning partner.
Seeing that most people do not even know this kind of learning exists I decided to write these two books showing how it is done.
[Not that I am so great at this. I learned from people that know how to learn a  million times better than me.]

Where is the path of Torah? 

learn word by word

One way I have found helpful in learning is to learn word by word as I have mentioned. But sometimes after I have finished a book and am in the process of review I find it helpful to hold my place with a place marker. Then the next day to go back over the previous page and then to go further after that.

I love to learn Torah

There was a process that I used when there was a very limited amount of material that I absolutely had to understand then and there,- and there was not time for my usual relaxed way of learning of saying, "When I come around the whole book the second time I will get it."
That is;- I would say every paragraph forwards and backwards. I based this on Yehuda, a mediaeval mystic, and the Ari (Isaac Luria) and Moshe Chaim Lutzatto. In all of their books I found some hint to this kind of idea.

I hesitate to mention this idea because it might be that some people do not need it, and others it might not work so well for.  Still for myself I have found it effective in some cases.


I used this saying the paragraph forwards and backwards when I was Polytechnic Institute of NYU. Without it I could not have succeeded. The reason is I needed to pass exams. The fast method of learning that I use t give me an overview of  a subject simply did not could not have given me the understanding I needed to pass those exams.
But that was because I was doing a very limited amount of material.
So in short what i recommend is two sessions for every subject. A fast session in which you read the words as fast as possible and do not think at all whether you understand or not. The other is this approach of saying every paragraph forwards and backwards. And even many times util you get it.

The first time I saw the idea of learning fast was in a secular context. Speed reading. But the idea did not include saying the words. In the Jewish context I saw this in a Musar book the Ways of the Righteous.

If people would learn in Litvak yeshivas they would already know this. The regular way of any Litvak Yeshiva is slow and in depth learning in the morning and fast in the afternoon.

the cult that the Gra signed the excommunication on

The problem I see with cults [Hindu, the cult that the Gra signed the  excommunication on, etc.] is that the leader can absorb people into his archetype.
Especially in the West. This is because the West has been emptied of meaning by David Hume and the British  Empiricists. That is if one holds by Nominalism and or empiricism the world has been emptied of meaning. This is what gives secular society the empty feelings that people feel but can not express. Thus youth are prey for archetypes that can absorb their energies and spit them out.

I can not go into all the details, here but you can easily on your own find examples of this type of thing and even see it in your own lives when you saw someone get involved in some cult.

Cults are the reincarnation of the ancient idols. Joining a cult one becomes a servant to some archetype. This at least gives me an idea of why the Gra saw fit to put the entire movement  into excommunication. Not just that he saw it as kelipat noga, but rather that he singled it out as the most destructive force coming into the world at the time that would result in other cults like communism and other assorted idolatries.

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.