But after a while I saw many of the cult's (that the Gra signed the excommunication on) obsessions with rituals was not coming from Torah, but from psychological defects that manifested themselves in many other ways.

There is a kind of schizo personality that is overly interested in religious matters

I tried to judge people that showed this tendency on the scales of merit. After all, the Torah is by its very nature all encompassing. But after a while I saw many people's obsessions with rituals was not coming from Torah, but from psychological defects that manifested themselves in many other ways.

So like Sapolsky I ask, "What does this mean?"  Even if there was one case in history of someone considered a tazdik who was merely suffering from some chemical problem, what does this mean?

"Religious leaders tend to be the most fervent and the most accomplished at carrying out the rituals."


If it is real, then there has to be some connection with menschliechkeit human decency. If that connection is not there, that is a sure sign the rituals are coming from a schizo personality.
And since, by and large, the relationship between rituals and human decency is inverse, therefore the majority of ritual-people are coming from either following a schizo personality, or they themselves are schizo.

The Schizo ritual obsessed  I think is an evolutionary strategy of nature. It has amazing reproductive advantages. It is the schizoid leaders of the cult that the Gra signed the  excommunication on that have the most reproductive success.

My Dad and the path of Torah and Science. He would not have put it in that way. He would have said "menschlichkeit"--"Be a decent human being." But much more. To be a mensch is to be honest loyal trustworthy hard working etc. All things that my father and mother were.

My Dad as a rule showed me his places of work. I went to visit the factory where he was producing his invention, a super sharp copying machine called the "copymate." Then we moved to Beverly Hills and his new place of work was very far away. (We were there for the high school. And was  a great school. My friends were super achievers, and I was a distant second place in everything I did.)
But I still managed to visit his place of work once. It was on an upper floor in the TRW building where he was working on a laser beam for the sake of satellite communication for the SDI project. I showed interest in science myself when I was young and also in elementary school. But in high school that interest went out the window. My interests were at that point in other directions like Philosophy and Music. Here is a piece I wrote then



But today I think the problem was that I did not have a good method for learning science. Still for me to have gone into science would have taken a lot of time. Nor was I aware of the Rambam's opinion about science at the time. I do not have pictures but here is a link to the Life Magazine article about my Dad

In high school I had a continuing interest in science but it was hard to do well in anything because of time constraints. I felt pulled in lots of directions. Not just philosophy and Music, but I found all my classes interesting and worthwhile. I wanted to do well in all of them. But there was the same old problem of time. I tried to solve it by applying to a private school, and  a college, and UCLA where I could concentrate on one thing alone. But nothing came of it. 

[I was accepted in all three places but did not have the guts to actually leave home.]

 By the time it came time to chose a career, I thought going to Mir in N.Y. made the most sense-- because it appealed to my philosophical side.  In other words, I was able to concentrate on one thing, and in fact the one thing that I really loved--learning Torah. 


My father and mother represented Torah with Derech Erez.
But I admit there are some people that sit and learn Torah all day and succeed. Rav Shach clearly held from the basic Litvak yeshiva model: learn  Torah and everything else will work out.


I never mention my mother because my Mom and Dad functioned as one unit. There was never a case where one or the other said I have to ask what the other one would say about this. Their coordination was extremely fine tuned. They always knew and agreed with what the other would say on any issue. They never argued. They never disagreed. And they loved each other and us kids with intense self sacrificing lobe as parents ought to be.


Appendix:

He entered active duty on July 20, 1944, and was an aircraft engineering officer 4823. His medals were the American Campaign Medal, Army of Occupation Medal and World War II Victory Medal. He served 1 ½ years in the US and almost 8 months in Europe. He left active duty on September 29, 1946. His serial number was 0 872 281. He was promoted to captain just before he left the US Army, and served in the US Army, Headquarters and Base Service Squadron 413th Air Service Group 40th Bomb Wing United States Air Forces European Theater. In the US, he served at Great Bend , Kansas and was in charge of maintaining 6 B-29 aircraft for the unit. He supervised the work of 75 enlisted men. In Europe, he was a civilian personnel officer. He served 8 months in the European Theater of Operations (France, Germany and Switzerland ) with the 413th Air Service Group and was in charge of 1500 German civilians, supervising 1 officer and 20 civilians. He spoke German fluently at the time.

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I terms of Torah what I suggest are the books of Rav Shach.

I terms of Torah what I suggest are the books of Rav Shach and Reb Chaim Soloveitchik. And  the basic Musar books I think you should know. There is a set of the classical Musar books the are the Chovot Levavot, אורחות צדיקים ספר הישר של רבינו תם. There are also a few books from the direct disciples of Reb Israel Salanter. מדרגת האדם אור ישראל. That is Reb Israel had one disciple Joseph Horvitz from Navardok and Isaac Blasser. 

Not everything the people say that sounds like Musar (Ethics) should be accepted as Musar. 


You see Musar itself is based on certain world views that the rishonim [mediaeval authorities] had. So even if you do not see them discussing their world views in their Musar (Ethics) books, still there is a strong connection between their world view and the Musar they wrote. So learning only the Musar means often people pick up world views from other sources without knowing it. So I see learning the Emunot VeDeot of Saadia Gaon and the Guide of the Rambam as being very important. 

I think the main reason people support Trump is they are thinking of the kind of freedoms that had before the Federal Government began intruding in every single aspect of private life.

What Donald Trump has done is launch a full-scale anti-Federalist counter-revolution. Many of his backers reject the idea that the Federal government has any power at the State or local level. They call for the repeal of Constitutional amendments that have increased the power of the Federal government, like the 14th, 16th and 17th. What they ultimately want is to recreate a free world. To paraphrase Michael Moore's documentary, "Dude, Where's My Country?" The Donald Trump answer is "The people you took it from are taking it back."

"physics envy,"

The harder the science you do, the more you look down on anyone not on that level. If you are in math, you think physicists are stupid. If you are a physicist, you have "math envy," and think biologists are stupid. If you are a biologist, you have "physics envy," and think psychologists are frauds and idiots, along with being insane themselves, and their motivation in going into psychology was to project their defects on everyone they do not like. 
Also, the scale of jargon is reversed. The more of a pseudo science it is, the more they have to invent jargon for simple things- so that they can sound profound and call what they do "science." Thus, "social sciences," which are at the bottom, have jargon invented for things that there are commonplace terms for. It is a scam in order to be able to call what they do "science." [I feel nauseous just writing the two words together.]


The result of envy is to try to de-legitimize whatever anyone on a higher level is doing and make yourself sound as if you were at the top. 

There is a lot to go into here but this will have to do for now.
in every vector of value there is a hierarchy. 

So what I m suggesting is a hierarchy in each area of value.
So you get a string a values. E.g. the one I started with in the above essay. Math --Physics-Chem-Biology etc.. Up there in (8) Beauty will be Bach-Mozart-Beethoven-etc. Politics also will have its own string. Another string will be in the Holy-"Pietative" Old Testament-Talmud-Rishonim-etc. 


So what you need here are different kinds of awareness or knowledge of universals. That is some universals are "It must be." The next level is "It can be" and the next is "one ought to do such and such a thing." That is for the different modes of necessity and possibility there will be a different kind of non intuitive immediate knowledge.

Mir Yeshiva in New York

The Mir Yeshiva in New York was a unique kind of place in that every day was a new class that was along the lines of something you would see in the book from Reb Chaim Soloveitchik or Shimon Shkop. That is:- the classes consisted of expanding the approach of Reb Chaim to every single page of Gemara.

So this gives me an idea of how to explain simply what it means to learn Gemara on a small scale. To get the basic idea you really do not need to go through the whole four year program. If you just would have one tractate of Talmud and one essay from Reb Chaim Soloveitchik or Rav Shach and go though that one essay along with the Gemara it was written on, then you would already know what it means "to know how to learn."
You might not yourself at that point "know how to learn" but you would have understood the basic idea.

Now I do not claim this deep knowledge myself. In fact, in the two books I wrote on Bava Metzia and Shas I sometimes see the kinds of trivial concerns like are like Freshman Level. Like "Why did the Maharasha write such and such a thing."  That might be slightly interesting, but it is not called "knowing how to learn." Knowing how to learn is global.  It means knowing how to calculate the sugia [subject] in front of you--so you know thoroughly the Tosphot. And then the crucial step is to know how it connects with the rest of Shas.
There are not a lot of places on that level. Mainly they are in NY (Mir Chaim Berlin, Torah VeDaat) or they are offshoots of Ponovitch in Bnei Brak.

This gives you a general idea of how education should be pursued. You should look for the highest quality. For some reason God directly my steps to almost always have teachers of the highest quality--even when I was not looking for this. If it is worth doing it is worth doing right.

[Sometimes people jump towards the global thing and are missing the first step in knowing the sugia. So I think my two books are important because they tend to combine both things. I deal at first with knowing the sugia in its place and then see how it connects with the global concerns of the rest of Shas.



If you want an equal of a Litvak Yeshiva in your home, then you only need one Shas, plus the books of Reb Chaim Soloveitchik and Rav Shach and the basic Musar books. If you also want to more mystic side of Torah after you have finished Shas twice, then what I recommend is simply to plow through the writings of the Ari (Isaac Luria) straight from beginning to end-or at least the Eitz Chaim which gives you the basic idea. But I should mention I think the Eitz Chaim goes with the idea of direct mystical awareness at least as far as the Ari was concerned. That fits with Hegel but not Kant.