A comment about women today in the West and why it is important to learn Musar

Faithless Cynic said...

There is another factor in play with White males. The verminous, hateful women that are available nowadays would sap anyone's drive. As an example, take my wife please ( with a hat tip to Rodney Dangerfield ) I have tried to be a good husband, building a business and working any scut [thankless menial errands] jobs I could during hard times. My reward for this effort? My feminist wife fucking HATES me. How bout that for incentive to work hard?. Work hard for someone who hates you. I stay in this marriage to avoid losing ALL my assets.

LEARN FROM MY EXAMPLE AND DO NOT MARRY!

9:39 AM

From this interesting blog


We know from the Rambam (Maimonides) that the laws of the Torah do not change according to the times. But on the other hand we also know from the Rambam the laws were made to specification according to the times. Therefore times do not change. The same idolatry that existed at the time of the giving of the Torah exists now, but in different form. Now it is worship of dead people, instead of sticks and stones.
We know the place of the husband and wife and their roles were declared by the Torah. But the idea of Saadia Gaon and the Rambam is this does not change. Their roles and obligations are today just as they were specified in the Torah.

Obligations of marriage are well outlined in the Shulchan Aruch by Joseph Karo. There was a great little booklet put out by a teacher in the Litvak NY Yeshiva Torah VeDaat that was an amazingly simple but deep introduction to the laws of nida and marriage.

My own opinion abut nida is to learn the Tur with the Beit Yoseph. No where else is explained so clearly the difference between nida and zava

[nida i even days then dip [total ] in naturalbody of water. Zava is if she sees blood for more than even days

]

I would like to divide human problems into different areas, physical and biological, psychological, spiritual, super-organism, social meme's etc.

The Musar (Ethics) movement of Israel Salanter deserves more attention than it gets. Its claims are great.

The way to understand this is to see the beginning of Isaac Blazar's book the אור ישראל. Plus you have to see the lectures of Sapolsky at Stanford. And then you need to put 2+2 together to realize the vast implications of what Israel Salanter was implying.

I would like to divide human problems into different areas,  physical and biological, psychological,  spiritual, super-organism, social meme's etc.

What Sapolsky is suggesting is schizoid personalities comes from biology. What people call nowadays a chemical imbalance. That is the source of all shamans and people that make  a living by meta magical thinking.  But others sources of human problems come from attitudes. or social memes picked up the super organism. Others have some spiritual component. Some are genetic and hard wired. Some are software--not hard wired. That is attitudes or reactions that have been absorbed into ones personality but are like software programming and can be easily changed.

I could go on and on but you get the idea.

The claim of Reb Israel Salanter is that learning Musar is a cure for all of the above mentioned aliments. And he is referring to a limited number of books. To him, not anything that talks about things that sounds like Musar are authentic Musar. They most often are pseudo Musar. Phoney and opposite in effects.
You know the Drill. Authentic Musar is Medieval Musar. There was something about that time period that the spirit of the fear of God existed in a way that got condensed and distilled and bottled into the works of Ethics written during that time period. [Much like Hegel claims about the Spirit.]
Phony Musar works just as well as taking phony aspirin.

r51 e minor 6-8 time Edited  r51 midi  r51 nwc

Plato was not thrilled with the role of arts and thought that they are destructive of morals and justice. In Western Europe, in civilization,  there was a kind of awareness of this problem and they sought to combine the Arts with a kind of spirit of "up", a lifting people to a higher plane of morality and justice.

There were probably aware of this because of reading Plato.

Mediaeval Ethics, Musar, Pirkei Avot and learning Gemara in depth.

 The year before I went to the yeshiva called Shar Yashuv in Far Rockaway I spent a lot of time on Pirkei Avot with Shimshon Refael Hirsches' Commentary. In Far Rockaway the attitude was to plunge the students into hard core lumdut [deep learning of Talmud] as soon as possible on the theory that if one does not get it then and there, one will never get it. And I have seen this theory is substantiated in fact.

Learning Pirkei Avot today I would recommend with Avot DeRabbi Natan, the Gra the Rambam and Shimshon Refael Hirsch also.

But that is for Musar.[Learning Ethics= "Musar"] 

As for Gemara, I would in fact recommend going as deeply as possible as soon as possible-because otherwise people never get it at all. I would prioritize going deep into the Gemara with the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach.[Rav Elazar Menachem Shach from the Ponovitch Yeshiva in Bnei Brak]. [Why is learning in depth important? According the Hegel once  a  people stops questioning its institutions and beliefs, then Spirit  dies and cannot 
further develop.]

What happens when people do not learn Gemara in depth at the very beginning of their yeshiva years is a kind of self delusion. They think they understand that which they do not understand. This is different than you find in other fields in which there are experts that know the different between real expertise and phony. In yeshivas nowadays the phonies are the majority. To find the real thing you have to dig deep or go to authentic yeshiva like Ponovitch or the Mir in NY. 

In other words the problem of phonies  is unique in the Torah world, and does not have an equivalent or parallel in the academic world.



[You could take instead of Rav Shach's book the book of Reb Chaim Soloveitchik or his disciples Reb Baruch Ber or Shimon Shkop. But  Rav Shach is  easier to understand.]

In short what I recommend is medieval ethics plus the oral law.

Blacks as group behavior

I think Blacks are more interested in taking down the USA than in who will pay for things after whites are gone. [That is Blacks as group behavior and attitude. Individuals can and sometimes are completely different than the bell curve of their group. That is because people have free will. But that does not change the fact that there is such a thing as group behavior. And in particular group behaviors as directed towards a certain goal. For example Muslim behaviors to destroy Christianity and Israel.

Once you've allowed the barbarians through the gates, any swashbuckling ruffian who is willing to pick up a sword and push them back out again is an ally.

Once you've allowed the barbarians through the gates, any swashbuckling ruffian who is willing to pick up a sword and push them back out again is an ally. We can worry about what the city should look like once we've put out the fires and have stopped the barbarians from actively setting more of them.

Vox Populi

Belief in God. I few ideas i wrote on Roosh V

Belief in God is rational. Everything has a cause. So unless there is a first cause, then you would have an infinite regress. And then nothing could exist. Therefore there must be a first cause. Therefore God, the first cause, exists. QED. (You could prove the first step a priori that everything has a cause by noting that nothing can come from nothing. This makes it a priori, not just an empirical observation).

The idea here is to limit the number of causes. I am not saying everything needs a cause. I am saying just the opposite. That there must be a limit or else nothing could exist.

The idea is similar to what you have in logic concerning the infinite regress.

The quantum mechanics that I am aware of does not say something can come out of nothing. Rather before something it measured it is just a probability.

For those it might be helpful here to look at this from the standpoint of Kant. Unconditioned realities exist but their character is part dependent on the subject and part on the object.

I am not trying to go further than the First Cause.

A priori , not based on observation, is how we know cause and effect. The question of Induction is not my intention here.

I would have mentioned Godel's adaption of Anselm's proof but that seems like too much to discuss here