Rav Elazar Menachem Shach

I realize not everyone has the time to go through the entire Talmud while at the same time going to university to learn a vocation. So I thought to myself what could encapsulate in   an easy way the basic essence of the Oral Law so that even the simplest person could understand it.
In other words I understand the idea of time limit.
So it occurred to me the best way to do this is to take almost at random any chapter or essay in Rav Shach's Avi Ezri and learn it well in connection with the sources he brings.

You could ask why not Reb Chaim Soloveitchik's Chidushei HaRambam?

First of all because Rav Shach is understandable and even easy to understand once you are familiar with the Gemara and Rambam that he is discussing. Second, I simply think it is a better book. I have great respect for Reb Chaim, but I think Rav Shach saw further and better.



There is a degree you have to trust my judgement on this issue. After all anyone learning any vocation has lots of difference of opinions than his mentors. It is just something that anyone and everyone has to go through to learn any subject properly. You just have to take my word for it until you yourself have gone through Shas and enough poskim rishonim and achronim to see what I am saying.
I had the same doubts when I was learning Gemara. I also thought, "What good is the in-depth learning, when I have not even finished Shas once yet?" Eventually I began to see that people that did not learn in-depth at the beginning of their yeshiva years, never even begin to understand Talmud. They think they know what they do not know. 

Trumpism is easy to define. It is the exact opposite of socialism. If you want to know what Trump stands for just think of the opposite of communism and socialism. Another way would be to look at the Constitution of the USA with limited powers of government.

The purpose of the attacks  directed both against Christianity in itself as a system of thought and belief and against Wasps (White Christians) is unknown to me. The degree of animosity is striking and confusing. I asked my learning partner about this a few times and he also is confused by it. You do not see anything like it directed towards for example Hinduism with more gods than man can count. You don't see anything like it directed against Muslims  with their open and stated purpose as the total destruction of all Jews. If idolatry would be the problem then you would not have warm and explicit borrowing Hindu mediation into Jewish meditation. If  antisemitism would be the problem then the bending over backwards to accommodate Muslims in Israel that I saw constantly would not exist. And if my learning partner can not understand  why this is the case then all the more so I.

The actual reason is simple. People have some degree of control over their beliefs. And they choose their beliefs based on the super-organism they want to fit in with. There is no reason to look for rational reasons that underline anyone's belief system or world view because it always is based on the social group they identify with. The reasons they give are merely excuses made in order to sound reasonable.

And the people that spend a lot of time and effort on perfecting their belief system are schizoid typal personalities. So for the average working guy, there are not many options. He knows well worked out systems seem to be coming from weird people. He does not have the time and effort himself to work it all out. So he just buys into the system that he identifies with emotionally.

Howard Bloom claims that the real organism is the super-organism. When one buys into any given system, it begins to take over. At a certain point one's thoughts are not one's own.

In order to correct this problem one can make a effort to go without judgement on issues that he knows may be subject to group bias. Also one can make an effort to ground his or her beliefs in reason.
So along with learning Torah I recommend learning the books of the Middle Ages on the philosophy of Torah -specifically the Guide of the Rambam but also the critiques on the Guide by Crescas Joseph Albo and others --all with the purpose in mind to come to a synthesis between Torah and Reason. [But I would not overdo it. The main learning of Torah ought to be the meat and potatoes of Gemara, Rashi, and Tosphot, Maharsha, and Rav Shach's Avi Ezri.]

Working on one's character was an original part of the Musar movement. The idea was besides the overall emphasis on learning Ethics, there was also an emphasis in each yeshiva for a different trait, Trust in God for Navardok. The Greatness of Man-for Slobadka, [self esteem].[Slobadka is where Rav Avigdor Miller went to yeshiva.]
The Mir was a late comer to the Musar scene and their emphasis remained learning Torah in as great  a depth as possible. And that was also in Far Rockaway the emphasis in Shar Yashuv.
[I think that is a good emphasis because I can see that learning in depth is totally different than the superficial learning that is generally done. I am convinced that if I had not been exposed to it from the beginning I never would have gotten the idea.]

But what I wanted to bring up is that in the Musar movement there was a concept of working on one's own personal character traits.
Now this fact is obvious if you look at the three Musar books that Reb Israel Salanter himself printed up in Villna. One was a book that incorporated a program of self improvement on certain traits per week. And Rav Miller himself mentioned once when asked how to work on the trait of trust in God He said to go through the Shar HaBitachon in the Obligations of the Heart ten times.

What I am trying to say-is that one way the masters of Musar thought one could work on ones traits was by finding the particular subject that one knows he needs work on in some book o Ethics and to keep and learning that chapter over and over again many times.

I tried this myself with the chapter on anger in the אורחות צדיקים the paths of the righteous and I believe it helped me. Very much.
[And this goes along with the idea of "Review," that Rav Freifeld and his son Motti were always talking about--in the context of learning Gemara.
I also worked on speaking the truth always and also avoiding gossip, (lashon Hara).

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Howard Bloom has made a  point considering the super-organism and its effect on each person. This is in his book the Lucifer Principle. He takes this super organism as a kind of being in itself.

The point is hanging around in with people you recognize are a cult is a bad idea. If the whole group does not have the kind of character traits you think are admirable, you should leave. The Rambam made a similar point that a person is drawn in his traits and charter by the group he hangs out in.

Howard Bloom brings from the idea of hard wiring a computer. Once the circuits are set, that is it. It only takes a short time for the groups dynamics to get set inside ones cerebral cortex, and then get hard wired.


I think there is a difference between groups behavior individual behavior. There is such a thing as a Bell curve. While individual can rise above the group norms, that is still no reason to ignore the fact that there are groups norms. And the group norm is what one will be dragged into if he stays.

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