One reason to go into the Navy is to learn how to be a man, a mensch. There is something about learning how to be a man that one does not get by books of Musar or even by learning Torah.

This does not apply to any armed forces, but rather to armed forces that are devoted towards righteous causes.
But people that learn what it is to be honest and reliable and upright and trustworthy from books alone never end up with these traits.

The last person you want watching your back in a survival situation is a religious teacher.  A religious teacher will be the first person to betray you to the enemy.Much less be trustworthy.


The main profession that the religious world learns is how to ask others for money. That is their main goal in life. How to get money from others.


The way they do this is sneaky. They pretend to be doing public service by getting people to  do meaningless rituals and then expect to get paid for that. They also make yeshivas that are frauds. They pretend we are all one big happy family but then when one is on board the ship and no longer is able to learn an independent livelihood they throw off the pretense and it becomes about being their slaves.

Kitzur Shulchan Aruch [Abridged Shulchan Aruch]

The Kitzur Shulchan Aruch [Abridged Shulchan Aruch] is a good book in many ways. It does give a basic synopsis of practical laws. But it has a flaw that it says to go to  religious teachers when in doubt.  Religious teachers are not honest. You can not trust them about anything. I do not know why this is but they can be trusted to do as much damage to you and to me given the slightest chance. And they have no idea of Torah law either. If in doubt about some particular case of Torah law, the only choice is to go to the Gemara directly. [Even going to the actual complete Shulchan Aruch of Yoseph Karo does not help, because you anyway have to go to the Gemara to see how the law is applied and understood.
There is no skipping of this step. However, when one has learned the subject in the  Gemara thoroughly, then the actual Shuclan Aruch with its commentaries is a useful tool.

r66 D minor

Definition of a religious teacher: an idiot that thinks he is smart and in fact smarter than anyone else and therefore people ought to give him money.

 Perhaps one of the most ugly and perfidious concepts is that somehow  religious teacher are righteous, loving and virtuous. 


They work  politically and economically  for  destruction of secular Jews and Baali Teshuva and the State of Israel.


You are told in a constant sensory assault that these religious teachers who cannot do for themselves and live off the charity of secular Jews, it is your duty to lug the ever burdensome dead weight across your own back until you are satisfactorily broken, beaten and demoralized.

Definition of an  religious teacher: an idiot that thinks he is smart and in fact smarter than anyone else and therefore people ought to give him money.


The farther you stay away from this class of creeps, the closer you will be to God and to the holy Torah.

Some people see Kabalah as a negative thing. They group it together with attempts of things like the New Age cults and such. This was never my impression, but I think this opinion should still be considered.  After all how is it that it got to be so widely and wildly  accepted the  religious world? I am not sure how to answer this? From what I can tell there might be some reason to think the entire acceptance of it as a legitimate part of Judaism might have been a mistake.

In any case it is hard to see any good that comes out of it.

However sometimes it seems  people that were good  did learn the Zohar and the Ari. And that does not seem like a bad thing. After all the Ari is just developing a modification of a neo- platonic system and using it to explain the Torah. Still you have to wonder is there perhaps some kind of bad energy mixed up with the whole thing? Based on what we have seen for the last centuries as Kabalah became popular we certainly did not see people improving in any way because of learning it.

What might be going on is that people are putting anything that smacks of the Dark Side all in one trash basket and throwing it all out without inspecting the particulars of each case. Thus they would be putting the cult that the Gra signed the  excommunication on and cabala and new age and hinduism all together and saying that it is underneath all the same dark side.



In other words some people are instead of focusing on the positive aspects of their beliefs system are focusing on avoiding the Dark Side in all and every manifestation of it. This is probably a good approach. The reason is that it is easy to be distracted and to swallow the bait. I think people are the most interested in avoiding the Dark Side are probably thinking correctly.The question is how to identify the dark side? But they are not concerned with that. They simply dismiss anything that smells even slightly off.

Now I have never done that myself and I am probably at fault for this. As I look over things I have read I see I have studied in great depth and detail systems that were pretty obviously from the Dark Side. Maybe I did not care, or maybe I thought it would not effect me. Maybe I thought I was immune?

I have talked about kabalah in particular is some other essay. But just for now let me mention that Im Kal Da [even though] which comes up all the time in the Zohar is a translation of Im Kal Ze [even though in Hebrew]. It was a phrase invented by the Ibn Tibon family during the Middle Ages. [There were  ways to say "even though" in Hebrew during the time of R Shimon Ben Yochai, like "af al pi" or "af al gav." But Ibn Tibon was looking for something that made more sense, so he came up with this "im kal ze."] Therefore not one word of the Zohar can be from R. Shimon Ben Yochai. QED.

r65 E Flat Major r65 in midi format r65nwc

Why American should not bow before the pressures of the Federal Government to enforce Queer agenda.

 Moral Principles are worth more than money.