Authentic Lithuanian Yeshiva.

A healthy yeshiva operates through no universal methods, but several general principles, and these become adapted in many specific ways. One way is culling. Any successful yeshiva has internal gatekeepers who drive out the people of lower moral standards, ability and behavior or those who are merely genetically incompatible. The sane form of this is exile; the insane form is  not doing it.

There is a side idea: Don't join a group of crazy people even if their doctrines sound nice.

r90 slightly edited. This probably needs a lot of editing but  if I do not put it here I can easily just forget about it. And unless God grants to me some kind of inspiration I have no idea how to edit it.

Musar is the glue

I realize my life and the meaning of my life is fragmented. If I look at all the pieces of the puzzle some are more well put together than others. But the whole thing is like pieces of a puzzle when you open the box. It looks like one big mess.
It is like when I was following the path of Musar of Reb Israel Salanter which in a nut shell is the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule then all the pieces fit together. That is Fear of God and working on having good character (as the Torah defines good character) --as like the mortar for the bricks, the cement, the glue.


The problem was accepting a different "meme" unit of social information. The Torah is explicit about what matters and what does not. The trouble is that as long as I was part of the Mir Yeshiva in NY there was a kind of glue that held things together. Learn Gemara and Musar. Though I think Reb Nachman was a great tzadik, but getting involved in the group that supposedly follows him was exchanging the meme of the Torah for an alternative meme.
Besides that it had the problem of ignoring the signature of the Gra on the second excommunication.


What this means for people that are not in the Mir yeshiva is simple. No matter where you are you can work on the exact same things: (1) Fear of God (2) Good Character. These are available at all times to everyone.

The best ways to go about however is not clear to me. But the goal is clear.

I am not saying the books of Musar are perfect. Rather what I am saying is that without Musar it is all too easy to get the meaning of life and of Torah mixed up.

 Sparta. It is hard to know why Plato thought it was so great. Perhaps he was thinking of the fact that Athens at the time was under Spartan rule and was doing fairly well.

Perhaps he was thinking of a kind of synergy between Athens and Sparta? After all that is what existed in his time and it was the time that he and  Aristotle wrote and many other advances came about.


[To see a thorough account of the affinity Plato had for Sparta see Karl Popper's, The Open Society and its Enemies]

r87 G Minor edited

Allen Bloom called tendency to self destruct "the crisis of the Enlightenment." He also noted the anti Enlightenment began almost as soon as the Enlightenment itself. He was thinking along the lines of the Republic of Plato a being the solution. That seems to indicate Sparta. Not that Sparta was all that much like the Republic but that is certainly where the sympathies of Plato were.

If the goal is to save Western Civilization then it is important to focus on the principles involved, not on who is saying them. If S. Miller [an advisory to Trump] helps in this regard then he should be complimented. What people ought to do is focus on the prize--the presidency-- because you can be assured that the Left is extremely focused on that. If the right will not concentrate to the same degree we are likely to lose everything. Civilization itself.