Nationalism really comes down to a debate between Kant and Hegel. I am on the side of Kant in this, but I think Hegel also had some good points.  I am not sure how to reconcile them. You can see the side of nationalism in Howard Bloom's, The Lucifer Principle. But the draw backs of the system in the USA was brought to print by Allan Bloom's masterpiece, The Closing of the American Mind.

[I should say here that I tend to be on the ide of the Kant-Fries school of thought that you can see in the blog of Kelley Ross] And I also think that my very good impression of Hegeli more based on my  reading of his Logic of the encyclopedia. That is a masterpiece. But the way he elevates the "State" in the Phenomenology is really hard to digest.

I knew  some people that were prime examples of what a man is supposed to be.
My Dad as a father, a husband, a scientist. My teachers in school,: Mr Smart the music teacher, my two Roshei Yeshiva, Reb Freifeld and Reb Shmuel Berenbaum.

I would like to go into detail about each one and what I learned from them. But this minute it is hard to do so because excellence is hard to describe. And what makes it different from mediocrity. Still, God willing I would like to go into detail perhaps in a future comment.

Each one had a great sense of balance and responsibility.

Each one was focused on what they could give to others-not what they could get from others.

I have described my Dad a little in this blog beforehand but he remains the greatest mystery to me.
His major principle was self sufficiency. Do it yourself.  Many people have made it their way of life to collect charity from others and that would have been for my Dad the lowest of the low.

Mr Smart had an amazing sense when it came to music and how to instill appreciation of great music into his students. He got his amateur high school orchestra into a state of excellence. I have no idea how. It was just some kind of excitement about him when it came to music and conducting the orchestra.
Reb Shelomo Friefeld  had a grasp of what Torah is supposed to be about and a way of instilling that into others.

And Reb Shmuel really needs to be understood together with his wife Rebitzin Berenbaum. As a team they made the Mir yeshiva in NY into the most phenomenal kind of place I have seen. The spirit of Torah just permeated the place.

But in the face of these really great people, I am at a loss to describe what it was that pushed them over the line from average into greatness.

Today it is hard to find good people, much less great people. But the main thing about each of the people I mentioned is they loved what they were doing, and they were extremely competent, and  had a tremendous excitement about them in trying to instill this into others.

[Sadly enough I knew a great number of con men that acted the parts, but had no substance. It took me too much time and experience and suffering to realize this. To understand the world you live in it is no enough to have great teachers. You need to experience terrible people also in order appreciate the good ones. And book learning can complement this but it does not replace it.

Sitra Achra (Dark Side) and graves of tzadikim

כישוף witchcraft and occult are  areas of Torah Law that are largely forgotten. Amulets, going to graves of tzadikim, doing different rituals to gain spiritual powers seems to be part and parcel of the cult that the Gra signed the  excommunication on. This is to some degree a surprise because these things are expressly forbidden in the Torah.
These things get to be called doing  a mitzvah in the context of the cult that the Gra signed the  excommunication on

To gain mystic powers would seem to be just what Bilaam was about. He was open to God but also open to the Sitra Achra (Dark Side).

The way this is made to be kosher is by a slight of hand. They do not call it כישוף but rather "תיקונים" But the idea is the same. Instead of doing God's will in the Law it is to gain spiritual powers.
And often it works. People would not be having shamans and rituals of this nature for thousands of years if there was not some effect.

People that you expect will stick up for you, never do. The people you least expect help from are the ones that stick their necks out for you.

Sephardim in America were descendants of the Jews that were thrown out of Spain. 

The original Sephardim in America came from Amsterdam. Sephardim means Spanish Jews. These were what would be called today Ashkenazim-- European Jews not from N Africa 


That is not the same as Sephardim today that got mixed with Jews from North Africa. 





The Jews from N. Africa were intermarried with Arabs from the beginning of the Arab conquest of the Middle East. That is the reason Jews like Maimonides from those areas used the term ס''ט ספרדי טהור To show that they could trace their lineage to Jews. [Or to be a little more exact the term was used to show they use trace their male lineage to Jews. The distinction came about because in the beginning of the Arab Conquest Jewish women were taken as wives by Arab men.]

This is also the reason you find the letters  ס''ט after the signature of people like Bava Sali .


i would not make a big deal out if this if not for the fact that Sephardim make a very big deal out of their claim to be the only true Jews.  This seems to be a case of projection.

The way of marriage was rather well defined in yeshiva. At least in Litvak yeshivas. You studied well and the local homeowners when they saw a good guy would offer a date with their daughter.

This was how it was supposed to work in theory. And in the USA in NY that was how things were. The best guys got offers from the Rosh Yeshiva himself. Lesser guys were offered shiduchim from lesser status people.

And how marriage was, it's obligations and responsibilities, was all spelling out in excruciating detail.

In fact it really was humanly impossible to prepare for marriage. You simply could not go through Kidushin, Ketubot, Nida with the Tosphot, Rif, Rambam, Tur, Shulchan Aruch. Maybe superman could have but no normal person could. I had a great advantage that someone in Torah DeDaat had written a short book with the basic information with some easy Lumdut. So you could get a basic idea of the arguments between the Shach and Taz without having to go through the whole third volume of the Shulchan Aruch By Joseph Karo.

The general amount of dating was six dates before a decision was reached. These were often planned for Motzai Shabat [the night after Shabat.]

Along with this was a fervent desire on the side of the guys and the girls to follow the Law of Moses and the Oral Law and to make it work. [The Oral Law was not looked on as a burden by rather as the Background information needed to make sense of the Law of Moses. It was understood that without background information and  a context one can make any text mean whatever she wants.

Why is this relevant? Because today few people have any idea of what marriage is.

Along with this was the understanding the wife would work during the first year and the husband would continue learning Torah for at least a few years. In theory this was supposed to go on forever but in NY guys often began to work about five or ten years after marriage. The main idea was based on the will of the wife. She was in theory a girl who respected Torah and thus would want her husband to learn Torah as she made ends meet with the kollel check and he own work and support from both sets of parents.

So far I am trying not to let any value judgments get in the way. I just want to explain the system. You don't have to agree with it. You just have to understand the mechanics.
This is all just marriage 1.01. Nothing new here.
My purpose in writing this concerns the next step. What went wrong? This next step is really why I began this essay. But now I want to take  a break and think about what went haywire?
After some thought I have to say the problems began when the Stra Achra [dark side =the cult that the Gra signed the  excommunication on ] go in the door. Instead of the basic meme of Torah idol worship was placed at the center. That took the focus off of God and the Law of God

 Dr Kelley Ross asked some questions on Kant in his PhD thesis to show unity of consciousness can not be by synthesis. I am wondering then. It seems to me he must be meaning that consciousness is an epi-phenomenon of the ding an sich. Or something like that. I can not tell.