The group that the Gra put into excommunication is poison.

The group that the Gra put into excommunication is poison.

The toxicity is in the dosage.  When children are constantly inundated with this, the overall effect will be noticeable.  They internalize this as the new normal.

So why are they doing this?

Part of the reason is that religious teachers hate you.  You, the stupid  masses that do whatever you are told, and never question; they despise you in the same way that a rapist hates his victim.  Your unguarded mind is too tempting for them to resist (or so they tell themselves) and it’s your fault for making them do it.

Another part of the reason is that it works.  Every single one of you is a fallen creature in love with sin.  You lust after ugly pornography, you live  through  antiheroes, and deep down you want to rebel against the reality God made. 

So while a Litvak yeshiva  showing off how delicious learning Torah is might raise awareness, its impact is going to fall short of a group that subtly implies something subversive, dark, and sinister.  Part of you loves things that are twisted; they’re just giving you what they want. It is the same reason the group of the Shatz was so successful. You want sin, and you want to be told it's OK.

In the Middle Ages the point of Christian scholarship was to iron out the contradictions plus work out the problems of theology based on the Neo Platonic school.  One such problem was Divine simplicity. The way this was done by Boethius was mainly to stick to Neo Platonism. This was serious work and was not made irrelevant by subsequent people, nor Martin Luther.  The Jewish world faced a similar problem. To iron out the contradictions and meaning of the OT and in the Talmud. Plus similar problems in Theology. In any case, all this is based on one idea. There is no essential contradiction in the word of God. What Protestants do is to ignore all these problems. If a certain verse appeals to one, then he or she grabs it and that is that. Divine simplicity never bothers Protestant at all. All the problems facing the Middle Ages were simply swept under the carpet, not answered.


As about a thousand years of trouble with Divine simplicity did not get very far, Aquinas simply  went to Aristotle following Maimonides.This was very helpful as far as Divine simplicity was concerned but made other problems. Kelley Ross thinks the problems with Aristotle are so great that the logical thing to do was to go back to Plato. [Not that Aquinas or Maimonides could have done that since they were busy working out their system. But later on people when they saw the problems could have simply gone back to a Neo Platonic approach. But in the West that is not what happened. People went into a far more radical empirical-ism than that contemplated by Aristotle. So the Western Judaic Christian  world tends to be pretty secular.
[Dr. Kelley Ross: However, a stricter empiricism again creates the difficulty that the apparent "form" of an object cannot provide knowledge of an end (an entelechy) that is only implicit in the present object, and so hidden to present knowledge.
Curiously, the reaction to this was not immediately a new Platonism or Neoplatonism, but a more extreme empiricism:  The Nominalists overcame the Aristotelian difficulty by rejecting Realism altogether.]


My own feeling about all this is the to learn the Oral and Written Law and take a Neo Platonic approach. I do not think Aquinas was very successful in answering the Divine simplicity problem. Or rather let me say I think the Rambam did a better job by simply sticking with Aristotle and the First Cause. Though I can appreciate the efforts of Aquinas and what he did for natural law but in terms of the NT I think he was simply trying to do the impossible. As long as Paul is part of the NT there can not be any way to get him to correspond to the OT

I have thought that the Left will use violence to stop Trump because of two reasons. (1) Power is their religion. That is they do not have transcendental traditional religious values. Thus they bring to politics all the fervor you would normally find in religious fanatics. (2) I have some interest in Marxism and am aware of some of its doctrines. See some Marxist writings and you too will see that  the tendency is to advocate violence. Plus I saw that these kinds of books were being taught even in the humanities and social studies departments of good universities that I was in like Polytechnic in NY. So in terms of that I have to agree with the previous comment.

See the links to Marx and Hegel on the internet and you will see what I mean

Lithuanian yeshivas

I was thinking in high school that  I did not want to join the rat race and instead wanted to seek for the truth. I am grateful that I was in two very wonderful Lithuanian yeshivas, Shar Yashuv and the Mir in NY. I am eternally grateful to God for guiding my steps towards authentic Torah.





Here are some ideas [not my own] that I saw on a blog called Amerika  and actually reflect closely my own thoughts on jobs and work.

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Often jobs are not actually work and produce nothing of value and often produce the opposite of value e.g. psychologists generally ruin people's sanity and get paid for doing so. 

In  jobs,  little of worth is done. This occurs because most of the assigned activities are pro forma or make believe -work. Most business activities are ill-advised or irrelevant, through the creation of regulatory law.


 In traditional work, the individual learns how the world works and applies himself or herself to tasks and achieving mastery. 

Jobs do the opposite. Jobs reward appearance, not actuality, except in a few rare cases. Even in professional fields, the goal is to keep abreast of what others have done and do the same in a certain specific case, and accountability occurs only when one deviates from the commonly accepted practice, even if results are bad. Doctors lose patients, lawyers loses cases, and architects design junk all the time but so long as these are competitive with what others have established as “safe” minimums, no consequences attach.
_______Here are my thought about this: So what I recommend instead is Torah with Derech Eretz. That is to learn the Oral and Written Law {Old Testament and Gemara and Musar} and that one's work should not be to make money but rather to make something of value and learn somethings of intrinsic value. 
Many in the the Modern religious world value jobs for the sake of money, and that makes no sense to me. Others value Torah only if they can make money from it and that makes even less sense to me. [I have actually heard this from people that were in a kollel. That showed me that there are people that really use the holy Torah as  a means to make money. This to me is really shocking. Even many years later I find this attitude to be extremely vile. ]

s1 D Minor

s1 D Minor Edited. In the final part I used an idea of Mozart to end with 6-8 time

s1 d minor midi file'

s1 D minor nwc file

If it leaves behind it a trail of human trash then you know it is a cult.

My feeling is that the excommunication  {Cherem } that the Gra signed would be valid even if it was not based on objective reality. Besides that I think it did reflect objective reality. That is to say when he identified the groups he put into Cherem [excommunication] with the Sitra Achara [the Dark Side], I think he was correct. Sadly enough I am basing this on evidence and study over a period of many years.

Part of the problem is idolatry. Another aspect of the problem is the claim that their idolatry is in accord with the Law of Moses.  That is a kind of fraud.


I did a great deal of study on this, which is sad- because if I had been smart, I simply would have accepted what the Gra said, and not have wasted years. But the human ruin that that movement leaves behind it ought to give any decent person pause. If it leaves behind it a trail of human trash, then you know it is a cult.

  I am very well aware of their doctrines and teachings. Have nothing to do with them at all. Do not go to their place on Shabat and don't read their books. It is pure Sitra Achra.


  This is why understanding the cultural assumptions tells you a whole lot about the trajectory a culture is on. It’s also important to realize some people can change a culture for generations by either positive or negative actions, given their place. 

But some ask, why did the Gra put a Cherem [excommunication] on the whole movement when not everyone was bad? The answer is that poison got mixed up into it. What if I tell you, " Here’s a box of candy. One of them is poisoned with Ricin, but don’t mind that. Enjoy." Would you eat any?

The laws of Cherem are strict. One that ignores them is also under Cherem. There are difference between types of Cherem and Niduy, but in case of fact the cherem is the most strict. And it does mean one can't sit within four yards of the person nor learn Torah from them.


If others ignore these laws that does not make them invalid.

If one ignores the cherem it is guaranteed he will become infected

It is a kind of deflecting people's interest in fear of God and to redirect it into something that destroys their sanity. While fear of God is a good thing and ought to be pursued by means of learning books of Musar [Mediaeval Ethics], still this desire to be right with God can be hijacked.

To a large degree this happened with me. I was at the Mir in NY and often instead of learning Musar I would learn books from that cult thinking that qualified as Musar.

It took me a long time until I starting noticing the poison contained in them. I needed experience with that cults and also to see the books from the Shatz cult to see from where many of the doctrines were coming from. It would have been better if the Litvish Gedolim [the great Roshei Yeshiva of Lithuanian Yeshivas] had been aware of this from the beginning and warned others, instead of my having to make my way through that filth.

Socrates:

Thoughts on Socrates:

(1) I think some things in human life are constrained. To me it seems Socrates had to do what he had to do and his end had to be the way it was.

(2) It has been argued that  Socrates could have argued that not all laws are created equal. Some laws are for expedience. Some are  expressions of natural law. Some laws are unjust.

(3) Also, I should mention that Socrates was not just bothering the leading citizens of Athens, but  among his followers were people that were traitors to Athens. The court might have been aware of this.