Ideas on Bava Metzia page 14

Ideas in Shas  Ideas in Bava Metzia ch 8 and ch 9

In בבא מציעא we find that the רב said that in a case where one has bought something from a thief and the property returns to  the owner, that the buyer  gets the money he paid for it from the thief and the improvement also. רש''י explains that this is a case in which the original property was already improved and the thief damaged the property. So the original owner is getting back the property with zero improvement.  תוספות explains that the case is simply that the property was empty and the buyer improved it, and so when רב says the גנב pays back the שבח, it is a simple case of his giving back the improvement, and the original owner gives back the investment to the buyer.

The idea of תוספות is that this is not any different from a case where a person goes into someone else's field and plants it. In such a case the owner pays the הוצאה, או את השבח which ever is less.
This all seems simple and plain. Now this is also the way the פני יהושע understands this and it seems like there is no need of any explanation.

The problem here arises when we look at בבא קמא page צ''ה ע''ב. It looks like this entire subject in בבא מציעא is going according to the opinion of רבי מאיר over there, and against רבי יהודה and רבי שמעון. That seems absurd on the face of it.   רבי מאיר is the one person who holds that improvement goes back to the original owner with the stolen object, not רבי יהודה or רבי שמעון. But if you try to explain the subject in  בבא מציעא as if it was going like the law in בבא קמא , you encounter major problems. Some of these problems were noted by the פני יהושע, but there is  a  question  that seems to me to be even more powerful that the questions the פני יהושע raised. The fact is that שמואל is the person that argues with רב in בבא מציעא דף י''ד and he says  the buyer does not get back the improvement. If you try to explain this according to רבי יהודה it makes no sense. Of course he does not get back the improvement  because no one took it from him in the first place!
In short, the whole subject in  בבא מציעא seems to be going completely like רבי מאיר and we know from עירובין that this is simply impossible. When there is an argument between רבי מאיר and or רבי שמעון with רבי יהודה the law always is like רבי יהודה.

) בבא מציעא דף י''ד. בבבא מציעא אנו מוצאים כי רב אמר כי במקרה שבו אחד קנה מגרש מגנב ואחרי  חזרת הרכוש לבעלים, שהקונה מקבל את הכסף ששילם עבור אותו מגרש מהגנב ואת השיפור גם. רש''י מסביר כי מדובר במקרה שבו הנכס המקורי השתפר ביד הקונה אחר שהגנב היזק את הרכוש. אז הבעלים המקורים מקבלים בחזרה את הנכס עם אפס שיפור. תוספות מסביר כי במקרה הוא פשוט כי הנכס היה ריק והקונה שפר אותה, ולכן כאשר רב אומר הגנב משלם בחזרה את השבח, זה מקרה פשוט של  חזרת השיפור לקונה שעשה את השיפור,  והבעלים המקוריים יחזירו את ההשקעה לקונה. הרעיון של תוספות הוא שזה לא שונה מכל מקרה שבו אדם נכנס לשדה של מישהוא  ונטע הצמחים. במקרה כזה בעלים משלם את ההוצאה, או את השבח איזה שהוא פחות. כל זה נראה פשוט ורגיל. עכשיו זה גם האופן שבו הפני יהושע מבין את זה. הבעיה כאן מתעוררת כאשר אנו מסתכלים על בבא קמא דף צ''ה ע''ב. זה נראה כמו כל הנושא בבבא מציעא הולך לפי דעתו של רבי מאיר שם, ונגד רבי יהודה ואת רבי שמעון. זה נראה אבסורדי על פניו. רבי מאיר הוא האדם היחיד אשר גורס כי שיפור חוזר לבעלי המקורי עם החפץ הגנוב, לא רב יהודה או רב שמעון. אבל אם אתה מנסה להסביר את הנושא בבא מציעא כאילו שזה הולך כמו החוק בבא קמא, אתה נתקל בבעיות גדולות. חלק מהבעיות הללו צוינו על ידי הפני יהושע, אבל יש שאלה שנראית לי להיות אפילו יותר חזקה  מן השאלות שהפני יהושע הרים. העובדה היא כי שמואל הוא האדם שמתווכח עם רב בבבא מציעא דף י''ד והוא אומר הקונה אינו מקבל את השיפור. אם אתה מנסה להסביר את זה על פי דעתו של רבי יהודה זה לא הגיוני. כמובן שהוא לא נחזיר את השיפור כי אף אחד לא לקח את זה ממנו מלכתחילה! בקיצור, כל הנושא בבבא מציעא נראה שהולך לגמרי כמו רבי מאיר ואנחנו יודעים בעירובין כי זה פשוט בלתי אפשרי. כשיש ויכוח בין רבי מאיר לבין רבי שמעון או עם רבי יהודה החוק תמיד הוא כמו רבי יהודה. יש לומר יש חילוק בין מגרש לחפץ המיטלטל.

For some reason this whole piece was not in either book as far as I could tell so I put it into the Ideas on Shas just now Sept 7  2016. I can't remember if there was some reason I left it out.

After thinking about it it occur to me I might have left it out because it seems trivial.

The literal meaning of Torah פשט הפשוט

The idea of going straight to the Torah [the Five books of Moses and the Old Testament]  is not a bad idea. I think a lot of doubts can be settled that way.This does not mean there is not a need to solve contradictions. Contradictions in metaphysical reality seems to be part of the nature of reality as Kant saw.

What we see in practice is a lot of what goes on is contrary to the Law of God but people have ways of excusing  it by finding some verse that they say is ambiguous and making a explanation that contradicts the plain meaning of the text. The reason is people are attracted to the ugly and profane and sexual sin and want to hear that it is OK and so find some verse to support them.

It seems that Saul was in fact interpreting the word of God.  It was not the same as simple disobedience.

If you look at the actual verses it seems Saul thought he had obeyed the word of God because that is how he interpreted  it. It was not simple disobedience. It was first- interpret. And then to imagine that  he fulfilled it.

I would like to name  this sin, "the sin of interpretation." חטאת הפירוש

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. ]

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

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