Torah with Derech Ertez [a vocation]

My basic path in a nutshell is to learn The Oral Law, the Written Law, Physics and Math and Aristotle Metaphysics. This is a slight modification of Maimonides. While Maimonides did include the two sets of books of Aristotle The Physics and the Meta-Physics into his program of how to learn Torah he was referring specifically to the books of ARISTOTLE. In my modification of Maimonides I would instead put String Theory and Abstract Algebra and Algebraic Topology instead of Aristotle's Physics.




I should mention that Torah with Derech Ertez [a vocation] was the path of my parents. They did not think that being a position to use Torah for money was a good idea. If I could have done yeshiva in the morning and then learned some vocation in the afternoon they would have been overjoyed but as it was I was in Far Rockaway where the closest college was Brooklyn College and it was a few hours on the subway.  Even my own Rosh Yeshiva Reb Shelomo Friefeld was telling me to go to college.

At the time however I do not know what I would have majored in.  I did not know how to learn Physics in those days in a way that I could do well in it.   Even today years later it takes me a whole long kind of round about way to get anywhere. I have to read the words in order --just saying the words straight and going on. Then after about 50 pages or so I go back reading the last paragraph and then the one before that etc until I get to the beginning of the book. It takes a lot of time.

But just for the record this is what the Rambam advised and my parents and also from what I have seen this makes the most sense. Torah with Derech Eretz.

[I imagine I could have learned Kant or Music, but as it was I was pretty involved with Torah. And I think at least for those years I needed to be involved with Torah all day in order to make any progress at all.]


I also should mention that unless the Rambam had specifically included Physics in the mitzvah of learning Torah, I would not have much motivation for learning it. It is rather the combination of the Rambam along with my parents that convinced me to spend time on it. Otherwise I would have thought it is bitul Torah.

[Bitul Torah is the sin of spending time on anything when you could be spending it on learning Torah. This sin is considered very severe in the Torah and it was certainly a major part of the thinking of the yeshiva world]

One of the best books on Physics I have found to be free. You can find the links on my blog.
As for Musar and Torah the best books of Musar are the Nefesh Hachaim which go into more modern issues like bitul Torah and idolatry. And the Chovot Levavot. But the best idea in terms of Musar is to have a Cheder Musar {Musar Room} like I saw in Netivot. One room that has only Musar books and to get the basic set of Mediaeval Musar and the books of the Gra and the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter.

[I am not saying I have no doubts about this. In fact if I could I would be sitting and learning Torah all the time. Every second. But there were many factors preventing me from this-enough in fact for me t begin to wonder if sitting and learning Torah all day is in fact the best path. But I admit I could be wrong and that the sitting and learning all day is the right thing. I am just saying that for me that path did not work out so well and at some point I found it impossible to follow. So I concluded that the Rambam was right all along. But that might simply mean I was not on the kind of spiritual level necessary to learn Torah all day.]

s4 G major

The barbarians

The barbarians are not at the gates. They are in the gates.

Breaking news out of the town of Ansbach, Germany where authorities have confirmed that a device was responsible for a blast that killed 1 and injured 11 12 at a restaurant near a music festival which may have been the target:

 Suspect in #Ansbach bombing was Syrian refugee denied asylum

The Jewish people are going through a very difficult time with cults and false teachers. There is only one thing that can help now. A Miracle. 

I think it can be said that libertarian-ism and also Marxism had the advantage that they seemed to have intellectual basis. You can't accuse everyone of having bad hearts. No. It must be that they sincerely thought they were on the side of truth and justice. It is only the result of Time showing these movements for the ill-founded delusions of madmen that now traditional Judaic Christian values are on the rise.

It is common among the  Right to look at Marxists as having evil hearts. This seems to me to be unfair. While they are correct for identifying Marxism as  a bad thing, but we have to give people the benefit of a doubt. With the kinds of thinkers involved in that school of thought, we can't assume everyone was trying to do evil.
Rather it was time alone that showed Marxism to be  a poor system. Libertarianism also needed time to sort out the problems in that system.  

Medieval Ethics --Fear of God and instilling good character

The basic approach of Reb Israel Salanter learning the books on Medieval Ethics --the Musar movement- was directed towards Fear of God and instilling good character. But there is a side benefit that I found very helpful for myself in Musar. The basic set of books helped me get a general idea of the world view of Torah.  That is to say I realized that the Torah had a world view. The Torah is not an empty bottle you can put any worldview into that you want to. But I was not clear about what it is. The "Paradigm."  The benefit of Musar --at least for me-was to get a clearer view of how the Torah looks at the world and human life and everything else. It helped clarify many issues. Of course it also was saying things I did not want to hear. But that is what character correction involves--hearing things that you do not want to hear.

But I also realize there are more modern issues that came up after the original set of Musar books was written. Thus I found the Nefesh Hachaim from a disciple of the Gra to be very helpful.

I did notice in Israel that some people still take the idea of the Musar Movement seriously. For example in Netivot, I saw the yeshiva of Rav Montag  had an actual "Musar room" --the first time I had ever seen such a thing.
I also heard from Shimon Buso [a grandson of Bava Sali] and the daughter of Bava Sali, Avigail Buso a lot about the importance of Musar. But that was really just confirming what my impression already was about the importance of Musar. [The daughter of Bava Sali also mentioned to me about the importance of the books of Joseph Karo, i.e the Tur with the  Beit Joseph etc. ]
 There is also a promise of healing [physical and spiritual] that Isaac Blazzer said in the beginning of his book אור ישראל which he brings from the Rambam.

I imagine some people feel they are born perfected, and thus do not need to hear rebuke. But for the rest of us mere mortals, this seems to me to be the best way to go about character correction.

Why you   might ask is all this necessary? Why not just open up the Old Testament and see what it says? The reason is that any text without background is infinitely under-determined. It can mean anything you want. See John Searle in his theory of the Background and Kelley Ross's critique in which is shows the importance of John Searle's idea.

[This is relevant for anyone who cares about the Torah. The truth is without the background, it is radically undetermined. The nice thing about the Middle Ages was that understanding in a complete and logically rigorous way the entire written and oral law was of the greatest importance for people. So the books of Musar then were written with the whole picture in mind.  ]

Munich

The motive was clear. It was to kill infidels. They were to him “foreigners.” This was done in the name of a false god. How much clearer could it possibly be?