Temple Israel in Hollywood

 I should mention that I had a Jewish education from about 5 years old and onward. The only interruption was after my bar mitzvah in Temple Israel in Hollywood. The pressures from school were building up, and there also was some kind of pressure about paying more money monthly to the Temple, and some kind of commitment in order to have my brother Keith "Bar Mitzvahed" there.  So we quit the Temple, and when it came time for Keith's bar mitzvah we found a person from the Re-constructionist movement (Roth). [Kind of like Reform. In some ways more open, and in other ways more interested in tradition.] My parents also were undergoing, as usual, financial strain. My Dad was pretty sure after his project at TRW with satellites and lasers was finished- that he would be laid off so he quit before that.

He did not know it at the time but there was a person in the company that was stealing the secrets of American Technology and selling them to the KGB. That became a book and later a motion picture.

After High School it made sense to me to learn Gemara, so I went to NY to Shar Yashuv of Reb Freifeld, and after that to the Mir in NY. Both amazing yeshivas. The Mir was more interested in Reb Chaim Soloveitchik's kind of learning, and Shar Yashuv was more interested in the type of learning you can see in my two little books on Talmud--"calculating the sugia"

 and delving  into depth about what Tosphot means in his place. 
[I should also mention that I was very interested at the time in learning the Tur, Beit Joseph. I mean the way law is derived from the Gemara. That was in fact my major motivation in going to yeshiva.]


Here are a few ideas I had in learning Talmud [Gemara] for those who might be interested.

Ideas in Talmud

Ideas in Bava Metzia

[These books mainly reflect the kind of learning I was doing in Shar Yashuv.]

PS The only good yeshivas in those days were the Litvak yeshivas in NY (Mir, Chaim Berlin, Torah VeDaat) and Ponovitch in  Bnei Brak and that still seems to be the case. [I have not seen or heard of any exception except perhaps Brisk in Jerusalem.]

Albert Einsten. Why people put him down when they have no idea of what he said or did is beyond me.

The papers in 1905 for Special Relativity and the one laying part of the foundations of Quantum Mechanics are well known.

But I wanted to add, that Einstein's greatness did not end there. 


General Relativity was in around 1916 I think. And although he was criticized for later work still he had an effect on considering implications of Quantum Mechanics which no famous philosophers then or now did. Dr Kelly Ross puts it thus:

"In philosophy, failure to address the implications of Copenhagen Quantum Mechanics amounts to ... professional incompetence. At first, there was enthusiasm that Quantum Mechanics violated causality and thus refuted both Aristotelian and Kantian views of causality. This went along with a grave misreading and misunderstanding of Hume's evaluation of causality. Since causality as the laws of nature (as Hume understood it) is not in the least undermined, but only reinforced, by Quantum Mechanics, this particular fashion has rather died out. 
Meanwhile, ..., most of Bohr's colleagues in physics, like Einstein, Schrödinger, and de Broglie, who, like Roger Penrose, viewed Realism as presupposed by all proper science, were horrified at this metaphysical implication of the Copenhagen Interpretation -- at a time when philosophers, like the Positivists, were busy eschewing metaphysics as beneath serious attention. The first reaction of the philosophers, then, was to pass over the whole business as of no concern. So, as I have noted elsewhere, while Einstein and Kurt Gödel were walking down to the Institute for Advanced Study arguing about Kant, Bertrand Russell found the whole business ridiculous. Philosophy has not done much better, or improved its attitude much, since then. "

Also Einstein's dream finding a way of connecting the four forces did result in combining three forces in the 1960's and later in String Theory in combining all four forces.

Why people put him down when they have no idea of what he said or did is beyond me.

Gra, Reb Israel Salanter and Rav Shach (I.e. Rav Elazar Menachem Shach)

The most important three people in the Torah world that did the best job of explaining the Torah for simple people were the Gra, Reb Israel Salanter and Rav Shach (I.e. Rav Elazar Menachem Shach).

I am not talking in terms of what baali teshva are looking for "spiritual trips." Rather I am referring to the basic need to explain what the Torah asks from us as simple plain Jews that need its set of values and hierarchy of values explained. Without these three people one could take the Torah to mean anything at all, and in fact that is exactly what baali teshuva do.

What each did was reveal an important aspect of Torah, The Gra: learning Torah. Reb Salanter: Midot good character traits. Rav Shach: How to learn.

In plain English what I am saying is that you learn from these three people three important things about Torah: (1) It is very important to learn Torah and avoid Bitul Torah. (2) To be a "mench" good character traits. (3) To learn Rav Shach's, Avi Ezri shows how to learn Torah.

s11

Western women -what is wrong with them?

Here is a nice comment on Dalrock which seems to be pretty clear about the major difficulties that one finds with Western women. Just some background the beginning of his comment he is quoting another comment:

"If you take a shot with the wrong woman, your life could be over….

Your life will be over either way. You will lose the game if you never shoot in basketball.

Yeah, you may miss and turn it over. So what?

I tell you what.

– you’ll get thrown into jail for failing to pay court-ordered child support after losing your job; you’ll get anally raped while your wife gets railed by some alpha lout she found on Tinder, getting his rancid sperm shot into her various orifices

– you’ll be prevented from seeing your children; your slut of a wife will decide to cohabit with some alpha lout, who ends up molesting your children, and that bitch does nothing to stop it

– your passport will be revoked

– your gun permit will be revoked

– you’ll get registered as a sex offender due to a false accusation

– you’ll never find a decent job again

– your house and car will get taken away

But yeah, “so what”, right?"

[link to dalrock]

This seems to be a good argument to marry the rosh yeshiva's daughter if you ask me.

Therefore the best piety is home piety. To learn at home Gemara and Musar and Rav Shach's Avi Ezri. Institution based piety seems to have major flaws.

I was in Shar Yashuv in NY and then in the Mir and in neither place was it very easy to get to meet women. In the Mir there were no official channels for dating. On one hand it was kind of frustrating. But on the other hand it made for a kind of environment where one is motivated to get married.
To meet a girl one usually had to wait until some shiduch was offered by the girl's parents. It was nothing like what is usual in Western Society. But who can say? I generally approve of places for opposites sexes to meet. The more strict approach seems to be too heavy handed to me.

That is I think the real reason for the enlightenment. I think at some-point, people got tired of religious leaders telling them what to do. Especially when it seemed clear those leaders themselves had no idea of the difference between right and wrong. And that situation I think has remained in place. 

Recently I was looking at the trial of Joan of Arc, and it seems to me to reflect very well on exactly why the Enlightenment happened. People got sick and tired of religious authorities and princes acting in ways that were heavy handed, and unjust. 

Therefore the best piety is home piety. To learn at home Gemara and Musar and Rav Shach's Avi Ezri. "Institution based piety" seems to have major flaws. 

NASA projects

My learning partner said the NASA projects like the moon etc were scaled back because they were forced to hire blacks and Muslims that were incompetent and causing disasters. Diversity killed the Mars project.