the religious are crazy

My opinion about Israel is that it is important, but hard to make it there. I don't write about it because I have nothing new to say. I cherish every minute I merited to be there. The people that are against the State of Israel are  insane.


I had a great time when I was there and I felt what I could only describe as a tremendous spiritual light while there.

But what makes it so hard? I am really not sure. I think there was a kind of period of awakening when Bava Sali was alive. After that the עת רצון "time of grace" disappeared.

The best advice now is to learn the Oral and Written Law, and wait for God's grace to return.

We actually see in the Torah the major concern of God is to keep the Torah. Issues about Jewish identity or nationality do not come up there.

My major opinion about Israel is not based on Rav Kook. I never got into his books, though I briefly saw a few paragraphs on an I-phone my learning partner showed me.

My opinion is based on Reb Moshe Feinstein and Reb Aaron Kotler. Both said the same thing. דינא דמדינה דינא "the law of the country is the law." [Tractate Bava Batra chapter 3 חזקת הבתים]

That is neither saw it as some grand metaphysical goal to have  a state. But neither did they consider it bad as Reb Joel did. That is it has the status of any legitimate country.They did not think nationalism is a substitute for keeping the Oral and Written Law.
But they did not see it as a bad thing. That is: the religious are crazy. The make a mitzvah out of being dirty anti-Semites. No better than Nazis. Rather it is  a mitzvah to stay away from them.

The גמרא does give rules to how to decide a law. The trouble is these rules often conflict. Going by the majority is one rule in rare places.

The גמרא does give rules to how to decide a law. The trouble is these rules often conflict. Going by the majority is one rule in rare places.

I have mentioned some of these rules before in other essays. For example the list of sages of the משנה has an order. רבי יוסי comes first then רבי יהודה etc. A משנה with no name סתם משנה is considered the law. The trouble is often this conflicts. For example money in a doubt חולקים is  of the סתם משנה  with no name. Therefore it should be the law. But in a ברייתא it is said in the name of סומכוס against the חכמים so it is not the law except in one case where the רמב''ם brings in  a certain case.

Therefore it is best to have a session in the טור בית יוסף get a good idea in each place how the law is decided. 


The main thing is not to ask anyone's opinion but to do the learning yourself so you know what the Torah requires of you. Or to go to a legitimate Litvak yeshiva and ask the Rosh Yeshiva

Reb Chaim Chidushei HaRambam

I do not have a Reb Chaim Chidushei HaRambam  But it occurred to me that Bava Metzia pg 14 would be  a good place to use his idea of "zvei dinim." Two laws.

That is you have a lender borrower and one who bought one field from the borrower and then a later person. To Tosphot in the second answer he holds the lender would have to go after the second field. The reason would be because of zvei dinim. That is we know the lender can't go after sold property when free property is viable {bnei horin} So when the second field is sold and becomes the second sold property does ten lender collect from it because the power of collecting from free or sold property is one law. Just that there is an order to which one. Or is it two laws? If it is two laws then a new law now applies to the second property and the lender would have to go after the first field which preceded in its obligation.

It seems like a perfect place for this idea to apply! Anyone have a Reb Chaim to see if in fact he says something like this?

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בבא מציעא י''ד ע''ב would be  a good place to use the idea of שני דינים של רב חיים הלווי

That is you have a מלווה לווה and one who bought one field from the borrower and then a second buyer . To תוספות in the second answer of אפותיקי he holds the lender would have to go after the second field. The only reason he goes after the first is because it has been made an אפותיקי. The other answer of תוספות that he goes after the first field because כבר חל שיעבודו עליו means he has collect his debt from the first field


The reason would be because of שני דינים. We know the lender can't go after sold property משועבדים when free property בני חורין is available.  So when the second field is sold and becomes the second sold property, does the lender collect from it because the power of collecting from בני חורין or משועבדים is one law. Just that there is an order to which one. Or is it two laws? If it is two laws, then a new law a new חלות now applies to the second property and the lender would have to go after the first field which preceded in its obligation.

בבא מציעא י''ד ע''ב יהיה מקום טוב להשתמש ברעיון של שני דינים של רב חיים הלווי


כלומר יש לך מלווה לווה ואחד שרכש שדה אחד מהלווה ולאחר מכן קונה שני. תוספות בתשובה השנייה של אפותיקי הוא מחזיק שהמלווה יצטרך ללכת אחרי השדה השני. הסיבה היחידה שהוא הולך אחרי הראשון היא כי זה כבר נעשה אפותיקי. התשובה האחרת של תוספות כי הוא  גובה מן השדה הראשון כי כבר חל שיעבודו עליו  לכן הוא גובה את חובו מן שדה הראשון. הסיבה תהיה בגלל שני דינים. אנחנו יודעים המלווה לא יכול לגבות נכס שנמכר (משועבדים) כאשר נכס  חפשי (בני חורין) זמין. לכן, כאשר השדה השני נמכר לרוכש השני , המלווה מחויב  לגבות ממנו בגלל הכוח של איסוף מבני חורין או משועבדים דין אחד. רק שיש סדר. או שזה שני חוקים? אם זה שני חוקים, אז דין החדש חל  כעת חל על הנכס השני, והמלווה יצטרך לגבות משדה הראשון שקדם בחובה.

Space and Time

My own feeling about these things is kind of like Kant  mentioned. That is I think as Kant did there are two levels. One is which space and time are real and that is clear in the kind of experiments we have that test General Relativity like GPS things that you find in taxis. The other level is Quantum Mechanics in which space and time do not exist until they are measured. This in fact seems like something Kant was aware of as noted by Dr Kelley Ross in California.

What is being measured in the two slit experiment does exist. If it did not there would be nothing to measure. But its character as a wave or particle depends on how you measure it-with one slit or two.
This is exactly how Kant described things in themselves-they exist but their existence is unconditioned reality. Their character is however half dependent on them and half dependent on the mind

These two levels of reality are helpful for me in my religious point of view based on the Old Testament (the Oral and Written Law). Often, I have to say some statement in the Old Testament is referring to this hidden level of reality, --not the phenomenal world.  That is this world is conditioned reality while the hidden world is unconditioned reality.

I have on my own understood the Old Testament along these lines for years but did not write about it.

That is what you measure in Quantum Mechanics is expectation values just like you do when learning Probability Theory. That is the bracket notation in Quantum Mechanics is exactly the same thing as the expectation value in Probability. The ket vector is the original state and the bra vector is the final state and the observable is in the middle.

But don't talk to philosophers about any of this. They don't understand this stuff at all and either ignore it and think it is not relevant for metaphysics which they deny exists. Or they get it wrong.

[In plain English you have to have with QM either independent reality or locality. Since we know Locality because of Relativity therefore independent reality has to be thrown out. Simple as pie.]See this talk by Murray Gell-Mann 

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.