Marriage in secular USA

Marriage in secular USA and the West has been a bad deal for a long time. It can be assumed that this fact  has been a major factor in in rise of yeshivas that pretend to promote family values.
It  is a simply case of push and pull. The secular world is obviously sick. That is a force to push out. The force to pull in is the way Lithuanian yeshivas used to be in Europe when the stress on family values was real. But transplanting that has not worked.

Thus what I recommend is not to depend on the system anymore. Rather learn Torah and a vocation at the same time and serve in the IDF and do not make excuses.

Avi Preder suggested to me the idea of a "Beit Midrash" (study hall) as opposed to a yeshiva.
That is to say I am not the only one to see that while the yeshivas were idealistic at one time, they were ruined by success.

[I think the Torah alone approach is simply not the best approach from several angles. Though it worked for great people like Rav Shach and Reb Aaron Kotler, it does not seem to produce the high kind of individual you would hope for.

People feel the need for a holy man, a shaman, to intercede. This need people try to use for their advantage for themselves and their yeshivas. They want people to feel good about themselves when they give money that worthy cause. In most cases it is not a worthy cause, but a scam.

"family values."

Yeshiva did have an element of shiduch --finding a good marriage partner involved with it. That was an unspoken incentive. The trouble is the same that caused the downfall of the power of religious authority in the secular world. Abuse of power. It got to be just another scheme to get power of over people by the pretense of "family values." Yeah, right. "Family values" for the head of the dog pack and his buddies. "Eat dirt" for everyone else.
You can see why people  [including me] think they are better off not having religious maniacs telling them what to do.

Muslims to the USA.

Americans were not aware of the problems involved in bringing Muslims to the USA. Most people had visited, "Its a small world after all," [which I have to mention is a song made by Mozart, but not the words.] Americans including myself were very naive about what Muslims are all about. And once a person is in that mind set, it is very difficult to get free of it. (It took a good deal of attacks on my person for me to start getting the message. And even then it took time for the message to start sinking in.)

Ideas in Talmud

I might mention that I never learned Hebrew except a small amount in Hebrew school and Temple Israel in Hollywood when I was a kid. In yeshiva I did not spend any time on Hebrew at all. So some of my writing is the usual Talmudic kind of Hebrew you see in the Rishonim. Other parts are what I learned from the Old Testament which differs from the Hebrew of the Rishonim. And some of it comes from being in Israel. That is just a warning - since you might notice my style of writing varies. It is not two people writing. It is one person --that is I.

[The most obvious example is I take things like שנה to be feminine because of the Old Testament. שדה I take to be masculine. ]
Here is the link to the book  on Talmud and also to the book I wrote before that on Bava Metzia

Ideas in Talmud

Ideas in Bava Metzia


My main focus is as you can see in trying to understand Tosphot.
Rav Shach has a focus on Maimonides  and that kind of focus started with Reb Haim HaLevi [The Brisker Rav].

an authentic Lithuanian yeshiva

Therefore I should explain what yeshiva was when it was idealistic. The basic idea was you would sit and learn Talmud from about 18 years old until some father of a daughter would come into the yeshiva and ask the rosh yeshiva [teacher] who would be a good match for his daughter. Then 6 dates would be set up between the two on Saturday night. After 6 dates  an announcement was made.
After the marriage the son in law would be supported by his parents and then her parents alternatively.
He would continue to learn Torah.
The community would be surrounding the yeshiva and it would be isolated from the outside would by invisible barriers, mental barriers,- rules that were eagerly accepted and loved. The rules were voluntarily accepted by all and followed by all. The rules were the Torah-the oral and written law of God. And the ideal was to learn Torah all one's life. Learning Torah was the life goal.

After some years the young man would begin to work at some job.


What happened to change all this? Success.  When an organization is successful and there is money and power, then the people at the top tend to be the most materialist in direct opposition to the kinds of people that started the whole thing. Greed and corruption got to be the norm. It is like the Olympic committee that gets all the perks. The country that hosts it looses money. So Norway simply turned down the opportunity to host the Olympics.



Though in its pristine form the system should work well. It did not for me. So I am hesitant to recommend a return to it. For me no one helped find my wife. She came running to NY to get me. The only thing people at the top did was to try to ruin my marriage when they got the chance.
So the yeshiva world certainly has gone down in quality. Thus my present day recommendation is the Beit Midrash--an informal place to learn Talmud with no official aspects at all. Simply a place for learning Gemara for whom so ever wishes to learn Gemara. I was hoping to do this on my own but that did not work very well. I can not seem to even make my own small a place into a place of Torah. Still I can hope to encourage others.
That is all I am saying is this. Even if the whole world has turned  Torah into a business, still one can by himself learn Torah for its own sake.

[What I am saying here is a lot really depends on your own situation. If you have an authentic Lithuanian yeshiva in your area that as far as you can tell are learning Torah for its own sake and not for money then by all means join in. But if there is nothing like that are perhaps the places that are near you seems to be either all about using Torah to make money or perhaps are insane asylums as many yeshivas are, then it is best to learn Torah at home. Learning at home should at least in theory be easy. All you need is a Gemara  and a book of Musar.]

The Cold War

There were more than a few incidents in which individual soviet soldiers decided not to launch a nuclear strike against the USA, though the circumstances warranted it. I think there were occasions in which the officer involved was demoted.

There also was caution on the side of the USA. President Eisenhower was being urged to launch a nuclear strike against the USSR by the Secretary of the Navy, but instead decided to begin the U-2 program to see what the Soviets were up to. That showed him that, in fact, the Russian were not preparing any kind of invasion or launching of missiles. My Dad was the leader of one the teams that developed the cameras for the U-2.


The other incident in which the officer was ordered to launch missiles against the USA if he saw a missile launch against the USSR, and he decided not to launch. He was demoted. (He had seen only one missile on the screen, and decided it was a computer glitch. He though if the USA wanted to attack why would they launch just one missile?

S18 A Minor

s-18 A minor