What we are seeing I think is the death of the gods all the "ism"s, capitalism, communism,  and all the cults.
I am looking at this in a global way, but you could take almost any of the ism's. For example the Catholics are headed by a communist pope, and the Protestants have become a kind of Churchianity.
Church now is entertainment of the most superficial type. It is mainly to give sexual stimulus to the alpha male who has all the women listening to his every word. It is mainly geared towards the weakening of the men in the congregation.
The Torah world is no exception. The gods and the yeshivas there died also. It is a global phenomenon.
The main thing that characterizes the world today is disappointment in what ever they believed in.

Family and Home?

There is no incentive for a man to marry anymore. A wife to be proud of? Odds are that she’s in open competition with you for status and won’t submit. Kids? Odds are she’s going to take them away. Sex? When she’s in the mood *maybe*.

Throw in the fact that she’s likely to start the process of taking everything away from you including future earnings, time with your kids and beat you in mental submission through counseling and the like? Why would you want to?

Self sufficiency as the most fundamental principle of my Dad.

This manifested itself in many ways. Mainly it was in showing us how to do things ourselves. And also in not accepting help for anything that you can do on your own. In those days there were no computers so I was only allowed to use a slide rule when I could do the calculations by hand. When we went skiing as a family I was allowed to use the ski lift until I could climb the mountain and ski down on my own with no help. This meant mastering outdoor skills and also plain house keeping skills like sewing. Maybe he called this "self reliance." In any case this must have been the most important principle which he tried to instill in me and my brothers.

It was the exact opposite of communities that teach their children to rely on charity.

Thus while learning Torah is important, he did not agree with being in a situation in which one would end up having to relay on people's charity and be using the holy Torah to make a living as in done in kollels.

He held strongly of learning a vocation.

[I do not hold support of kollel's is a good thing because it is doing kindness for people that would never reciprocate. I do not know why this is but the facts are the facts. Te Sages said one that does kindness for one that does not recognize it is as if he worshiped idolatry.]

s21 F Minor  s21 midi  s21 nwc

trust in God

I have tried to deal with the issue of trust in God  a few times in this blog without much success because it is unclear in my own mind. You can divide the issue into several parts in order to make what is clear and where the problems are.
The simple part is what was going on in the Mir Yeshiva in NY. Learn Torah and God will do the rest. Don't worry about making a living because when you learn Torah for its own sake God will provide.

That part is the simple unambiguous part.

Then there come the later confusing issues when this structure seems to break down.You get to Israel when people "talk the talk" about trust, but in fact spend all their time and effort trying to get charity from rich secular Jews and the State of Israel and then call that "trust in God". Hypocrisy at the highest level.

Then you get to kollel's in the USA when they don't even bother to "talk the talk." There it is all about using "supporting Torah" as if they are geniuses at the RAND Corporation  Think Tank, and are getting paid for their work and services.

To add to the confusion is the history itself of Navardok which made trust their central meme and theme.

This  is a statement of the basic ambiguity that surrounds this issue. The difference between what the Torah says and what people do. People that present themselves as authorities in Torah that are insincere, scum bags that darken the name of Torah.

See Cult behavior:
Kollels certainly are cults.
You are not supposed to make  a living by learning Torah, nor teaching it. And you are not supposed to ask for charity because you are learning Torah. [See the Mordechai in Bava Batra dealing with the problem of even having teachers for children!!! I kid you not. מה אני בחינם אף אתם בחינם

Being unscrupulous is a trait of kollels. Lying to get money.


But the issue still remains how to come to authentic trust in God and to learn and keep Torah for real?

The trouble that I see is very rarely is any religious group anything but a cult. So to be Kosher Yid one really just has to learn Torah on one's own and give up the idea of being part of any group.

My suggestion is to support the places that I recognize as being "LeShem Shamaim" לשם שמים --for the sake of Heaven. I mean there are a few yeshivas that I was very impressed with that I thought were teaching people good values. Those are the Litvak Yeshivas in NY. Chaim Berlin Mir Torah Vedaat Shar Yashuv. I know little about Ponovitch in Israel, but just seeing the book Avi Ezri of Rav Shach shows me that that place must be the Mount Everest of the Torah world.

Jewish people involved in civil rights movements Jewish people involved in civil rights movements

. I also noticed Jewish people involved in civil rights movements and such things that seemed ignore the fact that they were  hurting the white working people (the basic WASP backbone and strength of the USA). I had no idea why the human consequences of such actions were ignored and I still don't. But I simply meant to bring attention that there are Jews  that did not and do not agree. These people are usually not taken as spokesmen for Jews as group. These people are ignored.

Fear of God is a tricky issue. You can't be part of the frum-world [religious world] because most people there is have a schizoid personality problems. That is what makes them religious in the first place. But you can't ignore the importance of the Law of Moses.

My parents found some kind of balance that I have tried to emulate and also suggest to others.
That is in a nut shell, Gemara [Talmud], Musar {Ethics}, Physics, Music, Math and survival skills.
Though in those days there was no term survival skills. It was "outdoor skills," and for that reason they sent me and my brother Keith to be Boy Scouts.

The Physics and Math part of the day should be the first thing in the morning. If you can boil a fresh cup of coffee before you start that can help. And if you have the coffee mixed with  a raw egg that gets rid of cravings for unhealthy food all day.

Don't worry if you do not understand the hard aspects of Physics. Say the words in order quickly and go on as it says in the Talmud לעולם לגרס אינש אע''ג דמשכח ואע''ג דלא ידע מאי קאמר Always one should jut say the words and go on even though he forgets and even though he does not know what he is saying.

[That is for the first few times you read a text. After that I try to say the words forwards and backwards from the end of  section to the beginning, and I based that on the Mediaeval book called ספר היראה and I saw hints to this in the Arizal, and also Reb Moshe Chaim Lutzato.]


Tosphot however is a different story. With Tosphot the best thing is to take one and stay on it repeating it over every day and taking off from there with Tosphot as your starting point. That is you look up all the Gemaras he brings and also the sister Tosphot in other tractates that is parallel to the Tosphot you are doing.

feminism

The world today is different from the one I grew up in. My parents and teachers and friends were wholesome moral and amazing. Something about the world changed.Some shift or consciousness to make  everyone change in someway. It was perhaps more simple for me to see because for  period I had been isolated from the world. When I emerged everything about people and they way they thought had changed in significant ways. It must be like Carl Jung had said about the collective Consciousness.
Very weird and strange doctrines were accepted as normal  that a few years ago would have be dismissed as serve cases of schizophrenia.

I meant feminism and many of the modern ''mishagases''[insanities]. But also something more subtle. People in the USA were looking at many possible solutions to the question "What is Truth?" But the answers had some basis in reality of known experience. It was not common to say  some nice sounding principle and then everything else after that had to fit into that box. Feminism just postulates men and women are equal in everything. And after that everything else has to follow including nature. And if nature does not want to agree, "We will make her agree. We will show Mother Nature who is boss around here. And don't you forget it."

So we get the idea that the sexes are interchangeable. That is juts one area of insanity. Nowadays there are many more. Some religious in nature. Some political. When people have some kind of schizoid personality problem and cant focus their insanity in some religious sphere because of the nature of society they instead do it in regard to politics.