Christianity and the Mystic Rav Avraham Abulafia

Christianity I think is mainly based on Paul, and not Jesus at all.  Jesus himself I see as simply a Jewish saint. And one could go further based on the medieval Mystic Rav Avraham Abulafia and claim he was משיח בן יוסף (messiah son of Joseph) foretold in the Talmud tractate Sukka.

That still would not provide any reason to worship him, as the Rambam makes clear.

[I mean to say that the Rambam made Monotheism clearer by going with Aristotle. In that case the idea of the First Cause is absolutely simple and consistent with Divine Simplicity.]

Appendix

Note (1) I mean to say that Neo-Platonic thought up until the Rambam had enough problems  to cause the Rambam to switch to Aristotle, and Aquinas followed him. I used to think perhaps the reason was Divine Simplicity, but now that I am thinking of it, I realize you can have just as much Divine Simplicity with Neo Platonic thought.

Note (2) Avraham Abulafia's books have been printed in Mea Shearim Jerusalem-or you can buy the whole set on line. When I was researching this topic I had to go through the microfilms with that insane medieval script to see what Rav Abulafia was saying. I should mention Avraham Abulafia was the subject of professor Moshe Idel's (at H.U.) Ph.D thesis and later books. }

Note (3) The subject of Messiah son of Joseph comes up a little in the Zohar, but mainly in Moshe Chaim Lutzatto's Tikunim and the קול התור of the Gra and a drop in the Ari {Isaac Luria}. The Gra's book, Kol HaTor deals mainly with the topic of messiah son of Joseph. Maybe there are more sources that I did not run into.

Note (4) I am not saying this is a topic to spend time on. Mainly it looks to me to be "Bitul Torah" wasting time that could be better spent on learning Torah. But still, in any case, I had I think good reason to get to the bottom of this topic.

Note (5) Sorry. I forgot to mention that Rav Avraham Abulafia was respected by Reb Chaim Vital and the Chida.

Note (6) Rav Abulafia went to debate the pope. He was not happy with the Catholic Church. There were orders to arrest him. No one could lay a hand on him.

Note (7) Rav Abulfia's ideas are brought down in the Remak and also Reb Chaim Vital in detail [in שערי קדושה חלק רביעי].

Note (8) The reason I say that Christianity is based on Paul is that if your take Jesus in his own context there is no claim of Divinity nor nullification of the commandments. These are strictly Pauline doctrines.  That is to say major doctrines of the church have no textual support from the New Testament. The said doctrines contradict what Jesus said openly. They depend only on Paul and yet Paul was writing things that contradicted what the disciples of Jesus had written openly in his name.

I should mention:I grew up in John Birch society area. It was basically WASP and very nice. I kind of had a glimpse of Old American Values, and it was a really nice world.

a Litvak yeshiva

Ideas in Tractate Bava Metzia edited Ch 8 and ch 9.

The best place to learn Torah, if possible, is a Litvak yeshiva [called Litvak because "Litva" is the proper name of Lithuania] It is where yeshivas were real and authentic

That is they were made in order to learn and keep Torah --not schools to turn out people that use Torah for money. This was an argument I had with my parents. They thought yeshivas were really meant as means to make money. I tried to convince them that, "No. Rather their pursuit is to learn and keep Torah." Which of us was right I still do not know.
I would say that Shar Yashuv and the Mir in NY and Ponovitch in Israel are  in fact for Torah "Lishma" (for its own sake.)

The best idea as far as I can tell is to learn a vocation, and not be in a position in which the only way one can make it is by using  Torah.

It is considered that Ponovitch is the best of the Litvak yeshivas, and Rav Elazar Menachem Shach was Rosh Yeshiva there for some time. From what I can tell this is accurate. Brisk also has a great reputation which is probably well deserved. But the best is probably Ponovitch [which includes "off shoots" (branches) like yeshivas founded by people that went to Ponovitch, e.g. Tifrach.]

S23 G Minor

Old Testament

DNA+ Old Testament+ Athens+ Sparta+ Rome = Western Civilization. So the "white thing" is one important factor. Genes and DNA do matter.

Even among Sephardim it was well known that DNA makes a difference. After the Muslim invaded and took Jewish women for wives it was the custom in all Middle East areas to write Samech Tet (Sephardi Tahor) after one's name to indicate that one could trace his ancestry to Jewish fathers before the Arabs invaded. That is one is "pure Spanish" and not mixed with the Jews of North Africa that all had Muslim parentage mixed in.

[I see the Talmud and the as an important part of Western Civilization.


New Testament itself I consider to have some good points and some bad points. The good ones are obvious--that it emphasis important aspects of the holy Torah--compassion. Compassion is something that people like to give lip service to but when in need people know the only place you can go to get help in an emergency is to a Christian. I have experienced this myself and I know I am not alone. [Other people as a rule talk about kindness, but Christians tend to be the ones to do it.]

The Talmud emphasizes the more obvious aspects of the Law of Moses--the actual nitty gritty about how to understand and keep each particular commandment. That is the the Talmud deal with the specifics of the Torah --how to what doe each mitzvah mean in a practical sense. This is also an important aspect of Torah and it is one that Christians ignore completely.

There are people that make a very big deal about keeping rituals that think that because of that they are close to God and the Law of Moses. They are about as from from God and the Law of Moses as it is possible to get.

Nowadays however everything that people look for as a system has to fail. It is something that is part of some Divine plan that the more one believes in some doctrine or in some group that that group will disappoint him and show itself to be the exact opposite of human decency and everything good.

It is called "the Twilight of the gods". So it does not matter what system you believe in. The more you believe in it the more it will disappoint you.


So DNA is one factor but not determinate. People still have free will and there are plenty of memes an paradigms to choose from. And even if one has made a choice to choose a good meme {Like the Bible} there are still plenty of ways of fouling it up.

Best approach that I know of--to be self sufficient and learn math Physics, Gemara, Musar, and survival skills. And the purpose of this learning is all in order to understand and keep the Law of Moses.

I figure the reason two people developed two eyes instead of one is the classical double split experiment. That is: with two slits you get interference patterns. This gives a better idea of distance than one slit where the particles act as particles, not as waves.

The distance between the eyes in proportion to the distance to the object is a trig function. 

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.]