The result of "Torah alone" studies is usually bad.

Keeping out secular studies was the major factor in most yeshivas and it still is in the ultra religious world. To some degree this is very justified because of social studies and the humanities which are mainly garbage. Especially that mentally sick demon, Psychology.

But the result of "Torah alone" studies is usually just as bad,- or worse. It tends to creates sanctimonious, jerk offs. [That is "holier than thou" people. You know the type.] For this reason, I just have not been able to recommend "Torah alone" as a legitimate program.

My ideas is to have balanced program Math, Physics, Music, Gemara, Musar, Survival skills.


Though I realize the great importance of learning Torah, I just can not recommend it by itself, but only in balance.
[I had seen the Torah alone approach in Israel among the ultra religious. This did exist in NY also to some degree in the Mir. But I rarely saw any good in this approach and it certainly was not what the books of Musar from the middle ages were saying. Later  Musar itself become anti secular studies but that were definitely against the original set of Musar books like the חובות לבבות and the מעלות המידות.]

I fail to see in "holier than thou" people anything worthy of admiration.

[I suspect part of the motivation to be so much against learning things like Math and Physics stems from the fact that they tend to show that many of  those that may know some aspects of Torah are not smart. Knowing some aspects of Torah is relatively easy, while Math and Physics are basically hard. If the natural sciences were part of  Torah education then many people could not pull off the scam they they do by seeming to be smart and spreading the word around  that- if you know Torah well somehow that makes you the top of the pack and from the top shelf..]

female empowerment. Every society that has tried female empowerment has died. Tellingly no society with empowered women has lasted more than 3 generations.

from this link

The reality is that female empowerment has reared it’s head throughout human history (most notably at the end of the Roman empire). Empowering women is one of the cycles of human existence, and it always follows the same pattern;

1) a society becomes wealthy and importantly, safe.
2) the men, unchallenged, become weak.
3) the women’s hypergamous instinct is triggered. The women start to doubt their men’s ability to protect them.
4) women initiate a society wide shit-test – pushing for economic, political and societal freedoms.
5) the men, anesthetized by decades (or more) of women behaving decently grant women their freedoms.
6) the women, free of boundaries, behave in an ever more feral manner, desperately trying to provoke the men to push back, to reset the boundaries, to prove their strength, to lay to rest the hypergamous doubt.
7) the men, ever more disgusted by their women’s behavior disengage from women, and in so doing disengage from society, working less, producing less, offering less protection.
8) societal collapse or reset, usually precipitated by a trigger event – maybe a natural disaster, economic collapse, foreign invasion etc.

Sometimes these resets are mild, sometimes they are severe. And they are technology agnostic. Whatever technology of the time is co-oped by the women as a force multiplier. But there is a case to be made that this instinctive hypergamous instinct in women is what keeps humans moving forward, never resting on our laurels, continually de- stabilizing human societies when we get a bit lazy.

How many generations does it take to tear it down. Back in the 1930's a professor at Oxford and Cambridge – J D Ulwin – set out to prove how female equality would benefit society. He didn't find what he expected to find and to his credit he published his findings. He studied 85 societies and  found that whilst not every society that has died has had female empowerment, every society that has tried female empowerment has died.

Tellingly no society with empowered women has lasted more than 3 generations. The young women entering the smp today are, broadly, the third generation. The whole cluster.. of feminism will implode on their watch. Plan accordingly

Every woman has a lifetime allotment of NO.

Each time she says it or implies a no via rudeness or cruelty uses up her store.
Then one day she hits the last No and the MAN flips the switch.
 She is beyond her quota. She is of no importance.

And its not retrievable by being nice. It is a paradigm shift. a solid impression.
Just as the wife goggles gave her the bank of NO, that made him put up waiting for the nice girl inside he knew was there.

Once the bank is dry the goggles are smashed replaced by a new set. A cast iron impression on one thing and one thing only. SELFISH BITCH.

A man is programmed to sacrifice, to endure for others. What can be the ultimate unforgivable in that mindset….Selfishness.

So one that selfishness arises once past the last NO, he then sees all she has done, all the NOs in a new light, of selfishness. And forever more she is a SELFISH BITCH.

Thus not worth his time. In fact not worth even looking at. and so
SHE CEASES TO EXIST….FOREVER.

 Its not a slow slide or a NO gauge winding down.
It is sudden. Immediate. Irretrievable.

How many generations does it take to tear it down. Back in the 1930s a professor at oxford and cambridge – J D Ulwin – set out to prove how female equality would benefit society. He didnt find what he expected to find and to his credit he published his findings. He studied 85 societies and (to summerise) found that whilst not every society that has died has had female empowerment, every society that has tried female empowerment has died.

Tellingly no society with empowered women has lasted more than 3 generations. The young women entering the smp today are, broadly, the third generation. The whole clusterfuck of feminism will implode on their watch. Plan accordingly

from this link

s30 B flat major   [s30 in midi format]

s30 in nwc format

Cuckolding

Cuckolding  is in fact very serious. It comes under the category of ניאוף. [adultry]The definition of adultery in the Torah is sexual intercourse with a married woman or a betrothed woman by anyone other than her husband.   It makes the woman forbidden to her husband. The children are ממזרים bastards, [and can not marry an Israelite woman]. If the act is done in front of two witnesses there is the death penalty for both the adulterer and adulteress. [Leviticus 18 and 20]

Gentiles are entirely unaware of this. They try to piece together  a coherent idea of what the Torah holds based on random readings and scraps from place to place. Clearly that can not work.They do this based on Luther. That was a reaction to the problem that the Catholic church which had started out sincere and  had become a self perpetrating bureaucracy. So on one hand he was doing a good thing- but it left a lot of misunderstandings. Since then it has been up to debate what the simple meaning of any verse is. How the individual wants to understand it? How the author meant? How the people reading it thought it meant when it was written? Etc.

The rise and fall of Navardok yeshivas.But besides the great Litvak yeshivas in NY, the system has become a self perpetuating bureaucracy.

I mentioned a few times some critiques on the yeshiva system nowadays. These institutions started out sincere and great based on Reb Chaim from Voloshins's model of separating the yeshiva from the "Kahal" and authority of the local religious authorities. [Before that the local yeshiva was simply the local synagogue where teenagers learned during the day and the local home owners put them up with a place to sleep and meals].

But besides the great Litvak yeshivas in NY, the system has become a self perpetuating bureaucracy.
So Avi Preder suggested a return to the basic Beit Midrash Model, [i.e., study hall model].

Based on what I have seen and heard from many people, this makes sense.  Too many people have been burnt by the system as it is in place today.

So what I suggest is a "Musar Beit Midrash." That is a kind of permutation from the "Musar Yeshiva" to a Musar Beit Midrash where the main emphasis is development of good character.

[This all came up because I was thinking about the rise and fall of  Navardok yeshivas and thinking about the amazing effect they had on the students that learned in them.]



[I am I admit not sure how this would work in Israel. The Ponovitch yeshiva which is the greatest yeshiva in the world still goes by the old yeshiva model, and that might be the only practical way to go about things in Israel itself.]


[But what would happen if you don't pay people to learn Torah? All the yeshivas would empty out. I say that is a good thing. The only people then that would learn Torah would be the ones that do it for its own sake. Torah Lishma.]

s29 G Major

s29 G Major  s29 in midi format

So who do you trust to have a true and clear idea of what the Torah says? The Rambam or them?

On a related not to the previous blog entry I wanted to add that books that claim to be teaching the worldview of Torah are almost always teaching their worldview in the name of Torah.

After all people smart enough have already done the job of telling us the basic השקפה thought structure of the Torah--the Rambam and Saadia Gaon. And there is no book on השקפה today that agrees with anything they wrote. In the religious world, no one dares touch the Guide For the Perplexed of the Rambam or the אמונות ודעות of Saadia Gaon because the world view of the religious world is in fact directly opposed to everything the Rambam wrote in the Guide and Saadia Gaon.

So who do you trust to have a true and clear idea of what the Torah says? The Rambam or them?

And it is not as if the Rambam is hard to understand. The trouble is that he is infinitely easy to understand. The religious just don't like what he has to say.