Uman Rosh Hashanah.I am pretty impressed with Reb Nachman

Uman Rosh Hashanah. The main reason yeshiva students come to Uman is for the Russian girls. I can't disapprove. After all Russian girls are pretty. But no one should have an idea as if this is some kind of mitzvah, And though Reb Nachman was a great tzadik, still no one of the groups that worships him can be considered to be keeping the Torah in any sense.

The trouble is the whole thing seems ambiguous. No one gets involved with it without getting some kind of state of delusions along with it.


I am pretty impressed with Reb Nachman himself I admit. But the people in Breslov are nightmares.

Dr Kelley Ross "Chief among the limits imposed on war is the principle that civilians are to be separated from combatants. This serves to limit the suffering to be endured by those, the non-combatants, who have not overtly been engaged and prepared to participate in war. A strong motivation for such provisions came from the experience of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), when armies not only lived off the land, taking the food and fodder they needed for the armies to survive and function, but they actively looted the land, even torturing and murdering peasants and tradesmen in the hope of finding hidden money and other valuables. To separate civilians from combatants, three things are essential:  (1) combatants must be easily recognizable, which means they are in distinctively military uniforms, in obviously military conveyances (including naval warships), or otherwise wear something to distinguish them as soldiers; (2) combatants target only other combatants and not civilians; and (3) combatants do not hide or mix themselves among civilians while continuing to fight, which would require that the enemy, to fight back, cannot avoid injuring the civilians" The problem in Israel is none of these conditions apply. Arabs militants wear nothing that distinguishes them from Arab civilians. Arabs target Israeli civilian populations. Arabs hide and mix among civilians while continuing to fight. "Like spies, irregular combatants, out of uniform, who cannot be distinguished from civilians, cannot expect any protection from the privileges afforded to proper prisoners of war. They can be shot.  "So, when civilians enter combat, they can neither expect to be treated as civilians, which they no longer are, nor to be treated as proper soldiers, which they have not become. If civilians wish to be separated from combat and be treated accordingly, they must behave as civilians. Otherwise, they warrant the fate of those who seek to evade the laws of war or seek advantage through deception." Added to this is an optimistic argument that the idea of nationalism is gaining ascendancy nowadays. This seems to be a good thing as Howard Bloom makes clear in his book, the Lucifer Principle. If so then this provides a strong argument for Israel, and for the idea that Muslims do not belong there. It is not their land. Never was and never will be.

Simply learning and keeping Torah

1.) According to Kant there are areas of reality that human reason can not venture into, and if it does, it gets caught in self contradictions. This area he calls unconditioned reality.
2) But we do have access to unconditioned reality by ways other than reason. That is through a kind of knowledge that is not reason and it is not felt or sensed.
3) My story has to do with how I came into contact with this kind of knowledge.
4) I was reading a little about Wyatt Earp and realized that 30 seconds of his life defined his entire life--everything leading up to it and everything afterwards. That was the gun fight at the OK Corral.

And I realized that it is not always up to a person to choose his life's meaning. All you can do is accept it and try to be worthy. I saw this also when I was reading the trial of Joan of Arc.

5) So I thought to put down briefly the basic story.It seems to me that it really started with yeshiva in NY. I felt some kind of force drawing me there to the degree that even though my parents were against it (and I loved my parents dearly), I simply had to go and learn in a Litvak yeshiva. I think today that those years of intense study of Gemara helped to prepare me.
6) I got married while still in the Mir Yeshiva in NY.
7) After some years I decided to go to Israel
8) Right when I got off the plane and breathed my first breath of the air of Israel I could feel it.
9) When we got to Safed the next day everything started lighting up.
10) Then there was some kind of cleansing process for  a few months and then the Divine Presence hit me like  tidal wave.-that both my wife and I felt, and I think my children also.
11) What I think this means is that: simply  learning and keeping Torah in the most simple way leads to the Divine Presence. No intermediates are necessary, No mystic intentions. Just simple Torah and being in Israel.
12) After about seven years I simply could not take it anymore and decided like Yona the Prophet to escape the Presence of God.
13) And would have been that,-- if not that the daughter of Bava Sali, Avigail Buso reminded me of my destiny. [She was thinking mainly about the path of Musar of Reb Israel Salanter and the Tur, Beit Yoseph and Reb Chaim Soloveitchik and his students like Reb Shimon Shkop and Rav Shach and  the other gedolai Lita. That is it in a nutshell.
14) Therefore, I have mentioned on this blog the importance of learning Torah in a Litvak (Lithuanian) yeshiva where Torah is learned for its own sake along the lines of simply learning and keeping the Law of Moses -the Oral and Written Law. Nothing more or less.

There are issues in my life that are inherently ambiguous. After high school I went directly to a great yeshiva in NY of Reb Freifeld. Without that I highly doubt if I ever would have "been able to learn," or to reach any understanding of authentic Torah. Still my parents wanted me to learn a vocation along with Torah and thus this move did not please them. This issue still underscores my ambiguity about this issue until this very day. [It is not that in principle I could not have attended Brooklyn College at the same time--as people were doing anyway in Chaim Berlin. It is rather that Shar Yashuv was very far from Brooklyn College and also I can see today I needed a few years of Torah alone in order to get anywhere. Divided attention would have I am afraid to admit that I would not have gotten anywhere in anything,

Still there are many issues that are related and hard for me today to figure out.Being far from my parents I think was bad for me and for them. I think I lost a lot I could have learned from them, Still as I read in the Torah right after I got to yeshiva that God placed the fiery angels to guard the path to the Tree of Life--that one has to go through hell to get to Torah. And later I saw that also in the two books on Talmud that God granted to me to write. It was with an enormous amount of pain and difficulties that it seems I needed to go through in order to merit to write anything decent in Torah thought. 

do it yourself kind of guy

I have always been a do it yourself kind of guy and thus I recommend to others. If you want a place to learn Torah and the local synagogue is too politicized, then get yourself an Avi Ezri of Rav Shach and take a piece and work on it at home. Get Gemara and Musar, and do not depend on the local place which is likely to have too many bad influences. 

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