People go through all kinds of problems,

People go through all kinds of problems, psychological or relationships etc. Depressions, OCD etc. I do not know why. I can imagine a bad childhood may have something to do with some of it. 



Still whatever the reasons are there must be a way to break out of it. 
The best way I can figure out  at this point is to develop a connection with some Lithuanian kind of yeshiva where Torah is learned for its pwn sake and to join in as much as possible and also to learn Musar.  That is to say I think there is "numinous " power in Torah learning that can correct many problems   But it has to be authentic Torah from the side of holiness for this to work. Therefore it seems to me best to learn a little Gemara and a little Musar every day either by yourself or in some kind of Litvak Yeshiva situation. I hope this will in itself solve your other problems. 

"Learn how to learn.The problem nowadays is-- in Torah, very evil people claim to be experts. Therefore you have to have someone either from the Ponovitch Yeshiva in Bnei Brak itself, or some authentic Litvak yeshiva.

At some point you ought to "learn how to learn." I am not all sure how this could work in your preset situation and schedule [i.e. most people need to learn a vocation or are already involved in their vocation]. The best thing I would imagine would be to start a kind of "iyun shiur"[in depth session] as it is called on your own. Maybe with just one essay from Rav Shach or just one page of Gemara and working on it on your own.  But the way this would work I think would be you would need one Gemara [like Bava Metzia or Ketubot] and a few Rishonim and Achronim like R. Akiva Eiger. With the proper materials and books you could probably do it on your own. 

The problem seems to be that most people are not in walking distance from any kind of authentic Lithuanian yeshiva. So the only way most people will ever be able to learn Torah is by doing it on their own [and staying away from people that are pretending to teach Torah, but are actually demons as Reb Nachman mentioned in the Lekutai Moharan Volume I:12] [The trouble is the vast majority of people that claim to be teaching Torah - are teaching the Torah of the Sitra Achra (the Dark Side).]


Maybe it is a matter of taste but in yeshiva, I was not ready for Reb Chaim Soloveitchik kind of things, and instead did a lot of Pnei Yehoshua and Maharsha. The issues the later achronim and the achronim starting with Reb Chaim and going up until Rav Shach are very different and deal with very very different kinds of issues. I feel both are important.
Today I would have to say the Reb Chaim et al. up until Rav Shach are more important. But I can not explain why. The main thing is that Reb Chaim deals with more fundamental issues.

In a lot of places I have seen a tendency to skip what is called "לחשבן את הסוגיא" "to calculate the sugia (subject)." --to work out in exact detail what Topphot is saying  before jumping into lamdanut ("global issues " that is how the sugia relates to other places in Shas). This is something that is ignored nowadays, but it is something that Reb Chaim and all the achronim assumed people were doing on their own. Nowadays it is almost completely skipped.

[The first thing you show up to yeshiva is they tell you to get your own copy of the basic rishonim, the Tosphot HaRosh, the Rashba, the Ritva, and the Chidushei HaRamban [Nachmanides] and also the Tur, Beit Yoseph. I can't say if this is all that helpful. Maybe for some it is.But for me learning from great roshei Yeshiva like Naphtali Yeager and Reb Shmuel Berenbaum  was probably more helpful. It is like learning the violin. You can pick up something by reading books, but to actually be able to do it you need someone that is an expert.  The problem nowadays is-- in Torah, very evil people claim to be experts. Therefore you have to have someone either from the Ponovitch in Bnei Brak itself or some authentic Litvak yeshiva.


 But I am just trying to give you an idea of what is involved in knowing how to learn.

Rav Shach,

Rav Shach, the Rosh yeshiva of Ponovitch, [who wrote the Avi Ezri] obviously held from the basic Litvak yeshiva path along with Musar. Though my idea of education is a drop wider but the basic approach of Rav Shach I have to admit is probably the best. I mean for sure one needs at least a good four years of straight Torah learning all day in order to get anywhere.

[For me four years was not enough. I only barely began to skim the surface after three years in Shar Yashuv and then another three in the Mirrer in NY. All I mean is at least four years.



And though I am critical of  places that use the name "yeshiva" that are really just club houses and have nothing to do with Torah, still the great yeshivas like Ponovitch and the great New York Litvak yeshivas are really amazing places. [i.e. Torah VeDaat, Mirrer, Chaim Berlin.]


My parent's approach however was more along the lines of  a balance between Torah and Derech Eretz [Derech Eretz has a dual meaning of being a mensch (being just and acting right in all circumstances) and also doing honest work for a living and not depending on charity.] [I really liked the Litvak Yeshiva World, but it was too close to other groups that are Sitra Achra סיטרא אחרא [the Dark Side]. And the boundary is porous. Not only that, but the divisions are not well defined. [I mean the Sitra Achra penetrated the boundary.]

If you do not have a yeshiva in your area the simple thing to do is to get one Tractate of Gemara [if you need English then the Soncino is best]  and one book of Musar {Ethics. The Obligations of the Heart is best.} If possible then one of the basic books that go into Gemara in depth like Rav Shach's Avi Ezri or Reb Chaim Solovietchik's Chidushei HaRambam.

A good reason to learn Torah is that people need help from problems.  Instead of going to people that can not help, the best thing is to go to God's word.

I also can not recommend any yeshiva  a such but rather to learn Gemara, Musar, Math, and Physics.


For some people yeshiva might be a workable option. For others nor. So I can not recommend yeshiva , but rather learning Torah and keeping Torah, jogging and survival skills.


Yeshiva is a stave of reed. It looks sturdy, but if you lean on it, it breaks.  They claim to be there to help the public but they are in fact there to help themselves. What makes this upsetting is people think they represent Torah values.

s34 G Major

What should be one's education?

The kind of Seven Wisdoms (Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy) that were mentioned by the Gra. In the introduction to the translation of Euclid by Rav Baruch of Shkolev a disciple of the Gra he quotes the Gra as saying "To the degree one lacks knowledge in any one of the seven wisdoms, to that degree there will be  a lack of knowledge of Torah."
Then  there is the Rambam's view of Physics and Metaphysics as being part of Torah itself.

[It was in fact awareness of the view of the Rambam and the Gra that encouraged me to take the step to start this kind of learning after I had  been against it as I was part of the religious world.] See also the Obligations of the Heart חובות לבבות in the Introduction where he brings the seven wisdoms and also the second chapter.

Here I am dealing just with logistics. But having dealt with that then the question comes up, what is the effect of  a liberal education, or what should be the results? What effect does it have on one's soul?
Why is simply sitting and learning Torah not enough? Or is it enough?


Appendix: I mentioned before that my basic approach is Math, Physics, Gemara Musar, Music Survival skills. [As you can see I have left out a lot of the liberal arts and included a few things. Also I did not include what the Rambam meant by Metaphysics-- that is the set of books of Aristotle by that name. The reason is I am not so thrilled about philosophy.]

Reb Nachman called religious teachers "Jewish demons"

Even though I am critical of most yeshivas nowadays, there were two great yeshivas that I was at in NY, Shar Yashuv and the Mir. At Shar Yashuv I was there sometime and the Rosh Yeshiva [Rav Freifeld] probably saw that I was frustrated in not making much progress. He made a promise to me that after a year and a half I would be able to learn. It occurred to me today that (if I do not have the time-line mixed up) that his promise came true. I think the first year we were doing Chulin. The next year, I think, was Ketubot. If this time line is correct, then  it was when doing Ketubot that I started asking questions from his son-in-law, Rav Naphtali Yeager,  and that is when I discovered what it means "to learn."
I think I must have described this elsewhere,- but mainly the idea was that I would come up to him with a question, and instead of answering it, he would have me recite the whole Tosphot. Within that context he would not accept the adding or subtracting words from Tosphot to make it make sense. And there would be no whitewashing problems in Tosphot. Nor would he accept making up principles. These thing that most yeshivas do were considered completely "traif"--pseudo intellectualism, and simply dishonest. Then he would how Tosphot by some turn of  phrase was attempting to answer some deep question. It is hard to explain but in the two books I have links to in this blog I have tried to show what it means to learn Torah.


But the yeshivas in Israel and in other places in the USA were pretty bad. The  Lakewood Kollel in LA did their best to break up my marriage after returning to the US from Israel. The other religious people there were if anything even worse. I discovered that when Reb Nachman called religious teachers "Jewish demons" he was not exaggerating. [LM Volume I: 8, 12, 28.] [That however, might be considered as "lashon hara"[disparagement ] and an insult to demons.]
These were the same people making a whole song and dance around me as if we were all one big happy family when they were trying to get a donation from my parents.




[No offence intended towards the great gaon, Reb Aaron Kotler.] I would rather not go into this in detail, but I did mention a few times that the signature of the Gra on the second excommunication ought to be considered valid, and if I had accepted it in that way, I would not have gone through this problem.

In any case, I have said it before, and I will say it again. In LA the only kosher places I know about are Temple Israel in Hollywood [Reform] and Mount Sinai Synagogue [conservative]. I think the religious mainly use rituals to cover up un-kosher insides [like the sages of the Talmud said about the pig. It shows itself to be kosher by stretching out its split hooves, but covers the fact that it does not chew the cud.]
The most basic assumption of the religious is that only their version is Kosher. I think it can be shown from the Oral and Written Law that only their version is treif (not kosher). little of what they do or say has any connection to the holy Torah at all except in appearances. It is all one big act to get money from secular Jews.

Monotheism of the Torah

Rav Shick [of Breslov] spent a great deal of effort and he must have printed  more than several million pamphlets trying to change the paradigm [world view] of Torah from Monotheism to pantheism.

I wrote an essay on this a few years ago that brought up the basic points, but was a little too sharp {I admit.} Since Rav Shick was claiming this as if Rav Nachman had supported this, I included critiques on Breslov.

But in that essay I brought some  of the relevant points: Spinoza, the Upanishads, where pantheism is held by. And I showed it has no support from the Ari''zal based on a least four of five references I brought there from beginning of the Eitz Chaim.

I did not bring up possible places of support like the Remak [Moshe of  Cardavaro] or the Shelah. Some suggested also the Ibn Ezra.

I discussed this once with Israel Rozen a friend mine in Jerusalem, and he pointed out that the Nefesh HaChaim does not actually support pantheism,-- even though some people understand it in that way.


All I wanted to say now was the clarify the basic idea of Monotheism of the Torah as understood by the Rambam and Saadia Gaon. That is that God is one and not a composite. And he made the world something from nothing. יש מאין. [ex-nihilo]. That is to say,-- that even from God's point of view nothing exists without him making it exist every second --but not that it is Him. He made everything from nothing. The world is not Divine. [Causality does not imply identity though Buddhism and Hume both conflate these issues. Buddhism has to do this because of the fact that there is no substance that continues in time. So they have to adhere to some form of causality to get identity. But I can make a tuna fish sandwich, but that does not mean that I am a tuna fish sandwich.

As Dr. Kelley Ross wrote on this issue : "Since the approach of Buddhism to the world is to break attachments, so that one does not suffer because of relationships to things, a simple way to do that is to say, in effect, that there are no things. If nothing is substantial or has any essence, this will do that job. What we get instead are the doctrines of "momentariness," "no self nature," and "relative existence." If everything exists only momentarily, then nothing is durable, and we lose that characteristic of substances. If there is no self nature, then there is nothing in things that makes them what they are, and we lose the existence of essences. If things only exist relative to other things, then (1) nothing exists independently and we lose that characteristic of substance, and (2) nothing has its own character, so we lose that characteristic of essence. So what is actually there? Well, what we see is the "form" of things, the external appearance. Since there is no self nature and things only have relative existence, what are things in themselves when we take away everything else? Well, Emptiness. This is not nothingness (a major heresy), but neither existence nor non-existence nor both nor neither. In other words, we can't say or comprehend what is there. Later, in Mahâyâna Budddhism, we get the doctrine of the Heart Sutra that "Emptiness is Form, and Form is Emptiness."

Unfortunately, Buddhism always had difficulty with the implications of all this fundamental metaphysics. The loss of substance and essence takes with it identity, so that it becomes difficult to say that an individual, like the Buddha, achieves Enlightenment and Salvation. The individual, in fact, does not survive beyond the moment, and so it is a different being who achieves Enlightenment from the one who existed previously, and a different being in turn who achieves Salvation. Buddhism attempts to substitute causality for substance, so that what I am now is simply caused by what I was before. Unfortunately, this does not restore identity. If I make a tuna sandwich, and so cause its existence, this does not mean I am the tuna sandwich. Causal connections can be within substances or pass between them, and the identity relation is contributed by the substance, not by the causality. In the end, Buddhism seems to settle into the notion of "provisional existence," which is durable and identical, and then, with some other expedients, ceases to worry about the matter. The popular belief, indeed, is that Buddhism is about finding one's true self, not about finding that there is no self at all (anatma or anatta, "No Self"). "

The Rambam thought this principle was important enough to spend the second volume of the Guide on it.