Torah values

I hold from Torah values very highly, but not from the religious people that claim to be following these values. The "world" of the religious I do not think reflects Torah values very well.


For example there is a lot of effort to make secular Jews religious, but no loyalty to these same Jews. That is an attempt is made to show great friendship ["love bombing"] in order to acquire their friendship, but no real friendship really exists. It is important not to pretend friendship where none exists. Especially this is so since the point of pretending to be friends is to take people from their real family and friends whom they can depend on an replace them with false friends on whom they can not depend.
This is not a minor problem, but permeates the entire religious world. It is the elephant in the room that everyone tries so hard to ignore.






It is hard to know how to deal with this problem--especially since I do believe very strongly in Torah values the Oral  and Written Law.
It is hard to know why the word that apparently claims to be following the holy Torah suffers from this kind of moral blind spot.
And to me this seems like  a major failing-not some minor flaw. 

What I personally conclude years ago is the religious world in fact has nothing to do with Torah and it does not reflect Torah values at all but rather reflects rituals that are exaggerated and not from Torah. 

The only places that I saw were more or less adhering to Torah values were Lithuanian kinds of Yeshiva s with the surrounding communities--that is yeshivas built and run on the principles of the Gra and Rav Shach.

Wiki leaked email: the voting machines are rigged to change Republican votes to Democratic votes.

 The Wiki leaked email between John Podesta and the brass at Smartronic discussing the rigging of machines at the direction of Soros. There is no "may" about this. We have already had multiple reports from Illinois, Texas etc of machines changing GOP votes to Dem votes AS THE VOTER WATCHES. And of course all these reports are blown off as "glitches".....apparently that's the new term the DNC and Media whores use for CHEATING.

Weiner should be up for the saint of the year award.

Weiner should be up for the saint of the year award.


No wonder he called the file "Insurance policy." He was aware of the danger of the Clintons and wanted to make sure what happened to anyone that crossed them did not happen to him.


........all 30,000 of the "missing" Hillary emails are on Weiner's laptop, plus hundreds of thousands more that were deliberately ditched and we never knew existed in the first place, evidencing not only lying about the content of the 30,000 emails but the existence of hundreds of thousands more?

What if among the authenticated email traffic is John Podesta saying, just days before the Clinton campaign was compelled to produce said material they they had to "dump those emails", apparently proving intent to obstruct justice?

What if all of the emails that came from big public cloud providers are provably, to a near-forensic standard, to be exactly as WikiLeaks has presented them and could not have been tampered with because those providers digitally sign every email that comes from them and those signatures all validate back against those cloud providers, and those emails are thus in fact already known to be authentic?

s63 d minor  s62 G major

Sometimes you see in Mozart he will extend a theme from four measures to five  of or some odd number. That is not teh same a a minuet where he will go to six measures. The fact is when Mozart does this it makes sense. So I have some defense for doing the same thing in s62.

But the Torah is not about spiritual experience.

The so called ‘New Age’ movement has been around for a long time now. (To be accurate, since the Garden of Eden). I did not realize the extent. 

 I myself was drawn to mystic goings-on of various sorts.

As I began to learn Gemara [Talmud], I was astonished by how much had changed during my years in the wilderness. 

 I have seen 'new age beliefs' and 'spirituality' from the inside. 

 They believe that those seeking ‘spirituality’ at Eastern Religion psychic fairs are going to the wrong place and should be coming to Torah for spiritual experience.

But the Torah is not about spiritual experience.

The Occult just got to be too much a part of how Torah i presented. [It might be the best idea to simply avoid that aspect for it seems to lead people almost automatically into the Sitra Achra Dark Side.]


[With no offence intended towards the Ari himself, still I think the whole mystic trip is a bad LSD trip.] My concern is with intention to get in contact with the spiritual realm comes evil spirits that trick and deceive and give powers from the Dark Side.


The trouble seems to be השחתת המידות destruction of good character traits when one gets involved. If good character was not an essential part of Torah then this would not matter. But it is. You can see this in the Sefer HaChinuch which brings in easy to understand form all of the 613 commandments of the Torah and good character counts for a lot of them. For example there are two separate commandments about אונאת ממון and אונאת דברים. Not to defraud someone in money and another one not to hurt another person by means of words.

I think it is best to allow the pseudo Torah mystic stuff fall off into oblivion. [You could possibly go back to the Zohar itself to find the beginnings of the problem.]

In the Guide, the Rambam has an approach in which reason and revelation interact and inform each other and modify each other.

My approach is based on Maimonides (Rambam). That is the rules of the Torah are meant to be obeyed-literally. However, in the Guide (מורה נבוכים) (Guide for the Perplexed), the Rambam has an approach in which reason and revelation interact and inform each other and modify each other. 

There was also an approach developed by Saadia Geon that when the literal meaning is impossible (according to Reason) then we must understand it as an allegory.   

The Maimonides approach was of a first level of Natural Law, and then a higher level of Law that can only be known by revelation.


Reform Judaism I think was too much influenced by the Reformation in which the laws of the Torah were considered superfluous. Or perhaps Reform just decided the halacha is like R. Shimon Ben Yochai that we go by the reason for each law.  This come up in Bava Metzia at the end of ch 9 and in Yevamot. And though people think we do not poskin by R. Shimon still there is a contradiction in the Rambam concerning this. And there is a long Mishna Lamelech which I think tries to answer this problem.     

The amount of time and effort that have gone into my two little booklets on Bava Metzia and on Shas surprises me. I would not have thought that it would take the amount of time that it did. And even if I had spent that time, but not have had my learning partner David Bronson, I am certain nothing would have been written.
The whole project started around ten years ago which is when I started learning with David. I had been out of Gemara learning in depth for some period of time so when I sat down with him and started learning again it surprised me greatly the depth of his questions and answers. It reminded me of my first yeshiva Shar Yashuv when I was learning Ketuboth  and heard amazing depth from Naphtali Yeger.

This gave me an insight into Gemara learning and also has a side benefit that I realize how long and how much effort is needed to approach Physics and Math also.

People get the idea in school that if they do not get something right away that they are not fit for it. I realize now that that is wrong Some subjects simply take a long time and lots of effort.

It took a lot of trials also. You have to get through a lot to be able to see the truth and  value of the Torah.