Musar Movement [Learning Ethics]

 In the Musar Movement of Reb Israel Salanter there was a subtle shift of emphasis from the axis of Musar during the Middle Ages to a new axis. In the Middle Ages the axis was a balance between Reason and Revelation. [That is Faith and Reason.]
The Musar Movement itself emphasized fear of God and good character traits. 
[Even though each one of the great Musar Yeshivas built by the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter all had a different focus, still the ground level  was these two principles--Fear of God and work on good character. 

No one really knows any more how they worked on character. You can try to dig up hint in the books that they wrote but it is not at all clear. Nowadays the most you have is a few minutes of learning Musar before Mincha and Maariv.   

I can not say I am very happy with this. The average session of Musar in the great Musar yeshivas was 40  minutes and 45 minutes.

But I am myself no "Baal Musar" If I could I would rather focus on the points brought out and emphasized by three individuals. The Gra, Reb Israel Salanter, and Rav Shach. That is these three points:(1) Learning Torah (2) Learning Musar (3) combining the Rambam with the Gemara.  [If possible it makes sense to make a commitment to learning Gemara an hour every day and Musar and the Tur, Beit Joseph in such a way as to get through the basic material from cover to cover, every last word.What one does not understand in this world he will understand in the next world.] The Talmud itself ought to be done with Tosphot and the Mahrasha. That is to have one session in which you keep at the same Tosphot for days and weeks until it starts to become clear.

The fundamental problem with yeshivas

The fundamental problem with yeshivas involves the difference between them and let's say for example medical school. The difference is one trains doctors and thus asks government funding. The other asks for public money for what reason? To enable people to learn Torah.

Therefore for yeshivas there is no excuse to throw out people that are there to learn Torah. The fact that they do throw out people shows they are not in fact existing to provide a place for people who want to learn Torah, but rather to make money by providing a show of learning Torah. 


You could throw out all modern day yeshivas and not lose a thing. They are mostly all scams using the show of Torah to make money. But still there are places that are magnets for sincere people like Ponovitch and the great NY yeshivas, Chaim Berlin, Mir, Torah VeDaat. 


Since the religious are using Torah to make money, the Torah has no effect on their character except to make them worse and then when people see them acting like jerks (as is their custom), that gives people a bad impression about the holy Torah itself. That is called in Hebrew a חילול השם "a desecration of the Divine Name."


[For the sake of being fair there are offshoots of Ponovicth that are admirable. That is people that learned there and then went on to start their own Beit Midrash elsewhere. Same with the NY yeshivas. Just for one example of a yeshiva I was impressed with is the place of Rav Montag in Netivot which definitely had the real spirit of Torah as far as I could tell. 


 I should mention Rav Freifeld's place in Far Rockaway which I felt had the spirit of Torah very strongly and the level of learning was very high. It starts with beginners but reaches into very high levels of learning.
I should mention that I am allowed to write this because:

Shaming people is a permissible tactic. In the book on laws of slander by Israel Meir Hakohen he makes a distinction if it is for obligations between man and his fellow man and obligations towards God. See chapter 4 and the difference between there and ch 7.
מפרסמים את הרשעים מפני חילול השם There seems to be some difference between shaming for sins that are between man and fellow man an sin between God and man. The later case has clear permission from the book on slander by Israel Meir HaKohen in ch 4 as long as the sin is not just a one time event but done on purpose on a constant basis and private rebuke has done nothing.

USA

The USA is the result of a kind of ideological movement started by Hobbes and John Locke. It had a basis in Aquinas and Maimonides in terms of natural law. The very essence of American identity is bound up and tied with these thinkers.

What people are complaining about on this blog is the kind of Leftism based on Rousseau.

The difference is vast. But one thing that does stand out is Rousseau does not have any human rights. He has only the General Will. That is his center of gravity. To John Lock the beginning point is the rights of the individual.
But these rights are not more than the Ten Commandments translated from what one  person can not do to another to being right that the individual has not to be stolen from. 

But the difference between rights to get free stuff and rights to be left alone has been obliterated in the USA.

s70 G major  [s70 in midi]

To marry a virgin

The world has changed. It used to be known that being a virgin was very important. The Ketubah [marriage contract] is 100 (zuz) for a girl that is not a virgin, and 200 for a virgin. Also If he was tricked into thinking she is a virgin the marriage is null to some opinions. And at least she loses her Ketubah. [Either the whole thing or just 100. That is also an object of debate. See Ketubot pages 9 and 13.] From the first act of sex there is always something left inside according to the Ari [Isaac Luria]. However I heard that the Ben Ish Hai said that is only when the first act is after marriage. [That is not from the actual book the Ben Ish Hai, but from some other book that he wrote on the Ari. I assume he must have some source for that opinion. Maybe he saw it somewhere in Reb Hayim Vital?]
I forgot all the details. But, at any rate, this is a very big deal.

"Western Civilization."

"Christendom" used to be the term for it. Now it is called "Western Civilization." The problem is the weight of intellectual evidence weighed on the side of Christianity during the Middle Ages with heavy hitters like Aquinas et al.
The after that period the weight of Reason and Evidence did not go in that direction. This was not the fault of the Enlightenment philosophers. It was just the way things were. You certainty can not accuse John Locke of having a bad heart or evil intentions.  There was and still is a crisis of faith that no one has been able to mend.

To a great degree this had a parallel in the Jewish world also. And the advice there by Israel Salanter was to learn the books of Mediaeval Ethics. This to me seems highly applicable to the Christian world. That is to learn the books of classical Christianity, Augustine, Anslem etc. The reason is because everything starts in the mind. All deeds and all words and all attitudes start there. If you cultivate a good mind then you cultivate good deeds and good words. So learning the right kinds of things is the beginning of the correction.
Neo Reaction from Amerika: “They’ve essentially thrown out centuries of Christian tradition, practice, and scholarship in order to assert that here in the 21st Century, we’ve finally discovered the true doctrine, and it just so happens to be the one pushed by Christianity’s ideological enemies.”

Though not Christian myself, I have long thought that Christians have ignored Aquinas, Anselm, and Augustine at great loss to themselves and to everyone else. [I do not mean they ought to be Catholic.]

introspection can be bad for the health:

The trouble with psychology is that it makes people insane. 

"Indeed, introspection can be bad for the health: it is a road to “mental illness” (‘Illuminism and Terrorism’, 1798, [Immanuel Kant]

That means that talking about your problems with a psychologist or anyone in the related professions is the best way to go insane. Kant goes into great detail why this is the case.


People like to talk about their problems and about sex and all one needed to do to make money from this was to create the impression that doing this is good for them and then set yourself up  as one  whom to talk to. The terrible thing about this is that the real effect is just the opposite.