Gra based Musar yeshivas

 The most curious phenomena in religious history; the bright and dark sides are almost invariably found together. Whenever an attempt is made to shed some light on the mystery of the world and of man, the whole nature is pulse of nature is accelerated , and if the animal nature  is the stronger, it becomes all the more uncontrolled.  Every area of value when it deteriorates it deteriorates into its opposite.

I should mention that in Israel I felt a tremendous outpouring of God's light on me, but it did not give me understanding. I do not know what it was all about, but at some point I pushed it away for invalid reasons. In any case, I believe pushing away God's light was a mistake based on a commentary with no name on the first four chapters of the Mishne Torah of the Rambam. In any case, my basic approach based on this experience is that the basic path that had led me to God's light is the best of all paths. And that is the basic learning of Torah in the straight and simple Gra way. For all other paths I believe are paths of deception and evil. No sooner does one come to an authentic yeshiva like the Mir or Ponovitch that someone comes long to seduce him to some path of the Dark Side. In religion light and darkness are sadly mixed.
{I hold from Reb Israel Salanter, but I do not want to knock yeshivas like Brisk that learn Gemara only. After all, my first yeshiva, Shar Yashuv, of Rav Freifeld was a Gra based non Musar yeshiva. But if you would ask me, I would say it is important to have two musar sessions per day. And Rav Shach (Elazar Menachem  Shach) also says Musar is important as you can see in one of the introductions to the Avi Ezri.}

 That is that a synthetic priori knowledge is known through knowledge that is known not through sense perception nor through thinking]. That applies also to the dinge an sich (things in themselves) through Schopenhauer. That is that the dinge an sich can be known until we get to the Ding An Sich (God). 


One fundamental advantage of Kant is that he provides a good account of light and the electron. As far as light goes the principle of Einstein that its speed is the same to anyone watching it, whether moving or not means that space does not exist except as a way of measurement. The electron also we know depends on the observer in order to decide whether to be a wave or  a particle, so its existence is independent of the observer but its characteristics are not

Stop. You are going to Hell. Turn around and go back. Reb Israel Salanter

I have given Hell a lot of consideration, and I would like to divide the topic into two parts. One part is "What actually gets a person out of Hell?" and the other is "What is sin?"  

First I want to give my perspective and then mention other points of view.

My own perspective on this issue really came to me one Rosh Hashanah at the Mir yeshiva when I was already married. During Musaf during חזרת הש''ץ (repeating of the prayers) I spent learning the אור ישראל Light of Israel of a disciple of Reb Israel Salanter, Isaac Blazer.  

That book is really a collection of several books but the one I opened up to dealt with the difficulty of getting out of Hell.[I have zero sefarim with me so I can not look it up to tell you which book it is. I vaguely recall that it is the first section.] His point is simple. It is hard to get out of Hell. He brings lots of proofs from the Talmud. Thus, even if one is thinking he keeps the entire Torah properly, (or thinks he has some other guarantee), in all likelihood he or she is deciding based on lack of evidence. 
To a lesser degree you can see this same in the books of the Chafetz Chaim, Reb Israel Meir HaCohen.

What bears on this issue in terms of an answer I want to bring the Reshash (Shalom Sharabi) and the Rambam.
The Reshash in Nahar Shalom נהר שלום says the soul is the character traits. Mitzvot are only the clothing of the soul. Learning Torah is nourishment of the soul. Thus a sin one can repent on. Also lack of Torah. But a lack of a good character trait is a basic limb of the soul that is missing. On that little can help. מעוות לא יתוקן
Proverbs "What is crooked can not be made straight." [The Chafetz Chaim says the same in שמירת הלשון.]


The Rambam says in Mishne Torah that one's portion in the next world depends on גודל המעשים וגודל החכמה deeds and wisdom.
[Thus what matters in the long run is not one's standing in the superorganism nor one's social group. Nor commitment to religious or political movements.]

[During the Middle Ages the issue of Hell was in the forefront of most people's mind. See Dante for example. Dante for me was גירסה דינקותא the learning of my youth. I had it with me all the time in high school. One thing you see in Dante is this same opinion expressed by the Reshash--that Hell depends on character traits. Each circle of Hell is for one particular character trait. I forget the order. I think the top is for excess desire, then anger, greed, lying, stealing, and being traitorous to people that trust one.

The christian perspective also relates to the issue of how not to go to  Hell and instead go to the Garden of Eden.[called salvation]. (Soteriology). To the Catholic baptism is a sine qua none for salvation. But it apparently is not sufficient. One can wreak it up as we see in Dante lots of people in Hell even after being baptized including a pope.  [That is there are things  that take care of Purgatory. But that is not baptism. But baptism does not save from Hell proper if one does any of the deadly sins like lying etc.]

  Protestants  don't believe in that but rather say faith alone saves, but good character is an epi-phenomenon of being in fact saved.
In any case, there is also the basic fact of salvation and good character [human decency] as being closely tied. [There is some degree of tension here. Catholic are trying to have their pie and eat it too. They want sin to be forgiven by baptism but then to still need repentance. And Protestants want to have no sin after one says a few words about faith. This trivializes sin.]

Now there is another subject of what is sin. Protestants mainly want to define this without reference to the Bible. This  has some justification since they are looking for what you would call wholesome living  along with kindness. That is the exact same things I was discussing above about having good character. Still the ignoring completely the laws of the Torah and making up their own set of what is called sin is disturbing to me and apparently also to Peter and James in The Recognitions of Clement. [Baur was the first to point  out, and his followers in the Tübingen school elaborated his views into the theory that Simon Magus is simply the legendary symbol for Paul. The remarkable similarity of the doctrinal points at issue in both the Petro-Simonian and Petro-Pauline controversies cannot be denied, and the scholarly reputation of the Tübingen school is such to make this probable..] Apparently Paul came up with this doctrine and as we see in the first Corinthians his followers took him quiet literally which left him aghast and caused him to backpedal.

To make a long story short what my approach is is mainly that of Reb Israel Salanter in the sense that I accept this idea that midot is the main and primary thing. However I also can see the idea that midot is an epiphenomenon of some internal state of the soul. This was note by the Chazon Ish --that midot do not come differentiated. One is either a good and decent person and that is that or not. Kant noticed the same thing and he called it by some name that I forget. The idea is that one is either radically good or radically bad based on one thing alone--the acceptance of the moral law.

T4 F major

The arrow of causality is from faith to reality. This is what Kant said that reality has to conform to our a priori knowledge. That is that reality has to conform to your faith. [I am saying that faith is a kind of a priori knowledge.] [That is the electron has to conform to how you measure it, with one or two slits, but the laws it follow are objective.]

But there is also free will. Thus the decision to have faith is dependent on one's will and it is part of the nature of the world to have this faith tested many times. But if one falls from faith because of some test and then his faith becomes less, then reality will conform that that lesser amount of faith. And then when things stop going right, then one's faith gets even less. And then things get worse and worse because they have to conform to his lack of faith.
At some point you have to stop the process and make a distinction between faith and trust. That is, you have to no longer trust that things will go your way-- so as to be able to hang on to simple faith in God that he is One, and he made the world ex nihilo,  and he has no reason or obligation to be concerned with you at all. Because at that point, you do not want to lose faith in God because of things getting even worse.
The best solution to this problem is simply not to fail in the original test of faith. To stick with trust in God, even though things are obviously not going the way you want and need. The trouble is that there is no simple formula for how to stand in a test of faith. [I should know..]

Appendix and thoughts.

(1) The arrow of casualty is actually determined by intention. Otherwise it is undetermined.
(2) בטח אל ה' בכל לבך ואל בינתך אל תשען היינו שיהיה לבך שלם במדת הבטחון ואל בינתך אל תשען שלא תאמר אבטח בה' אלא  אני מחוייב לעשות ולהשען

גם על שכלי ולכן אמר לא תשען על שכלך אפי' בתורת משענת וסוד העניין שתהפוך לבך לבטוח בה' בכל אז יברך אותך ה' בכל
That is: the Gra also said that reality has to conform to your trust in God.
(3) Just in the way to make it clear what I am saying. If you are in a situation where you are able to learn Torah [That is the Tenach and Two Talmuds], then unlike me, you should not leave. It is hard to find a situation in which one can learn Torah and if one leaves it, it is impossible to return. [By this I do not mean to exclude two topics the Rambam thought were part of the Oral Law, Physics and Metaphysics. It has always been the custom in the Lithuanian yeshiva world to gain expertise on the side, but not during the regular yeshiva session in the morning. However since Physics is hard I recommend the opposite--that is to do the Physics session  first thing in the morning and then later the sessions in Tenach (Old Testament) and Gemara.]




(4) Just in the way of explanation: Kant wants to justify universals (synthetic a priori) by means of the fact that reality has to conform to a priori knowledge. This really all started with John Locke and his primary qualities and Descartes. Then it dawned on Kant and even things we consider primary qualities like number quantity and extension depend on the observer.

Thus God can do miracles by means of people that we would not consider as worthy.

Kant said the most profound and important fact about spirituality: that when pure reason ventures into the area of uncondioned reality, it comes up with self contradictions.

This  you can see in the Torah itself in the verse The hidden things are to the Lord our God הנסתרות להשם אלהינו והנגלות לנו ולבנינו לעשות את כל דברי התורה הזאת [note 1] 

Thus God can do miracles by means of people that we would not consider as worthy. And thus all the questions that people have about spirituality  fall away because we simply cannot know. Not just human reason, but even pure reason can not go into areas of spirituality, -- because if it does, it will destroy itself.

All we can do is to learn and keep the Torah. 

So when I hear about miracles, my tendency is not to dismiss anything because I know God can and must work in ways that if we try to understand them will cause self contradictions. He works in ways on purpose that to us must not make sense.

On a related note I must mention that sometimes people make exaggerated claims. This undermines their credibility. The best thing is the old traditional Litvak approach "Learn Torah," and not to make claims beyond what the Torah says. 

In my opinion this applies to everyone. I have heard that Christians think they do not have to keep the commandments of the Torah because of the phrase, "until it will all be fulfilled." In any case they are depending on Paul against the testimony of Peter and James to support and interpretation that is against the simple explanation. See the Recognitions of Clement and you will see that Peter and James and all the in fact disciples were all holding the Law of Moses is forever and obligatory. They were not Judaizers. They were simply being as loyal to their teacher as they could. Saying the not one jot or tittle of the Law will be nullified means that when it says,  "Thou shalt do such and such" that  obligation continues.

[I also do not hold by individual interpretation. Laws mean something. And they way to understand the laws of the Torah is by rigorous analysis, not by feel good emotions. But to do the rigorous analysis is hard. Therefore there is a short cut. That is the מורה נבוכים, חובות לבבות, שערי תשובה, אורחות צדיקים and the other classical Musar books from the Middle Ages.

The Middle Ages were characterized by the rishonim that did painstaking and rigorous thinking about what exactly does the Torah require.  

[This is not to knock Paul entirely. Rather it is in order to get some perspective. I can see the points of Paul as related to the people he was addressing.]

I should add that there is an obstacle to keeping Torah and that is תלמידי חכמים שדיים יהודאיים false teachers. Since false teachers are all to common in the religious world. The trouble is that the Sitra Achra [Dark Side] has gone deeply into it. Thus  avoid the religious world completely, and learn Torah at home or make sure the place you learn Torah at does not teach Torah from the Sitra Achra. 



[note 1] ["The hidden things are to the Lord our God and the visible things are to us and our children to do all the words of this Torah."]

Robert E Lee.

State rights makes a lot of sense to me. I could never figure out what the war was about. The Constitution was a contract. The South felt the North had violated the terms of the contact by interfering with local laws.{And the Sumpreme Court agreed. That should have been the end of the diagreement. } So they thought they were justified because of breach of contract.
I think we ought to celebrate the birthday of Robert E Lee. January 19. It should be a national holiday not just for the South but the North also because it means the great importance of the  Constitution of the U.S.A..

[Dred Scott was decided in 1857. And after all, that is the job of that court to decided what is constitional. The North decided to ignore the Constitution.]

The theory of the Background.

The way that Torah is interpreted in the religious world is that the foremost obligation is to be part of the religious world. But that seems to me to be highly inaccurate. But I can not disprove it except because of my own background. My feeling based on my own experience is that joining the religious world is the worst possible thing to do in terms of actually keeping the holy Torah.
The closest I could see to a sincere effort to actually learn and keep Torah according to its own background and core assumptions was in the two Litvak yeshivas that I was in in New York, Shar Yashuv and the Mir. But outside of the yeshiva world based on the Oral and Written Law of Moses, I found the religious world to be a hot bed of קטנות המוחין triviality and backbiting and a kind of living nightmare while awake.

The only way I could understand this was by means of Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle which he bases on Hobbes. The idea of the super-organism as being Lucifer.
Though he does not look at it in the same way the fact that he uses the term Lucifer to me implies a lot. That is by joining a larger community one gets to be sacrificed to Lucifer.










[The theory of the Background

John Searle: "What philosophers like Quine and Wittgeinstein got right, however, is the fact that verbal expressions underdetermine meaning, i.e. the number of ways that a given sentence could be misinterpreted is so great that, in their view, an interpretation or an assignment of meaning is something that doesn't even happen, because meaning in the traditional sense doesn't exist."


Sentences express abstract features, but these are always in a context of other abstract features (what Searle calls the "Network") 


The theory of the Background of Searle


"The thesis of the Background is simply this: Intentional phenomena such as meanings, understandings, interpretations, beliefs, desires, and experiences only function within a set of Background capacities that are not themselves intentional."]