Plotinus. Neo Platonic thought is the basis for Western Civilization

Avraham Rosenblum says:

Some aspects of Western Civilization are worth preserving and others not. A good deal of the literature and philosophy is worthless. Allen Bloom suggested just throwing out the entire Humanities and Social studies departments of most universities.

• JPW says:

  If you really are down on certain aspects of Western Culture, I strongly encourage you to go forth and develop a better one. Don’t gripe about the problem. Solve it.
  • Avraham Rosenblum: That is a hard challenge –especially after the greatest minds in history have worked on the problem before me.
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  • Brett Stevens says:

    Maybe there is something they have expressed that overlaps, which we have overlooked? Do you think that Platonism (not neo-Platonism) is the basis of Judeo-Christian metaphysical thought?
  • Avraham Rosenblum says:

    That is what I was thinking. But I tend more towards Neo-Platonic as did all the medieval thinkers and up to and including Hegel. Dr. Kelley Ross wants to return to a more pure form of Plato and Kant. But the basis of Western Civilization to me looks to be Plotinus and neo Platonic thought. And the the journal of Medieval Thought from Cornell they mention that even in Aquinas people have proven Neo Platonic influence.     
  • After Thought: The Ari, Shalom Sharabi, Yaakov Abuchatzaira, the Rambam are all clearly straight forward Neo Platonic thought--each one developing it in different directions. Shalom Sharabi in his scheme of things found a way to balance Plato and Aristotle as you can see in his order of the worlds after תחיית המתים which goes like Aristotle in which the universals depend on the particulars.
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the Jewish religious world is that of the Sitra Achra (the Dark Side).

The major problem I see in the Jewish religious world is that of the Sitra Achra (the Dark Side).
That is to say that when people thirst for the spirit of God that is in itself not a bad thing. And I agree there is  a  mystic side to Torah as we see in the Gra and the Ari. Still this thirst for spirituality is hijacked to draw people into the Sitra Achra- to the degree that if there is any part of the religious world that is genuinely kosher I would be surprised. 

Still the side of attachment with God in the Torah is difficult to ignore. But it mainly seems to be connected with a pretty well defined path--that of learning Gemara with great intensity until one knows Shas pretty well and then delving into the writings of the Ari. When this is done right as in rare cases, it does open up a door of attachment and dekekut with God (as with Bava Sali). But as a rule the spiritual thirst seems to just get people involved in the Sitra Achra. It is kind of sad to see.

To the religious world, the main thing is to be religious, but not too religious so that the money keeps flowing from the plebeians to them. 
Obviously Reb Israel Salanter and the Gra saw this problem and suggested what I have to admit is probably the best solution to learn Musar Medieaval Ethics.That is the classical Musar Sefarim of the Middle Ages, and to learn Straight Authentic Torah.

In any case the arguments that forbid electricity on Shabat or cooking with electricity are amazingly flimsy and concocted out of thin air.

I just wanted to jot down a few ideas about electricity on Shabat--not a formal essay that I would have liked to have done.
Mainly the issue really boils down the the Gemara in Shabat chapter 3 about cooking with תולדות חמה or in חמי טבריה. [Heat generated by some derivative of solar energy, not fire]. The relevant sources are the Chazon Ish, and  the book of one of his disciples that disagreed with the Chazon Ish, and the Gemaras from where the Chazon Ish derives his law from. They are the gemaras about putting a bed or a candelabra that are made out of parts together. I was back at the Mir in NY for a sort time and looked at the Chazon Ish and was impressed. I then asked Rav Nelkenbaum about it and he said an אדם גדול told him the essay of the Chazon Ish on this subject is simply and plainly wrong.

That is the sum total of the relevant information I have about this subject. The only thing I might add is the argument between the Rambam and Raavad about a vessel that needs to be put together to be operative in laws of טומאה וטהרה but after thinking that over I did not think it was relevant. In any case the arguments that forbid electricity on Shabat or cooking with electricity are amazingly flimsy and concocted out of  thin air. 
As they say in Israel "If you want to be frum, (extra strict) then do it on your own חשבון (expense). Do not force it down the throats of others."

I was unaware of what was going on in the Christian world for a long time. It only occurred to me to notice something going on with what is known as Pentecostal. I imagine because I tend to look more at doctrinal difference between groups that I  was scarcely aware of their existence. Part of this is really not from lack of awareness, but more from the fact that Pentecostal people and groups do not like the name and so go by the more mild sounding "Evangelical."  It only occurred to me recently what really makes them different from every other group. It is the Pentecostal experience. This is way beyond what it sounds like. To them this is the one and only thing that separates a real christian from a fake.
I really only became aware of this after reading a Catholic critique on it.
I really can not tell exactly what they are thinking however from personal experience.

I was pretty solidly into the Torah point of view when I got to Israel, and when the Divine Light started shining, I thought little of it,  and thought it was just the common experience of everyone in Israel. To me experience of the Divine Light is nothing more or less that fulfilling the verse in Deuteronomy 11: 22 ''to be attached to God'' which is one of the 613  commandments.
At any rate, what I wanted to say today was simply this: To me it seems so hard to get to be a decent human being because people are basically depraved and vicious beyond belief. So in my mind, anything that people do to come to gain good character is praiseworthy. 

In other words my viewpoint is the good character is the center of gravity of the Torah. [Based on the אור צפון, the רש''ש Shalom Sharabi,  the Hafetz Chaim, and Rav Yerucham of the Mir in Europe.] So to my point of view, what ever it takes for anyone to come to good character is a good thing.

That is to say besides that people are depraved, I see most groups and especially most religious groups as adding to their inborn depravity a thousand fold. So anything at all on the side of getting people to be a little more honest, to lie a little less, to have a little more compassion on others, is already a great thing and a rare thing. For most groups encourage just the opposite under nice sounding slogans

Sadly Musar [Jewish Mediaeval Ethics] is subject to abuse and that tends to give it a bad rap. What to me makes this sad is that Musar gives the best and most compact explanation of what the Torah requires from a person in the most explicit simple and practical way possible.  That is it is like Bava Sali in the sense that it just tells you what Torah is about and leaves out all the Shtick that people like to add or subtract. There are tons of books supposedly about Torah, but most of them are false. They change the Torah in so many subtle ways that ignorant people can scarcely tell the difference.

t26 B flat major [t26 in midi format]

[t26 in nwc format]

Review of the same section or paragraph many times

The first thing that hit me when I got to yeshiva in NY [Shar Yashuv in Queens County--not Brooklyn] was the idea of review.

Mordechei Freifeld, the son of the Rosh Yeshiva Shelomo Freifeld emphasized this idea of review {חזרה} many times--especially when I would come and say how learning fast was important and I would bring proofs from the book בנין עולם (Building the World) and the Musar book אורחות צדיקים Paths of the Righteous. To some degree I in fact tried this over the years in yeshiva. I even remember in the Mir in NY I would take one paragraph of the Pnei Yehoshua and learn each one more than ten time--sometimes even 15 or twenty. [I had a pencil and would put a dot next to the beginning of the paragraph to note each time I had read through the whole thing.]

Moti Freifeld never changed in this respect and always emphasized review. When I discovered that Reb Nachman also empathized learning fast and getting through lot of material, Moti just kept emphasizing the importance of review all the more so.

I did not know it at the time; but it is the accepted custom in Lithuanian yeshivas to learn in depth in the morning and fast in the afternoon.

I think today that one has to gauge himself.  There is a "law of limited returns." That is a law that goes thus:There is a limit to how many times you can kiss your wife that will add to marital bliss.
So when the material was basically unfamiliar to me [like when I was doing Ketuboth, Yevamot and Nida] I would basically do each Tosphot twice and not more--because I discovered that after two time I got the basic idea and doing any more times did not add anything to my understanding.


My basic compromise about all this is based on a Gemara [Talmud] לעולם לגרוס אדם והדר ליסבר. Always one should learn in the way of "Girsa" (saying the words and going on further) and afterward to make sense of it all. That is: when the material is completely unfamiliar the best thing is just to go through the whole book from beginning to end a few times. Then when you already have some idea of what is going on, then to take some individual section that you noticed seems to be pivotal or a key to the understanding of the whole subject and to do that one section many many times. This I found to be helpful in Physics also.  

When I was learning with David Bronson  in Bava Metzia I found him to be unwilling to budge an inch on anything in Tosphot that was unclear. That led to my long essay in the beginning of my little booklet on Bava Metzia on these words in Tosphot [page 97B] "Even without Abyee we would have to say that the law of Rav Yehuda comes from Shmuel." I should admit we never found an answer to that and after about two or more weeks of just sitting and staring at those couple of words we finally decide to go on. Some years later as you can see in that book, I found a tentative answer. And after  that after getting the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach I found a better answer after about 10 years of wondering about that problem.


What I ended  up saying is that Shmuel hold from certainty is better because חזקא מעיקרא in Ketuboth would not have been enough to believe the woman. That I based on the analysis of Rav Shach about the Gemara in Nida page 2

SO I suggest two sessions in Talmud, and two in Physics. A fast one where one just says the words and goes on. The other in depth in which one finds the key ideas an works on those sections and ten times or more

[So it ended up the things I did the most review on were the Mahrasha, and the Pnei Yehoshua. Those were hard but also the fact that each paragraph or idea was short made the ability to do review practical. This is less practical with Tosphot.

I should add that review seems to work better in Torah because sections in Gemara and Mishna are more or less self contained. In Physics, it seems I need to spend a lot of time in getting the big picture before woring on details becomes practical.