There is a lot to be learned from the Ari''zal however all the cults that pretend to teach him are in fact teaching the approach of the Shatz and his false prophet Nathan of Gaza. This is how the Sitra Achra the Dark Realm got into the religious world. I

"Around and around go the wicked." [סביב רשעים יתהלכון] (Psalms) You go from one thing to the other. You find Torah and then some group comes along and says, "Yes, keep Torah. But if you join us, you will do it so much better." 
And then one  goes and joins that cult. And then find it to be  a cult and finds some other  group or ideal and around and around he or she goes for years on end.

The way to be saved from this kelipa is by trust in God. To believe where you are --physically and spiritually--is where you are supposed to be. What is is what ought to be.


It is my tendency to be like this by nature--to investigate new things. But I am not alone in this. However the flaw in this is that cult and kelipot and dark side forces are not always obvious at first. They often cloth themselves with clothing of righteousness while the inner essence is evil.  

And in any case Litvak Yeshiva world where authentic true unadulterated Torah is learnt and kept in fact has numerous flaws, which do cause people to seek the Truth elsewhere.

[In any case, at some point I settled on the Gra  to "learn Torah." This makes the most sense to me as the set of paths that contains in it the proper paths that gives the right guidance, but is not too open to allow all things.] [This idea of learning Torah is defended by Reb Chaim from Voloshin in the book Nefesh HaChaim.]]

What it means to learn Torah is basically expressed well in Lithuanian yeshivas, Gemara, Rashi, Tosphot,  and Avi Ezri of Rav Shach but along with that I add Physics and Math mainly because of my parents and the Rambam.  (I admit that if it was only my parents, I might not pay that much attention as I should. [There is that spirit of rebellion against parents which minimizes the authority of parents sadly enough.] But there is the Rambam that puts Physics and Metaphysics into the category of the Oral Law. I know that each these subjects takes time and along with that there I the issue of a vocation. Still I try to set up my day in a way that I  get at least a mall amount of each of these essential vitamins.   Musar I should add gives one the basic practical aspects of the Oral Law

It is hard to explain why the school of thought of Reb Chaim Soloveitchik and Rav Shach is so important. The basic reason is that it is hard to actually see what is going on in the Gemara without them.  There is a lot of depth in the Gemara that is easy to miss with them.
[There is a lot to be learned from the Ari''zal however all the cults that pretend to teach him are in fact teaching the approach of the Shatz and his false prophet Nathan of Gaza. This is how the Sitra Achra the Dark Realm got into the religious world. I could document this but it is easy enough to look up if you have the stomach for it. That is the reason the Gra puts that whole cult into excommunication. ]

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Jewish Cults:They cloak themselves with outer signs of Jewishness in order to hide their moral perversions.

In the religious world the main thing is to avoid the cults. And the closer they seem to Torah the more dangerous they are.

Not enough attention is given to the problem of "masit umadiach" one who attempts to seduce another person into worship of an idol.
For  that is what the cults try to do in the disguise of Torah.

In Torah there is no such thing as a  proposition or a mysticism being ninety-nine point nine percent right, and point one percent novelty or error. It is either all or nothing, as the stakes are simply too high for anything else.  Teaching doctrines that are not of Torah in addition to Torah is just as bad and worse as not teaching Torah at all.
These obviously good and well  meaning people  start with half-truths. 
One minor example is that the Torah teaches Monotheism, that God is One and He created the world ex-nihilo something from nothing. That is, He is not the world and the world is not Him. But the problems with the cults only start with perversions of faith. They cloak themselves with outer signs of Jewishness in order to hide their moral perversions. 
And you can not walk into any place or building of their's without being infected. Their power is like that of a barnacle that attaches itself to a male crab and injects a kind of enzyme that makes it think it is  a female, and thus goes and digs a hole in the sand for its eggs. But it has no eggs. But the barnacle sure does.

Better yet. Instead of avoiding the cults, destroy them. Take them out. 

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Having the English Soncino was a big help and for my first five years I used that as an aid.

I do not have any magic system towards learning. When I was in yeshiva I found  certain people helped me to understand the Gemara. That was the Tosphot HaRosh, the Maharsha and the Pnei Yehoshua. I did not feel in any way ready for the big leagues like Reb Haim Soloveitchik though that was the bread and butter for most people. Having the English Soncino was a big help and for my first five years I used that as an aid. Having a good learning partner is also a great help. But when it came to Physics I did not really have any idea how to get started. It seemed a lot depended on finding the right book for me. But in terms of Physics, one way I managed to get through my courses at Polytechnic Institute of NYU was by a method I had seen mentioned by the Ari (Rav Isaac Luria Ashkenazi) and the Ramchal of saying the words forwards and backwards. This was an amazing help for me, and and I think once a person has gone through a book a few times straight with no review, then it is  a good idea to go back to review it with this method. I think a lot of people give up on it because they are not aware of the method by which they could open the lock.


[For fast learning what I did for a while was to do a half a page per day with Rashi Tosphot, Maharash and Maharam. That was for fast learning and only took about 40 minutes per day. I do not recall if I was learning also with my learning partner at the time. That would have been in a different session and his path was to stay on it until it was clear. We learned only about an hour a day, but he refused to budge until every last detail was clear. I think the average time on one Tosphot with him was about two or three months [sometimes more -up to I think six months.] He used to think up the most amazing questions with seemingly no effort, and sometimes great answers also. Some of the answers on questions in my two books on the Gemara I came up with only after years of thinking about his questions.][e.g. Bava Metzia page 97, the answer to the question there I thought of only after learning Rav Shach's treatment of the Gemara in Nida page 2b. The learning with my learning partner stopped after Bava Metzia page 104 but then picked up again later when we did the Gemara in Sanhedrin 63 and other Gemaras.]

One person said on Breitbart that religion motivates people to evil:
I suggested he look at Dr Kelly Ross and Steven Dutch.

I should mention I have in fact seen religion motivate people towards all kind of things,-- good and bad.


This is what Steven Dutch says:

Given the endless ways religions can be subverted and co-opted, the wonder is less that religions commit evils than that they do any good at all. And given the way Marxism was transformed into an unchallengeable dogma in the 20th century, the simple-minded prescription of John Lennon's Imagine:

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
doesn't seem to offer much prospect of a solution. After all, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Stalinist Russia and Enver Hoxha's officially atheistic Albania didn't exactly shine as beacons in the darkness. One could readily see, in a world where Lennon's ideals somehow gained supremacy, that a few generations later people who atavistically clung to national identities or religious beliefs would be ostracized and persecuted. Solely because of the threat they posed to peace, harmony, and all-round good vibes, mind you.

In fact, blaming religion for the ills of the world is a wonderful way to avoid taking a hard look at human nature. It's a variation on the "noble savage" myth and suffers from the inevitable failure of believers in the myth to ask how innately benign people could ever be attracted to repression in the first place, and how we can guarantee that eliminating all forms of repression in the present will prevent its returning in the future.

the baali teshuva /newly religious.

The religious world was putting forth great effort to get Jews to be religious. [In the sense of keeping trivial rituals at the expense of the more weighty factors  like honoring one's parents.] [Certainly no religious organization was interested in strengthening one's observance of that mitzvah.] But there was more about it that was odd. No one has documented much of the spiritual abuse and the taking advantage of the baali teshuva [''newly religious'']. Maybe it is the prohibition of ''Lashon Hara'' [slander]?

But the main focus seems to have been to create  a slave caste to support the  supposedly superior "frum [religious] from birth". The whole thing reeked of hypocrisy and fraud until it gave a bad name to the holy Torah.
For themselves they would encourage and parade family values, but for baali teshiva
they would encourage their wives to divorce them, and the sexual abuse of the children from those marriages was rampant in the frum world. While pretending holiness and higher moral standards they would  act like the most depraved of humans.  I have long sought for a reasonable explanation of this phenomenon, and the best I could find was the influence of the Shatz and that whole movement that the Gra put into excommunication.

[It is not to say that the Litvak world [Yeshiva World based on the Gra] is immune. Just the opposite. They allowed elements from those movements to get inside, and thus partake of many of the flaws of fraud and spiritual uncleanliness.

So the solution, I imagine, would be simply to pay attention to the excommunication of the Gra. That would seem to be obvious. But for some reason, this obvious solution is ignored except by Rav Silverman in the Old City of Jerusalem and to some degree Ponovitch.

Appendix:
Rav Zilverman is the Rosh Yeshiva of Aderet Eliayhu which is the first yeshiva to specifically do everything according to the Gra. Since then, others have started. Ponovitch tends towards that approach also much more so than any American Yeshiva.