Torah and Aristotle. While Saadia Gaon and the Rambam dealt with problems concerning the seeming contradiction between Torah and Aristotle still internal problems were not a major concern.

In Torah there are questions that come up  concerning the simple explanation. While Saadia Gaon and the Rambam dealt with problems concerning the seeming contradiction between Torah and Aristotle still internal problems were not a major concern. [In Aristotle himself]  The way to deal with a lot of the more obvious problems is usually resort to  the Ari. [The Ari is Neo Platonic. However of you look at the Reshash/ Sar Shalom Sharabi you will see that after the time of the revival of the dead the world will be like Aristotle. ] This has the advantage that you are not making the Torah to be allegories which is already the path that Philo used, and does not at all seem convincing. With the Ari rather there is the possibility of seeing how the Torah refers to realities that  are more real than this world. [At least this works for me.]

There is also an approach I borrow from the Kant school of thought as developed by Dr. Kelley Ross. That is: the world of the dinge an sich is simply not accessible to human intellect. Dinge an sich are all areas of a priori knowledge that do not come under the title of conditions of possibility of  experience [not possible experience. ]

So the question comes up how to learn the Ari without falling into the strange cults that claim him as their authority? That is : How to listen to the Gra, when everyone else seems to be ignoring him?

[Because of the great value of Dr Kelley Ross's ideas and Hegel's it would be a great idea to try to reconcile these two approaches.]

I learned in high school and later in yeshiva a good deal of Leftist literature. The Communist Manifesto in high school [on my own.] That was not assigned reading. In yeshiva between the morning and afternoon sessions, I read the major work of Sartre and read about Lenin. In high school, Camus was assigned reading. It is impossible to project myself now into my past and decide what I was thinking, but fro my actions I think it is clear that I was not impressed with Left wing thinking. I definitely was going more in the direction of the Rationalists--but had never gotten enough time to get into the debate between them and the Empiricists and to see how Kant tried to resolve it. In any case, even back then I think I had seen that there was something remarkably superficial about Left Wing thinking.

I might be attributing to myself more common sense than I have  a right to. Because what ever sense I had then seems to have abandoned me in later years when I more or less lest the straight Litvak yeshiva path.

It seems more likely to say I was impressed with my parents home and with the way American society was in those days. And I simply saw these alternative claims to making Utopia as being highly unrealistic.

In any case Leftist and Religious thinking always seemed to be about undermining social order and bringing about chaos so that they could come in and impose their own social order with them on top. Left wing thinking and the religious world both seem to me until this very day to be all about trying to destroy decent society and to bring about dis-stabilization so that they can impose their own authority
So even though I could discern the hidden authoritarian agenda of Left Wing Thinking I did not see this in the Jewish religious world, until too late.   But the agenda is the same. The means however are different. The claimed doctrines all seem to have the same purpose of breaking the ties that bond one with his parents and society in order to be able to come in later and impose their own authority.

r99 F major [Rough draft]


t58 D major

Occult practices and beliefs get into the religious world by means of the slippery slope.

Occult practices and beliefs get into the religious world by means of the slippery slope. That is by fudging definitions about faith in Torah, and bringing statements that support some of the crack head beliefs that were said by supposedly great men. It is a kind of conspiracy that began long ago to sneak in occultism into the Torah world.

The effort to get occultism into Litvak (Lithuanian)Yeshivas is mainly because they are the gold standard of what qualifies as legitimate and authentic Torah.
Thus you can find elements of the occult in even well known Litvak Yeshivas. the only one that I know excludes all these elements rigorously is the yeshiva of Rav Zilverman in the Old City of Jerusalem which goes strictly by the Gra. I was pretty friendly with the rosh yeshiva there already for about 26 years and though I did not learn there myself I have been pretty well impressed with the place. The name is not so well known, but just for the record the name is Aderet Eliyahu.


The great yeshivas like Ponovitch and Brisk are, as a rule, places where you can get into only f you already know how to learn. But Rav Zilverman's place starts at beginner levels.


I should mention that I have heard there are other start-up places that go by the Gra. 

Intensity of religious devotion

Intensity of religious devotion can be a great thing if one is on the path of truth and light and a terrible thing if one is on the path of darkness and evil.So the first thing one must do is to learn to discern between the holy and the unholy, though the unholy is easy to discern in fact. The more they are religious in appearance, the more you know they are from the Realm of Evil and Darkness. The prophet asks: "What does God ask from you? but to love compassion and justice הצנע לכת עם אלהיך to walk modestly with your God." (note 1) So if people are making a public announcement about how religious they are, then you know they are not doing the prime directive of God. Therefore it is easy to discern that they are from the Realm of Darkness.  

(note 1)  The entire verse is this: מה השם אלהיך שואל ממך כי עם אהבת חסד ועשות משפט והצנע לכת עם אלהיך.

However the basic question remains for oneself: how to discern between good and evil, right and wrong, in the  same area of value?
What are the minimum or maximum requirements of the Torah. Clearly the fanatic religious world is off on some lunatic LSD trip, but still that leaves the question open. The fact that many do Torah wrong does not tell me how to do it right. The best approach in my opinion is that of the Rambam who at least stated clearly his four fold approach of learning the Written and Oral Torah [the two Talmuds,] the Physics and Metaphysics of Aristotle. This seems to be close to the path of my parents. Most other paths I have seen as producing really evil people is religious disguise.

There is nothing wrong with intensity of devotion if one is on a basically good path. For example, let's say that one is in a straight Lithuanian kind of yeshiva that goes strictly by the path of the Gra. In that case there would be nothing wrong with being a fanatic. Being fanatic is learning + keeping Torah is a good thing. There are dangers there also, but still the idea is once one is on a good path, one must stick with it and not leave--even for other paths which seem to be good.

The contemporary Jewish religious world  is an occult practice. Although varied in its beliefs from group to group, the occult usually encompass the views of honoring corpses of their leaders  as sacred, monism (all is one energy), polytheism (many spiritual powers), and pantheism (all is God/Goddess),  or panentheism (God/Goddess is contained within the world), communing with the dead.

This is in steady and stark contrast to Torah which is Monotheism, which is the belief that God created the world and He is not the world.

T58 D major

pillorying of white people--being done by other white people.

My impression of the USA (before there was lots of energy put into making it black) was highly positive. And High School taught as much. Later, I got more involved in Talmud,  and that was in Queens [NY] and later in Brooklyn,- so being involved in that I simply paid zero attention  to politics. But in the meantime (--when I was not looking), things just went downhill. So coming out of my shell in the 1990's, I was pretty horrified at what I have seen of the USA. 
My impression is that values changed. Instead of positive values, "Truth, Justice and the American Way" (as Superman so aptly put it), I saw pillorying of white people--being done by other white people.  This was done to appease the savage.  But also this is what Churches were teaching as being moral.