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When people try to flee from the Sitra Achra [Dark Side] they often end up in some greater evil.
This happens because the great evil disguises itself in elaborate ritual observances in order to seem kosher. 

For this reason I have stressed the importance of learning the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach so as to have a good idea of what the Torah actually does require of you.

The Rambam[ה' ממרים] holds there is a difference between (1) גזרות תקנות ומנהגים [decrees and laws that were instituted by the sages] and (2) laws made as a fence for Torah.

The Rambam[ה' ממרים]  holds there is a difference between (1) גזרות תקנות ומנהגים [decrees and laws that were instituted by the sages] and (2) laws made as a fence for Torah. The prime example of the later are the 18 laws brought in the first chapter of Shabat. But the Rambam extends that to anything made as a fence.
Thus for the Rambam: laws judged by the 13 principles can be changed by  a later court of law even a small one.
Things that are תקנות גזירות ומנהגים ([decrees and laws that were instituted by the sages]) can be changed by a later court if that later court is greater in number and wisdom. Laws made  for a fence can not be changed by any court of law- ever. [The Rambam is obviously getting this last category from the first chapter of Shabat concerning the 18 decrees.]
The issue here is the Raavad who makes only two distinctions -if the law דרבנן is accepted by all Israel. If so no one can nullify it. If not, then even a small court can nullify it. So when does the גדול בחכמה ומניין become relevant to the Raavad?

The question here is אבות דר' נתן The commentary on Pirkei Avot from the amoraim [sages of the Talmud]. There it is clear that no one has the authority to make  a law as a fence for the Torah since it says doing so is like what Adam HaRishon  [the first man] did in adding to the command of God not to eat from the tree of knowledge. So what does this mean? Perhaps the Rambam saw this midrash and decided that we see from it a difference between decrees and laws that were instituted by the sages and things instituted for  a fence. However the Rambam  is saying the opposite of that braita [teaching] in so far as the laws made for  a fence are more strict.

The teaching in אבות דר' נתן is  very explicit about decrees that add laws to Torah  law. It says better a wall that is ten inches and stands, rather that a wall 100 yards and falls. This is obviously of great relevance today when people are constantly coming up with new things to add to the Law of the Torah.

The interesting thing is the fact that things learned by the 13 principles are the most lenient and can easily be changed. That is contrary to the usual way these things are understood. But it fits well with teh well known opinion of the Rambam that things derived from the 13 principles are דברי סופרים words of the scribes as he says in the ways a woman can be married.

importance of institutions.

In short I had two ideas today that intersect. One is the fact that no institution can take the place of learning Torah. You can not support some institution that you think is learning Torah. You have to do it yourself. It makes no difference where you do it. It could be on the beach. It could be at home. It could be while parachuting on the way down when you have nothing else to do before you get to the ground.

The other thing is I did want to emphasize the importance of institutions. If yeshivas today were in fact authentic Litvak yeshivas then in fact it would be a great thing to support them.
'When a father inquired about the best method of educating his son in ethical conduct, a Pythagorean replied: "Make him a citizen of a state with good laws."

This includes two levels. The state one lives in. The other is the local group one associates with.

So if one is in the area of a genuine Litvak yeshiva then great. If not then the best thing is to get the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach, a Gemara [Vilna Shas edition ONLY.], and Musar and learn them at home.
[I say Rav Shach because he is the most logically rigorous and deep. However any of the disciples of Reb Chaim Soloveitchik from Brisk are also very good., I.e. "Gedolai Litva" 

Many students have a difficult time seeing a distinction between the following two statements: a. It's true. b. It's true for me.

"Well, it's true for me ...."
Many students have a difficult time seeing a distinction between the following two statements:

a. It's true.
b. It's true for me.

But there IS a difference, and it is important to see the difference, and most people see the difference when it comes to things like mathematics, science, accounting, engineering, law, etc.

Here's the question: What does "for me" add to "It's true"? What I mean is, why would anyone say "It's true for me"? Let's say, for example, your favorite physics teacher asks you to tell her what the rate of fall is for a body located approximately at the surface of the Earth. Let's say that you are a student of physics and know with certainty, that bodies fall at 9.4 meters per second per second. If you write on your exam that bodies fall at 9.4 m/sec^2, your instructor would put an annoying red "X" next to your answer. (It should be 9.81)

"But wait a darn minute, there, ma'am: it's true for me that bodies fall at 9.4 m/sec^2!"



Relativism and Tolerance
What is the matter with the following claim:
"Different groups have different moral beliefs.
[One glance would show the absurdity of the logical extension of this argument. Disagreements in questions of history or biology or cosmology do not show that there are no facts about these subjects.]

Do you understand the reasons why such statements as "well it's true for them…" are confused and mistaken (with exceptions)?
Do you understand why such statements as "no one can tell me what to believe (or what to do)" doesn't work as a response to moral criticism? And why it isn't a very respectable or sophisticated response to differences in opinion? [Let's say a cashier in a supermarket who takes money from the cash register is approached by her boss. She defends herself: "No one can tell me what to do."
Let's say a private in the army does not know how to clean and reassemble  a rifle.He is approached by his superior officer who tries to tell him how to do it. He answers: "No one can tell me what to think."]

Do you understand the reasons why such statements as "who needs morality?" are confused and mistaken (with exceptions)?
Do you understand the difference between the law and morality and why the law is an insufficient moral guide?
Do you understand how it is that humans get their views about morality? The various stages of development that many humans experience?


Morality is a social phenomenon. Think about this. If a person is alone on some deserted island would anything that person did be moral or immoral? That person may do things that increase or decrease the chance for survival or rescue but would those acts be moral or immoral? Most of what we are concerned with in Ethics is related to the situation in which humans are living with others. Humans are social animals. Society contributes to making humans what they are. For humans there arises the question of how are humans to behave toward one another. What are the rules to be? How are we to learn of them? Why do we need them?


Consider what the world would be like if there were no traffic rules at all. Would people be able to travel by automobiles, buses and other vehicles on the roadways if there were no traffic regulations? The answer should be obvious to all rational members of the human species. Without basic rules, no matter how much some would like to avoid them or break them, there would be chaos. The fact that some people break the rules is quite clearly and obviously not sufficient to do away with the rules. The rules are needed for transportation to take place.

Why are moral rules needed? For example, why do humans need rules about keeping promises, telling the truth and private property? This answer should be fairly obvious. Without such rules people would not be able to live amongst other humans. People could not make plans, could not leave their belongings behind them wherever they went. We would not know who to trust and what to expect from others. Civilized, social life would not be possible. So, the question is :

Why should humans care about being moral?

John Mackie calls ethical intuitions 'queer' and 'utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else'. '

Behind Mackie's distaste for intuition there no doubt lies some of the strong empiricist sentiment of twentieth-century philosophy. Empiricism--roughly, the idea that all 'informative' knowledge, or knowledge of the mind-independent, language-independent world, must derive from sense perception--has been fashionable for the last century, though less so, I think, in the past decade.


Here, I will give a  counter-example to empiricism.

First example: Nothing can be both entirely red and entirely green. How do I know that? Note that the question is not how I came upon the concepts 'red' and 'green', nor how I came to understand this proposition. The question is why, having understood it, I am justified in affirming it, rather than denying it or withholding judgment. It seems to be justified intuitively, that is, simply because it seems obvious on reflection. How else might it be justified?

A naive empiricist might appeal to my experiences with colored objects: I have seen many colored objects, and none of them have ever been both red and green. One thing that makes this implausible as an explanation of how I know that nothing can be both red and green is the necessity of the judgment. Contrast the following two statements:

Nothing is both green and red.
Nothing is both green and a million miles long.

We have never observed a counter-example to either statement, so it would seem that the second is at least as well-supported by observation as the first. The second statement is probably true, since we have never observed a green object that is a million miles long, although there seems to be no reason why there couldn't be such a thing. We have a clear conception of what it would be like to observe such a thing, and it would not be senseless to look for one.But the first statement is different: we can see that there simply couldn't be a green object that is red, and it seems that no matter what our experience had been like, we would not have said that there was such an object; consequently, it would be senseless even to look for one.

I conclude with a final epistemological objection to intuitive morality. Even if moral properties are real, it does not seem that they could affect anything. They do not produce physical effects, so they do not affect our brain processes, so they probably do not affect our mental processes either.

Some philosophers maintain that knowledge of a thing requires some kind of interaction with it.
Now, this problem is not specific to moral knowledge. It is a general problem about a priori knowledge. Paul Benacerraf originally raised it as a problem about mathematics: since we have no interaction with the number 2--we do not bump into it on the street, and so on--how can we have knowledge of it?

Answer: Reason perceives universals

Universals exist necessarily. 'Universals' are abstract things (features, relationships, types) that two or more particular things or groups can have in common. For instance, yellow is a universal. It is something that lemons, the sun, and school buses, among other things, all have in common. Yellow is 'abstract' in the sense that it is not a particular object with a particular location; you will not bump into yellow, just sitting there by itself, on the street. Nevertheless, yellow certainly exists. Here is an argument for that:
1.
The following statement is true:
(Y) Yellow is a color.
2.
The truth of (Y) requires that yellow exist.
3.
Therefore, yellow exists.

Comment: Suppose I say, 'The King of Colorado is fluffy'. Since there is no king of Colorado, some would say the sentence is false; others would say it is neither true nor false. But no one thinks it would be true.

Some philosophers (the 'nominalists') say that the only thing multiple particulars have in common is that we apply the same word or idea to them. Here is an argument against that:

4.	Yellow is a color, and lemons have it.
5.	No word or idea is a color, nor do lemons 'have' words or ideas.
6.	Therefore, yellow is not a word or an idea.

Yellowness is something lemons, the sun, and so on have in common; so what they have in common is not (merely) a word or idea. Some philosophers will say I have oversimplified this issue. I say I have simplified but not oversimplified; the existence of universals is a trivial truth.

[The latter part of this essay is taken from Dr Michael Huemer.]]

The Torah's world view is Monotheism. That is: that God created the world something from nothing, and He is not the world, nor is the world Him.

The basic idea of the verse אתה הראתה לדעת כי השם הוא האלהים אין עוד מלבדו (You were shown to know that the Lord is God, there is no other besides Him.) is actually explained simply in the beginning of the Mishne Torah (of Maimonides). [הלכות יסודי התורה פרק א' הלכה א-ד] That is that God's existence is independent of anything else. The existence of everything else depends on the existence of God. It does not mean the way people commonly take it to mean nowadays as a support for the Bhagavad Gita.

I mean to say that the Torah's world view is that of what is called Monotheism.That is that God created the world something from nothing, and He is not the world, nor is the world Him.

This all goes to show how right Reb Israel Salanter was about Musar. For in Musar one gets the basic orientation of the Torah. 

[In Israel, in Rav Montag's yeshiva I had an opportunity to demonstrate this. I was talking with some of the "kollel-lite" guys that were learning in kollel, and this subject came up. I had two stones in my pockets. I asked them about one of them, "Is this stone godliness?" "האם האבן הזאת אלקות?" They remained uncommitted. They must have thought I had something up my sleeve. I then took out the other stone and put the first one on the floor and smashed it with the second one. It made such a noise that the entire beit midrash looked up-including Rav Montag.
I asked them, "Did it just break godliness?"האם עכשיו שיברתי אלקות? 
[I do not recommend this demonstration because part of the first stone flew out and it could have hurt someone. That would have then brought up the question: "Is godliness is dangerous?"]

Most supposed Torah scholars are demons as Reb Nachman pointed out. Once they decide to use Torah for money they lose their holy soul and become possessed by forces from the dark side.]

Not enough credit is given to Kant when it come to his insight that when pure reason goes into an area of  "the thing in itself" (dinge an sich (plural)) it comes up with self contradictions. Kant intended this insight to be expanded. Not just to be understood in the limited philosophical form he put it in.
 Thus Kant himself applied it further. He said when a person looks into his own soul and psychology that creates in him mental illness because the "self" is in the realm of the dinge an sich. [That in itself was an important insight. It was by this awareness that one is only conscious of the surface of the self--not what is inside it that gave Kant the ability to overcome solipsism.

Thus it seems clear to me why learning Torah presents the kinds of problems that one generally encounters. The reason now seems simple. It is in the realm of the dinge an sich.
The only way to come to Torah is to be able to jump over the questions. To come to appreciate Torah is much more important than the amount of time spent learning it.
The question typically are sometimes contradictions in the issue of "parnasa" how much time to spend on a livelihood as opposed to how much time spent of learning Torah. There are also questions that arise from phony people that pretend to learn Torah and yet are not at all moral or decent.[Most supposed Torah scholars are demons as Reb Nachman pointed out. Once they decide to sue Torah for money they lose their holy soul and become possessed by forces from the dark side.]
The way you can see this in the Ari [Isaac Luria] and Rav Shalom Sharabi is  the צימצום applied to all the midot (sepherot). Thus when the צימצום occurred it happened even in wisdom. So there are areas where wisdom can not venture into. [That is how the Reshash explains  the צמצום at the beginning of the נהר שלום  based on a reading of the Ari.]

One trouble is also the very common problem of people being thrown out of yeshivas. There are many causes of this-sometimes justified and sometimes not. One thing that makes this disturbing is the fact that many yeshivas present themselves as "open door" places to the public. That is the face they present when trying to collect charity. But the big picture is more simple. It is hard to merit to Torah and to do so one has to overcomes the mental blocks, questions about, "Why should one learn Torah?" So if it would not be one kind of question or problem it would be another, because there is not way to merit to Torah without jumping over the questions and ignoring them and simply saying "people are people are primates" and simply decreeing on oneself to sit and learn Torah as much and even more than what is possible.

[What I meant to say here about Rav Shalom Sharabi is that he mentions the doubt of Reb Chaim Vital about if the צמצום  was only in כלליות or also in פרטיות. And the Reshash says there that this doubt of Rav Chaim Vital was only at the beginning of his learning from the Ari, but later it was clear to him that it also applied in פרטיות. Reb Nachman brings this same point also. He says like the Reshash that the צמצום contraction happened in all the traits -for example wisdom. So there is a limit to how far reason--even pure reason can extend.]