Can virtue be taught?

The thing is that traditional American values were a delicate balance of values.  It was known to be hard to keep stable. I believe high school education was actually geared towards instilling those values. This all goes back to the conclusion of Socrates at the very end of Protagoras where  he decided that virtue can be taught.
Probably a lot of people in programs that are directly towards special ends [goal directed programs] do not see this. But when I was in high school I definitely got this impression.
 That was before the Frankfurt school [that came to the USA and changed education in the USA to become socialist] changed the very essence of USA education.

To me it seems that there is a lot of value in what could be called classical education.

 There also were Bible based organizations in the USA that explicitly had this as their goal [but combined these goals along with outdoor skills--being aware that virtue is best achieved in an indirect fashion.]


Can virtue be taught? Apparently not so easily. There is no question that the traditional Litvak yeshiva with its balance between Gemara Rashi and Tosphot with Musar/Ethics strove to achieve exactly that purpose. To me it seems clear that the gedolai Litva [sages of Torah in Lithuania] thought this balance was the best way to achieve this. Heads of the yeshivas in Lithuania  definitely did not think hours of Musar {books of Ethics} would bring to virtue. But neither did they think ignoring Musar was right. So they also sought this balance.

The Silverman yeshivas I think do the best job since their approach is modeled on the path of the  Gra which has in it an implicit balance of values.[I do not mean just Silverman. There are other yeshivas which have adopted the Silverman approach]
 I think it is clear that wickedness can be taught. I can see lots of systems out there that definitely instill evil in people. Does it makes sense to say the virtue can be instilled? Maybe. In any case my impression is that the general Litvak yeshiva approach ought to be modified into the Silverman approach which goes with the Gra and a great deal of Tenach [Old Testament] and Mishna. This is based on the Gra and from what I can see, the results are excellent.

[I might mention that I did try to do Mishna on my own time in yeshiva--mainly Taharot with the commentaries.]



So it seems the general conclusion is that virtue can be taught but not directly but as a by product of some other process. Why should this be so?

time itself is a creation

Causality I think is more fundamental than time. This comes from Bell's inequality which shows that things do not have values in time or space until they are measured.
The fact that nature violates Bell's inequality shows that one of two things needs to be thrown out: (1) Reality, or (1) Causality (Also known as locality). We know causality from GPS satellites which would be off by 11 kilometers !!! every day if either special Relativity or General Relativity were wrong. [The have to be calibrated to account for the effect of GR that is to go faster than clocks on earth by 45 micro seconds and to go slower by 7 microseconds. Thus to be made to go slower each day by 38 micro seconds in order to correspond with clocks in Earth] Therefore it is the assumption of Reality which has to be thrown out--that is that things have objective time or space before being measured. But they do exist --because otherwise there would be nothing to measure. [Not like Bohr.][Thanks to Dr Kelley Ross for bringing this fact up about Bohr.]]
[This treatment of the subject I owe to Motl Reference Frame and a a book on Quantum Mechanics from Beer Sheva University by  דורון כהן

[All popular science books claim locality is the thing which needs to be thrown out which does not speak well for their level of understanding.]






This fits in well with the idea that time itself is a creation. [Reb Nachman brings this in Sefer Hamidot, but it comes from Augustine of Hippo.]
This also fits well with the idea that God is the First Cause and He created time. Human reason has a hard time imagining how there can be causality without time, but there are plenty of other things   people can not picture. [A 4-d sphere]

The Sexual Revolution was begun by pseudo science

A great deal of the problems arise when pseudo sciences are substituted for actual science.
My own feeling is that this was inevitable after the Enlightenment when "Science" gained some kind of godlike status. The Sexual Revolution was begun by pseudo science. See this link
and here Judith Reisman

It just takes time until it gets into people's minds.

 Political "Science"? Social "Science"?  Thrown in a few equations and people get fooled by the simple word "science". What a joke.

[All of these stupid sciences are just a simple result of Physics -Envy. People too stupid to do the real thing.]


In other words, when the Rambam picks out Physics and Metaphysics to learn, I think he was being exact and very particular. He could easily have picked out other subjects in Aristotle. Why did he pick those two? I suggest he was being as exact and careful as much (and even more so) than he was being in the Mishne Torah as Rav Shach and Reb Chaim Soloveitchik constantly point out.

My feeling about the problem with the sexual revolution is that since it permeates society it gets into one's head--  just because one is automatically drawn after the opinions of people around him.

A synthesis balance between Reason and the Revelation at Sinai.

It is well known that the Rishonim (Medieval authorities)  had an approach based on a synthesis and balance between Reason and the Revelation at Sinai. This you see in Saadia Gaon also.
I did not pay much attention to this while in yeshiva- even though I definitely saw this in most of  the Medieval Musar books. This forms the basis for my approach about the importance of learning Physics and Metaphysics as the Rambam put it so bluntly.
The problem is obviously that these subjects tend to be hard. For that reason use the approach (I also saw in Musar books) of learning דרך גירסה just saying the words and going on with faith that eventually I will understand.
[Though I had seen this in only one Musar book [אורחות צדיקים] in California, later in NY I saw a book about learning [בניין עולם] from Bnei Brak that brought down a lot of Musar books that said the same thing. ]


The direction of the Rambam and Saadia Gaon was changed almost immediately after the Zohar was published. From then on this Rambam approach was relegated to the periphery, while mysticism took first place. My own approach is to accept the Ari and the Remak [Rav Moshe of Cordoba] but not to the degree of ignoring Saadia Gaon and the Rambam.
The main thing about the Ari is that whole thing has basically fallen into the Sitra Achra (Dark Side). It is almost impossible to get to the Ari without getting a fatal dose of the Dark Side along with him. It is for that reason I mention that anyone wanting to learn the Ari should only go to a descendant of Rav Yaakov Abuchatzaeira in order to avoid the Dark Side. [Or Rav Shalom Sharabi.]


The reasons are more or less because I saw plenty of people that took the mystic approach and was never impressed. I can't even think of one person I knew that was into mystic stuff that was not filled with religious delusions.

Music for the Glory of God t91

t91 C major t95 G Major  t91 midi  t95 in midi

Music for the glory of God

T90 E Flat Major mp3 T95 mp3 T90 in midi  t95 in midi [t90 in nwc t95 in nwc]

The Six Days of Creation. The Revolt against Reason.

The idea of six eons I saw in the Ari and heard in the name Isaac of Aco. The Ari say the the six eons is not even time but rather higher realities that are above time. This really all goes back to Plato who postulates two levels of reality the unchanging world of forms and the changing world of phenomena. This scheme I see also in Kant.




I am however not taking this idea of Kant to its ultimate end. I more or less agree with Hegel that even the realm of the Dinge An Sich ["the things in themselves"] is accessible to reason by means of some kind of process of dialectics.
[The idea of raising Torah truths beyond reason to make it immune to critique seems to backfire. In any case, this is a debate between Kant and Hegel and until I have gone through the three critiques and the published works of Hegel in their original language I do not feel qualified to put myself between tall and high mountains.

And as one great person put it:

Now the result of this line of defense is not really to save  morality, but to throw all morality into confusion.  No common obligation will any more be binding.  The obligations of man to man, of father to son, of trying to produce the greatest good, of obeying conscience—were pronounced unreliable and flouted.  And that means moral nihilism.  Natural men, that is the great majority of us, are asked to believe this about ourselves: that the very ideals we have always followed are condemnable; that the better way of life is being deliberately withheld from us, but we shall be condemned nevertheless if we do not find it; and that it is our duty to hold such an arrangement in reverence as perfectly just.  If this is true, our appropriate attitude is not only one of despair, as Kierkegaard noted, but one of moral skepticism, as he did not.  We can rely neither on reason, for that is corrupted, nor on divine direction, for that is beyond our reach.  The right inference from this is that nothing open to us is certainly better or worse than anything else.  Once the compass of natural reason is discredited, what is left?  Inspiration from omniscience?  But with the appeal to reason and sanity no longer available, how are we to tell true prophets from false?  What, one wonders, would be the ground rules in a debate between Kierkegaard and Dr. Leary?

[The way of protecting faith by attacking reason has a long history going back as far as you could want to take it.  This appears in the Middle Ages with the arguments against the Rambam.

In Hegel a process of reasoning through things leads to knowledge about areas that Kant says are inaccessible to reason. And it seems that is in fact exactly the case.

[Judging by the amount of modifications that Dr Kelley Ross makes to Kant, I wonder how close he is actually getting to the same things that Hegel was. How far is Numinous value from Absolute Spirit? Are these really all that different? Why make disagreement where perhaps none really exists? I think it all comes from Popper's unwillingness to see anything original or of value in Hegel-or simply his justified hatred of totalitarian systems that were using Hegel as justification. Popper was wrong about the Nazis but he was right that the Left was certainly using Hegel for their own un-Hegelian purposes.

But in essence I just do not see Hegel to blame for all that. And some of the critiques are just as much applicable in the reverse direction.  Hegel like Kant believed Reason generates self contradictions when it gets into the area of the Dinge An Sich. Hegel uses this idea as way that an idea sublimates itself. Dr Kelley Ross also has the idea of Ur Contingency [Ultra Contingency in the area of the Divine where two opposites can both be true.]