Learning Gemara opened the door into transcendence.

Reading Cleaving by Albert the Great just reconfirms what i already said   that the basic idea of the Middle Ages is to be attached to Hashem directly. The whole goal and orientation is completely different from the later Reformation.  


Personally, I have to say that I found learning Gemara opened the door into transcendence. It was just that that transcendence did not come to fruition until I got to Israel. I never really could put my finger, on it but there was some aspect of Gemara got me connected with the Divine.

What I mean to say is this:  at first learning Gemara was just that. Learning Gemara. The only thing different about it was my tremendous desire to learn Gemara. But there never was any thought about transcendence at all. It was just that while at the Mir in NY, I could feel the Divine presence. But that was all. It was only in Israel that the Light hit me with full power. But clearly it was because of the door that the Gemara opened. [Though I admit it might have been  learning Gemara in the Mir Yeshiva specifically or some kind Litvak yeshiva.]

The temporary romance has to precede the permanent one.

I have have not even heard of situations where this was not the case.

That is how love works. You have an intense love early in life, but for some reason it does not last, and then you find the next one which does last. In Litvak yeshivas they say every shiduch [date] that does not work  is one step towards the right one the "beshert." [The destined one.]

 Going through this  means one is one step towards finding the right one.

That is to say often people would go on endless shiduchim and never find the right one and the attitude was that each failed shiduch was one step toward the right one

The first one however must be real. It does not count if it is only immature love. Still there is something about it that makes it temporary.

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.

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