my decision making process

I can believe that there is something wrong with my decision making process. It is not just a lack of "street smarts". I have thought this for a long time after finding myself in one predicament after the other. I did not start learning Musar to answer this dilemma but after I was learning at at the Mir I thought it would help solve this problem.

[My original reason for learning Musar is I felt my poor soul drying up without learning about the Fear of God].
This is related to another question about the proper approach towards education that comes up in Laches where Socrates discusses this with two generals. The discussion notices that great men often have children that do not seem so great.

My basic impression is that in fact Musar [Medieval Ethics] helps to answer this problem to a very great degree. There are people like me that we find our decisions in life often seem flawed and sometimes there even seems to be some reaction from Heaven as if telling us that something is wrong --but we do not know what it is. I think for them and for me, Musar helps to a very large degree.  But there still seems to be plenty of areas of doubt.


I should mention that we ask forgiveness in the confession of Yom Kippur for not listening to our parents and teachers and to me it seems clear that this is the source of my difficulty. I had great and amazing parents and teachers in high school and in yeshiva but somehow I though I was better than them.

The Israeli Supreme Court decided it is allowed to deport illegal immigrants involved in criminal activity.

The Israeli Supreme Court decided it is allowed to deport illegal immigrants involved in criminal activity.


I heard about the problem surrounding the Ben Gurion airport. [Criminal activity by people from Africa]  I was warned not to leave the airport grounds at night for that reason.--by Tel Aviv people! That was something like 7 years ago. It took them long enough to come to a decision.


Nationalism has some support from Hegel and Howard Bloom. The main thing I think is important to remember about Hegel is he not thinking of every state that ever was or will be. He is thinking of an ideal state.
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There are some people you just do not want to be part of your state. It is as simple as that.

It is not that I am against illegal immigration. Rather I think a lot depends on what kind of people you are dealing with. Perhaps Europe might take a hint from the Israeli Supreme Court and do the same with people that are in Europe mainly in order to destroy European Civilization.


Israel's inability to deal with elements in its enemy population whose ultimate goal is the destruction of Israel to a large degree comes from Leftist attitudes that refuse to recognize  people can be evil and enemies

Objective morality needs to be awakened and it not known automatically. You can see the Rambam goes through great pains to emphasize the fact that faith {Torah} needs Reason {Aristotle} and Reason needs Faith.

The idea of learning Torah is made simple and concise by the Rambam. He goes about explaining it in a fashion that you need to put the different strands and threads together. But the end result is clear. To learn the entire Tenach [Old Testament], the Mishna {of R. Yehuda Hanasi}, Physics and Metaphysics or Aristotle. [Physics I would say based on subject matter is today's String Theory.]
The reason for the Rambam is clear. He goes to great effort to show that people have no inherent moral intuitions. Whatever morality we have has to be reawakened. And that can only happen in this way.

I mean to say the Rambam is neo Platonic--that we have access to the forms by some process of "remembering", but not by regress of reasons. That is objective morality needs to be awakened and it not known automatically.

The basic idea here is contained in Mishne Torah where the Rambam says to divide one time into three parts the Oral Law, the Written Law, and Gemara. [The Oral Law is the Mishna and Talmud as the Rambam makes clear in many places. One such place is where he talks about mistakes in legal decisions. He says any legal decision that goes against things that are openly stated in the Mishna or Talmud have no validity. He definitely puts the final authority of judgement in the Mishna and Talmud.]
[Gemara he says includes the subjects discussed in the first four chapters of Mishne Torah which are what the Rambam says are the Physics and Metaphysics of the ancient Greeks.]

You can see the Rambam goes through great pains to emphasize the fact that faith {Torah} needs Reason {Aristotle} and Reason needs Faith.

[My own personal experience with the Mishna was to learn every day about two mishnas with the Rav from Bartenura that is printed with the mishna and also to learn some of the other commentaries. Every mishna I did about twice. That is once I just read the words straight an then the Rav Ovadiah from Bartenura and not understand at all. Then I would do that again a second time and by that time I usually understood the basic idea.
  I should mention the commentary of the Tiferet Israel is really great but it is time consuming and I wanted to make progress. After I got to Israel I spent time just going through the Mishna straight with no commentaries at all which is also a great way to go about doing the Mishna.

[Here is one case in which Hegel and Dr Kelley Ross are not so far apart.  To Kelley Ross the end of the regress of reason ends in immediate non intuitive knowledge. With Hegel this knowledge also comes from outside of one's self. [The Divine Mind of the Neo Platonists even though Hegel would not have put it in that way.]

"search for Truth"

Secular USA lacked numinous value. You could look for it yourself and many thus went into Eastern religions. But the general experience of life in the USA tends to feel empty.
Later I think people looking for numinous value became part of the evangelicals. The later seems to me to be a lot better than the Eastern thing. The Evangelicals seem to find value in doing acts of kindness. That seems better than sitting around and doing nothing. [There are more serious complaints about Eastern religions but they still have some good points as Schopenhauer noted.]


Though at the time I would not have put it in this way but the search for numinous value led me to two Litvak Yeshivas in NY and later to Israel. But I certainly did not think of it in that sense. At best I would have said it was the "search for Truth" in capital letters.

Without a doubt I was influenced by my environment in which the search for "Truth" was a current theme. But I also think that I took it more seriously than most of my peers.

Though the search for truth I think is admirable, it does not take into account the problem of "religious delusions." This is a problem for two groups. The newly religious  who almost invariably have this problem. But more so with people born religious. The trouble there is there is an assumed superiority (moral and spiritual and intellectual) by reason of birth, and where pride is there comes a fall into serious religious delusions. These delusions  have no cure since the people born religious assume they are immune from delusions.
As long as their religious leaders are in externals keeping rituals, they assume there is no chance that they are possessed by the Sitra Achra [Demons] . A greater mistake or more serious delusion is hard to imagine.
[I am not saying I have all this down pat myself. But the Middle Ages were amazing in this regard because it was assumed that reason was needed for faith and faith for reason for many different reasons but among them must certainly have been this one.]

To cut away reason from faith is inevitably going to lead to this.

If you consider what I have written here you can see the exact reasons the Litvak yeshivas strive to walk this middle ground between faith and reason

It is true however the general rule that the baali teshuva [newly religious] are infected with religious delusions. The religious world is right on that account. But they do not see that they have the exact same problem in different forms-- and much more serious ones. It is they who lead the baal teshuva into their delusions.

Hegel and Dr. Kelley Ross

The biggest problem I see in philosophy today is the difference between Hegel and Dr. Kelly Ross of the Kant-Friesian School. Each one has amazing points, but if there is any way to reconcile them seems impossible. And personally I think both are outstanding for their scope of vision.
And the only justification for the basic approach of Torah from Sinai seems to be from the Kant-Friesian School with the idea of immediate non intuitive knowledge. [Knowledge that you know but not by reason and not by any of the senses.]

Both Hegel and Kelley Ross are important for their rigorous thought, but also for the scope of their vision. And scope is important because the world is not disconnected pieces.

It is one of the failures of philosophy of the twentieth century to be incredibly trivial and self contradicting. [If only they could come out and say openly their opinion of  meaningless existence.]

One thing I would like to mention in terms of the Kant-Friesian school is that causality is in fact existing among things in themselves. That is to say Locality but not reality.  [Things  have only possible values in space and time until measured, but locality still is true. There is no action at a distance. So Schopenhauer's complaint that Kant had not proved causality seems to me a little weak. But here is where Hegel come in useful with grades  of being. One level of causality and yet there being levels beyond that.


Hegel says (Introduction to Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830) Part One): Thus the knowledge of God, as of every supersensible reality, is in its true character an exaltation above sensations or perceptions: it consequently involves a negative attitude to the initial data of sense, and to that extent implies mediation. [Is that all that different from Kelley Ross? Well yes because Hegel can not hold of any knowledge that is "immediate". But with Kelley Ross it is knowledge but not through reason. To Hegel the knowledge of God is also not through Reason or senses but a combination of both. perceptions and sensations provide data. Then Reason works on that data.

What destroyed marriage?

What destroyed marriage?

Judith Reisman goes deeply into this problem and its sources. http://www.drjudithreisman.com/reisman_articles.html

The idea according to her was to change people's conceptions and present perversity in the guise of normalcy and scientific respectability.  That is,-- if you change people's thoughts and attitudes then everything else follows.

My feeling about this is people are not familiar enough with science to be able to distinguish authentic science from fake science. I do not think rejection of science is much of  a good option.

I am not saying this is the reason to learn Physics and Mathematics. The best reason to learn these subjects is the Rambam and my parents.
That is the basic medieval attitude of a synthesis between Reason and Revelation. [That really started before the Middle Ages, but it took a long time to find the right balance.] If you look at the classical period you will see this balance was by no means obvious.



But a side benefit is that when you know real science, it is harder for pretenders to fool you.

But the way I suggest going about science is to find  a balance between Gemara, Rashi, Tosphot and Science.
[That is the best thing is to translate the Mediaeval ideal into a reality in every day life by learning a little bit of Physics, a little bit of Mathematics and a little Gemara Rashi Tosphot [or Mishna or the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach].] [I tend to think the Avi Ezri is the best because it already contains everything else good.]



In any case I am very happy that I got a chance to see what a real marriage ought to be like in my parents and I think that this will return.  My optimism knows no bounds at this point.

Music for the Glory of God

t101 in mp3 

t101 in midi

t101 nwc