The State of Israel and the statement of Shmuel in the Talmud: The Law of the State is the law.

The law is quite simple is understand.  It is that men have  common goals which are the objects of their rational will, that the state is a contrivance that they have worked out to help them realize that end, and that its authority over them rests on its being necessary for that end.  If it is politically obligatory at times to obey a law that one regards as bad, that is because the state could not be run at all if the citizens could pick and choose which laws they would obey. Ultimately, therefore, political obligation, even that of obeying a morally bad law, is a moral obligation; and when, as occasionally happens, it becomes a duty to disobey, the ground is still the same.  I believe that this simple doctrine is what the Gemara and all the rishonim [medieval authorities] are saying. [Credit goes to Reb Moshe Feinstein and Reb Aaron Kotler who both pointed out the connection between the State of Israel the statement of  Shmuel in the Talmud.]


The religious world assumes if they were in charge then everything would be peachy. This is not true. I have never seen any situation in which religious people got involved in that they did not make it a thousand times worse. Whatever Torah they think they are keeping it is certainly not the Torah from the realm of Holiness.




Does it follow that since the state is a necessary means to our major ends, we should in all circumstances obey it, that we never have the right to rebel?  Not at all.  Our view would not only justify disobedience in some cases; it would require it.  If the state is regarded, not as sacrosanct or an end in itself, but as an instrument to certain great ends, then when it becomes so corrupt as to cut us off from those ends rather than further them, when it serves its purpose so badly that it is better to risk chaos for the sake of a better order than continue to suffer under the old, then resistance becomes a right and a duty.  

  This will be an extreme and desperate case, since it will obviously be better as a rule to obey what we regard as a bad law and try by persuasion to get it amended than to seek the overthrow of the power which supports all laws alike.  
  But there is no doubt that when government has ceased to serve its major ends, the people who have fashioned it to serve those ends have a right to replace it with something that serves these better. 

The argument between Dr. Kelley Ross [the Kant Fries school] and Hegel.

I admit I am profoundly disturbed by the argument between Dr. Kelley Ross [the Kant Fries school] and Hegel. [This argument is an inheritance from the differences between Hegel and Fries. Also there is the fact that the Marxists made extensive use (and still make extensive use) of Hegel though they reject more than they accept.]

It does not help much the fact that Hegel himself says on occasion outrageous things like his treatment of Newton.
My own feeling about this is that Both Hegel and the Kant Fries School have  a lot to say that is valuable and important.[This is like the difference between Plato and Aristotle. There also it is hard to decide.]

The truth be told is that if you would whittle down the argument to looking simply at the difference between the two systems--the differences would not be great and almost complementary.


The normal thing to do in this case would be to learn Kant and Hegel thoroughly, and yet I have time constraints that make this impractical today.


Both Hegel and Dr Ross are important for two reasons, rigorous logic and scope of vision.
Today philosophy has sunk into deep meaninglessness as Allan Bloom already noted in his Closing of the American Mind. You need a certain scope in philosophy because that is the very essence of what it is--to make sense of the world. But also you need logic and reason, because otherwise anyone can say anything that appeals to people. If one is not constrained by reason, then he can say anything, and the only limit is what people like to hear, not what is true.


The reason all this s important is that the defend Torah by means of the medieval books e.g. the Rambam and Saadia Gaon is difficult when the make use of axioms that no longer seem valid.

To actually defend Torah seems a lot easier by means of Kant and Kelley Ross.

Music for the Glory of God

U1 A Minor

The major source of evil is the refusal to leave a cult once one realizes its true nature.

סור מרע in Psalms it says to "go away from evil". Not the term you would expect  לא לעשות רע--not to do evil. The reason is  the main evil people do is because they refuse to leave some cult that they joined and now recognize as evil, but refuse to leave it. This is the constant temptation of all mankind. This is major source of  evil. The refusal to leave  a cult once one realizes its true nature.

This is easy to see in real life and also in the Rambam who says it is the nature of people to be drawn in their opinions after the people they associate with. See Howard Bloom in The Lucifer Principle  concerning the power of the super-organism. 

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.]