How do you find a teacher that will not cause more damage than benefit?

There was a discussion in ancient Athens about if it is worthwhile to train one's children how to fight in armor. Socrates and two distinguished generals and two fathers went to a demonstration of how to do this. One of the generals said that he had seen the fellow doing the demonstration in an actual battle and he had shown himself to be  a perfect coward and incompetent. [See the book of Plato called Laches]

This brings out the more modern question should one send his teach his children to teachers to learn .. meditation? Torah? survival skills? How can one tell what they might pick up?

Even if you have a good idea what to teach your children, how do you pick find competent teachers?
How do you find a teacher that will not cause more damage than benefit?

There is also the trouble of how to avoid criticizing some teacher who very well might be a trickster, but one who still your children get benefit from?
Sometimes one cult is a good way to escape from a worse cult.

  I see this world as a battle ground between good and evil in each area of value. So even if one area of value is good, still the most famous teachers are more than likely to be damaging to that area.

Mainly I am referring here to teachers of Zen and other forms of Eastern religions. My impression is they do not add much good to people's character. But my comments could just as well apply to the religious Jewish world.

I should add that thanks to God I usually was guided in such a way as I almost always had great teachers. Beverly Hills High School, then Shar Yashuv in Rav Freifeld's yeshiva and then the Mir in NY. the best ones were Mr Smart the music teacher. Naphtali Yeagert the rosh yeshiva in Far Rockaway and Reb Shmuel Berenbaum the rosh yeshiva of the Mir.

Lashon Hara/slander

I noticed that when people divorce they often tend to say something negative about their former spouse.This brings up the subject of Lashon Hara [which means saying something critical about someone else].

This subject was very much in the consciousness of most people at the Mir Yeshiva in NY when I was there. It was not a part of the official sessions but there was a grandson of Rav Avigdor Miller  who started a kind of mini-session every day after the morning prayer.
One question that was brought up the was about the law of באפי תלתא in front of three. That is  the law that if lashon hara has been said in front of three people, one can spread it even further because it is already considered to be known publicly. The problem is the person that is asking the question is one of the three. So just tell him "No" and then there will not be three people spreading the lashon hara.

I mentioned to Shimon Buso that often this prohibition is used to protect corrupt people in authority. And he answered me that without learning the Chafetz Chaim, then the whole issue is הפקר a free for all. That is unless people learn the laws about lashon hara then they usually are not even aware that what they say might be lashon hara.
Rav Israel Abuchatziera had only one picture in his home, that of the Chafetz Chaim. No one knows why. But it is possible to speculate that it was a combination of respect along with the reminder to be careful about lashon hara.

On the other hand you are suppose to warn others of possible dangers about fraudsters and crooks and cults. The Na Nach group assumes all religious teachers are fraudsters until proven otherwise. It certainly seems true to me that they have  a good point. [But to me it seems that the real problem is the religious world follows social norms that are opposite to everything the Torah says. What Na Nach say however is true that the main problem starts with the teachers. There seems to be some aspect of the Dark Side that takes over their personalities. The issue was brought up by Reb Nachman who discussed מפורסמים של שקר charismatic evil teachers. But Reb Israel Odessar shortened it to "מפורסם= שקר" once a teachers is famous, then you already know he is false.

Some people in order to lend to their ideas the appearance of divine authority adopt the same device as Zoroaster and Mohammed.
Mani did this having discovered a cave through which there ran a stream of water, he laid up in it a store of provisions, and retired there for a year, giving out that he was on a visit to heaven.  In this retirement he produced his book a work  the ingenuity of which has been greatly praised.

This is common nowadays in the Jewish world. People do not claim to visit heaven physically but they do claim to have gone there in spirit and to bring back their particular configuration of confused ideas. [Instead of trying to nullify the laws of the Torah they make them irrelevant or secondary to their new revelations.]

The particular problem with this is that in the Law of Moses it is stated there will never be  a new Law from God. Sinai was a one time event. [Prophecy is not to bring new teachings nor new interpretations of the Torah]. [Deuteronomy 29:29]

Nowadays it is easier to claim divine revelation since one does not have to go into a cave for a year to do so. But one has to make sure that his disciples are the ones that claim it openly, not himself. It is fairly easy in the West but harder in India where people are used to charlatans and give them tests to see if they are real. In the West all one needs is one or two gullible disciples to get the ball rolling.

Besides all that, a prophecy to add or subtract any commandment in the Torah gives the prophet the category of a false prophet [Deuteronomy 13].

I recall Allan Bloom [in the closing of the American Mind] brought the idea that the social studies departments and humanities at USA universities were mainly postmodern nonsense.

My basic feeling is to go through the basic ABC's from beginning to end. That is to have one session in the Written Law, one session in the Oral Law starting with the Mishna  and getting up to the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach. Then one session in Physics and another in Math. Though the Rambam emphasize both Physics an Metaphysics I would hold off on Metaphysics until I had finished Shas and Physics.

The teachers of Postmodern stuff and PC and pseudo Torah I recommend shooting.



[In short the  major ideas about learning I want to introduce are these (1) דרך גירסה the path of just saying the words in order and then going on with no review until one has finished the book. (2) שיעורין כסדרן sessions in order. That is to have separate sessions  each day in all the major subjects. That is to learn them in order. (3) To learn the Written Law  (the Old Testament), whole Oral Law in order,  the two Talmuds and all the midrashim; Physics, Metaphysics ]

limits of knowledge

(1) What you can derive from Socrates  is that it is more important to know what you do not know than it is to know what you do know. There were plenty of people in Athens that knew how to work as a blacksmith and other professions. But they were not  aware of the limits of their knowledge.

The oracle had said about Socrates that he was the wisest and that meant he was the most wise because he knew that he knew nothing. That is to say that even when he went around in Athens talking with artisans that in fact knew their own professions very well, that did not add up against the fact that they were unaware of what they did not know. Therefore Socrates was wiser that all of them because of his awareness of not knowing anything except that one fact that he was ignorant of everything.

(2) This is one of the difficulties I discovered in yeshiva. Sometimes you could find someone who knew a little Talmud. But along with that knowledge came a kind of hubris  that: "Since we know  Talmud, therefore we know everything." Clearly that is a leap in logic that does not follow

(3) This comes up in Reb Nachman a few times. תכלית ידיעה שלא נדע: "The peak of knowledge is that we should not know." [It comes up in a chapter that is reputed to be from the ספר הנשרף the  book that had his deep lessons that he burnt because he thought the world was not ready for those higher lessons. ]

This also come up in השמטות the lessons that were left out but later included as an appendix. That is where he says all the מידות were מתפשטות until God limited them and that includes wisdom.

[4] In the way Buddhism is presented in the West [and Hinduism also] you get this impression that often people that teach it and learn it are unaware of what they do not know. They do talk about higher knowledge without actually being aware of what constitutes knowledge in the first place and what makes it different from opinion.  Nor does it seem to bother them that if there is no atman-no self then there is nothing that can become enlightened.



[5] I would like to mention Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in this context. Dr Kelley Ross holds that there is a third source of knowledge which is not sensory nor reason. Hegel holds that through a process of dialectics reason can cross the boundaries of reason.
 Though I left Kant for last, still I feel his approach to this whole issue is the best.

I was sick

Yesterday was the first day I actually walked (or limped) in 49 days. I am very grateful to God for sending me to the local hospital in Uman where there is a great doctor [Alexandr Sergevitch] and  a great nursing staff. After I broke my leg  and foot in three places,  I was offered a new apartment by a fellow Sasha and my son came from the USA to take care of me.
So God's mercies are great. However this all still leaves me wondering about what lessons were meant to be learned?



I mean to say-- that there is a principle brought in the Talmud: "אין יסורים בלי עוון" "There are no troubles without sin." So any kind of trouble I have is always with some kind of sin. Either some sin caused it, or that the sin simply took away some kind of Divine protection.
I might have seen this in the gemara Shabat itself or the Gates of Repentance by Rabbainu Yona. [In both places that statement of the sages is brought.] But I think I probably saw it in one of the books of Musar from the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter.

[I should mention I was sick in my stomach after being released [from the local hospital in Uman]  and went to the "hospital of the region" where also there was a great staff of doctors and nurses that helped me get better. In fact after taking the medicine they prescribed, the pain went away within about one or two minutes-and that was about the most excruciating pain I have every felt.


Clearly repentance as a concept is simple: to correct what one is doing that is not in accord with the Law of Moses. That is simply to keep the law of Moses. However what that actually means in practice is  not clear to me. What generally was done at the Mir yeshiva in NY was for people to emphasize  certain basic principles in the hope that that would help to come to keep the entire Torah. So in practice what almost everyone did was to emphasize not speaking lashon hara [i.e.not to speak evil about others] and to learn Torah. Those were clearly the two most important principles at the Mir. One could easily say in my case there is a  need to get back to these two things.

Divine simplicity

Divine simplicity.

The main point I wanted to bring up is that this is the reason I think the (Rambam) רמב''ם made it a point to emphasize that God has no מידות, character traits.
It has been known for some time that introducing ideas into the Mind of God violates Divine simplicity. But what I think the Rambam is doing is even suggesting that even introducing Divine traits violates Divine simplicity.
I think the letter of excommunication that the Gra signed also was intended to guard Divine Simplicity.
Divine simplicity means God is not a mixture of things. (He is not a composite.) Also it means: He has no characteristics that are associated with the physical world. He has no form, no matter, no substance, etc.