Gemara says what it means.

The way I look at the Gemara (i.e. Talmud) is that it says what it means. This is different than interpretations of charity--looking at it in the way that agrees with what one already thinks.

It did not occur to me to mention this until yesterday when I mentioned that the path of my parents is Reform.


So I thought today just to mention a few Gemaras that go along with this idea.
One would be the Gemara in Bava Batra [14b] that Moses wrote his book (that is Deuteronomy) , the Book of Job, and the parsha [section] of the Holy Torah that deals with Bileam. [משה כתב ספרו ופרשת בלעם ואיוב]  The simple way of understanding this is that that is all that he wrote. Not the rest of the Five Books of Moses. The Five Books were certainly Divinely inspired, but that does not mean that Moses {Moshe} wrote them. [There is a Gemara in the very first tractate of the Talmud that says that Moses wrote all Five Books, but that seems to disagree with the Gemara in Bava Batra. [The 13 principles of Faith then would be deciding like the other  Gemara].
[At any rate, the Gemara in Bava Batra can not mean that Moses wrote all Five Books because that would include the section on Bileam. It has to mean just "his book", ספר דברם Deuteronomy



The other very well known Gemara is in the end of Makot where the obligations of the commandments are lessened.  Rashi explains that if people would be required to keep all the commandments then no one would merit to the next world. Therefore the obligations were lessened down from 613 to one [faith]. It was a long process starting with King David and Isaiah.

Another lesser known example is the opinion of Hillel [the Amora] in the Gemara that the whole idea of a final redemption does not apply since we already had a final redemption in the days of King Hezekiah.

There are many more examples of where you can see that the Gemara is not "PC." It says lots of things which offend many people's sensibilities.

[The author of the regular commentary on the Guide for the Perplexed, Joseph Albo also wrote on the principles of faith in a separate book  where he disagrees with the Rambam about the actual principles. I vaguely recall that Rav Joseph Albo reduced the principle one must believe in down to six and I think Abravenal down to three.]

u37 u57 music files

U-37 D Major U-57 D Major in this last piece I used an idea you can find in the Middle Ages of let's say you have a major scale as the tonic and then you go down to C Major instead of the expected A Major. Its's also found in Irish Music. [here is U-57 in midi format so that the scores can be downloaded by who ever wants] both pieces need slurs that i neglected to put in.

The Rashbam explains there [Bava Batra 76b]

It might seem trivial but to me there seems to be another place where you can see that you do not need 600,000 people walking on a street to make it a public domain. That is the opinion of Yehuda HaNasi that a boat is acquired through מסירה [passing--not pulling] in a public domain. The Rashbam explains there [Bava Batra 76b] because pulling is not possible in a public domain like a רקק מים [a water-way].
Even though it is a perhaps over doing it to apply that to Shabat, still the implication seems clear. It is a water-way that ships can sail through. And on no water-way do 600,000 people walk every day.

[However pockets seem to me to be OK from the case of the divorce that is thrown into a woman's bag.  It is also the Rashbam there that says openly [pgs 85-86 ]that the issue over there is if an object in a bag is thought to be in the bag or in the domain. If the bag is tied or hanging on her it is thought to be in the bag, not the domain.] [I mean to carry things in one's pockets I think is OK on Shabat even in a public domain. There is nothing in tracate Shabat to suggest otherwise and the issue I addressed in Bava Batra in the sense of  acquisition.]

We were Reform Jews.

The way I was raised by my parents seems to have been very purposeful. I mean to say that I think their decisions where to live and where to send my brothers and me to school were with lots of thought and planning. At the time this also seemed to be the case.

So I want to jot down some of the basic details. We were Reform Jews. We had gone to a Reform school when we were in Newport Beach and later when we moved to Beverly Hills we went to Temple Israel of Hollywood.  The decision to move to Beverly Hills I think was largely influenced by the need to find a good high school for their children. Otherwise my parents could have moved closer to my Dad's place of work which was the TRW building where my Dad was working on laser communication between satellites.  [I am pretty sure his research was stolen by the KGB and ended up in the USSR. That was a well known event which ended up as a motion picture.]

In any case the Reform path I think was  very much a conscious decision. Not to be fanatic.

[However there were some aspects of Reform that my parents did not go with. Certainly the "Social Justice" thing was viewed with skepticism. And almost immediately after my bar mitzah we went to a Recontructionist person to do the bar mizvah of my younger brother. The actual views of my parents I think were closer to what today would be called Conservative. Faith in Torah was very important to them and also support of the State of Israel.]


I was encouraged to go into Physics and Math because I was showing a lot of interest in those subjects on my own. But I think that my parents saw a kind of numinous value in those subjects kind of the way I do nowadays. You can see this in the Rishonim [Medieval Authorities] that stem from the school of thought of Maimonides and the חובות לבבות Obligations of the Heart.
In any case the path of fanaticism was really very far away from the concept of my parents about the proper path in life.

That is a balanced path of values was what they were striving for. [To conceptualize this you could look at the Polynomic Theory of Value of Dr Kelley Ross which in turn is base on Leonard Nelson's approach to Kant.]

I have to admit that at the time I did not see how I could have gone into the hard sciences. The only way I was able to make progress in that direction was by the kind of learning I saw in a Musar book אורחות צדיקים  where he goes into the idea of learning fast--saying the words and going on.

Law of Moses

In the book of Ezra we see that bringing the proper sacrifices as taught in the Law of Moses was the first priority. Even before there was a building, people put up an altar and brought the sacrifices. Only later did they start to build the walls of Jerusalem and the buildings of the Temple.
The reason this is hard to do nowadays is the lack of a red cow. That lack means that one can not be made pure from the kind of uncleanliness that results by touching a dead body.
But this is simply remedied by genetic engineering. At that point one who has touched a dead body would have to be sprinkled on by the ashes of the red cow and go into a natural body of water.
[The issue with having touched a dead body s that one can not go into the Temple nor eat sacrifices. So the red cow is a requirement before anything can be done.]


The calendar also that is in use today would have to be scraped. It was invented by Meton in Athens and is not a Torah idea. Rather the Torah has the new moon being in fact on the day of the new moon--the conjunction.
In terms of the actual laws the best book to learn is the ערוך השלחן which was written by a very great sage. It is in fact one of the best books written by the אחרונים. The other great books of אחרונים are the Avi Ezri of Rav Shac and the Pnei Yehoshua.


[Different groups have claimed that sacrifices are no longer needed but I think it is clear from internal evidence in the Old Testament itself  that the obligation is even today.]

[In terms of who is  a priest who can offer sacrifices, I think Yemenite people have been careful to guard that information accurately.]

[Most Christians believe that sacrifices are not necessary however that seems based on misunderstandings. The basic way I understand the actual statements of Jesus is that he had no intention to nullify the Law of Moses. To me this seems obvious. However it is customary in Christian circles to claim the opposite. I even tried once or twice to argue this point and I not get very far.]

U58 music file

U-58 D Minor   [U-58 in midi]

a good way to argue for Kant and Plato in terms of there being two levels of reality

There is a good way to argue for Kant and Plato in terms of there being two levels of reality. The dinge an sich things in themselves and the level of phenomenon.

This you can see by the collapse of the wave function into just one state from many possible states.
So on that level there are no classical values of space or time until something is measured. This is like Kant that space and time are imposed by the subject. This also goes along with Plato that there is some higher realm of Ideas not dependent on objects or the classical world.

The other level of reality is the classical world where causality exists and is definitely local. This is seen in GPS satellites. [They have to be calibrated to account for Special Relativity and General Relativity both. The speed they go around the Earth makes them lose time. The fact they are far out from the gravitational center of the Earth means they go faster. In fact the effect of General Relativity is far stronger in this case than Special Relativity. The clocks on the satellites do go fast compare to earth. To get them to correspond they have to be slowed down.]
But there also is some connection between these two realms because the wave function also collapses when there is a thermal bath in the area of the quantum particle.   


[But this would not be the general way Kant was understood by what was called the Neo Kantian schools that denied the very existence of dinge an sich. The only way this would work would be the way that Leonard Nelson understood Kant--which was definitely not the main stream.]

[I should mention that not all schools of thought based on Leonard Nelson are equal. There seems to be  a lot of interest in England and Germany, but the major proponent is Dr Kelley Ross in California and he builds on Nelson, but also on others. ]

To be quite frank I have to say that Leonard Nelson seems a lot better than anything else being done in academia. For some reason people seem to be attracted to Heidegger and/or Marx for reasons that seem to have nothing to do with logical rigor or even the slightest possibility of validity.