Support for Reform and Conservative

The best support for Reform and Conservative groups is the opinion of R. Shimon Ben Yohai that דורשים טעמה דקרא. [We go by the reasons for the verse, not the literal meaning when the two conflict.]
And there is no mystery about the reasons for the verses since the Gemara itself assumes as a simple matter that we in fact do know the reasons. The only question is when the reason conflicts with the literal meaning.
[The sages that disagree with R. Shimon do not say we do not know the reasons for the verses. They agree we know the reasons, but the question is if to go by the literal meaning, or the reason. But in any case, to me it seems clear that the very concept of ends and means to get to that end implies that the end--the goal-has primary importance over the means. That is the simple implication of the idea of ends and means by definition.]


And the Rishonim (including the Rambam) do in fact state openly the reasons for the verses.
And we in fact see a conflict in so far as that often keeping the literal meaning does seriously conflict with the reasons for the verses.
The Rambam gives the basic reasons. To learn to come to good traits [to be a mensch], not to do idolatry, peace of the State. We see most times that people supposedly keeping the Torah are in serious conflict with all three reasons.

[The opinion of R. Shimon is in Bava Metzia circa page 119 and in other places.]

I am not saying that the actual law is like R. Shimon. Rav Shach asks this question as do others and Rav Shach's answer is elegant. He says the law comes out not like R. Shimon nor R. Yehuda  but the first opinion in a Mishna which is a combination of both.


In any case it is hard to know the right path. My basic impression is I should have listened to my parents who knew and understood a lot more about life that I realized at the time. And they were definitely Reform minus some of the problem in Reform like "social justice."
The problem with the religious is they are always looking to add some extra restriction that is not contained in Torah. Then they claim it is from the Torah. And then impose it on everyone else.

And since no one else is convinced of the fraud, they do not accept it. And so the religious do not see secular Jews as human. For any rational human would accept the vast intellectual and moral superiority of the religious people and thus serve them. The religious think being religious absolves them from being decent human beings. They do not realize that Natural Law precedes Divine Law. [The Guide of Maimonides says that the level of natural law revealed to Abraham was needed before there could be the level of Divine Law at Sinai. ]

Rav Shach agreed about the importance of learning Musar [Ethics of Torah] as you can see in the introduction of the Avi Ezri. However Musar can be a distraction. It can lead to one thing that leads to another that eventually gets one away from learning,- sometimes incompletely and other times completely.
In fact, the problem with distractions  has been something that has bothered me for a long time. The Dark Side never comes along and says, "Come and do a sin." It rather finds ways to distract one's attention from things that really matter to things that in fact are trivial.[As the Gra says in the beginning of the Book of Proverbs.]

Thus I found for myself that it  it makes a big difference to find what are the things that really require attention.  Learning Musar can be a big help in that direction because it more or less helps to define what really matters in in Torah. But it can be a distraction in itself --and often it is.
[That is the reason in fact that Brisk--the prime Litvak yeshiva is not a Musar yeshiva. Reb Haim did not agree with the Musar movement.]

On a personal note, I am not in any yeshiva at all, but I found the few years I spent at the Mir in NY to be refreshing and inspiring even many years after I left. And a great deal of that I attribute to the fact that it is a Musar Yeshiva.

Rav Moshe Haim Luzato and the Book of Job

Rav Moshe Haim Luzato has a remarkable approach towards sin that helps to explain the book of Job. The main idea is when one has 51% sin he gets punished in the next world [for the 51% sins] and rewarded for his good deeds in this world. If he has 49% sin or less then he gets punished in this world for his sins and rewarded for his good deeds in the next. [The percentage of sin does not go by just the number of sins, but also their weight.]

He does not tie this in with the book of Job directly, but it still helps to explain the basic issues that come up in the book of Job.

The major problem in the Book of Job is that it seems to be in contradiction to the rest of the Old Testament. The major question is this: Do righteous people suffer?  The answer of the book of Job seems to be "Yes." The rest of the Old Testament answers, "No."
So the רמח''ל Rav Luzato answers as I mentioned above. [In דרך השם and in the other well famous book of dialog, but I forget the title.]
Thus, when the Old Testament calls Job a צדיק and תמים (a saint or a righteous man.) it does not mean without sin. Rather it means 51% good deeds and 49% sins. This corresponds directly with the Rambam who says exactly the same thing in הלכות תשובה (Laws of Repentance.) (The translation in English of תם  for Job is "perfect" but the meaning therefore confuses English speakers who think it means without sin. תם or תמים means more accurately "simple" as in איש תם a simple man).



[The academic world tends to look at the Book of Job as in fact contradicting the rest of the Old Testament as you can hear in the lectures of Christine Hayes at Yale University.]

Sin is a big subject in the Old Testament: that is the question what counts as a sin and how to measure the severity of sins. In the secular world these issues do not come in the same appearance. But there still are sins like lack of tolerance or racism etc. These things however in the Old Testament are not considered sins. Lack of tolerance is praised and to be rid of wicked people  is  a major goal. Racism is also considered a virtue. That is to discern between good and evil even in groups.


[The Christian world dismisses sin since belief nullifies it. The secular world has another set of actions and thoughts that are considered sinful. Being male is considered the primal sin by many people in the USA. That is  a sin for which eternal repentance is declared obligatory.Fasting and prayer are not enough to wipe out that sin.]

Rav Isaac Blazer (the major disciple of Reb Israel Salanter) also goes into the issue of the weight of sins, and shows that one sin can cancel lots of good deeds. He uses this idea to show the importance of learning Musar.

In the two Litvak yeshivas I was in-Shar Yashuv and the Mir of NY the emphasis was on: learning Torah, not to speak lashon hara and kindness in cases of need. That is to say it was considered that certain kinds of good deeds like kindness and learning Torah can cancel sins as the נפש החיים {Soul of Life} by a disciple of the Gra (Reb Haim of Voloshin) brings down.

[Tolerance really began in England as virtue after the disastrous Civil Wars between different Protestant groups.--the dissenters (Puritans, Quakers, etc.) versus the establishment until the Edict of Tolerance. But even then people recognized there were limits to tolerance as Defoe goes into. The colonies in America were supported by the English government all through the 1700's. They did not grow as a result of escaping persecution in England since the Edict had been passed in Parliament.]


Appendix: 1. I have to mention the Gemara in Bava Batra that also takes a negative view of Job. Also the Gemara Shabat--אין יסורים בלי עוון No problems without sin.

2. My own take on all this is thus: that there are major sins [weighty] and minor sins . And that there are major good deeds and minor good deeds. And that Reb Haim from Voloshin was correct that learning Torah  is weighty and can cancel a lot on the other side of the balances. The difference is that I include learning Physics and Metaphysics as the Rambam considered both of these are part of the Oral Law.

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support for the Rambam

The shinning forth of Being of Hegel seems to provide support for the Rambam. After all without that it is hard to see the position of the Rambam that learning Physics and Metaphysics brings one to the fulfillment of the two commandments to (1) Love and (2) Fear God
Even the idea of the Wisdom of God being contained in the work of Creation seems to not bring to what the Rambam is getting at..
However Hegel provides a link in the chain that seems invincible. Hegel wonders about Kant's "mere appearance". (That all we can know is mere appearance.) Hegel wonders about "mere". He says on the contrary the appearance is the shining forth of Being itself. 

Mutual Aid groups

Mutual Aid groups seems like a natural development in the Christian world since kindness towards others is considered the major goal in life and the major way of serving God. But when this is applied to the institutions that are supposedly learning Torah,the whole concept seems to fall flat on its face.  As my learning partner expressed it "They are just private country clubs."
But to gain respectability they do have to present an image of helping others. But in fact the whole thing seems like a kind of scam. Naive people of college age are drawn in by the scam but later experience shows that they are not what they present to the outside world. And woe to the individual that gets taken in by the scam.
There are however legitimate places like the great NY Litvak yeshivas [e.g. Mir, Torah VeDaat, Haim Berlin] that pretty much stick with the basic formula of Reb Haim From Voloshin about what a yeshiva is supposed to be.

I am wondering about the issue of yeshivas and I can see the point of Reb Haim in starting the Yeshiva Movement. [That seems all the more important in so far as the contracts that the "Kahal" had held in Poland were about to be nullified starting with the Russian Czar.]
Still outside of the few great Litvak Yeshivas in NY and Bnei Brak, the whole things looks like a scam.  A way to make easy money. Besides the fact that almost every yeshiva in Israel was made by vegetable stand owners that could not make living any other way than getting a few people to sign up and getting an automatic income--and the people that signed up were mainly interested in getting out of serving in the IDF.
[However I have heard great things about off shoots of Ponoviz, like Tifrah [תפרח]  and in Netivot I was very impressed with Rav Montag's yeshiva which is continuation of Yeshivat HaNegev. 

attacks on Hegel

Hegel has received a series of attacks. The first was in Germany in 1843-1845. Also WWI spelled the end of Idealism and the beginning of  dumb movements in philosophy. But even people that accepted some of his ideas in part like Marx and Kierkegaard were certainly no Hegelians

To me it seems the weak part of Hegel is in politics. When he ties ideas to politics that where he seems to have gotten off on a wrong foot.
Even the attacks on Hegel from Karl Popper and  Dr. Kelley Ross seem to focus mostly on the way his metaphysical system was subsequently applied to politics. But that is what seems to be the weakest part of his system.

[On the other hand looking at the founding fathers of the USA I tend to be very impressed. It seems to me that the geniuses of England and the USA spent a lot of time and thought on politics and that is where their expertise was. In Germany the great minds there simply spent their best efforts in other directions].

But I am not saying the system of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson would be applicable to China or Russia. The founding fathers of the USA were definitely basing themselves on England especially the England of the 1700's. But  that whole foundation depends on the kind of people the English were. You could not transfer that to czarist Russia where the problems were very different.The Czars had an empire that was composed of many groups with high percentages of criminal DNA and bad genes. James Madison had to write a Constitution for people that had good intentions, but their good intentions conflicted with other people's good intentions. That is a whole other ball game.