Straight Torah.The problem however is not money. It is that the people that claim to speak in the name of the Torah are generally liars.

In the prophet Zephaniah 3 there is a verse that compares the judge of Israel to evening wolves that are constantly hunting new prey, so that they do not even bother with the bones and leftovers from their old prey.

This goes along with the idea brought in the end of tractate Shabat "If you see a generation upon that troubles come go and check the judges of Israel. For all the troubles that come into the world only come because of the judges of Israel."

To some degree this can be seen even in the Rambam  in his commentary on Pirkei Avot that כל הנהנה מדברי תורה נוטל את חייו מן העולם. [Whosoever derives monetary benefit from the words of Torah takes is life out of the world. The Rambam says that means the world to come.]
The actual statement of Hillel was in the beginning of Pirkei Avot not to make money off of Torah nor get paid for learning or teaching. קרדום לחפור בהם. But later in Pirkei Avot  that same statement is brought a second time with the explanation כל הנהנה מדברי תורה נוטל את חייו מן העולם,- and that is where the Rambam goes into detail about this problem.

The problem however is not money. It is that the people that claim to speak in the name of the Torah are generally liars.




This does however leave a kind of problem about how to give a divorce or other aspects of Law.
In fact in order to have a good idea of how to keep Torah, knowledge of Gemara and Musar is necessary. But you need to find a kind of legitimate Lithuanian kind of Yeshiva to get straight Torah.
Or learn at home. The only straight Torah places I know of are the great NY Litvak yeshivas or Ponoviz where Rav Shach taught. [There are possibly places with people that learned in Ponoviz or in the Mir in NY that might be good places. I am really not sure.]
[If one is out in the woods where there is not a Litvak yeshiva, then the main thing is to learn Tosphot along with the Pnei Yehoshua and the Avi Ezri.]
Instead of getting through a lot of tractates what I think is best is to work on just one tracate per year and to do with with Tosphot, Pnei Yehohua, and the new R.Akiva Eiger which they printed up in such a way that you can find what he wrote on each page and the Aruk LaNer. [For Nida, Sukka etc where there is no Pnei Yehoshua.] [The Avi Ezri should be learned as a session in itself.]

I might mention my own experience here. In the Mir in NY, people mainly spent theri morning hours getting ready for the classes. That is: Year 1- the Sukat David. Year 2- Rav Shmuel Brudny. Year 3- Rav Shraga Moshe Kalmenoviz. Year 4- Rav Shmuel Berenbaum. Each rosh yeshiva has his own new ideas on the subject matter every day that was along the lines of the Avi Ezri or Rav Haim HaLevi.
The fact that I was doing  a lot of the Pnei Yehoshua and the Maharsha was not the general practice.
[Th reason is not that I was so advanced. Just the opposite. Everyone was far beyond me. But the kind of classes in the Mir were  versions of the kind of deep learning you find in the Avi Ezri and חידושי הרמב''ם of Reb Haim Brisker. And that was beyond me even though officially I could attend any class that I wanted. But for me I found these middle level אחרונים to be something I could grasp.
The fact is the rosh yeshiva, Reb Shmuel Berenbaum did me a favor by letting me join the yeshiva because I was no where near their level of learning. And the saying "smart Mir yeshiva guys" has definite a basis in fact.]

[ might mention the fact that every one of the teachers had an enormous amount of new and original ideas that they gave over every day in class. I have no idea why they did not bother to write them down.  Today the original teachers are gone but in their places are people of genius level like Rav Nelkenbaum.] But if you are far from there you can still get an idea of what is going on at the Mir if you learn the Avi Ezri and Reb Haim.--that at least can give you  a taste of real Torah.

In NY I did not like the NY Times much. I preferred the NY Post and NY Daily. They fell in quality after around 2000 but then recently seemed to be getting better. In any case the Times always seemed slanted to me to the degree that I could not stand reading it. It felt like reading the Pravda.

Something similar with the Haaretz. Even at a meeting with a reporter from Haaretz I felt the force of "Politically Correct"  in his complete refusal to acknowledge any evidence that went against the basic "Party line". Yediot I found a lot better,  and yet quality there too fell after 2000. Maybe it picked up recently like the NY Post. I am not sure.

U-73 C Major   [U-73 midi]  [U-73 nwc]

To some degree I can see the process that Hegel calls dialectics  in how Relativity was discovered. The basic idea of Hegel was if you take some concept and just go with it taking it as far as you can, you will eventually end up with some kind of contradiction. That is more or less what Einstein did. He simply took Maxwell's equations and asked what would happen if you took them for a moving body? That in fact led to a problem in the equations themselves, unless you took the speed of light in a vacuum be constant in all frames of reference.  And in fact at that point in time there was the result of the Michelson/Morley experiment indicating just that. [Though I got the impression that that experiment was not very important for Einstein's results which him came to even without it.] And after that Einstein just took the next logical step in asking what would happen in an accelerating frame of reference? And then came up with his idea that a person in free fall would not know he is in an accelerating frame of reference. But to get the equation for that, Einstein needed to do some more work. But still the basic process of reasoning was more or less straightforward.


[As pointed out by McTaggart, the dialectics of Hegel is not meant to be separate from observation. That. in fact, had been a critique on Hegel that was answered by McTaggart, and also I think that it is more or less clear in Hegel himself. --In his treatment of immediate knowledge.]

I have to say that I see a lot of parallels between Plato and the Kant.Fries system and also a strong connection between Hegel and Plotinus [Neo Platonic]. [Dr Kelley Ross wrote that the Rambam is pretty much a straightforward Neo Platonist, so that puts him somewhat closer to Hegel in that regard. [In Kelley Ross's web site there is an essay which presents a case that the Rambam was in fact close to the Kant Fries approach --which does seem to be right in the areas he points out there.]

[Popper puts to much blame on Hegel. When Marx and Lenin openly rejected the major points of Hegel I can not see how Hegel is to blame. Besides that Hegel was supporting a system like that of the USA.  The Estates  wanted to go back to feudal laws against the constitution proposed by the Prussian Monarch which was saying equal rights under the law! So Hegel supporting that constitution was actual supporting something close to the USA constitution].

my search for truth

In my search for truth, I believe I came upon a remarkable theory of the Kant/Friesian approach of Kelley Ross and Leonard Nelson. But that is in terms of philosophy. I do not think that can substitute for the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach nor of Gemara, Rashi, Tosphot, Pnei Yehoshua,, and R Akiva Eiger,.Aruck LaNer These are separate areas of value.
Getting philosophy and politics right is just as important as Gemara.

For a long time I was unaware of German Idealism. Most philosophers  nowadays think they can by- pass it as irrelevant. In the meantime twentieth century thought is astoundingly empty of meaning and reason. I do not think you can bypass German Idealism, but nor do I think it is the strongest basis for politics. In terms of Politics, I think English thought --John Locke, De Foe, Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson are a lot better as you can see in the papers they wrote to convince NY to vote for the Constitution.

[In terms of Hegel, however, I do not share the general disdain  that some of the German Idealists held for him. I can see that in Russia, the Marxists were dealing with different kinds of problems than the founding fathers of the USA were dealing with. The thing about the USSR is that the czar and the later USSR had to deal with a totally different kind of population than WASP's  {White Anglo Saxon Protestants}. That means that things and ideas that worked for the newly formed USA could not work for Russia.]

In any case, I feel that Leonard Nelson deserves a lot more credit than he is usually given-- and that goes for the German Idealists also. [Somehow I imagine that Nelson's books have not even been translated. And that is surprising and sad.]

The idea of  balance of values is one that I got from my parents. Under their guidance I went to publc schools -which in those days were much better than now. My parents definite advocated a balance of values.

[In the USA there seems to have been a default position that everything and anything slightly related to German Idealism was out and out wrong. This even penetrated high school. You could not even find books old or new in that area. It was almost as if Kant and Hegel never existed. To replace that vacuum all kinds of really dumb stuff was suggested.] 

Nowadays the trend seems  a lot better. There is Dr Kelley Ross, Michael Huemer, Edward Fesser and others. The dark pit of insane twentieth century philosophy seems to be in the past--thank God.

"Seeking for truth" was a big subject when I was growing up. In any case truth is not what you know, but how you live.

"Seeking for truth" was a big subject around (in high school) when I was just entering my teen age years.
For some this was the age of the rise of many movements that laid claim to the "Truth."
On my own I did some reading on this. It seems to me today that a great deal of my motivation was internal as well as external.

I did not know anyone in particular who went deeply into Hindu or Buddhist religion, or the different gurus around then. But there were plenty of people that went that way (to their own later regret).

Philosophy at that time was well known to be empty of meaning, so no one that I knew went in that direction.

I did my own reading of Plato, Dante, Spinoza and a compilation of about 1000 Chinese philosophies.

[Neither in book stores nor the public library, nor the high school library were Hegel, nor anyone representing Idealism. However I do recall I think one book of Kant in the high school library.
The philosophical fads in those day  were ridiculous vacuums --but no one knew it at the time.]

Today I think avoiding these kinds of movements that lay claim to "the Truth" is the first step towards "the Truth". Truth lays in living a moral life, talking with God in one's own language, the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have other do unto you.

[To some degree I can see why there was no interest in Hegel or any part of German Idealism. But the philosophies that attempted to replace that were empty wallets. You can see this in Dr. Kelly Ross's web site where he goes into detailed about the failed philosophies of the twentieth century. Dr Michael Huemer also goes into some detail about that.]

In any case truth is not what you know, but how you live.

In terms of knowledge, nothing is immune to disproof. Lots of things people were 1000% sure of turned out to be false. [Frege's self evident axioms, the world is the center, etc, ] Even in your own life you can see this in things you thought you remembered in 100% certainly that later you found out were wrong. The mark of truth is that it s fallible as Popper said.  It must be falsifiable.

Maimonides and Saadia Gaon went a long ways in getting the ideas of Plato and Aristotle as considred a part of "The Truth." I feel today a similar effort is needed to get Kant, Hegel and Leonard Nelson also to be lifted from the pit of obscurity  into the light.

Hegelian Idealism

Hegel has had a curious history. Hegelian Idealism was totally gone by 1850.  Marx and Kierkegaard also disagreed with Hegel about most major points but still adopted his methods. Now these two philosophies of Marx and Kierkegaard  encompass a large part of the globe. And a great deal of twentieth century philosophy is a kind of struggle to escape Metaphysics. Is not it time to give Leonard Nelson and the Kant/Fries approach due consideration?

Opposed to the Idealism of Kant and Hegel is most of 20th century philosophy.

A great deal of twentieth century philosophy is  really quite horrible. As Dr John Searle put it "It is obviously false"--that is referring to the linguistic (British-American) and analytical (continental).

But never the less getting it right is still important.


[In high school I was very interested in philosophy but thankfully I did not go into it as a profession or even a hobby.  I guess I did not see much going on there of any value.

Allen Sokal and Allen Bloom already made these points. But you can see this for yourself when present day philosophers say anything that even vaguely is related to science. That is one  area you can see they went off the path of sanity.]