serving in the IDF

The Gemara does give some kinds of פטור (no obligation) to people that are learning Torah for taxes, street sweeping, building a wall {Bava Batra 7.} -- but not for digging wells, since they also need water. Thus to me it seems clear that serving in the IDF also would be included in things they are obligated in since they also need נטירותא guarding. When the rockets from Syria were raining down on Safed, they all ran south. No one said their Torah learning would protect them.


In any case, what do you call "learning Torah"? If that means simple straight Litvak yeshivas  learning Gemara, Rashi, Tosphot,-- then these places are very rare. Most yeshivas in Israel were made in the first place in order to avoid the draft.  Learning Gemara is the last thing on their minds. [Other ones were made to make money for the rosh yeshiva and his close buddies. They are basically country clubs made for sitting and talking all day. They also have nothing to do with learning Torah except for show.]
In fact, the enormous amount of fraud that got into the whole thing tempts me to say the best thing is to shut them all down except Ponoviz and a few of its offshoots and branches.

The major advantage of Litvak yeshivas is that they learn straight Torah. Also they take seriously the חרם the excommunication with the signature  of the Gra which is important in that it warns people to stay away from the Dark Side. That is one advantage. Another advantage of paying attention  to the signature of the Gra is from the standpoint of law--even if it would have no basis in reality. 

Hegel and Leonard Nelson

I feel a little guilty in recommending Hegel because this is quite different from the Kant-Friesian School which started with Leonard Nelson. Still I feel the total dismissal of Hegel is not warranted.

The problem is that while Hegel to me seems very great, a lot of misuse still is made of him. Now Popper thought that he was the cause of all totalitarian movements that came later, but that does not seem accurate at all. Never the less nowadays self identified Hegelians do seem to have gone off into the deep end of the swimming pool. 

[You might look at the debate between Dr Kelley Ross and a self identified  Hegelian on his web site  and you will see what I mean. The weak part of Hegel in fact seems to be when people try to apply his ideas to politics.]
So far I like to look at German  Idealism as one. That is one solid body of knowledge. The differences I like to think are only the result of looking at different aspects of the same thing. So I tend to see Hegel, McTaggart as not all that different from Leonard Nelson. Just different aspects.

[Anyway just take McTaggart's critique of Hegel --in particular his "take" on dialectics and you do not end up much different than Leonard Nelson. That is his idea that dialectics corrects mistakes.]

[ I have tried to ignore one German idealist after the other. It does not seem to .work. You can try to take Hegel in a vacuum and that does not work. Try to take Kant in a vacuum and that works even worse. Try to ignore them all and that goes down blind alleys. I think you really in the end have to accept Kant Hegel and Leonard Nelson.

If you try to go with the basic Rambam approach in the Guide you end up immediately in the Middle Ages. The Logic works but the axioms do not. That is the problem with all Medieval Philosophy.The Logic is always rock solid but the axioms seem clearly false. Try to go with later Rationalists or Empiricist the  logic is mostly circular and the axioms are  false. So to avoid Kant and Hegel which is what a lot of people would like to do just does not work. --Unless you like twentieth century philosophy which is sheer gibberish.]



Looking at for one example the real is rational in terms of time and Bradley and McTaggart's dealing with it leads me to notice the same thing that Dr Kelly Ross does, and Job also--the universe now is not perfect. Whether it is with Hegel or Dr. Ross I get the same idea that perfection is only in the Platonic spheres, not down here.

[McTaggart's concept of time is also just not all that different from Kant but from different reasons., i.e. there is no time. However here too it seems necessary to divide reality into two parts, the dinge an sich and phenomena as Kant does.

In terms of Quantum Mechanics this idea of the problem with time come up in so far that thing are superpositions of many possible values in space and time before they are actually measured.
But that doe not mean there is no time.Rather things do not have any one value in space or time until measured. This you know from the fact that Nature violates Bell's inequality. [Bell did not like QM and base on the Einstein [EPR] set up he showed that any hidden variable theory would come out differently that QM. Nature shows QM is right. [Bell used the EPR set up to build  his inequality. ]
However I have to add that the moon is there even before you see it because of coherence lifetime. That is the atoms are not in a vacuum. They interact with each other and that causes the wave function to collapse to just one state. Coherence lifetime is the reason quantum computing is hard --it is hard to get atoms all by themselves.

The Metaphysics of the Rambam

The Metaphysics of the Rambam was not Kabalah. You can see in the Guide where he defines it as the Metaphysics  of the ancient Greeks. But even in his commentary and in the Mishne Torah itself you can see this when he makes references to Plato and Aristotle' s system.
Besides that I do not feel the Zohar is all that it is cracked up to be.   But on the other hand I have great respect for the Ari and the Remak but not because of their insights into the Zohar but rather from their own personal service by which they gained insight.
The Zohar itself I think is a work from the Middle Ages. As for example" גרדני" [guards] is not an Aramaic word. "עם כל דא" also is a clear red light. It is  a translation of  a phrase invented by the Ibn Tibon family to stand for "although" which before the Middle Ages was "אף על פי" or "אף על גב".
Rav Yaakov Emden already went into this. [The phrase invented by Ibn Tibon was עם כל זה]

The Zohar itself basically takes the world view of the Middle Ages and expands on it.
The oddest thing about it is when Rav Isaac from Acco asked the author about it, he answered with an oath that more or less said may G-d strike him down if it is not from R. Shimon ben Yohai and that he would show him the original manuscript if Rav Isaac would visit him and that promise was not fulfilled since in fact G-d struck him down afterwards. But stories are not proof. The main point is that internal evidence shows it is a work of the Middle Ages. If one wants to know and understand the deeper nature of reality, it is better to abide by the approach of the Rambam.

I decided a long time ago to go along with the idea of faith in the wise and I think there is no doubt that the Rambam fits the category of "wise."

But Metaphysics has made progress since the Neo Platonic School that the Rambam was basing himself on. Thus I think to fulfill what the Ramam was saying the best idea is to learn, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel. [To understand Hegel the best idea is to learn McTaggart.]

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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.

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