There is something in laws of Truma of the Rambam [chapter  1] that I have a hard time with. It comes from a well known statement of Reish Lakish that if one takes the first tithe before he takes truma from sheaves of wheat that have not yet been separated and grounded then the Levi does not have to take truma but only maasar. In that the Rambam is going like the Babylonian Talmud [Abyee], not like the Jerusalem Talmud. The Jerusalem Talmud holds that the Levi gives truma only if the tithe was taken after the crops became obligated. The thing that I find confusing is that in the first case the crops are tevel [obligated after the grinding] and the maasar is not even maasar. So why would the maasar be anything but a present/gift? The tithe was given before the crops even became obligated, so the maasar is not even maasar. In the case of the Jerusalem Talmud, the crops are actual tevel and still there is no obligation to give truma.

These are not really hard questions once you have verses which state that that is just the way it is. But what is odd is the Rambam says the reason in the first case is that the crops have not yet been obligated in truma. How is that a reason? In both cases you have real tevel that is not going to have truma taken from it. So on either Gemara I really have no question. It is rather the reason the Rambam gives that I find hard to understand.

The new idolatry is worship of religious leaders. Israel is so full of this that it is almost impossible to go anywhere without encountering it. This was one of the major reasons I did not want to return to Israel. As you can see in tractate Avoda Zara to go anywhere where there is avoda zara [idolatry] is a problem.
I knew there might be  probvlem but I was not aware of how extensive it is. If only Rav Shach and the Gra had been listened to, this would nopt be an issue. But for some reason even in the Litvak wolrd they are ignored for the most part.

The lowest I.Q. among all university majors

The lowest I.Q. among all university majors is the people that go into social work. And they are the people that decide whether you can keep your children? And interview children to see if they have been hurt by an adult? As in "did so and so hurt you".[That is they ask leading questions to get the children to say what they want to hear.] You must be kidding. social workers ought to be put away in some insane asylum so they can stop hurting people themselves. Asking a social worker to interview kids is like asking a monkey to do the same.
Psychologists are almost as stupid as social workers--but not quite. But they certainly think they are superior beings.

The Hegelian State is not so absurd in my eyes. I think Communism is in its very core based on serious mistake like the Labor Theory of Value--even thought that was accepted as fact in the time of Marx--still it is not true that they value of any thing depends on how much labor went into making it. Rather it depends on how much people want to buy it.

And Hegel's model was in any case meant to help avoid the insane chaos that was the French Revolution.
And what then is up with China?
Dr Michael Huemer and Kelley Ross are against Communism in any and all forms for very good reasons and yet how else can one take control of chaos before it gets out of hand? Anyone who has been to Ukraine knows there is some kind of elements in the population that are simply crimnal and there is  alarge percent. They are not WASPS [White Anglo Saxon Protestants]. And then good elemenst are either in fact Russian DNA or Russia leaning.

In the Talmud in Nazir you have a case around page 32 or so where two people see someone coming. One thinks it is George and the other says it is Simon. The one that said it is George says "if it is Simon I will be a nazirite." The one that says it is Simon says "if it is George I will be  a Nazirite" If it is Simon the first one who thought it is George is a nazirite.

Why is this any different from nidrei zeruzim of other kinds of vow where one really does not intend the vow to actually become obligated?

I always had a kind of conflict between learning fast as I wanted to do{as I saw in a few books] in Shar Yashuv and the fact that Rav Friefeld and his son Moti were always recommending review.

So what I did was this kind of compromise that I would do the actual paragraph of the gemara twice with Rashi and also one time the English translation in the Soncino.

The idea of a sort of minimal review seemed to help me then and later on also when I was in university learning Physics I also had this kind of minimal review approach. That is one time to review the page or paragraph and go on.

This is not exactly the way of Rav Nahman that was to read the words i.e. say them in a whisper or out loud, and go on without review until you reach the end of the book and then review. But neither was it was Rav Freifeld was.


In Shar Yashuv [a Litvak yeshiva that went more or less along the path of the Gra.] They were doing Gemara in a deep way that was different from the Mir where I went later on. In Shar Yashuv the way was kind of what is called in Israel" To calculate the sugia" that is intense analysis ofg the actual words of the Gemara and Tosphot. Later in the Mir and especially with Rav Shmuel Berenbaum I saw a different approach that was based on Rav Haim Soloveichik which was global--and not concentrated on that one page in front of you. I benefited from both approaches but again as I mentioned up above when it came to personal; learning I found this kind of method of review of the paragraph twice and going on to be the thing that worked for me best. 

The basic background in Bava Mezia 101a as far as I can recall is this:
The Mishna brings the law that a renter of a field in Israel from an non Jew, takes maasar (tithe) and then pays the non Jew (probably Arab). The reason is that you can not pay your debts with tevel (produce that has not had tithes taken from it). R. Yehuda adds "also a sharecropper must take tithes and then pay." The Gemara says at first it looks like a gentile has no possesion in such a way that the crops are not obligated in tithe and a sharecropper is like a renter.

Then the Gemara brings a braita that says that R Yehuda said his law only in the case of a gentile that took the ground without paying for it. That is he stole it.  So the Gemara concludes that there is possesion and a sharecropper is not like a renter.


Sharecropping is when the worker shares some percent of the crops like Frank Hamer used to do before he became a Texas Ranger and brought down Bonnie and Clyde.