Bava Mezia page 43a. First Tosphot on the page. The question of Tosphot

  Bava Mezia it seems to me the question of Tosphot is thus. [And I should add that clearly Tosphot thinks he is asking on Rav Huna even though it can be expanded to Rav Nahman also. This you can see in the language of Tosphot where he clearly points his question towards Rav Huna. but the fact that Tosphot is on the question of RavNahman we can see he is also asking on Rav Nahman.]
  The question is this:There is no משיכה for money. I mean to say this. If the money given to the money changer would be a loan then fine. We can see that the money changer would be obligated as a person that took a loan. But he is not a borrower. he simply has permission to use the money. That does not make him a borrower. It would make him someone that borrowed an object like an ax. But money is not an ax. There is no קניין on the money as if it would be an ax.
  [The unstated problem I am trying to adress here is that the question of Tosphot seems to be more appilicable to Rav Nahman than to Rav Huna-because to R yohanan the whole reason that money does not acquire is so the seller can not say to the buyer your wheat was burned up in the barn before you took it home. This does not seem to apply to Rav Hiuna who holds the seller in that case would be liable.]
  I was not able to learn this Gemara for a few days sadly enough. But today I went to the mikveh in the sea and on the way to the library the intenion of Tospfot became clear to me.
I am still looking for a place I can sit and learn Torah but without any success.
  Anyway after writing the above paragraphs I want to just add a little bit of background as far as I can remember the gemara itself.  In the Mishna we have the law that if you give to a money changer money to guard --but the money is not sealed, the money changer can use it. But if he loses it he must pay it back. The mishna says "if he looses it:" but Rav Huna said also if he looses it by means of a accident that was not his fault he still has to pay it back. Rav nachman said only if he loses it but if it a big accident then he does not have to pay it back. Rav Nahman asks on Rav Huna from a teaching that says if a person that has in his possession an object of "bedek habait" gives it to a to a money changer to guard and the moeny changer uses the moeny, then the first person is liable for meila.
Tosphot asks from the mishna נתן לו מעות ולא משך ממנו פרות יכול לחזור בו.
בבא מציעא מ''ג ע''א. שאלת תוספות היא כך .אין משיכה לגבי מעות. דהיינו אם המצב היה שהשולחני קיבל מעות בתור הלוואה הכל היה בסדר. אבל הוא אינו לווה. הוא פשוט קיבל כסף לשמור הגם שיש לו רשות להשתמש עם הכסף. וזה אינו גורם לו להיות לווה. אבל הוא גם אינו שואל בגלל שכסף אינו חפץ. אובייקט.
השאלה שאני משתדל לענות עליה היא ששאלת תוספות נראית יותר להיות שייכת לרב נחמן. היינו שהסיבה שאין משיכה במעות היא בגלל החשש שהמוכר יגיד ללוקח חיטיך נשרפו בעליה. וזה שייך רק לרב נחמן אבל לרב הונא הנפקד הוא שואל ולכן חייב באונסים. אבל עכשיו רוצה לומר שהשאלה שייכת  במיוחד לרב הונא בגלל שאין משיכה במעות אלא אם כן הוא לווה. ובמצב שלנו הוא אינו לווה וגם אינו שואל. הרקע כאן הוא זה. החוק במשנה הוא המפקיד מעות פתוחות לשלחני ונאבדו השולחני חייב בגלל שהייתה לו רשות להשתמש בהן .רב הונא אמר אפילו אם נאנסו. ורב נחמן אמר רק אם נאבדו. ורב נחמן שאל מחוק שגזבר שהפקיד ליד שולחני מעות פתוחות והוא השתמש אתם הגזבר חייב במעילה. השאלה היא שרק אם הוא השתמש, לא אם רק נמסרו לו. תוספות שואלים מן הדין נתן לו מעות ולא משך ממנו פרות יכול לחזור בו.

I was asked a few weeks ago about Leibniz and other pre-Kantian philosophers.

I was asked a few weeks ago about Leibniz and other pre-Kantian philosophers. I do not recall how it came up. I simply walked into the Na Nach Breslov beit midrash and someone asked me about this. My short answer to them was "They are not relevant". My main point was that pre_Kantian thinkers got to a certain point in the conflict between Mind and Body and it needed Kant and Hegel to come up with a kind of synthesis.

On a larger scale, my idea is this. Philosophy before Plato  was leading up to Plato and then everything after that was picking up  the pieces. (The question the pre Plato people had was "How is change possible?")
This question went up until Plotinus. Then a new problem arose: Faith and Reason. [And that in itself had a subset of a different problem free will as opposed to Divine knowledge. That went up until Aquinas.

 Then a whole new question came up with Descartes; the mind body problem. Then that went on back and forth between the people like John Locke and Spinoza and Leibniz until Kant. Since then everything has been getting trying to get a handle on Kant and Hegel.

And the relevance of all this is great as politics is downstream from Philosophy. What kind of idea people have about what is truth and justice will determine what kind of society they will live in.


[And you do not really get to skip this process by assuming you know the whole truth because of some religious text you read. The problem with that is that truth is not determined by "identity philosophy." That is to choose who has the truth based on what religious group or ethnic group they belong to. If that would be valid, then why did the Rambam make such a big deal out of the importance of Aristotle? You have to say that he did not think in terms of identity politics.]

I ought to add that in terms of the post Kantian debate I think that Leonard Nelson is unjustly ignored. To me his system [the Kant Fries School] seems important. And just to add weight that that it is a fact that Karl Gauss saw the book of Fries and praised it and David Hilbert clearly held that Leonard Nelson was on the right track. But I also do not think that this takes away from the importance of Hegel. But after Nelson I think 20th century philosophy really took a nose dive into the mud.

Kelley Ross does use the Nelson Kant approach for knowledge and Shopenhaur for Metaphysics but I am thinking that Hegel's Metaphysics might be better.

Kant and Hegel

I find the argument between Kant and Hegel to be along the lines of מחלוקת בין הצדיקים argument between the righteous/ That is I see both as being as important to figuring out what "It is all about" as Plato and Aristotle. [The idea of argument between the righteous comes from Rav Nahman and it refers to the fact that even great people seem to not be on the same page about what is important to emphasize. However there is still the problem of figuring out who is  a zakik in the first place. The problem in that is that there is a lot of sitra achra [the dark side] around that copies true tzadikim. Especially in Israel there is a lot of this problem- Rav Shach and the Gra warned about it but they seem to be universally ignored. Or perhaps it is just in the supposedly religious world that they are ignored.]

And in fact I owe a debt of gratitude to a certain school of thought of Kant based on Leonard Nelson. [That is the Kant-Fries School].

That is to say I found some of the problems in Torah thought to be almost insolvable because of two reasons. One was in understanding the basic meaning and the other problem is in practical experience.
So when I found on the Internet the school of thought of Kant Fries--that basically answered almost my questions.[That is the web site of Dr Kelley Ross from California.] However it helped also to see the essays of Dr Michael Huemer.]


There is an argument between Hegel and Kant about the dinge an sich [the thing in itself with no properties] if reason has access to it. In one way it seems that Kant has the advantage here since in his view there are two levels of reality --one in which reason can penetrate and the other in which it can not. This certainly helps when it comes to question in faith.

However the advantage of Hegel is that universals are at least accessible to reason by a process of dialectics. But when it comes to a political system I think the founding fathers of the USA were more on track.

a way to dispose of corrupt religious leaders.

Sometimes it is useful to have a way to dispose of corrupt religious leaders.

Rav Nahman of Breslov has quite a few chapters of his book [LeM] on the difficulties that stem from Torah Scholars that are demons.

The trouble with the idea of having a way of disposing of them is that thy have no authority in the first place. Once ordination was continued from Moses at Mount Sinai until about the middle of the time of the amoraim (Talmudic period). But once that authentic ordination was lost then authority reverts back to the Gemara [Talmud].
" Just like you can not add or subtract from the written Torah so you can not add or subtract from the Oral Law." Rambam in his letter to Yemen.

So anyone that claims ordination is a fraud in the first place. Much less to make money out of Torah makes it worse. So to dispose of these frauds really requires nothing more than simple awareness of the facts.

The phony kinds of ordination that is claimed nowadays started during the Middle Ages, but it has no legal validity. It is just a way to use Torah to make money--thus piling one lie on top of the other.

Question: Remember the thing about the earth being created from snow?  Fasten your seatbelt: Iyyov 37:6. (The Book of Job)

I just found it brought as a proof in the Midrash Rut from the Zohar Chadash 93:a. If the Rambam accepted the tradition that Iyyov was written by Moshe then it’s a pretty, uh, shtarke qasha. Moshe is as authoritative as it’s possible to get on the question.


My Answer: That midrash refers to the Big Bang. Not the actual earth. The idea is that snow contains structure a hexagon that you do not see in water or other things. That is why snow is used as the analogy. In Greek thought before R Eliezer there was an argument of what the world is made of. Water or fire etc or all four. So R Eliezer did not want to say all four but not one or the other either. Rather he found snow as being some combination of Solid Liquid Gas and Energy in a way that combined all four but in some way that was not any of the four.

But I imagine you are referring to the fact that the Rambam thought that Midrash is ridiculous. The Rambam can be wrong as I might have mentioned before. For some reason the great sages like Rav Shach and others made it an important part of learning to answer questions in the Rambam--and that is a worthy cause. Still with all that we see Rav Nahman ignored him in his list of things that one ought to learn every day.

 I was impressed with Tosphot when i first got to Far Rockaway and later learning sessions  simply reinforced that impression. Still the Rambam is a worthy Rishon but not one to put above any of the other great rishonim.

On the other hand the idea of the Rambam of a synthesis between Reason and Faith is a worthy idea and found in other Rishonim and Geonim. 
Pirkei Avot --I forget where is one place where the Rambam misunderstood the meaning of an Aramaic word. The commentaries over there mention this and they are right. Another place I mentioned is the Spheres and the Rings. The whole reason the Rings were introduced was because the Spheres did not explain the fact that Venus gets darker and lighter. So just in the course of one generation after Plato then spheres were abandoned and the Rings put in there place. yet the Rambam says the reason the Rings were introduced was because of the darkening and lightening of Venus.


I might add that the way of the Litvak yeshivas since Rav Haim of Brisk is great on the side that they dig in to find some way of reconciling the Rambam with the Talmud which is usually hard if not impossible. Yet they all do an amazing job. Rav Shach, Rav Haim, my own teachers at the Mir Rav Shmuel Berenbaum etc. Yet too much in Tosphot is forgotten about. people get to the point of almost just skimming over Tosphot without getting the ideas except for how the conclusion may of may not disagree with the Rambam. They ignore the whole reasoning.

Dr Kelley Ross and Dr Michael Huemer are coming from very different kinds of approaches. Dr Ross from German Idealism especially of Leonard Nelson and Fries. Dr Huemer from the intuitionist school {Prichard]. Still both very much against communism. And while I agree totally that communism is not very good-I also got to see  the Ukraine and started realizing things are not so simple. To me it looks like politics depends on DNA to a large degree. Capitalism just does not work automatically. But DNA is the one area that philosophy just can not deal with. that is the fact that people are different. not just individual people but also whole groups.

Sorry I can not go on but the library is closing and I do not have my own computer.

Talmud Bava Mezia 43

In the Talmud Bava Mezia there is a mishna that says that one who gives over money that is not sealed to a money changer--if the money changer loses it he is liable [The money changer is liable]. the reason is it was open so he was allowed to use it. To Rav Huna that means even if it was unavoidable accident. Rav Nahman askes on him from a braita [A kind of teaching that is from the time of the mishna but not included in the mishna]. It says if a gizbar [one appointed over Temple funds] gives over to a money changer money to guard--if he uses the money he [the gizbar] is liable the sin of trespassing meila.[The idea is the if the permission to use the moeny is what counts then here also the permission to use the funds ought to make the gizbar right away liable]
Tosphot asks on this question from the Mishna that one who sells some product and has received the money but the buyer has not yet picked up the product the seller can change his mind and renege on the deal.

Rav Shach and the Maharam [under the Maharsha] and the Maharam Shif all go into this subject.
But what I wanted to say here is that the question of Tosfot is thus: It does not seem to be any question on Rav Huna since in a case of meila or just regular buying and selling the permission to use the money does not exist. Only actual using the money counts. So also in our case of just giving over money to guard what ought to count is to make one a borrower is actual using. And permission to  use should only count as far as being considered a paid guard.

בבא מציעא מ''ג ע''א. משנה המפקיד מעות אצל שולחני אם היו פתוחים ונאבדו הוא חייב לשלם. לפי רב הונא השולחני הוא נחשב שואל ומחויב גם באונסים אבל לרב נחמן הוא רק שומר שכר. רב נחמן שואל שגזבר שמפקיד מעות אצל שולחנית אם השולחני השתמש אתם הגזבר חייב במעילה. היתר תשמיש אינו מועיל לעשותו שואל אלא שומר שכר. תוספות שאול  שבמכירה המוכר שמקבל מעות אינו יכול להשתמש אתם עד שהלוקח מושך את החפץ. היינו שבמכירה זה שנמצא הכסף ביד המוכר אינו נותן לו רשות להשתמש אתו. ולכן במעילה הדין דומה שאין היתר השתמשות--ולכן מה הקושיה על רב הונא?