Authentic Torah

The major thing which I found compelling about the Litvak yeshiva world was its authenticity.

That is more or less if you put the Gra, together with Rav Israel Salanter, and Rav Shach and Rav Haim of Brisk, you come out with a kind of path that struck me as being "the real thing."

Why was this important to me? I really do not recall very well. Mainly, I think it was that in those days, finding the Truth was the big thing. And to find to Truth was perhaps for me more than intellectual interest.

But you do need a certain kind of common sense to be able to tell in any area of value what is the real thing,-- and what is not. As Steven Dutch says for every area of knowledge there is a pseudo science that corresponds to it. [Authenticity was not mentioned a lot in those days, but it was implicit that in the search for the truth, you did not what to settle for half baked measures.]

The aspect of Rav Israel Salanter is an important aspect of this, since without that, it is easy to get sidetracked about what Torah is really about. His emphasis on Musar [Ethical books] of Torah brings out what is really important in Torah (character, fear of God, trust in God), and what are just side issues.

[In truth, however I find this path hard to stick with, and hard to keep, and hard to understand. There is some kind of aspect of the whole thing that became institutionalized. So for this to work at all you need to be part of a place that really is authentic.--Something like Ponovitch, or Brisk, or the Mir--or along those lines.]

Tikun HaKlali of Rav Nahman. Correction for sexual sin

Rav Nahman of Breslov emphasis on sexual purity makes a lot of sense to me. Even though it is hard to maintain any kind of purity nowadays he did search for a solution for after the fact sins. To some degree you can see this in books of Musar and also the Ari [Isaac Luria]. But Rav Nahman's idea seems best to me. That is to say these ten psalms, 16, 32, 41, 42, 59, 77, 90, 105, 137, 150. that same day and also to go to a natural body of water like the sea or a river.

In the book of Rav Natan [one of his disciples] he also brings the idea of being married is a Tikun HaBrit [correction for sexual sin]. But nowadays this is hard to do.

The basic idea of Rav Nahman is that sexual sin  causes damage in spiritual realms. And so by saying thiose ten psalms which corrospond to the ten kinds of song that David said the psalms in would bring total correction.

[It should be noted that this saying of teh psalms has the ability to correct even more than sexual sin as you can see in the major book of Rav Nahman the LE"M vol I chapter 19.]

German Idealism

Idealism is the idea that we are only aware of our own minds. what is outside our own heads we have no idea of and have no reason to think it is real.

Idealism of Berkeley is false but has great and rigorous proofs. So Thomas Reid spent a good deal of effort refuting it.

Kant accepted idealism to the degree that he holds there is an outside world but that it must conform to conditions of possibility of experience.

And our own knowledge must conform to the limits of reason. As Kelley Ross puts it: a bathtub full of computer chips is not a computer and cannot process information.

Shopenhaur accepts that Kant proved his point but modifies it. [Shopenaur starts his book with "The world is my representation. So now that he is not here, why is the world still here?]

To me it seems that idealism is simply wrong. I am pretty sure that most people reading this have seen rigorous proofs of absurd things. Like: there can be no motion of Zeno. Or that pi = 3.


That does not mean the idea is true. That is how I look at idealism.

So as Michael Huemer says--the Mind Body problem [which is behind all this] is not solved. What seems true to me is that Hegel got the right idea that any knowledge combines synthesizes both empirical impute and a priori impute. [Michael Huemer says basically the same thing in one essay where he shows all empirical knowledge depends on a priori assumptions.] His way to solve then issue is by probability. Every assumption starts out with a beginning amount of how much sense it makes. So even when you throw out one assumption that at first made sense it is because it disagrees with another assumption that makes more sense. That is for example how Einstein decided to modify Newton instead of Maxwell. To him , electrodynamics was more basic than Classical dynamics.

A major premise of the religious world is that if they would be in charge of things, then everything would be all right. Once you find out that this assumption is wildly wrong, you usually do not have the ability to back out.

A major premise of the religious world is that if they would be in charge of things, then everything would be all right. Once you find out that this assumption is wildly wrong, you usually do not have the ability to back out.

So I see a lot of value in then book of Allan Bloom where he goes into the Enlightenment. There he shows that it was largely a political movement to take power from priests and princes and give it to the educated people.like scientists. I am in full sympathy with this idea after living in a society that was largely based on Enlightenment ideals --especially John Locke--i.e the USA during the period when it was mainly WASP.[White Anglo Saxon Protestant].

However as he points out, the Enlightenment and the USA itself is at a crossroads. It is not just the many people that are American citizens that hate the USA that will stop at nothing to destroy it. It is a focus of lots of forces. But more important it is an epiphenomenon from the problems in the Enlightenment itself.

The best idea would be to answer the question how to move forward. Not simply to give up and go back to the rule of priests and princes.

So what is needed I think is some kind of Hegel synthesis.--to see what is right in Enlightenment philosophy and what is right in the counter enlightenment and to create a synthesis of both and to then discard what was not right in either.

My own feeling is to divide ones time between these two methods. As was done in the Mir yeshiva in NY. The morning for intense in depth learning and the afternoon for fast learning.

In the Conversations of Rav Nahman 76 there is the famous few paragraphs about learning fast.
This certainly helped me a lot when I was trying to get up to speed in Physics and Math. After high school I concentrated on Torah learning --which is great in itself. But  that meant that I skipped Physics. [Not being aware of the opinion of Ibn Pakuda and the Rambam. Nor were their opinions well known in the Litvak yeshiva world at the time. ]
But besides learning fast Rav Nahman does talk about review in his sefer hamidot.
So how to combine these two opposites?

In books of Musar before Rav Nahman like the אורחות צדיקים Ways of the Righeous there seem to be both things.

[ My own feeling is to divide ones time between these two methods. As was done in the Mir yeshiva in NY. The morning for intense in depth learning and the afternoon for fast learning.

American life before things got weird

Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind goes into the conflict between the Enlightenment vision of people as improvable by means of education and the anti enlightenment philosophers.
In that book he traces the conflict to be a question between John Locke and Rousseau about what is the state of nature of man before you would have any education or civilization.

It occurred to me a long time ago that he leaves out the treatment of these question of Kant and Hegel. And I am not sure why. Maybe he did not think that there has been any kind of solution.

Why would not the Hegel kind of synthesis work here?


In any case-my own view is based on basic experience. I had the opportunity to experience average American life before things got weird. The regular experience was  is the regular schooling up until university and family outings every weekend. It was Freedom combined with responsibility. There were no free rides. the Welfare state had not been expanded yet.
Of course all that changed. But that is how things once were and it was great.
So all the arguments against capitalism and the American way just fall off me like water on a duck.

But I see the USA in a deep crisis. And I am not sure why people want to make it into a socialist society. However i also can see why Russia had to become the USSR. It was not just the end of the effects in the Ukraine now that the thawing out period is over and the criminal elements in the Ukraine are raising their heads again. But even before that--I saw all the working infra structure was from the communists. So as far as Russia goes I can see the point of the USSR. But not in the USA. So what is the difference? I could take  a guess and say that the USA used to be WASP. But there might be lots of other explanations. The point is that my views are not based on idealism but experience and just seeing how things are and how the used to be.

So based on my experience I do not see the religious world as any kind of noble ideal.  My experience in the religious world shows me clearly that it is no where near as nice as the just average day experience in the USA only just a few years ago. In fact, the very concept of the religious gaining power gives me horrible nightmares.

Rav Nahman's Sefer haMidot-- "If you want to repent be sure not to be in debt."

Dr Kelley Ross has a nice section dealing with Kenyan economics on his Kant Fries site.http://www.friesian.com/.. Michael Huemer also I kind of recall. The basic idea is that the driving force of economies is demand, not supply.

My opinion about economies is based on a statement in Rav Nahman's Sefer haMidot-- "If you want to repent be sure not to be in debt." And since I got the idea from Musar books I had read before I discovered Rav Nahman about the importance of repentance, I decided to not be in debt even for a minute.

This related since  the way the government works nowadays is based on Kenyan economics. Which is the idea that going into debt is a good thing and it is what drives the economy forward. [They use weasel words to disguise what they mean. They call it the "supply side". But that simply means the more debt you go into, the richer you will be.