The hidden Torah and Physics.

The hidden Torah [that is enclosed in the Work of Creation] is mentioned a lot in the Le"M of Rav Nahman in different ways.

One place I noticed this is in the book of Rav Natan his disciple that is brought on the subject of the Red Heifer. That is the sacrifice that is brought outside the Temple and which purifies from the kind of uncleanliness associated with the dead.

For a long time I have thought that this hidden Torah inside of Creation refers to Physics. My reasoning originally was based on the Obligations of the Heart. [Chovot Levavot] where he says both to learn the spirituality inside of creation and also the wisdom inside of creation--two different things [Shar HaBehina chapter 3 I think.]

You can see this idea also in the Rambam in his Guide and the Mishne Torah.

[In terms of the Ari--Rav Isaac Luria you do see a lot of Divine names that are contained in the physical Universe. --at least in the Eitz Chaim. But also in the Reshash [Rav Shalom Sharabi] there is an expanded version in the forth volume of his Sidur. (I mean that there are two sidurs of the Reshash. One is the smaller red one. The other is the large one which is considered more accurate. The smaller one was put together by the grandson of the Reshash. The smaller red one is thought to be a compilation done in Syria. Though I used the smaller one for years until I found the larger one, still Rav Mordechai Sharabi said the smaller one is not all that reliable.]

At any rate, this refers to the spirituality inside of Creation.--not to the laws of Physics which is what the Chovot Levavot  and the Rambam are referring to.

Rav Nahman: You can serve God with everything. אפשר לעבוד השם בכל דבר.

So how can you learn Physics. Say the words and go on. This is called "Girsa" learning in that way was already mentioned in the Gemara in Shabat 63.

If the Gemara would have wanted to say that music is forbidden period. It is hard to imagine how it could have said it any clearer.

Music is mentioned in the book of Rav Nahman (Le''M 72) as being a great thing -- rids one of illusions and delusions. The way to understand this is not simple since in the gemara in Gitin [I forget the page number but it is towards the beginning] "How do we know that music is forbidden?" And then it brings some verse. And then it goes on to explain that music is forbidden whether by voice or by instrument.
The answer on one hand is like Tosphot that it is referring to music at a wine party. Another answer is that even if you do not hold with the answer of Tosphot but go with the Rambam that all music is forbidden, still he adds that singing praises of God is allowed and praiseworthy.

But again the comes up the more well known question that using verses of the Torah as words for songs is forbidden. It specifically refers to psalms and the Sir Hashirim but the prohibition is for all verses of Torah. "When people use the words of Torah for a song the Torah dresses in garments of mourning and complains before God ';They have made a song out of me'".[That is a quotation from the Gemara.]

[If the Gemara would have wanted to say that music is forbidden period. It is hard to imagine how it could have said it any clearer. So is there any answer for all this? Mainly I have to say that I depend on Tosphot.]

Faith in the wise is one of the great principles

Faith in the wise is one of the great principles I found in Rav Nahman's Le''M vol I chapter 61.

And it is the reason why I will often quote different wise people --for example Rav Nahman himself, and the Gra, and Kant and Hegel. The reason is this principle of faith in the wise. So it can happen that people that are wise can contradict each other. Sometimes that is in order לגרש את הסיטרין אוחרנין to expel the forces of evil. That is often one is no worthy to learn from a truly wise person or a tzadik. So it comes about that different tzadikim disagree with each other in order to sow confusion in minds of people that then go away from them.

This applies to truly wise and great people. So this is  test to see who is worthy. On the other hand there is such a thing as the Torah of the Realm of Evil. And there are Torah scholars that are in fact demons of the Sitra Achra as Rav Nahman brings in Le''M vol I chapter 12 and 28. So it is necessary to develop some kind of common sense to be able to tell the difference between authentic and inauthentic.

"Faith in the wise" is as is well known a principle from the Mishna in Avot [Pirkay Avot] but the reason this stuck in my mind was that Rav Nahman ties it into the problem that I had at the time. He says על ידי אמונת חכמים יכולים להוציא את משפטינו לאור "by means of faith in the wise one is able to bring his judgment into the light." That is to merit to the right piece of advice that will help him in his troubles." i.e. to merit to the right advice. I was not sure what to do at that time. So I simply learned that particular Torah lesson every day--saying it from beginning to end, until some kind of clarity would come to me. So I was learning that lesson for a different reason --not to come to faith in the wise. But the idea of faith in the wise did stick with me.

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.