Rav Nahman said not to be strict about anything.

Rav Nahman said not to be strict about anything. That is in terms of Jewish Law but also in terms of every day matters.

So for years I was not at all careful about carrying things in a public domain on Shabat. Sadly I can not learn Torah but I did get a chance to glance at a few pages in tractate Shabat and noticed that carrying is a big issue over there.

Even though you see the idea that a public domain in only where 600,000 people walk through  in Rashi and Tosphot and the Shulhan Aruch of Rav Joseph Karo itself brings it. Still it does not seem to be in the Gemara itself. I even noticed in the Yerushalmi some incident where a sage accidental carried on Shabat said he would bring a sin offering when the Temple would be rebuilt.

How would that have been possible in Babylon? the Jewish cites there were minuscule. Just think about Rome at the peak of its power. It had about a million people.  How could small Jewish towns have had comparable numbers?

Creation ex nihilo [from nothing] comes up in the book of Rav Nahman of Breslov in in LeM vol 1 chapter 4.

The idea of Creation ex nihilo [from nothing] comes up in the book of Rav Nahman of Breslov in in LeM vol 1 chapter 4. So it is hard for me to figure out why some people think that the Torah and or Rav Nahman held by pantheism.

Torah that comes from the halls of delusion

In the LeM of Rav Nahman [Collections of Rav nahman] you find the idea of Torah that comes from the halls of delusion. That is in volume I. Chapter 245.

In the השמטות [left out parts] you also find this idea of Torah of the Sitra Achra [the Realm of Evil]

The basic idea there is that  there are Torah lessons which come from the kelipot [forces of evil].

That is to say --in order to merit to true and authentic Torah takes a great deal of self sacrifice in the service of God.

Not just people that cl;aim to be giving over Torah lessons, Rav Nahman finds highly suspect;-but also doing things which you think are good deeds ma very well not be good deeds. As the LeM starts out Vol I chapter 1 "the evil inclination is dressed in mitzvot" היצר הרע מתלבש במצוות

The magnum opus of Rav Nahman from Breslov [Collections of Rav Nahman, the LeM] has a great deal of great ideas

The magnum opus of Rav Nahman from Breslov [Collections of Rav Nahman, the LeM] has a great deal of great ideas but does not seem to have a systematic world view except "be frum."
It is not like Hegel, Spinoza, or Leibniz [or the Nefesh HaHaim by Rav Haim from Voloshin]]

When you find a particular Torah lesson that deals with your particular issue, you learn it forty days in a row and that helps to solve the problem.

His idea of avoiding philosophy on one hand makes a lot of sense. Like Descartes said . that no opinion, however absurd and incredible, can be imagined, which has not been defended by a philosopher.


However the blanket attack on the Guide for the Perplexed of Maimonides and all medieval Jewish thinkers seems a bit over the top. Plus the attack on scientists also seems kind of overboard. [Okay then stop using your I phones and Jet airplanes to get to Uman.]


My view is more along the lines of Rav Israel Salanter while at the same time accepting the important ideas from other places.

faith with reason

In the Middle Ages there was an approach that combined faith with reason.
In Ibn Pakuda חובות הלבבות Obligations of the Heart you see this right on the first page of the introduction in terms of the important of what Muslims called "theology"["Wisdom of God" literally] . So he is not referring juts to Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus but also to how Muslim scholars developed those ideas. [I imagine he must have been thinking about Al  Farabi and Al Kindi.]

Later in Obligations of the Heart in chapter 3 of Shar NaBehina you see the emphasis on Physics [not just the spiritual aspects of Creation like angels.]

This seems to go with the general nature of the approach of Saadia Gaon and later the Rambam.

With the Rambam, the subject becomes a little more clear when he says specifically Physics and Metaphysics as they were understood by the ancient Greeks. [So he is not talking about mysticism.]

Even though learning Torah mainly refers to the Gemara with the Rishonim [Tosphot, Ritva, Rashba, Tosphot HaRosh.] still you see in the medieval sages [mainly from Spain] that also included Physics and Metaphysics in the category of the mitzvah itself.

Physics I think is clear if you look at the subject matter  extends to modern Physics. But what about metaphysics?
I think that after the Middle Ages some important advances have been made. On one hand you have Berkeley and general critiques of Aristotle. But what do you do with that? Thomas Reid [the philosopher of common sense] pointed out how absurd Berkley's idealism is and yet admitted that his arguments are close to irrefutable. To deal with this it seems to me it is unavoidable to have to learn Kant and Hegel.

faith in the wise. You need some kind of common sense to tell when it is best to listen to the experts and when to develop your own approach.

Rav Nahman makes a good point about אמונת חכמים--faith in the wise. But I think one needs to develop a certain kind of common sense to know in what exact points the sage was correct and to be able to filter out the areas where he might have been wrong.

In universities it is common to give advice to students to think for themselves. Read the material and come to their own conclusions. However how would this work if you are in a hospital? What would be the best approach? Listen to the doctor? Or think for yourself and come to your own conclusions?

Sometimes however even experts can be wrong.
You need some kind of common sense to tell when it is best to listen to the experts and when to develop your own approach.

the main benefit of Musar is the formation of ones consciousness plus world view issues.

To merit to fear of God and to good character traits was a major point of Rav Israel Salanter. [I mean that was the major point of the Musar Movement.]

I think the main benefit of Musar is the formation of ones consciousness plus world view issues.
That is to say that without Musar it is easy to adopt false sets of values all the while thinking sanctimonious thought about how one is keeping Torah.

Musar has the advantage of having its background world view being Platonic as outlined by Ibn Pakuda in the beginning of his Obligations of the Heart. [And that world view permeates most of Musar of the Middle Ages.]