The signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication

The signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication for some reason is ignored.This is curious since it certainly has legal validity. And the fact is the spirit of Torah really resides solely in the Litvak Yeshiva environment. So to come to Torah in an authentic way really requires a walk in the Litvak path based on the Gra. And the peak -the Mount Everest-of the Litvak yeshiva world is Ponovitch -based on Rav Shach. But to some degree, most Litvak yeshivas can impart that authentic Torah experience.

The idea here is that to come to Torah in an authentic way really requires a group. One might learn Torah alone, but to get to that inner spirit requires a Litvak Yeshiva.

 I am myself not in any kind of Litvak environment (that is my fault). But once I found my muse when I was in two: Shar Yashuv and the Mir of NY.

The idea here is rather simple. It is the super-organism that Howard Bloom talks about. What makes a Litvak place unique is the set of values that it is based on --straight Torah.

But further--for the spirit of Torah there is a need for the group or institution to be consciously based on the Gra.


[I might add here that a "Herem" excommunication comes from the law of nederim/oaths in which one can forbid his object to another person. Thus a Herem also has that power. --if it is done by someone who can do it. And there is no doubt that the Gra had sufficient Torah knowledge to give him authority to establish a herem.]

The laws about Herem are not in the Gemara itself directly related to Nedarim. They are simply assumed to be valid. Rather the reason that I say they are connected to Nedarim is the achronim say  that is from where herem gets its legal validity.

One important aspect of the herem is that it is not "Niduy" rebuke. Rebuke is a lesser form of herem. Herem itself is more restricting.

w9 music file

w9 Music file mp3  w9 in midi   w9 in nwc

It seems kind of unfair to Hegel to say that he does not have a place for faith in his system when his whole system is an attempt to justify faith.

Hegel and Leonard Nelson (picking up some concepts from Fries) were rivals about the legacy of Kant. With Nelson there is something like direct justification of faith as a source of knowledge that is not based on reason nor sense perception.

Hegel definitely justifies Faith also but not as a separate source of information outside of reason or the senses. In fact he does not address the Mind Body problem at all. Or in the way it was understood then the difference between the rationalists and the empiricists.
He assumes right from the start that all knowledge needs an immediate source of information [senses] and an a priori element. This he calls "notion".

Hegel sees himself as doing the same thing as Aquinas. Except he thinks he is doing it in a more rigorous fashion and also taking  Kant into account.

My feeling about this is that "Notion" of Hegel is close to the immediate non intuitive knowledge of Fries in the sense that in the first place you have to ask about the limit of reason that Hume came up with --that reason can only discern contradictions.  This was accepted by Kant. But it is not true. Reason recognizes lots of things besides contradictions. But these other functions are different in some sense than pure reason. They have elements from empirical sense and also from a priori sense.

And the non intuitive knowledge of Fries occupies a similar ground--somewhere between sense perception and reason.

It seems kind of unfair to Hegel to say that he does not have a place for faith in his system when his whole system is an attempt to justify faith. But he does so in a different way than Nelson. 

two arrows of time if you combine with two arrows of entropy come to amazing results

There might be two arrows of time that meet to make the now different from the future or past. Feynman had such a paper. It did not produce at the time any great results but if you combine it with two arrows of entropy it does come with amazing results.

A physicist from the USSR did some great work in this direction [Georg Ryazanov] but his work is I think lost.

It was not really formulated in a way that would make it helpful today. Still its results were so astonishing that I spent a lot of time trying to iron out the details with him. But we never got it into publishable form.

The problem with the whole thing was that it was more or less classical physics. But the good things about it were that with two arrows of time and two of entropy with four worlds he got results with the exact mass of the electron and other particles.

Actually the paper might still be in existence in one of the "Way Back When" Internet places that store old data. His son [who I think teaches physics in Princeton or somewhere like that] also might still have his papers.

A few issues regarding the New Testament.

It seems to me worthwhile to mention something I find odd in the New Testament. It is not just that Jesus says to keep the entire Torah including the Oral Law. ["The Pharisees sit on the seat of Moses and therefore all that they say to do that you must do..."] The thing I find curious is that wherever you look there, Jesus is always depending on the authority of the Law of Moses. Not just once or twice. I mean to say Christians may quibble about what it means when he says that the Law is eternal and will never be nullified. But how can you quibble with the fact that he considers the law to be obligatory on himself and all others.

So how can you argue with that? True that Paul does say that gentiles do not have to keep the Law. However that is understood anyway since the most commandments were addressed to Israel.
[Later it does look like Paul wavers on this point. But that does not seem relevant to the basic issue about what Jesus held. Paul was addressing gentiles and so the issue just does not come up at all.]

A few more comments about this might be in order. One is the Sabbath day of rest. Ears of wheat that are not in need of the ground one can pick on Shabat. That is to say if they are totally ripe. So what the disciples of Jesus were doing on Shabat was totally permitted. While it is true that picking unripe wheat is one of the 39 kinds of forbidden work, still picking ripe wheat is not. And unless there is a specific degree from the sages not to pick even ripe fruit or wheat we do not make up our own decrees. [I mean to say that while there are plenty of decrees from the sages but after the time of the sages of the Mishna we can no longer make up our own decrees. This authority lasted only up until the end of the Mishna period. Even amoraim could no longer make decrees.]

To address another problem in the New Testament: The Oral Law. On one hand in Mathew 23 does say to listen to the Oral Law. "The scribes and Prushim [Pharisees] sit on Moses's seat and therefore all that they command you to obey that you must obey."
The Prushim a group that was fanatically religious and not the ancestors of the sages of the Mishna. However the Prushim did accept the Oral Law, but added tons of their own restrictions. [They were not the teachers]] They are well known all throughout the Gemara. For example they ate "חולין על טהרת הקודש" regular food as if it was the remainder of sacrifices. [note 1]That is it can not come into contact with anything "Tamee" unclean.
  Obviously this is not a restriction of the sages of the Mishna and certainly nothing that the sages of the Mishna did or taught as being desirable in any shape or form. So clearly the Prushim are not in any way related to the actual sages.


[note 1]
[I mean to say that there are different degree of "Tuma", an Av (a principle), a 2nd, 3rd or even a forth degree.  Food can be eaten no matter how unclean "tame" it is. even if it has been touched by a dead lizard. Only the food of sacrifices or truma has to be clean. That is let's say you have decided to thank God for some deliverance. So you bring a thanksgiving offering to the Temple. The priests then sacrifice the animal and you get part of the meat. That meat must be kept clean. In fact eating it in a state of tuma is Karet. But eating it when it is tame is not karet but still a prohibition from the Torah.

And since it is derived from a sacrifice it can become tame even to the forth degree. That is a dead lizard touches food. That food is allowed to be eaten--but it is a Rishon. [First degree of Tuma]. Then that food touches other food. That other food becomes a Sheni [2nd degree]. Then that other food touches more food. If that last one is truma then it becomes a 3rd degree. If that truma then touches the leftovers from the thanksgiving offering then those leftovers become a forth degree and can not be eaten. But none of this applies unless one has in fact brought a sacrifice.

There are many more issues. One is "sonship". A soul of Atzilut has the category of son. Souls from the next lower world "creation" do not have that level but rather are called servants. Most people have souls from the lower worlds. Only souls from Emanation are called "son".This is all very well explained in the Ari-Rav Isaac Luria.

many commandments of the Torah have to do with good character.

The Musar movement of Rav Israel Salanter was meant largely to help people improve their character traits. But it has a side advantage to help people become aware that good character is an essential part of Torah. In fact this was a surprise for me. My first year in Shar Yashuv [a Lithuanian type of yeshiva based on the Gra], I spent some time learning the Sefer HaChinuch. There I discovered that many commandments of the Torah have to do with good character.

Music in F major. mp3

Music File mp3 w8 

My only question here was about the song that this starts with. At first I added a measure to make it more symmetric. But then it occurred to me that it makes more musical sense without that extra measure. (But I left in that measure when the song is repeated in C major.) The reason is that I have seen in Mozart that he will not insist on symmetry when the actual song makes sense with an odd number of measures. I was very surprised when I saw this in Mozart but I figure if it is good enough for Mozart, it is good enough for me.
[I think this is common in Mozart but the first time I saw it was when I counted the number of measures he put into one of his pieces and I saw it came out an odd number.--But it seems impossible to tell by just listening since it makes perfect sense with the odd number.]