There is a valid reason to listen to the Gra

There is a valid reason to listen to the Gra in so far as his signature on the Herem (letter of excommunication) was based on facts. It certainly was not mistaken. But even if  a sage makes an excommunication that is because of false assumptions, the herem is still valid.

The reason I say this is because I ask from where does the force of a Herem (excommunication) come from? Nedarim (vows). {I say that because of the regular commentaries on the Rambam.} And what is the law of a vow? It is if one says, "My bread is a sacrifice to you," that is valid, and has legal standing. That bread is in fact forbidden to the other person. It makes no difference why the person said it in the first place. And this is not a decrees from the scribes. It is a Torah law.

[In fact I wish I could follow more of the advice of the Gra-especially about learning Torah and trust in God. But in whatever I can manage to listen to his amazing ideas, I am happy.]

"Spirit of Torah"

 To get the "Spirit of Torah" it is necessary to learn in a Litvak yeshiva. But furthermore. It tends to instill a certain faith in the sages of the Mishna and the Rishonim [mediaeval authorities]. That is: when I was in Shar Yashuv and learning with Naphtali Yeager [the son in law of the rosh yeshiva who eventually became the rosh yeshiva himself], that was when I discovered the depths of Torah.
[Mainly by deep study of Tosphot].
But to my way of thinking this does not exclude some secular subjects. I feel the natural sciences plus metaphysics would have to be included in the category of learning Torah. This is based on Saadia Gaon and the later Rishonim. However when I was in the Mir secular subjects  were more or less frowned upon.

I admire people that do sit and learn Torah all day, but I just was not able to do so myself.

However it is odd that the signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication is ignored to a large degree even in Litvak yeshivas were you would expect it to make a difference.

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.

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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.