And if Slavery (forced work without compensation) is so wrong, then why do black people not mind forcing white people to work for their free welfare checks?

Once you agree that slavery was some terrible evil then you have already lost the argument. Better to go along with what is open in the Bible--that Slavery is OK as long as the slave is not abused. Just forced to work. All England were more or less slaves under William the Conqueror. So were all Europeans under their lords in the feudal system.


The South was right. After all in the Bible there are Hebrew slaves and Gentile slaves. This is OK. The laws however are different for each one. [Hebrew slaves are let go after seven years automatically. A Gentile slave is never free until his master accepts money to free him, or gives the slave a document that says he is freed or there is injury of limb.] But it really goes against the Bible to say that a law of God was wrong.

[However slavery is an important issue because the simple claim that it is unjust mean automatically that one does not believe in the Bible.] 

And if Slavery (forced work without compensation) is so wrong, then why do black people not mind forcing white people to work for their free welfare checks?

If you look at the effect of England on the world you can not help but be astonished. Whatever it touched became prosperous and flourished. The USA, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, India, South Africa etc.

If you look at the effect of England on the world you can not help but be astonished. Whatever it touched became prosperous and flourished. The USA, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, India, South Africa etc. Count the USA as an extension of England and the effect goes further. [Japan after accepting an English kind of government.] [But take away the effect of England then things fall apart quickly.]]

One thing that is so astonishing about this is that there was nothing in the development of England that had anything to do with being planned. Not philosophy nor any political theory. [John Locke simply came to explain what had happened before him.]

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Some of the concepts of the Ari come from verses of the Torah  and the Sefer Yetzira, not necessarily from the book of the Zohar. The first three seferot from Mishlei 3 and the seven lower sepherot from Chronicles. ["God by his wisdom founded the earth by his understanding etc."].To you Lord is the greatness and the power and the beauty etc.
However the basic scheme comes from Plotinus. Nothing is wrong with that, but that does not mean that the basic concepts were found in Torah. 

You can wonder about mixing belief systems. When the Rambam combined Aristotle with Torah, that must have seemed at the time like mixing apples and oranges. However you would not ask that if one would apply that principle to Torah and Medicine. It seems like they deal with two different areas. But Aristotle's Metaphysics must have seemed to some people as not really a different area than Torah but rather a conflicting area.
It is hard to come up with a good rule of thumb about this.

"מחאה" (to object to wrong doing)

It was pointed out to me once by Leibel [the son of the Rosh Yeshiva of the Mir Rav Shmuel Berenbaum] that there is an obligation of "מחאה" (to object to wrong doing--even when it seems you will not be listened to.]
In fact you see that in the Gemara in the events about Kamza and Bar Kamza. There was some wrong act that was done. But that act was not the cause of the fate of the Temple to be destroyed. Rather the fact that the sages of the time did not object to that act.
You see this also in the Old Testament with the tribe of Benjamin that did not object to the treatment of the concubine at Giva. And in that case God himself revealed to Israel to continue wiping out that tribe because of the fact that they did not object to wrong doing.

Similarly you can see why the Gra would have signed the letter of excommunication. Same reason. To object to evil--even if you know you will not be listened to.

two great Litvak yeshivas

There was a certain degree of grace that I merited to go to two great Litvak yeshivas. Shar Yashuv and the Mir in NY. Only later did I come to Israel to learn in kollel. But the kollel thing in Israel seemed to be structured in a way that I though was not really proper and so I dropped out of it and learned Torah on my own and said to my wife that we would trust in God to help with making a living.

[That is the short and sweet of my yeshiva career. The beginning of it was a meeting with Shmuel Glazer who was going to a different Litvak yeshiva in Baltimore (I think of Rav Rudderman).

I was in Asbury Park at the time, and met him through an old man at a hotel that my family was running. [The Hamilton Hotel]. 

What is great about Litvak yeshivas is basically the fact that they learn Torah in the straight and narrow path. They do not add nor subtract. What is Torah is Torah,- and what is not is not.
So in the few years I spent there I got a basic idea of what Torah is all about. That is on one hand the most obvious advantage of the Litvak yeshiva world. Another hidden advantage is that if you get into it, you can really get touched with "the spirit of Torah", but that is a little harder to put my finger on.

But it is not as if they are going with the path of the Gra exactly. Rather that they get about as close to the real thing as possible. But it would be nice if they would stick with the Gra more than they do.  The way I see it is that if they would take the Gra and Rav Shach a bit more seriously, that would help to bring clarity to what really is Torah and help people avoid the Dark Side and pseudo Torah.
 [Just for clarity let me just mention that basic set of the great Litvak yeshivas is Mir, Chaim Berlin, Torah VeDaat in NY and Ponovitch, and Brisk in Israel. [But Ponovitch has branches and also non-official branches of people that learned at Ponovitch and started yeshivas along the lines of Ponovitch. Shar Yashuv is known as a beginner's kind of place --which is true for the first year. But my impression was that after the first year they get rapidly into deep Torah waters in a way that falls nowhere behind the other great Litvak yeshivas.

[I did not learn Musar in Shar Yashuv because that is a Litvak yeshiva, but not a Musar Yeshiva. The idea really comes from Rav Haim of Brisk that Musar can be and often is a distraction. So Shar Yashuv was based on that model. They want the time in yeshiva to be for getting to the "real thing" as deep and fast as possible. Yet later at the Mir I did learn Musar. And I still am not sure which model of  Litvak yeshiva is better. With or without Musar.]