Eliyahu on Mount Carmel

 Eliyahu on Mount Carmel asked the People of Israel, "How long will you jump between two extremes? If the Lord is God then serve him, but if the Baal is God then serve him."

Why did they not just answer "Both?" After all that was the ancient Canaanite religion: that the Lord [Yod he vav he] is the ruler of the heavens and the Baal was the ruler of the Earth. I think that the point of Eliyahu was that there can be only one First Cause. [There can only be one first of any series.] This is the same point that the Chovot Levavot brings in answer to this same question. [That is the first book of Musar The Obligations of the Hearts by Ibn Pakuda

I was reading that whole incident and I had  a few observations. One is the Eliyahu was eating bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat at night. That was from what the ravens were bringing to him. That seems odd in itself in terms of tractate Hulin. [The sages said the meat was coming from the table of Ahav. So the only problem was בשר הנעלם מן העין. Meat that was hidden and then found. But there is an answer to that.]

Another thing is that even after the People of Israel had repented, still the later prophecy when Eliyahu was at Mount Horev said to anoint a king on Aram, then one of Israel and then Elisha who would kill all those who had bowed before the Baal. And you see later that in fact only 7000 people were left of all Israel. That is another thing that is hard to understand.

Another point is that the way the Canaanite religion was, was that the Lord is the God of the heavens which means he has final and absolute control over the heavens. The same with the Baal on the Earth. So the point of Eliyahu was that God has the final and absolute control of both heaven and earth. But we do find in the Torah that people did ask prophets to pray for them. Like Hezekiah asking Isaiah to pray for him. So the idea that there can be an intermediary between one and God is possible. But "asking" is not the same thing as "praying." "Praying" is when one knows there one he is praying to is the final court of appeals and has absolute power over the subject one is asking about. "Asking" is not the same thing. And one does not worship the intermediary. Only askes to pray for one.  

Aliens. My dad used to work in area 51.

 I would like to mention that my dad used to work in area 51. That was when the USA government asked him to develop an extreme long distance camera to mount on the U-2 in order to see what was going on on the ground in the USSR. [There were two teams to develop a camera so in history you do not see my Dad's name (Rosenblum) since he was in charge of the second team.] And he never mentioned anything about aliens to me. OK, (you might say), it was after all Top Secret. However he never hid from my brothers and me (when we were just kids) his work on SDI - Star Wars in making Infra Red spy satellites and later laser communication between satellites;-- and even with him and his friends discussing how far advanced or behind the USSR was from us. [As far as that goes, he and his buddies at TRW explained that the USSR was actually more advanced than the USA in developing the tech and math needed for a SDI program, but then towards the end of the 1960's the USA caught up, and out stripped them. That was even before either government admitted that they had such a project.]

To be up front with you all, I think there probably are aliens, and they probably have been around here looking at earth. [But I am not afraid of them. It from the humans down here that I am afraid of.]

 However as for Area 51, I doubt if anything is going on there with that. 

 x49 AMajor 

Sorry I put this on before checking it. [I forgot to change the key back into A Major at the end. ] Now it seems to be OK. 

sexual purity

 Rav Nahman said for the sake of Tikun HaBrit/sexual purity to go a natural body of water. [That is if one has accidently spilled seed in vain  to go a dip into a natural body of water and say the ten psalms called the Tikun Klali 16, 32, 41, 42, 59, 77, 90, 105, 137, 150.

Bit I have noticed that going into a natural body of water seems to help me get my equilibrium back. (I usually go in with my clothing on and just change into dry clothes when I return to where I am staying.) That is: whenever I am upset or taken off balance for some reason, I run to the nearest body of natural water like a sea or a river.  [If you go in a sea with clothing, then rise them when you get home because the salt eats away at the material unless thoroughly washed out.]  ]Sometimes I have been in area where there is a spring. That is when I was in Safed and also in Jerusalem by the site of Shmuel the prophet. [It can not be man made like a pool.]  This helps purify my spirit. And at the same time, I do some exercise to help me regain physical health also.

Still even though the great ideas of Rav Nahman are important, one needs to be careful that one's focus should be on God, not on the tzadik.

Eliyahu  said to Klal Israel, "How long will you skip between the two ends. If the Lord is God  then serve Him; if the Baal is god, then serve him."  This seems to be ignored by religious people who tend to take some middle agent to serve.

Rav Shach in the Rambam's Laws of Buying and selling, Chapter 23. Bava Batra 63.

There is an argument of one can give or gain possession of something that has not come into the world.

R Meir said one can. However the sages said "no", and so throughout Shas, you see it is a given that one can not.

[There is a certain order among the tenaim/ authors of the Mishna with whom is the law. R Jose, R Yehuda, etc. according to order. R. Meir is near that bottom unless it is a "stam mishna" [no authorship is attributed] in which case the law is like R. Meir. [That is how R Yehuda the Prince arranged the Mishna]

In the case of a fruit tree, if one sells it to one person and sells its fruit to another, the other has acquired nothing except fruit which is on it right now. Not anything that will grow in the future. But in a case where he sells the tree to one person and he says, "I am selling to you the tree, but keeping the fruit for me," he keeps the fruit --for it is considered as if he kept the place where the fruit is growing for himself.

Same with a sell of a house where he says I am keeping the upper porch to be able to build upper extensions into the courtyard. But in both cases, there is an argument among rishonim if he can pass that right along to the people that inherit him. The Gra and Rashbam say no. The Ramban [Nachmanides] says yes. The issue is that the right to build an extension is thought to be a thing that has no substance.

The Gemara there in Bava Batra says the case of the Levi who sells his land "on condition" that the first tithe he gets. That arrangement does not continue with his children that inherit him. The idea is he keeps in theory the actual ground that the tithe grows on.

From there Reish Lakish learns from there about a person that sells his house on condition he keeps the roof space. But he keeps it anyway in the ancient usage of Iraq when if one sells a house the seller keeps top of the roof unless that is specified. To the Rashbam  saying openly "I sell you the house on condition the rood space is mine" means he added a condition that was implicit anyway. So it comes to include teh right to extend the rood to the other side of the courtyard and to make  a walk way there.

To the Ramban [Nachmanides] that is not because of the language but part of the actual arrangement in any case

The Gra holds like the Rashbam that the case of a Levite and roof are similar in that the children do not inherit the right, but the case of the roof is because of owning a thing that has no substance, not because of the language used in the deal.

 x48 F Major

My Dad [Philip Rosten/Rosenblum]

 My Dad [Philip Rosten/Rosenblum] had a way of downplaying anything good or great that he did. When he volunteered for the USA Air Force, he could have said it was for patriotic motives. But instead he said, "Well, everyone was getting drafted."  I realized that joining the Air Force had a significant effect on his life. For he had just got his master's degree from Cal Tech. So when he got to the Air Force, they must have seen that had someone they could use. So they put him into the development of the top secret B-29.  Then he was sent to fight for the war in Europe. But after the war, he developed the first Infra Red telescope. The the army base where he made that the focus of Senator McCarthy who had noticed that there were hidden communists in the USA government [like nowadays.] So when my Dad came to work on Monday morning, the whole place was empty, except for Berny Marcus, his friend. All the others were fired. So even though it was just window dressing because all the workers were back at work in a couple of days, still my dad and Marcus had been offered to work on a new government project--the top secret U-2 airplane. So he and Berny came to California. [They were flown out every Monday morning to Area 51, and came back home on Friday. [That is how it came about that I was born in California.] Then that was finished and there was apparently some other project at Hycon Corporation. But after that was finished, my dad invented a new kind of xerox machine called the "copymate machine." But that was the first time he was working in a private capacity. That lasted for five years, and then the USA government came calling again. They wanted him to put his infra-red kind telescope onto satellites that would spy on the USSR.  So they got a constellation of satellites into space for that, and then asked my dad to work on laser communication between satellites for SDI (Star Wars).

And that is when the whole incident when the KGB started stealing the documents from  TRW corporation where my dad was working. [That was made into a movie.] But my dad quit there, and started working for himself. He sold our house, and made a tidy sum, and started investing with that. 

[I am not saying he stopped because of the KGB. Rather it seemed to me, that he was going to quit even before that was revealed. He told me that better experts were up and coming from the universities and that his areas of experience were no longer needed.] 

When my dad was making his invention, the copymate machine in Newport Beach, we went to Temple Sharon in a nearby city. Then we moved when he started work on SDI, and I started going to Temple Israel in Hollywood. Then when I graduated from high school, I decided to go to a very great Litvak yeshiva, Shar Yashuv in NY. [My motivation was mainly philosophical. I had spent a lot of time studying Plato, Dante, Spinoza, and Chinese philosophy. To go and learn Torah seemed to me to be the natural next step.] Shar Yashuv had a beginners program, but rapidly advanced to deep "Lumdus" learning. [So my first year there was sort of confusing, but the second year in when we started on Hulin and the third year was for Ketuboth. In the middle of the fourth year, I decided to go to the Mir in NY. That is where I discovered a second kind of deep learning that you see in books of Rav Haim of Brisk and Rav Shach. It is very different from the type done in Shar Yashuv which was more analytic. [Kind of like G.E. Moore in philosophy.] The type of Rav Shach is more "global". [Sort of like Hegel.]

So my education in Physics was delayed by some years and I am finding it hard to catch up.