It is not known if the Gra agreed with the establishment of an institution "yeshiva" as independent from the local Rav and community. {That is something like a corporation.] For the most part, all you had was the local place where people prayed in the morning and then who ever wanted to just stayed and learned there during the day.

When Rav Chaim of Voloshin asked the Gra about starting such an independent institution as a yeshiva the Gra did not answer at first. Then there are several accounts. Some say that he agreed in the end. Others say he never agreed.

To me this shows a basic ambiguity about the whole issue. Certainly, Torah was never meant to be a means to get a kollel pay check. On the other hand, I had been part of two very great Litvak yeshivot Shar Yashuv and the Mir in NY.   In Shar Yashuv I learned about the great importance of reviewing everything you learn ten times.

So it is hard to know. Maybe the connection between Torah and Money nowadays has just gotten too out of hand.

[I do not know if it matters to others, but perhaps a bit of personal information might be helpful. I had a great time in Shar Yashuv and learned from Naphtali Yeager about the infinite depths of Tosphot. But after that I went to the Mir where the learning was more along the lines of Rav Haim of Brisk. ] 

signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication. It is customary to ignore the Gra's signature on the document of the herem but because of this ignoring the fact has caused the religious world to descend into its present state of insanity.

 The problem that Rav Nahman brings in the Le.M  [volume I chapters 12, 28] about תלמידי חכמים שדיים יהודאיים "Torah scholars that are demons" would not resonate so strongly with me if not for the fact of personal experience. The issue is there are plenty of these sort of Torah scholars that can "talk the talk" and say all the right words and verbiage, but when it comes to action, they do as much damage to us simple people as they can. I was not aware of the presence of these teachers of righteousness that are internally demons until I experienced their damage on my own self and family. And so I knock myself every day that I did not heed the warning of the Gra concerning this difficulty.

So what does this mean for other simple people? Not to avoid Torah which is holy and important. Rather to heed the signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication. Not because we are so religious, but rather because of self preservation.

[I wish I could walk in the path of the Gra--straight learning and keeping Torah. But at least this important point of the Gra I think should be heeded. And furthermore, even if one thinks that the herem was by mistake, it still is valid since a herem/excommunication has the same category as קונמות--נדרים vows. That is one can say about an animal "This is to be a sacrifice" and that is valid regardless of  his reasons for doing so. So it us in the case of the excommunication. It is valid no matter if people accept it or not. 

I need to do here that Rav Nahman was not included in the Herem signed by the Gra. This you can see by looking at the actual language of the document. 

It is customary to ignore the Gra's signature  on the document of the herem but because of this ignoring the fact has caused the religious world to descend into its present state of insanity.

 z62 midi file  z62 nwc

(The Work of Creation and the Divine Chariot) are what the ancient Greeks called Physics and Metaphysics.[They do not refer to any kind of mysticism]]

If you take the natural sciences as being "secular" [devoid of numinous content], then I can see why people find them as dry. But for me, the opposite is the case. I see in them the "Wisdom of God",- the hidden Torah contained in the Work of Creation.  

{This is not my original idea. Rather it is based on the fact that I noticed in the חובות לבבות Obligations of the Hearts (Gate III perek 3) and the Guide of Maimonides this idea.  See the Guide of the Rambam (Maimonides) introduction. He says what the sages called מעשה בראשית ומעשה מרכבה (The Work of Creation and the Divine Chariot) are what the ancient Greeks called Physics and Metaphysics.[They do not refer to any kind of mysticism]] 

[See the Le.M of Rav Nahman about the hidden Torah and how it reaches even into the places far from God to call all those fallen souls back to Him.]   LeM vol II perek 12.

[I might mention that I was interested in the natural sciences when I was younger, but did not see the "numinous" content in them. So it took me  long time to start to see this aspect of things. Clearly my dad working at TRW on laser communication was intuitively aware of this, but I never heard him express it as such. And this must have come from his older brother Alex, that encouraged my Dad in this direction.]

Clearly some Rishonim disagreed with this approach, and I myself was inclined to just sit and learn Torah. However circumstances were such that I thought it wise to take the advice of the Gra, the Rambam and Ibn Pakuda. [The Gra was quoted in the translation of Euclid by one of his disciples as saying, "One will lack in knowledge of Torah a hundred times more than his lack of knowledge in the seven wisdoms.]"  כפי חסרון הידיעה בשבעת החכמות כן יחסר הידיעה בורה מאה פעמים

 

great ideas of the Gra

 One of the great ideas of the Gra is that every word of Torah is worth as much as all the other commandments put together. And you can see in the Nefesh HaChaim of his disciple Rav Chaim of Voloshin the greatness of learning Torah. So while on one hand I felt the tremendous holiness  of learning Torah, I did not appreciate the Litvak world [built on the Gra] as much as I should have. I saw the great advice of Rav Nahman and that got me off track to get involved in Breslov. So while clearly there is tremendous benefit in the books of Rav Nahman, but there is a "consciousness hook" by which I and others can get off track when we do not realize that Rav Nahman is one thing but Breslov is something else.

{I should add that I had a really great time in Shar Yashuv and the Mir in NY.  So I had no good reason to think the grass was greener elsewhere. But now that I know , at least I figure that I can let others know about the importance of the Gra and Rav Shach. --while still retaining a great deal of respect for Rav Nahman.

I also want to add here that it was Rav Freifeld of Shar Yashuv that told me to go to university. To him the best approach was half day of Torah and half day of university. But I did not listen because I felt I needed to be learning Torah all day at that point. (And after all what could I done in college at that point? I did not know of the method of learning of "saying the words and going on". So I I could do would have been philosophy which in the 20th century was a disaster or music.]

One of the reasons that I am impressed with the Kant-Fries School of thought is personal experience. I know that can not be used as a proof for a philosophical idea, still for me this made the idea of the Friesian School highly credible. I mean to say that Kant  tries to find a justification of the synthetic a priori by means of structures that are already placed in the mind. And thus to him, reality has to conform to the mind. If you find this doubtful, you are not alone. So the idea of non intuitive immediate knowledge made more sense. That is that there is knowledge that we know not by reason and not by the senses. And this gives the beginning axioms upon which the synthetic a priori can be built.

[I mean to say that my own belief in God is not based on reason, but can be justified by reason as we see in Kurt Godel's proof of the existence of God.  While this proof is solid, still there is always room for doubters to doubt. So for me faith comes above reason. And faith is immediate non intuitive.

[If Fries was accused of psychologism that is not really all that accurate since he was only saying we need to inspect ourselves ["know thyself"] to see the source of this faith, but not that it depends on the mind.]

And even if other things he got wrong, that is not a reason to discount what he got right. This is like what the Rambam wrote about Muslims. He wrote "If they lie about us, that does not give us a reason to lie about them."

General Grant and General Robert E. Lee

 General Grant tried to underplay the South's fighting ability. He wrote that the numbers of the Union forces counted all the axillaries. [Cooks, baggage carriers etc.] But in most  battles (before overwhelming numbers were brought against the South), the South won. [There was one exception in which General McClellan won and that gave confidence to the North.] [And I mean this only in the East. On the Western Front, the Union had total victory, and took Kansas and Tennessee.]And the very idea that the North was fighting for what was right seems to contradict both the Old Testament  and the New. [note 1]

I mean to liberate slaves who would afterwards turn to be Trojan horses and continue to undermine the Republic. That was wrong. But to keep the Union together, that very well might have been right as General Sherman said that with that break up, the states would turn out to be like Mexico fighting one with the other to the ruin of all. [As was in fact the case before the Constitution was signed]

So they were fighting for morality based on "reason". But if you want morality based on reason you can come up with systems that look good on paper (like Marxism), but end up enslaving the entire population where it is employed--and murdering a high percentage of its own population. [note 2]

[note 1] There are rules about how a slave is to be treated. But that does not mean the institution is wrong. It is well known hat even a gentile slave must be treated as well as the master. The law is that if the master has only one pillow, he must give it to the slave. The only thing the slave must d is to work, not to suffer.

[note 2] I hope it is clear that Reason and Revelation is what is necessary. I am only criticizing the idea that reason alone can bring to objective morality. Reason alone can not bring to objective morality since it is the most flawed of all human perceptions. But nor is Revelation sufficient since it is just as subject to perversions as any other human institution. Only with Reason with Revelation is there any chance of coming to objective morality.