Musar [i.e. the classical books on Morality] But it is hard to say that one can just get the basic world view of Torah without it.

 I may not have a lot of trust in God, but I try to renew my trust in him when I wake up in the morning and repeat to myself the opening paragraphs of the Level of Man [Navardok] in the section on trust. And this practice I recommend to others, to learn Musar [i.e. the classical books on Morality from the Middle Ages]. Then when you find something that you know needs reinforcement, to repeat it to yourself right when you get up in the morning. Over time something has to sink in.

The major works of Musar are , מסילת ישרים, ספר היראה, חובות הלבבות, שערי תשובה, אורחות צדיקים Book of Fear, Paths of the Righteous, Ways of the Just, Gates of Repentance]

But I would like to add the books of the disciples of Rav Israel Salanter as they deepen one's understanding of these principles of Fear of God and good character traits.

[However if you really want Fear of God and good character, you must runaway from the religious world since they assume the appearance of Torah, while are in fact ruled by the Sitra Achra (the Dark Side).] 

Where did the break occur between authentic Torah and the false world of the religious? The break happened when the signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication was ignored. And the result i that the entire religious world is wicked.

On a side note: The path of Musar is great but has some drawbacks. That is why the Litvak world introduced it in the yeshiva but only for 20 min in afternoon and 15 at night. The danger is that it can get one off the path of learning Gemara,-and even going off on some tangent. But it is hard to say that one can just get the basic world view of Torah without it. In fact it seems clear that without Musar people go off into terrible delusions . But even so you can see that there was a god reason that the actual time for learning it became much less than what was desired by Rav Israel Salanter.

i.e., where there is holiness (the holy Torah) the flies and demons gather around to surround. [This is in fact something that Rav Nahman of Breslov pointed out concerning Torah scholars that are demons. And he meant this quite literally.

 For some odd reason I found sticking to the straight Torah path to be hard even though I had a sincere desire to stick with learning Torah. The difficulties were from within and from without. "From within"--means I was too easily detracted. "From without" means even from people that  were learning Torah because that was the way they learned Torah to make money. That is the sort of Lakewood kollel sorts of fraud that claim to be super geniuses. But one way or the other I found sticking to learning Torah to be too hard when everyone in the so called "Torah community" convinced my wife to leave me and take her for themselves, and to rape my children. The religious world  at first seemed holy and upright. At that point, when they started to rape my children, they seemed to be not at all so great.

 Even though Torah is great and holy, the religious world is a mess. They are nothing like their claim of keeping Torah. It all a show of religiosity. There might be others who are evil, but for me the religious people were the most evil because of their ability and success to hurt my family by means of their show and dance. 

Torah is one thing. The religious world is the opposite. So the fact that some people see the religious world  as hypocrites--well there very well might be something to back that up.

So in conclusion --there is some aspect of things here that are hard to understand in their very essence. Some סביב רשעים יתהלכון "the wicked go round about" i.e., where there is holiness (the holy Torah) the flies and demons gather around to surround [and use it for evil סם חיים למיימינים בה סם מוות למשמאליים בה an elixir of life for those that walk in Torah for its own sake. Torah is a poison for those that walk in it for the sake of power and money (which means the entire religious world is poison).

So what is it about the religious world that makes the show and dance about Torah which s so different from Torah itself? Well for one thing the religious world is not about Torah at all. It is about the appearance of Torah. [This is in fact something that Rav Nahman of Breslov pointed out concerning Torah scholars that are demons. And he meant this quite literally. And thy are the leaders of the religious world. ]

 

importance of alliances.

The very identity of some people depends on disagreeing with Jesus. If you would take that away, they would not know who they are. It is a matter of their very essence. 

But I think this is not well thought out. For after all in the NT [New Testament] we find that Jesus emphasized keeping the written and Oral Law. Mathew chapter 23. "The Scribes sit on the seat of Moses and so everything they say to do, that you must obey and do." And then he goes on to attack the hypocrisy of many of those that profess to be religious. And the sages of the Talmud also attack the hypocrisy of the religious. It is brought in the end of tractate Shabat "If you see a generation upon which troubles come, go and check the judges of Israel. For all the troubles that come into the world come only because of the judges of Israel as it says in the verse 'their judges judge for bribes..'"[That is a verse in Isaiah]

[The place where keeping the Written Law is emphasized is right at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount.]

I admit I have my own idea about where Jesus fits into the scheme of things. חסד שביסוד של אצילות. [Literal trans. Kindness of Foundation of Emanation] In short that a concept you would find in the writings of Rav Isaac Lura. The basic idea is this. You have the first emanation of God's light into the Empty Space. ["Let there be light."] It goes down a bit and then goes around in a circle. Then it goes down a bit more and goes around in another circle. This continues all together ten times. Then the process starts again but this time the light forms into Adam Kadmon. Then light comes out from his ears, nose, mouth and then eyes. That light goes down until the navel. Then you get the process of the light running forwards down and back up. At some point there begins the Breaking of the vessels.[The death of the kings of Edom in Genesis. ] Then the broken pieces go down into lower levels which become to lower worlds. And the light goes back up. Then to start the process of correction [tikun] some of the broken pieces are brought back up and united with some aspects of the light. One of those corrections is the light of kindness is put into the vessel of Foundation.

[See the Eitz Chaim of Rav Chaim Vital for more details. But after doing Shas first.]

So while on one hand I can see some good points in the Evangelicals. But also some of the doctrines I find to be off base. [Metaphor from baseball]. The resolution I found in the Peloponnesian War about the importance of alliances. [That was a sub theme throughout that book]. So to be a support to goof groups is important even if you are not in complete agreement with everything they say. As long as they are in fact good. 

the religious world

Even though lashon hara [slander] is serious sin, still there is a need to warn people about danger that awaits them. So to speak highly of the great Yeshiva world of the Litvak yeshivot, one must also draw a distinction between those that follow the straight and narrow path of the Gra and the religious world that is obsessed with rituals 

There is some sort of "kelipa" (or evil force) that seems to have take over the religious world. Even though I found myself in a island in the few great Litvaks yeshivot that God granted to me to attend, still the wider religious world that seems to surround these sorts of places I found to be of the lowest moral standards.  סביב רשעים יתהלכון [That is a verse in Psalms. "The wicked go round about". That means where ever there is holiness, the wicked surround it.]  

medieval books on ethics

I think one of the greatest benefits I had at the few Litvak yeshivot that I attended, was the learning of Musar. Even though I was raised the home of my parents who were in fact very upright and moral people, still, I needed a sort of intellectual basis for this. Maybe I ought to know  simple moral principles by being raised in such an environment, but I needed the extra understanding that comes from Musar.

So what I recommend for myself and others is the learning of the basic texts of Musar which are the medieval books on ethics and also the books of the disciples of Rav Israel Salanter

 Scientism is the faith that only what science can measure in a test tube can be real. But this seems to be highly non scientific. For science seeks to know what we do not know; not to limit what can be known. 

But how can areas beyond what can be tested by a test tube or by pure reason be known? Thus to answer this question I had to turn to Immediate Non Intuitive Knowledge (of the the Kant-Friesian School of Kelley Ross). That means knowledge that is not dependent on the senses nor on pure reason.

And this makes a lot of sense to me because I am sorry to have to admit it but it makes sense to me because of my own personal experience of faith.  So I realize that personal experience is no proof of anything, still I have to explain why I find this school of thought to be so compelling. 

And along with this I can also believe that mystics like Rav Avraham Abulafia from the Middle Ages-had true mystic vision. [ Rav Abulafia had a lot of ideas that are in absolute contradiction to what the religious world thinks. And I admit I  was totally shocked when I first read his ideas in manuscript form in 1992.[This was after I had undergone difficult traumatic times in my life-so I might have been more receptive to his new approach. You might say I was no longer as sure of my ideas as I hade been before that.]  

But then how does one tell who has true vision?  For this I think you need the mediaeval formula of Faith with Reason. That is Faith may go beyond Reason but Reason still determines what is reasonable. 

So the question is how to strike a true balance between reason and faith. The problem is one without the other leads to lunacy. Thus the Litvak Yeshiva approach based on the Gra I think must be thought of as the true approach.   

mysticism based on the Zohar

 The problem with mysticism based on the Zohar is the phrase עם כל דא "even though".[עם כל דא "  is used all the time in the Zohar.]  I mean to say that the Zohar was written during the Middle Ages after that phrase עם כל זה [translated in Aramaic  עם כל דא] was invented by the Ibn Tibon family. Before then one said "even though" by אף על פי or  אף על גב. [Rav Yakov Emden in fact noticed the problem. He concluded that some parts of the Zohar were based on mystic writings that had come before that time, but a lot of it was not from R Shimon ben Yochai.

So while I have a lot of respect for the great mystics like Rav Avraham Abulafia and Rav Isaac Luria,, I do not see the Zohar as having validity at all.