In my reading of the New Testament, Jesus was just a regular Jewish Tzadik along the lines of Chanina ben Dosa. [Hanina ben Dosa was very similar,  but R. Shimon ben Yochai also might be thought to be along the same lines.] The legal aspects I have gone into before. Jesus held from the statement in Hulin perek 8 מים ראשונים מצווה מים אמצעים רשות מים אחרונים חובה the first waters-washing before the meals is a mitzvah a good deed. the middle waters are allowed, the later waters waters are the meal are an obligation." Thus the washing before the meals is not an obligation according to this--only a good deed.

To worship God alone was the exact point of Jesus when the Satan tempted him. And this point comes up in Revelations. Jesus held one should worship God, not him. 

This is in sharp contrast to the modern way of thought in which self worships the main obligation. This is really from Heidegger where instead of God we have "Being", a secular version of God. And the sole obligation is to be yourself, authenticity. That is another word for self worship. 

So it is ironic for people that worship themselves to be accusing Jesus of their own faults.

Jesus claims to be a son of man and never refers to himself as son of God. and even if he would have said that he is a son of God, so what? בנים אתם להשם אלוהיכם ''you are the sons if the Lord your God, therefore do not put a  bald spot on your flesh for a dead person'' Deuteronomy 

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 You can see something incongruous about a  stogy German professor Herbert Marcuse in Disney Land  and seeing that as late Capitalism that would lead directly into Nazism. California is the land "that hung the jerk that invented work.  I am a native Californian, and a lot of that tolerance and laid back attitude certainly affected me, but I have that sort of seriousness  and urgency of the feeling of finding the TRUTH to have made me seek and search in the great NY Litvak yeshivot. I think in high school this must have been apparent to my friends, Roland Hutchinson, Wendy Wilson. Paula (Lea) Finn and others. That was even before I was walking around with books that indicated as much. [Though I am not dismissing the insights of the Frankfurt School either. My point is there is much to e learned from these later thinkers, but one thing is lacking-faith with reason.]

But I never really came to a place where I could made sense of it all--the big picture. The best I could come up with was a lesson I learned almost at my first few days in Shar Yashuv--the importance of the Rishonim/Mediaeval thinkers. And that includes their synthesis of Faith with Reason.  

So while I have great appreciation for  later thinkers, I do not think they get anywhere near the depth of the Rishonim. 

If this is any indication of the issue let me say as an example that even in Shar Yashuv I would spend most of my in depth learning time with achronim/ later thinkers --because they are the key to unlocking the Rishonim.

Thus in Philosophy also, while the later people, Kant, Hegel, Leonard Nelson certainly are important, still there is something that we need to dig out of the Middle Ages.

[Just as  an example--Did Limited Constitutional Government, Parliament came from later people? Not at all. These all came from the English Middle Ages, Henry II, the English lords against King John, Edward I etc.

In the modern period it is the European philosophers tat get entangled with the internal world. Te Anglo American ones get the outer world, but lose the inner. The synthesis seems to be the Kant Friesian approach of Leonard Nelson that realizes there is a source of knowledge that is not reason nor sense perception. [Non intuitive immediate.]

 

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 LeM of Rav Nahman vol I perek 56 הסתרה שבתוך הסתרה God hides the deepest secrets of Torah in the hiddenness inside the hiddenness. This is one of the places where I note that the deepest secrets of Torah are contained in places where the holiness of God is hidden--Physics and Mathematics

The Closing of the American Mind

 I found high school to be extremely frustrating -as I am sure that most people do. One of the many issues was the need to be learning many subjects instead of being able to concentrate on just one. Maybe this was just a matter of growing pains. But my impression is that people ought to be able to have a certain direction without having to take extraneous subjects. 

But nowadays furthermore I think people ought to take the hint from Allan Bloom The Closing of the American Mind and simply close the social studies which have become simple propaganda. (Specifically anti America propaganda.) [This stems from the German philosophers at Columbia University that were refugees from Nazi Germany. They became the intellectual force that founded the direction of the "Education departments" in the USA. To their way of thinking unless the USA became Marxist, it was already close to Nazi Germany.] [Example: Adorno.] [This was the infamous Frankfurt school that became the birth place of postmodernism nd the Woeful Woke insanity]

Allan Bloom rightly sees the divide between the Enlightenment which formed the foundation of the USA and the anti enlightenment which was the foundation of the French Revolution. Kant iv somewhere in between but with Leonard Nelson of the New Friesian school --that puts Kant back into the  Enlightenment with its justification for faith that you see in John Locke

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