I realize taking a chapter of a book on math or a page of gemara 400 times is a lot if you do not know the context.  Even 40 times. So what i have been thinking is to take one section and  read it straight through 4 day in a row. if at that time nothing i clear--go to the previous section. [you can not always start at the beginning because it is material you have already learned. ]

new song based on a song of my son izhak ben avraham

 za3

Lashon Hara, [slander, or even saying what is true about others unless 7 conditions are satisfied.]

 There is a lot of stuff going on in the world which i would write about but for the problem of lashon hara [slander]. And this is a delicate issue because of the severity of the issue. I might be required to warn someone about hanging out with the wrong sorts of friends, but if my words are not accepted --,is that lashon hara?

And the whole issue  tend to be forgotten on the larger scale. So I try to mention only the positive things that I and  others ought to concentrate on--learning Torah "beiyun" in depth with lots of review. Going through the Gemara with Tosphot, Maharsha, Hidushei Reb Chaimof Brisk, Mathematics Physics, exercise, coming to Israel etc. 

i mean to say, if you are careful about Lahon Hara, what else is there to do but to learn Torah?

[7 conditions: for benefit, not to cause more harm than what would be in a court, to see it yourself, to not judge it except by the law of the Torah and not to rush to judgment, to rebuke beforehand, no other way to reach that benefit.] 

Haywires in the American Democracy

 There is something going haywire in the American democracy. I think the reason is it needs a firmer foundation in theory. For the basic model was put together in an ad hoc fashion with theory coming only later. It is based largely on the English model of government--the Magna Carta and Provisions of Oxford. Only after James II fled, and William and Mary became the monarchs, did the theory arise that the government is supposed to be for the people, not visa versa.

The American Constitution is just a slightly modified version of English law.

John Locke lacks the glitter of the gothic dialectic of Hegel and Marx.

And sadly enough the Frankfurt School also brings a corrupted version of Kant to support their ideas.

I could suggest a version of Kant called the Friesian school based on Leonard Nelson, But after things have gone so off the rails, it is hard to imagine that anything could help. [Allan Bloom had suggestions in his Closing of the American Mind, but it seems too late for that. ]

my son's [Izhak (also known as Nahman)] emphasis on learning in depth.

 I was thinking about my son's [Izhak (also known as Nahman)] emphasis on learning in depth. It occurred to me that in the Gemara there is the mention of four hundred times review of every lesson. [That is in the story of one teacher who used to learn every lesson 400 times with his student. One time the student was distracted, so the teacher taught him the same lesson again another 400 times.] [A voice rang out from Heaven, Because of that  merit, he can have either one of two things: (1) all of his generation will merit to the world to come or (2) he will live for 400 years. In the end he got both.] And there is another place where it is mentioned that one person used to learn for himself every lesson 40 times.  And in fact I recall that lots of review helped me in many cases--e.g. when I was learning the book of Rav Chaim of Brisk and in physics [Joos's famous book Theoretical Physics]. [In that physics book, there were for me two sessions--one chapter I did forty days in a row. But most of the book, I did the approach of ''saying the words in order and going on''. ]

[However, there is also value of "bekiut" (fast learning) as done in Litvak Yeshivot in the afternoon and evening. You can see this in one of the great Musar books Ways of the Righteous. אורחות צדיקים

I might mention that Izhak was making preparations to come to Israel, but died before his plans were realized. To me it seems that coming and settling in Israel is important, as you can see in parshat hayira [chap on fear of God in Deuteronomy. Plus  the State of Israel is important. Rav Moshe Feinstein and Reb Aaron Kotler said about Israel דינא דמלכותא דינא the law of the state is the law.[Bava Batra 35] 

Kant and Leonard Nelson

 I was at the beach and talking to people there about the importance of Kant and Leonard Nelson. I mean it is not as if these students are not learning hard things. One girl had read Hegel's Phenomenology. --[If anything at all of Hegel, I think that should be the last.]

[Nelson built on Jacob Fries. This approach has a third source of knowledge besides reason or sence perception; that is ''immediate non intuitive knowledge.'' But it is not infallible it jut gives the categories of Kant as starting axioms that can be modified by evidence --like space and time.]

  But the interesting thing is that one girl was complaining that Leonard Nelson's works are not in Hebrew,-- and that is a valid complaint. After all even when they {Springer Verlag}got around to publishing his stuff, it is all in German. Can you imagine that even in English,  they only published minor works.

  But just for now with my barely functional keyboard, let me give the basic outline.--but forgive me for leaving out the details. The basic point is philosophy in the last 100 years got to be a mess. Marcuse is juvenile. --''Just tear down everything, and utopia will magically appear,'' is his alchemy thesis--really, [And that is the "woke" (i.e. asleep), just Marcuse repackaged. ]] Analytic philosophy was harder to see the flaws until Jeremy Katz. then recently Robert Hanna dealt it the final blow in his book The Fate of Analysis: Analytic Philosophy From Frege To The Ash-Heap of History, and Toward A Radical Kantian Philosophy of The Future, by Robert Hanna, [https://againstprofphil.org/category/not-an-edgy-essay/page/15/].[I think now you need to buy the book. I had read it when it was still on line.] Existentialism was refuted by a child in the audience of one of the great names who was saying, ''What my words mean to me is not what they mean to you.'' So the child asked the natural question, ''So why are you talking? i.e. he is talking because presumably  he want to say something, not nothing. 

So like Robert Hanna says, ''Forward to Kant''. But then you get into the original problem in Kant, and so the modification of Leonard Nelson is needed.

[I also went into the development of  philosophy of the Middle Ages which for us Jews was neo-Plato until the Rambam who turned towards Aristotle. That Aristotelian  turn came from the Islamic world which had one school that was totally into Aristotle. Then soon after the Rambam, Thomas Aquinas also went to Aristotle. But this move towards Aristotle did not hold up under the scrutiny of Bishop Berkley [about the question how perception works,] that led to the conflict between the rationalists and empiricists until Kant found a solution to that dilemma.

  My son. Isaac ben Avraham. was extraordinary in terms of desire to help others and the trait of forgiveness. But I forget the exact circumstances when I saw this, so I did not write about it. I think one event was was we were living together (in the neighborhood of Zichron Moshe) in Yerushalaim when there was some hurtful act of someone that I was angry about, but  Isaac said that there was no point in bearing a grudge. Also, at some point, I was learning the Avi Ezri on Shas of Rav Shach in Uman and lost it, so he sent to me another four vol. set. But later I lost that again --and he sent to me another set. And so on and so forth many times. I would lose the books I had to learn [because of all kind of difficult circumstances I fell into] and every time he would send another copy to me.