Monotheism includes the idea of Divine simplicity. Despite the importance of this idea came about, it is largely forgotten. God is not a composite, no concept of substance or form applies to him what so ever.
So worship of dead so called ''tzadikim'' really ought to be easily understood to be outside of Judaism as the GRA saw so clearly and yet his signature on the letter of excommunication is still largely ignored except by a few.
There seems to me to be a kind of doubt about what Torah is "all about." Looking at a book on Jewish History today is noticed a few things. The first is that History is not a science. Anyone writing it can tilt it in any direction he desires. The next thing was the odd fact that some secular Jews used to think that Judaism is all about democracy and equality. Looking at Torah that can not be right. That was the reform Judaism line until it turned into Social Justice [i.e. Marxism]. That also is not Torah. Nationalism is also out there, but that seems wrong. However I have noticed that Reform Judaism is right about Monotheism. unfortunately the idolatry that Jews rejected for thousands of years came back in the guise of worship of dead people thought to be saints. That, thankfully, Reform Judaism rejects totally.
Previously, I worried about the cost of liberalism in reduced fertility. It’s time for a second major cost of liberalism: reduced social cohesion. 1. The Need for LoyaltyHumans are selfish social animals. This means that, unlike the case of bees or ants, our cooperation is always in danger of degenerating into conflict, because each of us is genetically programmed to pursue our own interests, often at the expense of others. Moreover, even when our interests align, our judgments often conflict. We might agree that we all want economic prosperity but disagree about which policies or leaders are likely to produce that. So there is a standing temptation for people to behave uncooperatively, to work to defeat each other and undermine each other’s efforts. In the worst cases, you have actual violence. Social loyalty—the sense of loyalty to one’s own society and its ways—is society’s defense against that danger. We need this defense because human beings are not smart and rational enough to agree on what the right institutions and policies are. So we need something that makes people put up with (what they regard as) the stupidity and degeneracy of the other members of their society. We have to be ready to say, for example, that even though the person who just got elected is obviously an incompetent asshole whom only a moron would vote for, we’re going to keep peacefully cooperating with such morons, for the good of society. We’re not going to try to burn down our institutions in order to get our way. A rational person would do the game theoretic calculations and figure out that they should act cooperatively. But a typical human just feels a sense of social loyalty. 2. The Source of LoyaltyHypothesis: We promote social loyalty, in part, by emphasizing the goodness of our society and the nobility of its fundamental ideals. We teach young children, for example, about how our country was founded on ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy. We teach them about the advantages of our form of government, the wisdom of its Constitution, and how our country has from its founding represented a beacon of freedom to the world. We go on to teach about admirable figures in our history, about the selflessness and honesty of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Notice that it’s not just a matter of dispassionately enumerating the benefits of living in our society; the education needs to form positive emotional associations with our society. (This is discussed in my colleague Ajume Wingo’s book, Veil Politics in Liberal Democratic States.) I received all those lessons in primary school. Of course, being an instinctive libertarian, I questioned many of them. But I retained an emotional appreciation for American ideals, such as those of freedom, equality, and innovation. The propaganda is not only for children. Traditionally, we repeat to each other statements of appreciation for our society and its ideals, even as adults, to prevent each other from backsliding. Not that ordinary people are intentionally reinforcing each other’s social loyalty. But this might be a product of cultural evolution—cultures with a tradition of self-reinforcement tend to survive longer than cultures with no such tradition. So almost all cultures have such traditions. If someone attacks our society, we instinctively punish that person, at least with social disapproval (if not actual legal penalties). Human beings learn how to behave, and even how to feel, from observing each other. So these traditions are self-perpetuating. Only in recent years, they have collapsed. Now school children are taught that America is a despicable nation founded on hatred and domination. In the popular culture, attacks on the nation’s majority groups are becoming increasingly open and increasingly strident. The nation’s elites consider it offensive to praise their own society. 3. Undermining LoyaltyThere are at least three reasons why liberalism undermines social loyalty. 3.1. HypocrisyLiberal values are unnatural for human beings. Basically, humans are biologically predisposed to be assholes—to oppress the weak, to hate foreigners, to admire authoritarian leaders. (Why this is the case is an interesting question for another time.) As a result, a society with explicitly liberal values will predictably be able to find many illiberal aspects of itself, especially of its history. Human nature pretty much guarantees that people in your society will have often acted illiberally. You will then have grounds to condemn your own society, from the standpoint of its own professed values. Obvious example: the founding fathers holding slaves at the same time that they loftily proclaimed that “all men are created equal”. This problem does not so much afflict illiberal societies, because they can more easily live up to their own, illiberal ideals. 3.2. The Value of Self-CriticismTo some degree, self-criticism itself is a liberal value. It isn’t liberal to reflexively endorse one’s own society and its ways merely because they are one’s own. A good, cosmopolitan liberal should assess the value of his own society in a rational, unbiased way and call out its flaws. This is the only way to improve society, after all. Illiberal societies don’t have this problem; illiberal values are consistent with dogmatically refusing to acknowledge any flaws in your society. 3.3. Freedom of ExpressionFree expression is the most paradigmatic of liberal values. It means that we cannot silence people who attack our own society and its institutions. This is one of the great strengths of liberalism, because this criticism leads to reform, which makes the society better. This is why the world’s most liberal societies have been on the leading edge of human progress for the last two centuries. The problem is, we can’t silence critics even if their attacks are complete nonsense. Suppose, for example, that someone is going around saying that this society is so utterly barbaric that its authorities regularly murder perfectly harmless people out of sheer hatred for their skin color, and the rest of society lets them do it because they are racist too. Suppose also that the government and a large portion of society perfectly well know that that is false. We still can’t suppress the people who are saying that, lest we abandon liberal ideals. We actually have to let people lie about us, even in the most malicious and invidious of ways. You may have noticed some similarity between these hypotheticals and the current, actual situation of American society. A large portion of America’s intellectual class has for several decades devoted their lives to attacking their own society. What I have in mind here is not constructive criticism aimed at promoting identifiable political reforms. What I have in mind are attacks that seem motivated by resentment and aimed at provoking shame and resentment in Americans—shame on the part of the presumably dominant groups and resentment on the part of the presumably oppressed minorities. The virulence of these attacks is not purely a product of liberalism. It is also in part an accident of history, due to the ideological uniformity that has grown up in American universities in the last several decades. This uniformity has produced increasing extremism, as academics compete with each other to make ever more extravagant displays of fealty to the common ideology. Progressivism began with reasonable critique of our society’s failures to live up to its ideals. Take that through several generations of increasing extremism and you get people expressing naked hatred for men, for white people, and for America in general. We can’t silence these people, under liberal ideals. Granted, not all speech is protected, and some kinds of lies can be legally prohibited. But that only includes lies about relatively straightforward matters of empirical fact. Like if you’re selling a car, and you understate its mileage by 50,000 miles. It would not include, for example, the “lie” that Jesus was the son of God, or even that Trayvon Martin was a victim of racism. If we start prohibiting the latter sort of lies, we’re opening the door to the government prohibiting speech that criticizes the government’s own positions. 4. More LiesIt is not only leftists who are telling invidious lies, of course. The basic leftist lie is that America is fundamentally all about racism, sexism, and oppression. The right-wing lies include the likes of:
These lies are also calculated to maximize resentment, division, and rage—they’re just aimed at a different group of people than the left-wing lies. The two sides feed off each other: the more you catch the other side lying, the more you feel justified in counterattacking with equally scurrilous lies. 5. Solutions?You know the liberal solution: “The solution to bad speech is more speech.” I.e., we just need to have people constantly debunking the lies of the extremists. Not all the divisive content is lies, though. Some of it is merely a matter of deliberately choosing focus and spinning stories to maximize division. E.g., it’s not a lie that America practiced slavery. We’re not supposed to cover that up, are we? No, but the historical facts could be taught in a less self-flagellating spirit. We might teach people that slavery was widely practiced around the world and throughout human history, including in the early days of our own country. Fortunately, we abolished it long ago, because it was incompatible with our fundamental ideals. That’s a better story (and a truer one) than the woke story that the nation was founded on racism as its core principle. This liberal solution to the problem of loyalty-undermining speech might work … but only if these debunkers can gain a wide audience. If, for example, there were some non-partisan information sources that people of all ideological orientations would trust, then this could work. Increasingly, though, there isn’t. Increasingly, Americans sort themselves into separate information environments, each with relentless biases and no voices of dissent. So I can, for example, debunk the Michael Brown myth all day (the myth that Michael Brown surrendered and then was gunned down by the police anyway just because he was black), but hardly anyone who has consumed that myth will ever even see my debunking. My article debunking the myth will be coded as “right wing propaganda”, which “nice” progressives don’t look at. So I don’t know what the solution is. Perhaps the nation is doomed to collapse into chaos, and humanity’s experiment with liberal democracy will end. ))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) That is the end of Dr. Huemer's writing. My own feeling about this is that the approach of democracy or government as a republic does seem to get reborn even after it is torched. Athens, SQPR, England, USA, Israel,- -and Europe. |
There is a tendency to not acknowledge our debt to gentiles at all. However, the Talmud says,''Wisdom by goyim-believe it. Torah by goyim don't believe it.'' On the other hand, the debt to Jews also tends to be ignored. Examples are many. One case that I thought was an example was my father's invention of the Infrared Telescope as mentioned in LIFE Magazine 1954 AUGUST, but later I learned that my dad did in fact get plenty of credit for that.
Maybe the reason for all the denial on each side of the aisle is that the idea is so important that you do not want people to ignore it just because of which group it comes from.
Jews never like to hear of any debt of ideas from Christians what so ever, but are willing to acknowledge some debt to some great Muslim philosophers during the Middle Ages. On the other hand, it might be noticed that the not just the Old Testament, but the New Testament was written only by Jews.
To me the whole idea of refusing to acknowledge a debt on either side of the aisle seems like small mindedness.
אחיכם יעלו למלחמה ואתם תשבו Moses asked the two and half tribes that wanted to settle in the land on the opposite side of the Jordan River: ''Your brothers go to war and you will stay behind?" TO me this seems relevant to the yeshiva world that has had a petur [permission to be excused] from service in the Israeli Defense Force ever since the 1948 war of Independence. I do appreciate learning Torah, but I do not see it as an excuse not to do any other mitzvah, furthermore, i think that this war is in the category of michemet mitzva [obligatory war]--as opposed to milchemet r'shut [permissible war].
I used to think that the American model of government is as good as it gets. But doubt has arisen because of how odd things have become. I do not think it works except for the sort of WASP population that it was originally designed for. [WASP=White Anglo Saxon Protestant] That seems to be an inescapable conclusion. But I also would like to venture a guess that there are two factors that are involved--DNA and also the Judeo-Christian set of values as contained in the Bible. [However, it is interesting that the American form of government was really a duplicate of the English form along with the Magna Carta and Provisions of Oxford which were developed while England was Catholic. That is when that form of government was conceived. But, of course, when John Locke wrote the Two Treatises of Government and the important ideas of Daniel Defoe , England was already Protestant. ]
From this insight, I am thinking that the attack on American values from inside and out as a negative thing. But in what way this relates to Israel, still befuddles me. After all, after Theodore Herzl, Israel was founded by communists or hard left socialists. But that is not to say that that was the best approach. I RECALL vividly when the left wing Labor Party was in power in the 1980's, and the inflation was like Weimer Germany in the 1920's. I loaned one fellow a hundred shekels, and when after a half year he returned the money, it was worth 10 shekels.
To the Gra one has an obligation to get through the whole oral and written law. [Old Testament, two Talmuds, the midrashei halacha and midrashei agada.] This clearly implies the fast sort of learning mentioned in the Gemara, ''Always one should be saying the words in order and going on [גורס] even though he forgets and even though he does not know what he is saying,'' [Tractate Shabat and Avoda Zara--i forget the page numbers.] However that is second in priority to learning in depth. So to accomplish that, I recommend getting through the basic Achronim: Reb Chaim of Brisk and his two students (1) the Birchat Shmuel, (2) Shimon Skophf and the Avi Ezri. [There are also the early Achronim that I used to learn--the Pnei Yehoshua and the Aruch La'Ner which are very important.]
[I am saying to do this on one' own, but if possible it is also worth while to learn from a Litvish Rosh Yeshiva. I had such an opportunity [Reb Shmuel Berenbaum at the Mir in NY and Naftali Yeager at Shar Yashuv.] but I realize not everyone has this possibility, and so at least one should do so on one' s own. ] [the mir was along the lines of reb chaim of brisk while naftali yegear is more along the lines of the early achronim. ]
The Gra also held with the importance of the Seven Wisdoms, and said that, ''One who lacks any knowledge in the seven wisdoms will lack in Torah a hundred fold more.'' [That refers to the trivium and quadrivium][Grammar, logic, and rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Music]
Philosophy is not a part of this. However the Rambam held with a different set of the things one should learn,--Old Testament, the Yad HaChazaka, Physics and Metaphysics.
[Learning Torah is the highest of all commandments, however to the Rambam, learning Physics and Metaphysics is considered to be part of the commandment to learn Gemara/Talmud. ] [Metaphysics is the name of a book of collected lectures from Aristotle.] ]