I would like to mention here a great book I have been looking at recently,- the Even haAzel אבן האזל  by ר' איסר מלצר Rav Isar Meltzer who was a friend of Rav Shach. This book fills in a lot of details which you might not get in the Avi Ezri. For instance, I have been looking at chap 7 halacha 12 of Monetary Damages. I think it is clear  that Rav Shach goes into some of these details in laws of Robbery, but the book of Rav Meltzer goes into greater  detail. [In Laws of Robbery 9 , halacha 8 Rav Shach comes to the same sort of basic principles that Rav Isar Melzer arrives at.   ]

I think that there is a lot of quite amazing ideas in the books of Rav Nahman of Breslov, but the fact that his name is associated with Breslov ruins the effect. Rav Nahman himself must have been aware of this problem when he wrote to his followers in Breslov in one of his five letters ''קצתי בישיבת ברסלב'' I have become disgusted with yeshivat breslov'' [or perhaps it could be translated ''I am disgusted with dwelling in breslov.] 

FOR his ideas really do not work well unless taken in a straight Litvak yeshiva atmosphere of straight Torah. but outside of that context, they tend to take people off into insane tangents. 

I found the approach to learning in Conversations of R.Nahman chap. 76 the most helpful, i.e., learning fast-- saying the words and going on. This helped a lot when I went to Polytechnic Institute of NY University.  

 I grew up in an area that was WASP and have believed ever since then about the importance of white Anglo Saxon Protestant civilization. The problem nowadays is most white Anglo Saxons Protestants  do not believe in themselves anymore. the problem of course is exactly what Saadia Gaon wrote: the trinity and nullification of the commandments. the positive aspect is paying attention and believing in the words of a tzadik.  

THE problem with the Trinity is to equate Jesus with God. The problem is  not ascribing ''divinity'' to him. The reason is that it is common  in the Ari/ Isaac Luria to ascribe divinity to certain Biblical figures: Abraham, Isaac Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Josef, David, Cain Hevel, Seth,.-- that is to say their souls are from Emanation which is totally divine. That is that Emanation is different from the worlds of Creation, Formation, and the physical universe which are not divine.   

 The name of the GRA is associated with learning in depth. However there is an aspect of the Gra that implies learning fast. That is saying the words in order and going on without any review until one finishes the whole book. This is implied when he stressed the importance of getting through at least once the whole two Talmuds, Tosefta, Sifrei Sifra, Midrash Rabah, Midrash Tanchuma (I.E. all the oral law from the redaction of the Mishna until the sealing of the two Talmuds.) [this fast learning is brought in the gemara in shabat and tractate avoda zara, in the musar book ways of the rightous and in the conversations of rav nachman chapter 76     ]

 

This later fast approach is generally known to come from the Talmud itself in Shabat page 63 and the musar book The Ways Of The Righteous .

I used the approach of ''saying the words in order and going on'' in Torah learning and also in physics and mathematics; saying the words in order and going on until the end of the book and then review from the beginning --and I learnt a lot more than if I had said ''This is too hard for me'' and given up.  But in Torah, Math, and Physics it is best if one can hear and learn from a teacher.  No matter how much I might have learned in Southern California, there is no question that i would not have understood a thing unless I had gone to those two great NY yeshivot, Shar Yahuv and the Mir and learned from people like Reb Shmuel Berenbaum who really knew the depths of Torah. My only complaint  is that I never got the how to get into the depths of Tosphot that Naftali Yeger had in Shar Yashuv and David Bronson. I suspect that it is not something that one can get unless he has that special kind of I.Q. and talent. But at least, the books of the gedolai Lita [Lithuanian Sages] are around so that one can get a taste of authentic learning. 

[note: I am aware that some people just don't appreciate learning Torah. taste. Maybe to appreciate it one needs a certain kind of  taste. But it might be like many good things--it is an acquired taste.   ]

I do not have the IQ of Rav Naftali Yeger or David Bronson, so i do not see automatically the depths of Tosphot. However i have learned a method for at least begin to see those depths. that method is to review that same exact tosphot every day [once  per day] for a month,

"If you refuse to admit a problem exists, and stonewall any attempt to fix it, then don't complain when someone else fixes it for you."

 When the religious refuse to serve in the Israeli Defense Force, it does not seem to be a result of trust in God, nor from great attachment to learning Torah. It seems to be, '' Let the fry yiden [secular Jews] do it because the are garbage.''   However I am sure that there are some people that learn Torah for its own sake and that trust in God for their needs. But for every one person like that, there are at least a hundred or more who learn in yeshiva in order to get out of serving in the army, and because it provides easy money that the fry yidden have to work for. This scandal has been going on since the creation of the State of Israel. No voice has been raised about the hypocrisy and scandal of this. All I can say is, "If you refuse to admit a problem exists, and stonewall any attempt to fix it, then don't complain when someone else fixes it for you."

 It is a curious fact that the Schrodinger wave equation is not really like any wave equation, but rather like the heat equation --which describes the diffusion of heat through a medium. A wave equation is taking a value for the acceleration of a string and saying that equals the curvature. That is, the second partial  derivative with respect to time equals the second partial derivative with respect to position. The Schrodinger equation on the other hand, is the first partial derivative with respect to time times i equals the second partial derivative with respect to position times i^2. What is the relation between diffusion of heat with the wave?     The first partial derivative with respect to time ought to be the velocity, and in the heat equation in fact tells us the speed the heat spreads. But that is not a wave equation.    In a string it would tell us the velocity of the string equals the curvature.

Schrodinger went to find such a equation because de Broglie had said in his PhD Thesis that an electron ought to have a corresponding wave equation based on E=mc^2 and velocity of a wave = wavelength times frequency, and energy = h times frequency But he never suggested what the equation for that wave.

So the Schrodinger wave equation is the heat equation with an "i" thrown in. Take heat and thrown in an ''i'', and you get an electron wave?     And after all, what is  heat? Kinetic energy of moving particles. Kinetic energy times ''i'' gives you a wave? Or entropy times ''i'' gives you a wave? 

Note: Particles have kinetic energy. So  Schrodinger's wave equation is describing particle's KE  spreading through a medium, i.e a complex medium.  

The Closing of the American Mind

In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom located the central problem of universities [and as an extension the whole of American society] to  be a essential contradiction of Enlightenment thought. He thought that either things will become clear or the whole of the social studies departments  and humanities departments of university structure will disintegrate.  I have thought because of that, it is necessary to come to some sort of resolution IN PHILOSOPHY. I thought Kant provided the best possible approach, but outside of philosophy departments, he is ignored. He is not as flashy as DEI, Marxism, existentialism, The One Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization.    And to some degree you can see that part of the fault is in Kant himself--in the B Deduction which there has never been the slightest agreement about what Kant says there. And my favorite version of Kant with the approach of Leonard Nelson is universally ignored. 

For some reason Allan Bloom did not refer to Kant as a possible solution. But he did suggest that people learn the Republic of a Plato, and that in itself suggest the Kant-Friesian School of thought because the major thesis of Fries is that there is a deep source of knowledge that begins before knowledge based on the outside world or knowledge based on pure reason i.e., non intuitive immediate knowledge. This correlates with Plato who held knowledge is from what we remember from what we knew before we were born. 

The Rambam might be considered a proto Friesian in that he does not think moral principles are derivable from Reason. They had to have been given by GOD at Sinai, but without that, they would not be known at all.

Sunwall writes :"First of all with regard to the primal status of monotheism, Maimonides has ruled out the most powerful argument that could have been made in its favor, that of an innate moral or metaphysical faculty in the human mind. This was a characteristic notion of his own, predominantly Islamic, cultural epoch. This sort of rationalistic anthropology motivated works such as lbn Tufayl's The Life of Hayy, in which the inhabitant of a desert island arrives independently at rational, moral, and monotheistic conclusions. However, Maimonides debars himself from saying "all human beings are natural monotheists" in the same sense that many of his contemporaries would have asserted that "all human beings are natural Muslims" (i.e. when they are born and until they may happen to be perverted by the cultures of non-Muslim societies). Rather in the Guide and elsewhere in his ethical writings, Mairnonides goes to great pains to deny that human beings have any innate metaphysical, and especially, moral intuitions. For Maimonides, although there are moral and metaphysical absolutes, these have been discovered, revealed, or forgotten, within the context of human history as a whole and then transmitted, correctly or otherwise, by tradition. This places the burden of justifying the primal nature of monotheism entirely on historiography."