"Torah" is a word like "Democracy" that is notoriously ambiguous. [Like the German Democratic Republic which was the Communist power in East Germany] Even if you would get down to defining it properly , what it would mean in practical terms is subject to debate as wide as the sky. It is almost as if it can mean what ever anyone wants it to mean.
Thus almost anything you do based on what you think Torah says is sure to backfire. It is like walking into a pharmacy and taking the first set of pills that seems to appeal to you--since after all-- all the pills there are good for people one way or the other..

Thus I try to limit my basic principles to things I think are in fact what the Torah requires.
Honor and obedience to my parents, speaking the truth with total self sacrifice, learning the Old Testament and Gemara, Rashi, Tosphot. Learning Math and Physics as per the Rambam. Creation ex nihilo Creation something from nothing as the Rambam and Saadia Gaon go into in detail. Staying away from all the cults.

[Torah does not exist together with counterfeit Torah of the Dark Side. Since the entire religious world has accepted the counterfeit Torah of the Dark Side thus it is almost impossible to find true Torah. True authentic Torah has gone into hiding. One who wants to find it must do the same thing.]

Spiritual intoxication and bad advice.

Spiritual intoxication.
This intermediate zone is dangerous for a reason not mentioned by Aurobindo--the problem with advice.
The problem is that anything one does to help a difficult situation is not likely to help unless one knows the actual mechanics and how things work. For example in 1799, George Washington was sick and the expert doctors were called in, and among the remedies they recommended blood letting.They did it so much that it surely killed him. The reason is that the body is complicated, and they had no idea what they were doing. So it is in spiritual things. Whatever advice the experts give is almost assuredly going to cause more damage than help because the experts themselves are in the Intermediate Zone and have no idea what they are talking about.





[Aurobindo asserted that spiritual aspirants may pass through an intermediate zone where experiences of force, inspiration, illumination, light, joy, expansion, power, and freedom from normal limits are possible. These can become associated with personal aspirations, ambitions, notions of spiritual fulfilment and yogic siddhi, and even be falsely interpreted as full spiritual realisation. Those who go astray in it may end in a spiritual disaster, or may remain stuck there and adopt some half-truth as the whole truth, or become an instrument of lesser powers of these transitional planes. According to Aurobindo, this happens to many sadhaks and yogis.]


For this reason it makes sense to follow the advice of the Gra--Trust in God and not your own intellect.
That is to say there is a Gra that Navardok brings about trusting in God with no effort and this seems to conflict with the book the Obligations of the Heart who has trust with effort. What I am suggesting here is the difference between mechanisms that are well understood and those that are speculative.

To me Communism is just a sophisticated way of stealing from the poor and giving to the rich while claiming to do the opposite as the history of Communism shows clearly.
The Left in the USA is predictable. They believe whatever weakens or hurts the USA or Christianity is good. They will come up with all kinds of sophisticated sounding slogans to make it seem intellectually respectable, but the bottom line is simple and predicable. Just new ways of theft and coveting that which is of their neighbor's.

The trouble with Islam

The trouble with Islam is the entire movement began as the enterprise of crazed robbers of caravans and ruthless killers and sexual perverts. In the USA there was  period in which getting back to one's roots was emphasized but this seems to have back fired.

Tolerance towards other religious faiths I think would not apply to a faith that makes the destruction of your home and property  and all all infidels as its major goal.

[The whole thing about tolerance is just overcooked. It is OK to be tolerant but there is a line that you can not allow to be stepped over.]

Of course the Sepharadim had to deal with this problem. As history shows the Jewish women in Arab lands were taken as sex slaves for Muslim men and this created a problem with DNA that shows up today. The way that pure blooded Sefardim [like Bava Sali and Shalom Sharabi] dealt with this problem was simple. They looked at the Rambam who says in Mishne Torah that who ever wants to keep Torah can do so. The door is open for all to keep God's Law. Therefore they never mentioned this problem since all people have free will, and whoever wants to be good can do so-- no matter what their genetic code says. Still, the problem  has resurfaced. Sefardim today are divided into two camps. Pro-Ashkenaz and Anti-Ashkenaz. And the Anti-Ashkenaz show all the violent tendencies of their Arab DNA.

The argument that race does not exist because it does not depend on just one gene is ridiculous.There is not one gene for eye sight. Eye sight is complicated operation that depends on many separate DNA molecules. Even so eye sight exists-- and it is genetically transmitted. For example trees do not have eye sight and therefore their offspring also do not have it.

[The whole thing about tolerance needs to be re-thought. It should not be a door that allows all behavior and refuses to recognize evil when it sees it..].

[There are another problems with John Locke's "blank slate" and empirical-ism as Dr Kelley Ross and Dr Michael Huemer have noticed. ]

In the writings of Reb Nachman.

תלמידי חכמים שדיים יהודאיים  is a phrase that comes up in the writings of Reb Nachman. It means literally "Torah scholars that are demons." In fact it does not seem to be hard to figure out what Reb Nachman meant by this because the idea of שד יהודי comes up in the Ari [Isaac Luria].
It is borrowed from the Zohar itself and the Ari goes into some detail about it. But the prominence that Reb Nachman places on this concept is unusual. The issue comes up very often in his major book and even in the last Torah lesson he ever said n his lifetime.
But the issue is more than meets the eye. The reason is that every Torah lesson of Reb Nachman is highly structured. And every lesson is a closed unit. I mean he intends every lesson to be able to be taken as a life guide. So only a very few basic הנהגות are mentioned in any given lesson. The idea is to have a small number of basic principles that one can walk in and be assured of coming to that which one must come to.

[In fact, this seems to have been a major concern of Reb Nachman--to find one or more simple basic practices that anyone could hold onto --and then be assured of coming to what he must come to.
For example התבודדות--speaking with God constantly in one's own language as one talks with a close friend.
So then why would this concept of  תלמידי חכמים שדיים יהודאיים play such a major role in  Reb Nachman's thought? I mean to say- apparently from what I can tell, he thought that avoiding Torah scholars that are demons is a prime directive so powerful that if one would just hold on to this one simple principle, then he would be assured of having a good portion in the next world.

I can tell that he was definitely hinting to a major  warning,  but it is hard to know what are the criteria involved. Who can really tell the good one from the bad ones? Surely Reb Nachman himself was aware of this problem.

Since no one can really tell the difference, the conclusion seems to be simple; to avoid all of them. That way one is safe, and does not have to worry about losing his or her portion in the next world because of associating with a Torah scholar who's a  demon. Better safe than sorry.

Apparently Reb Nachman was thinking along the lines of the Rambam who also did not want learning or teaching Torah to be a paid profession.

The Mordechei the friend of the Rosh and disciple of R Meir of Rotenburg brings up the issue of how is it possible to pay teachers of children after that the Gemara itself says מה אני בחינם אף אתם בחינם God says to the Jewish people: "Just as I taught you Torah for free, so must you teach Torah for free." I forget his answer.  But this is not the issue I want to raise here. The focus of Reb Nachman is not whether Torah scholars are paid or not. It is rather that some significant percentage of them are demons. That is to say they are not בטל ברוב nullified by the majority. That is even if you would say the majority are good people that does not nullify or cancel the effect of these bad ones.

U-28 [U-28 in midi format]  U-27 A Minor 3-4 time   [U-27 in midi format]

The four fold lines of the Rambam/ Maimonides.

The four fold lines of the Rambam/ Maimonides. That is: (1) The Written Law [the Old Testament] (2) The Oral Law, that is Gemara, Rashi and Tosphot--mainly Tosphot.(3) Physics [up to and including String Theory] (4) Metaphysics (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel.)

The way to do this is simple. Guard the first hour when you get up in the morning for learning alone. That is a Half hour of Gemara and a half hour of Physics and Metaphysics. Just say the words and go on. What you do not understand in this world you will understand in the next world.
[As it says in Avoda Zara and also in Shabat לעלם לגרס אדם אף על גב דמשכח ואף על גב דלא ידע מאי קאמר]
"One should always learn fast [Derek girsa] even though he forgets and even though he does not know what he is saying."]

This brings to attachment with Absolute Spirit as the Rambam makes clear in the Guide.[The Rambam also says the same thing in the Mishne Torah but in such a way that people usually skip over it. That is in the Laws of Learning Torah where the Rambam quotes the Talmud that one should divide the period of one's learning into three parts: The written Law, the Oral Law and Gemara. Then he adds this significant phrase: "and in the category of the Gemara is Pardes" which he defined is the subjects he mentioned in the first four chapters of Mishna Torah.  ]

[When I mention Physics I should add the math needed in order to get to Physics. And that is mainly Topology,  Algebra, PDE, Lie Algebra and few other important things. ]