There are several areas in which I disagree with religious Judaism as a whole and there are areas which I agree.
One very major area that I disagree is the way they justify Torah and the Talmud. You can see some of the arguments in books by Rav Avigdor Miller. These arguments in favor of Torah and Talmud are obviously false. On the other hand I do have a way of arguing negatively for Torah and Talmud.
That is I can’t justify what I will call now just "Torah" [but meaning Torah along with it commentary the Talmud] in a positive way but I can deal effectively with most of the criticism. This I do mainly based on my readings in philosophy of Kant, [non intuitive immediate knowledge--which is meant to work mainly for a priori knowledge.], and the Intuitionists like G.E. Moore and Michael Huemer. 
So in short I do justify Torah but not in the way of the Orthodox.


There are individual areas of halachah I also disagree but these are based on my reading of the Talmud and the later authorities like the Rif, Rambam, Tur, and Shulchan Aruch with its commentaries the Shach and the Taz.--




Specific areas of disagreement are the time of Rosh Chodesh, electricity, some aspects of Nida, and the status of statehood of Israel and serving in the IDF. But in general I accept the general framework of Halacha and how a legitimate halacha opinion is found and defended by means of the Talmud and poskim that I mentioned above. In other words I claim that a halacha that can't be defended by the Talmud is not a legitimate halacha.


In terms of Books in Torah thought that I think are the most impressive I would have to put the  the Madragat Haadam of Joseph Yozel Horvitz commonly known as the "Alter of Navardok".
As for the Madgarat Haadam there is not even any English translation.

I think both of these books can provide a system of checks and balances in Torah thought. For each one on its own can be misused. But both together I think provide a very good approach to Torah.


Some of the most important ideas in these books a re ideas that have universal validity and are in no way specific for Jewish people. One is trust in God with no effort. This is probably the most important idea of the Madragat HaAdam. The other is talking with God in a forest or some place far away from other people. 



The Orthodox do have one advantage over me--they seem more Jewish.This seems to me to be the result of a kind of nationalism (or rather chauvinism)  in which seeming Jewish seems to be the most important thing. And the Orthodox certainly seem very Jewish. They wear lots of black clothing. They speak Yiddish. They hate everything that smacks of  culture or gentile thought. There is obviously nothing remotely good or Jewish about any of this. But if what you value the most is to seem Jewish, then by all means go ahead and join them.




The thing I should mention about non intuitive immediate knowledge and how it helps to justify Torah is this. One basic area of debate between the rationalists and the empiricists is this we can know things  based on empirical evidence. because we can check our conclusions with what happens in the real world. But when it come to a things that we perceive by reason alone things  how do we know that what we think has anything to do with reality? [This is a bit of a simplification-- we do find the intuitionists think that even empirical evidence we know only by reason].
It is this question that immediate non- intuitive knowledge comes to answer.
It does more that just answer Kant's question how is synthetic a priori possible. It answers how is a priori possible.

Once you get to synthetic a priori we can see that there are areas of value that we know beyond just the principle of non contradiction. and we can test these areas by falsification. In other words even morality which we cant derive from an "is", we can falsify . This is what Socrates spent all of his time doing. and this is in large part what the Talmud is doing. Except the Talmud accepts  sources of information that were unknown to Socrates.

I would like to introduce the major and most motivating idea of Navardok-- trust in God. That is trust without effort--as opposed to trust with effort.
That was based to some degree of a statement of Israeli Salanter and the Geon from Vilnius  that real trust in God means to trust with no effort.




I would like to suggest an integrated approach that combines the best of both approaches with a special emphasis on hiking in the woods and forests while talking with God and when one is not doing that to sit and learn Gemara Rashi and Tosphot.

For people that are limited in time and have to go to school my suggestion is  to introduce into schools two pretty important books of philosophical and  ethical thought--the book of Joseph Horvitz --the Madrgat Haadam I see both as containing important principles for the proper conduct of human life.  

They contain these basic principles: Trust in God with no efforts, talking to God in a forest or someplace where you are not seen or heard by others, learning the Torah, and a program designed to correct ones character flaws--learning Musar.





This is opposed to Pagan cults. Pagan cults are a system of rites. 
 Pagan cults are  systems of rites that involves a manipulation of substances — — that are believed to have some kind of inherent power, again, because of their connection to whatever the primordial world stuff may be in that tradition. So  there's always an element of magic in a pagan cult. It's seeking through these rituals and manipulations of certain substances to, again, let loose certain powers, set into motion certain forces, 

One final and very important point, in the polytheistic worldview, just as there are good gods who might protect human beings there are also evil gods who seek to destroy both humans and other gods. Death and disease are consigned to the realm of these evil demons or these impure evil spirits, but they are siblings with the good gods. Human beings are basically powerless, in the continual cosmic struggle between the good gods and the evil demons, unless they can utilize magic, divination, tap into the powers of the meta divine realm, circumvent the gods who might be making their lives rather miserable. But what's important is that  in the pagan view, evil is an autonomous demonic realm. It is as primary and real as the realm of the holy or good gods. Evil is a metaphysical reality. It is built into the structure of the universe. That's the way the universe was made. The primordial stuff that spawned all that is, spawned it good and bad and exactly as it is, and it's there and it's real.


So  the fundamental idea of Torah  is a radically new idea of a God who is himself the source of all being — not subject to a metadivine realm. There's no transcendent cosmic order or power. 

So what then are the implications of monotheism?
 So in the  Torah - Hebrew Bible, for the first time in history we meet an unlimited God who is timeless and ageless and nonphysical and eternal.

That means that this God transcends nature. Nature certainly becomes the stage of God's expression of his will. He expresses his will and purpose through forces of nature in the Bible. But nature isn't God himself. He's not identified with it. He's wholly other. He isn't kin to humans in any way either. So there is no blurring, no soft boundary between humans and the divine.
So there's no process by which humans become gods and certainly no process of the reverse as well.
 God can't be manipulated or coerced by charms or words or rituals. They have no power and cannot be used in that way, and so magic is sin. Magic is sin or rebellion against God because it's predicated on a whole mistaken notion of God having limited power. 

I knew this fellow fairly well and we had a few discussions about difficult subjects in the writings of Isaac Luria an he knew the material very well. Much better than almost any so called kabalaists in Israel.

A few years ago i lost contact with him while on my adventures to the USA and Uman and to other parts of Israel outside of Jerusalem.

when i knew him he was on the up and up. He was married [a prerequisite for respect in the world of the charedim] and well respected in the community.
The yesterday I met him again and he had been in prison.. His wife was on the path to becoming pretty much not religious and so there a divorce and she was instructed as common in the chareidi world to make the worst possible accusations and lies against her husband so that she would gain the advantage in the monetary arrangements. [Charedim do not advice all young wives to make these claims--only baali teshuva wives. But for people born a part of their community they go out of their way to make peace.]

The thing here is that after he told me some of the things that happened to him and his family i kind of sympathize with the wife. They were living in some yishuv outside of Jerusalem and had bought a large plastic swimming pool for their 5 year and 4 old daughters.one weekend they went away and the chareidi neighbors slashed it .

I was having the traditional cholent on Shabat.  I said over my little idea about Rav Huna who had thousands of students and the fact that he was not paid anything for learning or teaching Torah. In fact Abyee had a scheme to have his students advice him to divorce his wife and then the guarantor of her dowry/Ketuba [Rav Huna's father] would have to pay, and then he could remarry her and then have money for breakfast. The Ketuba all in all was about two hundred dollars. So Rav Huna must have been in desperate straits. And still he did not ask or receive any money by learning Torah. I have said this over a few times already but I was surprised by the reaction of the fellow I knew from Jerusalem.

I said that the present day gezera of having to serve in the IDF is a result of the sin of using the Torah to make money.

I had a few idea to mention. One in particular I think stands out. It is related to something the Chovot Levavot says--The Duties of the Heart.

It is the idea that one is not supposed to make up a new religion.

That means in practical terms that even though what does it means to keep the Torah can be hard to decide on a daily basis still we know what it means not to keep the Torah.

That means to say we know more or less that a Jews is supposed to learn the Oral and written law--the Five books of Moses and the Babylonian Talmud from cover to cover- and to keep what the Torah says. Period.
But in this process sometimes people have experience with other individuals which might not be optimum. This still does not give one permission to go and make up some new religion.
Learning Torah has been considered the prime directive of the Torah for a couple of thousand years. This is not the subject of any debate. That means to say at minimum everyone should sit down a learn Gemara, Rashi, and Tosphot at least an hour every day. And when it comes to Jewish law, the requirement to keep it is not a debate-- although the particulars are.

Also Monotheism is the philosophy of the Torah. This also has never been the subject of ant debate. Torah is not a document of pantheism in any sense and no one ever considered it as such--not Maimonides nor Isaac Luria

Devykut "attachment with God."

For me it so happened that I   that I started reading the Ari (Isaac Luria רבינו האריז''ל).  And after about a year I made Aliya to Israel and then I did a lot of  personal conversation with God while hiking in the forests surrounding Safed in the north of Israel].

 I spent most of my time in a forest. And then I got something that you could call Devykut. Devykut means literally "attachment with God." 


But outside of the subject of of this devykut, I would like to defend the Arizal [Isaac Luria--known by the short name the Ari] here in a philosophical way.
 The system of the Ari is Neo Platonic. That is is assumes a very Neo Platonic system, and then develops it in great detail based on the personal insights of the Ari himself-not on reasoning or logic.

But what makes it particularly interesting is the fact that it looks like Plato was right. I mean let's looks at the rival schools of thought. The rationalist-- the antimonies of Kant demonstrated well the fallacy of rationalism.
The empiricists. There are a few well known simple proofs that empiricism is wrong. [See Michael Huemer's counter examples like you know an object can not be blue and green in the same place at the same time.]  Also Twentieth century philosophy is problematic. In the famous words of John Searle [at University of California, Berkeley], Post modern philosophy and all the analytic linguistic approach is "Obviously false". Just by default alone you are stuck with Hegel or Kant. At this point I rest my case. In either case you are dealing with a neo Platonic approach.

[Well I am not exactly done. I am not very happy with Hegel. But I would rather not go into that right now. And Kant many people associate with the Neo-Kant School. And that is definitely not Neo Platonic. {They also do not think we can know if the Ding An Sich  exists, and that is not Kant who wrote that we do know it exists--but its character is modified by our subjective input.} 

[It would be possible to argue with me that the Ari and Neo-Platonism do put a large degree of confidence in reason--much more than Kant. I assume this is why many Jews like were happy enough to go along with Hegel. 

[On a side note I might mention that there is another system of Kabala of Avraham Abulafia which Moshe Idel did some work on. And I should let people know that in university when people talk about Kabala they are usually talking about Avraham Abulafia, or some other Medieval system [like the "Heichalot"] and not Rav Isaac Luria. [These are relatively unsophisticated systems.] When people in the religious world talk about Kabalah, they usually means three specific people: the Zohar, Moshe Cardovaro and Isaac Luria. There is in fact almost no intersection between University Kabalah and Isaac Luria Kabalah.

There are a few different approaches to I. Luria. The best I think is Shalom Sharabi from Yemen. But there is also a good approach of the Ramchal [Moshe Chaim Lutzatto]. These are both very sophisticated approaches]. 
  

Kabalah in the Ashkenaic world after the events surrounding Shabati Tzvi are filled with interpretations from Natan his disciple. Of all Ashkenazim, only the Gra is clean. The rest of the books take the system of Shabati Tzvi in Kabalah -- but the problem is the system itself is wrong and from the Sitra Achra.
When people think they are reading holy books of Kabalah, they are getting a heavy dose of the Sitra Achra (Dark Side) when they read Ashkenazic Kabalah.

Fear of God brings to length of days. [That is that each day should be filled with things that contribute to life goals--and not having your day taken up by things you know to be a waste of time].
I think we can rely on his intuition in this but it still does not tell us how to come to fear of God.

We know the Rambam had an unusual approach to this. [Even though he hides this approach well for the sake of uninitiated still you can see it openly in the Guide.] He held that learning the work of Creation leads to fear of God. and he defines this as what the ancient Greeks called Physics.

I have only a few minutes left here so I would like just to get to my point about Fear of God.
A proper Fear of God program that would I hope lead to length of day I think could be divided into several areas.
[1] Talking to God in a wilderness or forest far from other people. [Pack a lunch and canned water] This is not prayer but opening up ones heart to God. This is very very different from prayer. One advantage of this is that prayer is for specific things that are often contrary to ones actual interest. Another advantage is that it takes exercise to get to a wildness.
[2] Musar. That is two parts. Ancient medieval Musar books and part two the Musar books of the disciples of Israel Salanter. [Christians might try to find similar books that apply to them. Perhaps St John of the Cross.]
[3] The Rambam program of Physics. This goes even for people that are not talented in Physics and Math.