There are two ideas of what Torah is about. One is radical monotheism and the other is that of a document that is meant to lead people towards pure Monotheism. 

So the question is according to the Torah are all intermediate steps not kosher at all or is it possible that there is some justification of going to a tzadik for a blessing?  This is really a rather large issue and it would take a lot more than this quick note to deal with it thoroughly.

The idea of leading people towards Monotheism seems to be clear in Maimonides [in the Guide] when he gives reasons for mitzvot. 

This comes up nowadays when going to even Lithuanian Gedolim  seems to be commonplace and the issue seems to be surrounding the idea of an intermediary.

And it felt strange. I felt like I was opening up myself towards compromising the basic Monotheism of the Torah. I mean I was raised in home that was not particularly religious but the Torah was very important in our home and when I started learning Torah on a more intense basis I did not expect that my monotheism would be compromised.

Nowadays it seems to me that Orthodox Judaism is highly compromised concerning this issue [of Monotheism]. It does not seem to matter which group it is. While it is admirable the strict devotion to the Torah and Talmud that is claimed by the Orthodox, but that does not seem to provide an adequate excuse for diluting the most basic and essential message of the Torah

 I think it is possible to divide Breslov into two basic groups.

This would not be along the regular lines of who is the leader of that individual group. But the major issue would be concerning the problem of worship of a human being. I have been wondering for a long time where is Breslov located concerning this question. 

Yet a random sampling of people that come to his synagogue in Uman will show that many are pantheist and many also have crossed the line.  It is for this reason that I have decided that it is high time to take a closer look at the Talmud tractate Avodah Zara--Idolatry to see where the line can be drawn exactly.

I think that also it is possible to say that some groups of Hasidut do tend to blur the line between respect of a human being and worship of a human being.
However I do not mean to knock the more radical type of Breslov from the standpoint of strict adherence to the Law of the Torah.

But there is a much more serious issue that I was thinking about that relates to the interface between Strict Torah law and type of free society that Jews have gotten used to in the USA and in Israel. It is kind of a luxury to be striving for more strictness and more Torah when we have the benefit of a free society around us. 


Regardless of this it is clear that we need divine law and some counter balance to secular society. But make an ideal to undermine free and open society while enjoying its benefits seems to me to be problematic.

Tying oneself spiritually to a tzadik [i.e. saint]

Tying oneself spiritually to a tzadik [i.e. saint]. It occurs to me that I might have written about this in the past in light of the idea of Reb Chaim from Voloshin [the disciple of the Gra] that this type of thing is idolatry.


What bothers me is that the way this is understood by some people is to change the focus of Torah from being around God to being around a person. 


But I see this at least as a flaw in the system that should be openly corrected --that is it should be stated publicly that  the purpose of serve towards God is to do God's will and not to be tied to a tzadik.

learning Torah is the highest mitzvah

 In the older type of Torah system it was considered that learning Torah is the highest mitzvah and that as much time one needed to spend on a vocation was acceptable but not desirable.

Now the Rambam is probably the best support of Torah of all. He is highly rigorous but leans towards Aristotle.
So between the Rambam the Ramchal  there is fairly strong basis for Torah.
So the lack of a basis is not what is bothering me.  Torah has great intellectual and moral validity, but it does require some effort to discover what it is and how to live in accordance with it.

what idolatry involves.

I think that people are not very well aware of what idolatry involves. And recently I have thought that it might be a good idea to look at Tractate Idolatry [Avodah Zarah] in the Talmud to get a better idea of what it involves.
In spite of the fact that it does tend to be a confusing issue at least I think we can see some of the things that are either sufficient or necessary conditions for some act to be considered idolatry.
First any one of the four major types of service that people do towards an idol is idolatry. They are offering incense, bowing, slaughtering an animal as a sacrifice, or offering blood. Sometimes you hear religious people accusing some other religious group of doing idolatry, but that is a complaint that does need to be defended.


But there is more to it than that. The basic definition is accepting some other being as ones god besides God--[the first cause]. [This might not be a necessary condition. Doing one of the four services before an idol is alone enough to convict a person of idolatry. Accepting some other being besides God [the First Cause] as ones personal god would have to be considered a sufficient condition, not a necessary condition.]

One issue that makes the whole subject more complicated is that if one serves an idol with the type of service that's specified for that idol that is also idolatry.
I should mention that the Malbim discusses the fact that Nebuchadnezzar wanted to bow down to Daniel as an idol and the discussion that Jeremiah had with Yochanan ben Kareach in this regard.

It so happened that Jews in Egypt were telling Jeremiah that from the time that they had stopped offering incense to the Queen of Heaven that they began to have troubles. Jeremiah said to them that their troubles stemmed from doing idolatry, not from ceasing to do idolatry. Further he said if they do not stop they will be destroyed. [In the Tenach the issue that seems to bother God the most is idolatry. This certainly has to be the top on the list of the big No No's. Though it is true that in general keeping all of the mitzvot is also high on the list but this has to take the cake. You do not see racism on the list of No No's at all. Nor Homophobia. Rather you could say that homosexuality is rather frowned upon as being sodomy. Islam-phobia would probably be considered  a mitzvah.]

The thing that they were telling Jeremiah was [according to the Malbim] that they did not accept the queen of Heaven as their god, and that they were good orthodox Jews and believed all the thirteen principles of the rambam. They were just offering incense as a segulah [lucky charm].

Now I have discussed idolatry many times on my different blogs. And I have decided that it is time for me to do some serious work in Tractate Idolatry [Avodah Zarah] in order to get some kind of clarity about these issues. Idolatry is one of those terms that it is easy to throw around and accuse people you don't like of doing. It used to be a term that was an extreme insult. Nowadays racist has taken its place. But even so it is an important subject to understand.
Some people it seems are not even aware that they might be doing idolatry. On occasion you see this complaint leveled by Christians against some kind of practice like working too hard or making an idol out of some movie star.  But worshiping a movie star is not one of the four [avodot] types of serve one renders to an idol. They do seem blissfully unaware that serving a human being as god might very well come under the basic definition of idolatry. (Aquinas was aware of this issue and being the great thinker that he was did try to resolve it honestly. Protestants however seem unaware of the issue at all.) But of course this could apply across the board. Sometimes you do see people that seem to get close to crossing the line separating simple admiration and desire to emulate towards idolatry. 

 For further research I hope to do the two major areas in Avodah Zara which deal with these issues. The beginning of chapter three and four. It is surprising that this issue has not received more attention.
When people act and treat their rabbi as a god is that idolatry? I would think so. So even if I think that going to Uman is important, but I think people need to be very careful not to cross the line between being with a tzadik on Rosh Hashana which is good and doing things that might be considered as crossing a fine line.

So in conclusion I think it is safe to say that the four services do not depend on thought or attitude. Once one has done them he is guilty of idolatry. He can't say he did not accept the idol as a god. It is only in the sufficient condition of accepting a different god as one's god is where thought is relevant. So now we can see that offering incense to the queen of heaven was considered as idolatry even if they did not accept her as their god.

Children and teenagers in the USA are given radical left wing socialist induction lessons from kindergarten until the end of high school.

 Children and teenagers in the USA are given radical left wing socialist induction lessons from kindergarten until the end of high school.

This is the basic approach of all public schools in the USA. Yet at home children are given a set of Judeo- Christian values. But these Judeo-Christian values are not compatible with the wave of indoctrination they get in public school. And even if children would like to defend the values they get at home the fact is that Judeo- Christian values are hard to defend. Even Aquinas left a basic question he was unable to resolve and other questions that he could not resolve very well.


The difficulty this presents is that after 12 years of indoctrination you can’t expect people to vote in any way other than the way that reflects their basic socialist values. What is the surprise? No wonder Republicans have trouble.

I could suggest that everyone should start to learn Gemara, Rashi, and Tosphot [Talmud]--but to do so I would have to explain in what way this can provide a solution for the American dilemma and set of problems.
This might need a little more time than I have right now.
But I think I can give a basic introduction into the idea. I might not be able to finish but let me begin.
Human history is divided into three parts. Period one has in it three part Pre Socratics, Plato, and neo Plato, This period deals with how is change possible.

Period two is the Middle Ages. This deals more religious issues but issues which also relate to philosophy. The two issues are free will and divine simplicity. Here also there was leading up period and then the peak in Moshe Ben Maimon [or Aquinas depending on who you ask].

The modern period dealt with two issues also the mind body problem, and the debate between the rationalists and the empiricists.--How is knowledge possible? This went up until Kant. Then we had the post Kant period. Here also were three parts pre Kant, Kant and post Kant. [Also politics became an issue in this period.]

Now a new period is starting. I can't predicate the question that is going to seize the interest of mankind for the next thousand years. But I can say that people are going to need and anchor of rationality and moral value--the very thing you get when you learn the Torah together with the Gemara, Rashi, and Tosphot.

I can imagine that one major question will deal with the interface between Divine law in the Torah and how it relates to the natural law and natural rights. This is a continuation of Medieval thought but with the modern advent of the USA the fact of natural rights will become important as it relates to divine law. 


[note 1]

Another important aspect of the Talmud which I did not mention but which is relevant is because of the problem with the theory political authority.  I did mention in the essay that one question that will arise in the future is the interface between political authority and Divine authority abut what needs to be pointed out here is the fact that John Locke's ideas of natural rights really have no empirical basis. It is not just that Habermas and others have noted the problems with the theoretical basis of the Constitution of the USA and the more obvious problems with the total lack of intellectual justification for Marxist doctrine. It is that a new theory of political justification is necessary.  Habermas blew John Rawls theory out of the water but that still leaves us with need to defend or modify the system of John Locke.  In short: Divine Law is back. You just can't get around it.

Gaon from Villna

We find that world view issues were important to Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon. It is not just that he wrote the Guide for the Perplexed to  answer questions concerning, well, world view issues, but that these ideas pop up often in all of his writings.

 But when you try to get into the Rambam [Maimonides] you find several pitfalls.

One obvious one is Jose Faur. While his devotion to the cause of the Rambam is admirable but  his knowledge and understanding of the Rishonim [medieval authorities] is ziltch and when he attacks the other  Rishonim based on his lack of knowledge it come out looking like he went of a bit much into the "Sefardi pride" trap.

I think it is a true thing that the best way to learn the Rambam is in conjunction with the regular normal Rishonim like Topshpot and not to make a fetish out of him. [This is the way Ashkenazim have always learned the Rambam and Reb Ovadia Joseph also for that matter.]

On the other hand it is a good idea for people to start the task of understanding the Rambam in world view issues a little better. 

 I need to mention here that the Rambam had children and descendants that continued to be the rav roshi [chief rabbi] in Cairo for many generations. And a lot of them wrote books along the lines of the Rambam. So even if they are not the last word on what the Rambam was thinking, still they are instructive to give some hints about his path.

One curious issue that does come up in the Guide and in the book of the Rambam's son [Avraham ben Moshe] was the issue of pantheism.

You can guess why the Guide for the Perplexed is the most unpopular book in the world for Hasidim. You certainly do not want people finding out that the Rambam did not think that Torah belief and pantheism or panetheism were compatible.

In fact I once went through a book concerning the Gaon from Villna and it was clear form reading the actual documents of his time that the Hasidim were using a sophisticated strategy to  convert Jews to another religion. They were holding on to Jewish ritual even more strongly than normal religious Jews. This gave them the ability to substitute Jewish beliefs with pantheism. And they also learned how to use seemly sincere acts of kindness to promote their movement.

 The original Guide that you used to see hanging out in the frum world [you know the one with the commentary of Joseph Albo and someone else.  It is a very difficult book but it rewards the effort. 

There is a great book on the Rambam by David Hartman which is the best modern commentary on the Rambam that I have ever seen.