There is some support for the Rambam that idolatry means worship of a mediator. This is because ancient idolatry never involved a divine creator.

Idolatry was simply the idea that certain beings had control over certain aspects of the world. On the other hand these agents were not mediators.

So today when you find that people worship a corpse they can claim that they are not doing idolatry because they are not claiming that the corpse created the world. On the other hand it does seem that they are claiming that the corpse  is a mediator between them and God. That at least comes under the definition of idolatry to the Rambam.

But worse than this it seems they might be considering the corpse to have control over certain aspects of their lives. This would seem to be idolatry according to all opinions.


My feeling is to check from where the Rambam gets his idea of the mediator and that would seem to be Saadia Geon.

From the Talmud itself we have no source material on this subject. At best from the Talmud we have Shituf. That is like when people, would worship G-d  along with the Baal. They thought God had control over heaven and the Baal over the earth. So they worshiped both together.  That is Shituf. ="Joining." That is not the same as a mediator

Why are people irrational about Politics?

For my opinion concerning Israel and the situation today concerning the war between the Palestinians and Israel I would suggest to people to read the essay of Michael Huemer on why people are irrational about politics (http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/irrationality.htm) and also the essay of Kelly Ross considering fundamentalist Islam on his site .[http://www.friesian.com/afghan.htm#fascism]

But just for the record let me say that I think Israel has a right to protect herself. Furthermore in  a state of war I don't think they need to warn individual combatants. If fact I think the best think would be to drop the semantics and call it what it is: "War" (not conflict) and then let the rules of war apply. Obviously the Palestinians have no problem with targeting civilian populations. So this is war therefor Israel should do what one does in war. --take out its enemies. Period.


If Mexico was lobbing bombs on Los Angeles I don't think the USA would take long to respond with devastating force. That is exactly what Israel should do right now.

The only reason do not want Israel to respond is they like the idea of Jews being killed. 

People come to Uman to escape .

Of course other people come to Uman for the normal reason of praying by the grave of a tzadik in the hope that in his merit ones prayers will be answered.

But I did not want address this issue here. The first issue seems to me to be more interesting.
What you see is people that want to keep the Holy Torah but can't stand to be near any orthodox rabbi under any circumstances what so ever.
Personally I can relate to this feeling. But I am not sure of what kind of conclusion to draw from it.

I have a kind of sensitivity to numinous areas of value.

 is Breslov the same area of value as Torah?


 Now that does not mean I am asking: Is Breslov a different area of value as music is different? Rather I mean to ask if it is an area that we would think should be the same as Torah, but maybe is not? 

Or perhaps what some people in Breslov might say is the area of value of Torah and Mitzvot simply according to the Talmud the real area of value of Torah?  I know this sounds terribly insulting towards Breslov but still I think this is a question that needs to be asked.

Now with this type of philosophical analysis I think we can come up with proper answer.
A path of intensified numinousity of the Torah  people do tend to askew  into something that is not Torah. That does not mean it is a bad approach. It just means they did not understand his approach.

 Also, I wanted to address the problem that it can be hard to find a place to learn Torah. I.e. even if one is interested in Torah sometimes the local synagogue might have an approach that is highly divergent from Torah and still call it Torah.
[And there can be degrees of this kind of problem.]

 At any rate, my solution to this problem is to get yourself just one volume of Talmud plus some of the works of what is called Musar. Musar tends to limit how far astray people can go in their world views. I mean to say that without Musar, one can say the Torah means almost anything he imagines it to mean. One could find support for any conceivable world view. Musar tends to limit the range of possible world views one can claim for the Torah.

Rosh Hashanah in Uman.

  Nachman from Breslov.  Uman on Rosh Hashanah?.

Reb Nachman never said to come to his grave for Rosh Hashanah. If he would have do you not think that Reb Nathan would have written it down? He only said to come to his grave and say the ten Psalms. And he brought two witnesses to make sure that this could never be misunderstood. But he never did any such thing concerning Rosh Hashanah. He said to come to him on Rosh Hashanah when he was alive. He never said anything concerning his grave.



First let me make it clear that I did take a lot of time a effort to understand the opinion of Bava Sali concerning this issue. Clearly he had a very high opinion of  Nachman. What he apparently did not like were the small groups of cults of people that use his ideas to make up a new Torah. But  that did not diminish his respect for Rav Nachman himself. towards the end of his life he related a dream he had of his son coming to him from Gan Eden telling him how  Nachman was telling a Torah lesson to  the tzadikim [saints].

The minimum we can learn from this story is that Bava Sali did in fact have a positive opinion of Rav Nachman.

Reb Moshe [Feinstein] we also know did write a haskama [endorsement] on the petek of Israel Odesser.

Though this does not tell us anything about the petak [letter] again it is a clear piece of evidence that Reb Moshe also had a very good opinion of Rav Nachman.[especially if you see the actual word that Reb Moshe wrote.]

[And Rav Ovadia Joseph said it is allowed to come to Uman for Rosh Hashana. Rav Shach said no.]

What needs to be looked into here is the fact that some people do tie themselves with  Nachman.

According to the Nefesh Hachaim that is idolatry  My view of this is that one can do everything R. Nachman said and he or she should just be careful not to fall into idolatry.

I think that Rav Nachman came to help people keep Torah.
However there is a opinion that seems to be a basic belief in Breslov that one cant get close to God without going through Rav Nachman. This would be easy to dismiss if it was just Breslov. But they bring it from a statement of Rav Nachman himself in the Chayee Moharan. however if you look there at the actual Yiddish statement that Rav Nachman said you will see he said no such thing. Rather this: "There is something that comes into the world, that when it has come one can't get close to God without it." He did not say it was a tzadik or even a physical thing. Perhaps he meant it is some kind of spiritual dimension? see the Yiddish right on the page and you will see what I mean.

Philosophy at its best is vertical.

Philosophy at its best is vertical.
To explain what this means let me give an example. Take the Pre Socratics. The whole progression of thought from Parmenides until Plato was one long answer to the question of Parmenides, "How is change possible?"

In this case people today have had to look at the vertical progression of ideas and not concentrate overly much on any one particular philosopher. But in academic philosophy today even at its best almost has to take one particular philosopher and concentrate on him or at best on the small range of commentaries on him.

Sometimes this results in high quality work. You can find courses and books in Israel on Aristotle or Nietzsche or books devoted to Hegel which are of great quality.

But what is lacking here is the vertical chain of ideas.

To understand philosophy today you have to start with Spinoza and Leibniz and not learn them alone but also Locke and Hume. Only then can you get a good grasp on the debate between them and then you can see how Kant answers this debate in a very elegant way. But then to understand Kant you have several branches and side paths that lead nowhere. You need a strong sense of direction and also a highly developed analytical sense to be able to tell when post Kant thinkers doing their normal thing of circular logic.
You need to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff also as in Frege.

It also is helpful to know Math and Physics in order to see when people talking in pseudo Physics terms to sound profound but in fact have no idea what they are talking about.
In fact you could say the major problem in philosophy today is that they suffer from physics envy.
  
The problem with Linguistic Analytic Philosophy or Post modernism is that once one has touched it he  can never regain his sanity ever again.


What Kelly Ross is good at is the big picture or the vertical line of thought . Also he felt under no pressure to get a job fast but took his time to digest what people were saying. So he could pinpoint the fallacious in Hume and later thinkers even while making note of their valid ideas.

So what comes out is that we get  a train of thought that starts with the argument between the empirical school and the rationalists until Kant. Then we see Kant's answer to this debate.
But we also see that his solution was a bit too much ad hoc. So we come to Hegel that Reason by some process gets into the dinge an sich

In order to understand the Talmudic tractate about idolatry [called Avoda Zara] it seems to me to be necessary to get an idea of what idolatry is.
 It seems to me to be necessary to understand what was going on in lets say Athens at the time when people really believed in idols.

This would not refer to the philosophers who probably thought most of what was going on in the temples of the gods was ridiculous.

Now for people who were not specifically devoted to one god or the other it clearly was a benefit to have the Pantheon in Athens so that an average businessman on his way to work could make a quick detour to the Pantheon and offer scarifies to all the gods or at least the major ones, (and specifically the one that he thought might have some power over his future transactions).

But of course, there were people that were devotes of a particular god. They would spend as much time  possible in the temple of that god and would do as much services to that god as possible. E.g., devotes of Dionysus would go around in groups in a state of ecstasy and frenzy and do damage as they would go around the city and countryside. (Wine was of benefit to help them get into a state of frenzy.) 

Devotees of Venus would have other services they thought would be pleasing to Venus. But that would not stop them from offering sacrifices to propitiate other gods also.

The major experience of idolatry was not fear of retribution. The god that one was devoted to provided  the meaning of life and of the universe and everything else.


Nowadays that science and philosophy have pushed the realm of religion into the background, we are not aware of how much the gods were a major source of the very meaning of life for the ancients.

The Talmud itself does not deal with any of this. It is interested solely in the laws relevant to the statutes of the gods. The reason is that the religion of the Talmud is monotheism. The underlying assumption of monotheism is that there is a First Cause of everything that exists and that this First Cause provides the meaning of everything that exits. He made it all for some purpose.

Nowadays, we do not find devotes of Dionysus or Venus. People do try to get into states of frenzy and do seek physical pleasures that one might associate with Venus but without being devotes of Venus. But we do find modern substitutes that can provide people with the same kind of experiences  that devotes of the gods had.

There are several major examples but certainly the cult the Gra ut into excommunication would be a good example. Graves of tzadikim [saints] also for that matter. [note 1] The kind of frenzy of Left Wing Politics seems to be also a good example.

[note 1] For the sake of clarity I think it is good to learn the books of a tzadik and to follow his teachings. I think one can do so and should do so without crossing the line into idolatry. But in spite of that there are people would do cross the line.

In fact I think after seeing some of the problems there are in the world of orthodox Judaism that at the very least we can say his understanding of Torah is deep and profound.