I had two issue to discuss today. One is Kabalah and the approach of the Geon from Vilnius about it. First I want to say that too many people in the world of Kabalah try to make it out as if the whole thing depends on the authorship of the Zohar.  And they think that if someone does not accept that Rabbi Shimon Ben Yochai wrote then they are a heretic. And on the other hand there are people that do not see any value in it at all once they find out that it at least is not what we call the Oral Law.

Frankly when I was learning the writings of Isaac Luria it never even occurred to me that this was traditional. It seemed completely obvious that these were the השגות the revelations of the Ari. The same way that we assume other tzadikim had revelations. And we don't try to suppose they had some tradition going back to Sinai.

On the other hand when it comes to understanding Isaac Luria we do assume people are using their own intelligence.

  There are three basic authentic approaches to the Ari'zal: (1) Moshe Chaim Lutzato (the Ramchal) and this was clearly that of the Gra also. And recently they published the writings of the disciple of the Ramchal which seem to me to be very important to learn. (2) The Moroccan Mystic Yaakov Abuchatzeira, the grandfather of Bava Sali. (3) the Yemenite Kabalist, Shalom Sharabi (the Reshash).


[I forgot to mention the Kabalah Center. They are I think going with the Ashlag and the disciple of the Ashlag. I confess I never studied the Ashlag very much, but his writings look good. Especially the notes of his disciple  on the Shalom Sharabi's Nahar Shalom look very good.] From the little that I have seen it looks to me that the Ashlag is basically going with the approach of the Shalom Sharabi. But since Shalom Sharabi is very difficult it looks like the Ashlag is trying to make it a bit easier to understand.

In any case I think all this is very good and important to learn because it does give a deep understanding of Torah. But I think also it should be learned only after one has finished the Oral and Written Law.

 Try to learn Kabalah only with a Sefardi master and preferably with a descendant of either  Shalom Sharabi or Yaakov 
The Nesfesh HaChaim is mainly a Musar book though it does quote from the Zohar and the Ari. I highly recommend it but as Musar, not Kabalah.

I want to introduce the public to the idea of bitul Torah.


ביטול תורה  wasting time from Torah is considered a sin. The idea has its origin in the Talmud.
We have a minimum amount of learning that one is required: saying the Shema in the morning and evening. But when one has time he must go back to learning during the day. It means that one is not free to choose what mitzvahs or activities he wants to do. Even prayer.
The Gra said it is better to sit in a room and twiddle ones thumbs than to go seeking for mitzvas.
This is important to know because though one is required to learn a profession and also to learn survival skills and do all the things one is required, still when one has free time he is not allowed to decide what he wants to do. it is already decided for him.

One is not allowed to speak slander. This is a prohibition in the Torah. [It is one of the 613 commandments]. There is a difference of opinion between the Rambam and Rabainu Yona in this issue. And it is divided between what the slander is about; between God and man, or between man and man.
The later has seven conditions for it to be allowed. The former has no such conditions but still is similar in many respects. [There has to be rebuke and to see it yourself, etc.]
Rav Shick once said that if you hear someone saying slander about some third party, you should know that eventually they will say slander about you behind your back.
In any case there is a law that slander [lashon hara] that was said in front of three people is allowed to be said. The reason is once it was said in front of three it is already public. It is assumed they will go and tell it anyway.

The question here is the guy is coming to beit din and asking, "Can I say it?" Then tell him, "No," and then there will not be three advertising it. I heard this question at the Mir (NY) I think from the grandson of Avigdor Miller. I never found a good answer for this.

A similar question just came up today about the opinion of Rabbi Yochanan in Shabat.
שגגת קרבן forgetting a sacrifice is not called forgetting. Shabat 69a. Why is forgetting the punishment of karet (cutting off from his people) considered an accident? Because he can say, "If I had known it was karet, I would not have done it."
  So say the same about forgetting the sacrifice. Well, you could answer he does not bring a sacrifice since it is considered as if done on purpose. But this goes back on itself. It is only considered on purpose because we don't consider it as forgetting.



The way my learning partner and I decided to try and tackle this issue is to look at the Gemara in Shabat 69a, but so far it is not clear what we will discover.

1) Joy.
This is a principle that comes from the Gra. He says joy comes of עולם הבינה  the world of creation.


 LM volume II chapter 24.  "It is a great mitzvah to be joyful always." This is a serious approach to Torah. It says if something makes you miserable there is no mitzvah in doing it. This has in fact been a guiding principle for me. If a certain mitzvah is making me miserable I figure that I ought to quit it because it is defeating the purpose of the mitzvah.

Similarly if I think something is a mitzvah but it seems to bring out bad character traits in me then i figure that it is objectively not a mitzvah at all and that somehow I made a mistake in thinking that it was.

2) Similarly talking with God. This is because God can help. And even if he does not help at first he does eventually. And this kind of informal prayer without any fixed setting brings about a connection with God that often  do mitzvot do not do.

3) Faith in God. This is one of the reason I wrote a few essays on monotheism in my blogs, and I tried to show the difference between Monotheism and the paganism. I consider Jewish faith to be important to understand what it is. The main source for this is obviously the books of Saadia Geon and Maimonides but I thought since it is  such an important issue I should say  few words about it here also. (I should mention that Monotheism is the world view of the Torah. Many people worship tzadikim and think that that is a part of Torah faith, and so this issue clearly needs clarification. Tzadik worship is not a part of the Torah's world view.)

4) Judging people on the scale of merit. This I mentioned  before that you can find this principle in  Chaim from Voloshin also with the same kind of emphasis.

5) To go through the entire Oral and Written Law in order word by word. Every day to have a session in which you go through Babylonian Talmud, the the Jerusalem Talmud, and the Sifi, Sifra, Tosephta and all the writings of Isaac Luria.

6) Not to rebuke people. Even though there is a mitzvah of rebuke in the  Torah, but today we can't rebuke. Even Rabbi Akiva said in his days, "I would be surprised to find anyone in this generation is is capable of delivering rebuke properly." (תמה אני אם בדור הזה יש מי שראוי להוכיח) And when one cant do it properly then one is not required to do so at all.

7) To come to Uman on Rosh Hashanah. This I have found to be helpful for myself in helping me to keep focus on keeping Torah.

8) Not to pay attention to people that try to prevent you from the service of God. He said that Abraham only reached his level by thinking of himself as being alone in the world and so is the case for anyone who wants to serve God. They must not pay any attention to people.

9) Religious leaders that are bad people he thought one should stay away from.

The fundamental distinction between the polytheistic worldview and the monotheistic worldview of Torah

So, let's begin: pagan religion. The fundamental idea of pagan religion.

That God is subject to the will of the tzadik.

In pagan religion there's  a fluid boundary between the divine, the human, and the natural worlds. They blur into one another because they all emerge ultimately from the same primordial world stuff. 

Discerning the will of the God is really of little use, because even his will can be thwarted or overthrown by a tzadik.

The pagan cult, is a system of rites.  So the pagan cult, is a system of rites that involves a manipulation of substances — again, tefilin, candles, and so on — that are believed to have some kind of inherent power, There's always an element of magic in the pagan cult. It's seeking through these rituals and manipulations of certain substances to, again, let loose certain powers, set into motion certain forces, that will coerce  God to be propitiated, for example, or calmed or to act favorably or to vindicate the devotees, and so on.

The fundamental idea of Torah, which permeates the entire Torah in his view, is a radically new idea of a God who is himself the source of all being — not subject to a tzadik . 

He doesn't have in the Bible a female consort, a Shechina . 

 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. 

 Magic in the Torah is represented as useless. It's pointless. There's no metadivine realm to tap into. Power doesn't inhere in any stuff in the natural world. So the world is sort of de-divinized. 

Power, or Divinity  isn't understood as a material thing or something that inheres in material substances. God can't be manipulated or coerced by tefilin 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. 

There are magical conceptions throughout the Torah . But because God willed them . 

 There's no ritual or incantation,  or material substance that can coerce a revelation from God. So, we will see things that look like magic and divination and oracles and dreams and prophecy in the pagan world and in ancient Israel. But  the similarity is a similarity in form only. And it's a superficial, formal, external similarity. Each of these phenomena he says is transformed by the basic Israelite idea of one supreme transcendent God whose will is absolute and all of these things relate to the direct word and will of God. They aren't recourse to a separate secret lore or body of knowledge or interpretive craft that calls upon forces or powers that transcend God or are independent of God.

Now since God is himself the transcendent source of all being and since he is good, in a monotheistic system there are no evil agents that constitute a realm that opposes God as an equal rival. No divine evil agents. Again, in the pagan worldview the primordial womb spawns all sorts of beings, all kinds of divinities, good and evil that are in equal strength. They're sort of locked in this cosmic struggle. But in the Torah worldview, if God is the source of all being, then they're can't be a realm of supernatural beings that do battle with him. There's no room for a divine antagonist of the one supreme God, which is leading us down here to this point: that sin and evil are demythologized in the Torah. 

There's nothing inherently supernatural about sin. It's not a force or a power built into the universe. In Torah evil is transferred from the metaphysical realm (built into the physical structure of the universe) to the moral realm. I've put it up here for you. Evil is a moral and not a metaphysical reality. It doesn't have a concrete independent existence. And that means that human beings and only human beings are the potential source of evil in the world. Responsibility for evil lies in the hands of human beings. In the Torah, no one will ever say the devil made me do it. There is no devil in the Hebrew Bible. 

 Evil is a moral and not a metaphysical reality 

Even tzadikim are not gods.

In the Torah,  Nature  is not divine. It's demythologized, de-divinized. the created world is not divine, it is not the physical manifestation the Creator. The line of demarcation therefore between the Divine and the natural and human worlds is clear. In Genesis 1, the view of God is that there is one supreme God, who is creator and sovereign of the world, who simply exists, who is  incorporeal, and for whom the realm of nature is separate and subservient. He has no life story, no mythology, and his will is absolute.

In Torah, humans are created in the image of God, but humans are not, in fact, gods. They are still creatures in the sense of created things and they are dependent on a higher power. Even tzadikim are not gods.

This God transcends nature.   He's not identifiable as a force of nature or identified with a force of nature. Nature certainly becomes the stage of God's expression of his will. He expresses his will and purpose through forces of nature. But nature isn't God himself. He's not identified [with it]. He's wholly "other". He is totally different. He has no Divine substance. He isn't kin to humans in any way either. So there is no blurring, no soft boundary between humans and the divine. 


I write this because I have seen that this issue requires clarification. Though all the above points are clear in the Torah itself, you can see them explained by Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed and in Emunot VeDeot of Saadia Geon.

Is one allowed to learn Torah in order to get ordination and a paid profession?

This is believe it or not not obvious. You can read statements from the sages of the Talmud about not learning for the sake that people should give one honor. But to get an explicit statement is hard.
[In those days there was no profession of having ordination and getting money through Torah. Rather if one was recognized as being learned then it was a mitzvah to patronize his store.]
 We find programs oriented towards getting semicha [ordination].
 However I want to argue here that in fact it is forbidden to learn Torah for the sake of eith making money by doing so (kollel) or becoming qualified to gain ordination in order to make money. . This is in spite of the fact that my opinion is against what is considered to be common knowledge
I base my idea on a small book of sayings of the Gra called "Even Shelema" .

In chapter 5 paragraph 16 we find him quoting the Gra that when the evil inclination tries to seduce one to learn Torah for the sake of some physical benefit or  in order to become a rabbi it is better to learn books of Musar.

The actual statement of the Gra supports this. It come from Proverbs chapter 21 verses 5 and 6.
And the whole statement certainly supports  Rav Meltzan.

In money issues is where the whole religious thing goes wrong because people change what the Torah says and lie about it in order to keep the money rolling in.

If you are part of such a system then vote with your feet and be willing to be an outcast rather than betray the Torah.