The Rambam thinks people are not inherently moral. Even the level of natural law before Mount Sinai had to be revealed in some way.

 When reading the Guide  for the Perplexed of the Rambam straight it is easy to miss this. This is why Reform Jews are right for making a study of the Rambam's Guide. If you don't make it into a serious subject of study, it is easy to miss important points.
Or what often happens is people come up with their own ideas of what Torah ought to say, and then think that that is what is actually says even though their ideas contradict the Rambam. As if they think they understand the Torah better than the Rambam. Now sometimes they depend on Nachmanides, and that is OK.

There is no prohibition baking a cake for sinners.
But if there is a possibility they will listen you should tell them that what they are doing is a sin.
According to the Gra you should tell them even if you are sure they will not listen. At least I think that is what the Gra holds. And I think I saw something like that in the Shelah once.
  any case baking cakes for them is the best possible thing. White flour and vegetable oil and all the other stuff they put into cakes is like feeding them poison.  Delete the "like." It is feeding them poison. The question is are you allowed to bake a cake for hetrosexuals? I doubt it.

I mainly hold from learning Torah. But I don't think doing this in a study hall or beit midrash or yeshiva makes much sense anymore.

One is supposed to learn Torah all the time. And there used to be places where you could go to learn. Like the Mirrer Yeshiva in Brooklyn. But no every place is fit because in some places the light of Torah does not enter into the learning. Even though the books are the same the light stays outside.
You can tell where the real Torah is by  signs. In any case, to be on the safe side I recommend learning Torah at home alone and never going near any religious synagogue.

In fact learning at that breslov place I sometimes feel a kind of "help from heaven"  סיעתא דשמיא in my learning. Like just today I walked in and I was already exhausted from running around, but i sat down with a Gemara and looked at a Maharam on a Tosphot in Sanhedrin 63 and it suddenly and instantaneously became clear to me what Tosphot is saying.


David, the fellow I learn with thinks that the best sign of a bad place is when then throw out people that are sincere.

The Ukraine I think has been unfairly treated by Russian Media. I have heard things that imply that Jews are not treated well. And yet this does not seem to me to be accurate. My impression is that Jews are treated like anyone else. And I have seen a lot of effort made to make Rosh Hashanah comfortable for people coming to visit .
In general what you see in Uman is that anyone that owns property anywhere within walking distance of the synagogue of  builds as large a building as they can in order to put in as many people he can for Rosh Hashanah.
And they make efforts to be nice.
The reality that I have seen on the ground does not resemble way Russia Today portrays it.
I could go on with examples but you get the idea.
The funny thing is that I have been treated much worse in places that have reputations for being nice to Jews. Sometime reality does not resemble what the the media portrays. And this seems to be a prime example.

Germany for example is supposed to be nice nowadays but when I was there the Turkish population was very nasty. I think Germany thought they could make up for WWII by being nice to immigrants. But it seems to me that they made a mistake in policy.

Rav Shach [author of the Avi Ezri].  To his way of thinking only Torah is Torah and nothing else. That means learning the Oral and Written Law and doing what the Law tells us. It is hard to argue with this. And he also seems to think learning books about the hashkafa (or world view) of Torah is a bad thing. He applies the verse in Ecclesiastes against making books to books about hashkafa. That is they are bad.
Now to a large degree it is true that most such books are amazingly stupid, and certainly take people away from Torah when they read that nonsense. [They make  obviously false presumptions or else have wolrd views opposed to Torah that they present as Torah and by that manage to pull naive people into things that are not Torah. ]

But what I am confused about is if it is possible to give Torah a slightly wider interpretation? And if so, how wide?

The first step for me is to look at my parents. What did they consider to be Torah? And also parents are the first place that the Torah itself give regarding orientation. Now starting from my own parents makes everything remarkably clear. They had a very definite idea of what constitutes Torah that is the exact same thing as Rav Shach. The Oral and Written Law. That means the Old Testament, the two Talmuds and the halakhic and aggadic midrashim;-- or collectively what is called "The Mesora."(Torat Kohanim, Sifra, Sifri, Tosephta, Midrash Raba, Tanchuma,  and the Mechilta.)
There still would be a wider idea of what Torah is about coming from the side of my parents than sitting in yeshiva and learning I think.
It is that grey area between Rav Shach and my parents that I find difficult to deal with. I think Rav Shach would have held that one should learn Torah all the time. My parents would have thought that a wide range of activities constitutes keeping the Torah like taking the family to the beach on weekends, learning Music, Math, Physics, Engineering. It is hard to know. Because the Torah itself puts parents first I would have to side with my parents, but I can see the importance of Rav Shach and of learning Torah --that is Gemara, Rashi, and Tosphot as much as possible,
[Looking at the Rambam and Saadia Geon it seems they were more towards the direction of my parents. The Rambam is famous [or infamous] for his approval of Aristotle and learning Physics and Metaphysics. The Rambam meant by "Metaphysics" not just the book of Aristotle by that name but also the works of Plato--as he calls it "what the Greeks called Metaphysics." That means a wider set of books than just Aristotle.]

I am being short on purpose. Today the world of Torah is not like it was in Rav Shach's time.  Nor is university like it was in my parent's time. The world has changed and so have the rules. In any case, we all need to learn Torah and also Math and Physics,-- and survival skills and an honest profession.
There is no difference of opinion about that. How we go about it will have to differ according to the person and situation.

Rav Shach [Elazar Menachem  Shach, author of the Avi Ezri] asked what is really an obvious question but one that you don't hear much. That is the fact that there is a verse in Ecclesiastes that put down the making of books.  You know the verse so I dont need to quote it. Mainly it says there is no end to the making of books and they are worthless effort and a joke.
The obvious thing is that in the Torah world, we do have books and a lot of them are valuable.
I would think that there is a difference between the oral law and the written law. But that is not the answer he gives. He says the difference is between books that deal with understanding how to keep the commandments of God as explained in the Gemara according to the foundational principles of the Talmud which is OK and books on hashkafa [the world view and philosophy of Torah--e.g. understanding the reasons for the mitzvot.
And he has a point. I can see important value for books on orientation like the Guide for the Perplexed by the Rambam and the Horev from Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, and the books of Rav Avraham Kook. But mainly books on Hashkafa seem to me to be talking nonsense.
What is wrong with books of Torah hashkafa [world view]? One problem is the question who is qualified to write about what the Torah holds?  Who is qualified to even have an opinion about such a thing? Only someone who has read through the material and knows it well. Someone like for instance Moshe Ben Maimon (Maimonides). If anyone is qualified to have an opinion about what the Torah hold surely he must be at the top of the list. And to our great happiness he actually wrote a book explaining what the world view of the Torah is. You would think that people would be overjoyed. But no. People don't want to hear what he has to say because they have their own opinions about what they think the Torah ought to be saying. And they write they own books of nonsense and tell you not to learn the Rambam's book because it might confuse you and take you away from their own views which are contrary to those of the Rambam.

There is an area in the Ukraine which the separatists are seeking. The whole area they call "New Russia" [Novoi-Russia] is larger than just the two provinces that they have taken control of. Part of the reason I think they are seeking this new area is that the actual areas they already control have little strategic value to Russia. But the new area the rebels are seeking has immense value to Russia because it contains the backbone of the Russian space program and manufacturing of military hardware.
That whole strip of land starting at Kharkiv and all the way down to the sea is one vast military industrial complex of immense strategic value to Russia.
[I am not saying Russia does not produce its own stuff. Rather that industry was purposely divided by Stalin so that one part of a plane would be produced in one region and another part in another region--so that all of the USSR would be dependent on every other region. This means that a significant part of Russia replacement parts and rocket parts is still being produced in the Ukraine. So the fact that business is down in the Ukraine is a good thing. It means they are no longer supplying the Russian military. I can imagine the reason is they don't like being shot at. You won't see this information about Russian weapons because anything made in the USSR proper they won't tell you where it is made. Only if it is made in satellites of the USSR do they name the country of origin.]



Just to give one example to build the kind of aircraft carrier that Russia wants to build is not possible in any existing Russian facilities. The building of Russian rockets and aircraft is largely done on Ukrainian soil. This was never a problem  because the work was simply done in the Ukraine an sent to Russia. Nowadays this arrangement has become strained. It is hard for me to imagine that separatists will see this gold mine of a preexisting military industrial area right across its border and not want to take it.
That is to say that they are probably hoping to expand and take that area. But it also seems clear to me that the Ukrainian people in those areas will not hand over that territory peacefully. So if the separatists want that area they will have to take it by force.
And the separatist are definitely getting Russian military hardware like the anti tank PTRS-41.