1.7.15
I might at the end of this blog put down the basic idea but for now I wanted to say over what I think describes עבודת השם the service of God. The only place I ever saw what could be described as the service of God was at the two Litvak yeshivas I went to in NY. It was not just that people were learning Torah for its own sake without thought of compensation. It was a kind luminous numinosity.
לנחמן מאומן יש פרק בליקוטי מוהר''ן שנראה שמתייחס אליי בדרכים רבות. זה לווה מהמורה נבוכים של רמב''ם. והוא מדבר על היתרונות בהבאת אנשים לעבודת השם.
אני יכול בסופו של הבלוג הזה לסכם את הרעיון הבסיסי אבל עכשיו אני רוצה להגיד על מה שאני חושב שמתאר עבודת השם. המקום היחיד שאי פעם ראיתי מה יכול להיות תואר אמיתי של עבודת אלוהים היה בשתי ישיבות ליטאיות שהלכתי בניו יורק. זה לא היה רק שאנשים לומדים תורה לשמה ללא מחשבה על הפיצוי. זה היה סוג זוהר
It is my observation that learning Torah for its own sake only happens in Lithuanian type of yeshivas. And so I consider that path alone to be in the category of service of God.
Kelly Ross who I think is the deepest of all philosopher and the widest.
And he also is not much of an authoritarian.
I call him deepest because he seems to be always able to zero in on the flaws of philosophies that are considered rigorous and logically exact . For some reason he always finds the major flaw. And he is politically a libertarian or more exactly he goes with the American Constitution.
The other thinkers that are important are Karl Popper (The Open Society and its Enemies), Michael Huemer (The essay which destroyed Marxism.). I mind include Allen Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind) (Closing of the American Mind) and Harold Bloom (The Lucifer Principle) (howard_bloom___the_lucifer_principle).
The thing about all these people are they are not authoritarians. But they are different in many ways.
The most encompassing and systematic is Kelly Ross.
The question that comes up then is how to reconcile this with Torah. If Torah was solely a issue of personal morality then there would not be any question. But it is public law also in the sense that the only authority anyone has in Torah is to enforce the laws of the Torah. The Torah gives some legitimacy to a Sanhedrin and to a king and even to prophets but not one of these can change or modify or reinterpret a single law. They can only deal with the questions what is the law and how does it apply and also to solve contradictions based on the 13 principles.
The best interface between Torah and libertarian ideas I think is Kelly Ross. At least he was reading his material that helped me organize my own ideas into a cohesive system.
The other thinkers that are important are Karl Popper (The Open Society and its Enemies), Michael Huemer (The essay which destroyed Marxism.). I mind include Allen Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind) (Closing of the American Mind) and Harold Bloom (The Lucifer Principle) (howard_bloom___the_lucifer_principle).
The thing about all these people are they are not authoritarians. But they are different in many ways.
The most encompassing and systematic is Kelly Ross.
The question that comes up then is how to reconcile this with Torah. If Torah was solely a issue of personal morality then there would not be any question. But it is public law also in the sense that the only authority anyone has in Torah is to enforce the laws of the Torah. The Torah gives some legitimacy to a Sanhedrin and to a king and even to prophets but not one of these can change or modify or reinterpret a single law. They can only deal with the questions what is the law and how does it apply and also to solve contradictions based on the 13 principles.
The best interface between Torah and libertarian ideas I think is Kelly Ross. At least he was reading his material that helped me organize my own ideas into a cohesive system.
30.6.15
Even though we find a lot of good points by the Religious Zionists, still if you want to come to the service of God you have to have something along the lines of a Lithuanian Yeshiva. That is for a least four years you need to concentrate of Torah in order to get anywhere in it. And that needs to be done with Musar. That is you need a straight Litvak Yeshiva or you need to do this on your own. And if you can't do it on your own you can at least help others to try to do this. The idea here is that a Litvak yeshiva is a kind of incubator for good Jews.
And you cant get the same kind of effect when you dilute the Torah. That is why traditional Litvak yeshivas learned only Torah.--though at Chaim Berlin people did go to Brooklyn collage in the afternoon. [Rav Hutner was going to introduce secular studies even beyond high school but Reb Aaron Kotler begged him not to do so.]
So you can either learn Torah at home or try to start your own Litvak yeshiva.
But how to start such a thing? If you are learning at home I have already written about how to go about learning Torah. Mainly you need to stay on one page for as long as it takes until you can start to see the depths of the Talmud. You keep at that same page day after day with the Maharsha and Maharam until it starts to open up. And you need a fast session also.
That is for you alone. at most it is two hours per day. But as for making your own yeshiva you need someone that has fit to teach. That is need to impossible to find. One who knows "how to learn" is very rare. The main places you can find someone like this are in the basic set of Litvak yeshivas in Bnei Brak Jerusalem or NY. That is Ponovitch, Brisk, and in NY the Mirrer, Chaim Berlin, and Torah VeDaat. Anyone who has not learned in one of those place you can be guaranteed can't learn.
Don't be fooled by the frauds.
And you cant get the same kind of effect when you dilute the Torah. That is why traditional Litvak yeshivas learned only Torah.--though at Chaim Berlin people did go to Brooklyn collage in the afternoon. [Rav Hutner was going to introduce secular studies even beyond high school but Reb Aaron Kotler begged him not to do so.]
So you can either learn Torah at home or try to start your own Litvak yeshiva.
But how to start such a thing? If you are learning at home I have already written about how to go about learning Torah. Mainly you need to stay on one page for as long as it takes until you can start to see the depths of the Talmud. You keep at that same page day after day with the Maharsha and Maharam until it starts to open up. And you need a fast session also.
That is for you alone. at most it is two hours per day. But as for making your own yeshiva you need someone that has fit to teach. That is need to impossible to find. One who knows "how to learn" is very rare. The main places you can find someone like this are in the basic set of Litvak yeshivas in Bnei Brak Jerusalem or NY. That is Ponovitch, Brisk, and in NY the Mirrer, Chaim Berlin, and Torah VeDaat. Anyone who has not learned in one of those place you can be guaranteed can't learn.
Don't be fooled by the frauds.
The issue is that the Rambam says that the land of Israel was divided among the tribes by Joshua so that when they would go and conquer it would not have the status of the conquest of an individual. [I think that is in Hilchot Trumah.]
You can see why this is important. Jerusalem was never conquered by any of the tribes until the time of King David. So we have now that the land of Reuben and Gad had the status of Israel along with all the rest of Israel. So far everything seems good. But what about Syria? Syria was conquered by the general of Kind David. But it did not gain the status of Israel because Jerusalem had not been conquered at that point. [or at least not all of the seven Canaanite nations had not be conquered.]
But if Joshua had already divided up the land so that no conquest of any area would be conquest of an individual then it should not matter if Jerusalem was in the hands of Israel at that point!!!
The idea that there are times that the holiness of the land of Israel is not revealed. That is--even though the holiness is always there still it can't be revealed until Israel comes and conquers. That would apparently have to refer to כיבוש בבל when the exiles returned from Babylon. That is because the Talmud says openly that the first conquest did not sanctify the land except at that time alone.
This might help on on the point of joy also. There are lots of kinds of happiness that are evil. E.g happiness at the sorrow of another person. Good traits can becomes bad if misused. Certainly we don't consider compassion on the same level as cruelty. Yet compassion in the wrong time and place is cruel. That does not mean that compassion is bad. Not at all. Rather it can be misused. We find holy things can become profane. E.g. sacrifices that have not been eaten in the proper time period etc.
But if Joshua had already divided up the land so that no conquest of any area would be conquest of an individual then it should not matter if Jerusalem was in the hands of Israel at that point!!!
The idea that there are times that the holiness of the land of Israel is not revealed. That is--even though the holiness is always there still it can't be revealed until Israel comes and conquers. That would apparently have to refer to כיבוש בבל when the exiles returned from Babylon. That is because the Talmud says openly that the first conquest did not sanctify the land except at that time alone.
This might help on on the point of joy also. There are lots of kinds of happiness that are evil. E.g happiness at the sorrow of another person. Good traits can becomes bad if misused. Certainly we don't consider compassion on the same level as cruelty. Yet compassion in the wrong time and place is cruel. That does not mean that compassion is bad. Not at all. Rather it can be misused. We find holy things can become profane. E.g. sacrifices that have not been eaten in the proper time period etc.
It is mainly in Religious Zionist places that you find a combination of learning Torah and natural sciences. In the insane religious world places you don't see this much. And when the the insane religious world engage in secular activity it is never in the natural sciences. If they go into science at all, it is always pseudo science. And pseudo sciences are attractive, compelling, and false.
It is hard to balance natural sciences with learning Torah. The tendency is to lose the balance between the two. Or to denigrate one at the expense of the other.
But to ignore one or the other requires a enormous hubris.
Does the collective wisdom of the ages in the Old Testament and Talmud and books of Musar have nothing to tell us today? It requires a large degree of stupidity to think so. But on the other hand can you dismiss the natural sciences as false inventions of man? That seems to require even a greater degree of lunacy and stupidity than the first type.
These are not my considerations alone and they are not idea spun out of thin air.
The most compelling argument for what I am saying is a resort to authority, Moshe ben Maimon. The Rambam. He placed the natural sciences on a plane higher than Talmud, but required the Oral Law as proper preparation and foundation.
The easiest way to see this is in the son of the Rambam, Avraham. For the Rambam himself is a bit of a mystery. No one can seem to figure out the right kind of interface between the Mishne Torah {the legal book of the Rambam} and his Guide for the Perplexed [his philosophical work.]
The son of the Rambam provided that interface in his Musar book מספיק לעובדי השם Enough for the servants of God. There you see in the same characteristic clarity of the Rambam the actual practical implication of what it means to live according to the ideas of the Rambam.
It is hard to balance natural sciences with learning Torah. The tendency is to lose the balance between the two. Or to denigrate one at the expense of the other.
But to ignore one or the other requires a enormous hubris.
Does the collective wisdom of the ages in the Old Testament and Talmud and books of Musar have nothing to tell us today? It requires a large degree of stupidity to think so. But on the other hand can you dismiss the natural sciences as false inventions of man? That seems to require even a greater degree of lunacy and stupidity than the first type.
These are not my considerations alone and they are not idea spun out of thin air.
The most compelling argument for what I am saying is a resort to authority, Moshe ben Maimon. The Rambam. He placed the natural sciences on a plane higher than Talmud, but required the Oral Law as proper preparation and foundation.
The easiest way to see this is in the son of the Rambam, Avraham. For the Rambam himself is a bit of a mystery. No one can seem to figure out the right kind of interface between the Mishne Torah {the legal book of the Rambam} and his Guide for the Perplexed [his philosophical work.]
The son of the Rambam provided that interface in his Musar book מספיק לעובדי השם Enough for the servants of God. There you see in the same characteristic clarity of the Rambam the actual practical implication of what it means to live according to the ideas of the Rambam.
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