The Litvak yeshiva is where I found happiness.

Litvish Yeshiva. The Litvak yeshiva is where I found happiness. But I have not been a good advocate of this  system. We can understand what has prevented me from being able to advocate this kind of system.
That is if we look at the gentiles we can perhaps see a kind of parallel. In the gentile world there was a fellow by the name  Ludder. One day he was out walking and a lightening storm occurred. He made a vow to be a monk. He was a schizoid personality type. He could not stop washing. As he put it: " The more I washed, the more dirty I felt". Until one day he broke out of his mental prison, and announced to the word that with faith all things are clean. That was Martin Luther. He changed his name.

The Ding An Sich, the thing in itself, the self is hidden from us. Sometimes inside the self is some amazing new idea or world revolution that is just waiting to come out. But it can't come out because it is trapped inside the personality flaws of the individual.
That is me. I have recognized and known this amazing system for years, but because of my own mental prison I have never been able to advocate it. It is as if Luther had remained Ludder and never broken free.
What prevents me from saying this are the problems I had after the original years when things were going well. And even when things were going well, they were not as well as one could hope for. So there are mental obstacles and people obstacles preventing me from saying openly the Litvak Yeshiva is the best approach,  So instead I surf the internet until I find things that I like, or bother me, but do not spend the time and effort explain what is right and proper and great about the Litvak Yeshiva. [Nor do I spend the time on the Talmud that I ought.]  I live in a world of delusion. Thus, I can't be an advocate of something great and good. [The light and greatness and importance of the Litvak yeshiva are buried inside of me. Unless they break out of their prison, there is nothing I can do.]

In my first yeshiva I had a great deal of problems. First of all my parents were against it. They thought it was an institution that prepared people to use the Torah to make money. And even if that had not been the case, they still thought that Torah with Derech Eretz (Torah with a vocation) is important. But Something clicked inside of me when I got to yeshiva. Some amazing energy just gripped me. I found something so amazing in the Oral and Written Law that it would have taken a thermonuclear device to separate me from the Gemara. And there was no learning Musar there. It was Sola Gemara (Not Sola Scriptura, scripture alone but Gemara alone.) . {The two Talmuds, Sifra, Sifri, Tosephta, Torah Kohanim, Midrash Raba, Midrash Tanchuma}

But I fell into a mental prison. And since then the Gemara is....[unfinished.]


What my approach is today is in fact like my parents held:Torah with a vocation. And  I also go with the Rambam concerning Physics being a part of the Oral Law. So I do not think learning Physics or Aristotle is bitul Torah but rather a part of the Oral tradition. See the Rambam in Hilchot Talmud Torah in the halacah that one should divide his day into three parts. One part for the Oral Law and he says there the subjects called Pardes as he explained in the first four chapters are part of the Oral Law

Thus the Gra was right. And the excommunication should still be considered valid based on theory alone. The kind of wicked behavior that we see ought to convince us that the Gra knew what he was talking about. Does it not say a lot that no one wants to live anywhere near them?

Religious veneration can be idolatry. This is one of the reason I think that the Gra was right to sign the excommunication.

If, that is, the thing venerated is the thing the religion was founded to venerate {God}, and not something substituted, that is proper. This infinite God is a bit scary. If he knows what we need already, why pray to him? And he’s worse than Santa Claus – he knows whether we’ve been bad or good in excruciating detail. And if he says "No," then what? Talk about "The buck stops here." No, what we need is something a bit closer to us, a bit more limited in powers, a bit less in a position to point fingers. Something that leaves open the possibility of a bargain, or an end run around the rules. Like a saint; someone who made the grade, but is still human. And if one doesn’t perform, we can try others; we never have to face the fact that something might be off-limits.
Or maybe it’s a relic, a place, a holy object or a ritual. In theory, the purpose of the relic, holy place, object or ritual is to focus attention on God, and give the religion tangibility. In practice, it very often happens that the tangible expression itself becomes the object of veneration.
Thus the Gra was right. And the excommunication should still be considered valid based on theory alone. The kind of wicked behavior that we see ought to convince us that the Gra knew what he was talking about.  Does it not say a lot that no one wants to live anywhere near them?

  

I spend a good deal of time on tracatates Shabat and Eruvin.--The reason was force of circumstances. I had spend the previous two years in Shar Yashuv learning Ketubot and Yevamot. So when in my new yeshiva--the Mir in NY-started learning Ketubot, I felt it was time to start something new. So I did Shabat with a lot of the Tosphot, the Tur Beit Yoseph, Maharsha and Pnei Yehoshua. [I joined the small group that was doing Shabat in those days with my learning partner Hagi Presher who later became a rosh yeshiva in Russia and with Rav Nelkenbaum who is one of the roshei Yeshiva in NY in the Mir.] I did not however finish everything because in those days I was tried to get through the material as fast as I could, but also to understand it. Recently I put some nice ideas about Shabat (link) in my little booklet on Shas that deals with the most fundamental aspects of Shabat מלאכה שאינה צריכה לגופה. At the time I was thinking about these things, I was learning with my learning partner, David Bronson, who had  a copy of the Avi Ezri. The fact that he had the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach was very helpful. The main thing about Shabat is the Tosphot in Yoma page 34 or its sister Tosphot in Shabat and Sanhedrin. [Take a look at Rav Shach. The ideas there are astounding in depth and clarity.]

In terms of getting through Shas, I would prefer it if you would do a half a page per day with Tosphot and the Maharasha. Or if you do a whole page, then to still do it with Tosphot and the Maharsha. I think that it is important to get an idea of what is going on in Tosphot in one's early years,- because doing so later is often impossible. This is the reason why the places like Shar Yashuv and the Mir get involved in Tosphot even in the high school years. I did not understand at the time why learning Tosphot was important when I had not even finished Shas once, but now I see the wisdom in the approach of the Litvak [Lithuanian] yeshivas.

The book of Job

The book of Job  is a very important book.The Rambam goes into it in the Guide. My main feeling about the book is this. That the author has a privileged position. That is,- he is in a position to tell you accurately what happened. So though other positions [the friends of Job] have various degrees of validity, still the position of the author is different and should be considered the right position. So when he starts off that "Job had no sin," we should take that literally. And when Job gets punished from Heaven, we should not take that as a punishment for sin. Rather that Hashem (God) wanted to win a  bet with the Satan. Job surely was not at fault for this. And though the opinions of the three friends and then the last friend do reflect some aspects of reality, still they are not in the privileged position of the author. Furthermore, we know this is true because God himself tells the friends that they were wrong and should ask Job for forgiveness. Therefore what we learn is that numinous reality is beyond reason. It is the most basic and fundamental conclusion of Kant and Schopenhauer.  

This is important from a philosophical point of view, because  when you have God himself in the book of Job arguing the same point as Schopenhauer that gives it more weight.  

r97 C Minor  [r97 in midi format]

 [r101 in midi]

r98 F Minor r96 D major 6-8 time  [r98 in midi]

r93 f minor  in midi  r91 F Minor r91 in midi r90 e flat major  [r90 in midi]

Some things are not scale-able. The context of the Litvak yeshiva really works mainly in a small group. There is a kind of mystery in the fact that the Far Rockaway yeshiva of Reb Freifeld for me had a lot  more of the spirit of Torah than the larger more famous yeshiva I went to later.


[What I mean here is that once Gpddard and Von Braun figured out how to make a rocket ship, it was scale-able. The Democracy of Athens was not scale-able. Homemade bread is not scale-able. Certain things depend on size.]

Oral Law - Talmud

Sentences express abstract features, but these are always in a context of other abstract features (what Searle calls the "Network") . Thus the meaning of any verse in the Torah is radically under-determined. You need the Oral Law to get an idea of the overall context of Torah.