How to consider Joan of Arc? I brought that up with my learning partner years ago when I first saw the transcript of her trial. I found that transcript to be more compelling and shocking than anything else I had read about her. It was like I was in the courtroom with her.
But as many other issues my learning partner did not relate well to what I was asking.
He was thinking that whatever is Jewish is good and right and whatever is not is the Sitra Achra.

That approach seems to me to be highly inaccurate. While I do think there is a Sitra Achra [Dark Realm] I do not think the dividing lines are drawn according to those specifications.

Part of my reasoning is the Gra at the beginning of Shir Hashirim but also the Arizal.[about the higher root of the children of Noah].

But also I have a kind of Kantian view point about unconditioned realities. [Reason does not work there and when it tries to it comes up with self contradictions.]

The best way I think to consider Joan de"Arc is as the Rambam. I mean to say that he would not be willing to cut any slack to any kind of approach that is not a part of the Oral and Written Law of Moses, but he would also see a preliminary stage bringing to the Law of God.

[You would have to see his approach to  Ancient Hellas (Nemusai HaYevanim")

Appendix:
(1) The laws of the ancient Greeks [as known to Avraham the patriarch ] was considered by Maimonides to be  Natural Law that needed to be revealed in order for the higher level of the Law of Mount Sinai to come into the world.

(2) The Rambam would not cut any slack to Joan De'Arc as being part of the Catholic Church. He would in spite of the good and worthy aspects still consider the basic structure as wrong. According to the Torah we are commanded not to worship a person even as a mediator. And this applies to gentiles as well as to Jews. That is the faith of the Law of Moses in Ethical Monotheism. No mediators. And that God is not a composite and he is not the world. That is the Rambam (and Aquinas also for that mater) considered these things objective morality.

There is a good way to defend the Musar Movement of Reb Israel Salanter. This way would have to start with an unspoken premise of all authentic Lithuanian yeshivas that the rishonim are always right. The achronim however can and do makes mistakes, This premise is based on objective facts.
But it is not widely known. The Middle Ages fell out of favor in the secular world.
The thing that makes rishonim so important is hard to tell. On one hand it looks like that entire age--especially in France was exceptional in logic. That is logical thinking. A book like most achromim write filled with fuzzy circular logic would have never gotten past first base. It would have been laughed out of court. There is something more however about the rishonim that is more than just logic.[rishonim might not be infallible but in terms of logic they always are]

But it is all I need to defend Musar. That is the idea that only the medieval writers had the capacity to  understand and describe in a logically consistent way the world view of the Torah.

Rishonim are medieval authorities. [Anyone from Hai Gaon and onward up until Rav Joseph Karo. ]

Achronim are people after Joseph Karo, including Joseph Karo. Rishonim also include the Gra.

Torah with Derech Ertez [a vocation]

My basic path in a nutshell is to learn The Oral Law, the Written Law, Physics and Math and Aristotle Metaphysics. This is a slight modification of Maimonides. While Maimonides did include the two sets of books of Aristotle The Physics and the Meta-Physics into his program of how to learn Torah he was referring specifically to the books of ARISTOTLE. In my modification of Maimonides I would instead put String Theory and Abstract Algebra and Algebraic Topology instead of Aristotle's Physics.




I should mention that Torah with Derech Ertez [a vocation] was the path of my parents. They did not think that being a position to use Torah for money was a good idea. If I could have done yeshiva in the morning and then learned some vocation in the afternoon they would have been overjoyed but as it was I was in Far Rockaway where the closest college was Brooklyn College and it was a few hours on the subway.  Even my own Rosh Yeshiva Reb Shelomo Friefeld was telling me to go to college.

At the time however I do not know what I would have majored in.  I did not know how to learn Physics in those days in a way that I could do well in it.   Even today years later it takes me a whole long kind of round about way to get anywhere. I have to read the words in order --just saying the words straight and going on. Then after about 50 pages or so I go back reading the last paragraph and then the one before that etc until I get to the beginning of the book. It takes a lot of time.

But just for the record this is what the Rambam advised and my parents and also from what I have seen this makes the most sense. Torah with Derech Eretz.

[I imagine I could have learned Kant or Music, but as it was I was pretty involved with Torah. And I think at least for those years I needed to be involved with Torah all day in order to make any progress at all.]


I also should mention that unless the Rambam had specifically included Physics in the mitzvah of learning Torah, I would not have much motivation for learning it. It is rather the combination of the Rambam along with my parents that convinced me to spend time on it. Otherwise I would have thought it is bitul Torah.

[Bitul Torah is the sin of spending time on anything when you could be spending it on learning Torah. This sin is considered very severe in the Torah and it was certainly a major part of the thinking of the yeshiva world]

One of the best books on Physics I have found to be free. You can find the links on my blog.
As for Musar and Torah the best books of Musar are the Nefesh Hachaim which go into more modern issues like bitul Torah and idolatry. And the Chovot Levavot. But the best idea in terms of Musar is to have a Cheder Musar {Musar Room} like I saw in Netivot. One room that has only Musar books and to get the basic set of Mediaeval Musar and the books of the Gra and the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter.

[I am not saying I have no doubts about this. In fact if I could I would be sitting and learning Torah all the time. Every second. But there were many factors preventing me from this-enough in fact for me t begin to wonder if sitting and learning Torah all day is in fact the best path. But I admit I could be wrong and that the sitting and learning all day is the right thing. I am just saying that for me that path did not work out so well and at some point I found it impossible to follow. So I concluded that the Rambam was right all along. But that might simply mean I was not on the kind of spiritual level necessary to learn Torah all day.]

s4 G major

The barbarians

The barbarians are not at the gates. They are in the gates.

Breaking news out of the town of Ansbach, Germany where authorities have confirmed that a device was responsible for a blast that killed 1 and injured 11 12 at a restaurant near a music festival which may have been the target:

 Suspect in #Ansbach bombing was Syrian refugee denied asylum

The Jewish people are going through a very difficult time with cults and false teachers. There is only one thing that can help now. A Miracle. 

I think it can be said that libertarian-ism and also Marxism had the advantage that they seemed to have intellectual basis. You can't accuse everyone of having bad hearts. No. It must be that they sincerely thought they were on the side of truth and justice. It is only the result of Time showing these movements for the ill-founded delusions of madmen that now traditional Judaic Christian values are on the rise.

It is common among the  Right to look at Marxists as having evil hearts. This seems to me to be unfair. While they are correct for identifying Marxism as  a bad thing, but we have to give people the benefit of a doubt. With the kinds of thinkers involved in that school of thought, we can't assume everyone was trying to do evil.
Rather it was time alone that showed Marxism to be  a poor system. Libertarianism also needed time to sort out the problems in that system.