Kabalah tends to lead to a kind of world view in which the experience and high LSD high gives validity to what ever the ideas are.

The trouble with Kabalah. The constant craving for spiritual experience,as is attested to by all the great mystics,is addictive, like a drug. If the experiences are indeed spurious,they will never ultimately satisfy the soul that hungers after them, and will be required in stronger and stronger doses. 

But Kabalah became embedded in Musar from the  start. It is an inevitable step from traditional Musar into Kabalah and from their into worlds of  delusions of grandeur.

Not that this was the case with authentic mystics like the Ari or Bava Sali.

You can see why Reb Chaim  and Brisk did not have Musar as part of the daily session. Kabalah tends to lead to a kind of world view in which the experience and high LSD high gives validity to what ever the ideas are.   

There is a problem with the slippery slope.People can not change the Torah openly because no one would accept that. Instead they claim mystic visions and explain the Torah in the way they want. That way they think they can nullify the Torah and be accepted.


Once the pursuit of spiritual power replaces the striving after straight Torah, then the flood gates have been opened up and it is only a matter of time before there will be an overwhelming confusion of spirits,and error and division will be the order of the day. The world of the religious today is sadlly overwhelming from the Dark Side Sitra Achra. That is not do there there is no spirit at work there. However it is not the spirit of God but rather the occult.

divorce

The fact that divorce was accepted in the Protestant  world  made it acceptable in the Jewish world also. Divorce would be the classic example of where shaming someone worked very well. People would whisper "she is divorced" under their breath as if some horrible unspeakable monster had been let loose.  Poland is a mainly Catholic country  the fact that divorce was considered as a horrible demon had the effect on Jews that Jews also simply did not get divorced except under extreme circumstances.

when they throw out the Law of Moses

I noticed people have some kind of moral code automatically. I have long thought that when they throw out the Law of Moses they do not become free but rather adopt some other set of values with the same kind of emotional fervor that you see in religious fanatics. Just the fanaticism is directed in different directions.  

They adopt some other thing to be fanatic about.

The basic idea of Howard Bloom in his book the Lucifer principle,-- that is the centrality of the social organism and the fact that the social organism is formed and based on some social meme [unit of social information.]

 So to people throw out the Law of God and find some other meme to coagulate around.

s71   [S71 in midi format]

Musar Movement [Learning Ethics]

 In the Musar Movement of Reb Israel Salanter there was a subtle shift of emphasis from the axis of Musar during the Middle Ages to a new axis. In the Middle Ages the axis was a balance between Reason and Revelation. [That is Faith and Reason.]
The Musar Movement itself emphasized fear of God and good character traits. 
[Even though each one of the great Musar Yeshivas built by the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter all had a different focus, still the ground level  was these two principles--Fear of God and work on good character. 

No one really knows any more how they worked on character. You can try to dig up hint in the books that they wrote but it is not at all clear. Nowadays the most you have is a few minutes of learning Musar before Mincha and Maariv.   

I can not say I am very happy with this. The average session of Musar in the great Musar yeshivas was 40  minutes and 45 minutes.

But I am myself no "Baal Musar" If I could I would rather focus on the points brought out and emphasized by three individuals. The Gra, Reb Israel Salanter, and Rav Shach. That is these three points:(1) Learning Torah (2) Learning Musar (3) combining the Rambam with the Gemara.  [If possible it makes sense to make a commitment to learning Gemara an hour every day and Musar and the Tur, Beit Joseph in such a way as to get through the basic material from cover to cover, every last word.What one does not understand in this world he will understand in the next world.] The Talmud itself ought to be done with Tosphot and the Mahrasha. That is to have one session in which you keep at the same Tosphot for days and weeks until it starts to become clear.

The fundamental problem with yeshivas

The fundamental problem with yeshivas involves the difference between them and let's say for example medical school. The difference is one trains doctors and thus asks government funding. The other asks for public money for what reason? To enable people to learn Torah.

Therefore for yeshivas there is no excuse to throw out people that are there to learn Torah. The fact that they do throw out people shows they are not in fact existing to provide a place for people who want to learn Torah, but rather to make money by providing a show of learning Torah. 


You could throw out all modern day yeshivas and not lose a thing. They are mostly all scams using the show of Torah to make money. But still there are places that are magnets for sincere people like Ponovitch and the great NY yeshivas, Chaim Berlin, Mir, Torah VeDaat. 


Since the religious are using Torah to make money, the Torah has no effect on their character except to make them worse and then when people see them acting like jerks (as is their custom), that gives people a bad impression about the holy Torah itself. That is called in Hebrew a חילול השם "a desecration of the Divine Name."


[For the sake of being fair there are offshoots of Ponovicth that are admirable. That is people that learned there and then went on to start their own Beit Midrash elsewhere. Same with the NY yeshivas. Just for one example of a yeshiva I was impressed with is the place of Rav Montag in Netivot which definitely had the real spirit of Torah as far as I could tell. 


 I should mention Rav Freifeld's place in Far Rockaway which I felt had the spirit of Torah very strongly and the level of learning was very high. It starts with beginners but reaches into very high levels of learning.
I should mention that I am allowed to write this because:

Shaming people is a permissible tactic. In the book on laws of slander by Israel Meir Hakohen he makes a distinction if it is for obligations between man and his fellow man and obligations towards God. See chapter 4 and the difference between there and ch 7.
מפרסמים את הרשעים מפני חילול השם There seems to be some difference between shaming for sins that are between man and fellow man an sin between God and man. The later case has clear permission from the book on slander by Israel Meir HaKohen in ch 4 as long as the sin is not just a one time event but done on purpose on a constant basis and private rebuke has done nothing.

USA

The USA is the result of a kind of ideological movement started by Hobbes and John Locke. It had a basis in Aquinas and Maimonides in terms of natural law. The very essence of American identity is bound up and tied with these thinkers.

What people are complaining about on this blog is the kind of Leftism based on Rousseau.

The difference is vast. But one thing that does stand out is Rousseau does not have any human rights. He has only the General Will. That is his center of gravity. To John Lock the beginning point is the rights of the individual.
But these rights are not more than the Ten Commandments translated from what one  person can not do to another to being right that the individual has not to be stolen from. 

But the difference between rights to get free stuff and rights to be left alone has been obliterated in the USA.