the baali teshuva /newly religious.

The religious world was putting forth great effort to get Jews to be religious. [In the sense of keeping trivial rituals at the expense of the more weighty factors  like honoring one's parents.] [Certainly no religious organization was interested in strengthening one's observance of that mitzvah.] But there was more about it that was odd. No one has documented much of the spiritual abuse and the taking advantage of the baali teshuva [''newly religious'']. Maybe it is the prohibition of ''Lashon Hara'' [slander]?

But the main focus seems to have been to create  a slave caste to support the  supposedly superior "frum [religious] from birth". The whole thing reeked of hypocrisy and fraud until it gave a bad name to the holy Torah.
For themselves they would encourage and parade family values, but for baali teshiva
they would encourage their wives to divorce them, and the sexual abuse of the children from those marriages was rampant in the frum world. While pretending holiness and higher moral standards they would  act like the most depraved of humans.  I have long sought for a reasonable explanation of this phenomenon, and the best I could find was the influence of the Shatz and that whole movement that the Gra put into excommunication.

[It is not to say that the Litvak world [Yeshiva World based on the Gra] is immune. Just the opposite. They allowed elements from those movements to get inside, and thus partake of many of the flaws of fraud and spiritual uncleanliness.

So the solution, I imagine, would be simply to pay attention to the excommunication of the Gra. That would seem to be obvious. But for some reason, this obvious solution is ignored except by Rav Silverman in the Old City of Jerusalem and to some degree Ponovitch.

Appendix:
Rav Zilverman is the Rosh Yeshiva of Aderet Eliayhu which is the first yeshiva to specifically do everything according to the Gra. Since then, others have started. Ponovitch tends towards that approach also much more so than any American Yeshiva.

T47 E flat major That is a celesta in the middle. All the songs in these pieces are original in the sense that they have never been written or heard before. But in everything after the E and G series I look at old tunes from the Renaissance or later and change them in ways that make sense to me. [The original tune is in the bass clef.] So I am not claiming they are original. Nor am I claiming Divine inspiration. I am no Mozart. I simply like to write music and I love to rite music and to me this is the peak of my life. I was doing this a long time before I could share anything with others on the internet. Now I am grateful to God that He allows me to share. But I am not making any claims to originality. I definitely borrow  and then change in ways that make sense to me.

 I also tried for years to play Mozart's and Bach scores on a violin and this way I gained some small amount of ideas of how they would develop a theme. And sometimes I try to use make use of their ideas. Again I make no claim to originality.  My only claim is I am grateful to God that he grants to me to write Music and also to share it.

And I am sorry if I do not have the names of all the people I owe the original ideas of these pieces to. Mainly they are Renaissance [Italy] and also Irish and German. I try to avoid this problem the books on the Gemara where in most cases I gave credit to my learning partner [David Bronson] when an idea was his. But credit goes to him anyway because before I learned with him I had no ideas in the Gemara at all. Learning with him kind of awakened that aspect in me.

Nice article on Martin Luther

I had heard of this opinion [that is mentioned in that article--the Holocaust being mainly derived from Luther]  before, but I had not been aware of the evidence behind the thesis. My own opinion is that Pauline Christianity tends to waver between two extremes, abidance with the Law and then nullification of the Law. This is the never ending dilemma of Christianity which comes to full force in Luther.  

"You owe nothing to God except faith and confession. In all other things He lets you do whatever you like. You may do as you please, without any danger of conscience whatsoever." (see Grisar, "Luther", vol. iv, p. 145).
...
"The body has nothing to do with God. In this respect one can never sin against God, but only against one's neighbour" (W12, 131).³

"It does not matter what people do; it only matters what they believe." "God does not need our actions. All He wants is that we pray to Him and thank Him." Even the example of Christ Himself means nothing to him. "It does not matter how Christ behaved--what He taught is all that matters" (E29, 196), is Luther's subtle distinction.




[My point of view is the anti law approach is simply unfounded and mistaken. To me it is of greatest importance to keep the Law, The written Law and its oral explanation {that is the Torah and the two Talmuds}.The best way to understand the Gemara in a straightforward way is to learn the books on Ethics from the Middle Ages which explain the basic emphasis of the Torah on good character and fear of God.] 

the religious world

I  can not look it up, but I recall that the beginning of the book of Isaiah  starts on rather a negative note. It is just the opposite of what you would normally expect from Isaiah. You would think it would start on some positive theme  But instead he sounds like Jeremiah. His point is Jerusalem which ought to be a faithful city had become full of pus. From this we can see a parallel to the world of the religious today. That is the name "Jerusalem" is made up of two words. יראה שלמה. Perfect Fear of God. So when a person joins the religious world and expects to find encouragement to fear God and serve him faith fully instead he finds it is "full of pus" and is "infected from foot to head," as Isaiah puts it.
Thus there is no choise but to avoid the religious world as much as possible and buy oneself a Gemara, a few books of Ethics {Musar}, and the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach [which is as deep, but more self explanatory than the חידושי הרמב''ם ] and to learn Torah at home.
The problem is the religious world seems to have some kind of infectious disease that one picks up just by being around them.  
Unless one is in the vicinity of an authentic Litvak yeshiva, then there is nothing to gain by association with the insane religious. The idea that problems with the religious world is infectious can be understood in light of Toxo-plasmosis. This is juts the first of its kind to be discovered, but it is probable there are millions of such parasites that can jump from person to person to infect others with bad thoughts and false idea. This is like the parasite that can make  a male crab believe it is female and then it goes about digging a place in the sand to bury its eggs. One can go a step further and postulate that a social meme has this same characteristic as the ToxoPlasmosis parasite. It face the same challenge-- it can only reproduce in humans and thus faces a challenge how to get inside of humans? (I know this is a stretch-to say the super-organism ha a mind of its own but this seems to be the way Howard Bloom look at it in hi book the Lucifer Principle)






[Though the groups that follow Reb Nachman are in the same boat, still it is refreshing to see that Reb Nachman himself brought attention to this problem as the Na Nach groups points out. The drawback is that as much as one gains from Reb Nahman's good advice, the eventual outcome is to leave off learning Torah.]

T44 C Major  t44 in midi

essence of Torah

I do not have enough spiritual sense to be able to claim the absolute truth. Truth as in TRUTH. But I do have enough of that kind of sense to be able to tell quality when I see it and to be able to discern fraud.So I do want to share some of the valuable ideas I have see around.
One thing is the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach. More than any other book I have seen that is the one set that contains the essence of Torah in crystallized form. I saw in my parents the path of Torah of balance-- i.e. Torah with Derech Erertz [That is "to be a mensch"decent human being--with good character and being self sufficient].  Their path as more or less the way of the Rambam with his four fold program of learning the Oral Law, the written Law, Physics and Metaphysics. In Reb Nachman I saw a wealth of great ideas --that is: particular pieces of advice, but all a vision of Torah that makes full use of his predecessors to create tapestry or a vast fresco of Torah. That is he weaves together the Tenach and Talmud with the Ari to create an amazing vision of what Torah is suppose to be about. That is not to give any kind of agreement with the group that supposedly go by his teachings. {Visionary would be a good word for Reb Nachman.}

[Among his good ideas are: (1) talking with God in one's own language. That is the real essence of prayer. (2) Avoidance of doctors. (3) Making an importance issue out of the kind of fast learning mentioned in Gemara and later books of Musar.]

Reb Israel Salanter had two disciples Isaac Blazzer, and the Madragat HaAdam. Both have written really amazing Musar books. The Madragat HaAdam is mainly about trust in God with no effort. If only I could come to that! But at least I am happy to be reminded about that. [A second book by Isaac Blazzer came out recently of his writings after he wrote the אור ישראל.]

Something strange is going on.

I seem to have trouble when it comes to learning Torah. It is as if there is some hidden obstacle(s).
The last day of Pesach was when a rosh yeshiva was having the last meal before the end of Pesach and I did not attend. That blew my chance of marrying his daughter. . Then getting back to Israel finding myself thrown out of every yeshiva that I attempted to sit and learn in got me to wonder if it is החרב המתהפכת לשמור דרך עץ החיים the fiery sword that guards the path to the Tree of Life. The truth is the obstacles to Torah for me are from so many directions that tend to wonder what is it all about?

Something strange is going on. So to some degree I found a kind of compromise by going with the opinion of the Rambam who advocates a four fold path of learning Torah (Oral and Written), Physics and Metaphysics. [The Polytechnic Institute of NYU I went to and majored in Physics]
Still something strange is going on. It is almost as if, even when I manage to get my hands on a book of Torah, that it does not take long until I lose it, or something happens in some way that I can not use it. Maybe I just do not have the merit to learn. Something always happens. So to cherish and love every word of Torah that I can manage to learn is my goal. To at least appreciate it from afar like a long lost love, and being aware that it can easily be taken away from me in the blink of an eye.

Maybe it is just some kind of test? But who knows? Or perhaps it is just a simple way of getting me to pay attention to the Rambam about the importance of Physics and Metaphysics along with learning the Oral Law (Two Talmuds) and the Written Law. If that was the idea, I would have to say that it was effective. Eventually I began to see the importance of the Rambam's four fold path.

The simplest way of understanding this is that it is the battle of the memes, units of social information. Every set tries to get a hold of as many people as possible in order to promulgate itself.

Even specific sins do this.