path of Torah and how to accept "the yoke of Torah"

What makes it hard to recommend the path of Torah is the problem of the cults and kelipot that people automatically get involved with when they think they are coming to Torah. That makes the whole endeavor highly undesirable, and it defeats the whole purpose. After all, what do people learn when they imagine they are coming to Torah? The first lesson is to ignore one's parents. Next is to learn mysticism of the unclean realm as you can see on the faces of the people themselves. They get that Zombie look after a short time. Next is to despise the State of Israel and all secular Jews.
After all that, it is hard to see what possible benefit they could have out of the whole thing-- once they have lost their basic human decency.

So the basic issue is simple. How does one go about accepting the yoke of Torah in a way that does not lead to negative outcomes?   There seem to be only two ways. To learn at home as much as possible, Gemara, Rashi, Tosphot, Avi Ezri. Or to start an authentic Litvak yeshiva where bad influences are terminated with extreme prejudice.

If you are learning at home, I found a great way of doing Gemara, that is a עמוד [half page] per day with Rashi, Tosphot, Maharasha and Maharam. Also if you do get through Shas that way,  then do the Yerushalmi.

[There is a problem with time distribution. Taking the Rambam' four fold path of learning the Oral and Written Law plus Physics and Metaphysics, the question arises about time commitment. Each subject in itself requires a great deal of time.] [That is the 10,000 hours rule. That is: to become even half way decent in any of these subject takes 10,000. That is why Authentic Litvak yeshivas have their four year cycle. That end up being around 10,000 hours. Same goes for Physics.]

It would be the 12th day of the Omer today if you go by the molad. That would make April 11 the first day of peach. This is only to Tosphot in Sanhedrin. Most people think the present day Hebrew calendar was set up when there was real semicha but there i no record of that in the Gemara. And letters of the geonim have dates in them that do not correlate to today's calendar. To me it seems clear it was adopted during the middle of the geonic period. But with no semicha there is nothing to make it valid. 

There is a lot to be learned from the Ari''zal however all the cults that pretend to teach him are in fact teaching the approach of the Shatz and his false prophet Nathan of Gaza. This is how the Sitra Achra the Dark Realm got into the religious world. I

"Around and around go the wicked." [סביב רשעים יתהלכון] (Psalms) You go from one thing to the other. You find Torah and then some group comes along and says, "Yes, keep Torah. But if you join us, you will do it so much better." 
And then one  goes and joins that cult. And then find it to be  a cult and finds some other  group or ideal and around and around he or she goes for years on end.

The way to be saved from this kelipa is by trust in God. To believe where you are --physically and spiritually--is where you are supposed to be. What is is what ought to be.


It is my tendency to be like this by nature--to investigate new things. But I am not alone in this. However the flaw in this is that cult and kelipot and dark side forces are not always obvious at first. They often cloth themselves with clothing of righteousness while the inner essence is evil.  

And in any case Litvak Yeshiva world where authentic true unadulterated Torah is learnt and kept in fact has numerous flaws, which do cause people to seek the Truth elsewhere.

[In any case, at some point I settled on the Gra  to "learn Torah." This makes the most sense to me as the set of paths that contains in it the proper paths that gives the right guidance, but is not too open to allow all things.] [This idea of learning Torah is defended by Reb Chaim from Voloshin in the book Nefesh HaChaim.]]

What it means to learn Torah is basically expressed well in Lithuanian yeshivas, Gemara, Rashi, Tosphot,  and Avi Ezri of Rav Shach but along with that I add Physics and Math mainly because of my parents and the Rambam.  (I admit that if it was only my parents, I might not pay that much attention as I should. [There is that spirit of rebellion against parents which minimizes the authority of parents sadly enough.] But there is the Rambam that puts Physics and Metaphysics into the category of the Oral Law. I know that each these subjects takes time and along with that there I the issue of a vocation. Still I try to set up my day in a way that I  get at least a mall amount of each of these essential vitamins.   Musar I should add gives one the basic practical aspects of the Oral Law

It is hard to explain why the school of thought of Reb Chaim Soloveitchik and Rav Shach is so important. The basic reason is that it is hard to actually see what is going on in the Gemara without them.  There is a lot of depth in the Gemara that is easy to miss with them.
[There is a lot to be learned from the Ari''zal however all the cults that pretend to teach him are in fact teaching the approach of the Shatz and his false prophet Nathan of Gaza. This is how the Sitra Achra the Dark Realm got into the religious world. I could document this but it is easy enough to look up if you have the stomach for it. That is the reason the Gra puts that whole cult into excommunication. ]

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Jewish Cults:They cloak themselves with outer signs of Jewishness in order to hide their moral perversions.

In the religious world the main thing is to avoid the cults. And the closer they seem to Torah the more dangerous they are.

Not enough attention is given to the problem of "masit umadiach" one who attempts to seduce another person into worship of an idol.
For  that is what the cults try to do in the disguise of Torah.

In Torah there is no such thing as a  proposition or a mysticism being ninety-nine point nine percent right, and point one percent novelty or error. It is either all or nothing, as the stakes are simply too high for anything else.  Teaching doctrines that are not of Torah in addition to Torah is just as bad and worse as not teaching Torah at all.
These obviously good and well  meaning people  start with half-truths. 
One minor example is that the Torah teaches Monotheism, that God is One and He created the world ex-nihilo something from nothing. That is, He is not the world and the world is not Him. But the problems with the cults only start with perversions of faith. They cloak themselves with outer signs of Jewishness in order to hide their moral perversions. 
And you can not walk into any place or building of their's without being infected. Their power is like that of a barnacle that attaches itself to a male crab and injects a kind of enzyme that makes it think it is  a female, and thus goes and digs a hole in the sand for its eggs. But it has no eggs. But the barnacle sure does.

Better yet. Instead of avoiding the cults, destroy them. Take them out. 

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Having the English Soncino was a big help and for my first five years I used that as an aid.

I do not have any magic system towards learning. When I was in yeshiva I found  certain people helped me to understand the Gemara. That was the Tosphot HaRosh, the Maharsha and the Pnei Yehoshua. I did not feel in any way ready for the big leagues like Reb Haim Soloveitchik though that was the bread and butter for most people. Having the English Soncino was a big help and for my first five years I used that as an aid. Having a good learning partner is also a great help. But when it came to Physics I did not really have any idea how to get started. It seemed a lot depended on finding the right book for me. But in terms of Physics, one way I managed to get through my courses at Polytechnic Institute of NYU was by a method I had seen mentioned by the Ari (Rav Isaac Luria Ashkenazi) and the Ramchal of saying the words forwards and backwards. This was an amazing help for me, and and I think once a person has gone through a book a few times straight with no review, then it is  a good idea to go back to review it with this method. I think a lot of people give up on it because they are not aware of the method by which they could open the lock.


[For fast learning what I did for a while was to do a half a page per day with Rashi Tosphot, Maharash and Maharam. That was for fast learning and only took about 40 minutes per day. I do not recall if I was learning also with my learning partner at the time. That would have been in a different session and his path was to stay on it until it was clear. We learned only about an hour a day, but he refused to budge until every last detail was clear. I think the average time on one Tosphot with him was about two or three months [sometimes more -up to I think six months.] He used to think up the most amazing questions with seemingly no effort, and sometimes great answers also. Some of the answers on questions in my two books on the Gemara I came up with only after years of thinking about his questions.][e.g. Bava Metzia page 97, the answer to the question there I thought of only after learning Rav Shach's treatment of the Gemara in Nida page 2b. The learning with my learning partner stopped after Bava Metzia page 104 but then picked up again later when we did the Gemara in Sanhedrin 63 and other Gemaras.]