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A lot depends on the social meme. There are social memes that bring out the worst in people, and other ones which tend to bring out the best. A lot of the good in the West I think was a result of combining a lot of good ideas together into one social meme--that is the unique combination of the Middle Ages of combing reason and revelation. This was not at all obvious as being a good thing as Hippolytus and Kierkegaard went in quite a different direction. But some time after Plotinus this began to be an accepted approach. It is well accepted that Paul got most of his ideas from Philo so the idea of combing faith with reason is an early approach. In any case whether because of Maimonides or Anselm, the basic approach is unique to the West. And this I think brings out the best in people across  the board. 

To a large degree I accept this approach of Maimonides though a lot of people disagreed with it.
But in my effort to combine Reason with Revelation I found a certain amount of difficulty. One is this: In the Rambam Maimonides program one learns the Written and Oral Law completely and also Physics and the Metaphysics of Aristotle. The trouble for me is that after the first hour in the morning i have trouble concentrating on the mathematics that is a necessary component of Physics. So I try to devote the first hour to that since without doing so, I would not be able to learn at all. Another issue for me is in understanding the Rambam. So I found that when I had a copy of the Avi Ezri that it was helpful to go through it straight because  frankly with that most of what the Rambam says in Mishna Torah is incomprehensible to me. 

A lot of how one's life goes depends on prior commitment. Ideally this should happen on the 13th birthday for boys and the 12th for girls.  The idea is to commit oneself to follow the Law of God the Written and Oral Law of Moses.
Another way of putting this to to follow God, the truth and the moral law. In any case, if one missed the chance to do that then, still every day at its beginning gives  new opportunity to do this. That means one can follow what he knows to be right of what people around him think is right.

Bob Dillon did this commitment type of thing and devoted himself to the prince of this world, which accounts for his success in this world.Often success in this world can be attributed to the person having made commitment to the prince of this world at a young age.  [Or the divinity that is found in this world--which is Satan.]

To some degree I think I made a good choice to try to find the "Truth" which at an early age. A bad decision was I think when I got married with Leah, that I did not make learning Torah the goal of our marriage. I think that that lack of commitment in the very beginning caused the problems that came later. Still I have never been able to get back to learning Torah as being the goal of life because of the kinds of people that populate that section of humanity.So my own doubts have lead to a lack of commitment. I found some compromise with the Rambam that as such that Physics and Metaphysics are part of that goal of learning Torah


My immediate motivation for this essay was that I noticed Bob Dillion's commitment to the Sitra Achra which gave him his success. Also I saw an essay on the problem in the Left of not making a distinction between means and ends. It hit me right then that that was something i should have done at the very beginning of my marriage.

Maybe I was myself confused about that issue. After all learning Torah as the goal does not really come up until Reb Haim from Voloshin. You just do not see it beforehand stressed in the same way. And that I think led to my own falling from that ideal.

There are rules about how to treat slaves. There were places where slaves were not treated well, and for those places it is good that slavery was abolished. 
There is nothing wrong with slavery if one obeys the rules about how to treat slaves. The rules are well defined in Exodus 22. The War on the South was a War against the Torah.

Same goes with serfs--as long as serfs were treated right. But freeing the serfs in Russia did nothing to hep the serfs who suffered the most after that. Not just in the Russian Revolution, but even immediately  condition deteriorated considerably.

[However there were places where serfs were not treated well. But then the remedy would have been to enforce laws about their treatment.]


Serfdom in Europe was due to an arrangement made by people. After the fall of Rome, Europe was in chaos. You had random bands of criminals just basically going around and looting and raping and murdering. To remedy that situation, people became serfs around a feudal lord around his castle. In exchange, they gave a percentage of their crops to the lord. That is what is nowadays known as taxes.
That is-serfdom was a negotiated deal.

Nowadays, white people in the USA are working to support blacks without any kind of reimbursement or exchange. That is the basic definition of slavery. This is the welfare system. Where are the black protet against this kind of slavery?

The Bible is not primarily concerned with politics

The Bible is not primarily concerned with politics. In fact, politics was mainly a subject in ancient Greece where individual towns had to decide on some form of  a constitution. In other places, where there were monarchs, this issue rarely came up..

Still in history you see the issue come up from time to time. In fact in ancient Persia this was an issue right at the time of the rise of the Four Kings. To Herodotus, one of the options the ruling elite were considering in Persia was the approach of Democracy. In Rome obviously this was an important issue in the founding of Rome as an independent state. So they came up with their balance of powers between the plebeians and the Patricians  who were part of the Senate. But the plebeians were anything but an unprotected class.

In any case, in the Roman Empire, politics faded and also in Europe. But in place of politics came Law. Justinian and the Visigoth Code.

And in the Torah world, defining the Law of Moses --what books should be included in the canon became an important issue during the Roman Empire. And also defining what the practice of Torah is. But politics was basically untouched except for the rule דינא דמלכותא דינא- ''The law of the state is the law.''
Only in modern times has politics became a major issue uprooting even Torah for most Reform Jews. That is for most Reform Jews, Torah is optional, not obligatory-- while politics  --Social-Justice-- takes the place of Torah. That leaves most Reform Jews in a mild state of confusion --since "social justice" is rarely true justice. [Still, the Torah world itself is far from a state of justice either. It is highly abusive, and has been infiltrated by evil forces.]
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Just for public information I want to  add that in Torah there are two ways of choosing a monarch, One way is by an accepted prophet.  The other way is the Sanhedrin. The trouble is that neither exist today. Prophecy ceased as the Talmud says after the end of the first Temple.  And the Sanhedrin can only be made up from people that have authentic ordination from Sinai-- which the Talmud also says stopped during the period of the Talmud itself. [Ordination seems to have puttered out slowly.]

In Europe, the home owners were granted power by the princes over the Jewish community. That was called the Kahal. That existed until around 1800 when the kahal was nullified by the tzar. Sefardim were ruled by the local wise man, the local Torah scholar who was recognized as such by the authorities.

Today both these approaches seem poor. The best idea in my opinion is simply to support the State of Israel that look to me to be the most practical approach to creating stability and justice in  the Land of Israel. And this approach is what I recommend to anyone listening to me.

I am not ignoring the problems of being in Israel. I am just trying to give a short introduction to the issues involved. Often it can be unbearable and one is forced to leave just to be able to survive. Often you find yourself with neighbors  that will stop at nothing to get rid of you. So Israel can be a complicated subject. In particular it should be known that Sephardim will generally try to drive out any Ashkenazi Jew that tries to live near them. [It is worse if they are religious but this phenomenon exists even with secular Sephardim. They will always find some reason but the reason they find is always just an excuse. In reality they just do not want an Ashkenaiz near them.

Most cults today in fact derive their power by means of falsifying definitions.

The basic "meme" (unit of social information) of Litvak yeshivas is just one thing: Learn Torah.
The basic emphasis on this comes from the Gra.

The trouble here is that different groups try to jump on the bandwagon by "fudge words." That is: they try to redefine that the word "Torah" means.

And in truth, it is hard to get a good closed definition with a clear boundary. What you want to do is to have a definition such that everything inside the definition is Torah,-- and everything outside of it is not. Otherwise the very concept itself of learning Torah is meaningless. It can mean whatever any conniving charlatan wants it to means. Most cults today in fact derive their power by means of this falsifying of definitions.

In a way this is relevant to what I was thinking yesterday to bring up the concept of ספרים חיצוניים which is the Rif and Rosh means books that explain the Torah not according to the Chazal {קבלת חז''ל}.

The importance of learning Torah depends entirely on the definition. To me the Rambam made this issue clear in one of his letters where he writes: כמו שאין תוספת וגירעון בתורה שבכתב כמו כן אין תוספת וגירעון בתורה שבעל פה. "Just as there is no adding or subtracting from the written Law so there is no adding or subtracting from the Oral Law." [In other words "Torah" is a closed set of books.]

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So, if you add these two factors together you get an important combination that cancels most cults. For most cults thrive on fudging the definition of "Torah" to change it into books that explain the Torah not according to Chazal but come up with their own explanations. And then they change the definition of outside books from  "books that explain the Torah not according to Chazal but come up with their own explanations" into books of Science. Thus by fudging these two factors they change attempt to fool people into thinking that what they are doing is valid according to Torah.

Torah and Aristotle. While Saadia Gaon and the Rambam dealt with problems concerning the seeming contradiction between Torah and Aristotle still internal problems were not a major concern.

In Torah there are questions that come up  concerning the simple explanation. While Saadia Gaon and the Rambam dealt with problems concerning the seeming contradiction between Torah and Aristotle still internal problems were not a major concern. [In Aristotle himself]  The way to deal with a lot of the more obvious problems is usually resort to  the Ari. [The Ari is Neo Platonic. However of you look at the Reshash/ Sar Shalom Sharabi you will see that after the time of the revival of the dead the world will be like Aristotle. ] This has the advantage that you are not making the Torah to be allegories which is already the path that Philo used, and does not at all seem convincing. With the Ari rather there is the possibility of seeing how the Torah refers to realities that  are more real than this world. [At least this works for me.]

There is also an approach I borrow from the Kant school of thought as developed by Dr. Kelley Ross. That is: the world of the dinge an sich is simply not accessible to human intellect. Dinge an sich are all areas of a priori knowledge that do not come under the title of conditions of possibility of  experience [not possible experience. ]

So the question comes up how to learn the Ari without falling into the strange cults that claim him as their authority? That is : How to listen to the Gra, when everyone else seems to be ignoring him?

[Because of the great value of Dr Kelley Ross's ideas and Hegel's it would be a great idea to try to reconcile these two approaches.]

I learned in high school and later in yeshiva a good deal of Leftist literature. The Communist Manifesto in high school [on my own.] That was not assigned reading. In yeshiva between the morning and afternoon sessions, I read the major work of Sartre and read about Lenin. In high school, Camus was assigned reading. It is impossible to project myself now into my past and decide what I was thinking, but fro my actions I think it is clear that I was not impressed with Left wing thinking. I definitely was going more in the direction of the Rationalists--but had never gotten enough time to get into the debate between them and the Empiricists and to see how Kant tried to resolve it. In any case, even back then I think I had seen that there was something remarkably superficial about Left Wing thinking.

I might be attributing to myself more common sense than I have  a right to. Because what ever sense I had then seems to have abandoned me in later years when I more or less lest the straight Litvak yeshiva path.

It seems more likely to say I was impressed with my parents home and with the way American society was in those days. And I simply saw these alternative claims to making Utopia as being highly unrealistic.

In any case Leftist and Religious thinking always seemed to be about undermining social order and bringing about chaos so that they could come in and impose their own social order with them on top. Left wing thinking and the religious world both seem to me until this very day to be all about trying to destroy decent society and to bring about dis-stabilization so that they can impose their own authority
So even though I could discern the hidden authoritarian agenda of Left Wing Thinking I did not see this in the Jewish religious world, until too late.   But the agenda is the same. The means however are different. The claimed doctrines all seem to have the same purpose of breaking the ties that bond one with his parents and society in order to be able to come in later and impose their own authority.