The evil inclination does not come to a person saying to do a sin. Rather it comes saying "Let's go and do some good deed."

Reb Nahman had a whole set of lessons that he said over on the statements of Raba in Bava Batra. The very first lesson of his book deals with the events that Raba said over about how he was once on a sea voyage and the sailors told him about the nature of the kind of wave that sinks ships. "They seem," they said "like a streak of white lightening at the top. But if one hits them with a stick on which the names of God are written,  that causes them to calm down."

From this Reb Nahman derived the idea that the evil inclination usually does not come to a person saying to do a sin. Rather it comes saying "Let's go and do some good deed." That is the evil inclination wants to seem white and pure.

The first time I saw this idea was in the commentary of the Gra on Mishlei on the verse זבחי שלמים עלי היום שילמתי נדרי "Today I sacrificed peace offerings. I fulfilled my vows." That is: the evil inclination starts out asking one to do a good deed.

The exact details however are not clear to me--that is how to go about evaluating the situation. As a general rule, I think the best idea is that of Rav Israel Salanter--to learn the basic set of Musar books to get a clear idea of what the Torah actually requires of one--in a practical day to day sense.

My father [Philip Rosten (Rosenbloom)]

My father [Philip Rosten (Rosenbloom)] was a hard act to follow. As his sister put it, "He was the 'Golden Boy.'" No matter what he did, he was great at it. It did not matter what it was. Being a father, a husband, a scientist working to put satellites with laser communications into orbit, violinist, etc.--Even business and the stock market.
My own interests were more in music and philosophy. But I still had an unconscious desire to do as well as him and/or better.
Now I realize that he had specific talents--not just over-all talents. I mean to say he had two kinds of talent. One kind was a general ability to excel at anything. The other kind was talent in specific areas.

[I realize also that people have made intelligence tests more sophisticated in that they do seem to be able to measure general intelligence better than they used to.]
[So it is likely that they can measure intelligence, but not specific areas of intelligence very well.]


What I mean to bring here is the idea of walking in the path of one's parents is a good idea unless the parents were on a prima facie (obviously)  evil path.


I my own case,following his footsteps  going to Cal Tech did not seem much of a possibility. But there were other areas where he had excelled in that I think I might have tried.

[You however do not see this idea mentioned much in the Gemara I think because the Gemara is thinking that many times one's parents are not very worthy of emulation..]

overwhelming religious interest is the sign of schizoid personality.

Robert Sapolsky {Stanford} brings the idea that overwhelming religious interest is the sign of  schizoid personality.

This seems to account for a common-place observation about the unreliability and general lack of sanity among such groups.

The issue is not the importance of religious value. Let's take it for granted that closeness with God is important. Rather the issue is that for every area of value there is an equal and opposite area of value. And since this world is mostly evil as the Ari (Isaac Luria) says, therefore the tendency is for religious people to fall into the Sitra Achra even if their intentions are pure.

[The idea here I think I did not state clearly.  Let me rephrase this: There is a spectrum of values. When or if they decay, they decay into their opposite. When some area of value is not so great, then it decays into something not so bad. But when a holy area of value decays, it becomes something really horrific.  ]


Thus learning Torah and trust in God are important, however self reliance also is--that is not to be relying on other people's handouts.

People that make their living off of Torah are often of this schizoid type. To add to the problem they also desire power and demand others pay their way.

music file U51

U-51 D Flat Major

U-47 E Minor

So cults that worship people I think should be avoided. This obviously was the point of the Gra when he put his signature on the letter of excommunication.

I think the secular world does not make much distinction between religious values. From the secular view it is all the same. Not much more than a waste of time. [Except for the Kant Fries school and Hegel to whom religious value is highly significant.]
But in the Old Testament a distinction is made between different kinds of religious value.
For example in Deuteronomy we find [Perek 13] the paragraph concerning the מסית ומדיח one who suggests the worship of another being that is not the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob.

The verse says that if one person, even a close family member says to you "Let's go and serve some other god," then that person must be put to death.

I did about a year's amount of work on the Gemara in Sanhedrin which deals with the issue of idolatry in order to get the subject straightened out in my mind and I pretty much came to the conclusion  that worship of human beings counts as idolatry just as much as worship of sticks and stones.
So cults that worship people I think should be avoided. This obviously was the point of the Gra when he put his signature on the letter of excommunication.

Philosophy is relevant because of politics and economics and morals. Getting philosophy wrong means that one will get each of these other three things wrong. And if enough people get all those three things wrong things can get really off.

The major problem in Philosophy today I think is really concentrated in deciding between three areas. One is Dr Kelley Ross (CA) of the Kant-Fries School. Another is Hegel and the third is the intuitionsts people like Dr Huemer in Colorado and Brian Caplan [which stems from Thomas Reid, and G.E Moore].
The rest of twentieth century so called philosophy [Linguistic and or so called analytic] is definitely defunct and as Dr John Searle {Berkley} puts it so eloquently:  "It is obviously false."

The Medieval development of Plato and Aristotle as we see in the Rambam, Anselem, and Aquinas seems also important and highly relevant [as Dr Edward  Feser (CA) makes note of].

There is a lot I need to learn here. But just off hand it seems to me that Hegel, Dr Ross are not so far apart.  But Hegel was in fact hijacked so some like Karl Popper blamed him for totalitarian systems that used his name.--Marx for example. But I think a close look at Hegel will show he was much closer to the American political system than is known.



Philosophy is relevant because of politics and economics and morals. Getting philosophy wrong means that one will get each of these other three things wrong. And if enough people get all those three things wrong things can get really off. 

So getting it right is important even if one does not have a natural interest in it.