Sometimes an idea is like a seed. You can plant it into someone and it takes root over time. It can be a trap

Sometimes an idea is like a seed. You can plant it into someone and it takes root over time. It can be  a trap or it can be fruitful.



You see this also in philosophy or any of the social pseudo sciences where people hear one idea and that idea acts like a seed that all subsequent ideas gather around to support and provide structure for.
 

 


But  to see why pushing off Devekut in order to learn Torah is a mistake see the anonymous commentary on the first four chapters of the Mishne Torah of the Rambam where he explains that the purpose of the mitzvot is to come to the higher fear and awe of God. Later I learned that people can learn Torah and still be bad. So I realized my mistake, but it was too late to return to Devekut.)


The orbit of different charismatic lunatics:
The basic layout of the religious world is god-kings. That is people that think of themselves as divine  and create a following of groupies  naive people. ]


I did have to figure out a basic approach that would make sense to me and what I found was the basic approach of Maimonides and the general constellation of Jewsih philosophers that agreed or  disagreed with him. That kind of Monotheistic approach --Reason and Revelation made the most sense to me. And this approach seems to encompass all good things .



I should mention that it is not that I figured this all out on my own. Rather I had great parents and teachers who had a kind of balanced world view. In what I saw in my home and at the Mir Yeshiva I saw a kind of approach to life that I think made the approach of Torah with menchlichkeit much more real than I would have been able to figure out on my own.

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There is a lot to discuss here. Examples of ideas that are like seeds are a dime a dozen. Every major system is based on one or two basic ideas and then the whole system is made around them.
(Sometimes a system is based on a few conflicting ideas.) Some examples off hand.

(1) Learning Torah. This was the central idea at Shar Yashuv and the Mir in NY.
(2) Secular Education is the redemption of Mankind. That is the Enlightenment idea.
(3) The Golden Rule.
(4) Ding an Sich. The modest idea of Kant that there is a difference between what things really are and how they seem to be. This idea gave birth to German Idealism and that contained great things and terrible things.