I was reminded about the book Or Israel [The Light of Israel] on Rav Israel Salanter by his disciple Rav Isaac Blazer that had a powerful effect on me. I was thinking what was it? The basic thesis of the book is that the fear of God is the key to everything--all good in the world to come and to Torah. I was struggling with Gemara at the Mir and I think that that was part of the effect this book had on me. It was giving me the key to come to understand Torah--and that is by fear of God which comes by learning Musar. And even more so, it was showing that all good in the world to come is dependent on fear of God. People are not automatically moral. Rather--as Michael Huemer puts it, people are basically Amoral. They just learn to talk in moral terms but what really matters to them is not right and wrong what so ever. Only very few individuals have any real moral sense and because of them, others gain some vague sense of morality. [Kelley Ross would put it differently. He would say the people know moral principles but do not know that they know. This is Socratic ignorance that we do not know consciously what we really deep inside do know. Our knowledge need to be brought into the open like the slave boy that did in fact know the answer to an geometric problem but did not know that he knew until Socrates by careful questioning brought his knowledge into the open.
[But I should add just for the sake of disclose that I basically try to walk as much as I can in the path of my parents who were Reform Jews. That is I long for the the straight path of Torah, but I think the so called "religious" have nothing to do with Torah at all and if anything are on teh opposite extreme from Torah. All except teh straight Litvak yeshivot.]
