Authentic Torah as opposed to religious con men

Religious teachers are the last people to decide what Torah is. .


When talking about Judaism, they are in fact talking about Jewish culture, not about Torah the Oral and Written Law. To conflate or mix up the two is stupid.

Woe to the innocent fools that go to religious teachers for advice..

To religious teachers  religion is about ritualistic behavior and Jewish culture. This appeals to people that are slightly schizo-typal personalities. To others it is all about culture.

To me Torah is about Torah--the oral and written law. Period.

Too many religious teachers are con men that are talented at getting people to believe there is some good deed involved in giving them money. It is because largely they are born into this scam. Their fathers made money by means of using the Torah, so they have to continue in this fraud.

This is very different from those people who in fact learn and teach Torah for its own sake as you find in Lithuanian kinds of yeshivas. But how to tell the difference I am not sure. Or how to give an accurate sign? I experienced the real thing, authentic Torah-in my first two yeshivas Shar Yashuv and the Mir in NY. So I should have been able to tell the difference between the real thing and the frauds and scam artists. But I was not. I am overly naive. Here is a good link to an essay on cults
[These are important ideas that were around in the 1960's but that did not stop problems. Warnings that people did not heed.]

authentic Torah

There is little idea of authentic Torah nowadays. People think authentic Torah is rituals. This gives power to schizo personalities to dominate. After all if Torah is mainly about rituals, then who better to be  a leader that someone who does long hard rituals? That is the nature of the schizo personality.
They love love hard rituals.

Or perhaps an idiot savant who can memorize  a whole library of books without understanding a word? Or who can write tons of religious fanaticism? Hyper-graphia  also being a characteristic of schizo personalities.

Believe me these are all examples of what is considered an authentic Tzadik {saint} nowadays.

Authentic Torah is found only in Litvak yeshivas. And what is that. It is a hybrid. The original idea of a yeshiva was begun by Reb Chaim from Voloshin [disciple of the Gra] . This was a radical departure from anything that had come before. It was an institution independent of the city it was located in. It was in no way subject to the home owners nor the Rav of the city. Its job was to learn Talmud , the Oral Law.
Independently  began the Musar movement [Ethics movement]. The idea there was to learn Musar Ethics. That idea did not take off at all for home owners. But it was by certain yeshivas. Thus certain yeshivas became all about ethics. So at that point we have two kinds of yeshivas. The Gra type for Talmud alone and the Musar type for mainly Ethics and some Talmud. The Modern Litvak Yeshiva is a hybrid of these two types.  Good examples are Ponovitch, Brisk, Mirrer in NY, Chaim Berlin, Torah VeDaat.

If you are near a Litvak place, then learn there. It does not have to be all day. In fact, when I was in Netivot I went to Rav Montag's place for an hour in the morning and an hour at night and Thanks to God made some good progress even in that short time. [Rav Montag is a disciple of Issachar Meir the friend of Bava Sali]
If you are an organized person you could learn a fast session for one hour  and another slow in depth session another hour and that would only take two hours per day and the rest of the day you could go surfing.
[If I had not gone to yeshiva in NY would not know how to learn. It would not make any difference how smart I am. I would have thought all the false paths were OK. ]