Reform Judaism is not a cult. In fact it has some things right that Orthodox Judaism does not have.
(1) Monotheism. Orthodox Judaism has become a religion of pantheism which is opposed to the world view of the Torah and the Talmud and the Ari. That would be in addition to the pantheon of little gods they have.
(2) They are not opposed to the State of Israel and in fact do what they can to support it.. I have never heard of a Reform or Conservative person that was opposed to the State of Israel. I do  not look kindly on many Orthodox  who support the effort of the Muslims to wipe Israel off the map and drive the Jews into the ocean.
These are two important issues. When the  Ultra Orthodox  not just in word, but in deed try to bankrupt the State of Israel.
When  the  Ultra Orthodox support Islamic causes, they don't seem to realize that they are supporting people that have every intension of murdering Jews  like they have always done and seem to be intent on doing for the perceivable future.[What I mean is  the  Ultra Orthodox think they are just opposing the political contract of the State of Israel. They want to be under gentile rule. But they don't realize that gentile rule in Israel was never benign.]



(3) Reform lacks the astounding amount of child sexual abuse that goes on in the Orthodox world


The problem however is that for some reason Reform do not learn the much Mishna or Talmud. And even the Conservative do not make it a priority.
And the very idea of keeping the commandments is not on the radar scope of the Reform. Well at least the right wing of the Conservatives do better in terms of keeping mitzvas.

The major problem with Reform it they lack the numinous  aspect of Torah.




I think the Conservative movement is on the right track in terms of emphasizing the Talmud but also recognizing that reason and logic and science also are authorities in there areas.
At this point I would have to say that since the Orthodox seems to have problems with facts and reality that it has morphed into a cult. Orthodox have had plenty of time to get their act together, and just seem intent on getting more and more fanatic.

Kabalists in Israel

Kabalists in Israel. One way to tell if someone is fraud is by listening to them when they mention a subject you know something about. [They claim to knowledge in Talmud, but when they open their mouths the effect is spoiled] This test works for  other subjects as well. It was mentioned to me about a religious book called Genesis and the Big Bang. But it works for kabalah as well.
But the whole scene of kabalists in Israel is confusing. Perhaps it might be better to mention one at a time. I have forgotten so many it might be hard for me.
Perhaps a few names at first just to help me so some recall.
There was that fraud who prayed at the western wall every day for the sunrise minyan. He had the major characteristic of most kabalists in Israel that whatever personal likes and dislikes they have, they attribute it to Ruach Hakodesh (the divine spirit רוח הקודש).
There was that fellow in the old city who  had some connection with Rav Ashlag. But since he is not part of the Kabalah Center, people go to him for a Sabbath meal, and get a little spiritual inspiration. He is believe it or not a OK fellow. I would not exactly call him a kabalist along the lines of Bava Sali but he is a kosher person.

Then there are the  kabalists that learn Shalom Sharabi. They like to think that they are the real thing, but they too are just deluding themselves. And have all the normal character traits of frauds. And actuality believe anything they think is automatically the Divine Spirit. But in terms of knowledge of kabalah it seems to me that they are actually doing well. They take the Ari and the Reshash and do a rather rigorous examination of both. I have even heard from one friend in the old city that this Reb Yaakov actually knows an thing or two.
But none of these people are "up there."
  They are just looking in from the outside, and as usual filled with delusions of grandeur which seems to be part and parcel of anyone who touches the Zohar.
  Then there are all the kabalists that actual have some kind of spirits divine or otherwise.

  I have to say that they people are not really kabalists per say. They don't know much of the Ari or the Reshash. But they have something. It is what should be called trans-personal. It is not the divine spirit. but it is something. but they confuse it with the divine spirit. This is a trait of the religious world that they assume any spiritual manifestation buy a Jewish persona has to be from the Divine realm.

Then there are all the descendants of Bava Sali.

Bava Sali had great character but a lot of the miracles were a result of his character, not some kind of knowledge. But the flaw was that his knowledge was not perfect. He made mistakes about people and even the failed miracles are not advertised. There were times he said such and such a thing will happen that simply never came about.


Descendants of Bava Sali tend to have something of his spirit. I could mention a few. Rav Shimon Buso in Netivot, Reb David Abuchatzeira in Naharia, Moshe Buso in Jerusalem [somewhere in the vicinity of Rechov Shmuel HaNavi]. The daughter of Bava Sali, Avigail Buso. She definite has something like the Divine Spirit.

The book of Spinoza, the Ethics, was a companion of mine for all my years in high school. But eventually I started seeing some problems in his logic. There are good reasons I switched to Leibniz and Kant.
But as Jewish books go as far as ethics is concerned, the Ethics of Spinoza is powerful. 

The Ethics ("Musar") books of the Middle Ages e.g., The Duties of the Heart, are better than the Ethics. They avoid some of the problems you find in Spinoza. They are a little more modest about what we can know.




I forgot it, but I did have some way of defending Spinoza. I think it was something like this: What is an accident? Some characteristic of a substance. The difference between them is the substance is permanent and the accident can go away. A leaf can be green in spring and red in fall. But substances also change. In fact there is little that is permanent. What is it that these substances are accidents of?
It is this permanent substance that survives  all changes that Spinoza calls substance.
 This argument is what I used to try to defend Spinoza. Not that I am particularly happy with them but that at least we can understand what Spinoza was trying to get at.

Now if you want to give a critique on Spinoza, it would go like this. Even with this justification, that is still not a axiom. Typically an axiom in Geometry or Physics starts  with something self evident and almost trivial. For example if a=b, then b=a. You don't start with something highly counter intuitive and then try to make it into an axiom like "Nothing can affect a substance." [Even though philosophers do this all the time since Hume, it still just talking cleverly and making something dumb sound smart. ] For reasons like this. and several others(that Leibniz pointed out) I decided that Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, and Kant were closer to the truth.

\


Spinoza puts a condition of substance which almost forces his conclusion of Pantheism. 

 People claim for the Rambam the title of the greatest Jewish philosopher. Maybe he was, but the Guide for the Perplexed is the most perplexing book I have ever read.
They used to print it with the commentary of Joseph Albo. If you can get through it congratulations! I found it frustrating. And the medieval alchemy really bothered me.
But if you want to get to what Maimonides was saying without having to go through hell and back to find out, then the best book I ever saw is David Hartman's. And the Rav Kook Institute also had a very good edition of the Guide with a short but very good commentary.  Also Rav Kapach from Yemen had an edition based on the original manuscripts of the Guide with his own very deep commentary. If you have time I would recommend learning these and also Plato and Aristotle in order to have an idea of the issues that the Rambam was addressing in the Guide.

I have been challenged to write an essay about moral objectivity.. I have not read the essay on the Standford or Internet encyclopedia of philosophy.. [Whatever is there I am sure I could never write anything better than that.] But in the meantime, I just want to organize a few thoughts about this subject.
  First, Professor Michael Humemer does not use the idea of the fallacy of subjectivity in his essay because he knows that an outside statement about morality can be coherent as long as the statement itself is left outside the set of all moral facts.[As Moshe Israel Rosten noticed] 
  To defend Moral Objectivity I could in theory use  Professor John Searle's argument. [ Here is the web adress: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jsearle/] But his argument works really only against the idea that all knowledge is subjective. But some people don't say that. They say just moral facts are subjective. This is harder to defeat. (Moshe Israel Rosten pointed this out to me. This is because the moral relativist might accept there is objective truth but just not in the area of morality. For that you need the essay of Michael Huemer in Colorado http://www.owl232.net/objectiv.htm)

But I should mention that my interest in objective morality actually goes deeper than a challenge on the Internet. When I was learning Torah I certainly thought I had found one self consistent objective logical and reasonable system of morality and a unified coherent world view. That illusion has been smashed. In its place I have a philosophical system based on Kant and Plato that the Torah can be justified with.  But what I presently believe in does not really come anywhere near the grandeur of Torah and Talmud. So what I try to do is to fit the Torah into my present world view. But the whole process is like  the practice medicine used to be about a hundred years ago. It is a hodge podge of different things that seem to work with no unifying principle
At any rate Michael Huemer does a neat thing. It claims that also the claim of all moral values are subjective is alos incoherent in this way:


Since rational judgment presupposes some ground apart from the judgment on which for it to be based, the denial of objectivity implies the intrinsic impossibility of rational moral judgment, since said denial means that moral values cannot have any independent existence apart from the mind

"There is a systematic plan to establish an Islamist beach head in the United States with the eventual goal of watching the United States crumble from within and establishing Islamic rule in this country,"

Steve Emerson's 70-minute film, Jihad in America: The Grand Deception, was released on DVD last October. Emerson, who directs The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), says the documentary traces the roots of Islamism inside the United States and reveals the chilling reality about the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood.

"Our job is to change the Constitution of America," Sayyid Syeed, national director of the Office for Interfaith & Community Alliances for the Islamic Society of North America, says in the film. "There is a systematic plan to establish an Islamist beach head in the United States with the eventual goal of watching the United States crumble from within and establishing Islamic rule in this country," Doug Farah, a national security consultant and analyst, adds.
http://www.onenewsnow.com/media/2013/01/10/jihad-in-america-the-chilling-reality

My own comment on this is that America will not be able to fight an enemy as long as it does not acknowledge the fact that it is an enemy. America and the whole western world and Russia also ought to learn the difference between a friend and an enemy before it is too late. Even Russia needs to learn this.
This is not the same type of conflict as the cold war. That was a conflict between two powers each trying to prove to the other that they could make a decent and just society. This is not what Muslims are trying to do. They are trying by the power of money and oil to infiltrate and destroy Russia and the USA.
It does not help to go back in history to find people like Ibn Rushd, or al Farabi. The question is what is Islam today. The greatest threat to the survival of the human race in two million years. and a threat to the very existence of Planet Earth.
Muslims armed with atom bombs are just as much a threat to us all as Muslims armed with a 747 jet airliner. Even more so.

Kabalah? Is it for you?

I would like to defend the theses that it is better to leave the Zohar alone. But I would like to also say this with the understanding that often there are very good insights into the Torah which you can find in the Zohar and the Ari (Isaac Luria האריז''ל).
To I make my these clearer I want to say that what gentiles consider Kabbalah and what the Zohar and the Arizal [Isaac Luria] are about are two very different things. The Zohar is not about magic. It is a neo platonic explanation of the Old Testament.

And it is an explanation that is necessary  for many reasons. One is that the alternative--Maimonides [the Rambam] with his reasons for the mitzvot  based on Aristotle are not very convincing. Clearly some type of Neo -Platonic approach is necessary. [See other medieval kabbalists especially Avraham Abulafia and the Ramban (Nachmanides).] (I mean the Rambam might be right but in any case he is hard to accept and grasp.)

Yet I still have to say that my general impression of people that learn Zohar is that they start thinking they are the Messiah, and get other delusions rather quickly.

That is just one criticism of it. I have another one also. It is this. That the aspect of Torah which is Numinous and holy is not touched by the Zohar or the Ari. This is an inner holiness of Torah which has nothing to do with the things talked about in the Zohar at all.

I should say that I spent time learning Kabbalah, and I am familiar with many of the so called "kabalists" in Israel, so I am not completely ignorant about this subject. I learned the Eitz Chaim of  the Ari [Isaac Luria] several  times, and went through the other writings of the Ari at length. I read several works of the Remak (Moshe Cordovero) including the Pardes and the Reshash and prayed with the Sidur HaReshash for many years. I went through  several authors of Medieval kabbalah like Avraham Abulafia and others. A lot of this was very inspiring for me.  But still it has the tendency is to instill delusions into people.
I know the fraudulent kabbalist of the Kotel.  And I knew others that had actual insights. One fellow had virtual film going through his head showing him the life of people that came to him. [He was put into Cherem (excommunication) by Rav Ovadia Yosef]  I was close with many of the disciples and descendants of Bava Sali.

Also one odd thing was that people that learned Kabbalah also thought they knew how to learn Gemara (The Babylonian Talmud), even though they could never tell you a simple explanation in any Gemara  They seemed to believe their expertise in Kabbalah gave them expertise in everything.

So though Kabalah is a legitimate sub-section of Torah learning, still there is the problem of cults.
And the Sitra Achra that got mixed up with it also.

The main principle in terms of Kabalah is this: Sephardim are OK, Ashkenazim are not.
The Ramchal also is fine [as far as I can tell], even though Rav Hutner (Rosh Yeshiva of Chaim Berlin) is reported to have said that some aspects of his teachings come from the Shatz.] 

  So I say in general simply to learn in a kosher Lithuanian type of yeshiva.
And avoid kabbalists. [But it is still OK to go to descendants of Bava Sali for blessings and advice-not because of Kabbalah, but rather from the standpoint of being descendants of a tzadik which gives  certain kind of merit.]

I think it is common practice for nations to try to limit the ability of their enemies to launch attacks from nearby bases. From what I understand this was part the reason the the USSR absorbed different territories after WWII and the reason they demanded that American remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey and the reason that Israel took the Golan Heights.

In spite of my ignorance about American history I recently read a very nice book on the subject and it was amazing in given the basic overview with detail but not too much. From what I can tell it was not just the British but also France was taking American boats and men. The thing which triggered the war was that after both England and France had signed agreements to discontinue this practice, they kept on doing it.

Besides that England was not fighting Napoleon at the time. They were involved with an economic war with France. And this was part of the reason they impounded American boats they could trade freely with France and England. This bothered both England and France.
In the attack on Canada, America was intending to limit the ability of England to launch naval attacks against America.
I think this is common practice for nations to try to limit the ability of their enemies to launch attacks from nearby bases. From what I understand this was part the reason the the USSR absorbed different territories after WWII and the reason they demanded that American remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey and the reason that Israel took the Golan Heights.I think this was also the reason that America attacked Florida when it was owed by Spain and why it took possession of Alabama --i.e with intent to stop the attack the creek Indians.I will not even go into the reason for taking Texas.