my suggestion is to learn and to finish the Oral and Written Law first and then do learn the Ari. Now the Babylonian Talmud I would like people to finish with Tosphot and the Maharsha doing it fast. Say the words and go on.

(Look up the actual statements of the Gra in his commentaries and not just collected sayings of his. You will see a big difference between what people claim and what he in fact said and wrote)


There were things that cooled me off to the Kabalah. And I wanted to go into some of these things here while I have the chance. After all have a public forum is an awesome responsibility.

First of all the Zohar and the Ari and the Remak all build on the paradigm of the Middle Ages, a paradigm based on the Pre-Socratics.
Of course, just a brief comparison between the Ari and the Pre Socratics will be enough to show that the Ari went infinitely beyond the available paradigm. Still it is a bit disconcerting.
But then the issue of the authorship of the Zohar also began to bother me.
And one day I saw what the Rambam wrote in one of his letters: "Just like one must not add or subtract to or from the Written Torah, so he can't add or subtract from the Oral Torah. And I began to think that in spite of how insightful the Kabalah is, it still is not in the category of the Oral and Written Law. The Zohar by all accounts was only revealed in 1260. the Oral and written law were known and accepted long before that. That is the Old Testament, the Babylonian Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud, Tosephta, Sifri, and Sifra.  That is the sum total of the accepted oral explanation of the written law. And the Rambam says you must not add or subtract. But people can and do write later on explanations of that basic body of texts. The Rambam did so himself.
And the Ari did also. But that does not mean that that is higher, or can replace of Oral or Written Law.
I know this sounds harsh. But what I am suggesting is that Kabalah is dessert. It is not the main meal. And my mother never let me eat dessert before I had finished my plate. And I think the same logic would apply here.

So my suggestion is to learn and to finish the Oral and Written Law first and then do learn the Ari.
Now the Babylonian Talmud I would like people to finish with Tosphot and the Maharsha doing it fast. Say the words and go on.
But just to make it clear that is not the only thing on my agenda here. And I definitely have an agenda.  All morality needs a numinous core. The next things on my agenda is Math and Physics, ---learning them the same way as I mentioned above about Talmud. Say the words and go on. Simple as "Pi". And that I base on the Rambam. But I admit when the Rambam says  "Physics" he is talking about a wider category of natural science than modern physics. He at least means what we would call modern Chemistry. Maybe engineering also.  But it does not seem to me that he was thinking of Biology. If he had wanted to include that subject matter in the Mishna Torah or the Guide he could have, but he refrained. [He had the books of Aristotle that had that material along with the medical books of the Middle Ages.] So we have a fairly good idea of what he thought was an important part of a Torah education--the Oral and Written Law, Physics and Math.

1) Trust in God is a confusing issue. The story with king Asa  seems to imply that his sin was to go the the doctors alone without trust. But it seems that Navardok--that is Joseph Horvitz- would say any kind of action directed towards getting ones needs met is not good. And he would say saying to oneself or others that one is trusting is just fooling oneself. It is self deception. He would say one should serve God and then God will find some way to help him.
 2) The Tenach says Asa was punished because he went to the doctors for help instead of to God.  2 Chronicles 16:12
 3) This is a well known controversy, between the Chovot Levavot and the Gra.
4) My impression is that it is not clear that trust relates to action. To me it seems clear one can be working all day and be trusting in God and one can be sitting and learning Torah and not be. That is there is not an strong tie between action and trust. However if one is trusting then it is reasonable to ask why work?
5) The way this idea of trust was understood at the Mir was to do what one must whether in mitzvahs or in secular pursuits which are required by the Torah--e.g working for a living. But not to be doing even that for any reason but that the Torah requires it. The way it understood it it was close to Navardok but not exactly.
The idea was no matter what--what is decreed on a person will come automatically. But by doing God's will in ones life has the potential of averting a bad a decree. And if it is decreed that one should have things he needs then these things will come no matter what.
I know this is hard to understand but that was the basic unspoken attitude.

6) I suggest looking at the Madrgat HaAdam  and the Chovot Levavot and tell me if you can make any more sense out of it that this.
The Gra's opinion seems to be based on an Agadah. That is significant because the Gra said all the secrets of the Torah are hidden inside the Agadah.

)

It seems to me that Islam is idolatry.

This is an idea about idolatry and  then a little bit at the end about my idea of Islam.
But I should make it clear that this is only my tirade against Islam, not against Arabs or Iranians. It is their evil murderous religion that is the problem. Not the people.



Introduction: We all know that idolatry is forbidden. The question is if one serves an idol in more than one of the four services [burning, sacrifice, pouring, bowing]. Does he bring a sin offering for each service? [The sin offering for doing idolatry is in the book of Numbers 15. ]
R. Zakei said no, and R Yochanan said yes.
(Sanhedrin 62a)

R. Aba wanted to say this depends on an argument between R. Natan and R. Yosi. (R Yochanan like R. Yosi that all the acts are just one act. )
R. Natan asked why is "fire"(לא תבערו אש בכל מושבותיכם ביום השבת) mentioned concerning the Sabbath day? Are not 39 types of work forbidden? (That is: any type of work that was done to build the tabernacle in the desert before Israel entered into the Land of Israel is called ''work'' in the Torah. This is because the Torah says not to do the work of building the tabernacle on Sabbath. It is a simple deduction that therefore the types of work that went into building the tabernacle would be considered work by the Torah. If they are not considered work when it comes to the Sabbath then why would the Torah forbid doing them on the Sabbath? So now we have a simple and easy measure of what is considered work on the Sabbath.)
R. Natan  answered, it is to divide. (That means to say that if one forgets about several types of work and does them on the Sabbath day, then he brings a sin offering for each type of work.)
How does he know this? It is because of a general principle that anything that was inside of a category and then was mentioned specifically comes to tell us something about the entire category.

R. Josi says the reason fire was mentioned by itself to tell us it is only a prohibition. [That means to say doing work on Shabat is one of the most severe sins in the Torah. If done on purpose it gets the death penalty, if done in front of two witnesses, and also a warning was issued right before he did it and he acknowledged the warning. That is, to get a death penalty in the Torah, one really has to be trying hard to get it.] If the sin was done by accident then he brings a sin offering (a she goat or she sheep.) One can't bring a sin offering for playing cards on the Sabbath.  Sins are well defined in the Torah. We find some people don't like what the Torah considers a sin and thus they try to redefine what a sin is.  But that is not the Torah approach.
At any rate, the idea of R. Yosi here is that fire is only a normal prohibition, not the death penalty.

My question here is on R Yosi. Does not he agree with the principle that what ever was in a category and has gone out to be mentioned specifically come to teach us about the entire category?
[I could have said my question in a second but in case some people might be looking at this blog that do no know much gemara I thought to give a brief introduction to my question.]
Now I wanted to mention that this is not the first time this kind of thing has come up. We find the same thing about bowing to an idol. There too the Gemara says it comes to teach about itself alone. But there I don't ask my question because though it is true "bowing" was in a general category of idolatry, still there is another verse that also come out--the verse about sacrifice. And if "bowing" was to teach us about idolatry, then "sacrifice" would not have had to be mentioned. So instead we say "sacrifice" tells us about the whole category--to forbid all types of service that were done in the temple in Jerusalem and then we are stuck with "bowing" that can't tell us anything except about itself. So I am not bothered with "bowing." It is only about "fire" that I am asking this question.

At any rate my learning partner suggest that perhaps the reason R Yosi uses the "fire" for itself alone is he had nothing else he could do with it. He already had division of work from the verse in Leviticus 4:2. And he thought that this is the reason why even "bowing" is used for itself alone;-- because after we have "sacrifice" (זובח לאלהים יחרם) coming to tell us division of services, then we can't use "bowing" for anything else.
Actually I think that I get 0.5 credit for this idea. Because my learning partner suggest this is the reason we use bowing for itself alone. But I think it was I that decided we could use the same reason for fire. (I am not 100% sure that it was I but I remember arguing this way. So I think it was I that came up with it.)
Even so it seems to me to be a cop out. After all if it was in the category then it did not need to be mentioned.So what in the world could it possibly means "It comes to teach about itself?"At least about bowing it makes some sense because we can have an act of idolatry that does not get the death penalty. so maybe we did need to hear this about bowing. But fire? Why mention it? To tell us it is a mere prohibition. Fine so tell us that about the entire category!!!
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My impression is that idolatry has more to do with numinosity than with statues. This I saw a  few times in Rashi where he defines "accepting another god as ones god" as meaning intending it for godliness. מכוויין לאלהות
For this reason, it seems to me that Islam is idolatry because they are not intending the God of Israel. While on the other hand we see Christians going through a mediator, still their intension is to the God of Israel. I means to focus on what is the source of numinosity. And that source is determinate.

Even though I have not worked it out completely I think we can see that idolatry has two parts to it. One is serve towards a idol and the other is accepting the godliness or spiritual power from any being besides God.
I must have written about this before. But Let me just say that the Gemara does not deal with the idea of a mediator at all. On the contrary. When Abyee is brining his proof that  one that does idolatry from fear or love without accepting the godliness of the idol he brings the idea that when one bows to a house of idols and thinks it is a synagogue that he is not liable because his heart is towards heaven. And a statute also--he says if he does not accept its godliness it is nothing. So Abyee and Rava are definitely thinking about accepting of godliness as one factor here.  I mean to say that accepting the godliness of some person or object to Abyee is obviously liable. It is just that he says more cases are also liable. But since the very god of Islam is not the god of Israel and the numinous aspect of it is clearly different than the God of Israel that means the god of Islam is a false god.
That means we would have to treat Muslims as idolaters and not accord to them freedom of religion until they curse the god of Islam.

I should mention that we don't want to expand the definition of idolatry to anything we don't like. You have to remember that idolatry is something  that requires the death penalty. It is an act that if done in front of two witnesses get the electric chair. So we don't want to make up our own definitions. This is something the Torah says to the court that they must give the death penalty for. It is not an option to forgive.
For example let's say you love your wife. And perhaps sadly enough maybe you love her more than God.
Maybe she means more to you than going to heaven. Maybe being married and having children is the total meaning of your life. That is not idolatry.  Idolatry has to be an act of worshiping some god other than God by one of the four acts, sacrifice, bowing, pouring, burning. There has to be the kind of numinousity involved with it that is involved in religious worship.

Now of course worship of a human being can be idolatry. But it is not the same thing as love. It has to be the kind of worship that people do to actual physical idols

Trust in God without any effort.

 Trust in God without any effort. From where does this come? Navardok (Joseph Yozel Horvitz) claims this comes from the Ramban [Nachmanides]. But no one seems to know from which Ramban. My learning partner today mentioned a certain Ramban on a totally different subject that might be related. The idea is the the name of God in the Torah "El Shadai" tells us that there is a level of Divine intervention that goes beyond the way of nature. I did not mention this to him but it did occur to me that this might be what Navardok was all about. That is when one trust in God then God sends his help even beyond the way of nature.
This he also brings from the Gra in a somewhat more explicit statement and from the Chovot Levavot also.

The actual statement of the Gra is based on a story in the Talmud. Raba Bar Bar Chana did not know what the verse means "Throw in God your burden and he will take care of you." the verse uses this strange word יהבך.
One day he was lifting his burden and a strange walked over and said to him give me your burden יהבך and I will lift it for you.
The Gra said that it is not the idea that the stranger knew the meaning of the word. Rather Raba did not understand what trust is supposed to be. Is one supposed to trust in God but still do effort, or is one supposed to trust in God with no effort. He thought surely one should do effort. But then he saw that one it is decreed that help will come to a person then that help will come no matter what. Even to the degree that people will ask to help you.
 My suggestion is that there is an aspect of ontological undecidability about this. For certainly we are supposed to do our job in this world. If we can show that the Torah requires us to work then that would be what we are supposed to do without any relation to the question of having our needs met. And certainly it is easy to show the Torah does require us to work. As the sages said as a covenant was established for Torah so was a covenant established for work. כמו  שיש ברית כרותה על התורה כמו כן יש ברית כרותה על המלאכה
And what one finds is people do use the Torah to make money -which is forbidden- and then hide behind the claim that they are trusting.
So there is some hidden aspect to this whole question.
I wanted to add the fact that the Gra saw this in an Agadah {stories in the Talmud or outside the Talmud like in Midrash Raba} is significant because the Gra held the deepest secrets of the Torah are contained in the Agadah.
Appendix:
 I wanted to add that being prepared and learning survival skills is a regular part of what one should learn. It is like Torah itself that one does because one is required to do it--not for benefit in this or the next world. Survival skills and self reliance are simply a part of "the way of the world" (Derech Eretz) that comes before Torah.

Elijah from Vilnius

The Vilna Geon, Eliyahu from Vilna, had an idea about Kabalah and also concerning the state of the world today. He said good and evil are mixed together. For this reason he warned about practical Kabalah.
But you see this in a lot of areas. The example that occurred to me today in with  a great thinker in analytic philosophy, Quine. He came up with this great idea of "alpha -1". That is the first uncountable infinity minus 1. I forget where this idea came up but it is a very important tool. But that was in a subject he was good at. When it comes to other areas of Kantian thought he had some ideas that were not so great.

When you dig you find great thinkers that had their share of really bad ideas. And this goes against the grain of human beings. W all want to find some nice package deal. But we can't. Every great person we find ends up having as many bad and sometimes really destructive ideas as tremendous great and beneficial ideas.

to finish Shas [Talmud]

1) A not so well known idea  is to finish Shas [Talmud]. To be qualified to have an opinion about anything in Torah, he first need to have finished Shas. That means to have gone once through the Babylonian Talmud in its original language. But this idea of finishing Shas came up so much in  NY, that I forget the entire context. Yet  I was very frustrated by the fact they they took sometimes a full two weeks to go through a single page of Gemara. Yet years later I began to see why they took so much time on one page. Because today it seems to me that unless one learns what it means "to learn" (Gemara) when one is at the ripe age of eighteen, then he will never learn it. I have tried to explain to people what it means to be able to learn but I feel like a dog barking up the wrong tree. Even on this blog I have a whole essay but I don't think I have explained it properly. It is not knowing a lot of Gemara. And it is not knowing a lot of commentaries. It is like playing the violin. I can't explain what it is but I can teach it and I can tell if someone knows what it is or not.

That being said I want to say that there is a point to finishing Shas also. Or what I would rather say --to finishing the Oral Law That is to finish Shas with Tosphot and the Maharsha,  the Yerushalmi, the Sifra and Sifri and the Tosephta.
 Most of the people that I knew that could learn were in NY . I think a good number of them did in fact finish the Talmud. Reb Shmuel Berenabum definitely did. But the main way they did this was by devoting the afternoon to fact learning. In Israel it was hard to tell who really could learn or not.It is not like the violin that you can hear. One thing seems certain -- that Rav Elazar Shach of Ponovicth could definitely learn. You just need to see his book the Avi Ezri.

So what I am suggesting to people is that no matter how much or little time you have to learn, I think you should divide it into two parts. One a fast session. Say the words and go on. If you don't understand at first eventually it will sink in. and the other is an in depth session.


2) You can already tell however that there is more to say than what I have written. I also meant to point out to laymen what it means to learn Torah and what it means to be an expert in Torah. This is something everyone needs to know. It means to have finished Shas and to have a basic grasp of what one has learned.
It is not to be called rabbi or have ordination from some fraud. In fact today anyone called rabbi is almost guaranteed to be a fraud. People that learn Torah for its own sake never get ordination and consider it to be a scam.

3) Also the Gra has an idea that to learn Kabalah it is first necessary to have finished Shas. 
So on one hand he is not against Kabalah. But on the other hand he does have this idea that one needs some kind of spiritual preparation for it. Otherwise it is damaging. The Ari himself has such an idea. and he says one that learns kabalah without knowing Shas and Poskim [Medieval halacha authorities]--it kills him spiritually.[That statement of the Ari is not well known because it does not appear in the introduction to the Eitz Haim but rather in the three books of the Ari on the very end of Deuteronomy.]

I was barely able to get thorough any of this in my first few years in Mir Yeshiva and Shar Yashuv. Since then I have made little progress. I was only due to the grace of God that he sent to me an amazing learning partner, David Bronson, with whom I did a drop more of learning and then wrote my two books of Bava Metzia and Shas. But I am sad that I do not seem to be able to make any more progress.

My suggestion is to learn Torah and to combine Torah with trust in God

I think the world is in great danger.  Some of the issues are known to people because of the threats of war.
But I think the lack of a consensus about what human beings are about and ought to be about is also at the root of these problems.

My suggestion is to learn Torah and  to combine Torah with trust in God.

But trust in God does not mean that you assume things will work out the way you want.
As far as that goes I think along the lines of God, Job, and Schopenhauer. I want to seperate the problem of Theodicy from the subject of trust. The idea of trust in this context is what Joseph Yozel Horvitz said in his book the Madragat HaAdam. "One does not need any cause. Rather what is decreed on a person will come without any cause at all." [What is decreed will happen. If you want something that you think has not been decreed then you could do something like learn Torah or so something you think will affect the heavenly court. But working for it physically is unlikely to affect the decisions of the heavenly court.]
 The Gra said that one that learns Torah from a person that is learning for money, that is damaging to him, and he will lose all the Torah he learns, and also all the Torah he has already learned.