path of balance

I see the paths of great people often seems to go in opposite directions from each other.
[Rav Nahman refers to this as the argument between tzadikim.]
From what I recall this is one of the questions raised by Socrates. What is virtue "arete" , i.e. human excellence. He meant to ask this: that even though human excellence seems to vary according to the person, still is there some basic essence of "arete" [in ancient Greek] that all these great people share?
Something in common between the Gra,-- (Eliyahu of Vilna), Rav Israel Salanter, Rav Shach, Einstein, Mozart?

In Musar you find two areas of value,- moral virtue, and intellectual virtue. [Kelley Ross postulates a whole spectrum of value, -along a half circle.]

What my parents recommended was a path of balance. That is since there is a whole spectrum of virtues that are all important but each person seems to be able to excel only in one or two areas so the best idea is balance. That way you hold on to all the areas of value to some degree but you find the areas that are specific to your soul.

There is an opposite area of negative value for every area of positive value. [This is like Rav Nahman said about truth. He said there is only one truth but lots of lies. For example, if you have blue paint and someone asks what color is the paint there is only one right answer. Blue. But there are an infinite number of lies one can say. E.g. one could say it is red or green or any of the continuous wave lengths on the color spectrum. So even though in every area of value there is one true path, there are many ways of getting it wrong.

[This gives a good reason why the Gra would sign the letter of excommunication--to give warning to people like me that would not know how to avoid the dark side.]

So when it comes to Torah I would like to suggest for myself and others to be careful you go to an authentic Litvak yeshiva where you can get the real thing. [But I should add that even in the straightest of Litvak yeshivas one needs to avoid fanaticism. And also concentrate on the classes of the roshei yeshiva in order to get to a point where you "know how to learn".]

Rav Israel Salanter

Rav Israel Salanter brings the idea of bringing merit to many as being a way to bring merit to oneself in his "Letter of Musar". ["One who brings a merit to many, no sin comes to him."]

His idea of how to do this was to make a kind of library of Musar [Books on Ethics]. The difference between a regular library and this library of Musar would be that learning Musar of any Torah requires one to say the words. So it would be more like a regular place of learning Torah except that it would be devoted to Musar (books of Ethics).

The thing is this idea never took off at all. Musar was totally absorbed into the Litvak Yeshiva [Lithuanian type of Yeshiva]. And to me this seems right. Musar can get people off track unless connected with the straight Litvak yeshiva approach.

[The reason however it seems that Rav Israel Salanter wanted to keep things seperate was that the Litvak yeshiva approach can also get one off track. ]

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Communism was founded on reason, and yet had become a totalitarian regime.

It was thought to be a truism a few years ago in the USA that Communism was founded on reason, and yet had become a totalitarian regime. Thus Reason is not always [or maybe very rarely] a good guide towards morality.

Whether you can find flaws in the system is not so much my point. Rather, that communism was based on the best the intellectual world had to offer, and yet was clearly causing mass murder and poverty wherever it was implemented.

So even though I did study leftist thinkers and philosophers, I was always aware that even pure Reason has limits.` And even if Reason recognizes moral principles, it does not know them automatically. You might take many examples violent tribes that still exist as mentioned in the book by Howard Bloom [The Lucifer Principle], though there are many more examples than the ones he picks.


This suspicion about the limits of human reason can give you an idea why I appreciate Dr Kelley Ross's web site about the Kant Friesian school based on Leonard Nelson. He seems to have an amazing defense of faith, i.e. immediate non-intuitive knowledge.


So on one hand, I can see the point of Dr. Michael Huemer that reason recognizes moral principles. But on the other hand, I also see that for Reason to be awoken, it need Divine revelation as the Rambam wrote in the Guide about Abraham the patriarch. Or you could go about the issue of faith with the idea of a dialectical process. A slow progress towards truth.

In the Guide of the Perplexed of Maimonides you have a allegory which makes the point that Physics and Metaphysics are above learning what we would call "learning Torah" i.e. Gemara.
It is the allegory of the king in his country. And you have there people outside the country, inside, near the palace and inside the palace. And right there the Rambam says people outside the palace are the "Talmudim" those that learn and keep the Oral and Written Law and learn Gemara all day. Inside the palace of the King in the outer sections  are the Physicists. In the inner section you have the prophets and philosophers.

So it does seem that the Rambam is making a value judgment about what is better to be spending your time at. Given a choice he seems to be saying one ought to learn Physics and Metaphysics rather than be sitting a learning Gemara.

However he certainly is not disparaging the importance of Gemara. Rather the idea is one ought to have  certain amount of time in Gemara and allot another larger section of his time to Physics.

And we know what the Rambam means because he defines his terms in the beginning of the Guide. Physics and Metaphysics he says mean the subjects so described by the ancient Greeks.

Philosophy today however I would have to say is probably better to avoid. It is known that Rav Nahman thought ill of philosophers and from what I can see today he had a point. So kind of by default I have gone more into Physics. [But in philosophy, I like Kelley Ross of the Kant Fries school, Michael Huemer, and Ed Feser.]

[Hegel to me seems important also although there is some friction between him and the Kant Fries school. See McTagart who answers some of the problems that Dr Kelley Ross raises. See Walter Kaufman on Hegel

The major advantage of the Litvak Yeshiva approach

The major advantage of the Litvak Yeshiva approach as exemplified by Rav Shach is that people do not have automatic access to moral knowledge.

This is how the Rambam understands the laws of the Greeks, natural law. He says unless it is revealed people would not know it.

So you might guess that people could guess at morality through their inherent reason, but that does not seem to be the case. Even natural law needs to be revealed.

That is what the Rambam says in regard to Abraham the patriarch--that he knew natural law but only because God revealed it to him.

But the interesting thing about the Litvak yeshiva approach is they did not accept the Musar idea in its entirety. 20 minutes before mincha and 15 minutes before the evening prayer is no where near the hours of Musar learning that Rav Israel Salanter was advocating. Probably the reason was that it can and does distract from Gemara. It shifts the center of gravity. But that would not be a problem if not for the fact that it shifts it in a way that is usually not really accurate in terms of Torah. So to learn some was looked on as a good compromise.

[It is possible that I was sidetracked by Musar, but I am not sure. In any case I did learn some of the books of the Ari [Isaac Luria] and Sar Shalom Sharabi which are commentaries on the Ari. But of all the books of mystics I found Rav Avraham Abulafia of the Middle Ages to be the most interesting.

Another important advantage is that the signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication is paid attension to at least a little bit. That tends to save one from the Sitra Achra if one pays attension to it.

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