Russian Revolution and justified anger. But the anger needs to be directed towards legitimate targets.

I wanted to bring a few ideas and then to tie them in.
[1] One is that to some degree I can see the point of the Russian Revolution. People feel hurt.  And sometimes that is justified. So from one aspect I can that there is such a thing as justified anger.

You can see this in the אורחות צדיקים [Paths of the Righteous] in the Gate of Anger.

The problem is that often the anger is directed towards the wrong targets. Capitalists, kulaks etc. Though it must have been that in tzarist Russia these powerful kulaks and capitalists were abusing people to the degree that their anger spilled over.

But also people were angry at religion. And that is also often justified. Not that in the Law of Moses, there is anything wrong. Not the Oral or Written Law. However people use that as a cover to hide their evil. This Rav Nahman pointed out often. So what people did was to reject all religion.

That was because people did not have the ability to be able to discern what is right and what is wrong. So they just said all religion is wrong. They did not have the insight and understanding of the Gra and Rav Shach to be able to tell the difference between the holy  and the Sitra Achra [the Dark Side.]
What they could have done was to have "faith in the wise" and just trust that the Gra and Rav Shach knew what they were talking about.

But furthermore, sometimes there is a point to the secular. It is not to say that if if just have the right religious values everything is OK. Not really. Often religion opens the door towards other things. People might start out with faith in a true tzadik like Rav Nahman but then get side tracked. That is in fact almost guaranteed. That is because it is in the very nature of things, that religion gets side tracked
all too quickly and easily.

I think this whole situation gives to me and others a chance to finally get to sit down and get through the Oral Law [that is the two Talmuds with Tosphot and Maharsha], the basic set of Ethics (Musar) books of Rav Israel Salanter, and Physics and Mathematics.
[Many Rishonim said also Metaphysics referring to besides Plato and Aristotle's Metaphysics as the Rambam stated openly in the beginning of the Guide for the Perplexed.

F Major w69mp3  w69 midi  w69 nwc

Trust in God draws good things. That is not the same as trusting in the Divine decree. Rather it is trust in itself which God answers. והבוטח בה' חסד יסובבנו  Kindness surrounds one who trusts in God. Not that kindness surrounds everyone. [I am just picking one verse, but there are many more all over.]

On one hand you do not hear about trust in God outside the Litvak Yeshiva World. And even there not so much. I heard about it at the Mir, but in Shar Yashuv in Far Rockaway not so much.

The interesting thing about trust in God as understood at the Mir in NY was that it was active, not passive. That is to say--it was trust in God in such a way that one was left free to learn Torah. It was a kind of way of being freed from constraints.--Constraints that would normally prevent one from learning Torah.

קניין סודר acquiring by means of handkerchief  as far as I can tell in the Raavad  and the R''id (Yeshaya of Trany) seems to work because of a kind of acquiring by means of money.
With the Rambam it seems a different kind.

The Tosfot Ha'Rid right at the beginning of kidushin says if the handkerchief is worth more than a penny then the kidushin is valid.
[That must be how he understands the gemara there that "exchange'' would not work because it is valid even for less than a penny.]
However the Rambam understands that that type of acquiring would not work for kidushin nor for letting a slave go free.

That is based on the Gemara in Kidushin i think around pg 79. One fellow had a Hebrew maid servant and threw at her a vessel and said, "With this vessel you go free." That the Gemara there says is not valid. At first the thought it is not valid because of acquiring by means of a  handkerchief. And in they end they decided it was because the vessel was owned by the owner.
So the Raavad in fact says that letting a slave go free by means of acquiring by handkerchief is valid. The Rambam says not.

So what I see here is the an argument about the handkerchief.

I admit this is the way it looks to me. From what I can see in Rav Shach's Avi Ezri, he seems to understand this sugia differently and I can not figure out what he is saying.

Capitalism

Capitalism causes prosperity, e.g. USA, England, Europe. Communism causes mass starvation (USSR in the 1920-'s and 1930's ) and mass murder. Example Venezuela.
Steven Dutch: Correlation, in and of itself, doesn't prove causation. But correlation, coupled with a reasonable causal explanation, does constitute strong evidence of causation.


Working class people work, and they worked hard to get what they have. So they don't want it threatened. They don't want criminals in their neighborhoods and they don't want the value of their homes threatened. And they're smart enough to realize that if you can take down the wealthy and the powerful, you can squash working class people like a bug. So many of them don't buy into the "soak the rich" philosophy because they know perfectly well who will be next to get soaked.


Leftists: buy a clue. We are not going to seize the wealth of the top 10% of the population and pass it out among everybody else. First, it wouldn't go all that far. Second, once it was spent, there would be no more. See Chile, 1974 for additional information, or take notes during Zimbabwe 2007-. We are not going to cure poverty by printing a million dollars for everybody. See Germany, 1923 for details. 

Politics and Philosophy seem to have a dividing line between them. If you take the top philosophers their ideas about politics seem not so great. Hegel, Kant, Leonard Nelson. Even John Locke came after the Glorious Revolution in order to justify it.

While the system of the USA Constitution and the Limited Monarchy in England seem to be the results of circumstances and not any well thought out system. The whole idea of having a Parliament was because Edward I needed money from the lords. Money that he did not have a right to under the  feudal system. So he had to come up with Parliament so he could get their money with representation. And later the  reason for the House of Commons was the same. The Magna Carta same as just being a way to stop the king from getting as much as he wanted from the nobles.
I could go on, but the idea seems the same. Whatever really works in politics is never the result of some well thought out policy but the result of circumstances and later is found to be working well.