It so happens I was outside and met on the street a Na Nach fellow. I mentioned during our conversation an idea that I thought to bring here.- that I see the path of the Gra as the backbone while Rav Nahman I see as filling in the flesh and bones of Torah thought. For to get to the authentic drive and intensity of Torah one needs the Gra. You can see this in any Litvak yeshiva where the love of Torah hits you in the face the second you walk in the door. But Rav Nahman fills in a lot of what is missing in that approach..  

 "Rule of law" I think is shorthand for England where there is this long standing tradition of listening to pieces of paper [or parchment] like the Magna Carta and the Provisions of Oxford.  I mean to say that countries that derive from England tend to take the law as written very seriously.  In most other countries without English influence, the laws are laws as long as they are convenient.

Many Western Values [Principles of morality] are different from principles of morality of Torah. So what is the relationship?  What makes this question difficult is Western Values change constantly. People think their values are those of Reason but if they change every ten years, then they are not.

Now "Torah values"  are manipulated constantly also. So unless you can come to some bedrock layer, of certainty, that also does not provide a solid basis.  

In the two great Litvak yeshivot which I attended, it was thought that the one important principle is to "learn Torah"  [meaning the Old Testament and the Gemara] because Torah itself will correct false opinions. 

However to me Musar [the mediaeval books of Morality] seems to be the best approach--a synthesis of Faith a Reason that was worked out in painstaking detail during the Middle Ages. 

I was at the sea again and it occurred to me to mention that you see this approach of deriving morality by faith and by reason in the Obligations of the Hearts, Saadia Gaon, Rambam. The first to do this was Philo but you can see that his efforts were somewhat naive. The later Mediaeval approach makes a lot more sense. Now I should add that later people like Kant, Hegel, Jacob Fries, Leonard Nelson Michael Huemer    do not look towards faith to discover morality at all but only towards reason.

But I can not see reason as being such a great guide alone. Try that and you can end up with sophisticated systems like Marxism.

[Just one well known example is slavery. But while I tend to see the point of the North to some degree I think the woke movement shows that the South was right.] 

  

 There are people that routinely cause damage to others without deriving any benefit to themselves.  They do not even consciously think they are causing harm. They are much worse than thieves or similar criminal types. 

You might be vaguely aware of these types but you forget about it. 

And you might even pride yourself that you do not mind hanging out with lowliness. But you forget this very important principle. For these people consistently cause damage to others without gaining any benefit to themselves. It is not an accident, but a pattern.

Slowly imperceptibly you lose what ever good traits you have by hanging out with these types.

There is a sort of "evil inclination" that says to you you do not want to be a "baal gaava" [person with pride] so you hang out with low lives thinking you will bring them up or at least not lose. But that is exactly the trick. --To get you to hang out with people whose ultimate effect is to cause you to lower your standards of decency .

, the vast majority of people I met and talked with thought rule from Moscow was much better than from Kiev.

I think that it is better not to get involved in Ukraine. One thing is that, the more weapons sent to Ukraine, the more the conflict will be drawn out. And that will just make things worse for the average people on the street who do not care if the government is in Moscow or Kiev. Plus sending weapons will just begin to involve a war between the USA and Moscow. And that leaves the USA open to nuclear strikes which can be placed anywhere on the map. Is that worth it?

 And the whole approach of painting the Ukraine as saints  does not seem accurate. [I barely escaped.] 

Plus, the oddest fact is, in a city of about 100,000, the vast majority of people I met and talked with thought rule from Moscow was much better than from Kiev.

I recall this attitude even going back to the 1990's and up until I left in 2018. When I asked whether things were better then under the USSR or now? they always said, "Things were better then."Тогда дела обстояли лучше. And in one of the last incidents when I asked this, the shop owner explained how in the USSR you were given a a free house or apartment. You could swap it with someone else, but it was yours.

[That policy began under Khrushchev.]

 z-70 midi music file

z-70 in nwc format

 I gave upon understanding people along time ago. [In White Anglo Saxon {WASP} USA, I realized I did not "get it", when my girlfriend, Wendy Wilson at BHHS [Beverly Hills High School] invited me to a dinner with her parents. I was so out of place, it was painfully obvious.] But then being in Ukraine [Uman for Rosh Hashana], I just as equally poorly understood what was going on. The best I can say is that Ukraine is an equal mixture of saints and sinners.

And in my own understanding of what human life is all about, I discovered the great books of Musar.--that define two major things-Fear of God and good character traits. This helps me navigate my place in an increasingly confusing world.

Musar means four basic books: Gates of Repentance, Paths of the Just, Ways of the Righteous, Obligations of the Hearts.

In Torah good character is one of the main goals, but how to come to good character is the question. The first step is definitions. Then the actual working on it.