Someone mentioned to me today about the problems he noticed in the USA on his recent trip there. That gave me a chance to explain a little behind the philosophy of  "learning Torah." In the Litvak Yeshiva world [at least as I experienced it at Shar Yashuv and the Mir] learning Torah is the best way to help oneself and the whole world. It is not considered as hiding from the world but rather as the only true and effective means to help the world. And you can see this to some degree in the way politics is practiced in the USA which involves a lot of Lashon Hara and Bitul Torah. Are things so much better now than they were in Elizabethan England? People then also had some say in things because of he House of Commons, but not to the degree that we see now. 

gentile slaves.

 You are not actually allowed to free a gentile slave. However as we know, a Jewish slave is freed after 6 years of work. [That is right after the Ten Commandments in Exodus.] The prohibition to free a gentile slave is from the verse בהם לעולם תעבודו (When the Torah discusses the case when one buys gentile slave it adds "you should work with them forever" i.e. not free them.  So you can see the point of the South. They realized that the slaves were not seeking freedom. They were seeking mastery--i.e. to become the masters. and that has happened.

So on one hand I can see the point of Abraham Lincoln in wanting to keep the Union together, still I do not know where he found that idea in the Constitution , not even if he had, why it would supersede states rights [the tenth Ammendment.] And besides all that, the real point comes to the fore in the verse that states on three things the land is destroyed and one of them is "עבד כי ימלוך (When a slave rules)." 

And the logical conclusion is that the USA should not let slaves rule.

[Rabban Gamliel had a gentile slave Tabi who was a great Torah scholar. But even so, Rabban Gamliel did not free him. Tabi himself was strict not to eat in a Suka, because slaves and women are not obligated to eat in a suka (during Sukot]).

 You do not really see in the Gra the idea of making yeshivot. And if he agreed with Rav Chaim of Voloshin about this is not clear. [Rav Chaim had come to ask him about this and there are a few versions of what the answer was. Some say he never answered.]  

So while this issue is unclear, there are at least some points which are clear. Torah is not supposed to be a means of making money. While on one hand learning Torah is the greatest of all mitzvot, still the general approach of yeshivot going around asking for money does not really mean that this is a good thing.

The religious seem intent on using Torah in one way or the other to get profit. In fact. I encountered a sort of odd attitude in which people in kollel would present themselves as "astronauts" [super achievers] which therefore deserved to be supported by all us plebeians. So it seems impossible to say that people in kollel are not doing it for money. Just the opposite--that seems to be their entire intension.

So what is the best thing is to learn Torah, but not to make a business out of it.

If you are learning Torah [which you should] then you should trust in God to support you. And if that trust is not fulfilled and you find yourself in need then you should find a job, but not go around asking people for money to support you. That is not trust in God. That is trust in flesh and blood. That is trust of the Dark Side

 I can understand to some degree why the Friesian School of thought is ignored in Philosophy. It is not exactly Kantian because of significant disagreements with Kant e.g the discursivity thesis. So if one is interested in Kant, he would not think of looking into almost any of the Neo Kantian philosophers. Plus Fries is not exactly constructing a tightly intricately constructed  Gothic Structure like Kant did or Hegel.

It takes generations for the implications of the Fries doctrine of immediate non intuitive knowledge to get put together in any sort of structure that could rival Kant of Hegel.

Still I find that the final synthesis of Dr Kelley Ross to where he pulls together all the threads of the Frisian approach to be quite impressive. See: https://www.friesian.com/foundatn.htm

Mainly because this corresponded with my own experience in which I felt I had faith that was not derived by logic nor by experience.  And this makes sense in terms of the Middle Ages in which Faith and reason were considered two different kinds of sources of knowledge.

And as Hume noted: reason does not tell us any where as much. as it was thought to show.

 In the Gemara there are places that seem to reflect negatively on Jesus. I noted in the Tosphot HaRosh that that particular Yeshu could not have been Jesus since the Yeshu referred to in the Talmud was a disciple of R. Yehoshua ben P'rachia. That is he was right in the middle of the period of the second Temple. And Jesus was at the end of that period. That is a difference of about 150 years or more.

[Mixing this up is like mixing yourself up with someone born in 1872. ]

The disadvantage of this is that Christians do not gin from the perspective of the gemara [Talmud] in which the laws of the Torah are taken literally, not allegorically. And it is this allegorical interpretation of the laws which is the Achilles heel of  Christianity. So the prohibition against homosexuality is thought to be an allegory. There have to be laws they understand in order to have a functioning society, but then instead of God's laws they have to have man made laws.

 The Lagrange formulation of Physics sort of gets around causality by things going to their lowest energy levels. That is to say things things seem to know where to go. And all Physics today is formulated in the Lagrange or Hamiltonian formulation. In classical physics this was not really any different from Newton. Only in Quantum Mechanics the results are different.

So what I am saying is that  causality does not seem fundamental.

So even if I use the idea of causality in showing the existence of God, a more rigorous proof is really from Godel [known as the Ontological proof.]

[Space, time and causality are all challenges to Kant.  These challenge can be met in different ways, [e.g. Hegel, or Fries] But they must be met.

To Kant, space and time are synthetic a priori. We must conceive of things in terms of where and when  but they have no relation to things in themselves. They might exist or they might not. This was a particular challenge to  the second Frisian school of Leonard Nelson. It is answered in the PhD dissertation of Kelley Ross where he divides the question of the nexus of things (where they are) and the question of the objective existence of Space-Time. 

And to me space has always seemed quite real from the fact that though ether does not exist, still photons are produced by oscillation in some kind of medium. Also the Bohm effect shows space has mathematical structure.  That is all besides General Relativity. There the main formula is that curvature of space time is the source of the energy momentum tensor.

Russia can wipe out every man woman and child in the USA in ten minutes.

 Why not get into a war with Russia?. Let's us be practical before we go on a moral crusade.  Russia can wipe out every man woman and child in the USA in ten minutes. And even  if you take the nuclear approach off the table, they are not weak. The are taking an approach to Ukraine where they want to preserve lives because they want it to be part of the Russian Empire. Not destroy it. The USA they can cripple without firing a shot. Just one EMP. Or just take out all the satellites. [i.e. the Internet.]]

Another reason is I think you could say there is a generational divide in the Ukraine. The vast majority of older people that lived under the USSR remember those times as significantly better than the disastrous corrupt rule from Kiev. The younger generation is the opposite. getting involved in a moral crusade, while it might be right, but in this case it looks to be disastrously wrong. People could not care less if they are ruled from Moscow or Kiev as long as they have peace and stability. They did not have that under Kievian rule. And no prolonging the war does not add anything except  more casualties.

So in conclusion: End the war. Do not imagine you are going to "win".What could that mean "Win"" What are you going to do wipe out Russia? That is your idea of win? Les see how that works out. So far trying to win has come a wee close to destroying the American economy. So you want to see have far that can go?