A few questions/concerns

Thank you Rabbi for your answer

A. I do not agree that questions A and B are empty slogans, they are the title of a question that is expanded upon later. However, I agree that when it was presented in its initial form it makes a serious discussion difficult, so I will arrange the questions one by one from here.

B. Regarding your answer to question C, Maimonides, in the introduction to the first chapter, writes

” [The first sect – accepts the words of the sages as they are]

The first, and this is most of what I have seen, and what I have seen of his writings and what I have heard about him –

They believe them as they are, and do not believe in any hidden interpretation in them. And all the omissions are for them the obligation of reality…….

And this is the sect of the poor in knowledge, they are to be pitied for their folly, since they honor and exalt the wise according to their own opinion, and they humiliate them to the uttermost, and they do not understand this. And God lives, blessed be He, that this sect loses the splendor of the Torah and darkens its radiance, and uses the Torah of the Lord in the opposite direction intended in it.

My heart tends to agree if the words of the Rambam are true. Therefore, I have to accept your answer that what is missing is for someone who does not study the introductions before he reaches the Talmud.

C. You are right that the connection of the topics in the original question is a little artificial, the logic behind it is that these three topics are the ones that cause me discomfort in my frequent encounter with the religious reality in which I live. Beyond that, there is a causal connection between them, at least in my understanding, that when one does not study introductions to the study and clarification of faith, one arrives from the Talmud to magical concepts, and due to magical concepts, the structure of the prayer processes the main point and becomes what is uncomfortable for me.

D. I wonder why others think differently in order to define my thinking. One of the methods of thinking is deduction. When I rule out the error, I get closer to the truth. As Maimonides says in Moreh Nevuchim, Part 1, Chapter 59

“Here it is explained to you that every thing that has been proven to you, the negation of something from which it will be exalted, will be more complete, and anything that requires something additional to it will be wrong and will move away from knowing its truth. And in this way one must approach its attainment through investigation and demand until one knows the nullification of everything that was nullified with respect to it”

Since my opinion is rare in my environment, I find myself in a need to clarify it by clashing with the opinions that are around me, so this criticism is constructive for me.

E. An educated secular person is critical of reality and tries to clarify what is possible in reality and what is fiction. It is true that he is required to clarify as much as he can the truth of reality and therefore to arrive at the positiveness of inventions first (Sefer Hamada 1,1) but in the environment we live in, it is very difficult for him to do so, because he usually grew up like me almost as a baby who was captured, and when he already encounters Torah distributors, it is usually very shallow and contradicts simple reason, so it is difficult for me to come to him with claims that he does not know the first and fundamental truth.

For this nation, an adult who believes that a red thread, a bag of salt or a branch of a tree that grows near a grave have a magical effect, I cannot help but burst out with this opinion.

F. I would be happy if you would refer me to your discussion on the subject of prayer so that I can use this to clarify my approach to the structure of prayer.

G. I would be happy to begin an orderly and reasoned discussion.

1. Since the first commandment of Exodus 20:2,

” I will be the LORD your God ” is a foundation whose children have no discussion at all. I conclude that the second commandment ” You shall not have other gods before me” is, in my understanding, the central axis that runs through the entire Torah.

There is almost no section in the Torah that does not refer to the prohibition of idolatry. As it is written in the Babylonian Megillah, page 13 ” And my mother said to her ‘Jews’? – Because of the atonement for idolatry, all the atonement for idolatry is called ‘Jew’.”

Or as it is stated in the Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, Parasha 33, Discourse 13

” A woman came with a basket full of grain in her hand and said to me: Go and offer it before them.

When I offered it before them, one said: I will eat the firstfruits, and the other said: I will eat the firstfruits.

And this great one stood between them and broke their silence.

He said to him: Why do you question me? Are they all able?

He said to him: And not? Your ears will hear what your mouth says.”

Question

Is this assumption correct that distancing yourself from idolatry and idols is one of the most central axes of the Torah?

For this, you don't need to study the Rambam. It's simple. And those who don't agree won't agree even if they study the Rambam. Adopting magical concepts has nothing to do with studying the Rambam, just as adopting faith in God has nothing to do with studying the Rambam. A person forms positions on various subjects in various ways. Even if they study a text that presents a different position, it won't necessarily change their positions. Many of those who adopt magical concepts know the Rambam well (and have even criticized his positions, like the Gra, for example).

The claim that those who reject one position adopt its opposite (by the way, this is not deduction, at least in the accepted definition, but the law of the avoided third) also does not require studying the Rambam. It's elementary logic. At the next stage you will tell me that one needs to study Rambam in order to know that one plus one is two.

You have a very romantic image of the secular. It is completely disconnected from reality. Like the secular with superstitions and foolish attitudes no less than their religious brothers.

My discussion of prayer is found in the second book of the trilogy in great detail.

I did not understand what you wanted to know about the העז and אנוכי. You may be surprised, but I too have heard of these verses before.

If you want to begin a systematic investigation of faith, this is not the place. You could perhaps use my trilogy, which is intended for exactly that.

The negation of the העז and idols is certainly one of the axes of the Torah, but today it is meaningless. On the other hand, fulfillment is absolutely not. On the contrary, the Torah’s simple explanation fulfills the Almighty. You must have studied too much Rambam.

Thank you Rabbi

Is there, and if so, to what extent, rabbinical authority since the signing of the Talmud?
Beyond receiving authority from a group of students at a specific time and place, which is easy to accept.
Thank you

Your answer was

No. I continued in the third book of the trilogy

So,
What allows me to marry my children off by authority?
What allows my in-laws to eat from my table?
Or why wouldn't I open a synagogue if a prayer I invented yesterday is recited?

It's not a riddle
And it's not 3 questions

These are one question if there is no binding authority for anyone,

How is it that for 1500 years there is still a framework within which we operate within a halakhic framework that meets us every moment and that some of the possibilities for division were supposed to split us into completely separate groups?

The fact that there is no authority today does not mean that there is no halakhah, nor does it mean that there is no possibility of conduct. First of all, there is halakhah that was ruled upon in periods when there was authority (until the Talmud). Beyond that, there are accepted customs and rulings (although in my opinion they are not binding). Beyond that, even if there is no halakhah ruling today, why does that mean that it is impossible to marry or eat at each other's houses? I simply do not understand the question. Don't you live among us? Don't you know that there are people with different halakhic norms, and yet life goes on? The public has developed the ability to live in a way that includes different rulings and methods (so couples adopt one ruling custom, etc.).
I have written more than once about the fact that our ability to exist as a single unit is mainly thanks to the Talmud. A brilliant text that was compiled in an amazing way in its genius (although, I do not know if consciously, that is, whether its editors really thought about it). See here briefly: https://mikyab.net/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/%D7%94%D7%97%D7%99%D7%95%D7%91-%D7%9C%D7%AA%D7%9C%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%93

Thank you for your answer
I have been trying to do the systematic clarification for the past 15 years.
I would also be happy to go through your books.

At the same time, I would be happy to maintain a correspondence with you.

“The negation of idols and idolatry is certainly one of the pillars of the Torah, but today it is meaningless.”
This answer surprises me
especially in light of what Rabbi Kook writes in Orat, Zer'onim, Asorim Me'sorim

“All the complexities of opinion in humans and all the internal contradictions that each individual suffers in his opinions come only from the fogs found in thought by the divine concept,
which is an endless sea and all thoughts, both practical and theoretical, from which they emanate and to which they return.”
“The emptiness of thought from the lack of learning and knowledge leads a person to think a lot about the essence of God. And whoever is more immersed in the ignorance of this terrible and terrible foolishness of thought will think that in this he is approaching the high divine knowledge, which he has always heard that all the great souls in the world yearn for. By accumulating such a habit over several generations, many falsehoods are woven from it, the results of which are many and terrible evils, until even the individual loses his material and spiritual strength from too much trouble and darkness. The greatest hindrance in the human spirit, in coming to the general understanding, is brought about by what the divine thought is fixed in a special way and known among humans due to habit and childish imagination. This is a spark from the defect of making a statue and an image, which we must always be very careful of, and even more so in a period of clearer knowledge.
All the troubles in the world, especially the spiritual troubles: sadness, impatience, boredom with life, despair, which are truly the main troubles of man, also come only from a lack of insight to look clearly at the tide of God”

In the wake of the general prohibition of spiritual study in divine matters, the concept of divinity is growing weaker ….

In the wake of the general prohibition of spiritual study in divine matters, the concept of divinity is growing weaker, for there is no purified intellectual and emotional work. With this, external fear and natural faith and the bondage of submission remain in many hearts as an inherited influence from those periods, in which divine thought and feeling shone brightly, to the point that it was worthy of a great man to enslave all souls to it. And since the inner point of divine knowledge is dim, the divine essence is contained in the multitude, and also in individuals who are worthy of being their guides, only as a strong force that cannot be escaped from and it is necessary to be enslaved to it. When one comes to enslave oneself to the service of God according to this empty state, of the dark picture full of wonder and bewilderment that arises in the idea when one thinks about the word of God without education and without Torah, one will see a wonder that is cut off from its source, that one will see an elevation, a person will gradually lose the radiance of his world through what he associates himself with the smallness of the mind. No pride – God is then revealed within the soul, but rather a baseness of wild imaginations, which paint the appearance of some false reality that is blurred, depleted, and distorted, which frightens every believer in it and oppresses his spirit, stuns the heart and prevents the subtlety of the person's soul from overcoming, and uproots the divine beauty in his soul. And even if he says all day long that this belief is just an empty word that the soul knows nothing about, and every gentle spirit must divert his mind from it, and this is the apostasy that occurred at the time of the Messiah when the waters ran out of the sea of divine knowledge in the Knesset of Israel – and in the entire world.

The gross mental settlement, regarding the reality of the divine plan in words and letters alone, is what disgraces humanity, and apostasy comes as a kind of cry from the power of pain to redeem man from this foreign strait, to raise him from the darkness of letters and proverbs to the light of idea and emotion, until it finds a place to stand even at the center of morality. Apostasy has the right to temporary existence, because it must digest the filth that has clung to faith from zero knowledge and work. This is its entire proof in reality – to remove the special forms from the essential thought of all life and the root of all thoughts. When this situation continues for generations, apostasy must emerge in a cultural way to uproot the memory of God and all the institutions of worship of God,”….

In order to purify the air from the pollution of the impudence and perversion of thought in the essence of God, – a glimpse that leads to idolatry, – absolute apostasy comes,

I understand from these things that the essential cause of apostasy/secularism is the removal of idolatry views from us.

Is this understanding wrong?

Rabbi Kook's speculations are not a binding source for me. I wrote what I thought.
What he writes here seems to me to be completely baseless.