A nice little columnlet to read.
“They think reason means only logical consistency” “Claims need to be argued in terms of truth and falsehood, logic, and the like” — but seemingly our teacher taught us about the emptiness of the analytic, didn’t he?

By the way, I once heard psychology defined as practical philosophy: how to implement principles while our psyche, with all its needs, continues to exist.
The Rabbi calls this throwing reason away. The issue could be solved by a “philosophical” assumption that the psyche is a plane that must be addressed not because it is essential, but as a means to philosophy.

a, exactly. Because of the emptiness of the analytic, they are mistaken.

The fact that there are people who made mistakes still doesn’t negate the way and the psychological approach as a way of life etc.
Why are you so alarmed by the fact that there are failures, even major ones, in other areas for example if someone as a result of your philosophical outlook leaves his family, his life, and Judaism it doesn’t bother you so much if you don’t connect to an emotional path maybe for you it fits less encyclopedically

Rabbi Michi, there’s no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and I’m writing this as someone who has already lived for 16 years in crazy Tekoa Bet. (With God’s help we’ll still get out of there.) And it really is crazy.
A combination of Talmud, Jewish law, and Kabbalah with a good sense of humor can provide the right balance between real learning (investigation and examination of concepts as standing in their own right) and the need for meaningful religious experience. Why does the sharp and clever philosopher from Tekoa (I’m intentionally not writing his name) admire Rabbi Menachem and Rabbi Shagar? Dealing with the psyche is not bad in itself. I agree that in this generation the feeling is that everyone has gone nuts…

I don’t think I threw out any baby. Psychology has no standing in questions of truth. That’s all. Whoever needs psychological treatment should do whatever he likes, from dancing in the moonlight through reading Hasidic texts or taking a pill with the help of Heaven. If psychology is what underlies religious commitment, then it is not religious commitment but psychological treatment.

As stated, I’m planning a column.

I’m glad that I came to refute and ended up building. In the commission of inquiry set up as a result, I was asked to find a source from you that explains how this construction took place right before my eyes without my noticing. Or in other words, a place where the Rabbi’s above basis is summarized.

a, this little columnlet contains a summary of a central line of argument in “Two Wagons.”

After reading what Erez wrote, I’ll just say that this is what I always say: “A righteous person who suffers” — because he is righteous.

Torah study is part of what it means to be a religious person, so it is impossible to detach religious experience from the topic, and from learning that strives for truth through subjective tools. Let me qualify my words: of course it is possible, and indeed one should detach them. But we’re not talking about a lawyer who goes to mindfulness workshops. We’re talking about the desire to study and know Torah מתוך religious commitment, and that commitment contains an emotional world through prayer. And how is all this connected? Over Torah study we recite a blessing in the morning, and that blessing is an opening to a whole set of words connected to, and in dialogue with, the Giver of the Torah. So even if when learning Torah one is learning Torah and not dealing with kishkes, still the emotional-psychological world is there in the background. Well, I’ll wait for the column on the matter in order to clarify and be clarified.

“And learning that strives for truth through subjective tools” = objective tools, of course.

I don’t know who you are, Michael Abraham. I happened to get to this page by chance. I only wish that you merit truly drawing close to our holy rabbi and to true righteous men, and that they forgive you in Heaven for this contempt toward the holy Breslov Hasidism.

God willing.

Michi, you’re piling up slogans without standing behind the words.
In Breslov there is not even a single sentence saying “throw away reason.”
In Breslov there is, however, the concept: “Where reason ends, faith begins.”
Do not enter into investigations such as knowledge and free choice, contraction and the empty void (if there is divinity, how did He contract Himself).
Read a bit of Hillel Zeitlin’s books on his view of Rabbi Nachman’s greatness.

Here is one of the classic examples where Rabbi Nachman said not to use reason and to rely on faith:

“His intention was that the answers to such questions have no substance. Needless to say, the answers found in philosophical works certainly contain nothing at all, and as explained elsewhere in our words (below 406, 411), for this reason our Rabbi of blessed memory forbade even looking into the books of the acceptable philosophers, because they bring very strong and great questions about the ways of God and elaborate on their questions, and afterward they wish to answer them, but the answer is very weak and easy to refute. Therefore, whoever studies them and wants to answer the questions by means of reason may come to great heresy, because afterward he understands that the answer is worthless and he remains with the question. Therefore it is forbidden to look into them at all; one should rely only on faith. And when, God forbid, some question on these matters enters his mind, he should know that it is impossible to answer it, because it is impossible for us to know and grasp with our human reason the ways of God, etc., but only to rely on faith alone, to believe that certainly in truth everything is correct and upright, only that with our reason it is impossible to understand the ways of God.”

Rabbi Natan of Nemirov, may he live long,
It appears that you yourself also carefully fulfilled your master’s instruction. You write that Rabbi Nachman does not say to throw away reason, and then bring a quote saying that this is exactly what one should do. Don’t think about problematic things, only about non-problematic things. That really is a proper use of reason. And how exactly will you know what one should deal with and what not? Before you have examined it, you do not know whether reason can solve the difficulties you are dealing with. But our teacher’s greatness covers over all the nonsense he writes. No wonder that for this to happen you need to throw away reason in order to draw close to the righteous man. The words are fitting for our teacher, and he for them.
I have no great interest in hairsplitting over quotations I do not know and that do not really interest me. But one cannot deny what is obvious. Go out and see how those who follow him behave, including the intellectuals among them.
If you like, you may look for your enjoyment here: http://breslev.eip.co.il/?key=5497
Or alternatively here: http://breslev.eip.co.il/?key=5491
And I haven’t even spoken about the folly you quoted, according to which where reason ends faith begins. There is no greater throwing away of reason than that. Truly a gang of cheap babblers.
Good thing I didn’t throw away my reason. That way I did not merit drawing close to the righteous man, and I was saved.

Where reason ends (= logic and derivation), faith begins (recognition of uncertain premises), just like someone wrote in a series of books published by Tam Publishing (editor Nehama Stern, typesetting Studio Tam, book and cover design Meital Harel, indexing Elad Gutman, printed at Beit El Press)

To say that recognition of premises is part of reason is a matter of terminology.

I was waiting for this to come up here. It is absolutely not a matter of terminology, because I am not throwing anything away. It is part of reason, and it is not unique to faith. The same is true in science and law and every other field. So no semantic trick will save this nonsense. There is nothing unique about faith as opposed to any other field.

Not unique to faith — that is true, but that is a different difficulty. Our teacher was not aware that in science too there are alternatives (he did not think, for example, about the problem of induction/generalization, and mistakenly thought everything comes from experience), and in truth it is true there as well. Law or morality outside the Torah is probably nonsense in his view. The assertion to throw away reason is a different matter from the assertion that faith begins where reason ends. Throwing away reason means that if faith in something is so strong that it manages to be pictured in the mind, then any rational challenge is regarded as a paradox where it is clear to us what the correct thing is, but it is hard to find the mistake, so it is interesting to solve the puzzle, but it has no implications. “With a carpenter’s spoon in a hollow we’ll burn mustard seed.” Call that a semantic trick with someone else.

In short, our teacher talked nonsense out of ignorance. So what is the point of hairsplitting over his doctrine?

Semantic trick — you know who you should say that to? Say it to yourself. You keep repeating like someone possessed that there is no certainty about anything, and “soft thinking” and probability and all sorts of words, but that is a huge semantic trick. It’s just words, and you behave exactly like someone who does have certainty. You say there is no certainty that if paper burns it burns — come on, give an example of a situation where the tiny doubt that maybe the paper won’t burn would affect your decision-making. And don’t say maybe a wind will come and blow the paper away, because everyone says that. Say a case where there is fire and the paper is inside for two hours and it’s ordinary paper and it won’t burn. In short, it’s all just words. You don’t call it certainty, but it sounds like certainty and behaves like certainty and smells exactly like certainty, and as far as I’m concerned call it Shakespeare’s cousin, like you like to say. So if you have a narrow spiritual awareness that lets you recognize only certain things that are not certain but behave like certainties, what do you want from people with a broader spiritual awareness who recognize exactly as you do but about more things?

You ran away.
Nice.
Learn not to belittle our teacher.

Natan, come on, let’s talk for a second about old pervert Berland. Until less than a decade ago, aside from some of the Na-Nachs, at least the Breslov people respected him and said he brought people close to the righteous man and to the blessed God. For some of them he was seen as a miracle worker and a servant of God, an extraordinary scholar, etc. etc. And lo and behold, no matter how much of a filthy old man and possible murderer he is, those same — exactly the same — pathetic two-cent speeches about faith, open contempt for rationalism and straight thinking, are now explaining to us what a wicked man he is.
It’s simply unbelievable how much ignorance and stupidity and lack of desire to repent there is. Only yesterday I read a responsum of the Knesset HaGedolah — do you even know who he is, or should one read only the Shulchan Arukh and Likkutei Moharan because anyway everything is found in our teacher’s books!!! — Rabbi Hayyim Benveniste, with all his genius and sharpness in Torah (Talmud and halakhic decisors) and presumably his righteousness, made a mistake about Shabbetai Zevi and did not refrain from admitting his mistake and returning from it in a responsum. There you have a real Torah scholar, one of the greats of Israel for generations. He understood that he had erred and fallen for the charisma of Shabbetai Zevi, and he used his reason to repent. But foolish Breslovers will keep on with the same infantilism that led them to admire Eliezer the madman. Didn’t work with Berland? No big deal, it’ll work already with some other spiritual guide. We’ll do hitbodedut and travel to Uman and everything will work out. Do you get it, Baruch? (I’ve got boots for sale.)

I hope I’m not taking things out of context, but it seems to me that the following segment from a lesson by that man may be the conceptual basis for his sadistic treatment method.
Minutes 11–13.

A very strange argument between a philosopher-rabbi who holds that the demand for absolute certainty is not absolute — if that is not throwing away reason then I don’t know what throwing away reason is — and a follower of Rabbi Nachman who claims that Rabbi Nachman demanded throwing away reason completely, while ignoring the fact that Rabbi Nachman himself did not throw away reason completely (he went to consult doctors about his tuberculosis and recommended that his followers get the smallpox vaccine developed by Edward Jenner). Rabbi Nachman’s own demand to throw away reason can easily be framed as opposition to the demand for absolute certainty of “the Wise Man” as it appears in The Story of the Wise Man and the Simpleton, and thus aligned with the view of the owner of this site.

I am not ignoring the spirit of Breslov Hasidism that goes to a more extreme place, but I wonder whether Rabbi Nachman himself was there, or whether that was an extremism created by his followers, foremost among them Rabbi Natan. So I have no problem with the trading of blows and mutual put-downs, but in practice the distance between the two approaches is not as great as they would like it to be.

Ignoring absolute certainty is throwing away reason? Strange. That itself is the instruction of reason.

I strongly protest for the honor of Rabbi Nachman!
The speech and style heard here are very fitting for Balaam — one who knows prophecy but mates with his donkey! Meaning, one who knows Torah but speaks in a way that a real Torah scholar would never use!

Everything written in the letter described exactly the emotional abuse I went through under Erez at that time, almost exactly! Today I understand that it came from the fact that he was hurt. It’s a shame I only read this two years later, in order to understand why he destroyed me and caused the hardest loss of trust I’ve ever experienced in my life! And he never asked forgiveness for what he did, maybe only rubbed salt into the wounds when he got to begin a healing process… Birds of a feather flock together.

With the help of Heaven, on the eve of the holy Sabbath: “The land is very, very good,” 5782

I will not enter into the “Transparent” affair, which I do not know, but I will say something about the relationship between “philosophy” and “psychology.” “Philosophy” tries to define what is true and what is moral. But the fact that a person intellectually knows that this is the proper thing to do still does not obligate that the person will feel good about it.

In order to bring a person out of distress and inner turmoil, intellectual clarity has an important role, but it is not enough. Just as the spies who toured the land saw clearly that the land was good and “flowing with milk and honey,” and nevertheless fear did not let them connect to the good — whether fear of the power of the nations of the land, or fear of entering a material world, or some other fear.

Emotional distress requires an appropriate response that can create a connection between the binding intellectual awareness and the emotional world that creates rejection and aversion. And here lies the role of the “psychologist,” who helps a person free himself from his anxieties. It is not true reason that needs to be “thrown in the trash,” but the anxieties and aversions that dress themselves up in rational justifications and excuses.

Here there is room for the assistance of a person from outside who, on the one hand, deeply understands the emotional distress of the person being helped, and on the other hand can serve as an “Archimedean point” to help him move forward. By making use of an experienced person, the “bound prisoner” can free himself from the prison of emotional barriers.

Obviously, the chance inherent in relying on an outside adviser also contains risks. Aside from the concerns about unprofessional or untrustworthy people exploiting the sufferer’s distress, there are also situations in which the therapist is professional and excellent, but is not suitable in temperament and methods for the unique emotional structure of this particular “patient,” for whose special makeup a different “guide” would be fitting. And at some point, a person must take responsibility and examine whether a certain method, which may perhaps be wonderful for others, is also suitable for him.

With blessings for service of the soul with joy and with reason,
Simcha Fishel Halevi Plankton

As for workshops in which a person tells a group the “afflictions of his heart” — this is known in certain methods of psychology. It was also practiced in certain groups of the Mussar movement (they called it a “committee” or an “exchange”). In Rabbi Nachman’s teaching I do not know whether this exists. There is hitbodedut, in which a person confesses before his Creator; there is “verbal confession before the righteous man.” Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk suggests that a person tell his troubles to his rabbi or to a trusted friend, but speaking about emotional distress in a group sounds to me less familiar in the Hasidic world.

And in short:
Reason should be refined from lees and dross, so that it becomes “pure crushed oil,” and then it will shine and radiate in its lucid clarity. The refined reason should be kept in a flask sealed with the seal of the High Priest, and injected into a person’s emotional muscles and veins regularly, but in measured and fixed doses, and then the person will prosper in all his ways 🙂

With blessings,
Admon Akavia Lichtman-Laderrer HaMeiri

What about religious experience in Rabbi Soloveitchik?
He didn’t throw away reason.
He was far enough from the world of Hasidism.
He had a doctorate in philosophy.
And yet he spoke about the experience of God.

And therefore? Is there some question here? I didn’t notice one.

Does Rabbi Soloveitchik’s thought also fall under the problem the Rabbi presented regarding the thought of Rabbi Shagar?

Do you want an essay on Rabbi Soloveitchik’s thought? Ask a concrete question.

Rabbi Soloveitchik claims that he does not need to prove God’s existence, because he experiences Him, and this is second in certainty only to my knowledge of my own existence.

And therefore?

Seemingly he is making claims similar to those of Rabbi Shagar and Rabbi Nachman.