Children of the Gemara

I start my day with half an hour of studying Grash's [Translator's note: Rabbi Shimon Shkop] novellae in bed, then move on to a quarter hour of in-depth mathematics, followed by a quarter hour of Spinoza's Ethics for quick review, all while brushing my teeth. And so I go through the day, moving from one abstract thought to another. Then at night, I'm able to maintain supreme concentration for two hours straight and satisfy my wife

Ground Zero: Nirvana as an Intellectual Disaster Zone in the Brain (Source)

I dreamed that rumors were spreading in the yeshiva world about a flourishing of Talmud studies among the younger generation of Americans, and that there's now a new trend of studying in pairs [chavruta] abroad. Workshops for daily Talmud page [daf yomi] study are starting to appear in New York - for non-Jews. And enlightened girls are sharing on Facebook how the discussions of Abaye and Rava [Talmudic sages] have changed their lives and helped their businesses - "A day that doesn't start with hadaf hayomi [the daily Talmud page] is a day I earn less, am more irritable, and have less sex at night" - meaning the effect lasts 24 hours until the next page, even more than cannabis. And the most famous rabbi in the world is a yeshiva head who teaches in-depth Talmud - who is a non-Jew. He learned the ancient Talmudic methods in a yeshiva in Israel from a great teacher and hidden righteous man, imported them to the USA, and now he's opened a network of centers for Talmud studies, under the brand ©yeshiva, and he laughs through his thick beard and sidelocks (without a kippah): "Don't confuse it with Shiva!" And he explains in a viral video with millions of views:

Both current neurological research and the ancient wisdom of a civilization that has existed for thousands of years have reached the same conclusion, which contradicts the entire modern Western way of life: mindfulness and meditation are the dumbest things in the world, exactly the opposite of what you should do with your brain - that is, it makes your brain stupid, because the brain is plastic and you're practicing stupidity for several hours a day. A comprehensive recent comparative study showed that Buddhist monks, yoga teachers, and a group of gurus (randomly selected) speak slowly like retards and are full of the most inferior clichés, and that their creative achievements are inferior even to Americans, not to mention Europeans, not to mention Jews (who are the control group). If you have brain problems, like anxieties and stresses that stem from our feverish lives in the age of great clichés or from the Holocaust of European Jewry, you need to do exactly the opposite. Brain research is now turning to examine the brains of scholars who study Talmud for over ten hours a day for ten years - and shows enormous growth in gray matter in the Talmud area of the brain. Talmud is difficult for you? Study mathematics. Studying Talmud and mathematics were found to be the only effective cure for protection against Alzheimer's, brain aging, and advertisements, and today Western doctors are even sending complete non-Jews, who showed signs of initial stupidity and dementia, to study Talmud. The only problem is that their brains are already so degenerated due to the neuro-Western lifestyle that they prefer to die from Alzheimer's alone and disconnected rather than study one page of Talmud. Die! That's how degraded their brains are. Therefore, you need to start the neurological change in the brain's lifestyle at a young age, starting today. The brains of these unfortunates, millions of Americans every year, are already too rotten due to the smartphone and fail to do the Talmudic therapy in the short time left before death - despite the fact that the Talmud saves brains that science has already given up on, and medicine has said Kaddish [mourner's prayer] over them, and turns complete idiots into scholars.

I, for example, as a child, was a complete moron, and that's how I grew up in America, and America, after all, turns you into a fool, and I would have continued to be an incorrigible moron - if I hadn't met my Talmud teacher, who opened up my brain to modern-ancient horizons. You don't believe me today, right? I really was stupid, the stupidest, and only the Talmud turned me into who I am today - owner of the yeshivas empire where hundreds of thousands of pages are turned daily and which rolls in hundreds of millions. The ancient Talmudic sages, the amoraim, were able to even defeat death with the help of the Talmud's neuro abilities, and live for several generations of amoraim. The Talmud is behind geniuses like Einstein and Freud, names familiar to every American household. My teacher would always say that practicing mindfulness and presence and vipassana and inner emptiness is simply self-destruction of the brain, neurological suicide, and an intellectual disaster. You take a creative machine, like a new car that can drive anywhere, and put it in full throttle in neutral until you destroy the engine. After all, what is a mantra? It's brain destruction, exactly like any repetitive action, exactly like working in a factory 10 hours a day. Even if you were told to focus on a black wall for hours every day - it's exactly the same thing, complete degeneration. I, as a Talmud practitioner who also practices mathematics, tell you that there is nothing worse for the brain than all the Eastern methods, and compare the achievements of the Jewish brain to the Indian brain.

This might be anecdotal evidence, but anyone who has experienced studying Talmud in-depth [iyun] will tell you with deep conviction how challenging it is, and how mathematics purifies the soul - complex functions are simply heavenly sublimity, and set theory makes you dizzy, and Galois theory is more beautiful than any work of art. The Mona Lisa next to it is trash. Yogis can't understand a complex sentence, and speak in simple and basic sentences! And when I see all the victims of the failed methods of the failed East trying to explain to us, to us (!), in the successful Judeo-Christian culture, thanks to the holy Talmud and mathematics and philosophy and all the abstract thinking behind our achievements, and trying to convince us of nonsense - I ask (the question is an ancient Talmudic technique): Why are they the Far East and not we the Far West? It's because they are far behind us. After a day of studying Talmud, I come home and hear my wife and her friends chattering about meditation and telling how much it helps mentally, and I feel like someone who has lifted 300-kilo weights with his brain all day - and sees an advertisement for couch potatoes in front of him. They are brain potatoes! You understand how it feels, after I'm forced to unfortunately eat dozens of donuts every day, and you still see me as thin as a stick, just to provide energy for my poor brain to understand a simple interpretation in Tosafot according to Rabbenu Tam's method?

In Talmud study, your brain burns so many sugars - that you can eat a whole pig every day and still be as thin as an ancient Jewish Muslim, if you just activate your brain like me, in creative-intensive interval training. Every morning I start the day with half an hour of studying Grash's novellae in bed, then move on to a quarter hour of in-depth mathematics, followed by a quarter hour of Spinoza's Ethics for quick review, all while brushing my teeth. And so I go through the day, moving from one abstract thought to another. Then at night, I'm able to maintain supreme concentration for two hours straight and satisfy my yoga instructor wife as much as she wants, and I still have time to study with each of my children in pairs, simply because my brain has long since disconnected from the ordinary thinking problems of people who only use 10% of the potential of a man's brain. And then in the ten minutes before sleep, I give buying instructions to the stock market for tomorrow, and make a lot of money thanks to my knowledge of monetary laws and Bava Batra [Talmudic tractate].

You understand that if I think while eating, my brain burns more calories than I manage to eat? My wife is always stroking my forehead and asking if I have a fever - and I say: it's not fever, it's thermodynamics, which forces me to increase entropy in the universe and contribute to the heat death of the universe just to slightly decrease the entropy inside my brain and engage in Torah, exactly like a computer that overheats due to a bug in JavaScript. Sometimes we laugh and I ask her to fry an egg on my forehead while I crack some issue in cohomology in algebraic topology for breakfast. Show me one yoga teacher who can even understand what cohomology is, let alone defend the Rambam against the Raavad. These are weak minds, very weak, that Buddha has caused to become indifferent and dull. And in contrast, philosophy sharpens your mind like a knife you cut the world with - through all the nonsense everyone talks about you see a thousand likes ahead. Someone tells you something, and you understand the thing behind the thing behind the thing behind the thing he's saying - you come at him from behind like a ninja turtle - actually that's something from the East, isn't it? - so like an Amoraic martial artist, shouting "Rava said Abaye said!", and everyone becomes transparent to you, immediately you turn them over and turn them over and imprison them in them! And he shouts demonstratively that the video is canceling him from his studies and returns to the book before him - and the video ends with a zoom in on the wrinkles on his sweating forehead, where you can really feel the wisdom of generations behind it.

And the newspapers talk about the American Talmud craze that's conquering Europe and Japan too (Anime-Amoraim), and women's magazines come out with articles: "New concentration abilities!", "The Talmud improves your orgasm", and men's magazines come out with articles "The Talmud improves her orgasm", and they sell Talmudic deodorant "Head Additions" for forehead sweat and a Talmud stand that combines a treadmill for gyms (which compete for customers with yeshivas and claim it's a double burning of carbohydrates). And a movement of Talmud study in U.S. prisons begins, in a huge federal government program, because it's proven that those who study Talmud don't return to crime, and one Afro-Haredi drug addict says on the news: Talmud is more addictive than heroin. And here the fall begins.

People start complaining that the daily page is addictive, that they can't concentrate on watching TV, and even on Facebook it's already hard for them to be interested. I haven't seen a movie in a year, it just stopped interesting my brain, man! And there are people who stop working and start studying in yeshivas all day, and the American GDP suddenly starts to falter and decline - and everyone is afraid that their son will go to yeshiva and leave capitalism. Why did we send him to school? And the American media starts talking about the Talmud epidemic, people who are too smart to work, and prefer to live frugally, just to study, at the expense of the federal taxpayer, and blue-collar workers are going crazy: young retirees. Why did we work all our lives like donkeys? Why were we donkeys, for you to sit at home? And the Children of the Pages movement sweeps young Americans into marathons of sex, Talmud and rock and roll in pairs, and "function correction" parties where they wake up at midnight and study mathematics naked until dawn, and compete in solving integrals while drunk, instead of going to college, under the slogans: "Make chavruta, not money" and "All you need is Amoraita". And an anti-Semitic cartoon is published in the New York Times with a Shas [Talmud set] labeled "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" - and the newspaper apologizes for the mistake.

And a sycophantic-imitative field is born in the humanities called - gomorrah studies, to attract the young people who don't come, and then cunningly take out any possible fun from the study forever and wean them off Talmud for its own sake. But who's still interested in academia when you can study in pairs? And they bring secular Jewish lecturers who claim that the new trend is an appropriation of the Jewish gomorrah, and that it's not okay for a non-Jew to study Talmud. There are even Americans who start learning Aramaic (!) to read the Talmud in the original, and claim that the English translation doesn't convey the experience and that it's all fake and not serious - Talmud should be read in Aramaic. There are also complaints about scholars sexually harassing stupid female students, including intellectual harassment that scars their minds forever, and suddenly they also notice that the Talmud is not exactly politically correct and start teaching corrected Talmud, but the big blow is still waiting: because Hollywood discovers the Talmud. And many years later they're still laughing at the Page Girls, and the first (and last) Daily Page Completion Festival of alternative counterculture where everyone held hands and sang "Your law is better to me than thousands of gold and silver", and they talk about that generation of old men with funny beards who studied Talmud, and thought that the Talmud would fix the world and put an end to capitalism and bring world peace, and today they are the most gentile in the world.