On Knowing How to Learn, Part I
ברוך שהבדילנו מן התועים
Natan has been increasingly shocking me with his arrogance and ignorance. When I started on the discussion with him about Kollel and the Tashbetz, I believed him to be somewhat learned, if not a little misguided or mistaken on this particular issue. But his last two posts sound either like he does not understand Torah study at all, or he is just a plain Reformist.
The fact that Natan makes the extraordinary claim that R' Chaim, who was considered from the greatest scholars of his time by Torah sages eminently more qualified than Natan, did not know how to learn, belies belief. What R' Chaim did was revolutionize Torah learning and encourage scholars to look inwards and understand the text more carefully, rather than create 'pilpulim', 'l'shitasos', and 'ukimtas' to answer complications. While the terminology he used may have been his own innovation, the concept was admired by virtually all the gedolim of his time. That Natan thinks that he is even on the same level as them to disagree is astounding. Yes, the Chazon Ish may have disagreed with him from time to time, but he wrote glosses on his sefer, he did not reject the entire method lock, stock, and barrel. And while it is theoretically possible that a Rishon erred, it is a lot more likely that we simply do not understand what they were saying. There are many responsa from the Rambam to the sages of Lunel explaining what he said - sometimes using fine chilukim - and not saying that he erred. The practice of the poskim throughout the ages is to assume that their predecessors knew what they were talking about, and that they did not understand it, rather than rushing to say that they were mistaken. Only in extreme circumstances, where it seems that something is blatantly wrong, will later authorities disagree with earlier authorities, and even then, with the greatest deference. This is not a Charedi innovation. This is how the Halachic sausage has been made throughout the ages. All Nosei Keilim and Teshuvos strive to understand their predecessors, explain them, qualify them, and on rare occasions disagree with them.
Whether or not one uses 'Brisker' terminology in his learning is not the deciding factor whether one knows how to learn or not. 'Knowing how to learn' can be explained the same way (l'havdil) any other subject matter expert can be trusted in his field, and we would not trust an outsider. A Talmid Chacham is someone who both possesses the raw data of Torah required to arrive at a psak, and is also familiar with the methodologies used by poskim throughout the ages to arrive at such a psak. The same way we would not trust a high school grad anti-vaxxer who opened a few science books but is unfamiliar with scientific method and has no clue how to process that data, likewise, is it utterly ridiculous when someone with seemingly no background with the halachic authorities and the methods they use to arrive at their conclusions, opens a Tashbetz and totally goofs. And this has nothing to do with R’ Chaim. What R' Chaim did was to crystallize this method of deeper understanding and give it terminology and influence future generations to study things on a deeper level.
Natan seemed to be very excited about a horrific comment from a commenter who goes by the moniker ‘Fozziebear.’ The first part of Fozziebear’s comment (that Natan did not quote in his latest post, although he wrote that it was ‘perfectly stated’) sounded like it came straight from a Reform rabbi.
The sad situation in Torah learning in the frum world is that decades of self isolation, contempt for critical thinking, and academic approaches, and an excessive adherence to religious axioms of Torah study from prior generations (such as the belief that all statements can be reconciled, or the need to prove all 'heroes' to be infallible), have rendered the level of Torah study to be of a relatively low level, a type of puzzle solving, creating solutions to problems that don't really exist or banal answers to questions that noone in prior generations considered worth asking.
R. Slifkin is correct in that he advocates a learning technique that is honest, context based, open to critique, and genuinely truth seeking as opposed to being centered around ideological defense.
Now, I don’t know why he thinks he is smarter than the tens of thousands of talmidei chachamim and poskim that Judaism has been gifted and accuse them of exercising ‘contempt of critical thinking’, but this guy has a totally different idea of how Torah is supposed to be learned. Indeed, poskim do not use ‘academic approaches’ because such approaches are not Torah study. It’s like saying mathematicians don’t know what they’re doing because they don’t consider ‘the human element’. Torah is not academia. Torah is Torah, and we look to the methods of previous scholars to learn it, not to academics. And that means considering how they approached different topics and trying to reconcile and clarify that. There are clear klalei hora’ah codified in Shulchan Aruch (CM 25:2) and these are how poskim throughout the ages have arrived at halachic rulings. The fact that Natan feels this, which is the ‘Charedi approach’ (as well as the approach of even ‘non-Charedi’ rabbanim such as R’ Herzog, R’ Yosef, R’ Weinberg and R’ Waldenberg), is wrong, is the biggest vindication of what I have been saying the whole time.
I would say it's not just a question of klalei hora'ah, but a disregard for the whole concept of hora'ah in the first place. One of the many things Natan is kofer in is the concept of a mesorah, as you can see explicitly in many of his posts. A mesorah is part of what we mean when we talk about "knowing how to learn". It's how we avoid coming to conclusions like this:
That Lashon Hara is not really a prohibition and is only mussar:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/738lsg4d35waxtf/From%20Principles%20to%20Rules%20and%20from%20Musar%20to%20Halakhah%20-%20Benjamin%20Brown.pdf
Or that homosexuality is not really a prohibition:
https://rationalistmedicalhalacha.blogspot.com/2021/04/does-torah-actually-prohibit-all.html
Now obviously, there are many mesorahs of how to learn. Just like there are many ways for a judge to decide a case, and many different schools of thought when it comes to how to understand, say, the Constitution. But just like when it comes to appointing a judge, we want somebody who went to law school, who had many years of experience in the practice of law, and we are not satisfied with any idiot off the street who thinks he can "analyze a text", the same is with learning Torah.
I took it as a casually-worded insult that was truthful enough. It is kind of astonishing that he could not only deny it as such, but then turn around and make a long-winded response justifying his belief that you don't even know what "know how to learn" even means.
You can't really understand him until you understand what a gamma is. That, as it happens, isn't *just* an insult. It's a label for a personality type that really exists, with identifiable behaviors that give it highly accurate predictive power.
For one thing, they are highly passive-aggressive. Consider how I was banned. I know other bloggers who ban trolls and the like. When they ban, they address the subject, not the audience. "Shimshon, you are hereby banned." And usually they give a specific reason. Natan addressed the audience, and then lied about what I said.
When I finally pinned him down in the post where he pawned off whether to ban you guys via a poll, I asked him whether I was still banned. It was predictable as night follows day that he would not respond to my query. It was a mistake for him to ban me. Were I to make the same comment on this platform, he would not have done so. But he, like a true gamma, cannot admit to a mistake, and won't even acknowledge it. He won't even commit to his previous decision to ban me. Just leaves the question hanging.