There was a certain degree of grace that I merited to go to two great Litvak yeshivas. Shar Yashuv and the Mir in NY. Only later did I come to Israel to learn in kollel. But the kollel thing in Israel seemed to be structured in a way that I though was not really proper and so I dropped out of it and learned Torah on my own and said to my wife that we would trust in God to help with making a living.
[That is the short and sweet of my yeshiva career. The beginning of it was a meeting with Shmuel Glazer who was going to a different Litvak yeshiva in Baltimore (I think of Rav Rudderman).
I was in Asbury Park at the time, and met him through an old man at a hotel that my family was running. [The Hamilton Hotel].
What is great about Litvak yeshivas is basically the fact that they learn Torah in the straight and narrow path. They do not add nor subtract. What is Torah is Torah,- and what is not is not.
So in the few years I spent there I got a basic idea of what Torah is all about. That is on one hand the most obvious advantage of the Litvak yeshiva world. Another hidden advantage is that if you get into it, you can really get touched with "the spirit of Torah", but that is a little harder to put my finger on.
But it is not as if they are going with the path of the Gra exactly. Rather that they get about as close to the real thing as possible. But it would be nice if they would stick with the Gra more than they do. The way I see it is that if they would take the Gra and Rav Shach a bit more seriously, that would help to bring clarity to what really is Torah and help people avoid the Dark Side and pseudo Torah.
[Just for clarity let me just mention that basic set of the great Litvak yeshivas is Mir, Chaim Berlin, Torah VeDaat in NY and Ponovitch, and Brisk in Israel. [But Ponovitch has branches and also non-official branches of people that learned at Ponovitch and started yeshivas along the lines of Ponovitch. Shar Yashuv is known as a beginner's kind of place --which is true for the first year. But my impression was that after the first year they get rapidly into deep Torah waters in a way that falls nowhere behind the other great Litvak yeshivas.
[I did not learn Musar in Shar Yashuv because that is a Litvak yeshiva, but not a Musar Yeshiva. The idea really comes from Rav Haim of Brisk that Musar can be and often is a distraction. So Shar Yashuv was based on that model. They want the time in yeshiva to be for getting to the "real thing" as deep and fast as possible. Yet later at the Mir I did learn Musar. And I still am not sure which model of Litvak yeshiva is better. With or without Musar.]
What is great about Litvak yeshivas is basically the fact that they learn Torah in the straight and narrow path. They do not add nor subtract. What is Torah is Torah,- and what is not is not.
So in the few years I spent there I got a basic idea of what Torah is all about. That is on one hand the most obvious advantage of the Litvak yeshiva world. Another hidden advantage is that if you get into it, you can really get touched with "the spirit of Torah", but that is a little harder to put my finger on.
But it is not as if they are going with the path of the Gra exactly. Rather that they get about as close to the real thing as possible. But it would be nice if they would stick with the Gra more than they do. The way I see it is that if they would take the Gra and Rav Shach a bit more seriously, that would help to bring clarity to what really is Torah and help people avoid the Dark Side and pseudo Torah.
[Just for clarity let me just mention that basic set of the great Litvak yeshivas is Mir, Chaim Berlin, Torah VeDaat in NY and Ponovitch, and Brisk in Israel. [But Ponovitch has branches and also non-official branches of people that learned at Ponovitch and started yeshivas along the lines of Ponovitch. Shar Yashuv is known as a beginner's kind of place --which is true for the first year. But my impression was that after the first year they get rapidly into deep Torah waters in a way that falls nowhere behind the other great Litvak yeshivas.
[I did not learn Musar in Shar Yashuv because that is a Litvak yeshiva, but not a Musar Yeshiva. The idea really comes from Rav Haim of Brisk that Musar can be and often is a distraction. So Shar Yashuv was based on that model. They want the time in yeshiva to be for getting to the "real thing" as deep and fast as possible. Yet later at the Mir I did learn Musar. And I still am not sure which model of Litvak yeshiva is better. With or without Musar.]
