My own feeling is to divide ones time between these two methods. As was done in the Mir yeshiva in NY. The morning for intense in depth learning and the afternoon for fast learning.

In the Conversations of Rav Nahman 76 there is the famous few paragraphs about learning fast.
This certainly helped me a lot when I was trying to get up to speed in Physics and Math. After high school I concentrated on Torah learning --which is great in itself. But  that meant that I skipped Physics. [Not being aware of the opinion of Ibn Pakuda and the Rambam. Nor were their opinions well known in the Litvak yeshiva world at the time. ]
But besides learning fast Rav Nahman does talk about review in his sefer hamidot.
So how to combine these two opposites?

In books of Musar before Rav Nahman like the אורחות צדיקים Ways of the Righeous there seem to be both things.

[ My own feeling is to divide ones time between these two methods. As was done in the Mir yeshiva in NY. The morning for intense in depth learning and the afternoon for fast learning.

American life before things got weird

Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind goes into the conflict between the Enlightenment vision of people as improvable by means of education and the anti enlightenment philosophers.
In that book he traces the conflict to be a question between John Locke and Rousseau about what is the state of nature of man before you would have any education or civilization.

It occurred to me a long time ago that he leaves out the treatment of these question of Kant and Hegel. And I am not sure why. Maybe he did not think that there has been any kind of solution.

Why would not the Hegel kind of synthesis work here?


In any case-my own view is based on basic experience. I had the opportunity to experience average American life before things got weird. The regular experience was  is the regular schooling up until university and family outings every weekend. It was Freedom combined with responsibility. There were no free rides. the Welfare state had not been expanded yet.
Of course all that changed. But that is how things once were and it was great.
So all the arguments against capitalism and the American way just fall off me like water on a duck.

But I see the USA in a deep crisis. And I am not sure why people want to make it into a socialist society. However i also can see why Russia had to become the USSR. It was not just the end of the effects in the Ukraine now that the thawing out period is over and the criminal elements in the Ukraine are raising their heads again. But even before that--I saw all the working infra structure was from the communists. So as far as Russia goes I can see the point of the USSR. But not in the USA. So what is the difference? I could take  a guess and say that the USA used to be WASP. But there might be lots of other explanations. The point is that my views are not based on idealism but experience and just seeing how things are and how the used to be.

So based on my experience I do not see the religious world as any kind of noble ideal.  My experience in the religious world shows me clearly that it is no where near as nice as the just average day experience in the USA only just a few years ago. In fact, the very concept of the religious gaining power gives me horrible nightmares.

Rav Nahman's Sefer haMidot-- "If you want to repent be sure not to be in debt."

Dr Kelley Ross has a nice section dealing with Kenyan economics on his Kant Fries site.http://www.friesian.com/.. Michael Huemer also I kind of recall. The basic idea is that the driving force of economies is demand, not supply.

My opinion about economies is based on a statement in Rav Nahman's Sefer haMidot-- "If you want to repent be sure not to be in debt." And since I got the idea from Musar books I had read before I discovered Rav Nahman about the importance of repentance, I decided to not be in debt even for a minute.

This related since  the way the government works nowadays is based on Kenyan economics. Which is the idea that going into debt is a good thing and it is what drives the economy forward. [They use weasel words to disguise what they mean. They call it the "supply side". But that simply means the more debt you go into, the richer you will be.

ideas of Rav Nahman of Breslov

There are a few basic ideas of Rav Nahman of Breslov that i think are very important. Clearly the talking with God  in one's own language as personal friend has to take the top of the list. But there is also his way of learning of just saying the words. Though this is mentioned in Sihot Haran 76, there are other hints to it in the LM. I forget exactly where But one lessons starts out "על ידי אמצעות הדיבור יכולים לבא לתבונות התורה לעומקה".[By means of saying the words one comes to understanding of the Torah in its depth.']

However in Shar Yashuv review was emphasized by Rav Freifeld. The Mir clearly was into learning in depth. In fact the classes of Rav Shmuel Berenaum had the reputation in those days of being the deepest in the world.--And that might have been true. That is what students of Lithuanian yeshivot were all saying all over. To me it is hard to compare. All the great Litvak gedolim seemed to have very great depth--especially Rav Shach.

But I found a wealth of great ideas besides these in the books of Rav Nahman. But these two things seems to be the most important. (1) Learning fast and (2) talking with God as a friend talks with another.
As for learning in depth (of the Mir) this to me sometimes seems important, and sometimes it seems to just get me weighed down.

I found for example that learning fast helped me in Physics - since the kind of nitty gritty calculations that one need to do take me a very long time. To get an idea of physics beyond the surface level I think the fast learning is right thing. [As for Rav Nahman's discussions against science, I think he was referring to the pseudo science that was in his days.] 

It seems to me that Kant is going like Aristotle. That is that he agrees there are universals but that they depend on particulars.

That is to say (to take an example from Dr Huemer) lets say I have two pieces of paper in front of me. Do they have anything in common? Yes. They are both white. Whiteness is a universal. It is something that particulars have in common. How do you recognize particulars is by the fact that you see and feel them. But a universal you can not actually feel of see. You recognize it by a different faculty. Reason.

It was a point of Kant to limit the validity of reason to conditions of possible experience. That is particulars.

To be able to get to faith beyond the realm of possible experience it seems to me you would need either Leonard Nelson's Kant Fries School of non intuitive immediate knowledge, or Hegel.

For even though Kant did limit the realm of reason, there were enough problems in understanding Kant that leave room for a Friesian Development or a Hegelian one. [Maybe Shopenhaur also but I am not sure about that.] In any case, I have to say that I am just offering this a a suggestion but have really not do the homework to be any kind of expert. Still Americans have a good and health suspicion of experts as they ought. So I feel somewhat at ease in offering my opinion about areas of value that are more content and less formal. [Going in this like Dr Kelley Ross who divides areas of value along curve of all form and no content like logic and going up to more content like math but less formal. Then justice and art and music which have more content and less form. In those areas it seems the more expert one is the more they lose common sense.]

Kelley Ross has spent a good deal of effort to try and bring attention to Leonard Nelson. At least some of those efforts are gaining success.The  Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy by Nelson seems to have been published in English by Yale University Press.

Shulhan Aruch Even HaEzer 93

That section deals with laws of a widow. The basic law is that a widow gets mezonot [food] from the land of her husband until she asks for her Ketubah [marriage document which gives 200 zuz to a virgin if the husband divorces her or if he dies. But in it are included mentions of other obligations. 200 zuz  I figured might be a few thousand dollars based ona Rosh I saw once.]] or until she gets married again. But the Geonim who came after the Gemara made a tekana [law from teh scribes, not from the Torah] that she can receive food also from movable property. [This does not apply to a divorced woman who gets her ketubah right away but there is no obligation of "alimony".
But what happens if there are a few wives. Since they all got married to the same guy at different times so the obligation of the ketubah stars at different times. So the first one married gets her ketubah first. Then if there is any property left over the second one collects etc. [Just like would be the case if he owed money on loans he took out.]


I only had a few minutes to look at it but it seems to me that one way to understand the Rambam is that the obligation of mezonot starts at the marriage. [If there is the word therefore].

The Raavad understand that the obligation of mezonot starts at the time the husband dies, not when they got married. And that is how I think most of the people on the page over there in the Shulchan Aruch  like the Beit Shmuel and Helkat Mehokek understand the Rambam also.
[The simple way to understand this is that clearly the actual obligation of mezonot stars when the husband dies but the tekana stated at the marriage. The thing here is I actually recall Rav Shach mentioning this issue and that he took it as a simple thing that the obligation starts at the death of the husband. But then you can ask why would the ketubah be any different? There also there is no obligation until she is divorced or until she dies! What is the difference?]

When I saw the importance of  learning metaphysics and physics in Ibn Pakuda's חובות הלבבות it did not click with me right away. I was at the Mir in NY and was not looking for distractions from learning Gemara. still something of what he was saying must have stuck with me because later when I saw the same thing in the Guide of the Rambam, it started making sense that maybe that was the aspect of learning Torah that I had been lacking. However I really was not sure what to do with the metaphysics aspect of the whole thing.  On one hand the Ibn Pakuda and rambam were clear they were not talking about mysticism. [No offence intended towards the Remak (Moshe Cordovaro) and the Ari (Isaac Luria). It is just that that is not what the Rambam was talking about.] But what can one do with Metaphysics? What could be considered the be fulfilling what the Rambam was saying? Aristotle and Plato for sure. I guess Plotinus also. But what about later on people?


To make this short I should just say that I found the neo Kantian people to be pretty important, though I can not say who is better. Leonard Nelson and his Kant Fries School of thought look to me to be very great, but not to the degree of being the only ones that added or improved on things.
I mean to say that when Kant wants to limit the realm in which reason is justified he goes to conditions of experience. But a group pf people noticed some inner contradictions with that in Kant himself. That is the circularity that experience itself depends on a priori assumptions. So Reinhold came up with the Representation. That answers the issue since it is neither just a priori nor posteriori. Shopenhaur made good use of this in his The World as will and Representation. Still it seems that each one of these people fills in pieces of  a big puzzle. Hegel pointed out how the dialectic brings to truth and knowledge From Being to Logos]. And that is an accurate description of how in fact knowledge progresses.[You see this in Rav Nahman also in his claim that talking with God brings one to truth.].