There is a verse that is often taken to mean something it does not say. אתה הראתה לדעת כי השם הוא האלהים אין עוד מלבדו. "You were shown to know that the Lord is God, there is none other besides Him." Which means: There is no other god besides God, the First Cause. The reason I say this is two fold. One is simple grammar. If the words "אין עוד מלבדו" would be by themselves in the verse, then that would perhaps be different. However in the context of the verse, the meaning is the Lord is God, there is no other god besides Him.

The other reason I say this is in the actual meaning of the verse. In that verse in Deuteronomy Moses is talking to Klal Israel and telling them you were shown at Mount Sinai to see and to know something. What was that? That was that the Lord is the true God and there is no other gods besides Him. That is the simple explanation of what Israel saw at Mount Sinai. Not that there were shown that there is nothing. 

The basic idea of the Torah is that God created the world from nothing. Ex Nihilo. And all Rishonim agree that that is the point of Torah.

There is an argument between almost all other Rishonim and the Rambam concerning the question if one grabs a doubt.  The Rashba is usually in the side of the other rishonim in this kind of argument but in this case he brings a case for the Rambam and the Gra also.
The issue comes from a Gemara in Bava Metzia . R. Hanania said to Raba: there is a braita that supports your view that says the doubts go into the stall to be taken for the tithe. So if a kohen would grab a doubt and we would not take it out of his hand then one would be taking tithe by the money of a kohen.
The Rashba says that  that is only in the case of the first born of an ass which is at first owned by the Israeli. That is the status of the first owner causes us to say we would take it out of the hand of the kohen.

This comes up in the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach in laws of acquisition 3 law 9. I mean to go into this in a little more detail.

Hegel I think goes in reputation up and down

Hegel I think goes in reputation up and down sky high for about ten years and then sinks to the basement for another ten years,-- and then back up again etc. He has been doing this for the last two hundred years. It all started right after he was gone. For the first ten years after that he was the king of the mountain. Then the Prussian government brought in Schelling to knock him of his pedestal. Then back and forth it went with all kinds of permutations.
I can not figure this out. At least once Plato and Aristotle were accepted, they more or less stayed that way.

One odd thing about Hegel was the use that Marx made of him to turn his approach into its opposite. That does not invalidate him but it is one odd thing. And then you get the English enthusiastic people all heads over heels about Hegel until WWI. And then suddenly Hegel is responsible for WWI. [Not that people in Germany were even reading him at that point. When WWI started Nietzsche was the big thing in Germany, not Hegel.  With WWII it became even easier to blame everything on Hegel.

Now one one hand you have Leonard Nelson and the Kant Fries School and the Intuitionists like GE Moore which have great value, but that does not  seem to diminish Hegel just because they have other good points.

E.g. Hobhouse has a whole book against the Metaphysical view of the State which is against ideas about the state that some people were basing on Hegel.
In any case, One thing he knocks is the statement of Hegel that "matter is gravity" and Hegel compares that with people in their essence are free. So Hobhouse knocks [among other things] this idea that matter is gravity. This was certainly hard to see in the time of Hobhouse but now that we know that matter is made of strings the same as gravity it is harder to see what the complaint about Hegel is.  [I ought to add while that Leonard Nelson had a different view than Hegel about a lot of things still his main argument was against the Neo-Kantians of the Marburg school. And Husserl,]

[I think it is best to think of Hegel kind of neo Kantian thought. Not the peak and top, but nor the bottom.

The way of learning in depth I have nothing to add to the basic approach of the great Litvak {Lithuanian} type of yeshivas. They have already adopted the two clearly best ways of doing this.
Either the global type of approach pioneered by Rav Haim of Brisk and Rav Shach. The other the sort of kind of detailed learning I heard in Shar Yashuv from Naphtali Yeager and later by David Bronson.
I tried in my two books on Shas to embody both types.
However in terms of learning fast I do think that the basic idea of Rav Nahman of Breslov is something that people ought to do. Say the words and go on. In that way you can finish at least once in your life, the entire Gemara with Tosphot, the Yerushalmi with the Pnei Moshe and Karban HaEdah and get through the entire writings of the Ari and Remak and all the Midrashim and all the books of Rav Haim of Brisk and Rav Shach and the entire body of Mathematics and Physics which is  apart of Torah. Without this method of Rav Nahman, I think getting through this is inconceivable. 

Does a document of a sale count as money? The Rashba, an important Rishon, holds no.

The Rashba (and Ramban [Rav Moshe ben Nahman. Nahmanides]) held a document is not money.
See the nook of the Rashba on Tractate Kidushin page 5 and also page 47.
 You see this in Kidushin and Pidion HaBen. The question that Rav Shach brings is from Bava Batra where the Rashba apparently holds a document of obligation should be considered as an exchange of money. [This Rashba is not the same one called the Rashba in Tospfot.]

The actual subject is famous. You have a cases where a slave is owned by two owners. Then one lets him go. So now he is half slave and half free. Now a slave becomes obligated in all commandments  when he is freed. [As a slave he is only obligated in commandments that a woman is obligated in.]
The question to the House of Hillel seems clear. He works for himself one day and then the next he workers for his owner. It goes back and forth every other day. But the students of Shamai asked but what about getting married? He can not marry a fee woman because he is half slave and he can not marry a woman slave because he is half free. So the owner has to let him go and the slave writes a document that he is obligated in the amount the owner is losing. The Rashba holds this is good. But why if the document is not money?
Rav Shach answers this in this way. The reason you need more than a document to be counted as money in terms of Kidushin and in businesses deals is that you need a buyer and a seller. For example lets says one would give money so that a field should be "hefker", well that would not work for this reason. But freeing of a slave is "pedia" letting go, or redeeming. It is not a business deal. Once the owner lets go, even if the reason is simply that he got a document saying that the slave will eventually pay him back that is enough.

[Actually this subject may not be famous since clearly Abraham Lincoln was unaware of it. Detroit would look different today of only Abe Lincoln had learned the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach.]

Why you can ask is this just when freedom is so important? Because everyone has their place and ought to fit into their place. Obligation is part of freedom as Hegel goes into. See his discussion in History.

[The reason this same reasoning does not apply to pidion ha'Ben or Kidushin is clear that in neither of these last two case do you have a חלות state of being that is already here in potential  but just waiting for something to trigger it so that it can become real.]

I have tried to present a case that learning Physics and Mathematics is a part of learning Torah based on an array of Rishonim [mediaeval authorities.] That means it does not depend on whether you are smart or not.
I also added to this the idea of the Gra about trust in God with no effort. That would apply even to learning that you just say the words in order and do not worry if you understand or not. You just believe that God will help you, and that eventually you will understand.
And not just that, but I think this kind of learning strengthens trust in God. I mean that searching for methods of learning is a kind of ריבוי השתדלות "over amount of effort".

[The idea of doing a minimum amount of effort I got from Rav Nahman of Breslov [Sichot HaRan 76]. He explains the idea of trust in God that you make a vessel in which the blessing can enter and then cease. Anything beyond that is ריבוי השתדלות too much effort which implies lack of trust in God.

ideas about trust in God are brought in the major book of Navardok מדריגת האדם "The Level of Man" but I found a lot of help in understanding the subject in the LeM of Rav Nahman.

Tolerance can not be a prime positive value.

Tolerance is not  prime positive value. The reason is that everyone has some out-group that they do not tolerate. The out-group for tolerant people is intolerant people. So tolerant people have a group they do not tolerate, i.e the intolerant. So the tolerant people are intolerant. So tolerant people can not allow themselves to be tolerated,- since they are not tolerant [of the intolerant].

If you hold that people ought to be decent and kind and honest, then you ought to postulate those as primary values.