But there is no obligation to give anything to a divorced woman

The obligation to feed one's wife is one kind of obligation. To  the Rif and most Rishonim it is from the sages, not the Torah. To the Rambam, it is from the Torah. There is also an obligation for a widow to be feed until she remarries. But there is no obligation to give anything to a divorced woman except the Ketubah itself. There is nothing called "Mezonot" "Food". This fact has always bothered me about courts that do not see the difference between divorced women and widows.

In any case, I wanted to introduce the subject of a case where you have a few widows. [I.e. the same husband married them all at different times.]

[Rambam laws of marriage 18 law 14] They all get the ketubah according to the time they were married but mezonot/food they all get at the same time.
The Ravvad says the reason is the obligation of the Ketubah is because they were married. The obligation of Mezonot is because he died. So it is like "borrowed and borrowed and then bought" [at the end of Bava Batra] where all get the same.
Rav Shach I see deals with this issue.

I would like to go into some of the problems of the Middle Ages in order to show that sometimes going to the extreme is the proper thing to do. What I mean is that the Middle Ages was basically exemplified by the focus on Reason and Faith which more or less meant authority belonged to kings and priests.

These lost a great deal of their authority when they seemed incapable of solving problems. The Black Plague would be the best example, but there were  more.  

So the Renaissance began-- which meant more or less, "Let's go to extremes, and then see maybe that will get us somewhere." [Take your pick of many examples of such thinking.]

To some degree you see this in Rav Nahman [Uman and Breslov] in his idea that Torah scholars tend to have a problem of "תלמידי חכמים שדיים והודאיים" (Torah scholars which are demons) which his brings directly from the Zohar [Pinhas]. [See Rav Nahman's LeM I:8, I:12, I:28, I:61, II:1, II:8.]
I have tried to soften the blow of Rav Nahman by explaining this in terms of Jung's archetypes. But it occurred to me that Rav Nahman did not want anyone to soften the blow. He wanted his point to be open and explicit.
That means he did not intend it to be a nice idea revolving in some "mind space". He meant his statement to cause  actions. Sp what kind of actions was he thinking?

w50 E Minor   [w50 in midi]

The Middle Ages had some great points. Civilization could not have risen without the Feudal system. Also there were amazing thinkers. Aquinas, Anselm, Tosphot, Saadia Gaon, the authors of Musar.
But the drawbacks were real. They were not just made up by later generations.

One of the many great ideas of the Middle Ages was faith with reason. But at some point when people were seeing the limits of that they decided the middle of the road approach was not getting anywhere. They decided extremes was the only way. Some choice extremes in one direction and others in other directions.
I think the basic general approach is the middle of the road, but there does come a time and place when extreme action or thought is called for. The Renaissance was mostly about seeking the extreme. As x goes to infinity.
One example of the advantage of extremism is what I mentioned before about two kinds of learning. One going fast--saying the words and going on until you finish the book many times. The other is in depth learning. I think both are necessary.

There is some debate today about universities and some say they do not teach much. You can see this in Michael Huemer. But the problem was already seen by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind and he saw the issue in a wider context--an issue about the Enlightenment itself.
For there were people from the very beginning of the Enlightenment that were against the whole movement. [Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels where he saw the rule of the intellectuals as them siting on some floating Island and ruling over us plebeians.]

I myself do not see much of an answer. However I can see that even in the Middle Ages before any of that started there already was this issue about Faith and Reason. But the Middle Ages had more or less come to the conclusion that you need both and some kind of synthesis between them.
I would point out that Hegel came closest to defending faith and reason in the most rigorous possible system--if not for the fact that he has been used ever since then for the exact opposite.
Faith with reason in the middle ages was the idea that both are compatible, but no one made the whole into a organic whole.

Leonard Nelson also has a clear defense of faith [That is the Kant Friesian School] but I can not tell if the difference between him and Hegel is all that significant. [The dinge an sich with Nelson is detected by a third faculty of the mind immediate non intuitive knowledge.  It does not seem all that different than Hegel'e getting to God through the dialectic.]
[I think that in terms of STEM universities are doing great. Allan Bloom was talking about the other insane departments.]

So you have in Rav Nahman [of Uman] [Sicha 76] a clear emphasis on learning as fast as possible. Not just say the words but say the words with "Great speed".  But you also see in his Sefer HaMidot an emphasis on review.
So one way to deal with this is like I was doing in Shar Yashuv--learn each paragraph twice and then go on. Even when I started to learn in depth I also tended to do this same thing.

But that was not really like the general way of learning at the Mir. In the Mir [New York] the morning was devoted to getting as deep as possible. [It was famous for that with Rav Shmuel Berenbaum's classes being considered the deepest in the world.] The afternoon was for fast learning. And that aspect of either part of the Mir I never got to. I was really not on the intellectual level to get as deep into the Sugia/subject as the classes of Rav Shmuel were. But nor was I on the level of doing the fast kind of learning that people were doing in the afternoon.
So I had my middle of the road approach. I would learn the Gemara with Tosphot and the Maharasha and maybe the Pnei Yehushua sometimes and then just go on. I never got into the deep aspects of learning that you can see for yourself in books like the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach and the chidushim of Rav Haim of Brisk.

So now it seems to me that if possible the way of having two different kinds of sessions is the best idea--like they were doing in the Mir. One in depth with lots of review and the other fast. And later I in began to apply both methods to learning Math and Physics. And I can see that both are necessary.
[It took me some time to find the rishonim that held that Physics is part of Torah. That was not well known at the Mir at the time.]

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