Cure of Cancer in New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201445

I used to review each paragraph twice and to go on. Now I am thinking learning in depth is better.

 I thought the best idea in learning was to review each paragraph twice and to go on. This was the compromise that I made for myself in the great Litvak yeshivas Shar Yashuv and the Mir when there was this tension between intense deep learning and the path of Rav Nahman of just saying the words and going on.

Each of these two ways just did not work for me. If I just said the words and went on, I understood nothing. And if I sat on the same page doing lots of review, I also had no idea of what was going on.

So I found this sort of compromise to be the most sensible thing. With review twice, I more or less got the idea, but I did not linger on the same page in such a way that I made no progress.

Anyway that is how I learned in Shar Yashuv and the Mir. After that I did the "Say the words and go on" approach. And that is how I learned most of the time. [ After that I needed to find some way of making a living,  I majored in Physics at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU. To do that I needed a lot of review.

[I knew one fellow in Breslov who in fact took this advice of Rav Nahman very much literally, He used to finish Shas every month. (The entire Talmud.) He pointed out to me that this is not hard if you just come in in the morning and start going through page after page. Thus by the end of the day, you have gone through about 100 pages.] But that is only for  the fast bekiut sessions. Nowadays I think one should emphasize the Litvak approach of deep iyun [Deep learning] because I think that is the only way to get to the light of Torah; and in math and Physics also I think deep learning with tons of review on the same chapter is the best approach. But is agree that fast learning is good in the afternoon [as was done at the Mir.]

[Here are two books I wrote which show how I learn gemara chidushei hashas  [ideas in talmud ] iyunei bava meztia studies in Bava Metzia

 It is hard to know why people obsess  on certain things. During the Middle Ages, one fate in the next world was the major issue. And since the right doctrine determined that fate, nations would go to war for that. In the Victorian Age in England , death was the major issue. One tomb or grave stone was just one aspect of this. Mainly people were obsessive about their legacy. But sex could not even be mentioned. Nowadays all that seems ridiculous. Nowadays people obsess about sex and bring it up all the time, --it is on the news constantly. But ones' legacy on the news? Or one's fate in the next world? You will not hear these issues on the news. And besides sex, there is race.  

Why do people obsess about it? Who knows? 

z48 Music file in midi format 

All music files were labeled by "a" through "z" generally going to 100. But this was not done systematically. So a lot of work would be needed to go through old files to see what is worth while to save, or what is worthwhile to edit.

For example: this file. It was finished some months ago, but I thought to go back and take a look at it to see if it was worthwhile to do a bit of editing, and then present it. So here  I am presenting it for the first time though it was finished  some time ago.

faith is a source of knowledge

(1) A flaw in enlightenment philosophy is the attempt to get moral principles from pure Reason.

Pure Reason does not tell us much. It does not even tell us what axioms are "reasonable" to start with.. It is more like a tool to constrain. It can tell us when we are making a mistake. This is the point of David Hume that got this idea from his experience as a teacher of Euclid's Elements (Geometry.) The axioms were not derived by reason. But they were reasonable. The only function of reason in the Elements was to show when some idea could be shown to be in contradiction to one of the axioms.

There might be reasonable moral principles, but they are not derivable by mean of pure reason which can tell us they way things are, not how they ought to be. That is the famous rule of Hume: You can not derive an "ought" from an "is"

(2) What I am getting at is that faith is a source of knowledge that is different from reason. [This is a doctrine of the Kant-Friesian School]. But even those that are adherents of this school often seem to miss out that this is not a form of psychologism. While it is true with Fries that one needs to look into one's own mind to see what the beginning axioms are  that does not mean that the mind knows these things by some kind of implanted knowledge. Rather the mind perceives them but not by reason but by a sort of knowledge that is not sensed nor known by reason. It is non intuitive immediate knowledge.

(3) This was of course obvious in the Middle Ages. The need for faith and reason together was obvious to all. This insight was lost until the Kant Friesian School arose.

 z74 music file

 I must admit that it was not any lack in the Litvak Yeshiva World that caused me to leave. As long as I was in the Mir Yeshiva in NY, things were great. And coming to Israel would not have been a problem also because there was a Litvak  kollel in Safed that I could have joined. Rather I got involved in Breslov. And you can understand how that might come about since Rav Nahman was in fact a great tzadik. Still, the effect on me was to get me off track. [And in spite of the greatness of Rav Nahman, on occasion people that get involved in Breslov do tend to lose the way, close the Gemara]. The best idea is to stick with the Gra and straight Torah of the Litvak world while at the same time to benefit from the important advice and ideas of Rav Nahman.

One  of the great things I learned in the Litvak world: the importance of Rishonim Mediaeval thinkers. [This mainly refers to the commentator of the Gemara, Tosphot, Rashba, Ritva, Ramban, Rosh. etc.].But by implication it also refers to the Musar and world view philosophy of the Rishonim.

Also I learned the importance of review. 

However not enough emphasis was placed on the Gra.

=And that is the only thing I see amiss in the Litvak world- not enough emphasis on the Gra. [for example the letter of excommunication that he signed and yet is still ignored. ]