It is hard to know how to deal with Tosphot.
I have avoided this subject because it seems to me that people in a Litvak yeshiva would have to go about Tosphot in a different way than me.
Since I anyway try my best to divide my time between Torah and Physics, that gives me a kind of space to deal with Tosphot in my own way which would not work for people in a Lithuanian Yeshiva. Since my time is limited anyway what I usually do is just to take one page of Gemara and go over it with Tosphot for about a month. That means I am trying to review each Tosphot every day. That is from where the ideas come from that I wrote in my two small books on Bava Metzia and Ideas in Shas. The fact that I was doing a lot of review on those Tosphot or on Rav Shach or Rav Haim Halevi helped me to come to the ideas that I wrote down there.
But when I was a Litvak in a Litvak yeshiva doing Gemara all day, I clearly was not doing that. I was just reviewing each Tosphot about twice, and then go straight to the Maharsha and Pnei Yehoshua. I would try to get the basic idea and then simply go on. [Understanding the Pnei Yehoshua and Maharasha as you can imagine took me a lot more review than just twice. Sometimes I had to get up to about 15 times of review before I would get the idea.]
And then there was the time I was learning with my learning partner who has an IQ many magnitudes above me, and he would prepare, so when I got to the learning session he had already thought of some of the difficulties with Tosphot.
So in conclusion I would have to say how you deal with Tosphot probably depends on your situation.
If you have a learning partner with a high IQ, that is probably the best thing. If you are in a Litvak yeshiva, then in fact it probably makes the most sense to try to make progress. Learn the Tosphot, Maharsha and Pnei Yehoshua a few times and then go on. Also have a separate session in the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach. [That is I think the best idea with the Avi Ezri is just to plow through it straight since Rac Shach usually explains the issues clearly before he gets to his basic new idea. It is probably the clearest sefer on learning Gemara in depth that I have ever seen or ever heard of]
I have avoided this subject because it seems to me that people in a Litvak yeshiva would have to go about Tosphot in a different way than me.
Since I anyway try my best to divide my time between Torah and Physics, that gives me a kind of space to deal with Tosphot in my own way which would not work for people in a Lithuanian Yeshiva. Since my time is limited anyway what I usually do is just to take one page of Gemara and go over it with Tosphot for about a month. That means I am trying to review each Tosphot every day. That is from where the ideas come from that I wrote in my two small books on Bava Metzia and Ideas in Shas. The fact that I was doing a lot of review on those Tosphot or on Rav Shach or Rav Haim Halevi helped me to come to the ideas that I wrote down there.
But when I was a Litvak in a Litvak yeshiva doing Gemara all day, I clearly was not doing that. I was just reviewing each Tosphot about twice, and then go straight to the Maharsha and Pnei Yehoshua. I would try to get the basic idea and then simply go on. [Understanding the Pnei Yehoshua and Maharasha as you can imagine took me a lot more review than just twice. Sometimes I had to get up to about 15 times of review before I would get the idea.]
And then there was the time I was learning with my learning partner who has an IQ many magnitudes above me, and he would prepare, so when I got to the learning session he had already thought of some of the difficulties with Tosphot.
So in conclusion I would have to say how you deal with Tosphot probably depends on your situation.
If you have a learning partner with a high IQ, that is probably the best thing. If you are in a Litvak yeshiva, then in fact it probably makes the most sense to try to make progress. Learn the Tosphot, Maharsha and Pnei Yehoshua a few times and then go on. Also have a separate session in the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach. [That is I think the best idea with the Avi Ezri is just to plow through it straight since Rac Shach usually explains the issues clearly before he gets to his basic new idea. It is probably the clearest sefer on learning Gemara in depth that I have ever seen or ever heard of]
