How to learn? Fast or slow?

I  remember Reb Freifeld suggesting to learn every chapter of Talmud ten times. I did not do this as I wanted to make progress. I also had seen the musar book The Paths of the Righteous  which said to learn fast.
Still I remember that I did chapter 5 in Ketubot a a bunch of times. But I was learning with the group of Naphtali Yeager at the time and he was concentrating on the first chapter of Ketuboth mainly from page 9 until page 13. He was doing it with the שב שמעתתא and I was just a beginner at the time. Still he was kind enough to show me the ropes and showed to me the depths of Talmud and Tosphot and I have not forgotten that amazing lesson. I think most people that I have encountered are simply unaware of this depth in the Gemara.



This tension between review and fast learning is part and parcel of the yeshiva experience.

Yeshivas began to deal with this issue in this way. The morning hours were spent in preparation of the Rosh yeshiva's class which would be given a hour before Mincha.  The afternoon was meant for fast learning--meaning some Tosphot but not necessarily every single one.

In conclusion I want to suggest to divide ones time equally between in depth learning and review time of learning. This was the eventual conclusion of the great yeshivas and it seems to me that it must have been based on experience.

While I was in Polytechnic Institute of NYU I used to say every chapter of the Math  and Physics forwards and backwards- including the problem sets and that seemed to have helped me pass my courses. This was an idea I had seen in the Ari. when I used this method when I tarted getting back into math, this method helped a lot.     

 Kelley Ross understands rights as being derived from the natural law doctrine. He also mentions the Torah origin of this idea. [See the link.] That is he understands rights to be derived from things like "Thou shalt not steal." Since there are further commandments relating to human affairs that would make rights more extensive.

I think Kelley Ross might not have put all his ideas in one essay. So I might as well say the basic idea as fast as I can. Natural Law had some origin in the Stoics but was articulated clearly by Saadia Gaon חוקים שכליים. That is many of the commandments are simply morality that God already put into the basic fabric of nature. The Torah simply reveals what is already objectively out there. This was developed later by Maimonides and Aquinas. The idea of Rights of John Locke was simply the expression of this in a way that makes it more clear from a legal perceptive. Thou Shalt not Steal is Divine and Natural law. The way this is defined legally is that people have a right to their own property. No one has a right to take from anyone their property no person and no government.
John Locke was simply a natural continuation of the ideas of Aquinas in this regard. But he added the idea that legitimate governments are formed to preserve these rights.

The idea is that people give up a certain amount of their rights that they would have in nature, in order to preserve the government they live under. Otherwise it would be war of all against all. That was John Locke's idea of how it is legitimate to tax. But the idea was that government can't take what it wants. Only what powers given to it under a constitution are legitimate-nothing further.

This is related mainly to the fact that I noticed some people do not have a very clear idea of exactly what John Locke meant by rights the meaning of the American Constitution. So when Donald Trump suggests that the job of government is not to let in Muslims but rather to protect Americans he is absolutely correct. The only job of government is to protect its citizens from foreign invasion and from crime.

Ideas in Bava Metzia chapters 8-9 updated   Title page of Ideas in Bava Metzia


Ideas in Talmud  Title page for Ideas in Talmud


I was reading Bava Metzia page 81 and noticed that Tosphot did not seem to hold by my ideas on Bava Metzia page 104. Then when I read page 82 I realized that Tosphot was definitely against me. So I thought to salvage my ideas with Rashi. Then when I read Shavuot page 43 I realized that Rashi was not going to help me. So I had to correct my ideas on Page 104. While clearly it is true the lender owns the guarantee, but the document does not turn the whole thing into a sale. [You could say I was half right.He does own the guarantee but he cant keep it when the money is repaid.] In any case up above are the corrected versions.


I also see that the beginning on chap. 9 needs work. One idea was that David noticed the difference between the Rambam and Rashi about what is required on the worker. But that whole idea I think needs to be re written. 

I see that the issue of the Enlightenment in the Jewish world [i.e. the 1700's until the 1800's] was  related to the original Enlightenment. And at least in one issue they were identical--Secular Learning. Allen Bloom makes a good point that the original Enlightenment had a political agenda also. But that was clearly not all there was to it.

My experience is such that I have a good deal of sympathy towards authentic sciences  and have a great deal of antipathy towards pseudo sciences.


For example I have seen that where you find supposedly rigorous application of Torah principles with complete exclusion of  anything secular does anything but help people be moral or decent in any sense. In fact, just the opposite. Yet opening the door to the secular in the Torah world always leads directly to pseudo sciences and never towards the real thing.

So the quandary remains and I have to go and learn Talmud because I am already late, and I don't think this 600 year question is going to be solved on this blog this minute. Or rather I don't think I will solve it any better than my own patents and grandparents who held from  balanced approach--Torah with wisdom.


If we go back further to the argument about the Rambam's Guide we can see the issue of secular learning also was raised.
In any case, I hold learning authentic natural science is important and learning a kosher vocation also. But I also believe that there is something one gains by learning Torah that the secular world has not touched. There was some kind of amazing energy in the Mir Yeshiva in NY and also in Shar Yashuv. But i realize today that that energy can't be harnessed at will. It takes a very special kind of individual to make an authentic yeshiva.  The authentic yeshivas I can count on two hands. Three in NY and two in Israel. [That is in NY: Mir, Chaim Berlin, Torah VaDaat, Shar Yashuv. Israel: Ponovitch, Brisk.

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Songs for the glory of the God of Israel

q77 [q77 in midi]  n64 [n64 in midi] n63  [n63 in midi]

 n62 [n62 in midi]n60 [n60 in midi]n58 [n58 in midi]

n57 [n57 in midi] n56 [n56 in midi] n55 [n55 in midi]

 n54 [n54 in midi] n53 [n53 in midi] 

n51 [n51 in midi] n52 [n52 in midi] q79 [q79 in midi] g4 [g4 in midi]

g1 [g1 in midi] b100 [b100 in midi]

b101 [b101 in midi] b104 [b104 in midi] b105 [b105 in midi]

k16 [k16 in midi]

m  [mathematics in midi]  h4 [h4 in midi]

h7 [h7 in midi] h9 [h9 in midi]  h24  [h24 in midi]  C [chs in midi] bh [bh in midi]

 e33 [e33 in midi]

 e64 [e64 in midi]

e69  [e69 in midi]

I thought Schopenhauer took care of the problem of Evil by simply saying human good is not on the agenda of the "Will." And later he had some kind of second thoughts in which he added that the Will has some kind of higher agenda in which the Good is the goal.
Personally I think the Rambam did the best job by having השגחה פרטית "Divine watching out for" be directed towards higher intellects. It is an elegant solution which is Neo Platonic in showing how gaining the higher intellect is important. (This was the basic idea during the Middle Ages and was abandoned I think for poor reasons.)

God and Job obviously agreed with Schopenhauer as is seen from the end of the book of Job. In fact that is teh whole point of the book. Also I saw this in Psalms. I forget where but one obvious place is Psalm 72 [in the Hebrew and English numbering. In Russian and Ukrainian it would be Psalm 73.]







I wrote about this before but I saw a certain Mark Friedman also wrote what looks like a good treatment of this problem so I thought to mention the issue again.

Mark Friedman says: "Many philosophers, especially those working in the Kantian tradition, hold that persons have dignity as a result of their personal autonomy, and that respect for this attribute is a paramount value. At least for them, a world with free will is “better” than almost any possible world without it."
This seems to me to be  a good answer to this question. I think Leah a friend of mine mentioned this answer once when she was talking with her mother in Safed. At the time I did not think much of it but now it makes a lot more sense to me than it did then.