The genius? From Vilnius

You remind me of a story that happened to me. My son left the Haredi yeshiva where he studied in favor of the Hesder yeshiva in Gush Etzion. As part of the crisis that arose there and the efforts to convince him to stay, I spoke on the phone with a well-known yeshiva head who wondered in my ears what they found in Rabbi Lichtenstein, the head of the Hesder yeshiva in Gush Etzion. He said that he had read his articles and was not at all impressed. Every avrech in the Kollel Chazo"a or Ponevezh writes more brilliant things. I told him quite gently but directly that he was talking like a little child. Being impressed by scholarly sparks and brilliance is for children. Systematic thinking like Rabbi Lichtenstein's prevents all the problems that those brilliant people try to solve. His approach was more serious and did not seek brilliance and sparks but the truth and the fullness of the issue. It is difficult for someone who grew up in the Lithuanian yeshiva world to understand this. The same is true of the Gra. Although he did not write systems nor did he exhaust issues like Rabbi Lichtenstein (at least in what he left written), he has extraordinary brilliance, even if they are local and not through scholarly systems. It is clear that he was also a genius in his comments.