Question

1. Regarding the childishness that characterizes quite a few Haredim—I run into this phenomenon a lot too, and I’m unsure whether it stems from the mental isolation that many Haredim (including intelligent ones) impose on themselves (being cut off from the realities of the world in order to remain in “innocence”), or whether it’s the other way around—people with a childish personality have the potential to become Haredi, because the Haredi mentality is a comfort zone for them (or maybe both, as I’ve often heard people say against dichotomies 🙂 )
2. I can’t define myself as someone who was formerly close to Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky—but I certainly was something like a regular at the home of Rabbi Tuvia Yaakovzon, who is married to Rabbi Chaim’s niece and also lives at the legendary 10 Rashbam Street, and I can testify that the admiration for Rabbi Chaim stems, in my humble opinion, from great appreciation for his famous and legendary diligence, and people also attribute to him (perhaps as an outgrowth of that diligence) a kind of divine inspiration. And we’re not talking about simple “ordinary folk” who believe everything, but even major Torah scholars I knew truly related to Rabbi Chaim as a supremely holy man from earlier generations
3. On the subject of learning, I very much identified with the insight about the style of learning in yeshivot. After I got married, I left Netivot Olam and moved (following my wife’s studies) to Yeshivat Ofakim (as is known—a yeshiva mainly for Religious Zionist high-schoolers who had “burned out,” though the more scholarly ones—less so—went to Yeshivat Kiryat Malakhi). The head of the yeshiva was Rabbi Yaakov Horowitz (himself a former Religious Zionist), and he would give magnificent, complex lectures, in the finest tradition of yeshiva heads, while alongside him was Rabbi Chaim Kamil (originally an authentic Jerusalemite), who learned and taught more straight from the page, the depth of the plain meaning, without fireworks. After about 5 years in the yeshiva (to its credit I’ll say that I’ve never encountered a place where people live the learning so intensely—students and kollel fellows alike, with remarkable diligence from almost everyone there), I decided to leave, and the main reason was (as I explained to my wife) that I felt I was in a constant achievement competition—who would produce the most brilliant study group talk, come up with the sharpest and most dazzling conceptual innovation, etc. (there was a rotation among the kollel fellows for delivering these talks)—and intuitively it felt to me like this wasn’t it…. Yesterday the insight became sharper for me—the competitiveness and the fireworks are supposed to chart a path; they are not the path itself, and apparently I already felt that back then

Thanks in advance