Q&A: “Lack of explanation is lack of understanding” — necessarily?
Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.
“Lack of explanation is lack of understanding” — necessarily?
Question
A common slogan in the yeshiva world is that lack of explanation means lack of understanding.
I wanted to ask—what do you think about that?
Personally, it seems to me that there is some correlation, but not a complete one.
That is, in my view it is possible for a person to understand something a little bit (for example, 10 percent) but not manage to explain it at all (0 percent).
What do you think about that?
Answer
Obviously. The original slogan also does not mean a complete dependence.
There is certainly a correlation, and certainly there are also people with poor explanatory ability, or just lack of confidence or shyness, and so on. It’s like stuttering—does lack of clarity necessarily indicate that the person who stutters does not himself understand?
Also, when you understand something at a deep level, it can be astonishingly difficult to explain the concept to someone who is completely unfamiliar with it, because all the basic assumptions and arguments are no longer readily present for you, since from your perspective they are already self-evident.