Torah Study – Lesson 1
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- [0:00] Introduction: Torah study and the Brisker approach
- [3:43] Differences between Ponevezh and Slabodka
- [6:29] The development of logic: Aristotle and pilpul
- [10:53] The method of pilpul and its sources (MEDIUM)
- [12:59] The Regensburg method in learning the Talmud
- [18:38] Algorithmic thinking in Ponevezh versus Slabodka
- [21:30] A toolbox and an opportunity for every student
- [28:27] Summary: the level of learning and the audience
- [30:10] The difference between methodology and knowledge – criticism of the yeshivas
- [32:15] A lecture without a page – the power of oral memory
- [35:42] Ponevezh versus Slabodka – the right learning process
- [36:49] A lecture on Sukkah and a copy of Rav Shmuel
- [43:14] New tools – analyzing Brisker learning and the question of two laws
- [45:05] The basic inquiry in the Talmud – structure and application
Summary
General Overview
The speaker opens with the commandment of Torah study and chooses to begin דווקא with “Brisker yeshiva-style learning,” trying to describe its purpose and character. The central thesis is that Brisker learning is aimed at the learning itself and at creating a conceptual toolbox, not only at arriving at a halakhic ruling. He presents the debate between a pattern-based, algorithmic approach in the style of Ponevezh and a less structured approach in the style of Slabodka–Chazon Ish, and argues that one should begin by acquiring organized tools and then free oneself from them in order to build a personal second level. He then explains the idea of “conceptualization” through examples from Aristotle, from the controversy over pilpul, and from the history of Talmudic scholarship, and arrives at presenting “inquiry” as the foundation of learning, opening a central inquiry in Bava Kamma: is there a prohibition against causing damage, and what creates the obligation to pay damages? He explores this through Maimonides, the Raavad, and Even HaEzel, alongside a caution against over-reliance on precise wording in the medieval authorities (Rishonim).
Torah Study and the Purpose of Learning
The commandment of Torah study is presented as a central commandment, “Torah study is equal to them all,” and there is room to clarify its nature and what it is intended for. One approach defines the main goal of learning as clarifying the passage until reaching a halakhic conclusion, whereas in the Brisker yeshiva world the goal is defined as the learning itself, not as a means to Jewish law. The practical question then becomes how the learning is done and what one is looking for in it, even before discussing the reasons for the commandment.
Differences Between Schools: Ponevezh, Slabodka, and the Chazon Ish
The speaker describes a personal experience of moving between yeshivas and kollels in Bnei Brak, and concludes that differences that seem minor from a distance become significant from the inside. He highlights the confrontation between Brisk and the Chazon Ish as a formative dispute, through Rabbi Chaim’s novellae on Maimonides together with the Chazon Ish’s notes, interpreting the Chazon Ish not as merely offering local comments but as someone opposing the Brisker method and outlook itself. He describes the Chazon Ish as an autodidact, notes the yeshiva-world difficulty with his style as a kind of “layman’s learning” lacking analysis and definitions, and later acknowledges his uniqueness and the possibility of translating him into yeshiva language while still preserving the fact that it is a different method. He says the Chazon Ish understood very well the method he was criticizing, and adds that the Chazon Ish also opposed the Mussar movement.
The History of Methods and the Idea of Conceptualization
The speaker argues that the history of ideas is an imprecise field, because one can find early traces of methods throughout history even before their “invention.” He illustrates this through Aristotle: logic was used before him, but his innovation was to distill abstract patterns and establish a systematic “toolbox” that allows both conscious use of the tools and discussion of the tools themselves. He presents two advantages of conceptualization: the ability to pull out the right tool for a problem, and the ability to turn the tools themselves into the subject of analysis.
Pilpul as a Toolbox and the Absence of Discussion About Tools in the Halakhic World
The speaker mentions the booklet The Controversy over Pilpul by Yoel Rappel / Dov Rappel as describing the method of pilpul in fifteenth-century Europe, which classifies ways of answering difficulties into types and gives them names in order to turn them into accessible tools. He describes answer-patterns identified with places and yeshivas, and presents “Regensburger” as an example of a method that replaces a long explanation with a short name understood by learners. He argues that in the halakhic world a toolbox was created, but no parallel field to logic developed in which people write and examine the validity of the tools themselves, questions of application, boundaries, and relationships between patterns.
The Example of “Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon” and Brisker Sparks Before Rabbi Chaim
The speaker says that after the publication of his book Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon, he received reactions claiming that “it’s all already there” in Rabbi Kook, Rabbi Tzadok, Rabbi Nachman, and the Maharal. He agrees that one can indeed find many ideas there, including contradictory ones. He defines the difference as the innovation of conceptualization: the ordered formulation of ideas in a way that allows use, discussion, and sharing, as opposed to intuitive use of ideas without presenting them as tools. He describes a lecture at Bar-Ilan on “Brisker sparks” in the Pnei Yehoshua, and argues that Rabbi Chaim’s innovation was not that no one could have understood him before, but that he gave names, formulated rules, and set up thought-patterns for learners to use, so that afterward one can also identify them in earlier authorities.
Ponevezh versus Slabodka: Patterns, Yeshiva Heads, and Educational Implications
The speaker proposes two differences between Ponevezh and Slabodka in Bnei Brak: Ponevezh is pattern-based, sharp, and predictable in the structure of its argument, to the point that one can foresee the course of a lecture in advance, whereas in Slabodka the learning is perceived as less structured, more “maybe this way and maybe that way,” under the influence of the Chazon Ish. He adds the observation that almost all the yeshiva heads he knows are graduates of Ponevezh, and explains this by saying that a pattern-based toolbox enables even an average person to produce a consistent general lecture on any passage, while the Slabodka style requires a genius for one’s “it seems to me” to have value. He distinguishes between the original Slabodka, which moved to Hebron, and the Slabodka of Bnei Brak, and says his discussion is directed toward the Bnei Brak Slabodka.
Criticism of “Brilliance” versus Knowing the Passage, and the Story of Rabbi Lichtenstein
The speaker recounts a conversation with a yeshiva head from Bnei Brak who did not understand the admiration for Rabbi Lichtenstein and claimed that every average kollel fellow in the Chazon Ish kollel was more brilliant than he was. He interprets this as a “childish” way of thinking, identified with enjoyment of clever questions and answers. He tells of the Beit HaLevi criticizing Rabbi Chaim’s lectures as boring because they present two possibilities without the drama of questions, and quotes the saying that the Beit HaLevi enjoyed a good question and answer, while Rabbi Chaim showed that there was no question in the first place, so nobody was satisfied. He presents Rabbi Lichtenstein as someone who creates a coherent picture in which the questions do not arise to begin with, and describes this as seriousness and professionalism in learning for the sake of knowing the passage, not for the effect of a dazzling insight.
“Let Him Say This and It Will Help for Forgetfulness”: Method versus Knowledge
The speaker quotes the concluding formula “Let him say this and it will help for forgetfulness,” and brings a yeshiva interpretation according to which in Daf Yomi people forget the previous pages, so saying the conclusion helps them forget the last one too. He argues that in yeshivas as well, in the end what mainly remains is the method rather than the knowledge, because people hold onto questions and answers without having a picture of the passage. He says this undermines the pretension that every Ponevezh-trained kollel fellow is necessarily at a higher level than someone outside the yeshiva world.
Metivta Dinner: Kreizwirth versus Michel Zilber and the Purpose of the Yeshiva
The speaker describes the Metivta network, which promotes broad knowledge through learning four pages over the weekend with tests and cyclical review. He tells of a lecture by Rabbi Kreizwirth from Belgium, who demonstrated enormous breadth and precise oral citation of Talmud, Rashi, Rashba, and many other sources, and explained that the goal was to show where one should get to, that one “has to finish the entire Talmud,” not be satisfied with ten pages that are forgotten. He describes Rabbi Michel Zilber’s response, disagreeing with the criticism and arguing that the purpose of the yeshivas is to teach “how to learn” through methodology and tools, and only afterward, over the course of life, to use those tools to acquire broad knowledge. The speaker accepts Rabbi Michel Zilber’s position and formulates the yeshiva as a “preparatory program” that gives tools rather than knowledge, with the statement: “When you finish yeshiva, you’ve acquired the tools; now you begin to learn.”
Start in Ponevezh and Finish in Slabodka
The speaker argues that both methods have value, but the problem is that students remain stuck in the place where they began. He proposes an ideal track in which one starts in Ponevezh in order to acquire structured analytical tools, and then moves to Slabodka in order to say a personal thought and build a Torah of one’s own. He tells a story about a lecturer who gave classes on tractate Sukkah that turned out to be identical to the published classes of Rav Shmuel Rozovsky, and the lecturer was happy to discover that he had internalized Rav Shmuel so deeply that he reached the same lectures on his own. The speaker sees this as the goal of Ponevezh: reproducing an existing model. He says the proper goal is to learn from Rav Shmuel in order to build infrastructure and then give your own lectures, and compares this to criticism by parents and mathematicians in Haaretz against beginning with “thinking questions” before the basics—a parallel mistake to starting with “Slabodka in first grade.”
The Continuation of the Method: Revolt Against Brisk and Combining Additional Layers
The speaker describes a current revolt against yeshiva-ism and Brisker learning that leads yeshivas to focus on existentialist, Hasidic, or academic approaches, and argues that the problem is doing this “instead of” yeshiva learning rather than “on top of” it. He gives a positive example in Professor David Henshke, who combines excellent yeshiva-style learning with excellent scholarship and thereby creates “masterpieces.” He adds that after Rabbi Chaim established a toolbox, one can also discuss the tools themselves and clarify when distinctions such as “two laws,” “object and person,” and “sign and cause” are correct, what their boundaries are, and what kinds of “two laws” exist.
Inquiry as the Foundation of Learning and the Move to “Two Laws”
The speaker defines “inquiry” as a basic element in yeshiva-style learning: an analytical approach that asks whether a concept or principle is “this or that,” and then uses the two possibilities to explain disputes among the medieval authorities (Rishonim). He describes a more advanced stage in which one says that both sides are correct, formulating “two laws” in which each side appears in a different context and resolves contradictions.
Bava Kamma: Is There a Prohibition Against Causing Damage, and What Creates the Obligation to Pay?
The speaker presents a central inquiry in Bava Kamma regarding why the owner is obligated to pay when his property caused damage: is the obligation due to negligence in guarding, or due to the very fact that his property caused damage and ownership creates the obligation, with proper guarding serving as an exemption? He emphasizes that both components are true: proper guarding exempts, and lack of ownership exempts, so the question is which is primary and which is secondary. He brings Even HaEzel on Maimonides, Laws of Monetary Damages chapter 1, law 1: “Any living creature that is in a person’s domain and caused damage, the owners are liable, for their property caused damage,” and identifies the use of “in his domain” as connected to the Talmudic conceptual world of “in his domain” versus “his.” He presents a dispute between Maimonides and the Raavad in Laws of Monetary Damages chapter 4, law 10, regarding a guardian who accepted responsibility without specification: Maimonides obligates the guardian even for the damages caused by the animal, even without explicit acceptance, while the Raavad requires explicit acceptance of responsibility for its damages. The speaker explains this as a possible view that Maimonides sees the guardian as an owner for the purposes of damages by virtue of the animal being “in his domain.”
Precision of Language in the Medieval Authorities, Maimonides, and Rabbi Chaim
The speaker warns against building a whole approach on precise wording in the medieval authorities (Rishonim), and argues that linguistic precision is “a very dangerous thing,” even in Maimonides, though it is more accepted there. He describes an exchange of letters between Seridei Esh and Rabbi Yehoshua Ortner around the question of whether Rabbi Chaim’s interpretations of Maimonides are a “distortion” that Maimonides never intended, and presents the position that using modern language does not rule out uncovering a true intention, especially when this is based on practical implications and not only on wording. He concludes by presenting the language of Even HaEzel, which explicitly formulates the inquiry: does liability for damages arise from a law of guarding imposed on the owners and a liability for deficient guarding, or from liability to pay because “their property caused damage,” with proper guarding exempting as unavoidable accident? He notes that the continuation of the analysis will follow next time.
Full Transcript
[Speaker A] The topic
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] that I’m going to begin with today is Torah study, and also to touch a bit on Brisker yeshiva-style thinking or learning through understanding. Some people call it “havana.” So these topics are intertwined, but I actually thought of starting from the end. In principle, if you go top-down, then you need to begin with Torah study, see what that means, present several possible approaches, and then get to Brisker yeshiva-style learning. I’ll use those two terms interchangeably, even though that’s a little unfair to yeshivas of other kinds. But I דווקא want to go along that map—that is, to begin a bit with yeshiva learning and then come back and speak a bit about Torah study. Still, I’ll open with a little background. There is, of course, the commandment of Torah study—needless to say—“Torah study is equal to them all.” The commandment of Torah study is a very central commandment, and we’ll come back to it later as well, but at this stage I’m only giving a preliminary introduction. There is room to discuss what the nature of this commandment is, what it is meant for, what we are supposed to do within its framework. I’ll get to that too, but for now, separately from that issue, I want to focus on the learning itself—how it is done, what one does there. There are approaches that understand that what one needs to do is basically to clarify the passage and arrive at Jewish law. That is, to try to understand what the Talmud or what the medieval authorities (Rishonim) are saying, and to reach a halakhic conclusion. In the Brisker yeshiva world they don’t see it that way. The purpose of learning—the root of this already goes back to Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, but it became sharper in the yeshivas that followed him—is that the purpose of learning is the learning itself, not that learning is a means to arrive at a halakhic conclusion. That’s the first point. The second point is the character of the learning—not only the purpose of the learning, not only what one is looking for in the learning, but the character of the learning. The character of the learning is a bit different from yeshiva learning—or very different, depending how close you are. Small things look big when you get close to them. Once, when I was in a yeshiva in Bnei Brak, Netivot Olam, and I wanted to go learn in the Chazon Ish kollel—the yeshiva I was in belonged to the Ponevezh school—they warned me: forget it, you won’t manage with them, that’s Slabodka, it’s a totally different world. So I thought to myself, okay, two frogs living in a puddle and thinking it’s the Pacific Ocean. How much difference can there really be? Two yeshivas, learning more or less the same thing, everybody living together in the same place—how different can it be? And then I went to the Chazon Ish kollel, where I stayed for a few months, maybe half a year, I think, and really I didn’t fit in. So I really saw that it was a completely different world. The closer you get, the higher the resolution becomes, and suddenly you see that differences that from far away look very small, from within look very, very significant. And this is not just a nice illustrative example—it’s really connected to our subject, because it seems to me that when people talk about the yeshiva or Brisker approach to learning, they mean Ponevezh more than Slabodka. Slabodka, let’s say—and these are generalizations—but Slabodka is something that follows the Chazon Ish more, and the Chazon Ish is the antithesis of yeshiva learning. Maybe the central book one ought to learn if one really wants to clarify this question of yeshiva learning is Rabbi Chaim’s novellae on Maimonides—Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, of course—on Maimonides, and at the end there are notes by the Chazon Ish. In one edition they printed it with the Chazon Ish’s notes at the end, where the Chazon Ish comments on Rabbi Chaim not because he had objections in the style of the Raavad on the Shulchan Arukh. He comments on Rabbi Chaim in order to explain why his method is incorrect. That is, why the Brisker outlook is mistaken. The Chazon Ish came out against the method, against the outlook; these are not just local comments. And therefore that is the foundational book of the dispute around yeshiva learning. The Chazon Ish did not agree with it. He was an autodidact of sorts; he didn’t learn in yeshivas, and he learned the way he learned. For years I couldn’t get along with the Chazon Ish—it was this sort of baalebatish learning, meaning there’s no analysis, no good definition of the concepts, and for a yeshiva guy that’s very problematic. But later I matured. And I saw that he really was unique. You can translate him into yeshiva language too, but I still think it really is a different method. Maybe I’ll come back to that later. In any case, one more remark before I move on. When you come to discuss
[Speaker C] He didn’t understand the
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] method?
[Speaker C] What? He didn’t know it, or he didn’t understand it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, he understood it completely. You can’t criticize someone if you don’t understand what he’s saying. Meaning, he criticized Rabbi Chaim—he understood him very well. He understood. Yes, certainly, he opposed him. By the way, the Chazon Ish opposed a lot of things that were very central. The Chazon Ish opposed the Mussar movement, for example. He opposed the study of Mussar. Fine, that’s become a bit less sharp in recent years. In any case, maybe one more introduction: when you get into the history of ideas or methods of learning, it’s a somewhat problematic field to discuss, not very sharp, because usually when a method enters the world—generally, in philosophy too, in learning methods, in any field of thought—in retrospect you can find its buds all along history going backward. Yes, an example I may have brought here once: Aristotle and the Organon are considered the founders of logic, formal logic. But obviously he classified types of arguments—syllogisms, as they’re called—yes, all X are Y, all human beings are mortal, Socrates is a human being, therefore Socrates is mortal. That’s one pattern of argument; there are several patterns, different structures of arguments. Nobody imagines that before Aristotle people didn’t use logic. Meaning, if you told someone, listen, all frogs are green, then obviously this frog is green too—couldn’t you say that sentence before Aristotle? Of course you could, and I assume people did. So what was Aristotle’s innovation? Aristotle maybe understood that behind those arguments there sits some abstract pattern common to all of them. He distilled the pattern, the structure, out of the discussions. So once people said it about clouds, once about frogs, once about ideas, or whatever you want. Aristotle suddenly said, forget frogs and ideas—there’s really a general pattern here. If every X is Y and Z is X, then Z is Y. Now plug into X, Y, and Z whatever you want; it makes no difference. That was Aristotle’s innovation. Aristotle didn’t invent logic—logic was used before him—but Aristotle noticed that there was a structured form here, distilled it systematically, and added it to a new toolbox that he created. And that toolbox now contains different forms of logical syllogisms, different modes of logical argument. So after Aristotle created this, I’m sure people came to him and said, well, come on, you can find this type of reasoning in philosophers before you—you didn’t invent anything. But obviously he did invent something, or at least innovate something. Why? Because before him people didn’t notice that there was some fixed pattern here. For example, before him no one, I think, focused their analysis on the pattern of the argument itself. The patterns of argument were tools people used, and if they wanted to prove to you that this frog was green, they said: look, all frogs are green, so if this is a frog then it’s green. But nobody studied that rule itself at all—that if every X is Y and Z is X, then Z is Y—and what its relation is to similar or different rules, to build a structure and see how the whole thing works. You can’t study these tools themselves before they are conceptualized and defined. Even if you use them and understand them, conceptualization matters, because after conceptualization there are two kinds of significance to it. The first significance is that you can use them. You don’t always think intuitively in that logical form even though you know it, but if you know that you have a toolbox with ten patterns of logical inference, and you encounter some problem that requires logical analysis, then what do you do? You go to the toolbox that Aristotle placed before you, go through tool A, B, C, D, and see which one fits your needs. In other words, defining the tools, conceptualizing them, helps me use them—it helps me pull out the correct tool when I need it. That’s one advantage. The second advantage is that once the tools have been conceptualized, then you can discuss them themselves. Why really is it true that if every X is Y and Z is X, then Z is Y? Or what is the relation between that and another pattern of argument? If every X is Y and Z is not Y, then Z is not X. That too is a pattern of argument. So what’s the relationship between those two? Is there one? Are they two different patterns? As long as we weren’t relating to the pattern itself at all, but simply using it as part of our discussion, no one would ask these kinds of questions. Therefore logic as a field of discussion began with Aristotle. The use of logical tools existed beforehand, but logic as a field of discussion awakened with Aristotle. Something similar appears in an interesting booklet by Yoel Rappel—Dov Rappel, I think—called The Controversy over Pilpul. There he explains that pilpul was basically a method that began in Europe in the fifteenth century, I think, with Shachna, and several known Jews are mentioned there of whom not much remains besides their names. Polak—what was his name? Something Polak, I forgot the first name. There were several important Jewish scholars there who are considered the inventors of the pilpul method. Rabbi Heshel, I think, was later.
[Speaker D] What? Yaakov Polak.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, that’s the Pnei Yehoshua. Falk, not Polak. In any case, that method of pilpul also did something very similar to what Aristotle did. That is, we encounter a difficulty in learning, and many times the answers have types—you can classify them into types. There are several basic types of answers that can be used to resolve contradictions or answer questions in learning. Someone with some experience can already notice that things repeat themselves a bit—that the forms of thought are similar. And then it becomes natural to do what Aristotle did for logic in general—to do the same for the method of learning, and try to define tools with which one resolves contradictions, solves conceptual problems. And that is indeed what they did there in Eastern Europe or Central Europe from the fifteenth century on. And that’s what is called the method of pilpul. Yaakov Polak, I think. And that’s what is called the method of pilpul, and he describes there how there are early traces of this in the Shelah, and it disappeared from the world pretty quickly. But there are still a few traces—the Maharsha, the Maharshal, the Shelah—there are a few commentators where it still remains, and you can see it in them: they bring a contradiction, and then it’s a Regensburger. That’s it, move on to the next question. They don’t explain what they answered to the question. It’s a Regensburger, or Ravensburger, or something like that. Basically, when you say “Regensburger,” that’s already a known method. Meaning: take this baraita, say it goes according to this opinion, say that one goes according to that opinion, and the first clause isn’t like the last clause—and that’s a whole mechanism. But because it repeats often, they already gave it a name, and now you can use it. You no longer need every time to give a whole lecture about every contradiction. You say “Regensburger,” that’s all, everyone understands what you mean, and we solved the problem. Okay? Or yes, these were usually named after yeshivas located in different cities, so each such yeshiva had a name for a certain kind of answer. And some of these answers circulated around the world, and there was a toolbox. That toolbox is basically—now I remembered the name. There was once some TV show about officer training school, Bahad 1, my kids—actually it was a series. So my kids really watched it, and they always quote the commander of Bahad 1 from the closing talk, the summary he gave his cadets. He said: we want you to leave here with only one thing—a toolbox. One thing: a toolbox. Right. So the method of pilpul is basically trying to conceptualize the various forms in which we resolve contradictions, put them in our toolbox, and make them accessible to us. Once they’re made accessible, of course, as I said also with Aristotle, you can start discussing the tools themselves. Who says they’re valid? What are they based on? Maybe they’re subject to dispute? Maybe someone accepts this tool, but someone else won’t accept it? Maybe there’s a relationship between them? It becomes a field of discussion in itself. By the way, that did not happen in the halakhic world. In the world of Jewish law it didn’t happen. That is, they made a toolbox, used it, but I at least don’t know of discussions about the validity of the tools themselves. A field parallel to logic never developed—that is, discussion of the tools, a field of study. To write an article about Regensburger. Meaning: what is a Regensburger? Where can you apply it? Where can’t you apply it? What’s the relationship between it and a Ravensburger? I don’t know, things like that. What we do find in logic—I at least don’t know of a discussion like that in this context. Maybe another example of my own: after my book Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon came out, I got all kinds of reactions from people, and there were several very typical ones. Someone came and told me: this is all already found in Rabbi Kook. Someone else said: it’s all in Rabbi Tzadok. Same with Rabbi Nachman, the Maharal—I listed several of these types. It’s all there already. Now the truth is, that’s correct. No, they weren’t saying it for nothing; it’s true. They showed me passages where it really did seem that the central ideas were already there. Show me one idea that isn’t in Rabbi Kook or the Maharal and I think you’ll get a Nobel Prize. When you write in such an eclectic way, and so much, and you’re so creative, there is no idea that won’t be there—including contradictory ideas, an idea and its opposite, that too you’ll find there. So what’s the difference? I started thinking a bit about that. So what really is the difference? What exactly was the point of my writing the book? My feeling was that there was still something innovative here. Why? Because I tried to conceptualize those ideas that Rabbi Kook used. Like I said about Aristotle: until you formulate and conceptualize the idea, you’re only using it, understanding it, but it isn’t available for people to use. You can’t discuss it itself; you can only use it, but not discuss it itself. And therefore it’s very important to conceptualize it. I once spoke about this at a conference at Bar-Ilan. There was a conference on the Pnei Yehoshua—two hundred and fifty years since his death. Or his birth, I don’t remember. And there I spoke about Brisker sparks in the thought of the Pnei Yehoshua. The Pnei Yehoshua is about a hundred and fifty years earlier. And I tried to show actual Brisker modes of thought in the Pnei Yehoshua—really a Brisker method of analysis. So of course the question came up: then what did Rabbi Chaim innovate, if all of this was already in the Pnei Yehoshua? And the answer is that the Pnei Yehoshua didn’t call it by name. The Pnei Yehoshua used that form of thought. If Rabbi Chaim had given a general lecture in the twelfth century, people would have understood him. He wouldn’t have needed to explain; people would have understood. It’s not that he introduced things nobody understood before him. But he conceptualized it—meaning, he defined a system of rules or forms of thought that now stand available for learners to use. And that was his innovation. Therefore the fact that there are sparks of it already in the Pnei Yehoshua is true—but the fact that nobody noticed it at all until there was Rabbi Chaim is also true. After Rabbi Chaim, you can go back to the Pnei Yehoshua and really see that he too has such sparks. One of the interesting implications is a talk or lecture like this that I give almost every year at the beginning of the year. When I was teaching—and when I teach—I go back to those periods from Ponevezh, and in my time in Bnei Brak I tried to look around me a bit. I was a kind of amateur anthropologist. I always had the position of an alien, a stranger in the place, so I always looked at the environment through anthropologist’s glasses. And I saw that there are two differences between Ponevezh and Slabodka. One difference is that Ponevezh is much more algorithmic. That is, the thought-patterns are much more formulaic, much more predictable in advance, much more defined and sharp. It’s very clear what they’ll accept and what they won’t accept. There are things you simply cannot say there—it’s just passt nisht, you can’t say such a thing, it’s nonsense. You have to go with their defined patterns. More than that: when I was there, one of my hobbies while I lived in Bnei Brak was to go to lectures by yeshiva heads. During breaks, holidays, intermediate days of festivals, they would go around to batei midrash in neighborhoods or yeshivas and give lectures to the wider public. It was very nice; I enjoyed listening very much. At a certain point, after a few years, I suddenly saw that when a lecture begins, I can tell you how it’s going to end—how it’s going to end an hour later. Literally, not an exaggeration. I could tell you how the lecture would end, what proof he’d bring from there, what practical difference he’d make, what proof he’d bring from here, what question he’d raise from there, and what distinction he’d make. And it was a distinction I hadn’t thought of before. It’s not that I knew everything; I didn’t know everything. But when you know the shtick, these fixed patterns, you just run the calculation forward—you know what’s going to happen. I still enjoyed it; I enjoyed discovering that I was right about a large part of it. Sometimes I missed, but many times I got it right. To tell you what’s expected. That’s the Ponevezh outlook, the formulaic Ponevezh perspective. As against that, in Slabodka—and that’s why I didn’t get along there, as I said earlier, I moved to the Chazon Ish kollel and didn’t fit in—there they had chavurot where you didn’t know whether to yawn, laugh, cry, or fall asleep. The guys there open the Talmud: I thought maybe you could also say it this way, maybe that way, I don’t know, maybe this, maybe that. They start musing, something so unstructured that it’s basically a bit in the wake of the Chazon Ish, a kind of baalebatish method, not formulaic, not analytical. That’s one difference, a difference in methods of learning. The second difference—which later I understood is connected to the first—is that almost all the yeshiva heads I know are graduates of Ponevezh. Slabodka produced almost no yeshiva heads, at least back then; I don’t know what the situation is today. Almost none, really. Meaning, almost all the yeshiva heads I knew were graduates of the Ponevezh beit midrash. And it wasn’t only in my sample; it’s true. That was the overwhelming majority. And it wasn’t because of numbers, that there were more students in Ponevezh than in Slabodka. What? Did they go off the derech?
[Speaker A] You mean because of that they erased the Ponevezh method and went to…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no—graduates of Ponevezh. No, no. Slabodka graduates generally remain Slabodka people. They don’t—and they didn’t become yeshiva heads. And the point of why that is, is because of the second advantage of what I said by Aristotle. Once you have an organized toolbox, you can use it. And now every person can use it, not only brilliant people. So when you come to a certain passage, I can give you a general lecture on any passage, because I know exactly what to ask, what to answer, how to distinguish, where to bring the proofs from—the pattern is the same pattern. What difference does it make whether you’re discussing a zav’s impurity, sunset, I don’t know what, or the laws of the Sabbath? It makes no difference at all; the lecture looks the same. Basically, when you look at the logic of it, it’s all the same. You can roll this system out over any passage. The concepts are only the medium through which it works. It really doesn’t matter which concepts we’re dealing with. In fact, many times when you come to a passage, if you’re sufficiently skilled, you come to the passage and the general lecture reveals itself. You don’t need to—it’s obvious, it… it takes you. You don’t even have to create it; it creates you.
[Speaker E] It’s interesting historically, that all the great ones in the United States and all… a large part of them… the great ones were graduates of the original Slabodka.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, Soloveitchik, his doctorate, Shlomo Tikochinsky. The original Slabodka actually moved to Hebron. Hebron is the original Slabodka, and even Hebron underwent a change—it’s kind of half Ponevezh too. It also has a bit of that Ponevezh quality. It’s no longer—it’s not the Slabodka of Bnei Brak. Slabodka in Bnei Brak—no, it didn’t undergo a change, sorry. That is its form; it’s a Lithuanian yeshiva. Slabodka in Bnei Brak is something else. They called it Slabodka after Slabodka, but it’s not—that’s something else. I’m talking about the Slabodka of Bnei Brak, not the suburb of Kovno. So what I said was that these characteristics, these two dividing lines between Ponevezh and Slabodka, are connected. Because once you grow up on a formulaic method of learning, then every average person can basically become a yeshiva head. If he learns properly—again, you need talent, all true, you need to learn, you need to invest—but in the end every average person becomes a yeshiva head. Because if you’ve acquired the tools, you’ll give a Brisker general lecture—it doesn’t matter what passage you’re dealing with. In Slabodka you have to be a genius to be a yeshiva head. Because there is one Chazon Ish; the Chazon Ish was the Chazon Ish. But when every random zav and metzora tells me, “It seems to me this way,” and maybe “it seems to me that way”—so it seems to you that way, what do I care? Out of that you don’t—you have to be very gifted for what seems right to you actually to be worth something. You understand? For the Chazon Ish it’s worth something even without Brisker analysis, because he was such a person—yes, there’s no need to praise him. But when lots of people who are not at his level try to imitate that style of learning—there isn’t even any one style of learning there—but try to follow in that direction, each with his own learning style, not the Chazon Ish’s, because there is no Chazon Ish method, no such thing. A friend of mine once said to me—I told him I don’t understand the Chazon Ish, what… what is he writing? I don’t understand what he’s writing. This was during my yeshiva-boy period. “What do you want? He’s just writing the truth.” Meaning, a yeshiva boy doesn’t understand this idea that he’s writing the truth. I remembered stories today. I remembered that my son learned in a Haredi yeshiva, and at a certain point he decided to leave and go to Gush. And that was a kind of crisis in the yeshiva—not because he was the number one genius. If he goes off to the army and becomes some kind of street kid, that’s relatively easy, because fine, he’ll deteriorate, that’s easy to explain. But he’s going to Gush? There’s an alternative? A yeshiva that competes with this yeshiva? That can’t be. So a world war broke out there. They tried to convince him, this and that. In the end it didn’t help, so they sent him to some rabbi in Bnei Brak, an important elderly yeshiva head, who was used to talking, knew a little about the outside world too—he originally came from a midrashic background. And he was used to talking with guys like that who have questions and all sorts of things of that kind. At some point he called me—we know each other a little from various circumstances—and he said to me: listen, they tell all kinds of miracles and wonders about Rabbi Lichtenstein in Gush Etzion, of blessed memory by now. He said, I don’t get the big deal. I read a bit of his work—every average kollel fellow in the Chazon Ish kollel does things a thousand times more brilliant. So I said to him—or I didn’t say it in these words, but that’s what I thought to myself—that he thinks like a child. Because this is exactly the dispute between Rabbi Chaim, the spiritual father, and the Beit HaLevi. The Beit HaLevi was the head of the Volozhin yeshiva, and afterward Rabbi Chaim entered as a young yeshiva head. During the last few years of Volozhin they were together. Rabbi Chaim was his son-in-law, yes. He came in as a young yeshiva head; in those days things like that were still allowed. And it is told that after Rabbi Chaim would give a lecture, the Beit HaLevi would come listen and say, listen, I don’t understand your lectures. Your lectures are so boring. When I give a lecture, I present ten questions, contradictions, people are all stirred up, and then I sew it all together in one long move and show how the whole thing fits, and people are dancing with joy. And with you, no question even arises. Straight away you present two possibilities, this goes here and that goes there. It’s terribly boring. A pedagogical critique, sort of—as an older yeshiva head, giving him didactic feedback. It’s more or less the same thing.
[Speaker D] They say he said this about his son: what’s the difference between me and my son, the Beit HaLevi? When someone comes to me with a question, I give him an answer, then he’s happy—good question—and I’m happy—good answer. But when they ask my son a question, he shows that there was no question at all, and then nobody’s happy.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So it’s the same thing, it’s a reflection of the same thing. Maybe that’s the source of the story and not my story, it doesn’t matter, but you have to believe that it could have happened, like in the introduction to In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov. So I told him that it’s the same thing. Meaning, I knew both of them, after all, because I was there in the Chazon Ish kollel, in the Ponevezh kollel. By the way, the Ponevezh kollel more than the Chazon Ish kollel, if we’re already talking about flashes of brilliance and logic. But I told him, look, all ten difficulties that you stitch together in a general lecture—after you hear a lecture by Rabbi Lichtenstein, they just don’t arise. They simply don’t arise. Anyone who knows this knows—it just doesn’t come up. He says there are two possibilities: from this, this comes out, and from that, that comes out; he lays out the whole topic from beginning to end with all the possibilities, and no difficulty arises. A completely coherent picture. Now, that’s not called lacking a high level. That’s called aiming at more mature people and not at children. Someone who wants to enjoy the flashes of brilliance and all that—that’s for children. Someone who wants to know the passage should go there. In a certain sense there’s much more seriousness here, much more professionalism, let’s call it, with Rabbi Lichtenstein, because he comes to teach you the topic so that you’ll know it. Know the topic, understand the different possibilities, and know the topic. As opposed to there, where the goal was to create some impressive flash, to excite people, which is also important—exciting people about Torah and so on—but it’s not a professional approach. Meaning, are you coming to learn or are you coming to engage in Torah theatrically? Like in that story: at the end of every tractate there’s a Kaddish like that—well, this is surely familiar—a kind of Kaddish for completing a tractate. So at the beginning it says, “Let this be said and let it help against forgetfulness.” Know that? What does “let this be said and let it help against forgetfulness” mean? It should say “let this be said and let it help memory,” so that he’ll remember—not that it should help him forget, it should help him remember. So in the yeshivot they say that the only people who actually finish tractates are those doing the Daf Yomi. After all, in the yeshivot they finish maybe ten pages. The only ones who say tractates are the Daf Yomi people, where when you learn page 3, you’ve already forgotten page 2. When you learn page 4, you’ve forgotten page 3. How are you going to forget the last page of the tractate? “Let this be said and let it help against forgetfulness”—meaning, if you say this, you’ll forget even the last page. That only—in that sense it’s the reverse, the yeshivot are the opposite of Daf Yomi, but it’s the same thing. In the yeshivot too, in the end, what remains with you is mainly the method and not the knowledge. The methodology stays with you, because you internalize the mode of conceptual distinction. But you don’t remain with the topic itself, because you don’t actually hold the topic. You hold difficulties and resolutions. You don’t have a picture of the topic. That’s exactly the difference. Meaning, that’s why it’s a big mistake to think that every kollel fellow and every Ponevezher is on a higher level than some businessman. It’s simply an intellectual joke that someone says such a thing at that age. I don’t know—it’s slander to say something like that.
Anyway, maybe here’s one more story. I was once at a dinner held by a network—there’s some network of kollels called Metivta. There’s this kollel fellow, Boimrind, from Bnei Brak, who wanted to promote breadth of knowledge. So he takes kollel fellows and yeshiva students, mainly kollel fellows I think, for weekends from Thursday night until Sunday morning, or until Saturday night, and they learn four pages every weekend and are tested on them. Then they review it the following week. After a month they’re tested on the whole month. After three months they’re tested on all three months. Now I think that each month has three weeks of study and one week of review. Every three months it’s two months of study and one month of review, something like that—there was some structure, I don’t remember the details anymore. I joined them because I did a bit of Kodashim, so I joined them for Zevachim and Menachot to get to know that area a bit. Since then I’d had a connection with them, and he gathered the guys—it wasn’t a donors’ dinner, it was a dinner for the participants. So he held this dinner there, and there were two speakers. He invited two speakers. One of them was Rabbi Kreiswirth from Belgium, a student of the Rogatchover, I think, someone with terrifying mastery, really—one of a generation. And the second was Rabbi Michel Zilber, who was also a giant scholar, a much younger Jew from Jerusalem, the head of Yeshivat Zvhil. And with him too, today as well, both in thought and in learning—an extremely serious Jew. And I think he was one of the first to start a recorded Daf Yomi on cassette tapes—meaning, he too was someone who advocated broad learning and scope and actually knowing things.
Then Rabbi Kreiswirth started giving a lecture there at that dinner. He stood there without a page in front of him at all. He gave a lecture: he started with a Talmudic text somewhere and said, “Zevachim page 8, third line from the top in the wide lines, a tannaitic teaching…” He began quoting everything by heart, without a page, without a book, without anything—everything by heart, word for word. “Rashi, second line from the narrow lines, beginning with the words…” and he quoted it. “The Rashba, beginning with these words on such-and-such page…” He went through dozens of these references, I don’t know how many—Talmudic passages and medieval and later authorities, all quoted together with where they’re found. Now, he hadn’t memorized this beforehand. He just knew it. You don’t memorize something like that in advance—that takes insane investment. I’m sure he didn’t do that. He simply knew it. And then at the very end of the lecture he said to us, listen, I didn’t do this to show off to you. I did it to explain to you where you need to get. Because people in yeshivot know those ten pages, and in the end they don’t even know those—and “let this be said and help against forgetfulness.” Meaning, what you know are distinctions. Like they say about the kollel fellow who arrives at the heavenly court and they say, well, start telling us what you learned. A Lithuanian kollel fellow—story within a story. Start telling us what you learned? Ask a difficulty and I’ll give you an answer. What do you mean, tell you what I learned? A kollel fellow can’t describe to you what he learned; he doesn’t actually hold it. That’s completely true, by the way. Completely true. I’m like that too. I don’t know how to describe to you what I learned. Ask a difficulty and we’ll start talking. No, that’s how it works; that’s the disease of yeshiva boys. So that’s what he said. He said: when you study in yeshiva, you finish ten pages. You don’t know anything from that; that’s not a Torah scholar. You need to finish the Talmud. You need to get there. That’s what he told us, and that’s why he put on that demonstration for us—to explain where you need to get.
Fine, then he finished speaking, and Rabbi Michel Zilber got up—who could have been his son, maybe even his grandson, age-wise, not at all in stature; a well-known figure in the world, one of the greats of the generation. So he got up, a bit uncomfortable, and said, listen, I can’t stay silent, I have to say something, with all due respect to Rabbi Kreiswirth. I completely disagree with his criticism of the yeshivot. Because the goal of the yeshivot is to teach you how to learn. The goal is to learn the methodology, not the material. Afterward you have your whole life. You have your whole life to learn. This preparatory stage of a few years in yeshiva—that’s where you get the tools. You get the methodology. There you don’t need to finish the entire tractate. Learn ten pages and understand well how this business works. Acquire the tools; after that you have your whole life to learn. And when you learn all your life, you’ll apply it, and there of course you’ll be learning in order to know. That’s basically what he said, and I think he was completely right. That’s why I really think this criticism of the yeshivot is incorrect. The goal of the yeshivot is to impart tools, not to impart knowledge. That’s true—those few years when you’re in yeshiva, that’s what should be done. After that you need to start learning. Like the kollel fellow says: if I had money, I’d leave kollel and start learning. So in the yeshivot too: when you finish yeshiva, you’ve acquired the tools; now you begin to learn. Now you begin to learn. Until now it was only prep school. Yeshiva is prep school—it only gives you the tools.
And really, in that sense—let’s roll the carpet back a bit after so many stories, I hope I remember—I think, going back to Ponevezh and Slabodka: I think Ponevezh is a good preparatory stage, but one of the problems with this dichotomy between Ponevezh and Slabodka is that both sides are stuck where they were born. A Ponevezher always remains a Ponevezher, and a Slabodka person always remains Slabodka. That’s the mistake. I think there’s value in both of these study-houses, of course, as types—not necessarily those exact study-houses. But you need to start in Ponevezh and finish in Slabodka. Slabodka’s mistake is that they start there—they start and finish there. And Ponevezh’s mistake is that they finish there, not only start there. You need to start in Ponevezh. And that’s what the talk I gave students at the beginning of every year was about—I’ll finish it in a moment: in Ponevezh you study, you acquire tools. Tools of analysis. And as I said before, you get to the point where you can give a general lecture on any topic; that means you got the tools. And that’s very good—it’s not a criticism, it’s excellent. But afterward, don’t stay stuck there. Meaning, it’s a foundation on which you can build your own Torah. Now start saying what you think and move on to Slabodka. In Slabodka, each person says what he thinks.
And one more story: once we were learning Sukkah with my maggid shiur at Netivot Olam in Bnei Brak, we were learning Tractate Sukkah. At that time, the books Chiddushei Rav Shmuel and Shiurei Rav Shmuel hadn’t yet come out—they were published later—Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky of course; plain “Rabbi Shmuel” means Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky, in those days from Ponevezh. So those books didn’t yet exist, and at some point the first book came out on Sukkah, Shiurei Rav Shmuel on Sukkah. We opened it and turned pale. These were exactly the lectures we had heard from him. It was embarrassing. He hadn’t said anything, he hadn’t said that he was giving Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky’s lectures. Meaning, he gave us a lecture and led us to understand that it was his lecture. Almost word for word, more or less, with minor changes—everything was Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky. Fine, I didn’t know what to do. I was very close to him, I had been with him for many years, and at some point I just couldn’t anymore, so I went up to him and said, look, Rabbi, a book of Shiurei Rav Shmuel just came out—he didn’t know; it had just come out—and all the lectures you give appear there. Meaning, it’s all taken from him. Why don’t you say that you’re taking Rabbi Shmuel’s lectures? He was really astonished, and then he almost started dancing. He said to me, listen, I didn’t learn Sukkah with Rabbi Shmuel. We didn’t learn this tractate, Sukkah, with him. And that was amazing. He had simply given the same lectures Rabbi Shmuel gave on a tractate that he had never learned from him at all. And he was so happy, because the summit of his dreams was to take Rabbi Shmuel and internalize him so well that on his own he would say Rabbi Shmuel’s lectures. Now understand—this was an amazing resemblance. It was hard to believe that he hadn’t taken it from Rabbi Shmuel. Now that’s a Ponevezher, because a Ponevezher’s goal is to say Rabbi Shmuel’s lecture on whatever topic he’s dealing with. That is basically the ultimate purpose. And once you get there, you’re set—you become a rosh yeshiva with a long frock coat with two buttons. That goal, in my view, is problematic. It’s problematic because you need to say your own lectures, not Rabbi Shmuel’s. But the preparation you get is very important. If you start speaking your own lectures without having received some kind of infrastructure from outstanding Torah scholars, people who have abilities—it’s a shame not to use the things they discovered—then it’s a shame. You’ll teach us things that really aren’t significant, that are worthless. On the other hand, if you get stuck at Rabbi Shmuel, fine, Shiurei Rav Shmuel has already been published, I don’t need you. I can read it there. Why do we need to duplicate a wise Jew, however great he may be? He was already here once. I think the right thing is to take Shiurei Rav Shmuel, learn them, grow on them, and then start giving your own lectures. And I think that builds you much more correctly than if you begin learning on your own.
It’s like an article that once appeared in Haaretz. There were various mathematicians there, or various parents, including mathematicians, who said: listen, our children in third grade come home with homework that we can’t solve in math. They’re scrambling their brains. Instead of these “thinking questions” and all that, teach them the multiplication table, one plus two. Start with the basics. After that you can get to modes of thinking and deeper analysis and things like that. They were driving the kids crazy. And that’s exactly the same mistake as starting with Slabodka in first grade: starting to say what you think about a certain topic when you still have no idea about it. Listen, there’s a tradition—people have been learning this for thousands of years. Not all of them were idiots except for you. Maybe most of them—but there were a few who weren’t. Okay? Learn what happened until now. Meaning, see what this is about. Then afterward add your own layer. If you start from zero, then most likely you won’t create anything meaningful. You create something meaningful when you come after their layer and add a layer of your own. And therefore, you need to start in Ponevezh and finish in Slabodka—that’s the recommendation.
So if I now go one more step back, because this is a kind of mille-feuille, then basically Rabbi Chaim’s innovation was the conceptualization of the tools that in fact existed even before him, and that really allows us to add the next layer. And the next layer is to use Brisker analysis to say what I want to say. Not to make do only with formal Brisker analysis—but it’s a very important tool. And by the way, today people repeat the same mistake. This revolt against yeshiva-style learning and Brisker learning leads to the fact that many yeshivot abandon it, don’t engage in it at all. They try to do other things—existentialist, Hasidic, academic, whatever, all kinds of things of various sorts. And there are always bitter arguments around this issue: is this right, is that wrong? I don’t know whether there’s such a thing as right and wrong here, but it’s usually worthless. It’s worthless because they do it instead. Not because it’s wrong, not because there’s nothing to learn from the other things. In some of them at least—in some of them I really do think it’s nonsense. But in some there is something to learn. Yet if you do it after, or on top of, yeshiva learning, it’s far more meaningful than if you do it instead. You see people who aren’t learned in the yeshiva sense—even what they say in research isn’t worth much either, Talmudic research. On the other hand, you see someone like Henshke—you know him at Bar-Ilan, Professor David Henshke. Yes, it’s simply amazing, really, a singular figure in his generation. His ability to take yeshiva-style learning—he’s an excellent yeshiva-style scholar and also an excellent researcher—and when he does research on top of his learning, masterpieces come out. Really, it’s a phenomenon. And I think that’s exactly a demonstration of the point: you need to start in Ponevezh and finish in Slabodka. Start with what has been done until now, learn the shtanzes—the patterns that have been developed until now—because obviously there is a great deal of importance in that. People worked on this, intelligent people labored over this, this is what we grew up on. It’s a mistake to abandon that. But you don’t need to remain stuck in it; you need to add another layer on top of it. It can be a layer of research, it can be some other layer. Today I’ll talk about other layers, not the layer of research.
Now this is another point, that’s one point. A second point is that after Rabbi Chaim made his innovation and introduced his toolbox, now you can also begin discussing those tools themselves, as I said about Aristotle. Now you can begin discussing Rabbi Chaim’s analysis itself and ask whether it is correct, why it is correct, when it is correct. Now you can start asking about the “two laws” approach—where you can begin using this method of two laws, or the distinction between object and person, or between sign and cause, or all sorts of things common in Rabbi Chaim. You can ask where this was said, what the connection between them is, when it’s correct, whether it’s correct, where it isn’t correct, where you have to be careful with it, what kinds of “two laws” there are. There are several kinds that people don’t notice until the tools are put in front of their eyes—there are several kinds of “two laws.” And as long as these concepts didn’t exist, it was impossible to engage in them. That, I think, is an addition that ought to be made in this generation—in the generation after yeshiva thinking has more or less been understood and internalized, you can begin engaging in the yeshiva tools themselves.
Okay, this took me much longer than I thought. I’ll start and then we’ll continue next time. I’ll begin with one conceptual inquiry that I’m going to use; it will accompany us in order to demonstrate various things. A chakirah—well, maybe I should present the concept. A chakirah is a conceptual inquiry, yes, the basic element of yeshiva-style learning. When you approach—before you even get to all of Rabbi Chaim’s tools. Rabbi Chaim’s tools are an answer to a chakirah. A chakirah. You can answer it in several ways. There are all kinds of tools you can use, but the basic concept is the chakirah. A chakirah is basically to approach the concepts and principles in the Talmud analytically. To ask: is it this or that? Yes, there are two interpretive possibilities for understanding something, and then you ask whether it is this possibility or that possibility. This can be about a concept, a principle, and all kinds of things of that sort. Very often, after making that conceptual inquiry, you see two possibilities, and then you explain disputes among medieval authorities (Rishonim): these understand it this way and those understand it that way. Stage two will be to say that actually both sides are correct. That’s already “two laws.” After the chakirah comes two laws. And then if both sides are correct, but in this context side A appears and in that context side B appears—that’s not a dispute. We agree that both sides exist, but under different circumstances one appears and the other is neutralized for some reason. And therefore the laws look different. That resolves contradictions in that way. Okay? So that, for example, is an analysis of concepts and Talmudic principles from the Brisker school.
One of the famous conceptual inquiries in the yeshivot—people deal with it almost all year in Bava Kamma. There’s an opening lecture that more or less deals with this: is there a prohibition against causing damage? And that’s the opening lecture in Bava Kamma. Then they say: these are templates, everything is templates. Even the topic of the opening lecture—everything is more or less fixed. Maybe you’ll come up with another source from which there’s another practical difference or another proof. But the lecture is: is there a prohibition against causing damage? And after that they begin discussing this conceptual inquiry, and it accompanies us all year. The actual topics are all mapped onto it. And this conceptual inquiry is basically the question: why is the owner of damaging property liable to pay? Yes, my property caused damage; the question is why I need to pay. Do I need to pay because I was negligent in guarding it? It’s negligence in guarding. Or do I need to pay because of the very fact that my property caused damage? The very fact that my property caused damage obligates me to pay, because I’m its owner, I’m responsible for what my property does—not because I was negligent in guarding it.
Now it’s obvious—and again, this is an important point that often isn’t sharpened enough—both sides are certainly true. That’s the starting point. Obviously, if you weren’t negligent in guarding it, you’re exempt—the Talmudic texts say so. If you guarded it properly, you’re exempt. And if it’s not your property, you’re exempt as well. That’s obvious. So this is Brisker thinking. Because Brisker thinking says: clearly you need both. That’s obvious. But the question is still which of the two is primary and which is secondary. Is negligence in guarding what creates the liability to pay—except that it has to be mine, because otherwise I’m not obligated to guard it; I’m only obligated to guard my own property? Or the reverse: the fact that it is my property is what obligates me to pay, only if I wasn’t negligent in guarding it. Okay? But fundamentally, the obligating factor is that the property is mine. That is a Brisker conceptual inquiry. What I said earlier was not Brisker. What I said earlier, not really. Meaning, it could certainly appear earlier too. Meaning, whether negligence in guarding obligates, or—it’s like asking whether this is a dispute. People did that long before Rabbi Chaim. Rabbi Chaim takes something that does seem like one single structure and tries to show that it can be understood in two different ways. To analyze its components and see how those two components play off one another. That is the Brisker analysis.
So one of the main sources they bring in this context, even though he’s not the first to formulate it, is Even HaEzel. It also appears in at least two places in the book, Even HaEzel, in the laws of damages to property. It’s perhaps a very important work on Maimonides regarding damages to property mainly. He has a lengthy discussion there about damages to property. Right at the beginning he brings the law in Maimonides, Laws of Damage by Property, chapter 1, law 1: “Any living creature that is under a person’s authority and causes damage—the owners are liable, for their property caused damage, as it says, ‘If a man’s ox gores his fellow’s ox,’ etc.” “The owners are liable, for their property caused damage.” On the face of it—again, if we hadn’t made this conceptual inquiry, everyone just passes over this Maimonides: okay, they have to pay because their property caused damage, and moves on. Now we say no—we already have two possibilities for understanding why the owner is liable. The owner is liable because his property caused damage—that’s what obligates him. Or the owner is liable because he was negligent in guarding it. But it has to be his property, because otherwise he isn’t obligated in guarding it—only my property am I obligated to guard. If you read it through those lenses, then when Maimonides says “the owners are liable, for their property caused damage,” that really seems to tell us it’s like the first side. That the owner’s liability to pay is because the property caused damage and not because of negligence in guarding.
Here you have to be very careful. Inferences from wording in the medieval authorities—you have to be very careful, because the medieval authorities didn’t come with this Brisk distinction. What?
[Speaker F] And with guardians? Where it isn’t theirs. That’s his issue.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s his issue. Exactly—for that very reason he makes this conceptual inquiry, because a guardian—it’s not his, and yet he still has to pay. So that’s why he discusses it here.
[Speaker G] You can’t draw conclusions from the medieval authorities just based on their wording.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can’t. You can’t. It’s a mistake to infer things from the wording of the medieval authorities. Later authorities are much more precise in wording than the medieval ones, because later authorities are aware of the nuances you can raise; they are more investigative, so they’re aware of the nuances that emerge from the language. You have to be very careful with wording inferences in the medieval authorities.
[Speaker A] Inferences—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wording inferences in the medieval authorities can be good after you already know that this is their view. Then you can bring some additional support from a wording nuance. But to build on wording inferences in the medieval authorities—that’s a big mistake. In Maimonides, by the way, more so. With Maimonides, more so—the rule is that in Maimonides you can infer from his wording, because Maimonides—also they say this about Rashi—because Maimonides thought about every word he wrote, that’s what they say. And therefore in the books of rules it says that one of the rules concerning Maimonides is that you can infer from his wording. But even when inferring from Maimonides’ wording, you have to be careful. He wasn’t a Brisker. Meaning, he never heard of this conceptual inquiry—whether it’s negligence or one’s property that caused damage. Maybe he had it somewhere in the back of his mind, but he didn’t live in the conceptual world in Torah that we live in. And therefore when he writes this, I’m not sure it’s correct to infer from him, as if the side saying “my property caused damage” is what obligates me in guarding. There’s a well-known debate about this between Seridei Esh and Rabbi Yehoshua Ortner, the editor of the Talmudic Encyclopedia. They have some exchange of letters about this—yes, I don’t remember anymore, I don’t even remember who says what, except that I have a suspicion. One of them says: Rabbi Chaim is twisting things; Maimonides never dreamed of what Rabbi Chaim explains in him. Yes, the yeshiva joke says that when Maimonides came to hear a lecture by Rabbi Chaim—“that’s not what’s written here,” Maimonides says to Rabbi Chaim. Rabbi Chaim says: “What does a Frank know about Maimonides?” So the claim is that Rabbi Chaim bends Maimonides, because Maimonides never dreamed of this. And the response was, I think—if I remember correctly—that this was Seridei Esh. Seridei Esh argues that that’s not true. Rabbi Chaim is right about Maimonides’ intent; he just formulates it in his own language, in modern language. If Maimonides had lived in that language, he would have agreed. In principle, again, it could be that here and there Rabbi Chaim missed the mark. But on the fundamental level, the fact that you use a modern method doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid tool for uncovering Maimonides’ intent. You formulate it in your own language, but behind Maimonides’ thinking it is absolutely possible that you have exposed a correct idea.
Here there’s a difference between doing this from wording inferences in Maimonides—which, as I said, you have to be very careful with—and understanding practical ramifications. Meaning, if you show that Maimonides states a certain practical ramification, and that can only be understood if he held such-and-such, then even if Maimonides himself didn’t consciously think in those terms and derive the practical ramification from them, still, if that’s what he thought, then you are conceptualizing it—you’re analyzing what conception stood behind what he says. And I definitely do accept that as a tool for uncovering Maimonides’ intentions. You have to be careful. Linguistic inference is a very dangerous thing, but practical ramifications are, in my view, a better tool to use.
[Speaker F] By way of analogy, they asked Shaya Geller, “What if you meant this?” and it could be that he too would understand one side. Yes. So it’s the same thing, the same thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So Even HaEzel brings this Maimonides. Then he says: the fact that Maimonides framed it as “under a person’s authority,” which relates to the question that was asked about the guardian—the fact that Maimonides says “under a person’s authority” and didn’t write “any living creature that belongs to a person,” but rather “under a person’s authority,” it seems that his intention here—yes, this is already a meaningful wording inference, because “under his authority” and “his” is a distinction that appears in the Talmud. So Maimonides was aware of it. Meaning, when Maimonides says “under his authority” and not “his,” that’s not the same kind of inference I made earlier. This is a conceptual world that Maimonides did live in, and we need to note why he wrote this and not that. So he says: because it’s not only if the animal is his, but even if the animal is under his authority he is liable for its damages. And this is the reason for the guardian’s liability, because he steps into the owner’s place. Since the animal is under his authority, even though it hasn’t left the owner’s authority and the owner can still consecrate it, nevertheless it is also called under the guardian’s authority, and the guardian is like the owner, for his hand is like the owner’s hand and he can claim from the finder, etc.
[Speaker H] And that actually goes specifically in the first direction we said—or sorry, the second—that it’s specifically negligence and responsibility?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He says that afterward. It’s not clear, not clear. That what was renewed here is that the guardian is considered an owner regarding damages. He discusses that afterward. You’re right, seemingly, but—and this is Maimonides’ reason for holding in chapter 4, law 10, that a guardian who accepted responsibility for guarding the animal in the ordinary way is liable for damages, whereas the Raavad disagrees there and requires an explicit acceptance for this matter.
I handed an animal over to a guardian. Now I didn’t tell him that he should also guard it so that the animal won’t cause damage. Usually when I hand him an animal, it’s so it won’t be harmed. He guards my property. But what about guarding it so that it won’t cause damage? I didn’t say anything to him about that. Maimonides says that even if I said nothing, the guardian is responsible also for guarding it from causing damage. And if it caused damage, then he has to pay—the guardian. Okay? The Raavad disagrees with him. The Raavad claims no, only if he explicitly accepted responsibility for guarding against its causing damage. What’s the difference? The difference is that according to the Raavad, when the guardian receives the animal, he does not become the owner, and therefore he isn’t obligated to guard it—only an owner is obligated to guard. If you explicitly stipulated with him that he would guard it, then he is obligated to guard it, but that obligation is not by the law of liability for damages through guarding; it is by contract law. What’s my issue? I made a contract with him and he committed himself to guard it. Whether I paid him or didn’t pay him doesn’t matter—the contract obligates him to guard it. But that isn’t by the Torah’s laws of guarding against damages; it is by mutual obligation between us, by contract law. According to Maimonides, it is by the laws of guarding against damages: the guardian is obligated to guard. I don’t need to tell him anything at all. The Torah imposed the duty of guarding on him, not I. Okay? It has nothing to do with the contract; the Torah imposed it. Now why? After all, he isn’t the owner. You see that according to Maimonides—and that’s what’s written here, “under his authority”—for Maimonides it’s enough that it be under his authority for him to be considered an owner with regard to the obligation to guard. Whereas according to the Raavad, no—a guardian isn’t an owner and therefore isn’t obligated to guard. Only if there’s a contractual agreement between us—and that has major practical ramifications. And the question whether the Raavad can be explained this way is not clear at all, because then it means this is a contractual obligation. And who says all the Torah laws even apply to such a thing? Maybe it’s only the contract. And it could be that actually I have to pay, only I have a contract with him, so he’ll have to reimburse me. Basically they’ll sue me—I’m the one who, according to the Torah, has to pay for the damage. I have a contract with him, so I’ll sue him. He doesn’t need to deal with the… There are many practical ramifications here that I won’t get into now. But that is basically the focus: in principle, you have to be an owner. According to the Raavad, an actual owner. According to Maimonides, it’s enough that it be under your authority.
Now the question arises, if we ask the following question—which appears here another couple of pages later or something—what creates the liability in guarding? Is it the very fact that my property caused damage? Or negligence—negligence? So seemingly, from the fact that a guardian is also liable, it follows that negligence in guarding is what creates the liability. Because a guardian—it isn’t his, but he was negligent in guarding it. But that probably can’t even be right, even though on the face of it that’s how it looks. Because clearly it has to be his. Which is, as I said before, everyone agrees that to become liable you need both things. There isn’t here a conceptual inquiry of “either negligence in guarding or his property.” Clearly it has to be his property and also negligence in guarding. The question is which is primary and which is secondary. So in any event you have to explain somehow that the guardian is considered like an owner; otherwise he wouldn’t be liable. Once we’ve explained that, then the possibility also remains open of saying that he is liable because his property caused damage—his property, for the purposes of damages. Meaning that he is the owner for the purposes of damages. And that really is what he says in the second conceptual inquiry. And with this I’ll finish—just one more sentence, and we’ll continue next time.
And behold, there is a well-known conceptual inquiry whether liability for damages is because the Torah imposed a law of guarding on the owners, and they are liable for the deficiency in their guarding—that is, negligence in guarding is what creates the liability—or whether the owners are obligated to pay when their property caused damage, and guarding is an exemption that the Torah granted the owners in a case of compulsion, since they guarded it properly. Okay? So he says: basically, that you need both is obvious. If you guarded properly, you’re exempt. If the property isn’t yours, you’re also exempt. And the property has to be yours, and you have to have failed to guard it properly—yes, those two requirements have to be present in order to make you liable. But the question is which is the obligating factor and which is the exempting factor. Is the fact that it’s your property what obligates you, only if you guarded it properly that exempts you? Or is the fact that you didn’t guard it properly what obligates you, except that it has to be yours because otherwise you aren’t obligated to guard it? And then he brings the wording inference from Maimonides. He says: and behold, from Maimonides’ wording, where he wrote, “Any living creature,” etc., “the owners are liable to pay, for their property caused damage,” it implies that this is the main reason for the liability to pay, and not that for this reason he is obligated in guarding. And from what we explained here, that according to Maimonides guardians are obligated by virtue of being owners, one cannot prove that the main law of ownership is because of the obligation to guard, for guardians were included by “and he did not guard it,” because one can say that whoever has the law of guarding has the law of ownership for damages—what I told you earlier. And for that very thing he was included by “and he did not guard it.” And fundamentally the liability is because it is his property.
So ostensibly this is what comes out of Maimonides. Later he retracts and argues that Maimonides doesn’t hold that way. I said already: wording inference in Maimonides—you have to be careful with it. That is basically the conceptual inquiry with which I’ll begin, and through it I’ll try to demonstrate what I want to show.