Question

There is a beautiful passage in Ein Ayah (Sabbath 4:7) that talks about methods for resolving doubts:

(Sabbath 49b): “Abaye said to him: Then let us bring a Torah scroll and count. Did not Rabbah bar bar Hannah say that Rabbi Yohanan said: They did not move from there until they brought a Torah scroll and counted them?”
Three are the ways to resolve every doubt: tradition, inquiry, and experiment. Where experiment cannot clarify our question for us, inquiry comes to our aid and spreads the rays of its light along its near and far paths, all according to the subject. And where inquiry too is too narrow and cannot bring us to the promised shore, faithful tradition appears to us, from the secret of God to the upright, to express for us sharp hidden things and wonders of wisdom. But Heaven forbid that we should use a hidden power when it is within our ability to uncover the source of our knowledge through an open power; therefore we should not turn to speculative inquiry where we have simple experiential clarification. And from this too we learn that we should not refrain from inquiry in anything to which the power of our inquiry can bring us, for in whatever can securely be reached by one faculty, the Master of all souls did not grant the use of another faculty as primary.
However, doubts in words of Torah are precious to us, both by virtue of their very knowledge, between from the perspective of the knowledge itself, and because of the effort itself, which leads us to exert ourselves more in the toil of Torah. Therefore we must be careful not to say: since effort in itself is a worthy goal, why should we seek easy paths such as experiment? Let us instead delve into the heavy labor of logical investigation. That is one possible claim. And someone else might claim: since this good is the inheritance of mastery and faith in the sages, let us come and receive the solution through tradition. But neither this nor that is correct, for only where experiential truth is not properly available before us does it bear useful fruit to seek counsel from afar; and then the effort itself is praiseworthy, and every wise-hearted person will understand that there is a divine secret here, that this labor of analysis was left for this chapter of time and for these particular individuals. But when there is a way to arrive at what is sought by means of experiment, the divine counsel did not leave room here for the influence of thought arising from the power of doubt, which comes only from slackness and laziness. Therefore, even if a person says he will use inquiry here, he will not succeed, and the intellectual branches that emerge from it will not be planted by streams of the waters of the Torah of truth. Therefore, when the intellect acts in its constant course, one should not delay it at all, so that in the meantime it not build its conceptions on a shaky foundation, but rather clarify them with the clarification prepared for them according to their nature. Therefore, here, where experiment can clarify the question, let us bring a Torah scroll and count, and do not say that the time is not fit for such difficult experimental work, and meanwhile we will make use of conjecture and theoretical inquiry. It is not so, for we learned: they did not move from there until they brought a Torah scroll and counted them, to show the preciousness of the event that brought definite experiential clarification, and to show that we should not allow the intellect to occupy itself with conceptions not meant for it, when there is open clarification: “The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in an earthen furnace, purified sevenfold.”

I wanted to ask why it is not worthwhile to rely directly on tradition instead of experiment. I understood his arguments against inquiry, but tradition is basically just experiment that earlier people already did before me and passed on to me—so why can’t one rely on that?
(Actually, the passage also reminded me a bit of your criticism of armchair studies 🙂 )