Q&A: Talmud
Talmud
Question
Hello
Do you think that in classic and/or yeshiva-style Talmud study there are still innovations in methods of learning and major geniuses and important books, like Rabbi Akiva Eger, Ketzot HaChoshen, etc., and afterward Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, Rabbi Shimon Shkop, and so on? Particularly in tractates dealing with women and damages—have books come out in the last 50–60 years that illuminated the world in these areas the way they once did? And what do you think about the feeling that it is just grinding water, with no real ability for genuine innovation in the classic yeshiva approach?
Answer
I don’t agree at all. It’s true that as things progress, more tools become available to us and seemingly there is less room for innovation. But in my opinion, today there is much more innovation than there was in earlier times. New methods of learning are constantly emerging in different directions—academic, existentialist, literary, and also different conceptual modes of analysis. Maybe you are fixated on the old methods of learning and dismiss all the new ones—that’s why you speak about grinding water—and precisely because of that you get the impression that there are no innovations. Go out and see what’s happening in the world.
Discussion on Answer
Even within the accepted approach there are today many beautiful innovations and different approaches that are developing. Today we do conceptual Talmudic analysis much better than Rabbi Shimon Shkop and Rabbi Chaim and their students did. There are very many local innovations in all kinds of passages, no less than with them. As for a fundamental methodological innovation, I don’t think Rabbi Shimon had such an innovation. In Ketzot HaChoshen one can perhaps see a methodological innovation, but that is not unequivocal, and with Rabbi Chaim more so (though he too did not invent anything out of nothing). But innovations like those of Rabbi Shimon Shkop—which I very much love and appreciate—exist today in abundance.
But you need to notice that your expectation is somewhat self-contradictory. If the innovation is close to the old method, then it is not a significant innovation. If it is far from it, then it is not what you are looking for, because you are asking about innovations within the old method. So clearly you will not find such an innovation.
In my opinion, you’re missing a few things here.
1. You say Rabbi Shimon is less methodological and Ketzot HaChoshen is more so. In practice, the question is whether there will be methodologies like that later on or not. Of course one can say that it’s impossible to predict the future, etc. etc., and that’s true, but you can still talk about a feeling based on what we see today.
2. To say that we do conceptual analysis better than Rabbi Chaim and Rabbi Shimon is somewhere on the scale between problematic and ridiculous, since you yourself talk about there being an issue of intuitive grasp in relation to the medieval authorities (Rishonim), and more than that, there is something here that may be critical in all your thinking and that of others, because I start from the assumption that the thinking of people like Rabbi Chaim of Brisk or the Vilna Gaon is different and on another level, and I’m not sure that’s naive. On the contrary, probably your view is the naive one on this matter. The reason their thinking is different apparently comes from several causes, but first of all, Torah and Talmudic thinking is very different from scientific, mathematical thinking, etc. And these people were blessed with tremendous minds and an endless immersion in Torah and the expanses of the Talmuds, with unusual exertion within layers of reasoning and a whole world that is very complex, and not all of that is something that can be written down, for example—although I think you won’t accept that, but it’s a critical point.
3. It really is not true that there is a contradiction here. One can theoretically imagine a new methodology that is also part of the classical path, as there was until the last generation—what’s called old-new 😁
Sorry about the whole style, for heaven’s sake don’t get annoyed! 😃
Who got annoyed?!
I don’t know how to answer undefined questions (concepts like “old-new”) that are based on unsupported assumptions (about the immense greatness of this or that figure) of yours, which you yourself wrote that I do not accept. So if you assume your own assumptions and wonder about them, it follows that you should answer yourself. Good luck.
1. I really was speaking more about the accepted classical approach, but with regard to that, do you think it has more or less been exhausted? (Of course there are always new insights, but not on the scale of the innovations of Rabbi Chaim or Sha'arei Yosher and the like.)
2. Don’t you think that the approaches you are talking about are not innovations within the Talmud itself, but rather something in between Talmudic scholarship—which you also aren’t enthusiastic about—and classical learning? Meaning, for example, hermeneutical principles, your ideas and those of others, are not the Talmud itself the way it is with the Chazon Ish and Rabbi Brisk and so on, but something more external.