Q&A: Survey Study
Survey Study
Question
Dear Rabbi Michael Abraham, greetings and blessings!
I wanted to thank you for the warm welcome you gave me when I came to your home to purchase the trilogy books.
So far I have read God Plays with Dice, The Science of Freedom, The First Existent, and I am about to finish No Man Rules the Spirit.
I am reading the books with great thirst. Many things said in the books I had said myself even before reading them, aside from a few points that perhaps I will send to the Rabbi on another occasion. I did not see any heretical ideas in the books. True, beyond thin Judaism, one also gets dry Judaism, and in my opinion that can and should be addressed, without any need to fatten Judaism back up.
And to conclude I will ask: does the Rabbi have any advice for how to study Talmud broadly and correctly?
Answer
Regarding broad survey study, I don’t have any especially good advice.
As a rule, broad study at the beginning is meant to acquire initial information and familiarity with the Talmud. But after you pass that stage, the goal of broad study should be to understand conceptual principles, not to remember details or information. Today information is accessible, and in any case you won’t remember it over time. Broad survey study is a tool for analytical study in a different way.
My general view is that analytical study should come before broad survey study. First let a person learn, and only afterward understand the reasoning behind it (contrary to the source in the Talmud). Once you are skilled in analytical study, you can study broadly and effectively, because you can get fairly quickly to the principles embedded in the passage even without delving deeply and opening all the commentators.