Question

I recently read several of the Rabbi’s articles about Hasidism.
In your remarks there you made use of the concept of “study” [any kind of study, even if it is not Torah study],
and argued that study has meaning only insofar as there is active involvement on the part of the listener or reader.
That is, according to your claim [in column 104], if no act of thinking takes place and no insights or conclusions are reached from what is being learned, then it is not study.
But I would object: a lesson whose purpose is to convey knowledge on a certain subject [such as history, mathematics, etc.], where all that is expected of the student
is to understand and remember what he is learning—is that not called study?
Second: as is well known, the unsigned style of the Talmud allows for thinking about what is being learned and for the possibility of developing novel insights.
Maimonides, by contrast, wrote the Mishneh Torah in the opposite style, so that a person would know the conclusions and not be left in uncertainty.
As I understand him, in his view that is how the Torah would have begun: a collection of organized laws [relatively speaking], divided into chapters and clauses.
So again—would studying such a Torah, that is, acquiring knowledge from a book for the sake of review and memorization, not be considered “Torah study”?
Thank you.