[Avodah] More on Mitzvos and Iyun

[Micha Berger]

On Sat, 24 Mar 2007 23:03:07 -0400, RYGB <ygbechhofer at gmail.com> wrote:
:> As my son is a case in point. He would have no problem following the
:> be'iyun, if he didn't have to deal with reading the texts....

: I am not addressing the very smart population, regardless of reading issues.

My point was:
:> In general: IQ is a fiction in that intelligence can't be reduced to a
:> single number. Different people can gain different things from be'iyun, they
:> needn't get everything out of it to get /something/.

IOW, unless the person is lacking every skill necessary to learn be'iyun your
argument doesn't begin. But those boys are not even in the lower shiurim of a
mainstream yeshiva. (You speak of "lower shiurim" in a school that also houses
P'TACH, never mind altogether special schools.) This topic is for Areivim, but
I only wrote this much because I know you don't read it.

But given that you agree that chuqim have a refining effect on the individual
in ways we can not understand, why can't you accept that your collegue
believes that be'iyun, the shelish bigemara leshitas haRambam, might have such
choq elements?

: The question is what is the point of diminishing returns. Would you not
: agree that there is some point at which learning Ein Yaakov would be
: more productive? (As I have noted elsewhere, the question is actually
: sharper when it comes to bekiyus.)

Actually, I agree fully WRT beqi'us. We have a beqi'us shortage, and perhaps
seeking "shallower" books would get us more beqi'us per buck. My grandfather
learned mishnayos, but nowadays that kind of time is consumed with daf yomi.
To take an extreme case, leining the daf with a "crutch" (and I don't only
mean the most cited example) may not be as efficient of a beqi'us as taking
the same time to finish Mishnayos with Bartenura (or Kehati). Or, for that
matter, just learning Meiri without the gemara.

Or someone might want to learn AhS Yomi....

Tir'u baTov!
-mi

-- 
Micha Berger             Spirituality is like a bird: if you tighten
micha at aishdas.org        your grip on it, it chokes; slacken your grip,
http://www.aishdas.org   and it flies away.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                            - Rav Yisrael Salanter