42: How to Love Learning

Hi, I'm Dovid Orlofsky Welcome to the Rabbi Orlofsky Show Episode 42 and whether you are watching on Torah Anytime or wherever you watch or listen to your podcasts it is so nice to have you along and like I say our extended family keeps growing. If you know anybody who you think might enjoy this, might gain from this it's definitely worthwhile. I try to keep my topics generic enough that you could listen to it whenever. I got an email not long ago from a young lady who had to travel halfway across the country, more than halfway across the country, and she heard about my podcast. She downloaded all of them. Listened to it on the whole trip. And I certainly enjoy traveling and I'm happy to travel with you. So people can join in anytime. Yeah, so, please feel free to share, if you enjoy this experience to share it with other people. Okay, we are doing a little bit of a theme in our post Shavuos weeks and that is we are talking about topics that are relevant to Matan Torah and I want to deal with something this week that has Always been an issue to me. A serious issue. Let me tell you a story, Tell you a story. I travel around the world and I speak. I'm a somewhat inspirational speaker Humorous. Entertaining. I try to be relevant. I always say when I speak. I've got four goals I want to see a chiddush. And I want to be entertaining and I want to be inspiring and I want to be practical. Those are my four elements I try when I I go around and I speak. But I don't know they still have it, but at one point I know the kollel in Elizabeth used to make a Yom Iyun Fathers would come with their children and they would Come for Yom Iyun So somebody I know, I happened to be in America for Thanksgiving they were having a Yom Iyun, so they asked me to come and speak. So I called up the Rosh Yeshiva, the Rosh Kollel, I said, "So what should I speak about?" He says, "Speak about? gemara, Rashi, Tosfos, Rambam. You give out ma'areh mekomos and you give a shiur." And I said, "Well!" I said. I said, "Well, this is the first time I've ever been asked to do this." So I prepared a sugya oiker kiddushin lemefraya. The reason I took that is because usually when I give a shiur, it's gemara Rashi and Tosfos, I don't usually do Rambams. But there's one Rambam over there because the rabosav shel Rashi, the Kesef Mishna says is in fact the Rambam's shita. Okay So I prepared to my maareh mekomos, and I got get ready to give the shiur And he calls me up the day before and he says to me, "People say, 'You don't bring in Orlofsky to give a gemara shiur.'" He said, "So give, you know, two-thirds of the time the gemara shiur and the last third do whatever, You're usual shick, whatever it is it that you do." And that's what I did. And he said to me at the end, "I made a mistake." Because the people were loving the gemara shiur." Now, here happens to be one of the the great secrets. I give a great gemara shiur. I always have. I shouldn't say always have, it took my a while to get it down. I give a great gemara shiur. The only thing I still do in Eretz Yisrael, I give a daf yomi in the morning and for the most part, that's all I do. But I used to teach a gemara shiur. In fact, when I left one particular yeshiva, my talmidim came to me, a group, a delegation of talmidim and they said they're gonna take me to a din Torah to demand that I give a gemara shiur because they've been in many shiurim and they never had any shiur that was as good as mine. Now, I think that's an exaggeration, but not by much. Anyway, so baruch Hashem, so I've been pretty successful at doing this and there's a challenge. Most people do not enjoy learning gemara. That's a fact. And what's the reason for that? There's there's a couple different reasons for this that I'm gonna try to address at the time that we have together today. Ma ahavti Toraecha, hol hayom hee sichasi. How I love the Torah. I love the Torah. I was teaching in a particularly yeshiva and I came in the first year. I was giving a second year. And there was a guy in the shiur, he was only staying for six months. At the end of the six months he said to me, "I came back only on condition that I didn't have to learn gemara, and I was the deal I made with the rosh yeshiva, because I hate learning gemara and he agreed. And he was setting me up with other stuff to do. But he says, 'Listen, there's a new rebbe teaching second year, why don't you give it a try?' " Now, I never would have known this. He was one of the best guys in shiur. He was doing great. And he said, "If I knew that gemara could be that enjoyable, I would have learned my whole life." Now, that's a problem. It's a problem if people don't enjoy it. And I don't mean 'do it' and I don't mean 'master it' I'm talking about 'enjoy it', where it's better than what's out there. Famous story with Rav Aharon Kotler. Where this guy was helping him collect money to open up a Lakewood. At the end of the day the guy sits down and he opens up the newspaper Rav Aharon looks at him, he says "Why don't you open up a gemara?" He says, "Don't worry, rebbe. I have my Olam Haba. Yeah, I have my World To Come 'cuz I'm helping you. I have my Olam Haba." Rav Aharon said, "I'm not talking about Olam Haba I'm talking about Olam Hazeh! I'm talking that THIS world." If a person could enjoy learning in this world, there's nothing greater. They tell a story of this scientist who had worked with Einstein and he said to Reb Moshe Soloveitchik. He says, "I curse your father, Reb Chaim, all the time." "Why?" He says, "I don't believe in God. I don't believe in all this stuff, but I can't stop learning Torah! He made it so interesting. He made it so exciting. So exciting!" What does that mean? I may have told the story already, i don't remember. I heard from my son who heard from his rebbe who heard from his grandfather who heard from Reb Boruch Ber who was there. The first shiur Reb Chaim Soloveitchik gave in Volozhin and sitting around the table were all the people who became the famous Roshei Yeshivas whose Torah we learn today and he asked, he brought the Ketzos And he asks the Ketzos' kasha. He says, "What do you say?" And everyone went around the room and gave teirutzim and he goes around and knocks off everybody's answers. And then he shows how the Ketzos in a few words anticipated all of their answers. Okay, had everyone's attention. And he gave an answer. Everyone says, "Ah! Brilliant!" And then he knocks it off and he shows how the Ketzos also knocked off his answer. People were stunned. And then he gives an even better answer. This is how I heard the story. The people were dancing on the tables. And then he knocked it off. And he showed how the Ketzos thought of that one, too He says, "It was like Tisha B'av." And then he gave another answer. And went on like this for three hours. When you can learn Torah on a level with that level of excitement, that's what Torah is supposed to be. So, how do we make Torah come alive? How do we make Torah come alive? I want to start by saying the following,because this is so incredibly important especially in our day and age. i was at a bris and this rav was speaking and he said the following: "Kesheim shenichnas l'bris kain yikaneis l'Torah, l'chupa ul'maasim tovim. Just like you go into a bris, so you should go into Tprah, Chupa, and Maasim Tovim. How do you go into a bris? dressed up in a fancy outfit, carried out and a pillow, before you know it you're bleeding and crying. So we understand that's what marriage is right, but that's also what Torah is." I told the story about this father was working with his son and they meet the rebbe And the rebbe said the little boy, "So do you love the Torah?" And he says, "No, rebbe. I don't love the Torah." So the father gives him a look and the rebbe says, "No, no, no. He's saying right." Because this is reality. There's a certain base level of mastery that you have to accomplish in order for it to become enjoyable. What do I mean? I watch people learning how to play the piano do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do. And you're practicing chords, there's a practice that goes into it. There's a lot of donkey work that goes into it. But once you master it, and you could just sit down and start making the most beautiful music. But it takes time to master. People don't mind mastering something that they enjoy. Something they don't enjoy, they don't. So therefore you could have kids who are sitting outside, no, not sitting, they're running around outside on the hot asphalt Bouncing a ball trying to get it into a basket because it's important to them and they're gonna get. I knew somebody was a concert flutist. I asked him after he became frum and was learning in yeshiva. "How come you never play the flute?" and he said, "If you don't have eight hours a day to practice, it's not worthwhile." Eight hours a day! Now I was a magician. I mentioned this in an earlier podcast. I wasn't a very good magician. I'll be honest with you. I was a very entertaining magician, but from the point of mastery I mean, I I knew certain tricks and I would practice them and I would get by with my you know, personality and you know, things. But I saw people do the same trick. I know how the trick was supposed to be done I knew what they were doing and it looked like magic, you know, it was just absolutely amazing. They had mastered these skills. But they spent hours and hours and hours practicing. To be able to get it to the point that they were had a mastery. The average guy goes into shiur, they assume the 'position'. "Go ahead rebbe. Say anything that you think might interest me." Now, Torah is a dynamic. If you want to sit back... Now don't take this the wrong way. chas v'shalom. When I was growing up, we had a Jastrow dictionary. An Aramaic-English dictionary. There was almost no word in there that you ever found in the gemara, unless you were able to conjugate Aramaic. And if I could conjugate Aramaic I probably wouldn't need your dopey dictionary. I just didn't speak Aramaic. Conversation Aramaic wasn't my thing. When I was in Chofetz Chaim, people used to go to Queens College and try to get credits for different courses that they offered there was a Professor Katzenellenbogen and he had grown up frum, and so he knew... So he would farher these yeshiva guys on whatever they were trying to get credit in. So a friend of mine told me, he wrote down 'Aramaic'. He wanted credit for Aramaic. So he says to him, "Conjugate the verb 'to come'." Okay. So he says, I know, 'assa', you know what I mean. I know how to conjugate it in a past, future, first person, singular... I don't know how do that obviously, right? But you had Jastrow, it was very hard. If you got really desperate you took out the Soncino gemara. Now the great thing about the Soncino Gemara was that it was written on a level that it was easier to learn Aramaic than to try to figure out the English that was in this. Especially because half of it that was Latin anyway. Every now and they would they would write out things in Greek, you know, and it really wasn't... It was theantithesis of user-friendly. It was not user-friendly. And then they came out with the Artscroll gemaras which are incredibly user-friendly. And it says that's what they set down to do to - make it user-friendly. And that's why when a person is is trying to work through a piece of gemara and they get stuck on something they go to the Artscroll and they just want to look up one thing. And before you know it they're sitting here turning pages, amud bais...and they just keep turning. Why? Because it's so interesting. It's so user friendly. Pictures and charts and maps and pop-ups, you know. Can you help the meraglim find their way back to Eretz Yisroel?... Now, I have made this joke before and balabatim come over to me, very insulted then they said, 'I finished shas with the Artscroll. I never could have done it otherwise." And kol hakavod. I'm not trying to take away from it. And trust me. If you go through the Artscroll with all of the footnotes, you have a pretty good a hold on the Gemara But the secret to learning to get the geshmakout of learning is you have to work on it. I still resent the fact that my talmidim have the divrei hamashchil, the headings, in Rashi in bold print. I didn't have that when I was growing up. We had to search around to see where we were. And you have to admit, the gemara itself is distinctly not user-friendly. It's in Aamaic, with no punctuation no capitalization, you don't know where it starts and where it ends and you're sitting there trying to piece the words together and sometimes you;re jjust sitting there looking up all the words. "The bear went into the forest with the eagle." What does that mean? It's a proverb. Oh, great. Yeah. It means it's assur. So you sitting there working hard. But here's what you won't find. When a person has it more or less spoon-fed to them or you know, they just they take something where it's it's it's set up for them You won't see that excitement that you can see in a yeshiva when a person is struggling You see a person trying to get pshat, Trying to understand what's going on and they working hard sometimes hours sometimes days I remember during all my years in yeshiva I managed to avoid ever having to say a chabura. A chabura means that you have to prepare your own little like, you know, chiddush in Torah and present it. I always managed to get out of it. Yeah one time I was in a kollel and there was no way I could get out of it So I came up with a good question and I worked on it. I couldn't come up with anything. I went to the rosh kollel, Reb Shykie Bakst zol zain gezunt un shtark I said to him, "I just, I can't find an answer. I'm stuck." He said, "What time did you go to sleep last night?" I said, "I dunno. One o'clock." He says, "You think you're gonna figure out a chabura and go to sleep one o'clock in the morning?! When I'm working on a chabura I'm up all night. I go to sleep thinking about my chabura. I wake up in the morning thinking about my chabura. I eat, drink, and live my chabura. I was like, okay, okay, I went back to work and I'll never forget I finally figured out what I think was the answer, it was a chiddush. And I said it over and everybody was amazed. But that thrill that comes because I figured it out because I found my piece of Torah, That's an unbelievable thing. That's a thrill but that thrill comes from effort And once you get the effort once he put in the effort then you're able to do it. But you have to know that if it's if You're going to only eat food that was chewed up for you by other people and then spit out on the plate so that you can eat it, it'll be very easy to eat, but it won't be very tasty. Good, real learning comes with yegiya, it comes with effort. You have to be prepared to invest in it and therefore I have no problem if you want to have a bekius seder and you're using Different kind of aids to help you get through it etc. But you have to have at least some time during the day We're just sitting and working on a kasha, or you're just struggling to understand. Where you find yourself, you know like? Now, here's another big problem and I don't know why they do this. but I'm always amazed when people teach gemara this way. You read a line. You translate it. You read a line. You translate it. You read a line. You translate it. You read a line. You translate it. There's a question and there's an answer. There's a question and there's an answer. There's a proof. There's a this, that. But when you're all done, you don't have a picture. So I would sit down when I give a shiur and I'd start with a question. "What do you think?" Now, people would start to discuss it and after a while, you know, people would come up with basically two approaches and I say, okay "What you're saying is Reb Yochanan and what you're saying is Raish Lakish." And that's what the gemara's gonna say. And then we're gonna ask three questions on Raish Lakish and Raish Lakish's gonna answer them and then we're gonna ask one question on Reb Yochanan and he's gonna be disproven and that's how the gemara is gonna go. Now, let's look at it inside." But I've had times when I wrote out the steps of the Gemara and you have one line where it's a question on the... It's an answer to the question to the answer on the question on the answer on the question on the statement. There's a whole line there and you don't see the big picture. you have to first figure out what's going on. I don't know why people do this. Rebbeim always do this. Yeah, I would ask a question And they'd say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. The gemara will ask it later on." "So what does it say?" "You'll see when you'll get there." "What's the matter, you're worried about ruining the surprise? I'll be surprised anyway. I found out about surprise parties and I put on a surprise face anyway. It's not a problem." "You'll see .You'll see." So of course, with my kind of a mind I get stuck on that question. Just tell me what it says,! Why do we have to play these games? Why do we get stuck? So there's a lot of depth to learning and there's a lot of questions but the pashut psha, what's happening, that should be clear as day. When I taught in Derech, so Rabbi Lazarus he used to give what he called "The No-Fail Test." Because the test was the shakla v'tarya. What's the question? What's the answer? What's the question on the answer? What's the question? What's the answer? All the steps of the gemara. And you just had to fill them out. And if you didn't get an 80, you took the test again. And he kept doing it until you got it down. Because the purpose of the test was for you, at the end of the day, to Understand what the gemara is saying and what the steps are. That's the goal. So then, you could talk about the lamdus, then you could talk about the the depth and the thinking and all the kind of things that you can go to work on. But first you have to make sure you have clear what the steps are, where you're going. How many times have I seen people with.... When I was in yeshiva, so I would go to the shoel u'mashiv. And he'd always get that nervous look. I'm used to that kind of look, where they'd like to be someplace else, other than here talking to me. So one time I asked him, "Why do you get so nervous when I come by? I'm not one of the better guys in yeshiva?" He says, "You make me nervous because you ask easy questions. Hard questions are easy to answer because their based on a whole bunch of steps. So does the kinyan work like this or like that? What is the chalos over here.... But I know already what you're coming to ask. You want to know what these two lines are doing in Tosfos." I said, "Yeah, that's what I want to know." "No one knows what those two lines are doing in Tosfos, but you're the only one who's gonna ask it." Because to me, I wanna I want to understand what the steps are - what's going on. A the more you engage people... So doing preparation I would I would go around to the chavrusos and I'd say, "What do you think Rashi is saying?" He'd says Rashi is saying like this and maybe the other one would say he's saying like that. "What's he saying?" I said, "I don't know, I'm trying to work it out." I would just go around from chavrusa to chavrusa. Challenge them. Make it something that they care about. Somebody said this to me once. "You know when you're in yeshiva all you hear all day is a question and an answer. A question and an answer. 'Why?' 'Because.' But after you finish building up a question everyone cares about the question. That's got to be the goal." In other words, to care about it. At the end of the day it has to be something that's relevant. And I always say that. There's not one thing that I've learned that that I wasn't able to make some practical application. I was teaching Gittin in Ohr Sameach. A guy throws a get from his roof into his wife's courtyard. It catches on fire on them. Did the chatzer already make a kinyan on it? The courtyard already acquire the get? Someone says, "Why are we learning this? Why isn't you just give her the get?? Or, we were learning about how a guy would sent to get and then he'll cancel it out in front of two witnesses and she won't know about it and then she'll get married on the basis of the get and they'll have mamzerim. He said, "Why would anyone do this?? And I said, "Because when a marriage goes bad, there's no limit to what people will do to push each other's you know, sore spots. It'd be nice if everybody could be nice, but when you see something go wrong... We were doing Zevachim, I'm going through pigul. Pigul is that if I have the wrong thought when I'm bringing the korban, the cohen who's bringing the korban thinks we're gonna eat this on Tuesday and you can only eat it till Monday, it's no good. So someone says, "What's the relevance of pigul?" I said. "It's to teach you that your thoughts have impact. And what you think and what your intentions are can make an impact in this world." And so it goes with everything. Everything can be relevant. Everything could be something that we're learning from. There's a reason Hakdosh Baruch Hu gave us the Torah. It has to be relevant to us today. In our own lives. But sometimes in order to be able to figure that out you have to work. So you want to get a geshamk from your learning? And that's why if you've ever been the bis medrash and you see somebody working really hard and they suddenly figure it out, these people are unbearable. "Oh, I figured out pshat in the Tosfos! Let me tell it to you." "I'm not learning that mesechta". "No. No, that's okay, I'll explain to you. The gemara says like this...." "I'm not holding.." "No, no. I'll tell it to you. There's a question in Tosfos..." Why? 'Cuz he worked hard on it. It's his Torah, and it's so exciting. It's so geshmak. That's gotta be the goal. That we enjoy it,that it's exciting, that it's alive, that it's real. And im yitrtze Hashem, every one of us we were mekabel Torah and that we have to figure out how to appreciate the gift that we got. There's nothing worse than getting a gift and not figuring out how to put it together and how to use it. So you may not be able to program the clock on your microwave oven, but you have to be able to get an appreciation of the Torah that you're learning. So that's it for this episode. If you want to find out more about this program go to RabbiOrlofsky.com/podcast. If you would like to make a particular comment on this particular episode go to RabbiOrlofsky.com/podcast/42. If you want to fight about upcoming events go to RabbiOrlofsky.com/events. If you would like to contact Rabbi Orlofsky, b'kvodo u'vatzmo, go to RabbiOrlofsky.com/contact. If you would like to sponsor an episode and I almost forgot to mention, but acharon acharon chaviv, this episode is being sponsored anonymously. So, Thank you. And if you would like to be a sponsor, and have all that zchus, we don't have to mention your name. You know who you are and you're being mechazaik Torah and being mechazaik Klal Yisroel. So go to RabbiOrlofsky.com/podcast and click on Sponsor an Episode. My name is Dovid Orlofsky, and this is the Rabbi Orlofsky Show.