Blog Post on Rabbi Samaet

Did you go to yshivat charedi?  All in usa?

I embarrassed they learned much more than me

Lawyer named yaakov

I and my family are in Israel for the next 5 months on sabbatical.  Though we are living in Jerusalem I commuttee each day to the city of lod to learn torah in the kollel of Rabbi Israel Samet.  It is a small group of mostly young married men who have finished their army service and have chosen to learn in Lod with Rabbi Samet due to his unique and wide approach to gemara.   

Often we see gemara, especially the halachic parts as just that.  Legal discussions interspersed with quotes from the torah whose main fundtions is to serve as proofs for laws or derashot, showing the ways in which laws may be derived from biblical verses.   If there is anything in the halachic Talmudic sugyah (legal section) beyond the law, in the realm of philosophy or spirutality, that, in most yeshivot, is left to kabbalists or academics.

The approach in rabbi samet’s yeshiva is different.  Every halachic sugyah is seen as a hot bed of not only legal ideas and categories, but of philosophical and even human existential ideas and views.  Many of these are accesed but looking closely at the biblical sources for the halachic section not only as a sourcse of leagal proofs or derashot but to look at the biblical narrative and use this as a wedge with which to open the more philiosopiical and literary aspects of the sugyah. 

From my experiences in many yeshivot in America in which I learned, from branches of Lakewood to yeshiva university it is clear that in America there are only 2 ways to study gemara, in yeshivot it is studied using the method of rabbi chaim solovetchik, the brisker method and in universities it is studied with an academic approach, either viewing the page historically with an eye to its development over a period of time and the layer wixh compise it or with an eye to the social and cultural surroundings that influence the legal progression of the sugyah.   Rearly is there anything in between.

In Israel in contrast it seems thee is an openness to much subtlety , and to bringing many varired methodologies to bear on the Talmud.