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So Many Questions!


Question:

I study gemara daily, and I always end up with so many questions as I finish each page! Sometimes I ask Rabbis or friends to answer my questions, and sometimes I just stay with them. I find this extremely annoying. Help please?



AskTheRabbi.org answered:

While I truly empathize with you please allow me to suggest that your questions are wonderful! Jewish scholarship centers on understanding the texts properly and asking questions to try and plumb their depths. The Oral Torah is designed from its beginning to its end to be built around questions - that is how Torah knowledge and Jewish Law evolve. The greatest scholars in each generation toiled to answer their own questions so that they would have a deeper understanding. It is only through such questions and such toil that a person can grow to become an accomplished Talmid Chacham (Torah scholar). Torah scholars throughout every generation are renowned for the depth of their questions and their penetrating analysis that their constant probing brings. Rabbi Akivah Eiger was one of the greatest scholars of all generations - his scholarship was centered on his incredible ability to focus on a question and wrestle with it constantly. I have a thin book at home called Kushiyot Atzumot that is a compilation of all the questions that Rabbi Akivah Eiger was not able to come find an answer to! That is true scholarship - to ask questions and to attempt to answer them. 

Please accept my blessing that you continue to ask and probe and that you continue to grow in Torah and love of God for many, many more years to come!


 
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