New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman) A family member of the Chazon Ish once told me that he had once poked fun at the Brisker method of study.  He had asked, “I have a Chakirah:  Is everyone who violates Shabbos purposefully and spitefully – mechuyav Misah?  Or is it that essentially, everyone is mechuyav misah, but being mekayem Shabbos is a ptur – an exemption, in the Chiyuv Misa?

But how could it be that the Chazon Ish would be against the trend in the Yeshiva world that has veritably defined it for the past nine decades?

Perhaps the answer to this question appears in a much ignored essay bound into the front of Be’ayos HaZman, in the toldos section. It is titled “Darko Shel Rabbi Reuven B’Halacha,” and it was written by Rabbi Chaim Gronem Landau.

Rav Refael Reuven Grozovsky zt”l (1886–1958) was the maggid shiur in Kaminetz whose shiurim later became Chiddushei Rabbi Reuven, a set that sits on the shelf of nearly every yeshiva in the world. Rabbi Landau (1911–1997) was a Talmid muvhak of Rav Reuven zt”l.

Rav Landau was born in Starobin to the rav of the city, he learned as a boy in Slutsk under Rav Elazar Menachem Man Shach, then in Kletsk, and then in Kaminetz under Rav Boruch Ber Leibowitz — and, for several years, under Rav Reuven himself.

He later learned in Mir, where he belonged to the elite circle that included Rav Leib Malin, Rav Yonah Karpilov and Rav Yechiel Michel Feinstein. He married a daughter of Rav Tzvi Pesach Frank, was appointed a rosh yeshiva at the Beis Medrash L’Torah in Chicago, later headed Yeshivas HaDarom in Rechovot, and spent decades preparing his father-in-law’s Har Tzvi for print.

Two Shiurim in One Yeshiva

Between the two world wars, Kaminetz held more than two hundred talmidim, many of them bochurim of unusual ability. Rav Boruch Ber gave the first shiur. His son-in-law, Rav Reuven, gave the second.

 Rabbi Landau writes that the enormous light of Rav Boruch Ber did not dim the light of Rav Reuven. The talmidim who worked hardest to absorb Rav Boruch Ber’s shiurim were precisely the ones who also came to hear Rav Reuven, because his shiurim carried a color of their own.

A Third Rebbi

Two of Rav Reuven’s teachers are well known: Rav Moshe Mordechai Epstein of Slabodka, and his father-in-law Rav Boruch Ber. Although Rav Reuven spent more years learning under Rav Moshe Mordechai, it is the influence of Rav Boruch Ber that stands out more sharply in his derech.

Rav Landau adds a third name —. Rav Reuven, he writes, was shaped in no small measure by Rabbi Akiva Eiger, whose seforim he learned with tremendous hasmadah and enormous depth.

Who the Three Were

Rav Moshe Mordechai Epstein zt”l (1866–1933). Born in Bakst in the Vilna district, he was called the illui of Bakst as a boy and entered Volozhin at sixteen, where he learned under Rav Chaim Soloveitchik. He married a daughter of Rav Shraga Feivel Frank of Kovno, which made him a brother-in-law of Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer. In 1897 the Alter of Slabodka, Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel, asked him to serve as rosh yeshiva of Knesses Yisrael, and he held that position for roughly four decades, through the split over mussar, through the move of the yeshiva to Chevron in the mid-1920s, and through the massacre of 1929. His chiddushim on Shas were published as Levush Mordechai. He was niftar in Yerushalayim on 10 Kislev 5694 and is buried on Har HaZeisim. Rav Reuven learned under him during his Slabodka years — more years, in fact, than he spent under Rav Boruch Ber.

Rav Boruch Ber Leibowitz zt”l (born in Slutsk in the early 1860s; niftar 5 Kislev 5700/1939). A prodigy sent to Volozhin at sixteen, he became one of the closest talmidim of Rav Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk, and he spent the rest of his life transmitting his rebbi’s yesodos. He married a daughter of Rav Avraham Zimmerman and succeeded him as rav of Halusk. In 1904 he was appointed rosh yeshiva of Knesses Beis Yitzchok in Slabodka, moved the yeshiva through Minsk, Kremenchug and Vilna during the First World War, and re-established it in Kaminetz in 1926, where it drew hundreds of talmidim for thirteen years. His shiurim became Birkas Shmuel, named for his father, and they preserve a great deal of Rav Chaim’s Torah that was never written down anywhere else. He fled with the yeshiva toward Vilna in 1939 and was niftar there weeks later. Rav Reuven married his daughter, lived in the apartment above him in Kaminetz, and considered him his primary rebbi.

Rabbi Akiva Eiger zt”l (1761–1837). Born in Eisenstadt, he served as rav of Markisch Friedland and, from 1815 until his petirah, as rav of Posen. He is known to every learner from the glosses printed on the margin of the Gemara — short, sharp questions that go straight at the plain reading of the text — and from his teshuvos and his Drush V’Chiddush. He was famous in his lifetime as the Posaik haDor. He was never Rav Reuven’s rebbi in the ordinary sense — he was niftar forty-nine years before Rav Reuven was born — but Rabbi Landau insists that he shaped Rav Reuven’s derech as much as either of the other two.

Two Methods, Joined

Rav Reuven’s derech, in Rabbi Landau’s reading, is a fusion of two things that are rarely described in the same breath: the approach of Rabbi Akiva Eiger, and Lithuanian analytic logic.

The first is about pushing into the depth of the pshat — the plain sense of the words on the page. Rabbi Landau explains what drove it. Out of ahavas ha’emes, love of truth, Rabbi Akiva Eiger recognized that the simpler an explanation is, the closer it stands to the truth. He therefore pushed away pilpul, which ties distant matters to one another and hammers them into a single unit.

The Lithuanian derech, Rabbi Landau continues, likewise does not bring its bread from far away. It does not explain an Amora in one masechta by saying he is following his own shitah somewhere else. It found a different route: breaking a din down into its parts and asking what its geder — its precise definition — actually is. In nearly any din in the Gemara there is room to ask that question, and the answer can usually be framed two ways.

The Warning

For many authors, Rabbi Landau writes, the method turned over on itself. The chakirah became a goal in its own right. The intellectual charm of the analyses and the definitions captivated them. Then comes a line that belongs on the wall of every beis medrash: for some of them the learning became more lishmo — for his own name — than lishmah, for its own sake. Some took pride in inventing new chakiros.

What all of them share is the sequence. First comes “yesh lachkor” — here is something to investigate — and only afterward do they examine the sugya to see which side the Gemara actually takes.

Rav Reuven’s derech, he writes, was far removed from all of this. First one must understand the sugya as it plainly stands: the shakla v’tarya, the salka da’atach, the maskana.

Rabbi Landau’s evidence is simple and hard to argue with. Look at which seforim Rav Reuven actually used. He used, primarily, the Nachalas Dovid, the P’nei Yehoshua, Rabbi Akiva Eiger and seforim of that sort. The great pashtanim, in other words, were his primary teachers in how to understand a sugya, and their influence comes through in the seriousness and the weight of Rav Reuven’s own pages.

Only when those seforim did not supply what was needed to resolve the difficulty did the second tool come out. Then Rav Reuven turned to Lithuanian logic and began to investigate on his own. The order is the entire point. Chakirah is the second move. It is never the first.

The First Example: Ein Shaliach L’Dvar Aveirah

Rabbi Landau brings two illustrations.

The first concerns the rule that there is no shaliach for a matter of transgression. The din can be explained two ways. One: there is no shaliach at all, so no shlichus exists here whatsoever. Two: there is no chiyuv of punishment on the one who sent him, but the shlichus itself was never uprooted.

The nafka mina is sharp. Suppose the shaliach committed two aveiros in the course of his mission. One falls under the general rule. The second is one of the exceptions, where shlichus does apply even for an aveirah. According to the first definition, the Torah nullified the shlichus at its root, so there is no shlichus for the second aveirah either. According to the second definition, the Torah only withheld the punishment — so the sender is liable for the second aveirah, because the shlichus was never cancelled at all.

Then comes the detail that defines the method. Rav Reuven demonstrates explicitly that these two explanations are themselves a machlokes among the Rishonim. The chakirah is not pressed onto the sugya from outside. It is drawn out of the sugya and then located in the words of the Rishonim.

The Second Example: Kesubos 83a

A husband wrote to his wife that he has no claim to her property and to its produce. R’ Yehuda holds that he nevertheless still eats the produce of the produce, until he writes that he has no claim to her property, to its produce, and to the produce of its produce, forever.

R’ Yehuda’s position, Rav Reuven shows, can be explained two ways. Is his right to eat the produce of the produce a din in the property, or a din in the produce? Does it flow from his right in the property — just as he eats produce from the property, so too the produce of that produce — or does it flow from the produce itself, since produce that was not consumed becomes keren of nichsei melog, and whatever grows from it is the produce of that nichsei melog?

The nafka mina is whether the wife may eat or sell the produce. On the second definition, the produce itself carries the din of nichsei melog — land is bought with it and the husband eats from it — so if she sold it, the sale is void. On the first definition, the produce carries no din of nichsei melog at all; his eating of the produce of the produce is only an outgrowth of his rights in the original property. She may therefore eat or sell it, and only if the produce is still in existence does he eat what grows from it.

The chakirah always arrives second, after the sugya has been understood on its own terms. It is framed as two definitions of one din, not as an open-ended menu of possibilities. It produces a nafka mina that is concrete and halachic — liability for a second aveirah, the validity of a woman’s sale — rather than a distinction that lives only in the abstract. And wherever possible it is anchored in an existing machlokes Rishonim, which converts the chakirah from an invention into a discovery.

Investigations of this kind appear throughout all the simanim in the sefer, he writes, and their purpose is, for the most part, to explain the depth of the pshat in the Gemara or in the words of the Rishonim. The chakirah is not the destination. Pshat is the destination. The chakirah is the road.

A Training Manual, Not a Record

Chiddushei Rabbi Reuven, published after his petirah and edited by his son-in-law Rav Don Ungarischer, consists largely of the shiurim Rav Reuven delivered to talmidim in Kaminetz and later in Torah Vodaas. Rabbi Landau describes their function in pedagogical terms. They show bnei hayeshivos how to approach a sugya, how to press to the depth of understanding, and how to analyze concepts. They are not primarily a record of conclusions. They are teaching – how to learn.

Rav Reuven left Europe with a group of his talmidim, reached America, and threw himself into the work of the Vaad Hatzala alongside Rav Aharon Kotler and Rav Avraham Kalmanowitz. He served as rosh yeshiva in Torah Vodaas and in the young Beis Medrash Elyon in Monsey, chaired the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah, and helped guide Torah Umesorah as it planted day schools across the country.

Then it stopped. In Elul 5711 he was struck by a car in the street. A heart attack followed, and then a devastating stroke. He never delivered a shiur again, and he was niftar on 22 Adar 5718.

What survived him is a set of seforim that does not merely record what he held. It records how he got there — sugya first, chakirah second, pshat last and always.

And this is the real explanation of the Chazon Ish’s foray into humor.  He meant that the Chakirah should never be the end all – it should rather be a tool employed only after explaining Pshat.  Otherwise, as Rabbi Landau explained, it can be abused.

The author can be reached at [email protected]