I like to drink a couple of cups of coffee and stand there and listen to the rabbi and I feel like I’m doing something amazing.
I don’t think I’d get up early every morning to struggle over one line with a partner.
In his second lecture on R. Meir Simcha of Dvinsk for Torah in Motion, history professor Marc B. Shapiro says: Where do I hold with daf yomi? I’m not such a fan of daf yomi because I don’t know if daf yomi is a success. Yes, it has revolutionized things but I know people who can’t even read a line if Kitzur Shulchan Aruch and yet they’ve been through shas. Somebody tells me that in another two years, he’ll have been through all of shas. And he doesn’t know anything. He’s an am haaretz. What does it mean to go through shas? There’s a shul. I saw online that they have daf yomi every day for a half hour. I don’t think any shul takes more than an hour to do it. How is that learning? Part of the learning is the struggle and trying to understand it. If you just sit there and someone speaks quick words, you can’t follow it. I think I have a pretty good head. I’ve tried to listen to some of these shiurim and I’m thinking about what the maggid shiur said and he’s already two lines down. It seems to me that daf yomi is really ritual. It’s like going to a minyan. People feel they’re participating in something.
I’m not impressed by people who say they do daf yomi.
Learning has to be an active pursuit. It’s not passive. It’s not listening to a sermon. It’s not listening to someone else speak. You have to struggle over it. With daf yomi, there’s no struggle.
