I went to a high school whose name included the words "Talmudic Academy'. That is interesting, given the fact that most of my friends and I didn't really learn all that much Talmud there. It was taught but our minds and hearts were elsewhere. This is the reason that boys went through four years of four hours a day of Talmud study and miraculously didn't achieve the slightest capacity to read a page of Talmud and complete ignorance as to the vast majority of Talmudic laws and concepts.
Part of this was due to the fact that there were many other influences in our lives that conflicted with our Talmud study such as pop culture, sports, girls, drugs etc. etc. [it was an all boys school but somehow people still found a way to be in contact with girls although Baruch Hashem, I was not. I also never used drugs. Partially because I had no interest and partially because nobody ever offered me and partially because I had very little money to spend. Things haven't changed. I am still not offered drugs, I still have no interest in using them and quite often my pockets are filled only with dirty tissues]. We were also taught both explicitly and tacitly that other subjects were no less if not more important than Talmud. We were also young and immature and telling us that fulfillment of the mitzva of Talmud Torah was central to our role in this world was not an argument that would have convinced many. There were other reasons as well. One is that Talmud is HARD. Like - one long run-on sentence for a page and a half [i.e. no punctuation or vowels for that matter], a text composed in Aramiac and Hebrew of which we knew little, concepts completely foreign to our daily experiences, lots of ADD and ADHD which went undiagnosed because nobody heard of them yet, etc. etc..
I don't know if today things are better. I have been out of there for over 30 years. I am guessing that with the advent of the smartphone and other modern inventions designed to destroy one's attention span and ability to grasp abstract concepts, that things today aren't much better if not worse. Yet, parents still pay 25k in many places for their kids to learn so very little. Go figure.
Anyway - a few of my classmates ended being QUITE ACCOMPLISHED Talmudists. One was recently successfully tested on 1,500 blatt [which is really 3000 pages because each blatt is two sided] gemara, Rashi and TOSFOS [!!!!]. Think of how many questions and answers there are on that many pages. Think of the complexity. WOW!!!
So HAGAON HARAV Pesach Skolnick Shlita - KOL HAKAVOD!!!! May you continue mastering Torah with simcha and in good health and prosperity.
Some other classmates made ZILLIONS of dollars but they are not nearly as rich as HaGaon Rav Pesach. [Some of the wealthy are also miserly-wealthy which is an illness in and of itself]. He is by far the richest. [I have two other classmates I can think of who are massive Talmidei Chachomim and spread Torah to many students. Also SUPER-WEALTHY].
Some other classmates made ZILLIONS of dollars but they are not nearly as rich as HaGaon Rav Pesach. [Some of the wealthy are also miserly-wealthy which is an illness in and of itself]. He is by far the richest. [I have two other classmates I can think of who are massive Talmidei Chachomim and spread Torah to many students. Also SUPER-WEALTHY].
And as for little me who has learned such a pitiful amount of Torah in his life - may I begin to get SERIOUS about my Talmud study!!!!! It's about time.
