Q:
Does a person get the same credit for limud Torah, for learning something new, as he does for chazering something that he knows?
A:
Do you get more credit for learning something new than chazarah?
Chazarah comes first. It’s so important to get a mesikus, a sweetness in learning.
When you learn something the first time, it’s like putting a piece of bread in your mouth and swallowing it. No. When you start chewing the bread, it becomes sweeter and sweeter. You know why?
Because you have in your starch, in your saliva you have ptyalin, that’s a certain enzyme in your saliva. That enzyme takes the starch and makes it into sugar. So the starch of the bread, as you chew it longer, becomes sweeter and sweeter. The more you chew the bread, the sweeter it becomes. And the more you chew your learning, the sweeter it becomes.
We say והערב נא ה’ אלקינו – make Your words sweet in our minds. How can it become sweet? You learned it with difficulty, you didn’t understand it too well. There’s a tzaar, you remember. Go over it again. This time it’s easier. Then again. Then you begin understanding it and it becomes sweet in your mouth.
So chazarah makes you love the Torah more besides understanding it, besides remembering it. Very important chazarah. And one of the biggest mistakes of many yeshiva boys is they learn and learn, good boys, don’t review enough. Chazer over and over and over.
I’ll tell you a little story I remember. There was in the yeshiva where I was, the beis hamedrash, there was one young man, a boy, who always learned over what he saw in the Gemara, baal peh. He sat by himself and talked it over as if he was talking aloud to a chavrusah. He talked the whole sugya over, every time. All day long he was talking over the whole sugya over and over again.
I said, that’s a very good way of learning. Talk over the whole sugya to yourself over and over again. Because kashyes will arise you didn’t think about before, peirushim, you get a new havanah. Today he’s a big maggid shiur in the yeshiva as a result. And so reviewing is extremely important.
But not only reviewing your Torah learning. The Chovos Halvovos says you should review even your davenen. When you started davenen, you were five or six years old, and you still daven with the same peirush that you had then. You have to review your davenen. You’ll discover you never understood it before.
And I’m going to add something else, you have to review the sun. The sun that you first saw when you were three years old or two years old is not the same sun. No. You have to change your mind about the sun. The sun is a tremendous simchah. It’s a chesed. You have to thank Hashem for the sun. So you have to study the sun when you’re older and wiser. You have to again appreciate it, what a chesed it is, לעושה אורים גדולים כי לעולם חסדו. What a great chesed the sun is. ברוך אתה ה’ יוצר המאורות.
So you have to review always. When you get older, review and review everything. And therefore, chazarah is very important.
(November 1995)
