Reply To: Studying for a Really Hard Course

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#933403

Not you OOM. I actually pretty much agree with the viewpoint that you’ve expressed in this thread, but most, or at least many people, disagreed.

Just to break down what I wrote; people who admit to not having studied much (and it would be clear without the admissions) talk about how unimportant it is to explore new areas of knowledge. But you can’t know that without having the foggiest idea what it is that you don’t know. In support of those points, people post that Hashem will be happier if you do other things; which is an assertion that is so bizarre that it is hard to begin to address.

FWIW, I take this somewhat personally, because I bought into that attitude for too long and I strongly regret it. Even if there were no value at all to any secular studies, it would still be worth studying them just for the exercise. It is very difficult to minimize and denigrate effort in one area while sustaining effort and production in another. It’s pretty clear to me that the message that secular studies are unimportant doesn’t teach people to allocate resources to avodas hashem; it teaches them to be slackers.