“Before you start learning any Torah you must recognize this is Toras Hashem and it is totally Emes. Anything that doesn’t make sense to you is a flaw in you based on how you think or due to your prejudices. Torah is not a subject that you tackle with your brains and decide what’s right and what’s wrong. Its all Toras Emes. You have to park your pride. Its not about you its about what Hashem is trying to teach you and you will never understand it if you are always trying to make it fit your brain and preconceived notions attitudes and what you decide is rational and logical. When you come to learn Torah you should say I know nothing. Hashem teach me. Rebbe teach me. Otherwise it’s like you are trying to fit a square block into a round hole.”
WIY:
This is totally not about prejudice and it’s not about pride (tee hee). You are saying something unbelievable here. You are saying that when a person sits down to learn Torah, he or she needs to TURN OFF THE BRAIN. If you come in saying I know nothing and anything that is confusing to me is due to a personal flaw, you will not learn anything ever. Torah is all about asking questions, about using the logic and reasoning and intellect that Hashem gave us for this very purpose, about struggling, about push and pull. I have never personally witnessed this but I hear from my brother and husband that there are some male chavrusas who mamash YELL at each other while they are learning (and the poskim in the Gemara insult each other constantly l’sheim shamayim). You cannot go in saying I know nothing, I am nothing and you cannot suppress your intellect while you are learning. This applies to Gemara, halacha, and anything else you might be learning. There are so many fascinating teshuvos out there and we only have the benefit of learning them because some people thought to ask shailos. Likewise kashyas, likewise the hypothetical situations mentioned in the Gemara that can border on the absurd in terms of possibility. Those situations only came up because somebody decided to think about “but wait, what if…?” You don’t come up with “what if” if all you are doing is accepting learning into your brain like a sponge. You have to turn it around and ponder it and think about it and DO SOMETHING WITH IT. The reason there are different shittas out there is that different rabbonim have different brains and think differently. I cannot imagine that you would tell me that only rabbonim are allowed to use their brains while learning. Don’t you realize that every Rav was once a young bachur, and every Rebbetzin a young girl?