Yaakov’s Story: How a Little Dikduk got a Bachur Back from the Brink

When kids are struggling in learning, it is not simply a case of being less bright or intelligent than other students. A rebbi once sent me 19-year-old Yaakov (not his real name) for evaluation. He has a good head and his understanding of everything being given over in shiur was great. But when it came to learning the text inside, he had problems.

I went through 3 years of hell!

Years of intensely painful days… lying in bed, lying deflated and sad…. too emotionally weak to muster enough strength to pull myself out of bed.

Just 3 years of misery, despair, and emotional heartbreak, lying in bed desperate beyond desperate to get and make a success out of myself but simply unable.

3 years of hell!

I was a bright kid in school. I have memories of little me in class arguing passionately about the sugya, encouraged by the rebbi’s smiles, memories of asking the clever Kasha, and the classmates’ admiring faces…but one thing bothered me. It started as a little niggle at the back of my head but gained prominence as it inched forward to my conscious mind…and that problem was that I could never work out a Gemara myself.

Had I listened well in class I may have done o.k. but I tended to drift off here and there so I was never clear enough on the sugya to participate in class well enough and hence I was never appreciated much.
And that stung!

I knew I was bright. I saw it from my Kushios here and there, but finding chavrusas was always a heartbreaking experience, it punctured my self-esteem and gave me an intense, searing heartache too bitter and too painful to describe…I lost all motivation for anything

No Chavrusas

No major friends

Just a bunch of rebbeim who wrung their hands up in despair bemoaning my bitter fate by saying how they can not understand how a clever boy like me cannot get up in the morning.

Yaakov got into a yeshiva gedolah thanks to a combination of hard pushing and protektzia and was finally noticed by a caring and devoted maggid shiur who hired a private rebbi to help him. The rebbi was baffled by the fact that Yaakov was bright, but barely understood what he was reading, and often misread words in the text. He had no explanation for this phenomenon. That’s when the maggid shiur reached out to me for an evaluation. In Yaakov’s words:

Rabbi Abenson unearthed that I had no knowledge in dikduk, a basic skill needed to learn. He taught me the dikduk, then taught me how to learn with real understanding.
I have almost finished the course and I can already learn a posuk or gemara with a crystal clarity that bestows satisfaction, contentment, and a sincere enjoyment in learning
I have way more confidence in my learning and a much more positive outlook.

No kid should ever go through what I went through. I would lie in bed wondering: “why am I different? Why can’t I get up and others can? Why do I struggle when I read a Gemara myself when others just zip through it? Why don’t I find chavrusas when others, less clever than I, find them with ease? Am I really as smart as I thought I was?” These questions stabbed my heart filling me with emotional pain, enveloping my world with a cloud of black, gloomy, bitter despair.

Yaakov is a bright boy but all his years in yeshiva had failed to teach him the skills he needed to succeed. Indeed his rebbi was amazed to hear there even were such things as foundational skills, he assumed these were things boys just “pick up” as they go along. Every child learns at a different pace and in different ways, hence Shlomo HaMelech’s dictum “Chanoch l’naar al pi darko”. After evaluation, it didn’t take long in the program for Yaakov to see improvements. As he wrote, he went from deep despair to an intense love of learning and confidence and hope for the future.

Most of the yeshivos I have come across emphasize havana and chazara but not foundation skills. Here are three golden rules for rebbeim that I can never stress too much.

1) As a prerequisite for learning, students must be able to read all words correctly, reading the whole word, not sounding out syllables. If they are still at the sounding out syllable phase, even if they are reading with 100% accuracy, they are not ready to start learning. Whole word reading is crucial to comprehension. Syllable-level reading will not reveal the meaning in the words, the shorashim, prefixes, and suffixes.

2) Rebbeim must take care to translate every word clearly and concisely into English (or whatever language is spoken in the Yeshiva). Yeshivish English is often imprecise and does not give clarity

As an example of “yeshivish” translation, a student of mine recently translated the Hebrew word סוס (soos) as “donkey”. It actually means “horse”. I asked him in that case what is a חמור (chamor). He replied, “also a donkey”. He didn’t think there was much difference between the two animals. The differences are not just a matter of biological nitpicking. They are differentiated halachically and symbolically. Consider the mitzvah of peter chamor (redemption of a firstborn donkey) or the prohibition of a king having too many horses (Devarim 17:16), horses being a symbol of might and power, which a Jewish king must limit if he is to remember all his power comes only from Hashem. If the text of the Torah and the meforshim seem fit to differentiate between these two animals, the language with which we learn Torah should make the same distinctions.

3) Students must be able to express, outside, in a concise manner, what they have learned; whether it is Chumash, Mishna, Gemara. The benchmark for success here is whether a person who knows nothing would be able to understand what is being said. Anything less is not real clarity.

Although these points may seem obvious, in truth they are rarely implemented. Rebbeim do not focus on this and are not trained to identify missing skills or how to rectify them. Moreover, teaching with real clarity is hard work. The roshei yeshiva of past generations toiled for hours to be able to summarize a sugya clearly and simply. The more clear the shiur, the harder it is to prepare.

There is a famous story about Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky, who used to give what seemed a very pashut Gemara shiur. One day he gave an amazing shiur with meforshim and lomdus flying and people thought “Oh! This is what we expect from a real gaon” After he finished the shiur, Rav Yaakov apologized for the shiur and explained that he had gone to a Simcha the previous night and had returned home very late so he hadn’t been able to prepare for his usual shiur. My mentor Rabbi Zobin spoke personally with Rav Nosson Kaminetsky to find out if this story about his father was true. He confirmed that it was. Being clear was much more work for this gadol b’yisroel than being brilliant.

I see many kids like Yaakov. Most of them can be helped quickly and effectively, simply by teaching them the skills they lack. Don’t we as a community owe it to all of them to give them back their love of life and learning? Torah learning is a connection to Hashem. Can we afford to just shrug and say “too bad” if a child isn’t succeeding in Yeshiva, knowing the solution may be easily attainable? As Yaakov wrote to me most recently:

Learning this zman is literally no comparison to before – it’s miles easier and just so much more geshmak! Thanks so much!