Memoir of a yeshiva boy

Losing My Religion: A Yom Kippur Special
"I assume most people reading this did not have the misfortune of having to try and salvage some sense out of a Talmud page; I can assure you this is one of most arduous, pointless and senseless tasks imaginable. Being forced to do so for six hours a day was a torture which is hardly imaginable. I never excelled in it. After a while, I started feeling uneasy about it. The most annoying thing about studying the Talmud – aside from the fact it’s written in barely decipherable Aramaic – is that logic was never a part of the equation: the proper solution of a Talmudic problem, assuming there is one, must rely on the solutions of earlier problems or of bits and pieces of biblical verses, as a rule quoted wildly out of context. Any information coming outside the basic Jewish corps of ignorance – such as historical or archeological evidence – was obviously unacceptable. (One famous problem is the proper way of writing the text in the Tflilin; most Jews follow the system of Rashi, some follow his grandson Rabbi Tam, both from the high Middle Ages. Several decades ago archeologists dug up a set of Tfilin from the Classical era, which showed one of the two – can’t remember which – was right. The Orthodox world blithely ignored the discovery.)
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If you want to have an insight into the insanity inside Israeli society, please read this piece..