For many years, I was a student of HaGaon HaRav Henoch Leibowitz, ztz”l, who taught me the basis of lomdus and se’vora in Yeshivas Chafetz Chaim in Forest Hills, New York. Once, a new group of students came into the beis hamidrash and the great speed with which they became fully involved in all the ongoing debates made an impression on all of us. It was not long before I found out that their secret weapon was a small book called The Book of Logic, by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (Ramchal). At the time, this work was being studied in a chaburah with Rabbi Yehudah Davis, ztz”l, and my interest in their obviously useful and successful tool urged me to join in. That was the beginning of my involvement in methods of learning.

When I opened my own yeshiva, I continued to develop the idea of methods in learning — which are so helpful in cultivating the art of abstraction — in order to give my students a system for personal growth which I call “conscious learning.” In the opening verse of Mishlei, Shlomo HaMelech tells us that the Torah is for everyone’s development and growth. The Torah itself gives us the keys to understanding and the ability to change ourselves. Thus it is written (Mishlei 1:4-5), “It gives cleverness to the stupid, discretion to impetuous youth, knowledge to wise, and counsel to men of understanding.”

The advantage of the Ramchal’s work is that he has the stature and depth to distill the vast system of Talmudic dialectical debate into a small number of basic principles. A lamdan defines his value judgments in terms of distinctions between different abstract concepts or boxes, and the greater the man, the greater is the value of his boxes. The Ramchal was able to organize the entire system of dialectical debate and pilpul, and present a comprehensive understanding of its logical categories or boxes.

His method is handed down to us in three important books of which his Derech HaKodesh (The Way of Torah) is comprised:

The significance of the first book, The Ways of Reason, is that it provides the student with a Torah system of classification and categorization of conceptual ideas and terminology. These terms and methods are the “rings and handles” with which to acquire and handle Torah knowledge. The Ways of Reason gives us the tools, which will allow anyone who studies this method to apply the formula of our Sages of blessed memory and follow in Rabbi Akiva’s ways.

The Book of Logic, as a sequel to The Ways of Reason, represents a systematic effort by one of our Torah luminaries to distill the rabbinical method which is built into the foundations of Toras Moshe. It has proven to be very successful in the beis hamidrash. Students have been helped tremendously by this approach to learning Gemara, setting them on the path, with God’s help, to becoming talmidei chachomim.

Finally, in The Book of Words the Ramchal describes all of the rules governing communication of the mind and the will in his uniquely complete and orderly way. In the Gemara, these rules are constantly used by Chazal as signposts showing the points that our Rabbis saw as possible elements of weakness in our understanding. By making ourselves consciously aware of them, we have a definitive formula from Chazal that allows us to measure how successfully we have taken the chiddush of Chazal to heart.