How To Meet New Torah Scholars and Seforim: Transcend the Popularizers
To riff on a rumored Nietzsche quote, “The popularizers of a creed prove nothing against it.”
In general, time is a limited resource, and one can’t learn everything ever published. It therefore makes some sense to decide whether to investigate someone’s oeuvre based on their popularizers and translators.
In actual fact, however, I see time and again that the popularizers don’t necessarily make the best case for their rabbis (and I often fail for mine).
For example, if all the data I had to decide whether studying Rabbi Kook was worthwhile were the best-known and best-loved quotes floated by his flighty fans, I would never have looked deeper. And the English translations of the Malbim’s commentary on Scripture make it seem pointless and Germanic.
Fact is, to properly assess Rabbi Kook, you must go beyond the kookie-kutter quotes brandished by both fervent supporters and rabid enemies (not to mention the forgeries and context-omissions perpetrated by both groups). And even then… He was actually complex! Humans tend to cast their idols in their own, all-too-human image (think: Simcha Raz).
To judge the Malbim, you need to get awfully stuck on something which earlier commentaries do nothing to solve, and, in sheer desperation, look at the long commentary at the bottom it was always your “minhag” to ignore. Like so.
(I have more examples from living sages, but I think silence is the better option there.)
Lesson: Who knows what other Jewish treasures we overlook, either due to insufficient salesmen, or worse, idiotic salesmen?
