The story is told of a questioner who pressed Reb Hayyim about a certain difficulty. Reb Hayyim referred the questioner to a certain Tosafot. Upon examining it, he was amazed to find that it was only a small section, opening with teima as an expression of difficulty, offering no subsequent resolution, and, what was worst, wholly unrelated to the topic about which he had asked. Puzzled, he returned to Reb Hayyim, who explained, “I just wanted you to see that one does not die of a kashya.”
– Aharon Lichtenstein, “The Conceptual Approach to Torah Learning: The Method and Its Prospects”. Pages 1-44 of לומדות: The Conceptual Approach to Jewish Learning (ed. Yosef Blau; NYC: Yeshiva University Press, 2006), 22.
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