Dead or Alive?

I had the great zechus to realize my dream of learning in the Ponevezh yeshivah and basking in the glow of the gadol hador Rav Shach ztz”l. Novice that I was I found it difficult to make out the Rosh Yeshiva’s raspy voice and concentrate on the material at the same time. As a matter of practicality I would look into the Avi Ezri Rav Shach’s magnum opus on the Rambam and invariably find the very shiur I had just heard.

If the shiurim already existed in his sefer why was Rav Shach so engrossed the entire day of the shiur in preparing it to the point that he was absolutely unapproachable in another zone? Why didn’t he merely look into his own sefer to see how he already dealt with the same thorny sugyos he was presenting to us? I would never dare ask him. My newfound friends suggested that he liked going through the sugya from scratch to renew the freshness but his brain was wired to think the same way every time. I wanted more though.

This past Chanukah my quest came to an end. My beloved talmidim gave me a set of seforim containing Rav Shach’s shiurim from his later years including a thin volume of his last shmuessen entitled Hi Sichasi. To my great pleasure I saw that my question had been posed to him by a maggid shiur in Eretz Yisrael. The Rosh Yeshivah responded with another question: “Why do I bother giving a shiur at all? You could look up all of the relevant yesodos in the Rishonim and Ketzos Hachoshen without me!”