Chizuk Shmuel: Mussar and Hashkafic Insights Tied to the Daf Yomi Cycle

R' Yeshaya Fruchter, a reader of my blog, was nice enough to send me copies of his seforim on Shabbos and Brachos, Chizuk Shmuel: Mussar and Hashkafic Insights Tied to the Daf Yomi Cycle, but I've been remiss in mentioning the seforim and writing anything about them and I want to correct that.

R' Fruchter does not go through every single piece of aggadita in the masechtos, but he goes through every daf (nice for daf yomi learners) and relates a mussar/hashkafa point to each.  Sometimes the point relates to a story or an aggadah section, but sometimes it relates to a halacha mentioned in the daf.  If you think this is easy to do, just open Mes Shabbos to one of those technical sugyos about hotzaah, for example, and see if you can think of some mussar point you can draw out of it.  R' Fruchter manages to pull it off.  That in itself is a lesson to be learned from the sefer -- halacha is not a just dry lists of do's and don't's, but has a moral message in its details.

Even if you are not learning daf yomi or working on the sugyos covered, you can still enjoy the books because each piece/essay stands on its own and leaves you with a concept or a take away message that you can get with only a few minutes of reading.  That's both the plus and the minus of the seforim.  They are not meant as an exhaustive analysis of every single aggadita or a collection of meforshim to resolve every kashe -- for that, there are other books.  What they do is give you a clear message that imparts some lesson or moral derived from the sugya.

R' Fruchter draws on a panoply of different sources for that message: ideas from Rishonim, ideas from mussar seforim like Michtav m'Eliyahu, ideas from contemporary Rabbonim, ideas from philosophical works.  What you won't find in classical seforim but you will find here are topics like Brachos 33 -- "Understanding Free Will Using Chess, Quantum Physics, and Psychology."  Or, for example, the link he draws in Shabbos 108 between a piece from R' Chaim Shmuelevitz on self-restraint and the famous marshmallow experiment done by psychologists.  When you learned about the importance of yad as being equivalent to 4x4 tefachim on Shabbos 5, I bet you didn't realize that "although the human hand only comprises 10% of the body's muscles, a quarter of the brain's motor cortex is devoted just to the hands."   While writing this I grabbed one of the volumes and randomly thumbed through the pages -- in one spot I found a footnote to a R' Tzadok, in another, a quote from Eugene Koonin, a molecular biologist.  R' Fruchter knows his way around secular disciplines as well as the world of the beis medrash and does not hesitate to draw on that knowledge to enhance his message, or, I should say, the message of Chazal, which he presents as consistent with scientific evidence.  And it's not just hard science, but it's secular sociology/psychology as well that gets attention here, e.g. Brachos 20 -- "Understanding the Exemption of Women from Positive Time-Bound Commandments" is a whole essay on the topic of gender differences.  Is it apologetics, is it cherry picking data, or is it a strong defense of halacha?  Well, read the books and you can decide : )