A Good Night Story
I once spent an entire night writing divrei Torah. It was mentally and physically strenuous, to say the least. I still needed one last sentence to pull the thoughts together. Suddenly, a foreign Jew came to visit me. He brought me a gift of a sefer kodesh, which I greatly appreciated. In it appeared the exact sentence which I needed to complete my essay.
In spite of my tremendous exhaustion, I did not sit back and rely on this wonderful sefer to fill in the missing holes in my work. Instead, I began the process from the beginning. I re-wrote my entire composition, reinforcing my thoughts with supportive ideas. The sefer remained closed at my side. Only after I finished the painstaking task did I breathe a sigh of relief.
The way of the ben Torah is to study a sugya with intense concentration. When he comes across a difficulty, he plows on ahead, never relaxing his grip, until he has researched the subject completely, turning it over from all angles. Only then does he have spiritual satisfaction. But instead of resting on his laurels, he hurries to commit his insights to writing. This is a form of repetition of his Torah study.
