Thread by @Adderabbi

With Prof. Segal's permission, and knowing @DBashIdeas love of R. Hutner's Pachad Yitzchak, here's a story.
Aaron and I overlapped @inthegush for all three years I was in the kollel and he was there post high school. Once a week, kollel guys would host a "va'ad". 1/

https://twitter.com/DBashIdeas/status/1361760380058501120

A bunch of the yeshiva guys would come over for some nosh and some non-routine learning. I was fortunate to have the same group of 5-7 guys in my va'ad for 2 straight years. The group became very close. Aaron Segal was one of the guys. 2/

We switched up what we learned, but for a while it was Pachad Yitzchak. On one hand, R. Hutner was RAL's rebbi, and so on the Gush radar. On the other hand, he was not part of the curriculum there. Perfect, I thought. 3/

When we started, I introduced PY by saying that "It's not going to be the sort of discourse you're getting here. It's a different way of thinking. He's not going to talk about chiastic structures." That's me, trolling the young Gushnikim. 4/

So we learned, I think, the first ma'amar on Shabbos. Gets into the very meaning of creation and what we do when we do melakhah. Amazing stuff.
When we finish, Aaron Segal (who was 16 then) deadpans: "I hate to break it to you, but this ma'amar is structured chiastically." 5/

He was right, of course. Most of the ma'amarim are. R. Hutner asks question A, then B, C, D, etc. Then he gives you his central insight and shows how it answers D, C, B, A. Classic chiasm.
This yielded an important insight for me. Did R. Hutner know what a chiasm is? 6/

Maybe, maybe not. And maybe his daughter does.
But R. Hutner knew how to say a ma'amar, building up and then resolving tension. Chiasm is about what makes intuitive rhetorical sense, not about intentionally embedding secret structures. 7/

At the end of the first year, the fellows got together and bought me 3 volumes of Pachad Yitzchak. I e of them (I don't know which) inscribed it. Here's the inscription. I will always treasure this.