Torah study

This morning we studied "Lech Lecha" (Genesis 12)Abraham's Call,or rather, the first few verses, because by the end of an hour and a half we had managed to comment on only three of them.
Speed readers would be horrified.But do they have much to brag about.
I've had two experiences with speed reading. About thirty years ago I was consumed by a conviction that I was undereducated .(I have not abandoned that conviction))The advertisements for speed reading courses promised that the student would learn the techniques for whizzing through books such as all the volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall in an evening and that their comprehension would be better than those who slogged through them in six months.Incredible,I thought. The next night I could gulp down Shakespeare's plays. Marvelous. I went to three classes and learned the technique of following my fingers as they maneuvered over the page. In the third class the instructor announced that on that night he would read a work he had never read before " Darwin's Origin of Species" and report on the content the next day Alas,his account was confused and inaccurate The only redeeming feature was the possibility that he might get a position as the Darwin expert in some Bible College, I was reminded of Woody Allen's account of his speed reading class. "We read War and Peace in fifteen minutes. It's about Russia."
The next encounter was with a very bright student who boasted he would read an encyclopedia over the weekend. I never saw him again. I have visions of him wandering in the desert raving wildly with springs and wires dangling from his head .
I now read slowly. This is very pleasurable except that I never get anything finished.It took me a whole summer to read Julian Young's biography of Nietzsche.I love detective stories (in film) but I never read them because it takes me so long My slow reading Torah study class consists mainly of enthusiastic converts. One was a WICA priestess. Their responses are enthusiastic,very imaginative and often as wild as those of orthodox rabbis.
Two passages interested me .God tells Abraham leave his father's house and go to a land that He ,the Lord, will show him. He doesn't say where,so it is into the unknown Rashi underplays the sense of a radical break with the past. He is too Rabbinic for such cataclysms. When the Lord promises him he will still be a somebody. Rashi comments implausibly that these are precautions of any traveler. WEll the Rabbis don't seem to like too much excitement. It was they who announced the end of Prophecy and the end of Miracles.
The second is a passage that notes without comment that the Canaanites already live there. Rashi must have worried about this because he offers a long explanation of their origins. Noah originally gave the land to the forefather of the Hebrews and over the decades the Canaanites sort of sneaked in.. No Comment.