The most destructive

 And here they are, the most destructive words said by a rabbi in the last 400 years:

He is saying here that one letter of Torah study is worth all the other mitzvos. His argument seems to be that one can be yotzei krias shema by saying one letter, and saying krias shema can motzei you from Talmud Torah, and TT is equal to all the other mitzvos.

I believe that the statement and his defense of it are problematic. It's a slippery slope argument with faulty premises each step of the way. It could be that one letter motzeis you from the mitzvah of krias shema in the sense that it's taking on the yoke of shemayim. You can do that with one letter not because you took in the content of the shema, but because you had in mind the yoke of shemayim and in general you know the content of the shema, that it's all about the yoke. For example, Rabbi Soloveitchik says that one can fulfill Megillah by hearing any piece of it because that publicizes the miracle. You don't actually have to hear every word - as people drive themselves crazy to do. Similarly, a person can do teshuvah in a moment. R Moshe Feinstein says you can bury with frum Jews a suicide who jumps from a building because during the fall he may have done teshuvah. It's the same with a Ger and taking on the yoke of mitzvahs.

Reading one letter of krias shema is not the krias shema that motzeis you from study. I would think that for that you need to read at least one sentence as that has some meaning. One letter is meaningless. We say that you get schar for reading Chumash without understanding but not so with Talmud. There you need to understand something. One letter is nothing. Even a word is nothing. If you say Shnayim without saying Shnayim ochazin b'tallis you said nothing meaningful. Even Shnayim ochazin b'tallis is meaningless in terms of Torah insight. You need to continue on to "and they split it," the halachic conclusion. It's the same with Chumash. To say one letter is study is ridiculous. How about a corner of a letter? How about a microscopic piece of a letter? And whose to say that reading the whole shema is many mitzvahs of a sentence each. Your intent is one mitzvah, one reading. If you see Jewish life as collecting points, like some kind of financial equation, then maybe you look at it like separate items. If you look at it as connecting to G-d, as obeying his commands then it's one act. The Mabit says we connect to all mitzvahs by willing to do anything that Hashem asks of us. The willingness is the essential thing. 

Why wouldn't each step in holding a lulav be a mitzvah? That actually means something if you are paying attention.

Furthermore, his proof that not only is each letter a mitzvah, but it's a mitzvah greater than all other mitzvahs put together is shaky. His proof that it means greater than is that if somebody else can do a mitzvah, you do Torah, so Torah is greater. But that could be because Torah leads to other mitzvahs so if the action is being taken care of, then you study Torah as more mitzvahs than this one will come out of it. Or Torah is a mitzvah in itself, so you are doing a mitzvah that maybe the other person wasn't going to do. He wasn't going to study. You study. He does an act. You each are doing a mitzvah. That could be the explanation.

And even if Torah is greater than any one mitzvah, his proof that it is greater than all of them is weak. The Mishnah says kneged kulam which doesn't mean equal and certainly doesn't mean greater than. It means adjacent to. This can be explained by the Gemara that says learning is greater because it leads to doing (Kiddushin) This after a year long debate on which is greater study or action. Besides that, we have other chazal that use the words kneged kulam, regarding Shabbos, tzitzis, milah, tzedukah, yishuv haaretz, and lashon hara. That can't all be literal because each includes the others.

In sum, I believe his arguments are faulty. He is reading his view into vague statements of Chazal that can be read differently. 

The result of his view is a disrespect of mitzvos, which we see everywhere in the yeshivah world. Why would you take an interest in any mitzvah other than Talmud Torah if the latter gives you a 100 to 1 return or a 1000 to one return.

Yeshiva guys will say they care the most about mitzvos but they only care about technicalities, not feeling, not changing the world. Their mitzvah doing is an extension of learning. 

But mitzvos are life. I don't mean that poetically. Mitzvos shape your life. If you take them away, you cease to be. Your discipline, character, and practices become what yeshiva guys tend to be, a blob. It's all replaced with study, not even good study but letters coming out of your mouth. And if you are condescending against mitzvos, certainly you will do much worse to people who don't study as much, to gentiles, and to the entire world. Everything becomes a joke to you. Everything is a waste of time. You become the enemy of the briah that Hashem made or see it as your enemy. Why would you engage in Chesed which is said here to be one mitzvah, when you can review a daf, which is hundreds. Why would you even contemplate Hashem. There are no letters with that.

The yeshiva world has many problems that the Vilna Gaon didn't have. He didn't disparage secular studies or kabbalah. He embraced them. But the contemporary disparagement is rooted, I believe in these 10 sentences. These sentences, which yeshiva guys point to all the time, uproot the entire Torah. 

You want to say how dare you question the Gaon? That's what yeshiva guys certainly will say. I say you can question anybody except Moshe because he operated from direct prophecy. Did you know the Gaon? How do you know what he was, because somebody told you that somebody told you? And who says he can't make a mistake? And who says he actually wrote this. We get most of his writings through students of his. You are writing what somebody thought he heard the Gaon say. And this contradicts what he said in Even Shelaima: “Just as the prime purpose of a tree is its fruit, so is the study of Torah secondary to its fulfillment. Only the fulfillment of mitzvos qualifies a man as one of the righteous upon whom the world depends.”  

The Gaon questioned the Rambam who was a Rishon and his interest in that "accursed philosophy." Rav Hirsch also questioned the Rambam and his focus on philosophy over action. 

Tell that to a yeshiva guy. He won't process the info. He'll say, well I heard this from my rebbe, as if his rebbe is the mesorah. That's how they defend everything. The mesorah isn't in your rebbe. It's in the great scholars of every generation, and even they don't necessarily have the mesorah perfectly. It's not perfectly in any one of them. It's in the group of them in general.

So to base one's entire life on something that the Gra might have said, but something that contradicts his own words, and doesn't make sense anyway, and contradicts teachings from the Mishnah like study isn't the main thing, actions are, that seems pretty foolish to me. 

And then we have Shlomo, the sum of the matter is to fear Hashem and keep His commandments.

I'll go with Shlomo over something that maybe the Gra said that doesn't make sense.

And then you have his contemporary the Tanya saying that physical mitzvos are man's purpose in this world. See Epistle 20. So if we can question the Gra, we have what to rely on, a contemporary.

Now why is this the most dangerous utterance of the last 400 years? It's because the yeshiva world took over everything. They are so merciless that they pounded Chassidus out of Chassidim and even took over the Sephardim.

I believe that even Zionism came from Yeshivishness because once the mitzvos are gone you can base on entire life on one concept. The state replaced Torah study which replaced mitzvos and Hashem. The Litvacks took away Hashem more than the Zionists did. 

According to the yeshivish approach of tossing away anybody who makes any questionable statement (or one they don't like) we should toss away the Gra. But I don't share that approach. Just rip this page out of his book. 

What this means is that you can never go to a yeshivish rabbi for advice unless it's a choice between yeshivas. If you try to do anything else, he'll tell you to stay in yeshiva. If you want to choose where to live he'll tell you to live near a yeshiva. If you already are earning a parnassah, he'll tell you to do the one that makes the most money. 

Also because this philosophy of life is so narrow, so limiting, they'll knock out any all kinds of worthy Torah scholars who say anything to counter this philosophy. They also will keep you from machshava because that might lead you to overturn this approach to life. They also will not be nice people because they don't put Torah into action.