Why Rav Henoch Leibowitz's Shiurim Were Hard

My Rebbe, Rav Henoch Leibowitz, zt’l, would often repeat that teaching children is akin to training infants to walk. If you put a treat too far away, the infant will give up. If it’s placed too close, the infant will not be challenged to walk. The trick is to place the treat at the right distance where the infant will succeed if he tries. That is the job of a rebbe—to make the material easy enough to understand with some effort, but hard enough to challenge the students. One time after my rosh hayeshiva said this, a talmid with a little chutzpah asked him “Is that why the rosh hayeshiva always makes his shiurim hard to understand, so that we are forced to work at it?” The rosh hayeshiva just smiled.