Perhaps RYBS was being midrashic. The claim that it’s compelled by the grammar is his, as my father retold the vort. I am not chiming in with my own opinion, not having one.

-micha

I don’t know if you’ll ever see this – I came here via Avodah v 25 i 15 (?), and this is an old post. Perhaps people have already commented, but your grammatical analysis of “nitzchuni” is way off. It is clearly and undoubtedly pi’el past tense third person plural, with a pronominal suffix in the first person singular ithat replaces a separable “oti” as the object of the verb. Additionally, in order to claim that the interpretation you bring from Rav Soloveitchik is anything other than drash, you’d have to bring other instances in which the verb root n-tz-h is used by Chazal elsewhere in the sense of “to eternalize”. My passing familiarity of how it’s used elsewhere tells me that you’ll not find such an instance. In fact, the image the Beit Midrash as a stage for intellectual jousting (of the most sacred sort, of course) only works when n-tz-h is understood as it normally is and should be: to triumph, to defeat, to best in battle.

Rav Berachot,

Yehoshua Kahan