I don’t know about the others, but I DID hear many shiurim from a great Rosh Yeshiva who was breaking his teeth and twisting his tongue each and every time he had to deliver one in Yiddish. Only after the shiur, when people crowded around him asking for elucidation, did everything fall into place and make sense. What was the point then? The Yeshiva has an unwritten rule that only Yiddish may be spoken from the podium. Sure, that definitely applied when it was founded, and when only the “moderne” American rabbis couldn’t handle the language. Nowadays, when most of the bachurim know some 30 Yeshivish words in Yiddish, and some of the Hanhala themselves do not know much more, it is painful to watch how a great talmid chochom tries to discuss subtel nuances in a sugya in a language that isn’t his. Adding insult to injury, mistakes are made, sometimes very bad ones, causing laughter. Is THAT the supposed holiness of the language?
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