It's Hard Being a Gadol

This is just an idea.

It's a lot harder nowadays to become a "Gadol BaTorah" then it was back in the day. I mean take the Rambam, a fairly brilliant fellow. To get the status of a Gadol all he really needed to know was Tanakh and Shas. And that's it! (Maybe some geonim also) So yes, Shas is pretty big but it's not insurmountable. If you have a good memory you can probably get the whole thing down klor (I have not used that word in so long!) in 20 or 30 years. So you're done Shas and now what? Hey! Maybe a bit of Aristotle!

The point is for someone to have the status of a big macher in Torah nowadays you've gotta know LOTS of stuff. You need to know Shas, you need to know Shulchan Aruch, you need to know Rambam, you need to know Taz, Shach, Bach, Beit Yosef, Mishna Berura etc. etc. etc.

There is just so much Jewish legal writing out there nowadays that if you want to make it to the top you really cannot waste any time reading or doing anything else. Yes there are exceptions but I think it's virtually impossible nowadays for someone to have the automatic respect of the Orthodox world through sheer quantity of Torah knowledge, AND to have an in depth knowledge of non-Torah subjects.

And it's not just Torah that has grown. Science is also 100X more complex than the days of the Rambam. What did the Rambam have to know? Aristotle, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and some Plato. Nowadays there is just SO MUCH more secular knowledge!

Perhaps there is such a paucity of true Rambams nowadays because Torah and science have just become too big for one person to be proficient in both.

Maybe.

Am I completely off here?