ard > that it’s not a yeshiva bochur’s (or yungerman’s in this case) job to worry about the hostage deal. his job is to immerse himself in torah as much as possible
as I mentioned, we might not have the context for RY words. I posted my guess. But as to your interpretation, a person who is learnt in Torah obviously should have an ability and a desire to reflect on what is happening in the world. As an example – R Avigdor Miller suggests we learn lessons from what is happening in Vietnam, because if you don’t learn from that, you might get a lesson closer to you … in this case, those lessons were pretty close. Of course, one might argue at which point of learning one should engage with the world and where a particular student stands.