When books speak volumes: another perspective on rebuke

I recently posted a piece ("A Good Telling-Off?, here) on the importance of loving a rebuke. Let me return briefly to the same topic now.

This morning I found an article on Newsday, all the way from Zimbabwe. Titled "One Jewish secret to success: The Talmud". The author, Alexander Maune, is a Research Fellow at UNISA, Pretoria, which I once had the pleasure of visiting in my days as an academic. After opening with Ben Bag Bag's mishnah at Avot 5:26 about learning Torah ("turn it over, turn it over, for everything is in it..."), Maune brings a quote I'd never seen before, from Israel Gollancz -- not a rabbi but Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London for 27 years until his death in 1930. Gollancz writes:

“How safely, we lay bare the poverty of human ignorance to books, without feeling any shame".

Gollancz goes on to describe books as those silent teachers who

“... instruct us without rods or stripes, without taunts or anger, without gifts or money; who are not asleep when we approach them, and do not deny us when we question them, who do not chide us when we err, or laugh at us if we are ignorant.”

I do not know the source from which this quote comes, but it intrigues me. More to the point, I have always assumed that the references to rebuke in Avot mean a telling-off of the interpersonal variety. But there is no reason why a book should not be the medium through which a good telling-off -- or at least some sharp conscience-pricking -- can be effectively administered. If nothing else, a person can read and re-read the same passage of moral guidance and think about it in his own time and his own way. In contrast, a face-to-face rebuke can be confrontational and cause the person being reprimanded instinctively to put up the defensive drawbridge and seek to deflect the force of the rebuker's attack.

Rabbi Eliezer Papo (the 'Pele Yo'etz') would probably take the same view. He suggests that it is possible to carry on serving God even after you have died. His suggestion: write a book on rebuke and moral chastisement. If you write a learned tome on Talmud or Torah, the chances are that no-one will read it. But if you write something a bit lighter, that pertains to human behaviour,

Alexander Maune's article can be read here.