It doesn't take great brains...

In the past few years the Jewish world has lost two giants of Torah scholarship—Rabbi Aharon Yehuda Leib Shteinman ztz”l and Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky ztz”l. Obituaries have praised their virtually unmatched knowledge of Jewish law and their contributions to its further and deeper understanding, as well as their dedication and respective leadership roles within and often well beyond the confines of their traditional constituencies.

It is improbable that any reader of this post can equal the scholarship of these two remarkable men, but there is one aspect of their lives in which I believe there is a chance that we can match them. Let me explain.

It is universally agreed that both Rabbi Shteinman and Rabbi Kanievsky were humble. This quality is the subject of several teachings in Pirkei Avot:

• According to Rabbi Levitas ish Yavneh, a person should be extremely humble since the ultimate aspiration of the human is but the worm (4:4).
• Rabbi Meir emphasises that one should be humble towards all other people (4:12). He adds that, where a person studies Torah for its own sake and without ulterior motives, the Torah clothes him in humility (6:1).
• An anonymous Baraita lists humility among the 48 boxes that a person must tick in order to acquire mastery of the Torah (6:6).
  

While Pirkei Avot goes to considerable lengths to explain how one can acquire Torah and how best to learn it, there is no definition of humility—which makes it harder to know whether someone has it or not—and no explicit guidelines as to how to become humble.

In promoting the cause of humility we face a further problem. As children we learn a great deal about human qualities and characteristics, both positive and negative, and are thus easily able to recognise them. Even a small child will be familiar with concepts like fairness and unfairness, kindness and unkindness, happiness and anger, generosity and selfishness. The vocabulary relating to these traits is learned early too, as parents and teachers seek to reinforce good behaviour (“well done Moishe, that was so kind of you!”) and discourage that which is not (“You’ve had such a lovely long turn on the swing, Esti, so shouldn't you let your little brother have a turn now too?”). The concept of humility doesn’t seem to work the same way though. How often does one hear a child being told, “well done Moishe/Esti, that was a really humble thing to do”? Indeed, how old are most children today before they understand the word “humility”?

We should also consider whether, since "humility" is not a topic of daily conversation at home or at the workplace, whether it may be possible to assemble a sort of composite working definition of humility, based on compliance with several other provisions of Pirkei Avot that reflect aspects of the behaviour of a humble person. Thus we may hypothesise that such a person, for example, lets other people finish speaking instead of interrupting them (5:9), accepts that something is true rather than denying it (ibid.), gives others the benefit of the doubt (1:6), and greets people in a pleasant manner (1:15, 3:16, 4:20) both on the basis that they too are created in God’s image (3:18) and because God created no-one without some purpose (4:3). Moreover, a person should not consider himself entitled to act behind God’s back (2:1, 3:1, 4:5) and he should act in such a way that he should have no cause to regard himself as bad (2:17). Other provisions in Avot can also be marshalled into this composite identikit image of someone who is humble.

There is something inherently unsatisfying in describing humility only in terms of the aggregation of other human qualities, so readers’ thoughts are invited as to how they would describe someone as being humble in today’s terms. Meanwhile we can all take some comfort in the thought that, while none of us is ever likely to aspire to the pinnacle of Torah scholarship, it doesn't take great brains or years of study in order to be humble. All you need is the ability to behave properly towards your fellow humans, a large reservoir of will-power -- and a readiness to work hard at preserving your humility well beyond the point at which you feel so proud of having achieved it.