Knowledge or wisdom?

At Avot 2:6 Hillel teaches:

אֵין בּוּר יְרֵא חֵטְא, וְלֹא עַם הָאָֽרֶץ חָסִיד, וְלֹא הַבַּיְּשָׁן לָמֵד, וְלֹא הַקַּפְּדָן מְלַמֵּד, וְלֹא כָל הַמַּרְבֶּה בִסְחוֹרָה מַחְכִּים, וּבְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ

 

[Translation] “A boor cannot be sin-fearing; an ignoramus cannot be pious; a meek one cannot learn; a short-tempered person cannot teach; nor does anyone who does much business grow wise—and, in a place where there are no men, strive to be a man”.

The part of this Mishnah I’d like to discuss is Hillel’s statement וְלֹא כָל הַמַּרְבֶּה בִסְחוֹרָה מַחְכִּים. Translated here as “nor does anyone who does much business grow wise” (per chabad.com; the ArtScroll Avot is quite similar), it can also mean “nor does anyone who does much business make others wise” (see eg Tiferet Yisrael, Yachin; Lehmann-Prins Avoth). Of the two meanings I personally prefer the second since the word מַחְכִּים, where it appears in Avot 6:6, is understood to mean making someone else wise, rather than oneself.

Whichever meaning you prefer, you may want to think about an explanation of it which appeared a little while ago in the weekly Dee Project on Pirkei Avot:

“Although pursuing a livelihood is important, involvement with business can sometimes detract from a person’s wisdom. It’s important that a person’s mind is focused and one must be aware of the potential of business matters to distract from the important pursuit of wisdom”.

As a child, I had it drummed into my head—both by my father and by my teachers—that there was all the world of difference between wisdom and knowledge. 

You can be wise without being knowledgeable, which is why very clever people make rational but erroneous deductions in the absence of useful data. 

You can also be knowledgeable without being wise, like one of my friends at university whose phenomenal recall of facts was not matched by his wisdom: he knew far more law than I did, but was twice unable to pass his first-year examinations and left college with nothing to show for his two years there.

Somewhere in this classification there is also the butt of many Jewish jokes: the Phudnik ( = a Nudnik with a PhD).

In a best-case scenario a person will acquire both enough data to make his wisdom work for him and enough wisdom to apply his data to good effect. Involvement in business is potentially an avenue through which one can achieve both those goals. And it is not the time spent engaging in business that is relevant here, but the quality of one’s thoughts while so engaging.

I’d like to qualify this part of Hillel’s Mishnah by tying it in with the message of two other teaching from Avot.

The first is Ben Zoma’s reminder at Avot 4:1 that a person is wise when he can learn something from everyone, be it his rabbi, his math teacher, his children or the people who comprise his business environment.

The second is Rabban Gamliel ben Rebbi’s advice at Avot 2:2 in praise of combining Torah study with a worldly occupation because the blend of the two of them causes sin to be forgotten. Which sin? One might humbly suggest that it’s the sin of failing to recognise the difference between wisdom and knowledge.