Naughty to be haughty

Our previous post focused on the concept of achdut (unity, togetherness), asking why the word does not appear in Pirkei Avot. But it's not the only thing that is ostensibly missing.

Jewish tradition makes no secret of the fact that we should be humble, not haughty. גאוה (ga’avah, “haughtiness”, “arrogance”, “pride”, “conceit”) seemingly has virtually no place at all in the repertoire of acceptable Jewish behavioural characteristics.

Essentially, there is no excuse for puffing ourselves up with airs and graces. In recent years rabbis, notably R’ Chaim Friedlander (Siftei Chaim: Middot veAvodat Hashem) and R’ Shalom Noach Berezovky (Netivot Shalom) have repeatedly hammered home the dangers of cultivating this undesirable personal quality, which is as repugnant to God as it is to ourselves. As the Talmud teaches us:

R' Hisda said, and according to another version it was Mar Ukva: Every man in whom is haughtiness of spirit, the Holy One, blessed be He, declares, I and he cannot both dwell in the world; as it is said: Whoever privately slanders his neighbour, him will I destroy; he who has a haughty high look and a proud heart I will not tolerate:— read not “he” [I will not tolerate], but “with him” I cannot [dwell] (Sotah 5a).

So why does ga’avah go unmentioned in Pirkei Avot? If we dip beneath the surface of the words of Avot we find that the concept is not ignored.

In the first place, the Tannaim take a positive stance. Rather than discourage arrogance and pride, they encourage humility. Since it is not in practice possible for a person to be characterized both as humble and as arrogant, the endorsement of the one automatically entails the rejection of the other.

Secondly, commentators on Avot throughout the ages have used the language of Avot in order to condemn arrogance.  The Bartenura and the commentary ascribed to Rashi both take the opportunity to warn against ga’avah in the context of Avot 4:4 (where R’ Levitas Ish Yavneh urges people to be extremely humble), as do the Rambam, Rabbenu Yonah, the Meiri, the Abarbanel and R’ Chaim Volozhiner. There are other opportunities to preach against ga’avah elsewhere in Avot. For example the Maharam Shik uses Avot 5:1 as a peg upon which to hang his comments about God creating the world with 10 utterances rather than a single one: by not showing off, as it were, God is demonstrating His own form of modesty or humility, setting an example that we too should emulate by avoiding ga’avah when we contemplate our own achievements.

None of this explains why none of the teachings of the Tannaim and Amoraim found in Avot mention the g-word. Possibly Rebbi, when redacting the tractate, considered that the subject had already been sufficiently covered by the mishnayot and baraitot on humility. If anyone has a better explanation, I do hope that they come forward and share it.

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The problem of the prodigiously-praised professor

Over the past three years I have written on countless occasions of the importance of humility—one of the key middot in Pirkei Avot—and the correlative need to avoid pride. These priorities are not found exclusively in Avot. Rambam, in Hilchot De’ot, urges us not to seek out the middle path between humility and pride but to head as far as possible towards humility. The Maharal touches on a similar theme in his Netivot Olam, when he explains that only through cultivating humility to its furthest point can one truly make space for one’s Torah learning. This is all very well in theory, but how does one do this in practice?

Last week I was invited to speak at a celebration to mark the 20th anniversary of a phenomenally successful and much-loved weblog on a somewhat improbable subject: the law and practice relating to intellectual property as seen through the eyes of two fictitious cats. As a co-founder of this blog I was able to talk about its early days. The other speakers discussed a variety of legal topics, but they also had some very splendid things to say about me. At first I rather enjoyed this praise-laden attention, but as the afternoon continued I started to become rather uncomfortable. I was aware that I was filling up with pride, and I was troubled that this experience was so compellingly enjoyable. Indeed, rather against my will I found myself rating the various praises I had received in terms of quite how great or important they made me feel.

At this point I started to wonder how one should tackle pride when one feels it so powerfully. I decided to take a reality check in order to persuade myself that I did not deserve the praise I was receiving. Taking an objective view, I established the following points: (i) I was only the co-founder of the blog, not its exclusive originator; (ii) much of the content of the blog came from information and ideas sent in by readers, not from me; (iii) I had not contributed to the blog for nearly eight years, during which time it had become very much more successful and popular than it was when I contributed to it; and (iv) the blog was not indispensable since the world of intellectual property law existed quite happily before it came along and could easily continue to do so if it vanished tomorrow. This reality check did not however do the trick: I felt just as proud of its achievements as if I had written the whole thing myself and was about to be knighted for it. If there was a path from here to achieving humility, I could not see it.

After the event it occurred to me that, if I could not remove my feelings of pride, even though rationally I could challenge my entitlement to feel them, it might yet be possible to justify them. Perhaps this pride was not so dangerous because it related to something I had done in the relatively distant past and was never going to repeat, in a field of activity from which I had long since retired. This line of thought looked quite promising, even though it felt quite like an excuse. But are there in fact more than one type of pride? We learn from Tehillim that the possession of ge’ut, sometimes understood as pride or arrogance, is one of the qualities of God Himself (Tehillim 93:1), which suggests that—like every other quality that is generally bad when found in humans—it has its legitimate outlet, otherwise God would not have created it.

In English, when one speaks of a person “taking pride” in his handiwork, the real meaning is that that person has made some effort to do the best job possible. Rabbi Berel Wein, quoting Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, has described this state as one of acting leshem shamayim, “for the sake of Heaven”, as exemplified by the shoemaker who works hard to make sure that every shoe that receives his attention is made to the highest possible specification. On this basis, perhaps this sort of pride is acceptable because it is not inherently incompatible with humility. When I helped set up the blog and wrote for it, I did it to the best of my ability because I thought it would be useful for others as well as for myself. Is my pride in having done so a legitimate form of pride. I don’t feel that it has distanced me from God or from my Torah learning—but I cannot be sure that this feeling that I’m alright and can live with this pride is in fact a sign that it has already got a detrimental grip on me.

Thoughts, anyone?

Humility, Heep and a pile of baggage

The words “humble” and “humility” carry so much baggage in English that it can be uncomfortable to see them repeatedly appearing in translations of Pirkei Avot. The false, unctuous humility of Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield makes him one of the most vividly and instantly unlikeable characters to emerge from English literature, while association with the words “humiliate” and “eat humble pie” suggests that humility is not an inherent human quality but rather something that is inflicted painfully on others.

Some words in Hebrew can be reasonably stretched to bear more than one English meaning. Thus kavod (“honour”) and yirah (“fear”) can both be rendered as shades of “respect”, but shefal ru’ach and anav—the two Hebrew terms usually rendered as “humble”—offer little in the way of variation. Shefal ru’ach literally means “low-spirited”, but that conveys to the English ear a state of gloomy depression rather than humility.   

Our sages have in the past emphasised the link between humility and the need for each of us to believe—to convince ourselves—that we as humans are of no worth whatsoever and that it is only through the grace of God that we have any apparent merits at all. This position is rooted in midrashic and aggadic tradition. But the same tradition also points in other directions. Thus the sages also teach that we are to regard the world as if it was created specifically for ourselves and that we are the children of princes—and even the humblest of Torah scholars is entitled to “an eighth of an eighth” of pride. Pirkei Avot advocates a maximised form of humility (see e.g. Avot 4:4, 4:12) but also that we concede the truth (Avot 5:9), and the false modesty of scholars who repeatedly boast that they know nothing does nothing to promote the cause of humility among those who need to acquire it for themselves.

One way forward with humility is to explain it in terms that make it sound more accessible to ordinary people. Chanoch Levi’s English translation of Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner’s Ru’ach Chaim does that rather well in the course of the long, discursive essay in which Reb Chaim reviews the deeper significance of Avot 4:1. There he writes:

“It is important to realize that humility involves more than simply absorbing taunts and insults without exacting retribution. Humility is a state of mind, the recognition that one’s worth is no greater than that of any other man” (italics added).

This definition of humility is not only something that lies within the grasp of everyone; it is also compatible with the popular contemporary notion that all humans are equal. The statement that “I am no better than anyone else” is far easier to internalise than “I am of no worth when compared to anyone else”. However, “equal” is not the same as “identical”. We are all different and Reb Chaim acknowledges that too:

“For although a person may achieve great success, he may also suspect that perhaps he has failed to realize his true potential. Others might accomplish less, but may have maximized their potential; they are considered to be on a higher level”.

If we are honest with ourselves, we all recognise episodes in our lives in which we know that we could have done better, even if others do not see it. From my own years as a law teacher I can recall classes I gave which the students really enjoyed and thought were particularly good, though the high degree of enjoyment they derived and their consequently high rating of the class were as much attributable to the facts that they had insufficiently prepared for the class and that I, knowing that this would be the case, took less care in my own preparation for it than I could have done. In instances such as this, one has to resist the temptation to feel pride in a job less well done.