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. 

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Nice things for the righteous: a privilege or a responsibility

Towards the end of Avot (at 6:8) there is a Baraita that calls for a bit of attention. It starts off like this:

Rabbi Shimon ben Yehudah used to say in the name of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, “Beauty, strength, wealth, honour, wisdom, old age, venerable old age and children are fitting for the righteous and fitting for the world”. 

It then breaks off into a string of proof verses that either do or don't prove the point of the Baraita, whatever that might be.  The usual reading of this teaching is that the eight things listed in it are, well, fitting for the righteous (a class of people who are sometimes assumed to be rabbis).

Looking againat this Baraita, I wondered whether it might actually convey quite the opposite meaning to the normal one.  This would be the case if the eight things listed are not rewards or privileges, but instead impositions for anyone who posssesses them. In other words, this is a list of burdens that place responsibility on whoever is burdened with them.  How does this work? Let us take each term in order:

·     Beauty: a person’s physical beauty is a snare and a delusion, an external asset that deteriorates over time. An earlier Mishnah (4:27) has already warned us of the danger of taking people at face value, and the Book of Proverbs (31:30) emphasizes that it is a false value (“Favor is false and beauty is vanity”). Only a person with a strong moral backbone can be sure to cope with the pressures and expectations placed upon them by the perception of others that they are beautiful.

·     Strength: As Ben Zoma explains above (4:1), strength is defined in terms of the ability to exercise self-discipline in controlling oneself.  Given the powerful pull of a person’s evil inclination, having the strength to overcome it would seem to be an essential and ever-present weapon in the tzaddik’s armory of middot. The sad lot of the tzaddik is that his evil inclination is stronger than that of others, so he has need of greater strength to combat it (Sukkah 52a).

·     Wealth: Hillel the Elder has already taught (2:8), “the more the wealth, the more the worry”. Again, strength of character and moral rectitude are required if a person is to pass the test of affluence.  While we can all be rich—since the one who is truly rich is the person who is content with his portion (4:1)—this is something that applies to everyone, whether they are tzaddikim or otherwise.

·     Honour: of the eight items listed in this Baraita, none is as potentially toxic as honour: it is the only one that has the potential to kill a man spiritually stone dead (4:28). An ordinary individual runs the risk of chasing honor when it is as yet unearned, and of letting it get to his head even if it has been fairly earned. A tzaddik will however be able to handle its toxicity and treat it in the way Avot prescribes, by giving it to others (4:1 again) and by according it to the Torah (4:8)

·      Wisdom: like honor, wisdom can be dangerous in the hands of someone who lacks the requisite moral framework within which to utilize it. Pharaoh invoked wisdom when deciding to deal with his “Jewish Problem” (Exodus 1:10: "Come, let us deal wisely with them..."): this misdirected wisdom could have resulted in the extinction of the Children of Israel but instead caused Pharaoh’s personal humiliation and the destruction of his own fighting force. Balaam’s attempts at prophecy could not harm Israel but his wise counsel did, when he advised Balak on how to break the desert nation’s commitment to God (Numbers 31:16).  Few men of their generation were as wise as King David’s counsellor Achitophel (Chagigah 15b; Bemidbar Rabbah 22) and King Saul’s chief herdsman Doeg (Chagigah 15b; Tehillim Rabbah 52:4), yet their intellectual prowess was ill matched with their scheming politics. The harsh reality is that wisdom is only safe in the hands of someone who can be trusted—and that is a massive responsibility, as Moses discovered when he was the only person who possessed the necessary wisdom to resolve his people’s disputes (Exodus18:13-26).

·     Early old age: 60 or thereabouts is the time when a person becomes conscious of the fact that, while he may feel no different on the inside, he is starting to look old. Without a firm moral basis that supports a tzaddik, the drive to “have a final fling” or to yield to what is euphemistically called a “midlife crisis” can be overwhelming.

·     Venerable old age: the Talmud (Shabbat 152a) reports the words of Barzillai the Gileadite (2 Samuel 19:35) to the effect that, on reaching the ripe old age of 80, there was no longer much pleasure to be derived from life in the King’s court.  The diminution of one’s senses of sight, taste and hearing can weigh heavily on someone whose pleasures depend on them, but a tzaddik will not complain to God about his sad and feeble state. Rather, he should be well equipped to be able to take the disappointments and the tribulations of advanced old age as a time to recall with gratitude his earlier days and the opportunities he once had to serve others. Now is the time to reflect on the opportunities that he can give others to do acts of kindness for him.

·     Children: one does not need a Torah source to support the proposition, evidenced by life itself, that bringing up children can take its toll on even a loving parent. The price one pays for parenting can be steep in terms of time, effort, frustration, sleep deprivation, temper control and general inconvenience. Nor is there any point at which one can predict that the responsibility for raising one’s children will end. For a true tzaddik none of this is a burden.

Who is wise? A word on relative wisdom

Ben Zoma opens the fourth chapter of Avot with the famous question-and-answer: "Who is wise? The person who learns from all people". There he cites the first half a verse from Psalms in support of this proposition: "I gained insight from all my teachers ..." (Tehillim 119:99).

Listening to Dr Avshalom Kor's Be'Ofen Miluli slot on Radio Galatz this morning, I was reminded that there is more than one way of translating this verse. Since in Hebrew the preposition -מִ ("mi-") can mean both "from" and "than", the verse cited in Avot ("מִכָּל-מְלַמְּדַי הִשְׂכַּלְתִּי", mikol melamdai hiskalti) can also mean "I became more insightful than my teachers". This is indeed how Rabbis Avraham Ibn Ezra and Ovadyah Sforno learn it in their commentaries on Psalms. Curiously the Sforno's commentary on Avot makes no mention of his different understanding of the meaning of this verse in Psalms.