Last week, I closed the shiur with the words "Next week, chapter 3, with the hope to pick up the pace a little. See you then. Shabbat Shalom." I have decided that that was a mistaken urge, a desire to cover ground regardless of how that affected our depth of understanding reflecting my constant struggle with the conflicting desire for breadth of knowledge and depth of understanding. In the end, though, despite recognizing that we could spend years on Mishlei, taking up one after another of the various commentaries rabbbis and others have produced, this shiur is dedicated to studying just three of those.

Those three, however, deserve the concentrated attention that leads to at least some reasonable depth of understanding, both of them and of this remarkable book of Tanakh. While I may remain frustrated by the pace of this process, I do not believe that we can move much faster than we have been. What I will try to do is select a group of verses of sufficient size and depth of meaning that we can cover that group fully in each week’s course. For this week, that means verses 1-8 of Chapter 3, which read as follows:

"My son, do not forget my covenant, and let your heart guard my mitsvot; For length of years and years of life and peace they will add to you; Kindness and truth should not leave you, tie them to your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart; and find grace and good favor in the eyes of God and man; Trust in God with all your heart and do not rely on your insight; In all your ways know Him, and He will correct your paths; Do not be wise in your own eyes, fear God, and stay away from evil; It will be a healing to your navel, and marrow for your bones."

As always in our study of Mishlei, the meaning of the various terms is the essential element in finding the meaning of the text as a whole. In the first sentence for example, the term "covenant" and "mitsvot" would seem to refer to Torah, as indeed Rashi and Gra interpret. Rasag, however, assumes that the verse refers both to the wisdom of this world and of the next. For the wisdom of this world, Rasag’s examples show that he means such areas of life as how to speak appropriately to someone else, with stories from Tanakh demonstrating how the proper response can lead to saving someone’s life. Then, of course, understanding the wisdom of religion is also a significant contributor to length of life, again both physically and in the next world.

Rasag’s assumption that the sefer is referring to two realms again reminds us of the breadth of wisdom to which, in his view, we must be alert. While certainly he accepted the great wisdom of the Torah, he saw other great wisdom that was independent of Torah; both were necessary for securing length of days and years of life.

I would point out (on my own, although I would hope someone has said it before) that the verse promises that this wisdom, whatever it is, will grant length of days, years of life, and peace. However we translate peace, we should always remember that a lifestyle lived with Torah is supposed to lead to that. There may be times when, particularly if confronted by certain kinds of evildoers, Torah (and wisdom) calls for severe action, and we must not shy away from that when necessary. But Torah truly lived leads to peace, and if the Torah we are living, the wisdom we are following, is not taking us in that direction, we might want to question whether we have understood it fully and applied it correctly.

The next verse refers to hessed ve-emet, a contrast only Gra picks up on. He notes that hessed is what we do for others even though completely undeserved, while emmet, truth, is what we do for others in proper repayment for their previous actions. Gra uses the contrast to point out that we tend to do a little hessed (since it’s all a freebie, even a little seems like a lot in our minds), but we do emmet in great amounts, since we owe that. The pair is brought here, in Gra’s view, to stress that we need to do it all in great amounts (to do hessed as if it were emmet) to achieve the full effect.

From my own perspective, in an issue that has been bothering me for awhile, the conjunction of hessed ve-emmet might also come to remind us that they must be taken as a pair. We might become tempted, as we rise in our spirituality, to stress hessed, the freely given favor, as the way to act in all situations. As a personal value, that strives for a high level of generosity, and I would never argue against that.

But perhaps the verse is reminding us that in our search for hessed, in our attempts to deal with others not only in terms of what they deserve but in terms of what we are able to give them, we must nonetheless keep careful track of what is deserved. Otherwise our sense of justice—vital to deciding what we must do in situations where we are unable to be generous and also vital to being able to name evil when we see it—will be perverted. It is with both hessed and continuing sense of emmet that we achieve atonement for our sins.

The rest of that verse provides interesting commentarial fodder as well. First, Rasag assumes that the verse is addressing both men and women, reminding members of both sexes of the need to cultivate kindness and truth (and the underlying wisdom mentioned in verse 1) in their lives. The reference to tying these wisdoms onto one’s neck, for Rasag, is directed at women, contrasting the value of wisdom with the value they tend to place on jewelry (which goes on one’s neck). For men, who stress internal factors as important, wisdom should be given pride of place there as well.

I mention this because we tend to assume that Judaism has largely neglected the spiritual development of women throughout its history, that women were a legal curiosity who needed to be dealt with in certain situations, but were generally a distraction from the "real" world of Torah and mitsvot. It is certainly possible that some past Jewish thinkers had some such notions implicit in their ideas (Maharal’s views, more carefully presented, might come close to this), but there were others, and Rasag is one, who show a different road. While granting that there are many differences between men and women, such thinkers would assume that much of the spiritual path of Torah and mitsvot applied equally to both sexes, and would make sure to stress that wherever appropriate. This is one of those places.

Verse 5 clearly calls for bitahon, trust in God, in contrast to reliance upon one’s own insight, but the context of that call is a matter of dispute. Rashi, in a theme he stresses elsewhere as well, thinks the verse is referring to the need to spend money to find a teacher of Torah. Rather than thinking that one can study on one’s own, a person should spend the money, even if that leaves him impoverished, and rely on God to provide for him. Perhaps not coincidentally, Rashi acted exactly that way in his own life, moving (with a family) to Germany at the age of 20, to study with the giants of Torah of his generation, the scholars of Mayence and Worms.

Rasag does not see bitahon in financial terms, or even primarily in terms of relying on God to act for a person. For Rasag, bitahon means not testing God, not taking actions to see whether God would respond or not. Living an ordinary life, without assuming that God will step in in any way, seems to be ok for Rasag; bitahon means not attempting to force God’s hand by trying to elicit a certain response. Given that view of bitahon, the call not to rely on one’s intellect cannot be taken completely literally, since there was nothing else to rely upon. At this point, Rasag brings in the notion of Torah and mitsvot, that we should not think we can guide our conduct completely according to our own ideas, but that we need follow the principles set up by the Torah.

Two last interesting points in Rasag are worth spending a little time on. First, he interprets the notion of "knowing" God in all of one’s actions as meaning that one is always aware of one’s debt of gratitude to God. This assumes that it is not possible to actually acquire knowledge of God, and that the verse must mean something else. Rambam read this verse as calling for us to guide all our actions by the attempt to get closer to God, to have a greater percentage of our lives be governed by the striving to become close to God. A person who takes care of his bodily needs only in order to be healthy enough to work on worship of God, for example, is, in those actions, fulfilling this verse.

Last, Rasag notes that the verse refers to sharekha, your navel, when it really means the whole body. He explains that since this is the source of sustenance to a fetus in the womb, it is a useful symbol of the entire whole. I find that interesting because other traditions see the belly as central to our life energy; with just a little addition to Rasag’s commentary, we can see this verse as implying a similar notion.

Going back to bitahon, we find some remarkably anti-intellectual comments in Gra, remarkable since he was himself such an intellectual. He reads the verse as calling for trust in God to the exclusion of self-reliance, rather than in addition to it. (It does not mean "don’t only rely on your insight," it means don’t rely on your insight, period.) Similarly, verse 7’s call not to be wise in our own eyes, but to fear God and leave evil means, for Gra, that we should not think our study of the secrets of the Torah (the topic of the previous verse in his reading) suffices to inculcate proper action. We must instead simply repent, suppress, repress, and destroy our evil inclination, and follow God’s laws.

For all his interest in Torah and study, then, Gra was very clear that the way to obedience and worship lay not solely in the intellect, but in the experience of submission to the Divine Will, and conquering of one’s baser human instincts. Which leaves us to reconsider the role of all that study according to Gra—but that is a subject to take up another time.

What all of these versions share, despite their significant points of difference, is a reading of these verses as stressing the need to acquire the wisdom of the world, whether Torah-only, or wisdom generally. That wisdom, properly followed, coupled with proper trust in God, will serve as the proper regimen to heal one’s body and soul, and allow a person to live a proper life. Seeing Gra and Rasag agree about those general propositions means that the question for Jews is not whether these sentences are true, it is the specific definition of the unclear terms in those sentences, which is what we have tried to examine this week. Next week we will begin by considering the role of money in that picture.

Shabbat Shalom.