After a brief flowery paragraph—standard fare for writing a Rabbinic work in Arabic—Rasag begins to discuss what makes us human, since it is that characteristic we should work to develop (we’ll come to the relevance of this discussion to Mishlei in just a moment). In his reading, it is our higayon, which we generally translate as logic or thought, that separates us from the animals. That distinction is not exactly the one Rasag wishes to make, as we’ll see, but that would be the ordinary translation of the words he uses.

Building on this higayon characteristic, Rasag says that the extent that a person develops his sekhel (a word that ordinarily translates as intellect), defines how well that person has developed his or her humanity in all its excellence. People who follow their teva (which ordinarily means nature), are acting animalistically rather than humanly.

At this point, reading Rasag, we would think that he is supporting a sharp distinction between the natural and the intellectual (which is somewhat similar to what Rambam eventually does in his writings), but he is actually being more subtle than that. In the next few paragraphs, in his discussion of the pitfalls of following the teva and the value in following the sekhel, we see that the modern Hebrew meaning of these words can be misleading. Rasag says that the teva wants whatever is immediately pleasurable and detests whatever is immediately painful. It is only through the sekhel that a person can become aware of long-term needs, needs that might lead us to accept short-term pain (exercise), or at least resist short-term pleasure (overeating) for their longer-term gain.

Our teva is not inherently problematic it is simply shortsighted. Wanting food is not a problem, it is wanting all food right away without thought of whether that particular food is healthful. Strained through the medium of the sekhel, which does not have to be purely intellectual for Rasag (long-term perspective or judgement can involve other elements of a person than just the intellect), the teva can be harnessed to valuable purposes. Rasag’s central dichotomy, therefore, is between instinct (or short-term desires) and judgement (long-term perspective). People who simply follow their instincts are behaving animalistically; those who discipline their instincts to serve their long-term needs and purposes are achieving their true humanity.

QUESTIONS FOR CONSIDERATION: What does Rasag’s view say about the nature of human endeavor? What is success for a human being, according to Rasag? Does that meaningfully explain why God created us in this way, rather (for example) than just making us beings of inherent long-term perspective? Finally (and most importantly) does this distinction seem central to your personal human struggles?

To return to Rasag, he notes that his dichotomy affects ordinary human endeavor (as we mentioned before), but also affects our religious lives, since the teva will resist both the effort needed to learn about mitsvot as well as the discipline needed to adhere to them. Rasag here introduces an important distinction among mitsvot, a distinction you probably know but do not realize was first formulated by him. He notes mitsvot that are sikhliyot, that human beings could have (and would have) arrived at on their own, and others that are shim`iyot, that we adhere to solely because God commanded them. In both, however, the teva rebels, and needs the sekhel to insure adherence to them. Whereas teva is important for our basic human needs, it is, in Rasag’s presentation, largely a distraction and negative force in our religious endeavors.

If one challenge in allowing our sekhel to rule over our teva is that it requires foregoing current pleasure or accepting current pain because of long-term benefits-- always a difficult choice-- Rasag notes that we also tend to trust our teva differently than our sekhel. Our teva instincts depend on immediate realities that have been with us all our lives. We avoid contact with fire because, from the time we were young, we have known that it burns, and we feel that burning in our nervous system (Rasag does not say nervous system). We would have to weigh that actually physical experience of burning against the knowledge that cauterizing a wound will protect it from infection for the latter to happen (this is my own example; does anyone remember Rambo cauterizing his own bullet wound? While no intellectual, he was certainly using sekhel in Rasag's terms). The sekhel has to battle not only against the immediacy of the teva but against its greater accessibility to human experience.

The way that sekhel works to impose its will on the teva, and here we finally come to Mishlei, is by relating its judgements to facts that a person will know from his teva—hence the use of analogy. The analogies and parables in Mishlei, then, are the way that sekhel can express itself comprehensibly to the teva. When Mishlei compares promiscuity to falling into a pit, then, it is not a poetic twist, it is an attempt by sekhel to express the pitfalls of promiscuity (pardon the pun) in a way that can be understood by the teva. Basically, the text should be read as saying, you know that falling into a pit is painful and difficult to extricate oneself from, says the sekhel, well, promiscuity creates parallel problems. To the extent that the comparisons can be drawn vividly enough, the author will succeed at helping judgement rule.

Rasag notes that sekhel is not just more right than teva, but that sekhel encompasses teva. It is not that sekhel is one kind of human drive and teva another, but that sekhel, having understood all that pushes teva towards certain actions, nevertheless decides that other courses of action are more productive. This suggests that Rasag sees the old yetser hara/yetser hatov dichotomy as reflecting untrained and trained aspects of human existence, rather than good and bad. It is not that our impulses are bad—in the proper time and place, hunger, lust, and other short-term desires are productive and important for human continuity. It is allowing them free reign over human conduct that is problematic.

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER CONSIDERATION: Do you accept the notion that judgement should rule over instinct? Some people urge us to follow our wants, to revel in our immediate desires—are they wrong (in your view, not Rasag’s)? What is the proper balance between sekhel, awareness of the long-term consequences and value of our actions, and teva, the immediate pleasure principle? Does Rasag's view clarify Hazal's statement that the words "be-khol levavekha" in Shema mean with both our inclinations, that we can worship God with both our "good" and our "evil" inclination?

Rasag lists other types of verses in Mishlei as well, which we will see as we get to them. Basically, though, he sees all the verses as seeking ways to make sekhel-lessons, lessons of long-term judgement, available and convincing to our teva side. One aspect of this that is worth considering a little bit further is the question of how we go about acquiring wisdom, which will allow us to make correct sekhel judgements.

Rasag has two lists of necessities for acquiring wisdom (which, again, for him means the ability to understand and adhere to the demands of sekhel whenever they contradict those of teva). The first gives the stages of the process that lead to wisdom, and the second lists the qualities that are necessary for that process. Both are important for his reading of Mishlei, since he sees the book as a whole as being about this process, which is why he calls his commentary Sefer Derishat haHokhmah, the Book of Acquiring Wisdom. We thus have, by the end of this introduction, a clear view of what wisdom is for Rasag, and what the purpose of Mishlei is. We will see, in coming weeks, whether Rashi and Gra echo Rasag, or present differing views.

There are four stages to acquiring wisdom--learning it, remembering it, thinking about it, and understanding it. Rasag points out that these four are actually an elaboration of the two stages that Hazal traditionally spoke about, learning from someone else and then adding one's own insight. We will see this concept of learning in Rashi and Gra as well, so it's worth pausing to note the traditional elements in this view. Wisdom, for all of these people, meant first learning a body of knowledge from others; without that, there could be no true wisdom. After that passive receptive process, a creative thinker could advance the cause of wisdom by havanat davar mi-tokh davar, drawing new insights from the existing information. QUESTION: Do you see contemporary society as sharing that insistence on learning prior wisdom before being able to add constructively to a field? Do you (personally) agree that knowledge of what has come before must precede creative contributions to any subject of study?

In elaborating the four stages of what Hazal briefly referred to in two, Rasag has little new to say about learning and remembering. An element of his writing that I have left out here is that he relates many of his assertions to verses in Tanakh. We will have sufficient time to analyze his methods of reading verses in the actual commentary that I did not wish to get bogged down here in noting how he creatively interprets texts we all know.

The last two traits of wisdom, however, are kind of interesting. Rasag sees the third stage of knowledge as deep analysis of whatever has been learned, by separating it into its component parts and understanding each of them fully. This seems to involve raising many possibilities about a subject, even those that are not definitively known. The fourth stage is to choose correctly among the possibilities raised, thus coming to deeper and broader knowledge than provided by the generation before.

We will see more of this in weeks to come, so I do not wish to belabor it here, but I will recall a conversation I had years ago with mori ve-rabi R. Ezra Bick early on in my years in Gush, where I questioned the yeshiva's style of raising a zillion possibilities in every topic addressed (even in every particular commentator's words). To my mind, at the time and to a certain extent still today, it was much more efficient to just accept the most obvious reading of the words. R. Bick pointed out that just because a particular understanding came to us at first reading does not necessarily make it more correct than another possibility we only think of later. Rasag is saying something similar here, that having learned and remembered what others taught us, we then need to consider it in all its facets and possibilities, only afterwards choosing what we see as the correct understanding of the issue at hand.

Finally, Rasag lists five prerequisites to the acquisition of wisdom that are worth keeping in mind: 1)ability-- a person who cannot understand what others are teaching will have a much more difficult time (and will need greater effort) than one who can. 2)desire-- without a love of knowledge and wisdom, even the most intelligent person will not put in the necessary effort to become truly wise. 3) a teacher-- since, as we have said, there is a traditional component to wisdom, the first step of acquiring the knowledge of the wise of previous generations, 4) financial resources-- without food, etc., more advanced pursuits become more difficult, if not impossible, and 5)time-- attaining wisdom, like so many other of the important areas of life, is a marathon, not a sprint. Even the most intelligent person needs to percolate ideas, to let them brew (or ferment, if you like that metaphor better) before they come to their full maturity.