Having
seen how Rashi reads the first six verses of the book (last
week’s e-mail), we can better appreciate the depth of Gra’s
reading that we will see this week. I will note, for the last
time, that many of the ideas that Gra expresses in simple fashion
(such as the four factors we will see in a moment in the first
verse) have their roots in his kabbalistic understanding of the
world’s structure and workings. Here, we will only deal with the
simple meaning of those ideas and terms.
Gra notes that every object has four elements,
its material (homer), the person who made it (poel),
the form it takes (tsurah, which he understands here to be
its topic matter), and its purpose (takhlit). The six
introductory verses, then, are geared towards defining each of
those in the case of Mishlei. Although Rashi had also seen these
verses as introductory, Gra’s more systematic thought about what
it means to introduce a book (the elements that ought to be
covered in such an introduction) foreshadows the deep and
intricate system he will introduce us to throughout his
commentary.
VERSE 1
Gra does not clearly define the word Mishlei,
perhaps because he thought it was so clear, but he does discuss
the book’s reasons for mentioning Shelomo b. David, Melekh
Yisrael. Gra notes that when we come to read a book of wisdom,
the extent to which the book will actually impart wisdom depends
on the wisdom of its author. Mentioning Shlomo in this way
bespeaks three different types of wisdom that are important and
that Shlomo possessed—hokhmah (wisdom), musar,
and Torah.
The name Shlomo emphasizes the author’s
wisdom generally speaking, since Tanakh asserts Shlomo’s having
been wiser than any man on the face of the earth. Gra does not
define that wisdom here, although we will have ample opportunity
to see his vision of wisdom (as distinct from Torah) in the book
itself. Whatever it means, if Shlomo excelled in wisdom, his
standing as a general Jewish role model becomes somewhat less
significant—he was very wise in a general sense, but may not
have excelled in other areas of equal or greater import for Jews
to emulate.
For example, Gra sees the words "ben
David, son of David" as telling us another important area
of insight that Mishlei could not have done without, hasidut.
Since David is presented in the Talmud as a paradigm of hasidut,
spiritual excellence, we can expect that Shlomo followed his
father in this path as well.
A couple of notes on that last paragraph.
First, Gra mentions the Talmud’s statement (Berakhot 57b) that
one who sees David in a dream should expect to become a hasid.
Assuming that this is not mention supernaturally, it suggests that
Hazal had some instinctive understanding that what we see in our
dreams reveals our concerns and interests. Someone who dreams
about David haMelekh is, perhaps, already demonstrating an
interest in hasidut that predicts that that person will one
day actually attain it. Most people’s dreams reveal their
interests in other areas of life—I am reminded of the football
player who, in the weeks after having botched a vital play in a
game was asked whether he relived that moment in his dreams and
replied, "No, I dream about girls." What we dream about
says something about who we are, and if we dream about examples of
hasidut, we are already showing our interest in achieving
that level.
The second point I would note is that Gra sees
Shlomo’s hokhmah as reflecting him essentially, while his
hasidut is a function of him continuing his father’s
legacy. That doesn’t take away from Shlomo’s qualifications to
include issues of hasidut in Mishlei, but it does suggest
that Gra saw Shlomo as more wise than hasid.
The third aspect of wisdom that Mishlei
addresses is Torah (which, we should note, Gra is listing
separately from wisdom—there may be overlap between the two, but
Torah is neither wisdom nor hasidut, it is a category of
its own). In fact, Gra says, there are three parts to Mishlei, one
for each of these three topics.
QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT—What are the
issues that you dream about? What do they say about where each of
us are in our road to human perfection? What are the issues that
are central to our growth at the current time? How would you
differentiate between those elements of a life that are inherited
(and adhered to, but as a legacy than as a particular personal
interest) and those that define a person and his/her deepest
attachments? What would you suspect is the difference between
Torah and wisdom? Between Torah and hasidut?
VERSE 2
Verse 2 says that Mishlei’s goal is to teach
(for us to know) hokhmah, musar, and to understand imrei
binah. Similar to the three areas Gra had defined in verse 1,
he sees these three terms as relating to what might be called
general wisdom, practical ethics, and Torah. What is new here, and
decisively important to note, is the introduction of the yetser
hara. For Gra, hokhmah is to know how to avoid the yetser
hara, the evil inclination, and its seductions.
I call attention to this because of how
centrally Gra is placing the battle with our evil inclination.
Wisdom can mean many things, especially if we do not see wisdom as
necessarily connected to Torah. That Gra sees it (and the other 2
terms in this verse) as focusing on the battle with the yetser
hara immediately alerts us to how seriously he takes our
struggle with it.
Given that vision of the yetser hara, it
is perhaps not surprising that musar means the ways in
which a person who has already been ensnared by it can escape.
What is more interesting is that Gra also includes in musar
the ways of training those who are unschooled in the yetser
hara’s wiles how to avoid them. Yetser hara is thus a
presence to be constantly concerned about, to train oneself to
avoid, and that takes musar (which, as we will see in a
moment, means causing oneself some physical suffering to train
oneself away from the yetser hara’s lusts).
Imrei binah means to conduct one’s musar
campaign in a Torah fashion. Gra says that one should
therefore not fast all the days of the week and Shabbat as
well—he apparently sees no problem in fasting all the days of
the week as a way of training one’s inclination away from
improper lusts. This is a theme that will arise repeatedly in the
commentary—the yetser hara and the different ways to
battle it.
We might think that Gra has limited his reading
of the verse to the battle of the yetser hara, but his
final comments show that he sees this battle as emblematic of
broader human endeavors. Gra notes that the three parts of this
verse reflect the three kinds of intellect within human
beings—the iyyuni, the mahshavah, and the ma`aseh.
The first he defines as considering the paths of the stars and the
Merkavah, by which he means the nature of God. The second
is the consideration of how to train one’s character, and the
third is practical application of wisdom.
Those three areas correspond, for Gra, to hukim,
mishpatim, and mitsvot. Hukim (which Gra does
not define, but generally refer to those of the Torah’s laws
that human beings would not have legislated in the absence of a
Divine command, and for which the reason is not intuitively
obvious) are in the Heavens. Mishpatim (generally those mitsvot
that we would have come up with on our own, whose logic is
intuitively obvious) are on the earth, and mitsvot tie the
two together.
When Gra says that mitsvot tie together hukkim
and mishpatim he is apparently not referring to the first
two categories in their usual sense, but rather as ways of
differentiating the Divine way of thinking about the world from
the human one. In that sense, mitsvot are a way to balance
our inherent human side (which we cannot simply ignore or repress)
with our need to confront and engage the Divine.
Another version of that balance comes when Gra
sees these three in turn as paralleling Heaven, earth, and people,
who link them. So, too, he mentions (as reflecting a similar
triad) Torah, mitsvot, and middot (character
traits). If these three parallel the previous ones, then Gra is
saying that Torah is one system for battling one’s yetser
hara, middot (which can be conceived of independently
of Torah—Aristotle and many after him have built ethical systems
and perspectives of character) another, and mitsvot are a
way to mediate the two.
These effort to combine the Divine with the mundane, as
mediated by mitsvot, will recur in our reading of Mishlei
and is worth beginning to think about as it applies to ourselves.
To what extent do our lives consist of walking the line between
what is Divine and what is earthly? Do we bifurcate the two or
combine them? Where is one element emphasized over the other, and
where are they harmonized and/or synthesized?We will continue with
Gra’s reading of these verses next week, after which we will
take a break for Pesah. Shabbat Shalom
