jewish thought
Uncommon Wisdom Marina Zilbergerts
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his past summer marked the first yahrzeit of Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz z”l (17th of Av, July 26). Rabbi Steinsaltz was admired throughout the Jewish world on account of his great achievement in democratizing the experience of learning Talmud, bringing it to those who had neither knowledge of Aramaic nor teachers able to initiate them. In providing unprecedented access to Jewish study for anyone who wanted to come and learn, his life’s work represents a revolution whose importance cannot be overstated. His mission was to make Jewish knowledge accessible to the widest audience and thereby inspire authentic Jewish engagement through learning. By drawing on his wide-ranging fields of knowledge and interest – from academic Jewish studies to fields as variegated as botany, aerospace engineering, archeology, psychology, art, and music – his commentaries connect Torah, broadly speaking, to all the possible facets of life. In a work released shortly before his death, a new Hebrew commentary on The Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot), Rabbi Steinsaltz rearticulates many of the ideas that animated him throughout his life. His wide-ranging glosses on the nature of wisdom, intellectual achievement, human relationships, virtue, and government, among other topics, show how Avot explores the problems faced by the individual as a moral agent in a world where knowledge is readily available but wisdom is hard to come by. For Rabbi Steinsaltz, Avot articulates the Sages’ skepticism about intellectual achievement as the path to ethical action, cutting against the grain of contemporary culture. This commentary on Avot is a fitting capstone to his overall oeuvre. Like Rabbi Steinsaltz’s other works, this volume is both rigorous and simple. The writing is concise and inviting, avoiding jargon in favor of accessibility. This transparency of style is a matter of principle; in The Sociology of Ignorance, a 1987 Hebrew book Rabbi Steinsaltz co-wrote with his childhood friend, the historian Amos Funkenstein (1937-1995), the authors describe how knowledge has been monopolized by institutions from the church to the academy. The book presents an argument for the ideal of “open knowledge,” a value essential to Judaism, which Rabbi Steinsaltz
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traces back to Ezra, Hillel, and the rabbinic democratization of Jewish learning in Yavneh. Rabbi Steinsaltz’s commentary on Avot is written in the same spirit of opening the gates of Jewish knowledge to contemporary readers. He takes the terse statements of the Mishna and provides context, often from other contemporaneous cultures. He also provides historical and thematic character profiles of the rabbinic sages, relating their Mishnaic statements to the circumstance of their lives and personalities. The commentary contains an overview of key Jewish interpreters across the generations, as well as translations and etymologies of Greek and Persian terms, manuscript variants, textual differences from Avot de-Rabbi Natan, and a full bibliography. The book is neither a traditional religious tome nor an academic edition of a Jewish text, yet it offers much to both the religious scholar and learner as well as to the academic, or any person eager to absorb Jewish knowledge “on one foot.” In so doing, it reveals an essential component to the genre he pioneered that comes into full relief in this last book, namely, the humanist valence that is a crucial part of the Jewish view of learning and understanding. In the introduction Rabbi Steinsaltz comments on Avot’s overall goal: “This book helps us to become acquainted with the Jewish nation from the inside, to understand its inner thought, the means by which it aspires to perfection” (xii). Like the Mishna and Talmud, geared towards engaging with the process rather than the outcome, Avot does not describe perfection itself but the processes by which one might aspire to an ideal that is in itself unattainable. Contrasting with the Greek wisdom tradition,
Rabbi Steinsaltz explains that although the rabbinic sages are primarily concerned with philosophical questions, “they do not engage in abstract philosophical discourse.” Rather, they offer “short statements delivered by the sage to his students, which represent a grain of an idea” (xii). The form chosen for the articulation of Jewish wisdom, which Rabbi Steinsaltz compares to Confucianism, rebels against the hubris of Greek-inspired enlightenment rationalism. “This is not a book for reading,” he continues, referring to direct, rational, means of knowledge acquisition. It is, rather “a bundle of medicines that a person does not swallow all at once, but takes one at a time and internalizes until it begins to enact its intended remedy” (xiii). Neither apparent nor guaranteed, Rabbi Steinsaltz likens the wisdom offered by Avot to a type of medicine for the soul, whose remedial effects can only transform the person over time, if ever at all. Indeed, running through the commentary is skepticism about the very value of intellectual achievement and the difficulty of translating it into meaningful action. On Shimon ben Gamliel’s dictum “All my days I grew up among sages and found nothing better for the body than silence. Not study, but action is primary” (1:16), Rabbi Steinsaltz comments: While words of wisdom have a definite value and intellectual benefits, in terms of their outcome […] they are likely, in fact, to cause people harm […]. Action alone determines a person’s path in the final analysis; it, rather than the articulation of new principles and interpretations, however beautiful they may be, is the test for the individual and society (67). This skepticism about intellectual achievement might seem like a performative contradiction. Rabbi Steinsaltz was awarded the Israel Prize and many other honors and described as a “once in a millennium scholar” (a title his students say he disparaged). Rabbi Steinsaltz was clearly a paragon of intellectual achievement. What then explains this apparent disenchantment about the intellectual edifices constructed by the human mind? Is this a restatement of the old Hasidic critique of the cult of intellectual achievement targeted at contemporary culture? Rabbi Steinsaltz later clarifies that “intellectual achievement, even great wisdom,
October 2021 / Cheshvan 5782
