In Mishna Avot, or Pirkei Avot as it is often called, we find many
bits of profound wisdom. One of my
favourites is: Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. This has taught me the important lesson
of not dismissing anybody’s words. Most
of us tend to do that. If someone does
not look or sound like someone who would have wisdom to impart, our first
instinct is to ignore them. When we do,
it is to our own loss. No matter how
unlettered, no matter how inarticulate, no matter how young…no matter how far
someone is outside the image that makes one instinctively pay attention. Everybody has something unique to share.
If wisdom can – and does
– come from the most unlikely places, then the opposite is surely true. Sources that do fit the description of
what we might expect to be a fountain of wisdom, often spout all kinds of
nonsense. Take university
professors. Most of us have an instinct
to take them seriously. Why shouldn’t
we? They must study many years to obtain
a PhD degree. Then there is the
candidacy exam, an oral examination by a panel of faculty to make sure the
student really know their subject. Passing
that hurdle, the student must come up with a dissertation topic that represents
original research. Then comes the
arduous process of researching and writing it with a faculty referee who will
often accept nothing but excellence in every assertion, in every reference, in
every paragraph on every page of a paper that often reaches book length. Then comes the oral defense of
the dissertation. And then finally, the
first, untenured years of teaching when one can be let go for just about any
offense, real or imagined. So when one
finally gets a job title that includes the word ‘professor,’ we tend to be impressed.
All that would be
well and good, except that we keep hearing nonsense from the mouths and
keyboards of people whose job title includes the word professor.
Take Ward Churchill,
who used to teach Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, where my
daughter is studying. Churchill gained
national attention when he wrote, shortly after 9-11, an essay entitled On
the Justice of Roosting Chickens. In
it he infamously referred to the legions of those killed when the two airliners
struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, as little
Eichmann’s. The phrase little
Eichmann’s is not original to Churchill; it was coined by Hannah Arendt in
1963 in support of her notion of the banality of evil. For an American professor to use this
phrase to describe innocent victims of a terror attack, struck a raw nerve
among the public. Despite the firestorm,
Churchill would not very likely have lost his job over that statement. But afterwards, some began investigating his
writing and research as a whole. That
investigation turned up assertions he had published over the years in the guise
of academic writing, which were shown to be patently false. Churchill was finally fired in 2005, and a
long process of legal steps failed to get him reinstated.
One case does not
indict an entire class of people. There
are many more documented cases of professor spouting nonsense. Remember Joy Karega, the Oberlin College
Associate Professor whom I mentioned a couple of weeks back? Add to her, Melissa Click at the University
of Missouri, thankfully now fired, who sought to prevent the documenting of a
campus protest and cursed police who were only trying to keep a crowd orderly
to prevent unintentional injury. Then
there is Bill Ayers, the gift that keeps on giving. Cornell West, who having been driven out of Harvard
and Princeton, is now poisoning young minds at Union Theological Seminary. Edward Said, doing his part at
Columbia.
But even in naming all these names,
my point is not to indict the professorate, which surely includes thousands
upon thousands of individuals doing their teaching, research and writing with
the utmost integrity. Rather, my point
is that we should never assume that something outlandish from the mouth
or pen of someone belonging to a class of person we almost automatically
respect, represents wisdom. Just as we
should never automatically dismiss something profound from the mouths the of
inarticulate. We should be open to
receiving wisdom from unexpected sources, and take in the words of the lettered
with discernment.
I see this tendency in play every
day. People of a lettered class tend to
look down their long noses at those without their level of education. Politicians, and those advocating for a
particular politician, love to dismiss those who support a competing politician’s
supporters. You remember President Obama’s
2008 dismissal of small town voters who weren’t polling for him: They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people
who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a
way to explain their frustrations.
He said these
words at a closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco, a city not especially known
for religion and gun ownership. A city
of lettered people who are too smart for all that. Well, it’s no surprise that the Dismisser-in
Chief yet clings to his I’m smarter than you même with almost the
exact same words in describing Donald Trump supporters, this in late
December of last year in an interview on National Public Radio.
There’s
a commercial that runs on television here when registration for the next
semester is open. Its purpose is to get young
Australians thinking seriously about enrolling in TAFE. For my readers outside Australia, TAFE is an
acronym for Technical and Further Education.
A TAFE is the Australian equivalent of an American community college. The commercial shows young adults engaged in
many blue collar trades and tells the viewer:
Let’s celebrate the doers! The
point being, a society cannot run on cerebral pursuits alone. We need clever people who are willing to work
with their hands. Otherwise, nothing
gets built, nothing gets repaired…nothing that matters, gets done. But many of those who purport to know better,
are happy to tolerate the doers to the degree that they recognise we
need them. And disparage them when, in
their “ignorance,” the make choices that the lettered classes know enough to
avoid. But the TAFE commercials rightly
tell us that we should celebrate the doers. Implied is that we should take them seriously. And, if your hands are smooth from not
engaging in physical work, you should never think yourself better.
Who
is wise? He who learns from everyone. It is not always easy to remember to be open to learn from
everyone. Nor is it always easy to be
ready to scrutinse the “wisdom” of those whom we hold in awe for one reason or
another. In Proverbs 9 we’re told תהילת חכמה יראת ה' – The beginning of
wisdom is reverence for the Lord. And
I’m not one to argue with that! But take
it a step further. Reverence for G-d,
not reverence for credentials. At the
end of the day, the beginning of wisdom is discernment. Open minds are better able to discern. The root of my reverence for G-d is that His
Torah, used as intended, serves as a tool to open one’s mind.
I was
thinking about the notion of wisdom from unlikely sources the other day. It was evening, and I was sitting with a
blank look on my face. Clara asked me
what I was thinking about. I told her I
wasn’t thinking about anything. And then
suddenly the words of Winnie the Pooh came to me. Okay, of A. A. Milne, the author of the
Winnie the Pooh books. Sometimes I
sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.
Sometimes – often, for some of us – we overthink matters and
therefore our thinking turns muddled. Sometimes,
we don’t need to be thinking deep thoughts.
Sometimes, just experiencing life in the moment, is enough. Sometimes, just experiencing life in the
moment, is superior! Shabbat has
begun, the time especially set aside for experiencing life in the moment. Shabbat shalom!
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