"Wisdom" is one of these geriatric words in our language which is well on its way to join the ranks of such dusty oldies as "thou," "wherefore, and "art." At best, the word conjures up images of the mysterious East and a far-removed, ancient body of knowledge. At worst, one thinks of the pop-evangelical self-help books near the cash register of the pharmacy and airport bookstore.
We live in an era of absolute disemmination of knowledge. As Wikipedia expands, the new printings of gemaras get fatter with more commentators in the back. It is almost cliche to be writing about it, but it must be meditated on, because although the world is certainly more (formally) educated today than ever, our concept of wisdom has been flattened.
From time to time, usually late at night, with a close friend or spouse, probably over a drink or two, everyone has conversations that touch on the deep topics that pull on the bottoms of our hearts: life's meaning, our purpose, the metaphysical, the paranormal, etc. But as quickly as it came, the conversation evaporates like a dream, both parties doubtful that any real answers to such questions exist, and even if they do, we are hopeless to ever know them. Wisdom thus remains a far-off, almost mythical notion in the heart of modern man.
What is wisdom?
Torah teaches us that wisdom is everywhere. So central is this principle that the wise man is not defined by how much he knows, rather by his awareness of this reality ("Who is a wise person? The one who learns from everyone" [Pirke Avot 4:1]). The Almighty literally built the world on top of the invisible scaffolding of Wisdom: "ה' בחכמה יסד ארץ" ("Hashem with Wisdom layed the foundation of [the] physical world") (Proverbs 3:19).
The human body is our metaphor for this. Almost every cell in your body contains in the DNA in its nucleus with all the information to make your entire body. Of course, the information is not written in English -- it is written in biochemical code through a complex ordering of nucleic acids. Transcribed into letters, a small small slice would look like this:
Moreover, even if we knew what sequence codes for what protein (which we do), or what the mapping is of genes for the entire human genome (which we do), we still have barely begun to understand the oceans of medical wisdom therein -- otherwise all disease would have been banished with the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003.
You see, just because we know information, we do not necessarily know the wisdom from which it emmanates, nor the wisdom towards which that information could be used. Wisdom is hidden behind information, and information is hidden by layers of physicality.
There are a frightening number of people in the world who have dedicated an amount of time that I would rather not think about in order to memorize the digits of Pi (3.1412 etc; really -- look it up!). Throughout this rigorous process of memorization, it's more than likely that very little wisdom was absorbed.
Similarly, two medical students may have worked very hard in med school. Whereas one slaved to systematically memorize information from textbooks, the other learned by constantly digging to find the wisdom behind the biological system, carving out the underlying rules in his mind. The second doctor with medical wisdom could look at a persons skin color and "see" the invisible -- the problem behind the symptoms and its solution.
Wisdom in the language of Torah is called חכמה (Chochmah). There is an oft-quoted Zohar which "sees" in the word "חכמה" its essence: "כח מה," the "power of 'what' ." While the fool is complacent with the appearences of what is around him; a wise man probes to get to the wisdom buried beyond the surface, insisting "what is it?"
Any person who has worn black cow-skin straps with attached black boxes, or shaken a citrus fruit and 3 tree branches, or seen his mother frantically vacuuming for bread crumbs before Pesach...and has not sincerely asked himself, "what on earth is going on here?" needs to work on his חכמה.
The power of wisdom and missing the point
Every child knows that Einstein is famous for his formula E=mc2. What most people don't realize is that an implication of this statement is that if we could extract all the energy stored in the mass of a U.S. penny, we could power the metropolitan New York City area for 2 years.
If this enormous output of latent energy exists in matter, imagine the power of wisdom waiting to be unleashed -- after all, both matter and energy are products of the wisdom behind the laws which describe them...
.....
Avraham approached Jerusalem with his two sons Yitzhak and Yishmael, and his servant Eliezer, and no one knew exactly where they were supposed to go. G!d had been carefully ambiguous in his description of their destination:
"...go to [the] land of Moriah, and there offer [Yitzhak] up as an Olah offering upon one of the mountains that I will tell you" (Bereishit 22:2).As they got closer,
"...Avraham raised his eyes and saw the place from afar. Avraham said to his youths [Yishmael and Eliezer], 'Stay here with the donkey, and I and the youth [Yitzhak] will go until there..." (ibid 4-5).What did Avraham see that made him so sure that this was the place? Why does the Torah record that Avraham told Yishmael and Eliezer to stay "with the donkey?" Could there be a more innane piece of information at the cusp of such an epic moment as this?
The Midrash, highly attuned to these questions extrapolates on the subtelies of the verses:
What did [Avraham] see? He saw a cloud [unusually] affixed to a mountain. He said [to himself] that it appears that this is the place G!d told him to offer up his son. He asked Yitzhak, "my son, do you see what I see?" He said, "yes." He [then] asked the youths, "do you see what I see?" They said, "no." He said, since the donkey doesn't see it and you don't see it, stay here with the donkey (Bereishit Rabba 57).The Midrash brings into poignant focus the spiritual chasm that opens between Avraham & Yitzhak and Yishmael & Eliezer on this precipitous occasion. The inability of Yishmael and Eliezer to perceive the delicate subtlety of G!d's expression in this instance, causes them to be paired with the donkey rather than rising with Avraham and Yitzhak to the pinnacle of ethical achievement.
Let's keep in mind that Yishmael and Eliezer in broader terms are described as giants. Eliezer knew all of Avraham's teachings (Rashi 15:2), and Yishmael boasted to Yitzhak for being circumcised at 13 -- let alone a powerful enough individual to be father to a nation (B"R 55). Yet nonetheless, as they approached the spiritual crucible of the Akeida (the binding of Isaac) their lack of perception -- their missing a piece of wisdom -- their inability to "see" what was in front of them, made all the difference in the world.
The Talmud (Kiddushin 68a) goes even further to say that by missing this perception, they were "comparable to donkeys." This seems a bit harsh, but the understanding is that the donkey is our archetypal inertial animal. When a donkey wants to sit, you can push all you want, but he's likely going to keep on sitting. It is no coincidence that the word for donkey is חמור (Chamor), of the same root as חומריות (Chumriut), physicality. When a person is set in his ways and cannot perceive the inner reality of what is in front of him, at that instant, his is a glorified donkey.
A small drop of wisdom
At first, this midrash grinds on our sensibilities -- "it's not fair," "don't you think it's a bit of an exaggeration..." However, with a bit of thought, we can open it up.
Any person who invests money professionally can tell you after some introspection several occasions in which he made some large sum of money when the market didn't because of one or two pieces of financial wisdom which he grasped during his Masters or from his mentors, and most of his peers didn't.
On any given day, a surgeon, if he pays attention, will realize that there were several life-saving decisions he made that day because of specific subtle principles he came to understand deeply over the years.
People often ask me why I became religious. Usually they are looking for a story about an epiphone. I can tell you with certainty, that even for those people who do describe epiphanes, it can only be the result of many concepts which individually become clear over the years and ultimately come together, allowing them to "see" Torah for what it is. Very often a person in his 20's learning a mishna in Pirkei Avot feels a resonance in his heart from a deep-seated value impressed upon him by his parents in his childhood.
Because very often we make decision so quickly and intuitively, we unfortunately underappreciate the power of ideas in shaping our actions. Certainly, Torah concepts, which from the outset, already make up a totally foreign world, seem entirely irrelevant to our lives. And when we hear someone make a big deal about an extra letter here or a word-choice there, we assume they've spent a sufficient amount of time learning Torah to lose their minds. But therein lies the key.
The Almighty values wisdom more than we can possibly imagine. He sees the far-off consequences of us learning any one Torah concept we are sitting in front of, and is rooting for us to understand it. Just yesterday I saw how a concept in divorce law solved a problem in kashrut (Tos Yevamot 30b "Isha," Shach Y"D 50:1). The day before, I began to understand how G!d speaks to us through the events of our lives based off a concept in testimony law. In the invisible world of wisdom, behind the world of facts, nothing is irrelevant and every drop is powerful. After all, the Talmud teaches that the universe was created with a single letter (ה), imagine what you can do with the rest of the alphabet.
This dvar Torah is primarily based on the ideas developed by the Alter of Slobadka in the sefer Or haTzafun, under the title "Kne Midat Chochma."
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