We’re discussing Pirke Avot; I started with some general ideas about the discussion before we began, and now in order to facilitate some sort of coherent discussion that can be joined in and followed, I’ve broken the first verse into four notes. Here’s the verse:
Moses received the Law on Sinai and delivered it to Joshua; and Joshua to the Elders; and the Elders to the prophets; and the prophets to the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be not hasty in judgment; Bring up many disciples; and, Make a hedge for the Torah.
I broke out the first sentence, and I’ll talk about the first of the three things in this note, and then have separate threads disciples, and hedge. I hope this isn’t confusing. YHB is making it up as we go along, you know.
They of course are the men of the Great Assembly, who were responsible for interpreting the Law (both the Oral and Written) and adjudicating disputes. Although they claimed to be judicial, they really were a deliberative legislative body, capable of affirming a new rule (from an old principle) by agreement and enforcing it on the populace at large. They also had judicial powers, both as an assembly and individually. The sages would sit in panels at courts to judge what were effectively lawsuits; this was an important part of their training and their responsibility. The idea is not that these were the only things they said, either. You could think of it as they never shut up about these three things, or they wanted people to remember three important things, but the Text has just they said. And of course three. It’s a magic number. And good for remembering things. We’ll have a lot of threes here, and there is some use at looking at threes, at which things get combined together in a three, what the order of the three is, whether there is some attempt at balance, or at comprehensiveness, or at unity, or what. But at the moment, let’s go on to the first of the three that they said.
Be not hasty in judgment. Or be deliberate. From what I can make out, the positive phrasing is closer than the negative, but as bad as I am at Scriptural Hebrew, I’m much, much worse at the language of the Mishnah. My translations differ.
Anyway, this first saying is of course from magistrates and legislators to magistrates and legislators. They are certainly not saying don’t make judgments, because making judgments is a big part of their job. But they are saying don’t be hasty. The Vitry Machzur (compiled in the 12th Century by Simchah ben Samuel, who studied under Rashi) instructs that when a question of litigation comes to you, and you have already made a ruling on that same point before, twice before, four times before, still you must deliberate and not be hasty; you may discover something you overlooked before. When the saying widens out to us, the people of the land, who don’t rule in courts or make decisions about law, I think it loses something of it’s power. But of course, we make judgments and decisions all the time, and we hardly ever do it deliberately, that is, with deliberation. But I’ll also emphasize again that this collection of wisdom with an audience largely of people who do make judgments as part of their rabbinic duties places at it’s very head, the first thing that carries on the authority of the Great Assembly, the Prophets and Elders, Joshua and Moses and the Divine itself, is caution against haste in judgment, a reminder of humility and mercy. After all, if the Divine takes ten days between writing our lives in the Book and the Judgement on the Day of Atonement, shouldn’t we human judges allow ourselves some time for deliberation as well?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Being an INTP or an ENTP depending on when you poll my personality, I tend to find that I judge a good bit less hastily than my INTJ wife. Additionally, having judged, I am a good bit more flexible in allowing my judgments to be changed. There is something to be said for being able to argue from principle, which she is quite good at and which I find difficult without adopting a principled persona. Odd that I think of “principled” as analogous to… I don’t know. An “alignment” in DND maybe, a viewpoint that one can adopt in playing the role of one’s ego. What a nerd.
I think it’s an interesting perspective to discuss judgment in the context of a judiciary system, which is not one I immediately got from the text. My self-imposed context was “value judgments,” rather than literal, legal judgments. Probably the liberal Christian “gift to be simple” upbringing.
I like the notion of giving equal analytical weight to every case that crosses the docket, be it ever so similar to the last one. I think in practice that people accumulate wisdom, in the form of judgments we’ve made and the effects of those, to good and ill, and that we often rely on this wisdom, rather than analyzing the situation all over again. It’s nice to believe we can correct that tendency, or at least to hope we can and to suggest that we should.
Good advice, O ye sages.
peace
Matt
Re what Matt said: in theory i like that. But, hmm, this is maybe not very coherent, but… in real life, things happen faster than our deliberative process keeps up. If you decide to be deliberative about everything, how do you act on things that you haven’t gotten to yet? Final card random? Probably you just fall back on that wisdom anyway, whether or not you acknowledge that. And maybe the argument is, well, okay, we all do that, but it’s worth trying to be more deliberative more of the time.
That’s fine, but “Think about every case from scratch, even if you’ve seen a dozen like it before” just seems… unlikely. When i say “unlikely”, i mean it in the particular sense of “i don’t think i know anyone who lives that way”. Thoughts?
You know, quite a long time ago I came across a simple proverb: “suspend judgment.” I then promptly forgot the source (and google is, on this subject, useless), although I have a vague sense of it being an instruction of Buddha. “Suspend” is a stronger restriction than “be not hasty in” (or even “be deliberate in”) — but, interestingly (to me), it is not “don’t make,” either.
Also: Chaos demonstrates how Fluxx may be used as a tool to understand the Mishnah! May I be the first to say, “well played?”
Nice! I didn’t identify the reference, although it resonated. Milk and Cookies for Dan and Chaos, both!