Pirke Avot, verse seventeen: more Silence

So. I am still thinking about Simeon ben Somebody’s saying in Pirke Avot:

Simeon his son says: All my life I grew up among the sages and have found nothing better for anybody than silence; not study is the chief thing, but action; and he who is verbose brings on sin.

The rabbinical CW on the middle part is that study leads to action. The chief thing is action, but correct action, and we don’t know how to act without study. Therefore study is the chief thing, when viewed properly, but when involved in study, we tend to get caught up and fail to view it properly. Therefore Simeon’s warning. Which is not, the rabbis say, to avoid study, but to study with an eye to action. That is, the chief thing is still study, but the chief thing is to study while believing that the chief thing is action, so that study (which is, after all, the chief thing, without which correct action is impossible) does lead to correct action (which is, after all, the chief thing, for which the study is engaged). Study that does not lead to action is not properly speaking study at all; action that does not stem from study is not proper action at all.

Verbosity? I’m just getting started.

My point is this: did you know I was going to have a point? Was it guessable? My point is this: just as the advice not study is the chief thing, but action is good advice for those who like study, but lousy advice for those who like action, I take the advice on silence and verbosity to be for those who are not naturally reticent. Such as Your Humble Blogger.

I am not good at being silent. I’m not good at knowing when to stop speaking, or when not to start. I’m better than I was. I have been trying for fifteen years or more (and a good deal of the credit goes to Simeon, here) to remember that it’s OK not to share my opinion all the time, that it’s often better to let things go without my input, that my voice is not always required. That it’s all right, in the common phrase these days, to go to bed, even if someone is wrong on the internet.

There’s an ethical rule, I can’t remember where in the tradition, that says that saying something bad about someone is a Bad Thing, that is, that it always comes at an ethical cost. Obviously, if the thing you are saying is false, that’s clearly going to be a Bad Thing, whether you knew it was a lie or whether you were passing along a falsehood you thought was true. But even when the piece of information is true, saying it is a Bad Thing (in this view). Sometimes, of course, the consequences of not saying it are worse than the consequences of saying it. If you know somebody is about to go into business with a fraud and a thief, you have to warn her. Silence would be worse. But you have to make that judgment, and unless the consequences are clear and severe, you keep your mouth shut.

Now, I find that very appealing. I don’t adhere to it myself. I like to gossip, and enjoy saying good things about people more than saying bad things, strict adherence to the don’t-say-anything-nasty rule would give me a severe case of nerves. On the other hand, I have found it helpful to keep the rule in mind, even without following it. I have often wondered, when reading baseball threads, whether contributors think about the likelihood that, say, Barry Bonds’ children may spend a little time on-line seeing what people are saying about their daddy. I mean, I’ve Googled my father. And even if some of the stuff is true (and of course most people have no way of knowing that), the effect of it, well, perhaps I have too good an imagination.

On the other hand, the cost of not saying that Our Previous President had surrounded himself with a secretive cabal of crooks and incompetents seemed to me to be quite large. Even though my own knowledge of that statement’s truth is not necessarily any firmer than the abusive allegations against Mr. Bonds. And, surely, there was a cost to the failure to speak of earlier chemical abuses by other ballplayers. So it’s trickier than it seems.

And I think this verse is trickier than it seems. At least, I hope so. Because I’m left with the fact that I think that it’s bad advice, and I have benefited from it enormously.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.