Pirke Avot, verse seventeen: Silence

Well, and Your Humble Blogger is certainly slowing down on this Pirke Avot project, hunh? Perhaps we need justification for that. Here’s the next verse in Judah Goldin’s translation:

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.

Interestingly, R. Travers Herford spends a good deal of time discussing whether Simeon his son means Simeon the son of Gamliel, who was the speaker in the last verse, or whether the two verses were switched early on and this verse refers to Simeon the son of Hillel. The next verse will specifically refer to Simeon the son of Gamliel, which could mean that this one refers to Simeon the son of Hillel—or the next verse could be referring to Gamliel’s great-grandson, since Simeon the son of Gamliel has a son named Gamliel who has a son named Simeon. You see?

This is important because although Hillel’s son Simeon is briefly head of the House of Hillel, he is not quoted or referred to in the Talmud; if this is his saying, it is his only one, which given the saying, seems appropriate. If, on the other hand, this is a saying of Simeon the son of Gamliel (that is, the son of the first Gamliel), then it is harder (says Mr. Herford) to reconcile with what we know of him as a leader, both in the Talmud itself and Josephus. The rabbinic commentary all is clear that this is the later Simeon, but then the rabbinic commentary is unwilling to accept the possibility that the two verses were switched at some early point.

This leads us to two paths of interpretation: is the speaker, and therefore the advice, actually retiring from public debate, keeping silence as much as possible, minimizing words, and deprecating study? Or is the speaker a leader and speaker, deep in the thick of the political, ethical and academic arguments of his time, talking about silence and speech within that context? My own preference is for the latter. When Simeon (whichever Simeon he is) talks about nothing being better than silence, I don’t want him to be talking about silence as a habit, as a constant practice. No, I want him to be talking about silence as an effort, as a deliberate choice on the occasions that require it. As it would be for me.

I loathe silence, myself. I don’t just mean that I talk a lot, to hear the sound of my own voice, I mean that I find the lack of sound to be creepy and disorienting. I have music playing right now; I have music playing whenever possible. I have the ratatat of my fingers on the keyboard, the shuffle of papers nearby where somebody is working on something, and the fainter noises from outside the wall of a Spring Day on a college campus. And I would describe this as pleasantly quiet. I no longer like very high decibels, but I sure do hate silence. I know that Simeon is not talking about the lack of sound, but the lack of speech, but there, too, I like to fill in silence (or even comparative quietness) with chatter. Yes, I like the sound of my own voice (it’s a pleasant sound, I think) but I also like the sound of other voices. Yours, for instance.

And then, I’m a democrat. I like the voices of the crowd, the vox as it were populi, although as a democrat I am very skeptical of it as a single vox. I like it when lots of difference voices and experiences are brought into the national conversation (and the local ones, too); I think that when as voices drop out, the few that remain are the ones that are most powerful, the ones that already have the privileges, not least the privilege of continuing to speak. Silence = death, politically, and not just politically, either. If, as I once ranted, rust is what differentiates us from the Ancient Egyptians, sound is what differentiates us from the dead.

How, then, do I take the wisdom of Simeon, who grew up among the sages?

Perhaps, we think, that very act of growing up among the sages turned Simeon against sagery and study. All is vanity, sayeth the wise man, and all the wisdom of the wise is less than nothing. A warning, then, not about study per se but about the danger of too much study, of too much wisdom, in fact. An overdose. But then, what does that have to do with me? Not to knock my parents, nor yet my siblings, but I scarcely grew up among the sages all my life.

No, I prefer the other path.

This advice seems to be reminding me that at any given moment, the most perfect response may well be silence. Male Answer Syndrome aside, I do have the guy-training that an emotional problem or life complaint should be answered with advice or practical offers of help. I learned from Simeon (more than from Deborah Tannen or Carol Gilligan, I’m afraid) that where any individual piece of advice may be better or worse in a particular situation, flawed in a different way for different people (people being different one to another, which is what makes the world interesting and fun), silence always applies. A listening silence, not an excluding one. Not the lack of noise, but my conscious effort to refrain from contributing to the noise around.

For a while. At the right time.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.