We’re realio trulio going to talk about the first verse of Chapter Two now.
Rabbi (Jehudah the Prince) was in the habit of saying: “In choosing the right path, see that it is one which is honorable to thyself and without offence to others. Be as scrupulous about the lightest command as about the weightiest, for no man knoweth the result of his actions. Weigh the present temporal disadvantages of a dutiful course against the reward of the future, and the present desirable fruits of a sinful deed against the injury to thine immortal soul. In general, consider three things and thou wilt never fall into sin: remember that there is above thee an all-seeing eye, an all-hearing ear, and a record of all thine actions.”
This is Michael L. Rodkinson’s translation, because it’s on-line and I can cut and paste, saving wear and tear on my fingers. Other translations phrase it in a positive, rather than a negative frame (that which brings him honour from others), and I can’t easily tell which is in the Hebrew, and even if I could, I don’t know the nuances of negative and positive phrasing. I think it makes a big difference, whether the path is one that actively brings praise from others, or just avoids their censure.
At any rate, want I usually think about, regarding this verse, is the humility and modesty of it. If you look at the grid of outcomes, nobody really thinks that the actions that both you and other people find dishonorable are good, and the actions that other people praise but you think are dishonorable are probably not so good. It’s the third category, the stuff that you think is fine but other people don’t that is the tricky one, and what I think Judah is saying is that if you can’t persuade the community of the rightness of your actions, you need to consider whether the community is right and it’s you that’s wrong.
Now, there are of course times when the standards of the community are awful, so Judah the Prince doesn’t rule out this category as such. But he implies, I think, that it’s clearly better to persuade the community. There’s no badge of honor in the community calumniating you; even when you must earn their disdain in the service of Justice, Love and Stuff, there’s a bit of fail in it, too.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Wow, huh, you went a completely different direction in that than I did when I read it. “Without offence to others” sounded to me like “doing no harm” to others, and not so much whether you got calumniated (great word!) by them. I would never have thought about the question of what happens when you think you’re doing the honorable thing but the community disagrees. That’s the distinction in the translations, I guess–“without offence to others” implies they aren’t hurt by it, but “bringing honor from others” requires that they actually actively agree with your course of action.
Which again, is what you said. 🙂 But my individualist protestant American heart objects to the idea that if the community agrees with you it’s somehow better than if they don’t. What would John Wayne or Gary Cooper have said, after all?? ::chuckle::
Well, if they were talking to each other. It’s an interesting example, as during the Blacklist, John Wayne of course thought that he was right in trying to break what he saw as communist control over the industry, and thought that he was defying the (film-making) community by supporting the blacklist. Gary Cooper thought that he was right in making Carl Foreman’s High Noon, and that he was defying the (national) community by making this allegory about the blacklist.
Were their actions, their movies, an attempt to gain the praise of their communities for their ethical choices? Should they have both hesitated to defy their communities? It’s easy for me to say John Wayne was wrong, and Gary Cooper was right, and to work from that angle, but I think it’s more complicated than that…
Thanks,
-V.
Your discussion here treats the end of the sentence as “without offence to others [in your community]”. The individual vs. the community is a strong trope, but each individual’s community in a crowded world is a subset of all other individuals that we choose to act as our community. Rabbi Jehudah the Prince could be saying not just that we should avoid giving offence to our community, but that we need to choose our community based on shared values.
Hm. Interesting that I didn’t see that. I think there was an assumption, for Rabbi and his group, that there was a community of choice within the larger community, and that community of choice had shared values, because, you know, they were all Jews. At any rate, I think that whether it is getting praise from others or avoiding the censure of others, the others in question aren’t so other as all that.
Thanks,
-V.