A little late with the fifth verse, which is back to Hillel:
Hillel was in the habit of saying: “Do not isolate thyself from the community and its interest. Do not rely upon thy spiritual strength until the day of thy death. Pass not judgment upon thy neighbor until thou hast put thyself in his place. Say not a thing which must not be heard, because eventually it will be heard, Say never, ‘Sometime or other, when I enjoy leisure, I will attend to my spiritual advancement’; perhaps thou wilt then never have the leisure.”
This is a long fellow, isn’t it. Let’s start at the beginning.
The advice not to isolate yourself from the community and its interest is aimed at rabbis, although of course I insist that you can take the advice without having that position. I mean, I think Hillel is talking about the temptation for a rabbi who acts as a judge to keep himself remote from his neighbors out of either a misplaced desire for dignity (to resound to the benefit of the Law) or a concern about impartiality. Or from being an asshole, of course, but I tend to think that Hillel is more concerned about advising people who are already trying not to be assholes.
Seriously, though, I think that this is important. Don’t keep apart from the community and its interest. Don’t be a hermit. You have to decide what community you’re talking about, of course, and you have plenty to choose from. But I think you have to chose one, or two or three, and then be involved in it. Or you have to choose them all; Hillel puts the phrase in the negative, that you shouldn’t be apart from the community, so it’s not a matter of choosing and getting involved, it’s a matter of never cutting yourself off from any of them. Your work, your family, your neighborhood, your state, your town, the people who do similar work, the people who live in similar towns, the people who read similar books. Don’t isolate yourself from the community. And its interest.
Why not? Take the second leg: your spiritual strength is not enough. Oh, it’s good to have spiritual strength, but you can’t count on it. Your heart may be pure, you may have the strength of ten, but that’s today, under your current circumstances, and frankly, if you are reading this blog, your current circumstances are probably pretty damned good. And maybe they will stay like that. Maybe they won’t. Maybe there will be some sort of temptation, some sort of provocation, something that will overwhelm your own resources. And if you stood apart from the community, then your own resources are all you have.
And, seriously, those resources probably aren’t that great. And, you know, holding yourself apart from the community is a terrible way to build up resources, anyway. So I’ll take these two together as one idea, and a good one, too.
The third bit, here, about not judging your neighbor until you’ve put yourself in his place is one of those trite things that it’s very hard to pay attention to, really, because you’ve heard it since you were six. I’ll try to freshen it up for myself by tying it to the first two. Which is to say, you actually should put yourself in your neighbor’s place, by both being part of the community, and working for its interests. Then, your spiritual strength not being reliable, you rely on that of your neighbor, and he on yours. And then you judge.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.