Still with Hillel, and the twelfth verse.\n
He used to say: A name made great is a name destroyed; he that does not increase shall cease<\/strong>; he that does not learn deserves to die; and he that puts the crown to his own use shall perish.<\/blockquote>\nThis is assumed to refer to knowledge, and as such is entirely true. It’s true in Torah study, as things committed to memory and not used or added to tend to fade. It’s much more true, of course, in any field of knowledge that deals with the continually changing world. If you knew something about atomic physics or botany or computers or gastroenterology or phonetics or auto repair that you learned twenty years ago and haven’t added to since, the odds are that even if you remember it accurately (and you likely enough don’t) it’s wrong. Or if not absolutely wrong, inapplicable.\n
Again, as with the great name, this is observable fact about the world. It is also an ethical teaching, as this aspect of the world is easy but harmful to ignore. The commentary on this verse is clear that the verse as a whole is about humility.\n
When I read the Avot<\/I> for myself, this is a verse I tend to dwell on, just a bit. My own personal vices are laziness and arrogance; I can’t be arsed to do anything about sloth at this point, but I struggle with pride all the time. This Tohu Bohu has actually become a tool for me in that struggle, although not as good a tool as the Pirke Avot<\/i>. One of the ways this verse, and the Avot<\/i> generally, help me in the struggle is to remind me that the opposite of arrogance is humility, not humiliation. That between destruction of your name through vain greatness and the destruction through failing to increase is work, not for my own sake, but for the sake of something better.\n
So for me, I take the increase in the text as not just about knowledge of the Scripture, or about knowledge at all, necessarily, but about, well…they say that a noble spirit embiggens the smallest man. It’s about embiggening.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger inexplicably fails to make a dick joke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-11862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture","tag-pirkeavot"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11862"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18675,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11862\/revisions\/18675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}