{"id":14978,"date":"2014-09-30T20:53:49","date_gmt":"2014-10-01T00:53:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2014\/09\/30\/14978.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:10:12","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:10:12","slug":"teach-and-learn-turn-and-turn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2014\/09\/30\/teach-and-learn-turn-and-turn\/","title":{"rendered":"Teach and learn, turn and turn"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>We begin the second verse (<a href=\"http:\/\/blb.sc\/12Nj\">Isaiah 17<\/a>) as we enter the home stretch of the Days of Awe.\n<p><Blockquote><p>Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; <strong>Learn to do well<\/strong>; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.<\/blockquote>\n<p>As I always bring up, the verb for <I>learn<\/i> and for <i>teach<\/i> are the same, as well they should be. I think a lesson, here, is that Isaiah doesn&#8217;t say <I>do the right thing<\/i>, but <i>learn to do the right thing<\/i>. When he is speaking to a generation in Israel whose hands are red with blood, it&#8217;s a powerful indictment that they don&#8217;t even know how to do the right thing. But when we, as the tradition suggests, read this verse <I>every year<\/i> what does it tell us? The first time, yes, we can be chastised and admit that we must learn to do the right thing. But the second year; what does it mean to us the second year? And the third? And the tenth?\n<p>Are we to believe that we forget righteousness, year to year, so thoroughly that we do not only need to remember but to learn all over again? Maybe that&#8217;s true. It would be hard to defend humanity, year to year, that we just need a little reminder. Or perhaps this is another injunction to turn it and turn it; for all we have learned in the past, we can always learn more about righteousness. Humility seems to suggest that is true as well.\n<p>Another possibility: read it in cycles, as <i>learn<\/i> one year and <i>teach<\/i> the next. We can&#8217;t help but do both simultaneously, though; the only way to really learn something is to teach it, and surely no-one can be said to truly have learned righteousness without passing it to others. Teach and learn, learn and teach; every year we both repeat what we know and learn new aspects of it. Turn it and turn it. Turn yourself and turn yourself. There is no end to it; everything is in it.\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger, having committed to one of these notes for each of the Days of Awe, cannot wait for inspiration but has to go with what he got.<\/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":[],"class_list":["post-14978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14978","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=14978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16530,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14978\/revisions\/16530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}