As we said last time, Shlomo’s real חכמה was in teaching מוסר, character development; how to be the best human being possible. ספר משלי is the compendium of his advice, and it’s all short, almost trivial, verses. As Ramchal says in his introduction to מסילת ישרים:
But learning and re-learning these things is still critical.
And the implication of these terse apodictic statements is that there is a single correct answer to every question in human relationships. It’s clearly not literally true.
But this approach of משלי is an inherent part of its philosophy. It is one of three books of תנ״ך that have their own unique טעמים: איוב, משלי and תהילים; together they are called “ספרי אמ״ת”. We talked about this when we began studying תהילים, back in Smooth Rock. Calling them books of “אמת” is clearly significant, but what do they have in common that separates them from other “philosophical” books like קוהלת? My answer is that these books are the ones that deal, as their major focus, with the fundamental question of Jewish philosophy, צדיק ורע לו—why do bad things happen to good people; the problem of theodicy. There are three classical Jewish answers, given in these three books:
ה׳'s wisdom and plan is too deep for human beings to understand. He is good, but in our limited perspective we may not comprehend His goodness. This is expressed in איוב.
The evil that befalls the good and the reward of the wicked are just; everything that happens to a person is deserved. Bad things that happen to good people is because of the (possibly minor) sins they have committed. This is expressed in משלי.
גם זו לטובה. What seems to be a bad thing will be seen to actually to have been for a person’s benefit, not in some vague unknowable sense, but within the person’s own experience. This is the approach of תהילים.
We need to emphasize that none of these are answers to the question of צדיק ורע לו, they are approaches. There is no answer, and, as human beings, we have to accept that. Not even Moshe could get that answer from הקב״ה.
But to live our lives we need ways of thinking about theodicy, and one of those (that will be appropriate for some people, in some situations) is ספר משלי: bad things don’t happen to good people. Follow this advice and all will go well.
It is instructive to compare משלי to Shlomo’s other Book of Wisdom, ספר קהלת. קהלת is not about theodicy; it is about existentialism. What is the point of our lives if we are going to die? The universe existed before we existed, and will continue to exist long after we are gone. The book goes through twelve chapters of debate but reaches a conclusion in its penultimate verse:
The ספרי אמ״ת start from that conclusion. Our חכמה, understanding of how the world works and how it ought to work, starts from יראת ה׳.
ספר קהלת is the prerequisite to ספר משלי. We have to start from a position of יראת ה׳ before we can learn מוסר. Ethical rules have to be tied to the acknowledgement of a higher power, because human brains aren’t smart enough to understand the interactions of more than a few other human beings or the consequences of our actions beyond a short time.
Even the wisest of all men had to say (קהלת ז:כג) אמרתי אחכמה והיא רחוקה ממני. If we try to create absolute rules for evaluating human actions, we inevitably end up justifying immoral behavior. One example is utilitarianism, that we can quanitate the value of a life, and so having more miserable people is better than fewer happy people.
So we have a problem, from משלי's point of view. Good things happen to good people, but we’re not smart enough to be good people.
The other option for developing ethics is deontological ethics.
This sounds appealing to the halachic mind, since the rules are divinely determined. But applying rules without thinking about consequences also ends up immoral.
So we end up with what is called
virtue ethics: be a good person and your actions will be good. Practice doing the right thing in cases that aren’t hard, and you will develop your moral intuition for the actual hard decision. Aristotle called this “phronesis”.
I will use the words ethics and morality to refer to two different things (I think Rav Lichtenstein defined them this way, but I can’t find the source). Others use those words differently, but the concepts need to be destinguished. “Ethics” is a set of rules of behavior that can be thought about and reasoned with. “Morality” refers to a person’s intuition about what is right and wrong. Both refer to the rules of interpersonal relationships; ethics are of the mind and morals are of the heart.
Pure ethics is impossible; human minds are too limited. However, our moral intuition is determined not by some inherent moral-o-meter that we are born with, but by the things we see other people doing. We discussed this in Let Me Count the Ways ס.
We are social primates, and “right” means “what everyone does”. But, our brains don’t understand “fiction”. Observing something over and over in any context makes it normal and therefore moral. That is what makes TV, movies and videos so powerful and so potentially dangerous. What we see is what is right.
So the first step in achieving חכמה, phronesis, is to choose the right stories.
The Torah starts with בראשית, the stories of the אבות, because we need more than black and white rules, halacha, in our interpersonal relationships. בראשית is called ספר הישר.
So Shlomo, trying to teach his חכמה, does not give a list of algorithms. He gives short, memorable statements, parables, metaphors aimed at engaging both our minds and our hearts.
So we come back to יראת ה׳ as the sense of distance from Divine Authority. We listen even though we cannot fully understand. And our imperfect understanding means that our משלים, apothegms, need to be משלים, parables.