The Sotah and the Nazir

So much goes wrong in life, or at least not to our liking, that it is very tempting to see that life is just a big mistake. This was the subject of an ancient debate that went on for over two years between the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel that is reported in the Talmud (Eruvin 13b):

One says: It would have been preferable had humans not been created than to have been created. And the other says: It is preferable for humans to have been created than not created.

Ultimately, they took a vote and concluded: It would have been preferable had humans not been created than to have been created.

The sages concluded that we make such a mess of everything that the best thing for the world would have been if we human beings had never been created in the first place.

But that’s not how the story went, and we are here now, and the sages recognized that. That section of the Talmud continues:

Now that the human has been created, one should yifashpesh his actions. And some say: One should yimashmesh his actions.

Rashi explains: yifashpesh – “a person should examine the actions he has already done and examine the transgressions he has committed.”

He contrasts that to yimashmesh, which he defines through examples as considering your actions before you take them.

In either case, what the sages are saying is that now that human beings like you and me are here on earth, we should examine the deeds we have done as well as the ones we are considering doing.

The implication is that we have something to learn from examining our own experience. This idea became a cornerstone of the teaching of Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, a leading Mussar teacher who died only in 2005 and was a bridge back to the pre-war Mussar yeshivas of eastern Europe.

Rav Wolbe called this introspective process hitlamdut, which means “teaching yourself.” He based this teaching on the famous saying in Pirkei Avot (4:1) in which Ben Zoma asks, “Who is wise?” And then he answers that a wise person is “One who learns from every person.”

As I have written about in a few earlier posts, we learn important lessons about life by paying close attention to our own experiences and also the experiences of every person we have access to. Rav Wolbe encouraged hitlamdut as a relentless effort to learn from your own experience as well as those you see in others. He says, quite remarkably:

On this foundation of hitlamdut, …in all one’s dealings, one will seek only to learn from the experience, and this is literally until one’s last day. When one reaches the day of death, you won’t be dying—you will be learning how to die.

I’d like to zero in on a classic lesson that is derived from the Talmud. We find that in the Torah, the section about the nazir [a person who vows to abstain from wine, hair cutting, and contact with the dead for a period of time] immediately follows the section about the sotah [the suspected adulteress]. The commentaries (starting with the Talmud, Sotah 2a) feel there is meaning in the fact that these two sections are juxtaposed, though the reasons vary.

At the most basic, the association of these two sections is meant to teach that when a person sees another person in a debased and humiliating situation, they should abstain from wine. It is understood that wine loosens inhibitions, and the rabbis see a lack of inhibition as the root cause of the terrible situation the other person finds themself.

You might have thought that hearing about or seeing the humiliation of another person would be enough to teach a lesson to the observer, but we learn here that that is not the case. An all-too-common response to another person’s fall is to be content to stand in judgment of that other person, and maybe even to join the mob and pile on in reviling them. The nazir’s abstention from wine is an action that the person does that is focused on themself, not the other person, and it is meant to drive into their own heart the lesson that they need to learn which is valuable for their own spiritual ascent.

The real lesson here is not just about the sotah nor the nazir. It has to do with encountering events in our lives that ought to impact us in a deep and transformative way because they have something to teach us. If we treat those events as just information or if we just indulge a reaction, then we are taking no steps to draw into ourselves the spiritual impact that is our potential. Resolving to do an action that sharpens the penetration of the lesson into our deep inner recesses is how we activate the lesson and make it transformative for ourselves.

I have no prescription as to what kind of action one can take to drive home a lesson from experiences, your own or those of others. There are too many variables to devise a generic practice. Even the abstention from wine isn’t universal because some people don’t drink wine in the first place! It’s up to you to hear the lesson and then create for yourself a concrete action you can do that will speak to your own heart, and instill the lesson there, at the depths of who you are.

Is there a concrete action that you’ve taken in the past that helped you integrate an important lesson?