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We are at the last lines of the third paragraph of book 2 of ספר משלי.
כג תחנונים ידבר רש; ועשיר יענה עזות׃ כד איש רעים להתרעע; ויש אהב דבק מאח׃
א טוב רש הולך בתמו מעקש שפתיו והוא כסיל׃ ב גם בלא דעת נפש לא טוב; ואץ ברגלים חוטא׃ ג אולת אדם תסלף דרכו; ועל ה׳ יזעף לבו׃ ד הון יסיף רעים רבים; ודל מרעהו יפרד׃ ה עד שקרים לא ינקה; ויפיח כזבים לא ימלט׃ ו רבים יחלו פני נדיב; וכל הרע לאיש מתן׃ ז כל אחי רש שנאהו אף כי מרעהו רחקו ממנו; מרדף אמרים לו המה׃ ח קנה לב אהב נפשו; שמר תבונה למצא טוב׃ ט עד שקרים לא ינקה; ויפיח כזבים יאבד׃
And these last 11 psukim seem to jump around all over the place: poor and rich, making friends, bearing false witness. And the last theme is repeated in almost idential words: עד שקרים לא ינקה; ויפיח כזבים יאבד/לא ימלט. It seems that these last 5 psukim are meant to be a kind of conclusion, but it’s hard to see what. Actually, all of book 2 seems to jump around all over the place, but we’ve tried to pull together some sort of theme. We looked (in Horsefeathers)at the first paragraph as centered on חריצות, taking our words seriously because that means taking others (the ones we are speaking to) seriously. We saw the second paragraph (in There Are Some Things Money Can’t Buy) as a message to invest in the world around us. We have largely looked at this third paragraph as being about listening to others, not assuming we know everything. But I couldn’t figure out how to tie that idea with the psukim we’re looking at now.
And then I read a book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker. The book centers about an argument between two famous philosopers, Karl Popper (we looked at his political views in The Open Society and Its Enemies, but this was about philosophy) and Ludwig Wittgenstein, at Cambridge University in 1946.
Popper’s account can be found in his…autobiography, Unended Quest…According to this version of events, Popper put forth a series of what he insisted were real philosophical problems. Wittgenstein summarily dismissed them all. Popper recalled that Wittgenstein “had been nervously playing with the [fireplace] poker,” which he used “like a conductor’s baton to emphasize his assertions,” and when a question came up about the status of ethics, Wittgenstein challenged him to give an example of a moral rule. “I replied, ‘Not to threaten visiting lectures with pokers.’ Whereupon Wittgenstein, in a rage, threw the poker down and stormed out of the room, banging the door behind him.”
[According to others who were there, Popper wasn’t as clever as he made himself sound, and only thought of the bon mot after Wittgenstein left.]
Wittgenstein was famous as a philosopher of language, who insisted that the only meaningful statements were statements of observable, verifiable facts. Anything else was just babble. Better not to say anything.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
He later decided that things were worse than that,
The problem with logical analysis is that it demands too much precision, both in the definition of words and in the representation of logical structure. [T]he hope of developing an ideal formal language that accurately pictures the world is not only impossibly difficult but also wrong-headed…
[T]here is no reason to hope that any better versions of these basic positions will ever come along. Claims to have achieved a correct, final analysis of language are invariably mistaken. Since philosophical problems arise from the intellectual bewilderment induced by the misuse of language, the only way to resolve them is to use examples from ordinary language to deflate the pretensions of traditional thought. The only legitimate role for philosophy, then, is as a kind of therapy—a remedy for the bewitchment of human thought by philosophical language…
It is misleading even to attempt to fix the meaning of particular expressions by linking them referentially to things in the world. The meaning of a word or phrase or proposition is nothing other than the set of (informal) rules governing the use of the expression in actual life.
Like the rules of a game, Wittgenstein argued, these rules for the use of ordinary language are neither right nor wrong, neither true nor false: they are merely useful for the particular applications in which we apply them.
(That was the essence of the argument between Popper and Wittgenstein.)
He ends up concluding that we can never communicate what we actually feel, and therefore all language is just a game we play with each other.
Wittgenstein [argues] against the possibility of a private language, which culminates in the position that all subjective experiences of sensations are not communicable. Thus, language must be doing something else, other than communicating inner experiences, with its words that seem to refer to these experiences.
What does any of that have to do with ספר משלי?
תחנונים ידבר רש; ועשיר יענה עזות׃
The poor man begs and the rich man is arrogant. This doesn’t sound like ethical advice; Malbim takes it literally but has to warp the meaning of יענה to mean “control”.
תחנונים ידבר רש: אם הרש מדבר תחנונים ומתחנן, אז העשיר יענה ויכניע את העזות, שגם אם הוא עז בטבעו יכניע טבעו למלאת תחנוני הרש.
My thought, after reading about Wittgenstein, is that he is wrong. Some people can understand others, while others lack any “social intelligence”. There’s a spectrum; at one extreme we have “Autistic Spectrum Disorder”; at the other we have the person who walks into a room of strangers and is instantly best friends with all of them. That, I would propose, is the “rich” and “poor” of these psukim. And that connects it to the next pasuk:
איש רעים להתרעע; ויש אהב דבק מאח׃
The רש has to beg for friends; the עשיר is the איש רעים, but that isn’t necessarily real friendship; התרעע is a pun on רעים that means “rotten”.
תניא, רבי אומר: לעולם אל ירבה אדם רעים בתוך ביתו, שנאמר: אִישׁ רֵעִים לְהִתְרוֹעֵעַ.
איש רעים: כבר אמרו המחקרים כי הקונה אוהבים רבים אפילו אחד אין לו, כי האהבה יחידה היא, וכל שתתרבה בטלה ונפרדה, וז״ש מי שי״ל רעים הרבה…ובאמת אין לו ריעים.
ויש אוהב: אם יש לו אוהב אחד אז הוא דבק מאח, וזה גדר האהבה, שתגדל על כל האהבות גם מאהבת אחים.
So what do I do if I am a רש? Be honest; don’t use flattery to create friends. That leads to איש רעים להתרעע.
א טוב רש הולך בתמו מעקש שפתיו והוא כסיל׃ ב גם בלא דעת נפש לא טוב; ואץ ברגלים חוטא׃
Warping your words is foolish. You have to know yourself—בלא דעת נפש לא טוב, and not push too hard: אץ ברגלים חוטא.
ואץ: ענין מהירות כמו (יהושע י:יג) וְלֹא־אָץ לָבוֹא.—מצודת ציון, משלי יט:ב
This kind of foolishness just makes you miserable.
אולת אדם תסלף דרכו; ועל ה׳ יזעף לבו׃
אולת אדם תסלף דרכו: בעונו בא לו הרע, כי באולתו תסלף דרכו ועבר עבירות ונפרעין ממנו, ובבוא לו הצרה זועף לבו על הקדוש ברוך הוא וממהר אחר מדת הדין, כגון אחי יוסף שאמרו (בראשית מב:כח) מַה זֹּאת עָשָׂה אֱלֹהִים לָנוּ. —רש״י, משלי יט:ג
To summarize:
הון יסיף רעים רבים; ודל מרעהו יפרד׃
But fundamentally Wittgenstein is right. We are all רש, poor, in understanding the other. Other people have an infinitely deep inner self that they cannot communicate fully; therefore you cannot really know another person.
The distinction between totality and infinity divides the limited world, which contains the other as a material body, from a spiritual world. Subjects gain access to this spiritual world, infinity, by opening themselves to the Otherness of the other.
And that connects to the themes of this paragraph of being quiet and listening rather than assuming you know the other: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Telling someone what they really mean or think is called “gaslighting”.
Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a perpetrator intentionally sows doubt in a victim’s mind about their own perceptions, memories, or sanity, often through denial, misdirection, contradiction, or misinformation.
But even when it’s not intentional, not acknowledging the “infinity” of others is עדות שקר.
ה עד שקרים לא ינקה; ויפיח כזבים לא ימלט׃ ו רבים יחלו פני נדיב; וכל הרע לאיש מתן׃ ז כל אחי רש שנאהו אף כי מרעהו רחקו ממנו; מרדף אמרים לא [לוֹ] המה׃
The way to true friendship is to be the איש מתן, generous and giving. Being עשיר in the metaphorical sense that we are using it here makes you a איש רעים but it doesn’t make you a good person. We’ve talked about con men before:
A con man is essentially a salesman—a remarkably good one—who excels at making people feel special and understood. A con man validates the victim’s desire to believe he has an edge on other people…It’s an amazing paradox—a con man has incredible emotional insight, but without the burden of compassion.
And פסוק ז has a קרי/כתיב between לו and לא. We see a similar one in ספר תהלים:
דעו כי ה׳ הוא אלקים; הוא עשנו ולא [וְלוֹ] אנחנו עמו וצאן מרעיתו׃
We looked at that in Gratitude. The pasuk can be read either way; both words, even though they see contradictory, are true.
הוא עשנו ולא אנחנו, the כתיב, is a statement about creation. ה׳ created the world and therefore we need to serve Him. הוא עשנו ולו אנחנו, the קרי, is about relationship. ה׳ not only created us but made us His people.
The same is true here. מרדף אמרים—one who chases friends with words—לא המה: those friends will not be theirs. And also לוֹ המה—those words will be theirs; the words of עד שקרים will rebound to affect them. חז״ל connect this to the story of יוסף:
מרדף אמרים לא המה:…והמדרש פותרו ביוסף שהיה מוציא על אחיו דבה, ואמר לאביו שהן חשודין על אבר מן החי, לכך שנאוהו ונקרא רש לפי שהיה מוציא דבת שקר עליהם. ומחזר אחר אֲמָרִים לֹא הֵמָּה….ולענין יוסף לוֹ הֵמָּה, כי עליו חזרו דבתו הוא היה אומר שהיו אוכלים אבר מן החי והכתוב מעיד עליהם אפלו בשעת הקלקלה היו שוחטין שעיר עזים שנאמר (בראשית לז:לא) וַיִּשְׁחֲטוּ שְׂעִיר עִזִּים. הוא אמר שהיו מזלזלין בבני השפחות לכך (תהלים קה:יז) לְעֶבֶד נִמְכַּר יוֹסֵף, הוא אמר שהיו נותנים עיניהם בבנות הארץ אמר הקדוש ברוך הוא חייך שאני מגרה בך את הדב לכך (בראשית לט:ז) וַתִּשָּׂא אֵשֶׁת אֲדֹנָיו וגו׳.
So know yourself, recognize your infinite depth, and understand that others are infinitely deep as well.
ח קנה לב אהב נפשו; שמר תבונה למצא טוב׃ ט עד שקרים לא ינקה; ויפיח כזבים יאבד׃
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