Читать книгу The Essential Agus - Steven T. Katz - Страница 31

Perhaps the most significant insight of Jewish ethics is its stress on the supreme value of learning and thought. Our entire literature bears the impress of this ideal. The prophets reproached the people for their lack of “the knowledge of God.”¹⁷ In the Ethics of the Fathers, the pillar of Torah is put before those of worship and deeds of charity.¹⁸ Hillel went so far as to assert “that he who does not learn is deserving of death.”¹⁹ The “houses” of Hillel and Shammai debated for several years as to whether learning is more important than good deeds.²⁰ They concluded that learning is indeed more important, for, in addition to its own worth, it ultimately leads to all kinds of good deeds.

In rabbinic literature, learning was not simply the totality of human wisdom, but the specific lore of Judaism—Torah, Talmud, and Commentaries. However, as a basic ideal, the pursuit of truth was implicit in the ardor of Torah-learning. The Torah was to be studied “for its own sake.” In the activity of the intellect we enter the company of the Divine, as it were.

Can we recapture this insight in behalf of our own age?

We seem to be living in an age of exploding education. The colleges are bursting with eager students, and the Federal Government is preparing to enter this field on an unprecedented scale. Still, the emphasis is utilitarian. Education is essential to prepare people for good jobs and to make it possible for them to learn new skills when their old jobs are no longer available. It is also a prerequisite for a healthy democracy. Accordingly, the emphasis is now placed on mass education and, in the universities, on the sciences.

But we need to realize that religion itself is expressed in part through the quest of truth and the acquisition of wisdom for its own sake. Learning must be understood as a high purpose of life, not merely as a way to improve one’s earning power. As Rabbi Zadok put it, we must not turn wisdom into “a spade with which to dig.” ²¹

This emphasis would, in the course of time, change the prevailing spirit in our academic campuses. Students would not be driven to equate learning with grades, and professors would not be pressed to “publish or perish.” Learning would be esteemed as a way of life, noble in its own right. Whatever professions we may choose, we need to acquire the zest for wisdom as the supreme value of the good life.

The new age of automation is likely to provide many people with leisure hours that they could well utilize in a continuous program of self-education. But education requires emotional, hence religious motivation: “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.”²²

In the Western World, the marks of a religious life have been identified almost exclusively with the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Noble as these qualities are, they can be easily suborned and put to the service of fanatics and benighted crusaders. Does not history afford a thousand illustrations of this melancholy fact? Indeed, the virtue of self-criticism is as essential to faith, personal or collective, as a steering wheel is to a car. The task of aggiornamento is a divine imperative for every generation and for every faith. It is the Word of God in action—“The soul of man is a candle of the Lord, searching his inmost parts.”²³

The practice of self-criticism is our only safeguard against the tyranny of the mob, which, as Plato warned us, is the peculiar disease of democracy. Mass education made possible the kind of totalitarian thought-control that even the medieval world did not know. The soft virtues of faith, hope, and charity are of little help in resisting totalitarian idolatry. Propagandists do not dispute the maxim “love your neighbor”; they merely distort the image of the neighbor into that of a monstrous fiend. And distortions of this type exert a peculiar appeal to the “pooled pride” of the people. Bloody crusades are far more likely to be initiated by calls addresed to man’s noblest instincts than by appeals to his selfishness. This is particularly true in our day, when nuclear war could only result in the total impoverishment, if not the annihilation, of mankind.

It would seem that only madness could drive the world to a nuclear holocaust. Yet, such madness will surely wear the mask of the Messiah—it will inaugurate the “Reich of a thousand years,” it will establish the “classless” society, it will “make the world safe for democracy.” Only the readiness of people to accept the scalpel of criticism as the cutting edge of faith is likely to protect us against a resurgence of the seductive delusions of pseudo-Messianism.