Correct a Wise Person, and He Will Love You

King Solomon wrote: “Do not correct a mocker, or he will hate you. Correct a wise person, and he will love you.” Opening Many people share a simple idea about friendship and love between friends. Two people are close because they have something in common. They hold similar opinions, like similar things and see the world in similar ways. As long as they agree, the friendship is alive and growing. But ask yourself: what happens on the day your friend truly disagrees with you? Suddenly something in the “friendship” cracks. Sometimes it breaks completely. This raises a sharp question. If their love could not survive one disagreement, what exactly did they love? Their friend, or themselves? The Broken Mirror Here is a simple but powerful picture. A friendship built on agreement is really just a mirror. In your friend you see your own opinions, your own tastes and your own positions. They come back to you like a beautiful echo. You call it “love.” But really, you love the reflection of yourself that you see in him. The moment your friend disagrees with you, the mirror “breaks.” And then what happens? He has become a stranger. This is not because he changed. It is because he stopped reflecting you. What you loved was the “you” inside him, and now it is gone. So it turns out you never loved him at all. You loved yourself. Our Sages put it this way in Ethics of the Fathers, a classic collection of their teachings: “Any love that depends on something: when that thing is gone, the love is gone.” There it is. As long as the “something” is there, the love is there. That “something” is the agreement, the likeness, the common ground. The moment it disappears, the love fades away. A love like that never touched the person himself. King Solomon’s Surprise Here King Solomon surprises us with a few short, deep words: “Correct a wise person, and he will love you.” At first this seems the complete opposite of common sense. If I correct my friend, disagree with him and reject his opinion, why should he love me more? Doesn’t being corrected hurt? Doesn’t it feel threatening and challenging? But this is exactly the surprise. The wise person is not looking for a mirror. He is not looking for someone who will approve his opinions and hand him back his own image. He is looking for the truth. He wants a friend who values him, his inner self and his longing for truth, more than his comfort and his need to be agreed with. When you correct him, you show that you believe there is someone inside him who can listen and think it over. You show that you are bound to him, not to your own image in him. That is exactly why “he will love you.” You have proven to him that you love him, and not the “mirror” in him. The Deeper Meaning Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, author of the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, explains a deep idea in chapter 32 of the Tanya. The true bond between Jews does not come from the animal soul, the natural, physical side of a person. On that level there are differences of opinion, different tastes and a natural distance between people. The true bond comes from the divine soul, and the root of the divine soul is one and the same in all of us. As the Bible says, “One Father for all of us.” So any love that rests only on what two animal souls have in common is on the outside and will pass. But a bond that touches your friend’s divine soul is a bond with his very self. It does not depend on sharing the same opinions, so no disagreement can cancel it. Now we can understand what we said before. The wise person in the verse “Correct a wise person, and he will love you” answers being corrected with love. He feels that his friend is reaching him at his inner point, his longing for truth, which is what the divine soul wants. His friend is not touching the outer point of “echo” and “approval.” This is a love that does not depend on anything, and so it never ends.