Give to the Wise, and He Grows Wiser

As King Solomon wrote: “Give to a wise person, and he will grow wiser still. Teach a righteous person, and he will add to his learning.” The Pressure to Be Right There is a pressure we all know. It is the pressure to be “right.” To hold your position. Not to budge. Because if someone changes his mind, what will people say about him? Fickle. Weak. Inconsistent. But one short verse turns this whole idea upside down: “Give to a wise person, and he will grow wiser still.” Put simply, bring a wise person new information and he becomes wiser. More and more. The question is obvious. The wise person already knows! He already has an opinion. He has already formed a position. So why is he the one who will “grow wiser still”? Maybe it is the simple person, who has not formed any views yet, who has room to take something in? Wisdom Comes from Nothing To understand the verse, we have to understand what wisdom itself really is. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, author of the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, explains a verse from the Book of Job. In his reading, it says: “Wisdom is found from nothing.” Wisdom comes from a place of “nothing.” That is why the Hebrew word for wisdom can be read as “the power of ‘what?’” It is the power of setting the self aside. Wisdom is not a pile of stored-up knowledge. It is not an understanding that has already been built and set in place. It is the very first point where a person meets a new truth and says simply: “True. I didn’t see it that way.” This means that the “wise person” of the verse is not someone who has a lot of knowledge. He is someone who has a lot of… emptiness. His existing opinion does not weigh on him so heavily that it stops him from seeing a new truth when it appears. That is why “give to a wise person, and he will grow wiser still.” When you give him something, like a new piece of information or an angle he hadn’t seen, it finds an empty vessel in him, ready to receive. He takes it in. And he grows wiser. The Other Side: Consistency That Protects the Ego Now ask yourself: when the “consistent” person refuses to change his mind, what is he really protecting? Not the truth. If his opinion is wrong, his consistency is only protecting the mistake. What he is actually protecting is his ego, his sense of being “somebody.” It is his image of himself as someone who knows. Someone who doesn’t make mistakes. Someone who never has to take back what he said. In the language of Hasidic teaching, this is self-importance. It is arrogance of the mind. This person is not “consistent” because he is strong. He is consistent because he is a vessel filled to the brim, with no room for even one more drop. So he stays “consistent.” He is consistent in his mistake. This is exactly the new insight of the verse. How quickly you can change your mind is a measure of how well you can set the self aside. The faster a person can clear away his mental ego and take in a new truth, the deeper his “power of ‘what?’” runs. The school of Hillel, the disciples of the great sage Hillel, proved this in their own way. Their greatness was not only in their sharp minds and their depth. It was also in the fact that they would state the views of the school of Shammai, their rival school, before their own. A person who has truly set himself aside is not afraid to put someone else’s opinion ahead of his own, even when it contradicts his. What This Means for Serving Hashem Young married man, working man: has this thought ever crossed your mind? “I’m already used to doing it this way. I’ve studied this way for years. I already knew that.” That is exactly the point where growth stops. Not from a lack of talent. From a lack of setting the self aside. In serving Hashem, the “wise person” is someone who is ready, at every moment, to hear something new. He is ready to hear it about himself, about how he understands the Torah, about the way he raises his children, about an old habit in his prayer. And he is ready to say: “True. I didn’t see it that way.” He can say it without feeling that he is losing anything. Because what is he losing? His ego. And the ego is exactly what stands in his way. True Consistency True consistency is not holding on to one opinion. It is being consistent in a state of mind. That means a state of setting the self aside, of being an empty vessel, of being willing to take in more. That is the wise person of the verse. “Give to him,” and before you have even finished your sentence, he is already adjusting, taking it in, examining it. This is not because he has no position. It is because the truth matters to him more than his position.