Q&A: Measuring Wisdom
Measuring Wisdom
Question
Good evening, Rabbi,
Who is wiser, for example Maimonides or, say, the tanna Rabbi Yehuda or Rabbi Meir? What does the “decline of the generations” actually mean? Because how can one say that Rabbi Yehuda was wiser than Maimonides or Maran Rabbi Yosef Karo? After all, they dealt with the entire Torah and knew all the approaches on all the topics and all the novel insights that existed in their time, whereas Rabbi Yehuda seemingly knew only his own approach, or at most that of his teacher?
Answer
I do not know how to judge who is wiser. In my opinion, the concept of the decline of the generations does not describe a decline in intelligence, and certainly not in the scope of knowledge, which only increases. It is probably about closeness to the source, that is, the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. The closer a person is to the source, the better he intuitively understands the Torah and its language and intentions, like a native speaker of a language versus someone who learned it as an adult in an ulpan.
I have written about this more than once, and explained that there is no doubt that Rabbi Akiva Eger knew much more than Rabbi Akiva. He had to master an enormous amount of material, whereas in Rabbi Akiva’s time there were only mishnayot, and even those did not yet all exist. And I have no doubt that Rabbi Akiva could not have written analytical constructions like those of Rabbi Akiva Eger, and it is doubtful whether he would have understood them. In my book Two Wagons, in the third section, I described the decline of the generations and said that in analytic wisdom there is progress, whereas in synthetic wisdom, that is, intuitive grasp, there may be decline. But there are areas in which there is no doubt that we have an advantage over our predecessors.
In general, the authority of the sages of earlier generations does not stem from their greatness, but from the fact that we accepted them upon ourselves. This is formal authority, not essential authority. I also discussed this in my trilogy, No Man Controls the Spirit and Walks Among the Standing.
Discussion on Answer
My suggestion: we accepted the Holy One, blessed be He, and He revealed to us that the sages of the Talmud have authority regardless of their level of wisdom.
When did He say such a thing?
And if you would say, “Do not turn aside,” then say also, “who will be in those days” — in those days, and not in past days.
Why do we accept the authority of the Knesset? Is it because its members are wiser than all of us? No. It is because there has to be a framework within which the halakhic or legal discourse can operate. So too with the Talmud, with the added benefit of foresight: by establishing the authority of the Talmud, they managed to set a framework within which the miracle of the survival of halakhic discourse and the cohesion of the various communities took place. In my opinion, they could not have achieved this in any other way—not if they had set no authority and canon at all, and also not if they had established something like the Shulchan Arukh, which is too rigid. As I said, I have elaborated on this in several places, and I suggest you read there.
But wait a second—if their authority does not stem from their greatness, then why did we actually accept them over the generations????