Who Has Apportioned of His Wisdom to Those Who Fear Him / to Flesh and Blood

The Rabbi’s Opening Post

Who Has Apportioned of His Wisdom to Those Who Fear Him / to Flesh and Blood

Posted on 10/5/2006

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Who has apportioned of His wisdom to those who fear Him / to flesh and blood

As is well known, the Sages instituted a blessing for one who sees a sage from Israel or from among the nations of the world. For a sage from among the nations of the world: ‘Who has apportioned of His wisdom to flesh and blood,’ and for one who sees a sage from Israel: ‘Who has apportioned of His wisdom to those who fear Him.’ Today, Professor Aumann, the current Nobel Prize winner in game theory, is giving a lecture at Bar-Ilan University. A student asked me whether one should recite a blessing upon seeing him (he did not specify which of the two blessings—to flesh and blood or to those who fear Him). I immediately answered that one should not recite a blessing, since for a sage from Israel in other branches of knowledge (aside from Torah) no blessing is recited.

But afterward I wondered about that instinct. And so my questions to this holy community are as follows:

1. Why do we not nowadays recite a blessing upon seeing Torah sages?

2. Does one recite a blessing upon seeing sages of the nations (I have not seen this done), and what qualifies as a sage for this purpose (a Nobel Prize presumably meets the criteria, but one can debate prize recipients who are not quite so wise)?

3. And the most important question: is the division between Torah wisdom and other branches of knowledge still in force? As is well known, Aumann is also a Torah scholar, and he even uses his ‘external’ wisdom in such matters. He has several interesting proposals for deciphering difficult talmudic passages (one of them was discussed here in the past, regarding three people who contributed to a common purse, and the like). Personally, I find the division between Torah and other branches of knowledge very difficult. The boundary is not sharp, and to the best of my understanding it does not really exist. One can, however, argue on the basis of the sorites paradox that even a fuzzy boundary is still a boundary, and from a distance it certainly has two sides. Only the middle is fuzzy and broad (not merely the thickness of a line). Would we be prepared to say that every branch of knowledge is Torah? And what is wisdom at all? Is there a clear formal boundary between Torah and external wisdom, for the purpose of the blessing and in general?

4. Is there room nowadays to change our attitude toward Jews who are wise in other branches of knowledge, in light of the changed attitude toward those branches of knowledge generally (for their nature, too, has changed in recent generations)? What would the criterion for these blessings be, and more generally?

I emphasize that these questions concern both the laws of blessings, but even more so the essential distinctions, if any, between Torah and other branches of knowledge.

As possible background for the discussion, I will mention here a distinction I once made (also in a response in Tzohar, if I remember correctly, in issue 6) between person-centered Torah (= Torah whose definition as such depends on the individual’s relation to it and on what it does to him) and object-centered Torah (Torah in an objective sense, regardless of how the individual is affected by it or what he thinks about it). I will not bring concrete examples of the implications of this distinction (law, thought, narrative, and the like), because then a discussion would develop around them. For my purposes here, this is only a possible aid to the discussion.

Source (the forum “Stop Here, Think”): http://www.bhol.co.il/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=1912454