Why is the bathroom next to the houses of the wealthy? Because it is conducive to associations.
In the yeshiva where I studied, one of the guys, neither wise nor foolish, got swept up by Breslov. On Purim he got drunk, came in, and cried out in a tearful voice: “Rabbi, rabbi, I have wonderful Torah insights, but what do I do about the pride? Oh rabbi, the pride, what do I do?” One of the yeshiva teachers standing beside me leaned toward me and whispered quietly: “Too bad he didn’t come tell them to me. I’d calm him down by assuring him he has nothing to be proud of.”

Very nice, but less nice not to be generous. Maybe he really did have wonderful Torah insights? In any case, they seem at least wonderful in his own eyes, and that is enough for us. As our rabbis explained regarding the “falsehood” of “a beautiful and gracious bride” at the end of tractate Gittin: she is beautiful and gracious in her husband’s eyes, and therefore it is not false.

He was a world-class babbler. On the contrary, I’m actually a big fan of taking pride in achievements; I don’t connect to manipulative false humility, and I support openly complimenting friends for any real accomplishment. In that particular yeshiva, in the evenings I volunteered to be a listening ear for hire for anyone giving a study-group talk who couldn’t find someone to go into the details with him (I discovered this was a resource with very high demand and lower supply than the Dead Sea), and I got a pretty good picture of what was going on around me. It was only because of his self-importance that he thought the novelties were worth a penny in a hundred; he insisted on them against good objections and didn’t examine them all that much. And then he wailed about pride. That strikes me as ridiculous. Besides, all the “bad” traits are excellent engines, as is well known and well worn. The teacher whispered it only in my ear; he too was a bit tipsy and let the safety catch off.

Another association about that same teacher, may he live long and well:
There was a period when the yeshiva teachers would eat with us at the tables in the dining hall. Every time a teacher sat down, everyone would move over to talk with him about the Talmudic passage. I insisted on talking with him over food about the rest of the world’s vanities, and in general just talking with him about this and that; sometimes it would roll into Talmudic topics too, but not necessarily. In my opinion I got much wiser from this, and I also enjoyed it, and in general I discovered a far more multifaceted person with much more original and fascinating thought than others perceived him to be as having (as though his whole world consisted only of arranging the views of the medieval authorities in the passage. His classes really were monotonous in intonation, and if you weren’t paying attention it wasn’t clear whether what was now coming was an awesome foundational insight that suddenly clarified Rashba’s view, or some low-value little nuance in the wording of the glosses to Shaarei Dura, not unlike the ropes of a ship’s tackle at the end). And in fact, toward those who treated him with holy awe, he really did deal only in Torah, Torah, and preserved the image. From that I learned a general lesson: you have to allow a person to reveal other sides, and not imprison him inside a bubble of distant honor. Totally win-win.

By the way, in my opinion apprenticing oneself to a rabbi is also meant for this: to see other sides of the rabbi besides a furrowed brow delivering a serious lecture. It opens your mind to new angles and adds a general dimension, and sometimes more significant principles of thinking, and in general worldviews and ways of looking at things are revealed more in casual conversations about trifles than in meticulous precision in the medieval authorities. I discovered exactly the same phenomenon outside the yeshiva as well.

Well said and all the more so nicely sharpened.

With God’s help, 6 Av 5781

To Sand., greetings,

Your teacher’s analytical ability, both in the methods of the halakhic decisors and in worldly matters, comes from one trait: clear and orderly thinking, paying attention to rules and their details while relating to all aspects of the tension or contradiction.

From here also comes an answer to your friend’s concern about “pride” in the Torah insights he arrived at. After all, he did not “invent the method.” He is simply a good student applying the straightforward method of analysis he acquired from his teachers in the yeshiva, and when one analyzes a subject with order and clarity, one enjoys the sweetness of the ideas.

Usually, when you go straight, you find that earlier authorities already walked this path, and there is not really any “novelty” here, but only walking on the paved road.

With blessing, Yaron Fishel Ordner

About this I said, by way of wit, that when Rav Yosef said, “Do not teach about humility, for there is I,” he did not mean to boast that he was humble; rather, with his great breadth of knowledge he made all the students humble by showing them that all their innovations had already been said before (or refuted) by the earlier authorities. His breadth of knowledge left no room for anyone to take pride in his innovations, and thus they all became humble.

An example of an insight from one of the later authorities that had already been preceded by an earlier authority I found this week in Netiv Binah on prayer, which cites the author of HaKetav VeHaKabbalah explaining: “Forgive us, our Father, for we have sinned; pardon us, our King, for we have transgressed” — that after we have failed in “transgressions,” that is, acts of rebellion, we are ashamed to turn to the Holy One, blessed be He, as “our Father,” and instead as “our King.”

A similar idea appears in a Geniza fragment in which a listener recorded oral remarks he heard from Maimonides (and it was published in Tarbiz several decades ago). Rabbi Jacob Zvi Mecklenburg merited to arrive at Maimonides’ words.

And regarding thinking in the bathroom:
It happened to me personally that my toilet tank began to tilt to the side, and immediately the verse popped into my head: “And the course of the streams, which turned…” 🙂 And I immediately hurried the plumber to come fix it, so that he should not cause me to stumble into forbidden thoughts in the bathroom (aside from the fact that danger is treated more stringently than prohibition…).

With blessing, Y.F.O.R.

One of the best quips I’ve heard on “Do not teach about humility…”

“His name was Yankele Radishkover. He was a tremendous genius… but undoubtedly he was crazy… He published quite a few pamphlets in print… About one of them they said its title was ‘Crouching Beneath,’ because it contained insights he came up with while sitting in that little room. The common explanation from the title was that if the author himself was allowed to go in there, then all the more so it was permitted to bring in his book as well! When I asked him about it, he once answered me by explicitly showing me in the Jerusalem Talmud regarding Amoraim of whom it is said that ‘every difficult idea they had there, they would reason out there’!…
( https://www.bhol.co.il/forums/topic.asp?cat_id=24&topic_id=1316247&forum_id=1364 )