Every human being, every animal, is born without knowing how to survive. We need to learn. We usually learn from a "father's instruction" and a "mother's direction" (Proverbs 1:8). From parents and others, we learn about reality and how to survive in it. And although our emotions are inescapable inborn instincts that cause us to cry already at birth, we even learn the best paths in which to direct our emotions to survive concrete reality – both physically and psychologically. And we pass that practical information on to the next generation.
Unfortunately, that is where both the yeshiva and academia have failed. Both the yeshiva and academia have ignored the classic role of education, which is to teach concrete information.
Instead, they have replaced real-life education with education in impractical reasoning that "rises above" life – whether it bases itself on concepts, values, or ideologies. And this has wrought a disaster.
How yeshiva and academia have failed
To explain, people have classically studied concrete knowledge. From those who came before us, we learned how to manage life under the conditions of our local geography. We learned the details of how to farm under our local climate, we learned what labor trades can be performed with our local physical materials, and we learned the business skills relevant to our local and regional economy. Moreover, we also learned specific norms and didactic stories. We were taught those that had successfully guided our generations of parents as individuals, as families, as societies. And for Jews, all of this was the core of Torah study. Torah was practical wisdom.
All Torah? Yes. For instance, the first passage of the Mishna (Berakhot 1:1) begins with a discussion of how early one can say the Shema reflection on one's day and go to sleep. And a farmer rabbi in that passage (R. Eliezer) says that one must not stay up late, while the majority urban rabbis say that one can stay up until midnight. Those are practical norms, and the Mishna teaches that the details differ for people of different conditions.
Moreover, the last law passage of the Mishna (Uqsin 3:11) also teaches a practical lesson. It discusses the earliest stage at which one must be careful to keep disease-contaminating sources away from honey. The beekeeper-farmer rabbis (Beit Shammai) say from the point that the bees are being smoked out. And the urban rabbis (Beit Hillel), who had solitary beehives and could not pollute the neighborhood with smoke, say from the point that the beehive is broken (which was done midday, while the bees were away). This, too, is a practical norm. Moreover, here, too, the Mishna teaches that the details differ for people of different conditions. And the same is true for all the Mishna's laws. They are all commonsense norms for managing life – whether as individuals, as families, or as societies.
Today, however, both the yeshiva and academia refuse to study even concrete laws and didactic stories as practical wisdom. Instead, they have replaced concrete real-life education with education of impractical reasoning that "rises above" life – whether it is based on concepts, moral arguments, or ideologies. To be sure, we often find ourselves in realities that differ in some ways from the conditions of past sources. That makes past sources of one specific tradition less useful. But the answer to that reality should be to study the norms and didactic stories of even more cultures.
Consider the question of eating a lot of animal fat. One can study the competing ancient Jewish and Inuit norms on this question. Biblical law proscribes tallow in favor of meat (Leviticus ch. 3). And one can notice that the proscription makes sense because tallow provides little more than what we call empty calories without iron, protein, and B vitamins – in contrast to meat. Inuit classically ate all an animal's fat. And one can notice that the unlimited consumption makes sense because calories are critical to surviving the cold, and because whale muktuk is the only local source of what we call vitamin C. Each tradition makes sense because each teaches successful norms for managing life under local conditions. And wherever we are in the world, we can compare the lessons from both traditions to ask how we should eat.
Moreover, even the yeshiva can compare laws and didactic stories from variant traditions. Traditional Jews did this in the past. We preserved a variety of traditions, such as the evening norms of both farmers and urbanists (above). And later in history, we preserved a variety of law and norm traditions from a wide range of Jewish cultures from a wide range of lands. For instance, in Jewish cultures in which people fully reclined when eating long meals, there was an absolute norm to recline at the Seder. In Jewish cultures in which people ate long meals sitting upright in chairs, with individuals merely sometimes leaning back comfortably, it didn't matter if someone had not forgotten to lean back (Shulhan Arukh, Laws of Pesach 472:7).
Each of these norms is a lesson on the appropriate way of celebrating a long meal under specific material conditions. And one can learn from each one. But the yeshiva does not do this anymore. It refuses to study the range of norms and didactic stories as concrete lessons. Instead, both the yeshiva and academia distortedly transform all that useful information into a mere jumping board for reasoning impractically – for reasoning directly from concepts, values, and ideologies.
This approach has wrought a disaster. It has wrought a reality in which we no longer produce sages. Instead, we produce people who refuse to work hard to see all the interacting parts of reality concretely, to see those parts and their interacting consequences as clearly and non-ideologically as possible. And people who cannot see and accept the unavoidable risks and costs/harms of every choice cannot be sages.
One cannot offer guidance if one dismisses the risks, costs, and harms of any choice – if one justifies their own preferred choice by wishfully believing that it will work out, let alone by believing oneself to necessarily be right because of some concept, value, or ideology. One cannot offer guidance because reality no longer serves to help direct one's inborn emotions (above) to the best path of physical and psychological health and survival. Such a person is merely following their instinctual emotions, as we are all driven to do from the moment we cry at birth. In fact, some of those people even end up distorting the facts and foreseeable outcomes to align with their emotions. And that is the opposite of a sage.
To be clear, a sage is also affected by emotion. In fact, because we humans pursue psychological health in addition to physical health, a sage is interested in emotion. But the sage is in touch with emotion to make a value-based choice within practices that have succeeded and been passed forward. The sage does not drown in emotion to dismiss those practices. In different terms, a sage turns to tradition, or a range of traditions, to learn the tested and thus realistic paths to physical and psychological survival. And being in touch with their range of emotions helps the sage notice the complexity around them.
But a sage does not escape to a specific emotion or exaggerate a value in order to free themselves of the burden of facing mortal reality – does not use emotion/values to ignore, deny, or overcome the reality that every behavior carries real risks and inflicts harm.
And so, a society disastrously collapses if it ceases to produce sages. A society needs persons who can help it both by not being afraid to see reality with all its life-challenging messiness and by approaching reality with the concrete guidance that past generations had provided for a range of conditions. Those persons inevitably disagree with each other. But as sages, they each avoid arguing why they are conceptually, morally, or ideologically right. Rather, they recognize the harms of all their decisions. And they then explain to each other why they emotionally prefer certain risks, which they acknowledge are real, and prefer to wrought different definite harms, which they acknowledge will occur. In turn, that helps everyone in society avoid letting their personalities/emotions/values impose distorted pictures onto reality. Even as everyone's choices would reflect personalities/emotions/values, people could choose responsibly.
If we had sages that helped us see reality clearly through the lens of the concrete lessons of past generations – instead of for reasoning from concepts, values, and ideologies – we would have guidance on how to maturely accept responsibility for our risky and harmful choices.
In short, we need sages. And the yeshiva and academia have failed to methodically produce sages. But we can fix that. We can add a new focus, in addition to the beloved holy and secular intellectual playgrounds and value battlefields of philosophy, mysticism, and more. We can introduce a focus on the original human project of passing forward concrete wisdom.