Mentors

My Latin mass write-up and my write-up on Martin S. Jaffee's Torah in the Mouth will overlap today.

At my Latin mass, we had political priest, and he delivered a homily on Jesus' parable of the mustard seed, which was really, really small yet grew up to be a really, really big tree, one that offered shade to birds. The priest applied that to Jesus and the church, who started off small and insignificant yet eventually became widespread and well-known, offering spiritual shade and rest to anyone who wanted it.

The priest also applied the parable to looking for the good in people, however small that good may be. He gave us the example of Thomas Aquinas, who was called a "dumb ox" by many of his fellow students, and yet a mentor dared to see the good in him. As a result, St. Thomas Aquinas became one of the most renowned theologians in history. Talk about a small seed of overlooked intelligence becoming a vast body of theological insight!

How's this overlap with my reading of Jaffee? According to Jaffee, the rabbis wanted to keep the oral Torah oral because they sought to preserve it within a scholastic community. They desired for students to memorize the oral tradition so that it might change them. They also thought students should learn their oral traditions by following a teacher, who would instruct them through his knowledge and his example. Even if a teacher died, the students would be able to recite his teaching, so he'd still be present in the community in some way, shape, or form. But if the oral Torah got written down (as it eventually did), that could endanger the learning within community that keeping the oral tradition oral had fostered. Literate people outside of the scholastic community would have access to it, including (gasp!) Christians. Things didn't exactly pan out that way, for many Jews even today study written texts in communal settings. But many rabbis sought to keep the oral tradition oral because that engendered mentorship, respect for a teacher, etc.

I learn a lot from books, and that's all well and good. But it's also good to have mentors, in both academia and my spiritual life. And, although I'm as much of a loner as you can get, I'm fortunate to have people in my life who offer me guidance, from their wisdom and their example.