Rabbinical Anthology

1. In General

Proverbs are the wisdom of the people, the fruit of common sense, and in particular, are distilled from general experience. They are to the moral communication of men what coins are to the bourgeois. Through them alone, ordinary people obtain the wisdom brought to light by gifted men’s persistent and mature contemplation, which they then use and transfer to their everyday affairs. Experience is the mother of proverbs, and they also lead back to it. They appear among all peoples and, in their generality, are universally intelligible precisely because they share a common soil—life itself—from which they all emanate. Only the native costume distinguishes one from another, and it is this alone that requires explanation.

The content of proverbs is very diverse; it encompasses a large sphere and includes the parable, which transforms a general idea into a structured picture; the maxim, which provides an actual rule of conduct; and the reflection, in which the maxim gleams only indirectly. The parable, or rather the comparison, is the basis for the proverbial mode of speech; it differs from the proverb in that it is not independent, is based on popular opinion, and defines the general with the clearest limits. Reflective proverbs are closest to maxims and differ from them merely by their particularity and by their specific nature, which also brings them into the vernacular and keeps them there. It is perhaps not unfounded to suppose that maxims, originating from wise men, seek unity in the manifold. Their soil is abstraction. The proverb proceeds from the particular; its soil is the perspective of the individual, whereby it is then elevated to the universal. A maxim embodies itself in the proverb; a proverb is spiritualized in the maxim. The more general a maxim, the better; the more specific a proverb, the more useful. The transition from the maxim to the proverb was perhaps represented by the fable, in which a general principle was expressed dramatically in a structured manner. The moral, as an extract from the fable, entered the vernacular as a proverb or a proverbial phrase.

Both the fable and the proverb, each reflections of ordinary life, at times contain much egotism. Practical wisdom places the ego at the center of the universe and makes everything else revolve around it. The fable should counteract egotism to some extent, but it does not always do so directly; it often presents a tableau and leaves it to the thinking man to abstract the message from it. The proverb, however, is more often presented in its complete nakedness. The maxim—the saying of the wise—makes a man consider something other than himself and his material advantage. The real purpose of all the maxims of the truly wise is to teach self-denial, which, in all honesty, is a lesson seldom freely adopted by the greater masses. As a rule, proverbs have only incorporated those maxims that aim at cleverness. It seems probable that most proverbs were initially the maxims of the wise and were afterward adopted by the people. The simpler and shorter a maxim, the more suitable it is for a proverb.