Parashat Naso and Hitlamdut: Learning from Everyone

Hitlamdut -- taking a stance of continual openness to learning from everyone and everything around you. This is a mussar concept I have been thinking about based on the Tikkun Middot Program curriculum of Rabbi David Jaffe and the work of 20th century mussar teacher Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe.

According to Rabbi Wolbe, hitlamdut is the starting point for all personal change. One must be open to learning, open to changing, think of oneself not as a finished product but primarily as a continual learner, open to what texts, people and life experiences have to teach you. This means that we admit that we are not perfect and do not yet know it all and never will but are forever being taught by life.

One example that is given in the Torah of this stance is from this week’s parsha. Rashi explains that the reason that the nazir – the Nazirite who takes special vows of ascetic sanctity – comes after the sotah – the woman who is accused of adultery – in our parsha is that the Nazirite learns from the experience of the sotah. He looks at her and thinks how he can avoid falling into such a trap and vows to stay away from anything, like wine, which might lead him in that direction.

This is a form of negative learning and we have plenty of opportunities to do it, to look around us and say – hey, I don’t want to end up like that person, not out of a stance of arrogance but out of a stance of humility – the knowledge that we are all essentially the same and therefore I, too, am capable of falling into that trap and need to learn how not to.

In Pirke Avot, which we just completed, Ben Zoma also famously tells us that if you want to be wise, the way to do so is to learn from every person. He does not say to learn from every wise person, but from every person. Every person in this world has something to teach us if we can see it and are open to it. I think often what stops us from learning from others is judgment on the one hand and a kind of insecurity on the other. We either think we are better than them or we think we are worse. Either way, we close ourselves from learning, either because we think they have nothing to teach us or because we feel threatened by their goodness. We see the beautiful way they live and we feel small in comparison and shut ourselves off from learning or growing. To take a stance of hitlamdut is to understand that we are all in the same boat, all struggling with similar issues so that we can help each other learn to live.

When I looked back on my encounters with others in the past few days, I found I could learn something from many people (including children) – it was as if they were all sent to be role models for me in different areas of life which I find difficult. The generosity of one and the calm and sense of sanctity of another and the simple practice of davening before anything else in the morning of another and strangely, in another friend, the ability to ask for favors in a way that includes others and makes them feel intimate. If I can take a stance of hitlamdut, then I begin to see each person as an angel sent to enlighten me in some way.