Rabbi Nico here.
The following are the first two verses from Proverbs 18 (the Proverbs chapter for today’s date).
“A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire; he rages against all wise judgment. A fool has no delight in understanding, but in expressing his own heart.”
These are pretty straight-forward, even if you look at the Hebrew. Not much of a hidden meaning here.
The first half of this suggests to me the importance of community, especially when it comes to spiritual matters. There was a time when I spurned religious community. I made all sorts of excuses, ranging from, “They’re all judgmental,” to “They’re hypocrites,” to “I don’t fully agree with them.”
The funny thing about that was, in coming to those conclusions, I myself was being judgmental and a hypocrite, and who cares if I fully agreed with them? The point is not to find people we 100% agree with on all matters (that’s never going to happen). The point is to find people who will help us in our walk with the L’rd. Their gait may be a little off, but so is mine, and so is yours, and so is everyone’s. In isolating myself, I sought after my own heart’s desires, and the heart is wicked and full of deception, as the Scripture tells us.
The second part, about a fool only having interest in expressing his own opinion rings especially true to me. In my time on my own, when I had no connection to any congregation, whenever someone gave me even the smallest opportunity, I would tell them my own take on spiritual matters. Often, this take was barely Biblical, and highly-misinformed. A prayer life on one’s own is all well and good, if we’re actually LISTENING to the L’rd and trying to align ourselves with His will, rather than reading the Scriptures to find the parts that we feel agree with us so that we can say, “See? My ways are right!”
Recently, someone asked Jenifer and I a series of very hard spiritual questions. At one point, she turned to me and said, “Rather quiet there, rabbi.” The thing was, I was trying to listen more than I spoke. Most people who know me would agree that I do tend to be quiet when in groups of people, because I find that I learn more by listening than by speaking.
When you have something important to say, it is good to say it, especially if it comes from the L’rd. However, we must not be like the fool spoken of in this chapter of Proverbs. We must not be so interested in sharing our own thoughts that we are uninterested in other people’s takes on Scriptural matters. Each person we meet has a different perspective on Scripture, based on their learning, their experiences, and their walk with the L’rd. We’d be fools to ignore what others have to say, even if they seem to us to be uneducated.
Assume that everyone you meet has some degree of wisdom to share, and that listening to them now and then will improve you. We should only stop listening when a person has proven truly foolish, when a person is given to anger (and this includes if they are using abusive language toward us), or when a person tries to call us away to serve other gods (or no god at all). Other than that, we should generally assume that we might learn something from everyone we meet, because the L’rd may have put them in our lives for such a time as this.