The Path to Humility

From R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik:

The awareness of defeat, the path to humility, has five steps. The first is the feeling of dependence. A ben-Torah must realize he is dependent on the advice, guidance, and instruction of someone who has come a few inches closer to the summit of the mountain. The more one knows, the greater the perplexity; the closer one is to one's Creator, the clearer the awareness of one's inadequacy and failure. Someone else will know more than I. Sometimes it will be a great scholar, sometimes even a small child or a pupil...

The second step is intellectual circumspection and caution. A talmid chacham is careful in the rendering of halakha. Only ignorant and arrogant people think that all questions are answerable. The humble talmid chacham does not proclaim high-sounding theories, sweeping statements about ethics and philosophy. The humble person will not boast that Judaism is commodious enough to embrace any theory, any trend in modern culture. A new idea, a new problem, must be treated with circumspection, carefully, and with trepidation.

The third step is ethical modesty. There is not only intellectual dependence, but moral inadequacy as well. Moral complacency, so repugnant in a proper framework of kedusha, is all too prevalent in the Orthodox community, both in the diaspora and in Israel. A talmid chacham is very wary of such "pious" people, who condemn and judge mortal man from a position of assumed moral supremacy. Here too, the endowment with kedusha must be accompanied by a sense of inadequacy and modesty, a readiness to admit errors and understand the view of others, rather than one of self-satisfaction.

The fourth step is called "tzimtzum." The humble man must know how to recoil, to retreat; he must know the art of self-contraction, even when not required by the letter of the law. The is true first of all in the physiological sphere - the Rambam describes in Hilkhot De'ot (ch. 5) the necessity for a wise man to control his appetite, to forego many common pleasures, even though they are not strictly forbidden... It applies to his emotions as well - when he succeeds, the talmid chacham praises God, but does not boast or brag to others. The more one succeeds in the realm of kedusha, the less the outside world will know of it...

The fifth and final step is "chesed", generosity. We are interdependent. The same way I expect and depend on others to help me, I must extend help to others. I must open myself up to embrace the other...

Such a Litvak. It's refreshing!