I Mentor Therefore I Am
I Mentor Therefore I Am
This Dvar Torah was originally published in Torah && Tech, the weekly newsletter I publish together with my good friend Ben Greenberg. To get the weekly issue delivered straight to your inbox click here.
וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָה֙ אֶל־משֶׁ֔ה אֱמֹ֥ר אֶל־הַכֹּֽהֲנִ֖ים בְּנֵ֣י אַֽהֲרֹ֑ן וְאָֽמַרְתָּ֣ אֲלֵהֶ֔ם…
And Hashem spoke to Moshe and told him: speak to the Kohanim, the children of Aharon, and you should say to them…
The above verse, the opening verse of Parshat Emor, sounds a little awkward. Why is the Torah, famous for its conciseness, repeating itself by saying “speak… and you should say”? The Talmud routinely learns lessons from superfluous letters in the Torah; what can the addition of two seemingly unnecessary words (in the Hebrew) teach us?
Rashi, the famous 11th-century commentator on the Torah, quotes the Talmud (Yavamos 114a):
“‘Speak… and you should say’ [This double expression comes] to admonish the adult [Kohanim to be responsible] for the minors.”
There’s a lot of discussion in tech around what makes someone a “senior” engineer. Do they write better code? Can they debug in their sleep? Are they able to pick up new technologies faster?
The best definition I’ve seen can be summed up in this tweet:
The Torah teaches us that it’s not enough for us to learn on our own, instead we have a responsibility and an obligation to pass our knowledge on to others.
During the weeks between the holidays of Pesach and Shavuot, many have the custom to learn a weekly chapter from the Pirkey Avot (Ethics Of Our Fathers — a tractate of the Mishnah that deals primarily with ethical teachings). The very first paragraph of the Pirkey Avot encourages us to “raise many students.” The Mishnah doesn’t qualify its statement, implying that as long as there are students you can reach, you have not fulfilled your obligation to teach “many students.”
Of course, you don’t have to wait until you are “senior” before you start teaching and mentoring others. The Lubavitcher Rebbe OBM was fond of saying that “if you only know Aleph, don’t wait until you learned the whole Torah, find someone who doesn’t know Aleph and teach them!” In fact, there is no better way to solidify your knowledge than by turning around and teaching those behind you. Nevertheless, the more we grow in knowledge and experience, the more it is imperative on us to share that with those coming behind us.
And just in case there’s that little voice in the back complaining about the waste of valuable senior engineering hours that can be better used elsewhere, let me conclude with one of my favorite Talmudic sayings:
“Rabbi Chanina said: I have learned a lot from my teachers, and I learned even more from my colleagues, but from my students, I have learned the most.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Yechiel