Mishlei 27:3 - The Weight of a Fool's Anger

Click here for a printer-friendly version of this blog post.

Artwork: Grindstone, by Greg Simanson

Mishlei 27:3 - The Weight of a Fool's Anger

משלי כז:ג

כֹּבֶד אֶבֶן וְנֵטֶל הַחוֹל וְכַעַס אֱוִיל כָּבֵד מִשְּׁנֵיהֶם:

Mishlei 27:3

The weight of a stone and the heft of sand – the anger of the fool is heavier than both of them.

There are four questions here:

1. What differentiates the anger of a fool from the anger of a non-fool? Clearly, the metaphors will address this in detail, but it's worth asking as its own question.
2. What are these metaphors? In what sense is the fool's anger comparable to both "the weight of stone" and "the heft of sand"? 
3. What does it mean to describe anger as "heavy"? There are a number of adjectives typically used to describe anger - such as "hot," "intense," "strong," "fierce," "unyielding" - but "heavy" isn't one of them.
4. Heavy for whom? Is the pasuk characterizing the fool's anger as heavy for the person who he's angry at, or for the person who is forced to confront the fool in his anger, or for the fool himself? 

Personally, I'm not bothered by the question of why the pasuk uses the word "koved" (weight) for a stone and "neitel" (heft) for sand. Either these are the two terms that are appropriate to use for their respective substances, or the pasuk is just using synonyms for stylistic reasons. 

[Time to think! Read on when ready.]

Here is my four-sentence summary of the main idea:

A stone and a load of sand are both heavy, but for different reasons: the individual stone is an inherently heavy substance, whereas sand is light as a substance but heavy in large quantities. So too, the Mishleic fool, whose expects reality to always work out in his favor, is “weighed down” by his anger in two different ways: (1) since he takes reality personally, he will perceive each individual instance of reality not aligning with his desires as an intolerable hardship; (2) since the fool’s anger stems from his ego, he will experience a high volume of these “anger incidents,” the sheer quantity and frequency of which will be its own source of pain. In other words, the fool is burdened by the fact that he gets very angry, very often. This is one of the many reasons why the Mishleic chacham works on his expectations, striving to make them as realistic as possible. 

This would be a good place to review a methodology point that I've mentioned earlier. Chapter 25 begins a new section of Sefer Mishlei: "These, too, are the Mishlei of Shlomo ha'Melech, which were copied by the men of Chizkiyah, king of Judah" (25:1). This section continues through the end of Chapter 29. 

These pesukim are stylistically different than the "mainstream" Mishlei written by Shlomo ha'Melech in Chapters 10-24. Most of the pesukim are quite straightforward and unequivocal in their wording - as opposed to many of the pesukim in Chapters 10-24, which can be confusing and ambiguous to read and translate. The mashalim (metaphors) in Chapters 25-29 are also very direct, and tend to be stated simply as "X is like Y" or "as X is to Y, so is A to B." 

I was recently asked whether the ideas taught in Chapters 25-29 differ from the ideas taught in Chapters 10-24. I haven't noticed any difference. I would expect the pesukim in Chapters 25-29 to presuppose familiarity with the content of Chapters 10-24, since the latter were composed earlier, but I don't even know whether this is supposition is the case.