Gaining true wisdom is not a passive experience; it demands a careful balance between respecting ancient traditions and engaging in deep, personal reflection. It requires a person to constantly navigate the space between human intellect and Divine truth. The process of learning begins with a willingness to listen, but it must ultimately involve the heart. The primary approach among commentators is that merely hearing the teachings is never enough. A person must actively engage their inner self to truly grasp the depth of the concepts and retain them [מצודת דוד, אבן עזרא].
The journey to acquiring wisdom involves two essential stages. The first step is the reception of tradition, passed down from generation to generation. A person must accept these teachings with faith, even before they are accompanied by logical proof. Only after securing this foundation of tradition can one advance to the second stage: analyzing the laws and understanding the logical proofs with absolute clarity. If a person tries to rely on logic alone without first accepting the tradition, their intellect will fail them, and they risk denying the very core principles of wisdom entirely [מלבי״ם].
While it is acceptable and even proper to listen to the insights of various wise individuals, a person must never rely on human intellect alone. All human wisdom must be measured against the foundational principles of the Torah and a deep trust in God. The Torah points toward ultimate truths that the human mind simply cannot reach on its own [רלב״ג, אמרי דעת, עמנואל הרומי]. Furthermore, a moral filter is necessary when gathering knowledge. It is permissible to learn from any wise person, but if a teacher acts wickedly, the student must carefully extract only the wisdom while entirely ignoring the teacher's harmful actions [רש״י].
On a broader level, the instruction to listen to the wise serves as a Divine endorsement of the oral tradition and the authority of sages across all generations. A person might naturally hesitate to rely on physical, flawed human beings who are prone to making mistakes or arguing with one another. However, God already foresaw every new insight that every sage would discover throughout history, and the root of all these teachings was present from the very beginning at Mount Sinai. Therefore, the command to follow the sages is rooted in God's absolute knowledge, which gave them the authority to teach. Because of this Divine backing, a person can follow their guidance and decisions with complete confidence [אלשיך].