Beruriah, the brilliant second-century sage who was the daughter of the martyr Rabbi Chananiah ben Teradyon and the wife of Rabbi Meir, is one of the few women whose Torah opinions are preserved in the Talmud. She is also one of the few figures permitted to correct a colleague in print.
In one such moment, preserved as exemplum 237 in Moses Gaster's 1924 Exempla of the Rabbis, Beruriah rebuked Rabbi Yose HaGalili. He had asked her a question using five Hebrew words when three would have done. By which road shall we travel to Lod? he had said. Galilean fool! she shot back. Did the sages not teach, do not engage in much conversation with a woman? (Avot 1:5). You should have said simply, By which to Lod? Three words. The teaching embedded in her rebuke was that verbosity, especially in idle circumstances, is its own sin. A wise person trims speech the way a scribe trims a quill.
The same passage in the Exempla is linked to another tale of poor learning habits. A certain pupil studied diligently but never asked his teacher any questions. He sat, he listened, he wrote nothing down, he interrogated nothing. After a short time, everything he had learned slipped away from him, and he was left knowing nothing of what had passed through his ears.
These two vignettes belong together. Beruriah teaches us what kind of speech is excessive; the forgetful pupil teaches us what kind of speech is necessary. Say less when you are chatting. Say more when you are learning. The person who confuses these, who is chatty with strangers and silent with his teacher, will pass through life both annoying and ignorant. This small exemplum from Gaster's 1924 collection, drawn from Eruvin 53b, has been repeated in yeshivah study halls for almost two thousand years.