In praise of the ego?

The fourth chapter of the tractate of Avot features two mishnayot that address the same subject: humility. At Avot 4:4 Rabbi Levitas of Yavneh teaches:

מְאֹד מְאֹד הֱוֵי שְׁפַל רֽוּחַ, שֶׁתִּקְוַת אֱנוֹשׁ רִמָּה

Be very, very humble, for the hope of man is the worm.

Later, at Avot 4:12, Rabbi Meir teaches:

הֱוֵי מְמַעֵט בְּעֵֽסֶק וַעֲסוֹק בַּתּוֹרָה, וֶהֱוֵי שְׁפַל רֽוּחַ בִּפְנֵי כָל אָדָם, וְאִם בָּטַֽלְתָּ מִן הַתּוֹרָה, יֶשׁ לָךְ בְּטֵלִים הַרְבֵּה כְּנֶגְדָּךְ, וְאִם עָמַֽלְתָּ בַּתּוֹרָה הַרְבֵּה, יֶשׁ שָׂכָר הַרְבֵּה לִתֶּן לָךְ

Engage minimally in business and occupy yourself with Torah. Be humble before every man. If you neglect the Torah, you will have many excuses for yourself; if you toil much in Torah, there is much reward to give to you.

Two obvious questions to ask here are (i) why do we need two mishnayot to teach the same point—that we should be humble—and (ii) why does Rabbi Levitas impress upon us the need to be very, very humble while Rabbi Meir is content to caution us only with regard to ‘entry level’ humility?

We could seek to strengthen the first question by suggesting that there is actually no difference between “humble” and “very, very humble”, humility being by definition the absence of ga’avah, pride or arrogance. If one possesses any degree of ga’avah, even a small amount, one is not humble. Rambam’s seminal discussion of the quality of humility (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot De’ot 2:3) does not however support this answer: by maintaining that one should go to the opposite extreme from pride and arrogance rather than adopt a midway path between pride and humility, he recognises the existence of a gradated form of humility.

However, even assuming that there is no difference between the types of humility posited by Rabbi Levitas and Rabbi Meir, we can still appreciate why both teachings are needed. By citing man’s aspiration as being no more loftier than the worms that will consume his body after his death, Rabbi Levitas is referring to man’s humility before God, who gives life and takes it away—and whose love extends to all His creatures, including the worms that will consume us all. Rabbi Meir however refers to a different focus: that of humankind towards one another. Though we may spend our lives comparing ourselves with others and consider ourselves more important than many of them, we should scale down our self-assessment and realise how little, in the great scheme of things, we are really worth.

Turning to the second question, I found a thought-provoking observation by Rabbi Norman Lamm in Foundation of Faith, a collection of Avot-related perspectives edited by his son-in-law Rabbi Mark Dratch. This observation builds neatly on our answer to the first question:

“[W]hereas R. Levitas argues that in effect man has no reason to assert an ego, R. Meir acknowledges the existence of the ego and its legitimacy. Man possesses self-worth despite death. For R. Levitas, humility is a metaphysical judgement based upon man’s physical condition: since he will physically disintegrate, he has no metaphysical self worthy of esteem. R. Levitas thus negates the ego. For R. Meir, however, humility is an ethical-social obligation. R, Meir affirms the ego, with limitations. Finally, while R. Levitas is absolute in his denial of the ego, R. Meir urges that it be limited only “bifnei kola dam, before every man”., that is, man should not manifest arrogance in his human relations. He should seek out the ways in which to convince himself of the worth of his fellow man, even the superiority of his neighbor over himself, but he need not deny his self-worth”.

Rabbi Lamm goes on to examine the practical significance of this distinction in greater detail. There is something anachronistic in his explanation, in that the use of terms such as ‘ego’ and ‘self-worth’ would have been unfamiliar to Rabbis Levitas and Meir. Having said that, if we accept Rabbi Lamm’s explanation here, we must also accept that the two Tannaim had an understanding of the human psyche that was deep enough to embrace the concepts that lie beneath these modern labels.

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The truth about eyes

Let’s start the new calendar year on a positive note. At Avot 2:13 Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai tells his top talmidim to take to the streets, as it were, and see for themselves which approach to life is the most preferable. This is how they respond:

רַבִּי אֱלִיעֶֽזֶר אוֹמֵר: עַֽיִן טוֹבָה. רַבִּי יְהוֹשֻֽׁעַ אוֹמֵר: חָבֵר טוֹב. רַבִּי יוֹסֵי אוֹמֵר: שָׁכֵן טוֹב. רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן אוֹמֵר: הָרוֹאֶה אֶת הַנּוֹלָד. רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר אוֹמֵר: לֵב טוֹב. אָמַר לָהֶם: רוֹאֶה אֲנִי אֶת דִּבְרֵי אֶלְעָזָר בֶּן עֲרָךְ מִדִּבְרֵיכֶם, שֶׁבִּכְלַל דְּבָרָיו דִּבְרֵיכֶם

Rabbi Eliezer says: A good eye. Rabbi Yehoshua says: A good friend. Rabbi Yose says: A good neighbour. Rabbi Shimon says: To see what is born [out of one’s actions]. Rabbi Elazar says: A good heart. [Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai] said to them: I prefer the words of Elazar ben Arach to yours, for his words include all of yours.

Rabbi Eliezer’s choice of a “good eye” is generally understood to be a shorthand term for magnanimity towards others, being able to share their success or happiness, and not begrudging what they have. His answer, like those of his colleagues, is not incorrect, but it is passed over in favour of that of Rabbi Elazar, which embraces it but is of wider application.

At Avot 2:14 Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai gives a very different instruction, relating to the path in life that his talmidim should make an effort to avoid. This is how they answer:

רַבִּי אֱלִיעֶֽזֶר אוֹמֵר: עַֽיִן רָעָה. רַבִּי יְהוֹשֻֽׁעַ אוֹמֵר: חָבֵר רָע. רַבִּי יוֹסֵי אוֹמֵר: שָׁכֵן רָע. רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן אוֹמֵר: הַלֹּוֶה וְאֵינוֹ מְשַׁלֵּם, אֶחָד הַלֹּוֶה מִן הָאָדָם כְּלֹוֶה מִן הַמָּקוֹם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: לֹוֶה רָשָׁע וְלֹא יְשַׁלֵּם, וְצַדִּיק חוֹנֵן וְנוֹתֵן. רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר אוֹמֵר: לֵב רָע. אָמַר לָהֶם: רוֹאֶה אֲנִי אֶת דִּבְרֵי אֶלְעָזָר בֶּן עֲרָךְ מִדִּבְרֵיכֶם, שֶׁבִּכְלַל דְּבָרָיו דִּבְרֵיכֶם

Rabbi Eliezer says: An evil eye. Rabbi Yehoshua says: An evil friend. Rabbi Yose says: An evil neighbour. Rabbi Shimon says: To borrow and not to repay… Rabbi Elazar says: An evil heart. [Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai] said to them: I prefer the word of Elazar ben Arach to yours, for his words include all of yours.

Rabbi Eliezer’s response complements his earlier answer by framing the same advice in negative terms: if the right path is one of magnanimity, the path to avoid is the route leading in the opposite direction, towards envy, jealousy, negativity, resentment and dissatisfaction with one’s lot. Once again, his answer is not wrong but is too specific. His path to avoid is narrow; that of Rabbi Elazar is wider.

 As always, if one looks more closely at the words of a mishnah there is more to be said about it. For example Rabbi Marcus Lehmann, invoking the law of the excluded middle, points out that there is a zone in which a person’s attitude may be neutral or at any rate motivated by feelings and emotions that are not governed by goodness or badness per se. This is true, but is it relevant?  Our mishnayot are only concerned with the road one should take and the road one should avoid, not the roads that lead in different directions.

Gila Ross (Living Beautifully) goes beyond the obvious meanings mentioned above. She writes:

“Rabbi Eliezer said an evil eye: someone who sees the negative whether in things or in other people. It’s fascinating that he says “eye” in the singular. He’s teaching us that a person becomes negative by shutting one eye, the eye that sees Godliness within another person. Everybody has both good and bad within him, so by shutting that eye and only seeing the human, flawed side, a person develops an “evil eye”. When we shut our eye and don’t look at the good within the other person, we are left with the negative. Then, a person can even give negative motives to what other people do”.

This metaphor fits neatly with other mishnayot in Avot, notably Yehoshua ben Perachya’s injunction at Avot 1:6 to judge other favourably and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananyah’s condemnation of “an evil eye, an evil inclination and the hatred of others” (Avot 2:16) echoed in Rabbi Elazar HaKappar’s caution (Avot 4:28) regarding the self-destructive effect of jealousy, lust and the desire for kavod, honour.

But Avot does not say that we should look at others only with the “good eye”.  We are obliged to see what is truly there, since truth is one of the three values on which the continued existence of humanity depends (Avot 1:18). More than that, we are obliged to recognise and accept the truth, not deny it (Avot 5:9), and to set others onto the path of truth (Avot 6:6).

Today is the first day in the secular calendar for 2025. My sincere wish for this year is that we should all be blessed with the ability to recognise the truth when we see it—and to be able to accommodate ourselves to the truth rather than bend it to suit ourselves.

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Not such a saint

We are only human and, try as we will to be clinically objective in our analysis of mishnayot in Avot, our opinions, biases, preferences and prejudices inevitably leak out.

At Avot 5:17 an anonymous mishnah teaches:

אַרְבַּע מִדּוֹת בְּהוֹלְכֵי בֵית הַמִּדְרָשׁ: הוֹלֵךְ וְאֵינוֹ עוֹשֶׂה, שְׂכַר הֲלִיכָה בְּיָדוֹ. עוֹשֶׂה וְאֵינוֹ הוֹלֵךְ, שְׂכַר מַעֲשֶׂה בְּיָדוֹ. הוֹלֵךְ וְעוֹשֶׂה, חָסִיד. לֹא הוֹלֵךְ וְלֹא עוֹשֶׂה, רָשָׁע

There are four types among those who attend the study hall. One who goes but does nothing—he has gained the rewards of going. One who does [study] but does not go to the study hall—he has gained the rewards of doing. One who goes and does, he is a chasid. One who neither goes nor does, he is wicked.

It is difficult to retain the flavour of the Mishnaic-era term chasid when translating it into modern English. “One who is pious” is clumsy and misses the mark because words like “pious” and “piety” have attracted in today’s English an aura of sanctimony rather than sincerity.  Left untranslated, the word chasid conjures up images of ultra-religious followers of a rebbe, garbed in black hats and long black coats and sporting sidelocks and beards.

Rabbi Shlomo P. Toperoff (Lev Avot) designates the chasid as a saint. In doing so he has a precedent from the world of philosemitic scholarship: the Reverend Travers Herford employs it in his The Ethics of the Talmud.

The word ‘saint’ carries baggage: it may be deployed as a term of approbation of someone’s righteous and selfless behaviour, often in the face of temptation or with the prospect of suffering an enduring loss; it is also frequently used in a highly sarcastic comment on a person’s far-from-righteous behaviour.  Rabbi Toperoff was a pulpit rabbi in a town which then had two synagogues—one frequented by serious Torah scholars, the other (the “Englische shul”, which was his) being attended by more of the town’s rank-and-file population. The Englische shul was looked down on by some of the members of the frum synagogue who would likely not wish to hear his English sermons, and maybe it was this that was his motivation for writing the following:

“Hasid, saint. The hasid is one who attends and practises. Some authorities question the advisability of referring to the Hasid as a saint: he is performing the normal duties incumbent upon every Jew. However, …[t]here are those who consider themselves intellectually and morally superior to their co-religionists and consequently refrain from mixing freely with the multitude and do not attend the Beth Hamidrash. They do not hear the sermons and lectures of the Rabbis and therefore create divisiveness. More praiseworthy and meritorious is the conduct of the scholar who, in spite of his knowledge presents himself at the House of Study and listens to the discourse of the Rabbi. Such understanding bespeaks humility and meekness, and such a person is worthy of the title Hasid, saint”.

I personally doubt that any of the people who avoided going to Rabbi Toperoff’s synagogue and hearing his sermons would have read these words, but he does raise an interesting point: is there any real value in attending a sermon when you doubt that you will learn anything new from it and are confident that time spent engaged in other forms of learning would reap a greater benefit? Gila Ross (Living Beautifully) may think so. As she observes:

“Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk points out that the very act of pulling himself out of his comfort zone and going to a place of learning is going to help that person focus on his spirituality”.

Pulling oneself out of one’s comfort zone is the key point here. The very act is itself part of an ongoing process of character development. Gila Ross does not quote Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai on this, but in the second perek of Avot we see how, not once but twice, he orders his best talmidim to leave the Beit Midrash and go out and see for themselves how people live, to enable them to learn what best to do and what best to avoid.

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Big brother, or book learning?

For some people the third of Rebbi’s teachings at Avot 2:1 has a slightly menacing flavour:

הִסְתַּכֵּל בִּשְׁלֹשָׁה דְבָרִים, וְאֵין אַתָּה בָא לִידֵי עֲבֵרָה, דַּע מַה לְּמַֽעְלָה מִמָּךְ, עַֽיִן רוֹאָה וְאֹֽזֶן שׁוֹמַֽעַת, וְכָל מַעֲשֶֽׂיךָ בְּסֵֽפֶר נִכְתָּבִים

Contemplate three things and you will not come to the hands of transgression. Know what is above you: a seeing eye, a listening ear, and all your deeds are inscribed in a book.

The fictional nightmare of George Orwell’s 1984, a world of constant surveillance of the actions of individuals, became a reality years ago. We have become quite used to security cameras and to developments in computing and AI that create the uncomfortable impression that there are machines out there that know more about ourselves than we do. Many commentators on Avot, even in earlier generations, were quick to remind us that God sees and hears everything we do—and that nothing is omitted from His database of human actions, words and thoughts.

Rabbi Yaakov Hillel (Eternal Ethics from Sinai) brings a refreshing perspective to the part of the mishnah that mentions how our deeds are written in a book. For most of us the message of Rebbi is a cautionary one: don’t do it or, if you do it, don’t imagine that you can get away with it without being noticed. But Rabbi Hillel finds a positive message in it too.

Many of us are occasionally motivated to raise our game, as it were, and cultivate a more spiritual attitude towards the way we live in this, our physical and materialistic world. But from where can we derive our spiritual inspiration?

The path to one’s spiritual elevation isn’t tangible; it isn’t something that can be seen. We don’t normally experience spiritual visions and, if we started telling people we were having them, they would likely consider us likely candidates for psychiatric care. Likewise, though a baraita at Avot 6:2 mentions a Heavenly voice emanating daily from Mount Horeb (Sinai), our non-prophetic ears are not equipped to pick up celestial soundbites. That leaves only books.

Our Sages old and new have left us with a rich literary heritage in terms of Jewish subject matter: halachah, mussar, midrash, kabbalah, chassidut, philosophy and much more besides. If we find the right books, we can grow from them, enriching our understanding, our commitment and ultimately our closeness to God. So, explains, Rabbi Hillel, when our mishnah states that “all your deeds are inscribed in a book”, we can take this to mean that all our deeds—the deeds which we consciously seek to emulate or implement in our own lives—are already written down in the kodesh books we read. All we have to do is follow the instruction we find in the printed word.

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Are we truly afraid any more?

Fear (יִרְאָה, yirah) is a theme that runs through Pirkei Avot. We meet it first at Avot 1:3, where Antigonos Ish Socho counsels:

וִיהִי מוֹרָא שָׁמַֽיִם עֲלֵיכֶם

And let the fear of Heaven be upon you.

At Avot 2:11 the highest accolade that Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai can give to one of his leading talmidim. Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel, is to describe him as a יְרֵא חֵטְא (“a fearer of sin”). In the baraitot at the end of the tractate, to be בְּיִרְאָה (“in a state of fear”) is one of the 48 modes by which one acquires Torah—and there are other references to fear. But what does the word mean, both inherently and to us now?

Our sages have had much to say about fear. They have taught us to distinguish between fear of punishment, fear of actually doing wrong and the sort of fear one experiences (which we probably equate with awe) when in the presence of something so great that we simply can’t take it in, something that, we intuitively feel, substantiates our belief in God’s role as Creator of the world or His immanent presence. When used by our Sages, the word yirah, in one context or another, seems to span a vast range of human emotions: at one extreme it is a deep sense of terror while, at the other, it is more like a profound form of respect.

What I want to ask here is not what yirah means but whether we really feel it the same way as the early audience of Avot students would have done. This question is sparked off by a comment made by Rabbi Yisroel Miller, The Wisdom of Avos, on Avot 2:1—a mishnah that doesn’t even contain the word yirah. He writes:

“[I] believe without question that on Rosh Hashanah my life hangs in the balance as Hashem decides my fate for the coming year, and yet I do not tremble as much as I did when a policeman once pulled me over for a traffic violation!”

I suspect that this honest personal admission by a respected orthodox rabbi reflects the experiences of many, if not most, of us today. If we truly felt that God was with us and watching us all the time, and genuinely felt that He rewards us for our good deeds and punishes us for our bad ones, our personal experience of fear would no doubt be greatly enhanced.  As it is, in our busy lives we find times to tune in to God’s supervision, for example at times of prayer or when we are preparing to perform a mitzvah, and times when, like a divine App, we do not turn Him off but leave Him running quietly in the background.

This leads to another question: what is the role of fear in our lives today? Is it to be reserved for threats to our physical and economic well-being, leaving us to rely on the censure of our fellow humans and peer pressure instead? And have we really forgotten how to fear?

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The times they are a'changin...or are they?

For the observant practising Jew it is axiomatic that the Torah is eternal and unchanging. It is the blueprint for the creation of the universe (Bereishit Rabbah 1:1) and the words with which God’s will is expressed are eternally valid. Truth being a complex and multifaceted concept, we accept that the Torah has shivim ponim—“seventy faces”—meaning that, while it is an absolute value, the meaning it reveals to us may depend on the place from which we view it. This is the Torah’s strength: it offers both permanence and flexibility. The enduring relevance of the Torah also helps explain the high level of respect given to commentaries throughout the generations: we still study the Targum Onkelos and the explanations of Rashi, Ramban and others because the passage of time has not raised a barrier to their relevance.

Although Pirkei Avot is a major component of the Torah sheb’al peh, the Oral Torah, our sages’ commentaries on this tractate do not command the same level of appreciation or acceptance through the ages. This is unsurprising. Avot addresses the social, political, spiritual and emotional dimensions of our lives—and these in turn are conditioned by factors that are constantly subject to change. But even apparently obsolete comments may have something to teach us.

A good example of this is the commentary of Rabbenu Yonah on Avot 2:3, where a mishnah of Rabban Gamliel the son of Rebbi reads:

הֱווּ זְהִירִין בָּרָשׁוּת, שֶׁאֵין מְקָרְבִין לוֹ לְאָדָם אֶלָּא לְצֹֽרֶךְ עַצְמָן, נִרְאִין כְּאוֹהֲבִין בְּשַֽׁעַת הַנָּאָתָן, וְאֵין עוֹמְדִין לוֹ לְאָדָם בְּשַֽׁעַת דָּחֳקוֹ׃

Be careful with the government, for they befriend a person only for their own needs. They appear to be friends when it is beneficial to them, but they do not stand by a person at the time of his distress.

On this Rabbenu Yonah comments:

“When you have no more money to give them, even if it is because you are really financially pressed, they will have no mercy on a poor man. They will impoverish you and forget the old friendship, because that is all in the past. This is the simple meaning of the mishnah.

However, if this is what it actually meant, it would be a slur against kings, God forbid, and that cannot be. The world continues to exist through sovereigns who dispense law and justice. No one in the world can be as truthful as a king, as he has no need to flatter others or to fear them. There is nothing to prevent a king following the path of justice…” (tr. Rabbi David Sedley).

We do not live in an era of monarchs who wield absolute power over their subjects, and the kings and queens we encounter today are in the main constitutional rulers whose powers, if any, are token. What’s more, the propositions Rabbenu Yonah articulates here seem preposterous. How is it that the continued existence of the world depends on sovereigns? And surely it is unimaginable that no one in the world can be as truthful as a king! So how could Rabbenu Yonah have written what he did?

Rabbi Shimon ben Zemach Duran (the Rashbatz) suggests that Rabbenu Yonah only wrote what he did because he was afraid of the kings of his time. But can this be so? There’s a verse in Proverbs (Mishlei 21:1) that reads:

פַּלְגֵי־מַ֣יִם לֶב־מֶ֭לֶךְ בְּיַד־יְהֹוָ֑ה עַֽל־כׇּל־אֲשֶׁ֖ר יַחְפֹּ֣ץ יַטֶּֽנּוּ׃

The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will.

On this, Rabbenu Yonah comments:

“The goal of the hearts should be to fear God and not to fear the anger of a king. A person should ask mercy of God and hope and raise his eyes towards Him, for He tilts the heart to wherever he wants”.

These do not read like the words of a man who quakes with fear at the prospect of incurring a monarch’s anger. So what does his extraordinary explanation of our mishnah in Avot really mean? I think that there is more to it than meets the eye.

The first part of Rabbenu Yonah’s comment tells the mishnah as it really is. Rabban Gamliel warns us that government—whether in the form of kings, counsellors or politicians—is a career in which those who participate in it expect to enrich themselves or at least derive some form of benefit from those whom they purport to serve. It is an early expression of the sentiment that “they’re only in it for what they can get”, a view which, if cynical, is born of our experiences of being governed throughout the ages.

The second part of the comment is entirely tongue-in-cheek and it is really a subtle and pointed piece of mussar (moral chastisement) addressed to absolute rulers: Only if you dispense law and justice does the continued existence of the world depend on you (see Avot 1:18).  So why do you not respect the truth (which also features in Avot 1:18)? If your actions are just, you have nothing to fear from it. And if there is nothing to prevent you, a king, from following the path of justice, why don’t you? It is no accident that Rabbenu Yonah’s commentary on our mishnah ends with the words:

“For even if a king has his own ideas and has the ability to act as he sees fit, in truth he has no power to harm or to help, except by the will of the Living God, the eternal king”.

We have no old-style kings today, but across the world there are many regimes governed by the tyranny of an individual over a terrorised people. For such rulers and those whom they govern, Rabbenu Yonah’s words remain highly relevant.

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Syria after Assad: a question for Avot

At Avot 3:2, Rabbi Chanina segan HaKohanim teaches:

הֱוֵי מִתְפַּלֵּל בִּשְׁלוֹמָהּ שֶׁל מַלְכוּת, שֶׁאִלְמָלֵא מוֹרָאָהּ, אִישׁ אֶת רֵעֵֽהוּ חַיִּים בְּלָעוֹ

Pray for the integrity of the government; for were it not for the fear of its authority, a man would swallow his neighbour alive.

Few readers of Avot Today will have missed the news of the remarkable developments in Syria, where President Assad’s much hated but hitherto unassailable regime has been swept aside. In its place there has emerged a coalition of forces that share some aims but are themselves in conflict over others.

What are the stated objectives of the successful forces? According to an early statement we learn the following:

"After 50 years of oppression under the regime, and 13 years of crime, tyranny and displacement, and after a long struggle and fight and confronting all forms of occupation forces, we announce today on 12-8-2024 the end of this dark era and the beginning of a new era for Syria.

To the displaced all over the world, free Syria awaits you”.

This new Syria is declared to be a place where everyone

."…coexists in peace, justice prevails and rights are established, where every Syrian is honoured and his dignity is preserved, we turn the page on the dark past and open a new horizon for the future."

These are noble aspirations, but is there any prospect that they will be delivered? Success has come through the cooperation between numerous factions which, though united in their determination to force a regime change, are themselves deeply divided along political, religious and ethnic lines.

Though Syria has been technically at war with Israel since 1948, the Assad regime agreed a cease-fire with Israel which, though there have been breaches, has been in the main respected by both sides. At the time of writing this post, the long-term fate of this cease-fire remains uncertain. If the maintenance of the cease-fire depends on the ability of the new regime to prevent potentially lethal border incursions by any of its anti-Israel factions, should we be praying for the welfare of the coalition if Israeli lives depend on it?

There is a further point to consider. The once-thriving Syrian Jewish community effectively vanished in 1992 when the father of the current President permitted the last remaining 4,000 Jews to emigrate on condition that they did not make aliyah. Most settled in the United States. Might they respond to the clarion call of the coalition: “To the displaced all over the world, free Syria awaits you”? In the event that they are tempted to return (and we Jews have returned to many countries that sought to eliminate us), we would need to ask what this means to us. Does this mishnah address only the needs of the country in which we live, or does it speak also to those countries in which our brethren live and in which their welfare and safety depend on enforcement of the rule of law by a government with integrity?

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Learning a compound mishnah: where do we start?

Many times in Pirkei Avot we find a mishnah in which a Tanna says three or more things. A typical example is Avot 1:7, where Nittai HaArbeli says:

הַרְחֵק מִשָּׁכֵן רָע, וְאַל תִּתְחַבֵּר לָרָשָׁע, וְאַל תִּתְיָאֵשׁ מִן הַפּוּרְעָנוּת

(i) Distance yourself from a bad neighbour, (ii) do not stick to a wicked person, and (iii) do not abandon belief in retribution.

Commentators have long discussed the significance of these grouped teachings: are they put together because they are intended to be understood or interpreted in the context of each other? Or are they separate, free-standing teachings that do not in any way demand to be associated with one another, being brought together only for the sake of making them easier to remember? This is the only place in Avot where we find Nittai’s words. Keeping them together in the same mishnah makes them easier to recall than if they had been scattered through different chapters.

We can easily connect these teachings if we so wish, learning that bad neighbours are a greater threat than wicked non-neighbours and that, in either case, if such a person harms us he or she will get their come-uppance even if we don’t see it with our own eyes. Alternatively we can say that Nittai is teaching three unrelated principles, each of which demands to be considered and understood on its own terms.

We can also find examples of mishnayot containing teachings that are more challenging to connect. Thus we see the following from Rabbi Tzadok (Avot 4:7):

אַל תִּפְרוֹשׁ מִן הַצִּבּוּר, וְאַל תַּֽעַשׂ עַצְמְךָ כְּעוֹרְכֵי הַדַּיָּנִין, וְאַל תַּעֲשֶֽׂהָ עֲטָרָה לְהִתְגַּדֶּל בָּהּ, וְלֹא קַרְדּוּם לַחְתָּךְ בָּהּ

(i) Do not separate yourself from the community. (ii) Do not make yourself like a lawyer. (iii) Do not make the Torah a crown with which to glorify yourself, or a spade with which to dig …

Here the connections between the three teachings are far less obvious.

Among commentators there are those who strive to find connections wherever possible on the ground that, if there no such connections, the teachings would not have been grouped together in the same mishnah. According to Shimon Abu (Shomanu Avotenu), this principle derives support from Rashi (Betzah 2a, at se’or bekezayit), and scholars such as Rabbi Ovadyah Hedayah (Seh leBet Avot) apply it rigorously.

The problem with this principle is that there are so many mishnayot in which connections are not apparent and attempts to make them seem contrived to the student. For example, in Avot 2:15, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus says four things (officially three) which can be connected but only at the expense of plausibility:

יְהִי כְבוֹד חֲבֵרָךְ חָבִיב עָלֶֽיךָ כְּשֶׁלָּךְ, וְאַל תְּהִי נֽוֹחַ לִכְעוֹס. וְשׁוּב יוֹם אֶחָד לִפְנֵי מִיתָתָךְ. וֶהֱוֵי מִתְחַמֵּם כְּנֶֽגֶד אוֹרָן שֶׁל חֲכָמִים, וֶהֱוֵי זָהִיר בְּגַחֲלָתָן שֶׁלֹּא תִכָּוֶה, שֶׁנְּשִׁיכָתָן נְשִׁיכַת שׁוּעָל, וַעֲקִיצָתָן עֲקִיצַת עַקְרָב, וּלְחִישָׁתָן לְחִישַׁת שָׂרָף, וְכָל דִּבְרֵיהֶם כְּגַחֲלֵי אֵשׁ

(i) Let the honour of your fellow be as precious to you as your own, and (ii) do not be easy to anger. (iii) Repent one day before your death. (iv) Warm yourself by the fire of the sages, but be careful not to get burned by its embers; for their bite is the bite of a fox, their sting is the sting of a scorpion, their hiss is the hiss a serpent, and all their words are like fiery coals.

My feeling is that, when approaching any compound mishnah, one can maximise the scope for learning from it by taking the following route:

• Examine the possibility that two or more teachings in the same mishnah may be connected, or may even constitute a single teaching, but accept that this may not be the case.
• Where there is no apparent connection between distinct teachings, accept the possibility that they were understood to be related when Rebbi compiled the mishnah but that we no longer possess Rebbi’s understanding of what they meant.
• Whether connectivity between teachings in a single mishnah is established or not, examine each one separately and consider its content without reference to the others.
• Where a connection between component parts of a mishnah can only be established by coming up with an explanation that appears awkward or contrived, ask yourself whether—if that is the correct meaning—it is a meaning that Rebbi would have considered valuable enough to transmit through the generations.
• Never let a methodology for learning a mishnah distort or obliterate the plain meaning of the words which the Tanna chose in teaching that mishnah.

I’m sure many readers of this post will have other suggestions, some of which may prove more useful when learning Avot. If you are such a reader, please share your thoughts.

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Too many words

Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel (Avot 1:17) teaches:

כָּל יָמַי גָּדַֽלְתִּי בֵּין הַחֲכָמִים, וְלֹא מָצָֽאתִי לְגוּף טוֹב מִשְּׁתִיקָה, וְלֹא הַמִּדְרָשׁ עִקָּר אֶלָּא הַמַּעֲשֶׂה, וְכָל הַמַּרְבֶּה דְבָרִים מֵבִיא חֵטְא

All my life I have been raised among the wise, and I have found nothing better for the body than silence. The essential thing is not study, but action. And anyone who increases words brings sin.

It has sometimes been asked whether, if the most efficacious commodity in a person’s life is silence, it is truly necessary to add that “anyone who increases words brings sin”.  The answer depends on whether “one who increases words brings sin” is simply an explanation as to why silence is so good or whether it is a separate stand-alone teaching.

Until Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi (Rebbi) compiled the oral teachings into the body of law we now call the Mishnah, it seems to be generally understood that oral teachings were taught, explained and passed down the generations by word of mouth. Some Tannaim had their own collections of teachings which may have been written down for their own convenience, but these were not taught as normative text.  However, once Rebbi had compiled the six Orders of the Mishnah, the oral law now had a written text to which both teacher and talmid could refer.

The Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel who is cited as the author of our mishnah lived a century and a half before Rebbi, who was his great grandson. This Rabban Shimon, a contemporary of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, would have been active around the time of the destruction of the Second Temple—a time of great turbulence and uncertainty. With the benefit of hindsight we can ask why it was not in his generation, when continuity of Torah learning must have come under severe stress, that the idea of setting the oral law down in writing was not implemented as a way of preserving it.

Perhaps this issue was indeed debated in the lifetime of Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel and the teaching in this mishnah—that “anyone who increases words brings sin”—refers implicitly to his opposition to ‘increasing’ words by writing them down and thus increasing opportunities for transcriptional errors to creep in.

Thoughts, anyone?

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Where have all the scholars gone?

It sometimes happens, particularly with modern commentaries on Avot, that their most interesting and provocative content lies not in the commentary itself but in the casual, throwaway lines of the commentators that shed more light on their view of the world than on the meaning of the mishnah. A good example can be found in Rav Asher Weiss on Avos. Almost all of this two-volume work could have been written a hundred years ago without any changes, since Rav Weiss—a popular and highly learned teacher with a large personal following—is a dedicated Torah scholar who seeks to explain what the mishnayot in Avot must have meant at the time of the Talmud, from which he quote liberally when elucidating and developing the thoughts expressed in Avot. However, we occasionally find a comment from Rav Weiss that is aimed at contemporary Jewish society.

At Avot 1:10 we find a teaching by Shemayah:

אֱהוֹב אֶת הַמְּלָאכָה וּשְׂנָא אֶת הָרַבָּנוּת, וְאַל תִּתְוַדַּע לָרָשׁוּת

Love work, hate mastery over others, and do not make yourself known to the government.

After making reference to a gemara (Berachot 35b) in which Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and Rabbi Yishmael debate as to whether it is better to learn Torah exclusively or combine it with the pursuit of a livelihood, Rav Weiss comments:

“In our times … it is uncommon to find those who pursue a livelihood but who nevertheless achieve greatness in Torah. It would seem that with the steady decline of the generations, Torah no longer endures except in those who dedicate their entire lives to it, day and night, and do not turn their attention to any other matters”.

This statement stopped me in my tracks since it raises so many issues. How does one measure “greatness in Torah”? Is “greatness in Torah” a constant, or do the criteria change through time? How relevant is it that even the sages of the gemara could not agree as to whether being able to absorb Torah data was greater than being able to innovate and establish new learning through Torah exegesis? How does this proposition fit with Rabbi Gamliel’s mishnaic claims (Avot 2:2) that Torah, when combined with a livelihood, was beautiful but, without a livelihood, leads to sin?

Beyond that, there are wider questions. As the rate at which human knowledge and artificial intelligence appear to be growing exponentially, does God demand of us that we focus more strongly on our traditional core studies of Tanach, Mishnah, Gemara and the classical commentators, or that we embrace and study new sciences, technologies and social trends in order to bring our Torah understanding to them and “tame” them by framing them within the superstructure of Jewish values?

Rav Weiss has given us an opening for a keen debate, but we have to accept that there are no easy answers to our questions—and perhaps each question has more than a single valid answer.  We have to acknowledge the learning of a talmid who has locked himself away in the Beit Midrash day and night to learn the whole of tractate Chullin, a long and complex tractate that addresses the kashrut of animals and birds. But we also have to acknowledge the learning of the person who has only learned the practical laws of ritual slaughter but can actually identify the spleen or gall bladder that his more learned counterpart has never seen.

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Dealing with heretics

The brilliant, mercurial Rabbi Elazar ben Arach offers us three pieces of advice at Avot 2:19, one of which is this:

דַע מַה שֶּׁתָּשִׁיב לְאֶפִּיקוּרוּס

Know what to answer a heretic.

How relevant is this teaching to us today? At a time when religious observance was the norm and the notion of God’s existence was generally beyond question, the apikoros (heretic) could be expected to be well-informed and thoroughly versed in religious matters, and capable of arguing the case against Judaism (or, for that matter, any other religion). To take on an apikoros was no easy task: one needed mastery of the Torah and of our extensive and complex prophetic literature as an absolute minimum. Nowadays, as Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks once observed, the apikoros is most likely to be someone who has neither knowledge nor interest in the existence of God and the truth of the Torah. Cynical and likely to be hostile to religion, he has no doubts to call his own, but to argue with him is to risk generating doubts in oneself.

Many rabbis, including most recently R’ Yisroel Miller (The Wisdom of Avos) have pointed out that Rabbi Elazar ben Arach is not urging anyone to debate an apikoros. All he says is that one should know how to counter one. If we have the answers, this should secure us against our own doubts. To argue with an apikoros is to risk losing one’s own faith, so we should avoid doing so (Rabbi Yitzchak Magriso, Me’am Lo’ez). The Me’iri’s view is however quite the opposite: we should argue with the apikoros in order to refute his arguments and demonstrate the force of reason that underpins our own.

Rabbi Norman Lamm (Foundation of Faith, ed. Rabbi Mark Dratch) uses this mishnah as the basis of an idea of his own—that, in our portrayal of Judaism in contemporary society, we should be careful not to create heretics. He writes:

“[W]e Jews ought to be so very concerned not only by the impression we make upon outsiders, but by how we appear to our fellow Jews who have become estranged from our sacred tradition. We have labored long and hard and diligently to secure an image of Judaism which does not do violence to Western standards of culture and modernity. But at times the image becomes frayed and another, less attractive image is revealed… Sometimes we have made it appear that we are barely emerging from the cocoon of medievalism”.

This is a difficult line to take. Yes, we do try to portray our Judaism as being compatible with the norms of contemporary society—but this is not easy when that society is not hospitable to most forms of religious practice and is quite sceptical regarding religious belief.  We can’t pretend that the Torah only teaches things that are woke or politically correct when we know it doesn’t. That’s why two recent English-language books have proved so important. In Shmuel Phillips’s Judaism Reclaimed (Mosaica, 2019) and Raphael Zarum’s Questioning Belief (Maggid, 2023), the authors are conscious of the need to address uncomfortable questions in a lucid and respectful manner, seeking to explain the deeper meanings contained in the Torah rather than rely on soundbites and rhetoric. 

Rabbi Lamm continues:

“If we are to be witnesses to Torah, then we Jews must have a more impressive means of communicating with the non-observant segments of our people. Saadia Gaon pointed out a thousand years ago that the best way to make a heretic, an apikoros, is to present an argument for Judaism that is ludicrous and unbecoming. We cannot afford to have sloppy newspapers, second-rate schools, noisy synagogues, or unaesthetic and repelling services. When you testify for God and for Torah, every word must be counted and polished!”

Does Rabbi Lamm go too far here?  His citation of Saadia Gaon’s point is apt, but how does he get from that to his conclusion? Do “noisy synagogues and repelling services” create heretics—or merely people who are indifferent to organised Judaism and its traditional rituals?

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Drinking with thirst

In one of the earliest mishnayot of Avot (1:4), we have a vividly-expressed piece lf advice from Yose ben Yo’ezer Ish Tzereidah:

יְהִי בֵיתְךָ בֵּית וַֽעַד לַחֲכָמִים, וֶהֱוֵי מִתְאַבֵּק בַּעֲפַר רַגְלֵיהֶם, וֶהֱוֵי שׁוֹתֶה בַצָּמָא אֶת דִּבְרֵיהֶם

Let your home be a meeting place for the wise; sit in the dust of their feet, and drink thirstily of their words.

Much of the attention that this teaching receives relates to the “dust of their feet” bit, since it is understood by the traditional commentators in so many different ways. There is no consensus among translators either. I’ve used the ArtScroll translation here, but variations include “dust yourself in the soil of their feet” (Chabad.com) or my own preferred translation, “be wrestling in the dust of their feet”

In contrast, one might expect far greater consensus regarding the final part of the mishnah. There are no problems of vocabulary or idiom and the metaphor of drinking someone’s words thirstily is easily understood, whether used in a Torah context or in everyday speech. But here too the commentators have something to add to the plain meaning of the words.

A possible trigger for elaboration of this mishnah is the implication that “drinking” suggests water. Even though Yose ben Yo’ezer makes no mention of water here, the association of water with Torah, and of thirsting for Torah, is deeply rooted in the psyche of our commentators.  

According to two commentators, the thirst to which our mishnah refers is no ordinary thirst: it is the thirst that is generated by drinking salty water. This activity itself generates further thirst, which is compounded when the person seeking to slake his thirst merely drinks more of it. That. It is suggested, is how consumption of the Torah should be: the more one tastes it, the more of it one wants of it (Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner, Ruach Chaim; Rabbi Yitzchak Volozhiner, Milei de’Avot). The opposite view is also however taken, that the water—because it is a metaphor for Torah—should always be sweet to one’s palate, to encourage its steady consumption (Rabbi Yosef Yavetz, quoting Rabbenu Yosef ben Shushan).

The Chida, quoted in MiMa’ayanot HaNetzach, focuses on the realities of the metaphor, taking a practical view of drinking in one’s Torah. If one drinks too much at a time, it can be harmful. A perfect case in point is that of the baby at the mother’s breast. The baby cannot sustain itself without the life-giving force of the mother’s milk, but will nonetheless stop drinking once the necessary quantity of milk has been consumed. The slowly-slowly approach, in preference to going for a sudden, massive intake is also endorsed by Maharam Shik in one of his later comments on Avot 6:6.

So far as imbibing the wisdom of Torah is concerned, both approaches can be justified. In general, our education is governed by the speed at which we can absorb what we learn. But if someone special walks into our lives, we should at least make an effort to maximise the amount we can learn from that person—even if we do not understand fully at the moment we imbibe it.

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When one word can make all the difference

Most students of Pirkei Avot, when pressed, will admit to having a favourite mishnah. There’s nothing wrong with that. Some teachings of the Tannaim speak directly to us. Others seem somewhat threatening, particularly those that touch upon our continued existence as human beings. An example is the fairly unpopular and apparently quite menacing, mishnah at Avot 3:10:

רַבִּי דוֹסְתָּאִי בְּרַבִּי יַנַּאי מִשּׁוּם רַבִּי מֵאִיר אוֹמֵר: כָּל הַשּׁוֹכֵֽחַ דָּבָר אֶחָד מִמִּשְׁנָתוֹ, מַעֲלֶה עָלָיו הַכָּתוּב כְּאִלּוּ מִתְחַיֵּב בְּנַפְשׁוֹ, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: רַק הִשָּֽׁמֶר לְךָ וּשְׁמֹר נַפְשְׁךָ מְאֹד פֶּן תִּשְׁכַּח אֶת הַדְּבָרִים אֲשֶׁר רָאוּ עֵינֶֽיךָ. יָכוֹל אֲפִילוּ תָּקְפָה עָלָיו מִשְׁנָתוֹ, תַּלְמוּד לוֹמַר: וּפֶן יָסֽוּרוּ מִלְּבָבְךָ כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּֽיךָ, הָא אֵינוֹ מִתְחַיֵּב בְּנַפְשׁוֹ עַד שֶׁיֵּשֵׁב וִיסִירֵם מִלִּבּוֹ

Rabbi Dostai b’Rabbi  Yannai used to say in the name of Rabbi Meir: Anyone who forgets even a single word of this learning, the Torah considers it as if he had forfeited his life, as it states: "Just be careful, and closely guard your soul, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen" (Devarim 4:9). One might think that this applies even to one who [has forgotten because] his studies proved too difficult for him; but the verse goes on to tell us: "and lest they be removed from your heart, throughout the days of your life." Thus one does not forfeit his life unless he deliberately removes them from his heart.

We all forget things we’ve learned and none of us is in a position to deny the fact. Sometimes we are annoyed and frustrated at not being able to recall something we struggled hard to learn but now eludes us. On other occasions we forget because we were not paying sufficient attention to the subject of study. Perhaps it didn’t seem relevant at the time, or we planned to revisit it and learn it properly at a later stage—but never did.

Fortunately, the end of this mishnah softens the blow: it is only when we are learning Torah and deliberately seek to unlearn something that our lives are actually or metaphorically forfeit. We can also be at risk of forgetting our learning if we don’t understand its meaning or significance in the first place. Thus, while the Talmud (Sukkah 42a) tells us that, as soon as a child can speak, his father should teach him the Shema, a foundational declaration of God’s unity and His relationship to us, most children have little understanding of these concepts and simply chant the words parrot-fashion. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Rabbi Shlomo Toperoff answers this question by unexpectedly turning this mishnah on its head. If forgetting even one thing can destroy life, he suggests, even accidentally remembering even one thing can preserve or revive it. He writes, in Lev Avot:

“During World War II, many Jewish children were rescued from the Holocaust and placed in Christian hostels and homes. After the war, Dayan Grunfeld visited the evacuation camps that housed many of these young people. He was puzzled to know which children were Jewish and was suddenly inspired to mingle amongst them and repeat several times the words Shema Yisrael. A number of the children who had suffered from spiritual amnesia heard this plaintive cry from the distant past and they seemed to become aroused through the latent feelings embedded deep down in the recesses of their hearts, and they spontaneously responded by presenting themselves to the Rabbi”.

Rabbi Toperoff then presses home his point:

“The Mishnah records that if a person forgets one word of his learning he may forfeit his spiritual life, but the reverse is equally true. The solitary word Shema may reactivate the spiritual links which lie dormant in the subconscious mind and may trigger off a chain of events which would recover the loss of memory. So powerful is the potential quality of the one word of learning that, whilst the loss of it can have disastrous results, the vocal image of one word of the spiritual vocabulary of Judaism can produce miraculous results”.

It seems incredible that Dayan Grunfeld could have done such a thing—but we have a fuller account of his rescue activities from his son Raphael, writing in the Jewish Press (12 September 2012):

“When my father inquired whether the religious needs of the Jewish children in the camp were in fact being attended to, the reply was that there was not a single Jewish child in the camp. My father was skeptical. He knew that Jewish children had survived the war by hiding in the houses of gentiles who had risked their lives to save them, and he dared to hope that at least a few Jewish children were among the thousand.

As my father walked through the camp he began to recite aloud “Shema Yisrael” and “Hamalach Hagoel.” All at once he was surrounded by hordes of little children. “Mama, Mama,” they cried. “Take us home to Mama.”

It was this experience that underlined for him the magnitude of the problem and so he went on to establish the Jewish War Orphans Commission, which led to an unrelenting campaign before the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations for the rescue of Jewish war orphans and their return to Jewry”.

May we all be protected by the merit of our learning—be it much or little—and of those things we never forget.

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Out of this world?

Three mishnayot in Avot describe different types of undesirable conduct as having the same curious and somewhat menacing outcome:

רַבִּי יְהוֹשֻֽׁעַ אוֹמֵר: עַֽיִן הָרָע, וְיֵֽצֶר הָרָע, וְשִׂנְאַת הַבְּרִיּוֹת, מוֹצִיאִין אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעוֹלָם

Rabbi Yehoshua used to say: An evil eye, the evil inclination, and the hatred of one's fellows drive a person from the world (Avot 2:16).

רַבִּי דוֹסָא בֶּן הָרְכִּינַס אוֹמֵר: שֵׁנָה שֶׁל שַׁחֲרִית, וְיַֽיִן שֶׁל צָהֳרָֽיִם, וְשִׂיחַת הַיְלָדִים, וִישִׁיבַת בָּתֵּי כְנֵסִיּוֹת שֶׁל עַמֵּי הָאָֽרֶץ, מוֹצִיאִין אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעוֹלָם

Rabbi Dosa ben Harkinas used to say: Morning sleep, mid-day wine, children's talk and sitting at the meeting places of the ignoramus drive a person from the world (Avot 3:14).

רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר הַקַּפָּר אוֹמֵר: הַקִּנְאָה וְהַתַּאֲוָה וְהַכָּבוֹד, מוֹצִיאִין אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעוֹלָם

Rabbi Elazar HaKappar used to say: Envy, lust and [the desire for] honour drive a man from the world (Avot 4:28).

I’ve quoted the Chabad.org translation here; the ArtScroll translation is remove a man from the world. They mean practically the same thing and are much in accord with modern English translations. But what does it mean, to drive or remove a person from the world? The implication is that the world from which a person is being removed is this world, olam hazeh, rather than the world to come, olam haba, since every public recitation of a chapter of Avot traditionally opens with a declaration that every Jew has a portion in olam haba. In any event, Rabbi Yisroel Miller observes (The Wisdom of Avos), our mishnayot should have referred to not gaining admittance to the world rather than being taken out of it.

But what does this mean in practice?

Ancient commentators offer some suggestions, but they do not go into granular detail—possibly because they have an understanding of the term which they believe they share with others. Neither the Bartenura nor the commentary ascribed to Rashi offer any explanation at all for the words “drive a man from the world” (מוֹצִיאִין אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעוֹלָם). Rambam makes no comment the first two occasions when this phrase appears. On the third time around, in relation to envy, lust and honour, he adds that these bad middot “cause a person to lose his faith and prevent him from attaining intellectual and ethical virtue” (tr. R’ Eliyahu Touger)—though it is not clear whether this is an explanation of מוֹצִיאִין אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעוֹלָם or simply a comment on the harmful effects of envy, lust and honour. Rabbenu Yonah (at Avot 2:16) however takes a robust approach to the meaning of this phrase: “you sear your own internal organs by desiring what is not yours … your jealous thoughts will destroy your body, making you short-tempered and removing you from the world” (tr. Rabbi David Sedley).

Later commentators are generally less cautious in expressing their opinions. Thus at Avot 2:16 Rabbi Yitzchak Magriso (Me’am Lo’ez), citing a gemara at Bava Metzia 107a, asserts that the evil eye which Rabbi Yehoshua mentions in that mishnah is the cause of death of 99% of the people buried in a cemetery visited by Rav. At Avot 3:14 R’ Magriso offers a different explanation: being driven from the world simply means wasting time and losing out on one’s mission in the world.  

For Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski (Visions of the Fathers, Avot 2:16), the whole point of Rabbi Yehoshua’s teaching is its punchline. With the assistance of the Ramchal’s Derech Hashem he argues that any person who does good is effectively partnering God in the continued act of Creation. Conversely, one who does evil is undoing the purpose of Creation. Such a person is “removed from the world”. This explanation is attractively simple but still leaves open the question why three separate Tannaim, in authoring their Mishnah, should have rendered the Ramchal’s idea in such a strange manner.

The most brutal modern explanation of being removed from the world may be that of Gila Ross (Living Beautifully, at Avot 2:16): for her, Rabbi Yehoshua is teaching about things that are “so harmful they can actually destroy a person”. More than that, they can “cause us anxiety, … ruin our health .... and distance us from the World to Come by derailing us…”

Of all the recent explanations, the one that appeals to me most is that of Rabbi Norman Lamm (Foundation of Faith, ed. Rabbi Mark Dratch). At Avot 2:16 he writes as follows:

“The blacks and the whites of life are not what make up the ‘world’ which is for the greatest part comprised of shades of gray. It is rare that in crisis we have clear-cut options with which we are confronted: good and evil, right and wrong. Normally we have to make subtle distinctions; we are faced with paradoxes and ambivalences and are forced to choose out of uncertainty and confusion.

The confusion and ambivalence is most oppressive when we deal with ideas and qualities which can serve both the ends of good and evil, of the right and of the wrong. At such times not only is there an element of uncertainty as to whether we are using or abusing a certain quality, but there is a tendency for us to submit to rationalization—to abuse a quality and to assume that we are doing the right thing. Since the world is constituted mostly of such uncertainties and such qualities of double nature, when we confound their right use and wrong use, when we allow ourselves to rationalize away our own self-interest, then we lose contact with ‘the world’ and we are removed from it …”.

In other words, simpler words, Rabbi Lamm is saying this: the ‘world’ from which we are being removed is the world of our own objectively-viewed reality. We effectively remove ourselves from being able to think logically and along the lines of Jewish law and tradition to which we subscribe.

Being removed from the world of reality is not necessarily a punishment. Most of us feel it at one time or another. for example when a person is first in love. In former times such a person might be described as "looking at the world through rose-tinted spectacles"; I'm sure that there are modern equivalents. The main point is that, for good or not so good, our view of reality is distorted.

May our distorted view of the world only be the product of good and happy things!

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Being careful: theory and practice

Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi teaches (Avot 2:1) a much-discussed principle—that one should take as much care when fulfilling a light or minor commandment as when performing a heavy or major one. In his own words:

וֶהֱוֵי זָהִיר בְּמִצְוָה קַלָּה כְּבַחֲמוּרָה, שֶׁאֵין אַתָּה יוֹדֵֽעַ מַתַּן שְׂכָרָן שֶׁל מִצְוֹת, וֶהֱוֵי מְחַשֵּׁב הֶפְסֵד מִצְוָה כְּנֶֽגֶד שְׂכָרָהּ, וּשְׂכַר עֲבֵרָה כְּנֶֽגֶד הֶפְסֵדָהּ

Be as careful with a minor mitzvah as with a major one, for you do not know the rewards of the mitzvot. Consider the cost of a mitzvah against its rewards, and the rewards of a transgression against its cost.

We normally take this mishnah as a single lesson in how to handle God’s commandments and then go off into lengthy discussions of how you can tell the mitzvot apart in terms of their weightiness. But in reality there are two separate issues here. The first, as the Sefat Emet points out, is to take care when performing every mitzvah, regardless of its apparent magnitude or importance. The second is that it is not for us to assess the significance of any mitzvah, or the insignificance of any transgression, whatever our personal feelings on the subject. We simply do not have the data that enables us to do this.

The Sefat Emet adds that it is the zehirut—the care taken in performing a mitzvah—that determines the reward for its performance, along with the effort involved in performing it (here he cites Ben Heh Heh at Avot 5: 26: “According to the effort, so is the reward”).

We are just ordinary mortals seeking to carry out God’s will. Our problem is that what constitutes zehirut is not the same for every mitzvah. In the case of circumcision, the berit milah, standards of care are set at a professionally high level, which is why most parents who are bound by this commandment will assign its performance to a person who has been trained to display the requisite level of care and expertise. Other mitzvot are more problematic because there is no objective standard of “being careful”. A good example is that of nichum avelim, comforting mourners during the days that follow a close relative’s funeral. How many times have people caused more upset than comfort with well-meaning (and often true) statements such as “it must be a great relief for you now that s/he is out of their misery at last”, “at least you have three other children” or attempts to distract a mourner with irrelevancies such as “how long have you lived in this house?”

But every situation in which a person visits a mourner is the same, and taking care means tuning in to the needs of the person one is seeking to comfort. Let me cite a couple of situations where the bounds of zehirut were not immediately clear, and where they turned out to be quite different.

In the first case I was visiting the late Dayan Isaac Lerner of the London Beth Din, who was sitting shiva for a sibling. It was a mid-day visit and, when I arrived, I found that the Dayan, whom I did not know well, was quite alone, apart from a family member who was preparing food in the kitchen. I could hardly leave and return later when there were more people present so I sat down opposite him. I felt quite uncomfortable, but the Dayan clearly sensed my anxiety and put me at my ease by saying he welcomed the company. We talked for an hour or so and the time seemed to pass quickly; the Dayan steered the conversation towards a subject that deeply interested him: the role of prophecy in the Book of Malachi which I had recently learned and which, I discovered, he knew by heart. I soon realised that my role in the nichum avelim, my zehirut, was to concentrate on following his leads, to show I was following his train of thought and to let him guide the conversation towards his own lofty ideas on peace between generations and the end of days.

In the second case I was visiting the late Marcus Witztum, an exuberant, colourful character and restaurateur in North West London. Again it was a mid-day visit and the avel, who was not well known to me, was alone. Here the zehirut was quite different. Marcus did not want someone to talk with; he wanted someone to talk to. In short, he was lonely and needed an audience rather than words of comfort. Apart from the occasional nod, smile or gesture, there was really nothing else I could do—but that was all that was required of me. When I left, Marcus thanked me warmly for being with him, through I felt I had done nothing.

So, what does zehirut mean in practice? I guess it take a lifetime to learn.

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