THE DANGER OF WORDS, THE PROBLEM OF EXILE

Few areas of Jewish law and practice are as extensively addressed—and, it seems, as frequently breached—as those that relate to the abuse of words, whether written or spoken. In addition to the Torah’s many prohibitions against false, damaging and inappropriate speech, Pirkei Avot carries many warnings concerning the misuse of words, and indeed praises the quality of silence. One of the lengthier warnings in Avot concerns the teacher’s use of careless words and the risk that they will lead one’s talmidim (pupils) astray.  At Avot 1:11 Avtalyon says:

חֲכָמִים, הִזָּהֲרוּ בְדִבְרֵיכֶם, שֶׁמָּא תָחֽוֹבוּ חוֹבַת גָּלוּת וְתִגְלוּ לִמְקוֹם מַֽיִם הָרָעִים, וְיִשְׁתּוּ הַתַּלְמִידִים הַבָּאִים אַחֲרֵיכֶם וְיָמֽוּתוּ, וְנִמְצָא שֵׁם שָׁמַֽיִם מִתְחַלֵּל

Scholars, be careful with your words since you may liable to be exiled and be exiled to a place of bad water. The disciples who come after you will then drink of these bad waters and be killed, and the Name of Heaven will be desecrated.

Most traditional commentators link these words to the sad episode in which Zadok and Boethus, the talmidim of Antigonus of Socho, either misunderstood or deliberately misapplied his words and eventually led schismatic sects of their own. But, while this explanation is sound, it does not assist us in tackling the key question: how do we know that the words of any given sage are “bad water”, doctrinally unsound and dangerous to Judaism as we understand it, and not a brilliant, possibly counterintuitive innovation or insight?

Rabbis must have asked themselves this question ever since they resolved that Torah was not in Heaven and took upon themselves the task of applying, developing and elucidating the laws contained in the written Torah. How could they discern, for example, whether Hillel’s introduction of the prozbul as a means of circumventing the cancellation of loan debts in the Sabbatical year was a stroke of rabbinical genius and not a barefaced evasion of an explicit Torah law?

Rabbi Yisrael Miller (The Wisdom of Avos) recognizes this problem. He writes:

“Among great Torah thinkers and teachers, there are always some who are outside the mainstream (this is not a criticism). Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, Rav Yisrael Salanter, the Satmar Rebbe Rav Yoel Teitelbaum, and the Rambam in an earlier generation, all held and taught certain views that differed from those of the majority of their contemporaries, and their teachings are important contributions to Torah thought. But when a teacher is outside the mainstream, a student’s misunderstanding will likely not be corrected by what we might call ‘peer review’”.

In other words, the real danger alluded to in our mishnah is not that a teacher endorses doctrine that is erroneous—something that is likely to be spotted and challenged pretty swiftly by his peers—but that a talmid will fail to grasp the proper meaning of an apparently unorthodox teaching and will not be pulled back into the fold by his peers. But, while trying to find the right words with which to avoid giving offence, Rabbi Miller gets to his point:

“…[I]f the rebbi and his yeshiva are considered ‘different’ (by others) or ‘unique’ (by his own talmidim, then the opinions and arguments of ‘outsiders’ carry little weight. We see this among Breslover and Lubavitcher Chassidim, and also in some non-Chassidic yeshivas, especially in some smaller ones where there is only one rebbi whose talmidim are devoted to him). In such cases a talmid who misunderstands will not revise his thinking based on what ‘outsiders’ might say, and may remain with a serious error in hashkafah or practical halachah”.

Rav Miller does concede that to study under giants like Rabbi Yisrael Salander or the Satmar Rebbe would be “a ben Torah’s dream”. But the point has been made. Rav Miller concludes:

“Based on this, the ‘exile’ means to end up alone (“exiled”) from the mainstream. ‘Harmful waters’ are teachings that are dangerous if misunderstood (which of course pose no danger to the teacher who ’drinks’, because he knows what he means). But such Sages must choose their words with extra care, lest the students make a serious error that cannot be corrected, and the name of Heaven desecrated”.

The teacher whose words enable talmidim to go astray is clearly not about to do so himself. Avtalyon addresses this mishnah to “Chachamim”, a title that he would surely not confer upon peddlers of false truths and fake Torah.

Rabbi Miller’s explanation does not address the literal meaning of Avtalyon’s mishnah in one respect, since he offers no meaning for the part of the mishnah that stipulates that the teacher is liable to be exiled.  What does “exile” have to do with his message? Here another mishnah from Avot comes into play. At Avot 4:18  Rabbi Nehorai addresses exile full-on:

הֱוֵי גוֹלֶה לִמְקוֹם תּוֹרָה, וְאַל תֹּאמַר שֶׁהִיא תָבוֹא אַחֲרֶֽיךָ, שֶׁחֲבֵרֶֽיךָ יְקַיְּמֽוּהָ בְיָדֶֽךָ, וְאֶל בִּינָתְךָ אַל תִּשָּׁעֵן

Exile yourself to a place of Torah; do not say that it will come after you, that your colleagues will help you retain it—and don’t rely on your own understanding.

There is discussion in the Gemara as to the identity of Rabbi Nehorai. One opinion is that he is really Rabbi Elazar ben Arach, a talmid of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai who is speaking here from experience. He followed his wife to Diomsis (aka Emmaus), a place known for its waters. His colleagues did not follow him and he forgot his Torah. Although Rabbi Elazar ben Arach lived generations after Avtalyon, we might speculate that the idea of deserting the Beit Midrash for a spa resort was one that appealed to Chachamim of other generations too.

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WHO, OR WHAT, IS THE ONE AND ONLY?

Rabbi Yishmael ben Yose has some strong opinions about judges and judging. After effectively accusing anyone who wants to be a judge of being a pompous idiot (Avot 4:9), he continues (at Avot 4:10):

אַל תְּהִי דָן יְחִידִי, שֶׁאֵין דָּן יְחִידִי אֶלָּא אֶחָד

Do not judge on your own, for no-one is qualified to judge alone except the One.

Taken at face value, the "One" is God. But Avot is supposed to teach us mussar and middot--how to behave. While we seek to emulate God when and where we can, our sphere of operation is the sphere of the mundane. So what message can we learn from this mishnah that will apply specifically to us?

Most Jewish courts deal with ordinary civil disputes involving loans, debts, breach of contract and the like, aa well as supervising Jewish divorces, and these courts generally consist of three dayanim. It is permitted for a dayan to judge by himself (Sanhedrin 3a), but the practice is not generally encouraged. The circumstance in which this happens is likely to be where the judge has a particular legal expertise and where both parties to a dispute request it. This being so, one may ask why Rabbi Yishmael ben Yose is so dead set against it. The mishnah calls for an explanation.

One approach, taken by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (Pirkei Avot im Sha’are Avot) is to remove the mishnah from the context of litigation and direct it towards the individual. When we judge ourselves, we must be aware that we are not impartial, since no man is a rasha in his own eyes. We cultivate our own biases and may not even recognize them. When judged by God, however, our thoughts and actions can be objectively scrutinized. While this is an important lesson, one might ask whether Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, who redacted the Mishnah, or the Tanna who taught it, intended it to be removed from the sphere of civil dispute resolution, given that it is both preceded and followed by court-specific statements.

An attempt to widen the scope of the mishnah without removing it from a judicial context can be found in Rabbi Shlomo P. Toperoff’s Lev Avot. There, he focuses on the methodology of the judicial process in terms the standards we use both in court and out of it for judging others.

Rabbi Toperoff takes the words אַל תְּהִי דָן יְחִידִי  (al tehi dan yechidi, “do not judge on your own”) and effectively renders them as “do not do strict justice alone” since the root of the word דָן (dan, “a judge”) share a common root with din, “strict justice”. He argues that the Jewish way is to judge simultaneously in accordance with two standards: din, strict justice and rachamim, justice tempered by mercy.

This advice is admirable. We see it implemented in every judicial system in which a court’s decision on liability is based on strict justice but its resulting order takes into account factors that mitigate or aggravate the decision itself. However, Rabbi Toperoff then proceeds to give an example that detracts from the principle he advocates.

On the basis that mishpat (justice) is the equivalent to din and that tzedakah (charity) is the equivalent of rachamim, Rabbi Toperoff cites 2 Samuel 8:15 (וְדָוִד֙ עֹשֶׂ֣ה מִשְׁפָּ֔ט וּצְדָקָ֖ה לְכׇל־עַמּֽוֹ , “And David executed mishpat and tzedakah towards all his people”), he continues:

How did David execute both at the same time? One rabbi interpreted the verse literally as meaning that when David realised that the condemned man was poor, he himself undertook to pay the fine. In this manner, David dispensed justice with charity.

The rabbi concerned was undoubtedly well-meaning. However, no serious judge or dayan would find it helpful guidance in dealing with a case before him today. It would be hard to find judges prepared to hear cases if they were expected to finance fines and damages out of their own pockets and, if a judge was to be required to indemnify the guilty or liable party, any deterrent effect of the court’s award would be diminished or entirely eliminated. A poor person would then be at liberty to plough his car through a crowd of pedestrians in the knowledge that the unfortunate judge would be expected to pick up the bill. In short, this sort of explanation does nothing to promote the real-world value of Pirkei Avot as a guide to good and ethical behaviour.

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MIDDOT IN ONE’S DNA—AGAIN

Last month I posted a piece that expressed some dismay at the proposition, espoused by Rabbi Yaakov Hillel (Eternal Ethics from Sinai, on Avot 2:11), that good middot—behavioural qualities—are hereditary. I had assumed that this was a lone opinion, but I am wrong. The same notion is also expressed in another contemporary commentary on Avot, Rav Schachter on Pirkei Avos, based on the thoughts and shiurim of Rav Hershel Schachter as adopted by Dr Allan Weissman. This work comments on Avot 5:3, an anonymous mishnah in praise of Avraham:

עֲשָׂרָה נִסְיוֹנוֹת נִתְנַסָּה אַבְרָהָם אָבִֽינוּ, וְעָמַד בְּכֻלָּם, לְהוֹדִֽיעַ כַּמָּה חִבָּתוֹ שֶׁל אַבְרָהָם אָבִֽינוּ

With ten tests our father Abraham was tested and he withstood them all—in order to make known how great was our father Abraham's love.

Rav Schachter on Avos comments thus:

“Avraham Avinu’s success in passing the ten nisyonos indicated that his level of yiras Shamayim became part of his DNA makeup, and this could then be transmitted genetically to future generations. Thus, Avraham paved the way for his descendants, who have since stirred themselves to make aliyah, for example, and to accept difficulties in life with emunah and without question”.

I wonder if has ever occurred to the author that the vast majority of Avraham’s descendants are from Yishmael and not from Yitzchak. Moreover, a very large proportion of our ‘minority’ branch consists of people who have not made aliyah and appear to have little wish or intention to do so. The descendants of Yishmael, however, seem to be quite eager to occupy the whole of the land of Israel.

It's apposite to note that DNA in the context of our mishnah cannot be taken literally. It is suggested that it was only once Avraham had passed the ten tests that his DNA was perfected. Both Yishmael and Yitzchak were of course already born before then.

I remain uncomfortable with the notion that our behavioural choices in life are somehow conditioned by our genetic composition, especially in the absence of any evidence to that effect and when there does seem to be at least circumstantial evidence to the contrary.

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FIRST TO GREET? IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO

Only one mishnah in the name of Rabbi Matya ben Chorosh (Avot 4:20) is included in the version of Avot we learn today:

הֱוֵי מַקְדִּים בִּשְׁלוֹם כָּל אָדָם, וֶהֱוֵי זָנָב לָאֲרָיוֹת, וְאַל תְּהִי רֹאשׁ לַשֻּׁעָלִים

Rabbi Matya the son of Charash would say: Be first to greet everyone. Be a tail to lions, rather than a head to foxes.

Is this mishnah a pair of quite unrelated teachings, or are they connected? Questions of this nature persist throughout the tractate and they turn on the same meta-question: did Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, in redacting Avot, group more than one teaching by the same rabbi because:

• it was easier to remember the two independent teachings by the same rabbi if they were bracketed together in the same mishnah,
• they constituted only a single teaching which was segmented, or
• they were two separate teachings but the meaning of the second part was conditioned by the first?

Commentators at different times have taken different approaches. One rabbi who worked hard to establish a sequential link wherever possible in Avot is Rabbi Ovadiyah Hedayah, whose commentary on Avot (Seh leBet Avot) sometimes seems to push this methodology to its limits, if not beyond.  But the Seh leBet Avot has its surprises.

 The quality of being the first to greet people—the middah urged upon us by the Tanna—is praised for many reasons. It is a display of friendship, a recognition of the essential humanity shared by the greeter and the person greeted. It is also a sign of humility, since no-one is deemed so unimportant as to be snubbed in the street. Examples of great rabbis and personalities who do this are given. It is not a complex matter for the student of Avot to grasp.

The Seh leBet Avot has to find some link between this teaching and that which precedes it, an apparently harsh and fatalistic statement of Rabbi Yannai (Avot 4:19):

אֵין בְּיָדֵֽינוּ לֹא מִשַּׁלְוַת הָרְשָׁעִים, וְאַף לֹא מִיִּסּוֹרֵי הַצַּדִּיקִים

Neither the tranquillity of the wicked, nor the suffering of the righteous, are within our grasp.

There is no obvious connection between the words of Rabbi Yannai and those of Rabbi Matya ben Chorosh. Yet they are juxtaposed and, in many editions of Avot that are not numbered in the same manner as the versions found in modern siddurim, the two are even included in the same mishnah.

Rabbi Hedayah finds a link.  The teaching of Rabbi Yannai is about the inscrutability of divine justice. This is contrasted with that of Rabbi Matya, who speaks of justice made by man.

The words הֱוֵי מַקְדִּים בִּשְׁלוֹם can and do mean “be first to greet”, but the word שְׁלוֹם literally means “peace”. The teaching is therefore that one should be first to make peace. This applies in the context of litigation, where the disputants are facing off against other with anger and hostility. Our job is to get in first, ideally by identifying a pesharah, a compromise solution that will make both parties happy, or at minimise their sadness. The best form of peace is that which arises from the resolution of a dispute—and if both parties agree to it, the discomforts and frustrations of divine justice will simply not apply.

Up to this point, all is well—but what happens if a pesharah cannot be established and the dispute must be heard? Here the fox-and-lions part of the teaching comes into play. When judging a case, don’t hasten to convene a poor and unworthy Beit Din of which you are the head; for the sake of shalom, of real peace, it is better to be the most junior member of the tribunal so that the parties will benefit from it and you will learn from it too.

Yes, this explanation does seem somewhat contrived and is very much at odds with the way most people read Rabbi Matya’s mishnah—but it does remind us that we should be ever alert to new ways of reading the mishnayot in Avot. We may reject the result of what we learn, but we may gain from it too. I for one had forgotten that his mishnah might have anything to do with peace, notwithstanding the presence of שְׁלוֹם at the very heart of it.

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CONTENTED -- BUT DISCONTENTED?

The concept of being satisfied with one’s portion in life is deeply ingrained in Pirkei Avot. At Avot 4:1 Ben Zoma teaches:

אֵיזֶהוּ עָשִׁיר, הַשָּׂמֵֽחַ בְּחֶלְקוֹ, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: יְגִֽיעַ כַּפֶּֽיךָ כִּי תֹאכֵל, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ וְטוֹב לָךְ, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה, וְטוֹב לָךְ לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא

Who is rich? One who is happy with his lot. As it states (Tehillim 128:2): "If you eat of the effort of your hands, you are fortunate and it’s good for you"; "you are fortunate" in this world, "and it is good for you" in the World to Come.

This sentiment is echoed by a Baraita at Avot 6:4:

כַּךְ הִיא דַּרְכָּהּ שֶׁל תּוֹרָה: פַּת בְּמֶֽלַח תֹּאכֵל, וּמַֽיִם בִּמְשׂוּרָה תִּשְׁתֶּה, וְעַל הָאָֽרֶץ תִּישָׁן, וְחַיֵּי צַֽעַר תִּחְיֶה, וּבַתּוֹרָה אַתָּה עָמֵל, אִם אַתָּה עֽוֹשֶׂה כֵּן, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ וְטוֹב לָךְ, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה, וְטוֹב לָךְ לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא

Such is the way of Torah: Bread with salt you shall eat, water in small measure you shall drink, and upon the ground you shall sleep; live a life of hardship and toil in Torah. If you do so, “you are fortunate and it’s good for you"; "you are fortunate" in this world, "and it is good for you" in the World to Come.

Being contented with one’s lot is highly praised as the highest form of acceptance of God’s will. Anything less might be viewed as a criticism of His assessment of what you need or deserve—a point made by Rabbi Shalom Noach Berezovsky in his Netivot Shalom. But this itself raises concerns about the danger of complacency, which demotivates a person and causes us to rest on our laurels rather than seek self-betterment.

An approach towards establishing the parameters of contentment is found in the Si’ach Tzvi, a commentary on the siddur by Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Ferber. There, he refers to our request in the blessing for a good and prosperous year:

שבְּעֵנוּ מִטּוּבָהּ

“Satisfy us from your goodness”

There he observes that there are two areas in which one might be satisfied to the point of contentment: one is in one’s material aspirations, the other in one’s personal growth in terms of one’s human qualities.

The point of this blessing, he explains, is to seek contentment with one’s material wealth and not to keep demanding more, since man by his very nature is an acquisitive animal: the more we have, the more we want. We invoke God’s assistance in this blessing in curbing our constant desire to accumulate. But when it comes to one’s spiritual, emotional and intellectual development, one should never be satisfied with one’s lot. We should always seek to grow in knowledge, wisdom, emotional understanding and so on.

The truly happy person, Rabbi Ferber concludes, is the one who is truly at peace of mind with what he or she owns, while nonetheless striving to grow into a better person. The person we should avoid becoming is the poor soul who is comfortable with what sort of person he is and has no concern for his betterment, while simultaneously questing for more money and everything that goes with it.

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IS GOOD BEHAVIOUR HEREDITARY?

I have just come across an astonishing proposition from one of the most powerful proponent of focusing on Torah-true values, Rabbi Yaakov Hillel. It troubles me greatly and I shall explain why.

In his Eternal Ethics from Sinai, an uncompromising no-holds-barred commentary on Avot, Rabbi Hillel takes a position on one of the less discussed parts of the tractate: the two words of praise that Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai accords to his talmid, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya. At Avot 2:11 he says just two words: אַשְׁרֵי יוֹלַדְתּוֹ (“Happy is the one who bore him”). This is taken to refer to the pleasure Rabbi Yehoshua gave his mother by becoming a great talmid chacham, and tales are told of how she sought to place her baby son where he would hear and absorb words of Torah even before he could consciously understand them.

Rabbi Hillel, commenting on this teaching, writes this:

The parents of this exceptional child were truly fortunate. The Bartenura writes that Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananyah was blessed with such good middot that everyone said “‘What lucky parents to have such a son”. This is more than a matter of nahat from a good child. Middot are hereditary. The very fact that one has good middot is a compliment to his parents, because these fine qualities came from them.  … Sadly a child born to parents with bad middot is all too likely to inherit their negative traits.

To be fair to Rabbi Hillel, he later writes that even people born with these good middot should still work on them and improve them—a concession to the possibility that an individual may have some sort of choice in the matter, at least on the assumption that the urge to improve oneself is itself also a good middah that one has inherited from one’s parents. However, my discomfort with his words remains.

Let us start with a case recorded in the Torah: the children born to Yitzchak and Rivkah. Eisav and Yaakov were twins and no commentator has dared to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of their parentage. One, Yaakov, is credited with excellent middot: he is held up as the epitome of truth (Micah 7:20), a man of honesty and integrity in even the most trying of circumstances (the Torah records more tests of Yaakov than of Abraham).  The other is written off as a violent, egotistical degenerate, a person of no worth and who possesses just one redeeming feature in the way he honours his father. Heredity is hard to accommodate here but not impossible. Perhaps Yaakov inherited his parents’ pure and perfect middot while Eisav inherited those of the family from which his mother descended.

More tellingly, a lifetime’s experience has shown me that children with very different middot appear to be almost routinely born the same parents and that, while there are some families in which all the members have outstanding middot, such families do seem in our generation to constitute a minority.

I wonder what benefit a reader may extract from the proposition that middot are hereditary. This message may be read as a disincentive to do anything about one’s own middot on the basis that they are in one’s genes, as it were. It may also cause people to judge harshly and unfairly those families whose children display poor behaviour, not least because it discounts the impact of social influence and peer pressure—phenomena that are demonstrably easier to prove than moral heredity.

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WHY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE

While the topic of why bad things happen to good people—and vice versa—has occupied a place in the thought of religious people of many faiths across the millennia, it is plain that there is no consensus answer. We are faced with a palette of answers from which to choose, and each is open to objection. Sample explanations might run like this:

• The good person to whom bad things happen isn’t really good—and you aren’t in a position to assess their quantum of goodness;
• That person obviously didn’t pray hard, well or frequently enough to merit good things happening;
• That person may be good in this life but be possessed by a soul that was bad in an earlier existence, and which deserved a tough time;
• That person is really and truly good, and the bad things that happen are only to clear the way for them to enjoy a more pleasurable life in the World to Come;
• Bad things happen to this person so that some other person can have the opportunity to good things to them;
• The infliction of bad things has a cautionary effect, warning that worse things may come if the good person does not do—or desist from doing—a particular thing;
• Being made to experience bad things is only a test of how strong is that person’s faith in the face of adversity.

There are also correlative explanations as to why good things happen to bad people.

At Avot 4:19 Rabbi Yannai raises the question but then appears to deflect it:

אֵין בְּיָדֵֽינוּ לֹא מִשַּׁלְוַת הָרְשָׁעִים, וְאַף לֹא מִיִּסּוֹרֵי הַצַּדִּיקִים

Neither the tranquility of the wicked nor the suffering of the righteous are in our grasp.

Rabbi Yannai is quite correct. We cannot understand why the wicked enjoy the good things in life while the good do not, or why people who commit evil can sleep soundly in their beds at night while tzaddikim, the righteous, are unable to rest. One might venture to suggest that the thrust of his mishnah is not to tell us that we don’t have an answer but, by implication, to persuade us to let go of these issues and not waste valuable time speculating about them since we have neither the necessary data nor the Divine perspective that make an assessment in each case possible.

As one might imagine, this issue has attracted the serious attention of many of our Sages over the generations, none of which impressed Rabbi Baruch HaLevi Epstein

In his Baruch She’amar al Pirkei Avot, he expresses his astonishment that many have laboured over this issue when the answer is so obvious. He cites a gemara at Niddah 16b that runs like this:

Rabbi Chanina bar Papa made the following exposition: The name of the angel who is in charge of conception is 'Night', and he takes up a drop [of semen] and places it in the presence of the Holy One, blessed be He, saying, 'Sovereign of the universe, what shall be the fate of this drop? Shall it produce a strong man or a weak man, a wise man or a fool, a rich man or a poor man?' Whereas 'wicked man' or 'righteous one' he does not mention, in agreement with the view of Rabbi Chanina. For Rabbi Chanina stated: ‘Everything is in the hands of heaven except the fear of God, as it is said, And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear him …

This gemara answers the question entirely. God determines what is going to happen to a person in terms of his or her health, wealth, status and aptitudes—but it for that person to exercise free will and choose whether to be a God-fearing (= good) person or not.

The same gemara is picked up in a recently published commentary on Avot, Rav Schachter on Pirkei Avos (2023). The Rav Schachter in question is Rav Hershel Schachter and much if not most of his commentary is based on the teachings of his own revered rabbi, HaRav Yosef Dov HaLevi Soloveitchik. Curiously, the passage from Niddah quoted above is brought in a discussion of an entirely different mishnah, Avot 4:4, at which Rabbi Levitas teaches that one should be exceedingly humble. This is because, as the gemara explains, a person’s skills and talents are God-given gifts and therefore nothing to boast about.

So how does Rav Schachter tackle the good-person/bad-things issue? In truth he doesn’t—but he does write about the fact that we live an imperfect world in which we have failed to eliminate Amalek and the forces of evil, and about the importance of accepting God’s decree with equanimity as a means of demonstrating one’s own emunah.

Maybe the Baruch She’amar’s approach comes close to sweeping a complex philosophical issue under the carpet, but I can’t help preferring it to a lengthy, learned and well-sourced response that seems to avoid answering it full-on.

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THE CURSE OF COMPLACENCY

Earlier this week I took a little time out from my busy schedule to go downtown with my son to a Jerusalemite bar with a big screen. There, over a pleasant beer or two, we cheered on Israel’s national football (soccer) team as the took on the might of Italy in a World Cup qualifying match. It was a real thriller: Israel looked to have taken the lead but their goal was disallowed. They then twice did take the lead, only to be overhauled by the stylish Europeans. Ultimately having scored a late equaliser, they conceded an even later goal that proved to be decisive. We lost 5-4 but we made a real contest of it and could hold our heads high.

What has this to do with Pirkei Avot? The tractate pinpoints many character failings, but on a casual reading it seems that none of the sages who contributed to it had anything to say about complacency. The Israel team, reflecting what some people have unkindly suggested is a national characteristic, appeared to be afflicted by a tendency to concede a goal very soon after scoring one of their own. It is as though the players, having greatly exerted themselves to secure the lead, relaxed a little and slid down from the peak of intense concentration to which they had previously ascended.

So where in Avot do we find any discussion of complacency and the need to avoid it? If we are honest with ourselves, there isn’t one. Neither Biblical Hebrew nor the modern version spoken in Israel today have a word that exactly matches it. The closest we get to it is arguably the modern usage of שַׁאֲנַנוּת (sha’ananut), which suggests smugness verging on indifference.

However, Avot does nudge us towards a recognition of the need to guard against complacency. In Avot 5:24 Yehudah ben Teyma teaches:

הֱוֵי עַז כַּנָּמֵר, וְקַל כַּנֶּֽשֶׁר, רָץ כַּצְּבִי, וְגִבּוֹר כָּאֲרִי, לַעֲשׂוֹת רְצוֹן אָבִֽיךָ שֶׁבַּשָּׁמָֽיִם

Be as brazen as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer and strong as a lion to do the will of your Father in Heaven.

We are all supposed to do the will of our Father in Heaven. For every practising Jew that comes with the territory, and it’s so well embedded in the Written Torah that it would be otiose to repeat that obligation in the Oral Law. In other words, we are supposed to look at the animals and see what we can learn from them.

The leopard is a phenomenally successful feeder because, unlike many other predators, it is not territorial. Lions, who are territorial, feed well when migratory herds pass through their patch but can go seriously hungry when their food doesn’t come to them. The leopard, in contrast, does not complacently wait for its prey to arrive but seeks out—which is why it is so frequently found in areas of human habitation where prey is more readily available.

The deer cannot afford to be complacent either. As a popular and nourishing repast for predators, the deer must be ever vigilant and ready to flee at a split-second’s notice if it is not to be a big cat’s dinner. According to Rabbi Menachem Mordechai Frankel-Teomim (Be’er HaAvot) this mishnah goes further, with the deer epitomising the epithet zerizim makdimim lemitzvot (“Enthusiasts are first to fulfil the commandments”), a middah that is quite incompatible with an attitude of complacency.

There is also an overarching mishnah at Avot 1:13 in which Hillel teaches: 

דְלָא מוֹסִיף יָסֵף

The one who does not increase will decrease.

Complacency suggests holding to where one is, resting on one’s laurels rather than contemplating how to better oneself, whether in material or—more importantly for the committed Jew—spiritual terms.

To conclude, the mussar of Avot does address complacency, albeit in a somewhat indirect matter which is results from the lack of an apt term with which to describe it.

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UNEXPECTED LESSONS AND A TRIP TO IKEA

In a recent blog post (referenced at the foot of this piece), Rabbi Steven Ettinger wrote this:

While describing his early yeshiva years …, Rabbi Wein ztz’l fondly recalled what he learned in ninth grade from Rabbi Mendel Kaplan. Along with Talmud, this famed disciple of the Mir Yeshiva and Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman taught his young student “how to actually read the newspaper, spotting its unintended lessons in life.” 

Spotting unintended lessons in life was something Rabbi Berel Wein got down to a fine art. He was a kindred spirit of Dayan Gershon Lopian ztz’l, who quipped that one good Sunday newspaper would provide him with enough divrei Torah for the entire week. Learning unintended lessons is very much within the spirit of Pirkei Avot, where Ben Zoma opens the fourth perek with this advice:

אֵיזֶהוּ חָכָם, הַלּוֹמֵד מִכָּל אָדָם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: מִכָּל מְלַמְּדַי הִשְׂכַּֽלְתִּי, כִּי עֵדְוֹתֶֽיךָ שִֽׂיחָה לִי

Who is wise? One who learns from everyone. As it states (Tehillim 119:99): "From all my teachers I have grown wise, for Your testimonials are my meditation."

The Babylonian Talmud goes even further, where the Amora Rabbi Yochanan teaches (Eruvin 100b) that, had the Torah not been given, we could have learned the principles of good behaviour from animals, birds and even insects.

I had a small insight into how a Torah teacher might pluck instruction out of the most unexpected opportunities when I managed to do it myself last Shabbat. The occasion was the making of announcements at the end of mussaf concerning davening times and events for the coming week. Our shul’s Women’s League had organized a trip to an art museum followed by lunch (and a little browsing time) at IKEA, the legendary home of stylish flat-pack, self-assembly furniture. It suddenly occurred to me that there was a lesson to be learned. I said (more or less) the following:

“I’d like to say something about this trip to IKEA, because there is so much that this chain of flat-pack furniture emporiums can teach us as Jews. Indeed, IKEA carries a great message as we head towards the Yamim Nora’im [the Days of Awe—Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur].

 If you have ever purchased any self-assembly furniture from IKEA, you will know that it comes with a set of instructions. You never see these instructions or have a chance to read them till after you have bought the product, taken it home and removed the packaging. This is what it means to say na’aseh venishma: just as we agreed at Sinai to follow the instructions in the Torah even before we heard what was in it, so to do we commit ourselves to following the self-assembly instructions even before we have even read them.

Now, like the laws of the Torah, the IKEA furniture assembly instructions are not always easy to understand. Some don’t appear to have any purpose. And sometimes, even when they are easy to understand, it’s actually quite hard to follow them.  But we have been given free will. It’s up to us to follow those instructions or to ignore them and do our own thing. And just as with the instructions in the Torah, so too with the IKEA instructions, if you don’t carry them out to the letter, you may well come literally unstuck.

On the Yamim Noraim we confirm the validity of God’s instructions and then atone for those we have failed to carry out, whether deliberately, negligently or through our own incompetence. Most importantly we have to accept the reality that, with our Torah observance no less than our flat-pack assembly, it is we who are responsible for the consequences of our own acts. Please bear this mussar in mind when you visit IKEA and your trip will not have been an idle one”.

I was speaking on an impulse—and admittedly I might not have said any of this if our Rabbi had not been on holiday. But the temptation was too great to resist.

If any readers have had similar experiences, I do hope they will feel confident to share them with us here.

Rabbi Steven Ettinger’s piece, “Learning to Read the Torah”, can be accessed in full here.

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MITZVOT AND WEALTH MANAGEMENT

 One of the most trying mishnayot in Avot is the teaching by Rabbi Yonatan at Avot 4:11:

כָּל הַמְקַיֵּם אֶת הַתּוֹרָה מֵעֹֽנִי, סוֹפוֹ לְקַיְּמָהּ מֵעֹֽשֶׁר, וְכָל הַמְבַטֵּל אֶת הַתּוֹרָה מֵעֹֽשֶׁר, סוֹפוֹ לְבַטְּלָהּ מֵעֹֽנִי

Whoever fulfils the Torah in poverty will ultimately fulfil it in wealth; and whoever neglects the Torah in wealth will ultimately neglect it in poverty.

What can this mean? It surely cannot have been intended as a literal statement that the poor will become wealthy if they keep the Torah while the rich will become poor if they don’t. After all, from pretty much the day that mishnah was first taught until this very moment our literature has recorded instances of people committing themselves to the Torah with total dedication but dying as poor as shul mice. We also know of others who have basked in the sunshine of a life of unabashed and undiminished affluence, over which the study of Torah and compliance with its precepts have cast no shadow. Indeed, in the world today we can see with our own eyes that there are those who commit to Torah and remain poor while others ignore it and remain rich. So is this Tanna telling us a lie?

A cynical way to read this lesson might be as a judgmental one. If we see someone dedicating himself to Torah and remaining poor, we might infer that he wasn’t really committed to Torah at all, that his life was a sham, an outward display of piety; if things were otherwise, he would surely be rich!  Conversely, if we see a rich man who, despite his non-Torah lifestyle remains rich, we might castigate ourselves for judging him falsely; by retaining his wealth he is marked as someone who secretly pursues the Torah and hides his righteousness under a veil of affluence.  But it there is no reason to suspect that Rabbi Yonatan should have a message such as this in mind, and our traditional commentators do not take his words in this way.

Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski (Visions of the Fathers) suggests that Rabbi Yonatan is making a plain factual statement rather than describing a normative one: a person who is poor but lives a Torah life will not be deflected from it if his material condition improves, while the rich man who ignores the Torah is likely to continue to ignore it when his assets dwindle. If this explanation is valid, it is something of an outlier since it is more a statement of probability than a proposition relating to how we should behave—which is what most of the tractate of Avot addresses. Another outlier is the assertion of Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau (Yachel Yisrael) that we are being told here that both wealth and poverty pose challenges. If this is the message of the Tanna, we may ask why Rabbi Yonatan chose to express it in such an unclear manner.

It is easier to explain this mishnah as being based on metaphor. Thus, one might say, “wealth” is shorthand for one’s reward in the world to come. Naturally the poor man who adheres to the Torah can expect a massive dividend in Heaven, while the rich man who neglects it cannot. But this idea is so well chronicled in the Oral Law that we might wonder why Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, while compiling Avot, should have felt it necessary to add yet another teaching in support of it right here, in the middle of the fourth perek of this tractate. Another metaphor reads “wealth” as the quality of living one’s life in a meaningful and Torah-true manner. Keep the Torah when your life is meaningless and it will improve; abandon the Torah when life is sweet and beautiful and your sweet living will soon be lost (Gila Ross, Living Beautifully). Similarly, for the Sefat Emet, “wealth” and “poverty” symbolise the quantity of satisfaction that one can extract from rejoicing in one’s portion, while for Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner (Ruach Chaim) they relate to the spiritual elevation that can be enjoyed by governing one’s yetzer hara, the evil inclination.

A highly original spin on this mishnah comes from Rabbi Mordechai Shapira, the Saba Kadisha of Neshchiz (brought in the Chasidic anthology MiMa’ayanot Netzach). He takes this teaching as an open invitation to pray to God to give wealth to Jew. Why not? After all, if the Jew is a poor servant of God, the mishnah promises him money—and if he is wealthy already, more money won’t change his status and drive him off the derech, but he will be bound to lose it if he doesn’t trouble to serve His maker.

On a purely practical level, both Rabbi Yitzchak Volozhiner (Milei de’Avot and Rabbi Ya’akov Emden (Lechem Shamayim) have noted that some mitzvot cost a lot of money while others cost little or nothing. Building on this, it can be suggested that a poor man who commits himself to Torah observance should focus only on those commandments that are within his price range and make do with them in the hope that he will in time be rewarded with the opportunity to perform more costly mitzvot; this fits in nicely with the idea that the reward for a mitzvah is a mitzvah (Ben Azzai at Avot 4:2). Likewise, a rich man should splash out on expensive mitzvot while he can, since if he doesn’t he will be left with only the mitzvot that a pauper can perform.

Adding all of this up, we can see a surprisingly wide range of interpretations of Rabbi Yonatan’s words. Is this a good thing, since it fosters analysis, discussion and deep consideration of important elements of Jewish life? Or should the Tanna have been reminded of the importance of not saying something that can’t be understood immediately if you intend that it should be understood in the end?

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OLD CONCEPTS, NEW WORDS

Ivrit—the spoken Hebrew of contemporary Israel—shares with every other ancient language the challenge of expanding its vocabulary to accommodate the modern world. Computers, telephony, advances in the identification, and the diagnosis and treatment of disease all demand constant innovation of terminology. So too do the disciplines of politics, economics, sociology and psychology.

There are no ancient Hebrew words that correspond to the English terms “sympathy” and “empathy”.  “Sympathy” is generally rendered ahadah, and empathy as empatiyah, two terms with which the authors of the mishnayot and baraitot of Avot would have been entirely unfamiliar.  However, both sympathy and empathy are what we would rightly regard today as basic human emotions. Family and social life would be intolerable without them, and much of the entertainment industry depends on its popularity for its ability generate these feelings in a paying audience

Where do we find either of these concepts in Avot? R’ Yisrael Miller (The Wisdom of Avos) discusses the pair of them at Avot 6:6, which lists all 48 of the qualities that are said to contribute to one’s ability to acquire knowledge and understanding of Torah. One of these qualities is this:

נוֹשֵׂא בְעוֹל עִם חֲבֵרוֹ

Bearing the yoke together with one’s friend.

Commenting on this Baraita, R; Miller writes:

“This is the quality of empathy, a word so commonly misused that we have to clarify its true meaning. ‘Sympathy’ means to feel for the other person, while ‘empathy’ means to feel what the other person is feeling. … ‘Sharing the yoke’ means to try as best we can to develop empathy by imagining ourselves in the other person’s place, even when we have never been there.”

He adds that this applies as much to happy occasions as to sad ones, then goes on to ask the obvious question: what does the possession of empathy have to do with acquiring Torah? His answer is an affirmation of an observation made by R’ Simcha Zissel Ziv: developing an understanding of Torah involves learning to comprehend what we do not yet comprehend—not only additional facts but new perspectives, which require us to step outside ourselves to see the subject from a different point of view.  The need to step outside one’s own experience and mindset is actually presupposed by Hillel at Avot 2:5 when he teaches (among other things):

אַל תָּדִין אֶת חֲבֵרָךְ עַד שֶׁתַּגִּֽיעַ לִמְקוֹמוֹ

Do not judge your fellow until you have stood in his place. 

Whether the quality demanded here is empathy, sympathy or both is unclear—but is plain is that some form of stepping outside one’s own mind and into someone else’s is expected before making a pronouncement on another person’s feelings, intentions and consequent actions. The tie-in between sympathy/empathy and judging of a fellow human is also apparent at Avot 6:6, where the item that immediately follows sharing the yoke in the list of 48 qualities of a ben Torah is to be מַכְרִיעוֹ לְכַף זְכוּת (“Judging [him] favourably”). This juxtaposition allows one to infer that the ability to judge others fairly and favourably is somehow a consequence of being able to enter their mindset.

Empathy and sympathy feature elsewhere in Avot too. Thus we see the teaching of Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar at Avot 4:23:

אַל תְּרַצֶּה אֶת חֲבֵרֶֽךָ בְּשַֽׁעַת כַּעֲסוֹ, וְאַל תְּנַחֲמֵֽהוּ בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁמֵּתוֹ מֻטָּל לְפָנָיו, וְאַל תִּשְׁאַל לוֹ בְּשַֽׁעַת נִדְרוֹ, וְאַל תִּשְׁתַּדֵּל לִרְאוֹתוֹ בְּשַֽׁעַת קַלְקָלָתוֹ

Do not pacify your friend at the height of his anger; do not comfort him while his dead still lies before him; do not ask him about his vow the moment he makes it; and do not try to see him at the time of his degradation.

I can sympathise with a person for being angry when I see an objective basis for him to be angered—but it is well-nigh impossible to feel the extent of another’s anger, especially when it is fuelled by other causes that were hitherto bottled up. Not comforting the person who is in the process of burying his dead is an injunction to avoid sympathy that is simply mistimed—and gloating over a person’s shame when he is embarrassed or humiliated by something that was his own fault is something one should try to avoid. We may have no sympathy at all for his stupidity and firmly believe that it serves him right and that he got what he deserved. But if you can empathise with his present predicament you will leave him to lick his own wounds, just as you would almost certainly prefer if you were in the same position.

So, conclude, the Tannaim clearly appreciated the qualities of sympathy and empathy, even though they may have had no convenient verbal label for them.

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For a fascinating set of notes on the origins of ahadah and empatiya, lovingly prepared by ChatGPT, click here. 

SLEEP IN THE MORNING

Rabbi Dosa ben Horkinas teaches (Avot 3:14):

שֵׁנָה שֶׁל שַׁחֲרִית, וְיַֽיִן שֶׁל צָהֳרָֽיִם, וְשִׂיחַת הַיְלָדִים, וִישִׁיבַת בָּתֵּי כְנֵסִיּוֹת שֶׁל עַמֵּי הָאָֽרֶץ, מוֹצִיאִין אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעוֹלָם

Morning sleep, noontime wine, children's talk and sitting at the meeting places of amei ha’aretz [basically unlearned people] drive a person from the world.

The traditional view of this mishnah is that it addresses a lifestyle issue. This is not how a talmid chacham, a serious and committed Torah scholar, would behave. There’s a narrative here along the following lines: sleep in and get up late and you will miss the prescribed time for prayer. Full of self-pity or empty of any self-respect, you will then turn to the bottle for your comfort. Little learning and too much alcohol make you poor company for any real Torah scholar so you hang around making small talk with other losers. Since they will reinforce your choice of lifestyle and comfort you in your distance from Torah values, you will seek out their company and keep it. Your aspirations for self-betterment, if they ever existed, will be extinguished and you will drown under the weight of your own apathy and inertia.

The term שֵׁנָה שֶׁל שַׁחֲרִית  (rendered here as “morning sleep”) has attracted attention. Early commentators took the term literally, which is why both the Bartenura and the commentary ascribed to Rashi point to the fact that the late sleeper will miss the slot for recitation of the morning Shema, while Rabbenu Yonah focuses on being too late for the Amidah. The Me’iri sees the entire mishnah as a caution against over-indulgence; thus a person who gains a good night’s sleep has no need for extra sleep in the morning. Rabbi Avraham Azulai (Ahavah beTa’anugim) combines all these approaches, adding that the morning is also the best time for doing one’s day job.

R’ Ephraim Luntschitz (the ‘Kli Yakar’), in the introduction to the first volume of his Olelet Ephraim, breaks away from the literal approach when he sees in this mishnah an allusion to the morning of a person’s life, when he is young. The doors of wisdom are open to him—but he sleeps deeply through the opportunities that await him. An earlier version of this approach, by Rabbi Moshe Alkashkar, is preserved in Midrash Shmuel where the compiler, Rabbi Shmuel di Uzeda, adds that in one’s youth the yetzer hara, the inclination to do evil, is less cogent.

With a nod  to the “morning of the life” idea, R’ Abraham J. Twerski (Visions of the Fathers) takes the mishnah further and takes it as a warning against setting a bad lifestyle example for others, especially the young. The punchline here is that, by the time a person recognises the vacuous and dissolute nature of his lifestyle it may be too late to do anything about it.

R' Menachem Mordechai Frankel-Te’omim (Be’er HaAvot) comments that the meaning of the Tanna’s words in this mishnah is so obvious that it needs no explanation. The fact that people live dissolute lifestyles is a well-known phenomenon too. But it cannot be that this teaching is included in Avot if there is no chiddush, no new point to it. Perhaps the justification for repeating this words lies in the fact that they should sensitise us to the difference between humans, who should be able to appreciate their ability to lead a better life, and animals, which do not.

Curiously, one of the most pointed comments derived from this teaching is arguably the most strictly literal of all of them.  Rabbi Shlomo P. Toperoff (Lev Avot) notes that the word שַׁחֲרִית (shacharit) is the name for the daily morning service to which, in the absence of a good reason, every male Jew is obliged to attend in synagogue. He simply says:

“…our mishnah specifically deals with shenah shel Shacharit, sleep indulged in during the period of morning prayers”.

In other words, we are not here concerned with the lazybones who curls up under the duvet with his pillow and his teddy, to steal another hour’s sleep from the awaiting day. Rather, we are looking at the man who gets up, dresses, hauls himself off to shul and then dozes his way through the davening—perhaps daydreaming about the pleasures or the past or anticipating the delights of the future, but definitely asleep to the meaning of the words that may or may not be passing his lips.

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AARON AND THE PURSUIT OF PEACE

Throughout Jewish traditional and literature, the name of Moses’ big brother Aaron is synonymous with peace. A man of peace, he pursues the objective of establishing peace and is even prepared to sacrifice the absolute value of truth in order to achieve it. No wonder, then, that at Avot 1:12 we learn this from Hillel:

הֱוֵי מִתַּלְמִידָיו שֶׁל אַהֲרֹן, אוֹהֵב שָׁלוֹם וְרוֹדֵף שָׁלוֹם, אוֹהֵב אֶת הַבְּרִיּוֹת, וּמְקָרְבָן לַתּוֹרָה

Be among the disciples of Aaron—love peace, pursue peace, one love people and draw them close to Torah.

Our tradition paints a picture of Aaron’s peace-making capabilities that is too positive by far. It describes ways in which Aaron would achieve peace between, for example, former friends who had fallen out with one another. But in the big scheme of things we see a different side of things. There is no suggestion that he might have been able to make peace between Moses and Dathan and Aviram, Korach or any of the many unnamed complainers who accused Moses of incompetence and mismanagement in his leadership role—and he does not appear to have exercised his talents in drawing Moses closer to Pharaoh.

In the mismatch between the praise and the person I am reminded of my childhood love for Superman. This super-hero could do literally everything; he was invincible, invulnerable to everything but kryptonite—and he was honorable, fighting for justice and supporting the weak and the oppressed against the forces of evil. The comics of my childhood were also filled with war stories, which I read avidly. It was a surprisingly long time before I was awake to the obvious question: if Superman was so great and so strong in all respects, what was he doing between 1939 and 1945? Why was he not fighting the Nazis or the Japanese? Was he exempted from conscription? He didn’t sound like a coward or a conscientious objector.  Eventually I came to accept the reality that, while, the battles and the atrocities of the Second World War were real, Superman was not.

Aaron, I am happy to accept, was real—and I would not challenge his credentials as a man of peace, an epithet that would seem to befit him as well, if not better, as any other hero or heroine from the Tanach. But in his real world, like Superman’s fictional one, peace was something that could be achieved by a peace-making individual only on a micro-level, where one addresses anger and hostility between specific individuals. That is no mean achievement, but one cannot help craving more. If Aaron were alive today, would we have any expectation that—other than through prayer—he had a strategy for establishing peace between Israel and Hamas or (and sadly this might be even harder) between the various factions in the current Israeli government?

Returning to our mishnah, Rabbi Norman Lamm (quoted by Rabbi Mark Dratch in Foundations of Faith) has something provocative to say about Hillel’s teaching. Noting that we should emulate Aaron by both loving and pursuing peace, R’ Lamm raises a question asked and and answered by an unnamed Chasidic master:

“Why both ‘love’ and ‘pursue’? Because…both are necessary. When peace is at one with truth, not in conflict with justice, then you, like Aaron, mut be an ohev shalom, a lover of peace’ but if peace conflicts with truth and detracts from justice, then you must be a rodef shalom, a pursuer of peace, ‘pursuing’ not in the sense of trying to achieve it, but ‘pursuing’ in the sense of driving such peace from before you … [S]ometimes love it, sometimes chase it away”.

Although I cannot recall any instance of Aaron actively chasing peace away, I welcome this approach since it attempts to combine the adoption with a morally justifiable position with a practical means of resolving the imbalance between truth, peace, and justice. That truth, justice and peace should be balanced is itself axiomatic: the axiom is contained in the same chapter of Avot, only a little way on from the teaching of Hillel, where we find his distinguished descendant Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel teaching (at Avot 1:18):

עַל שְׁלֹשָׁה דְבָרִים הָעוֹלָם קַיָּם: עַל הַדִּין, וְעַל הָאֱמֶת, וְעַל הַשָּׁלוֹם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: אֱמֶת וּמִשְׁפַּט שָׁלוֹם שִׁפְטוּ בְּשַׁעֲרֵיכֶם

On three things is the world sustained: justice, truth and peace. As it states: "Truth, and a judgement of peace, you should administer at your [city] gates.''

That seems to say it all.

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YOU’RE A WASTE OF SPACE!

Devotees of the British sitcom Fawlty Towers will recall with glee an episode in which Basil Fawlty calls his waiter Manuel “a waste of space” and hits the Spaniard on the head with a spoon. Devotees of Pirkei Avot may however recall the mishnah at Avot 4:3 in which Ben Azzai teaches:

אַל תְּהִי בָז לְכָל אָדָם וְאַל תְּהִי מַפְלִיג לְכָל דָּבָר, שֶׁאֵין לָךְ אָדָם שֶׁאֵין לוֹ שָׁעָה, וְאֵין לָךְ דָּבָר שֶׁאֵין לוֹ מָקוֹם

Do not scorn any man, and do not discount any thing. For there is no man who has not his hour, and no thing that has not its place.

This mishnah does not quite address the Fawlty Towers scenario, in that what Basil Fawlty challenges is Manuel’s claim to space—in other words a place—rather than time. But the sentiment is there: the mishnah teaches us not to write off any person or object as being entirely without worth, and that is precisely what Basil Fawlty is going to the hapless Manuel.

Commentators on Ben Azzai’s teaching have often gone way beyond its literal meaning. For R’ Chaim Volozhin (Ruach Chaim), for example, it means that one should not write off another individual in reliance upon the words of a third party; the Ruach Chaim then goes far beyond that, suggesting that it is an injunction not to steal from anyone—and this in turn means not stealing from a poor person by not returning his greeting. Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski (Visions of the Fathers) turns the mishnah from a negative to a positive: one should look for and build upon the part of any person that is of worth. This perspective is very much in keeping with Yehoshua ben Perachya’s advice at Avot 1:6 to judge others meritoriously.

Rashi, the Bartenura and the Me’iri are more concerned with what might happen if you write off or underestimate someone who hates you, since the time may come when he will have the upper hand. The assumption here is that, taking his threat seriously (possibly a practical example of being ro’eh et hanolad, looking ahead to events that have yet to unfold: see Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel at Avot 2:13).

The Chasid Yaavetz, following Rabbenu Yonah, takes a different path which is premised on the assumption that Avot, being an ethical tractate, is more concerned in character-building than in offering practical hints for a person’s survival. By this view, we should train ourselves to appreciate that everyone and everything is created by God and for His glory (Avot 6:11). Basically, if we can’t see what use a person is, and reckon him to be a waste of time, space or anything else, the fault lies with us for failing to look hard enough to see where that person’s worth lies.

Ultimately we are faced with a real-world challenge here. This mishnah charges us with accepting that there is an inherent value in others that is sufficient for us not to dismiss them as worthless. But in the contemporary world we encounter so many individuals, in person and more frequently via the various media, that there is not time in the day to assess and appreciate their worth. On the basis of “thinking, fast and slow” (Daniel Kahneman) we have to create a strategy for swiftly assessing if people are worth reading or listening to without stopping to take stock of each one. Maybe this is why Hillel (Avot 2:5) urges us not to judge others at all unless we are standing in their place.

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CHOOSE YOUR OWN STRESS

At Avot 3:6 Rabbi Nechunya ben Hakanah teaches:

כָּל הַמְקַבֵּל עָלָיו עוֹל תּוֹרָה, מַעֲבִירִין מִמֶּֽנּוּ עוֹל מַלְכוּת וְעוֹל דֶּֽרֶךְ אֶֽרֶץ, וְכָל הַפּוֹרֵק מִמֶּֽנוּ עוֹל תּוֹרָה, נוֹתְנִין עָלָיו עוֹל מַלְכוּת וְעוֹל דֶּֽרֶךְ אֶֽרֶץ

One who accepts upon himself the yoke of Torah is exempted from the yoke of government duties and the yoke of worldly cares; but one who casts off the yoke of Torah is saddled with the yoke of government duties and the yoke of worldly cares.

This is a stick-and-carrot mishnah. The carrot, the inducement to lead a life of learning the Torah and fulfilling its precepts, is contrasted with the stick—the harsh reality of having to pull one’s weight in terms of accepting civic responsibilities and earning one’s own keep. So we have a question: if it is axiomatic, indeed self-evident, that it is better to learn and practise Torah than to close one’s sefarim and take one’s chance with the vicissitudes of daily life outside the beit midrash, why do we need a mishnah to tell us this?

An unusual answer to this question comes from Gila Ross (Living Beautifully). Our Tanna is not teaching us the obvious: instead, he has a powerful message that applies to every one of us today: human life is conducted in a state of stress—but we get to choose our stress.

Learning and living Torah has its upside, for sure, particularly when one is supported by others. But it is stressful too. The struggle to understand and then master complex areas of the Oral Law, the battle to internalize and live the precepts that look so simple on the printed page, the constant questioning of one’s motives, the purity of one’s thoughts and the impossibility of knowing whether one has reached the requisite spiritual level—these are all stress-inducing factors. Are they more or less stressful than the problems one faces at work or beyond? The answer depends on every individual and on every set of facts, and we can never know.

The principle of choosing one’s own stress runs way beyond this mishnah in Avot. Thus in the second perek Hillel teaches מַרְבֶּה נְכָסִים מַרְבֶּה דְאָגָה (“the more the wealth, the more the worry”, Avot 2:8). Again, and this time without any reference to choosing between Torah and secular life, we see an indication that we choose our own stress levels: too little wealth and we experience the stress of poverty—but too much wealth and it is our affluence that stresses us. The choice is ours—and our task is to be honest with ourselves when we seek out our comfort level. This is Ben Zoma’s point at Avot 4:1 where he teaches: אֵיזֶהוּ עָשִׁיר, הַשָּׂמֵֽחַ בְּחֶלְקוֹ (“Who is the person who is happy? The one who is happy with his portion”).

 If we can identify the point at which we neither strive to gain more nor feel insecure if we have less, we should have a stress-free existence. In practice, this is probably not going to be a single point but a fluctuating zone of personal comfort in which one’s stress is minimized. But if we ever find ourselves in this zone, being human, we will probably find something else on to which we will transfer our stress surplus.

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