The thing that grabs people about this mishnah is the problem that metal tongs are made by heating strips of metal to the point at which they become malleable so that they can be shaped into its component parts—but, without a pair of tongs to hold the red-hot metal, tongs cannot be made. Traditional rabbinical commentators tend to be divided between (i) those who explain what tongs are but say nothing of their significance; (ii) those who say that, if tongs can only be made if you already have tongs, the first tongs must have been made by God, (iii) those who say that tongs can actually be made by pouring molten metal into moulds, and (iv) those for whom the real issue is the actual time when the tongs were created.
So we remain stuck with a question: what is our takeaway
message from this mishnaic reference to tongs? In the 21st century most of us do not have much
connection with metallurgy on a daily basis, or indeed at all. It is possible
that not one in a thousand contemporary Torah students will have seen a blacksmith using
tongs to hold a metal bar that would otherwise burn a man’s hand (they might have seen sugar tongs, but these genteel items did not exist in Tannaic times). So why should we even
care?
If we look beyond the tongs, we see a bigger, wider message:
that we should always recognize God’s contribution to our own inventiveness for
it is He who created in us the potential to innovate. To put it another way,
whatever we invent today is a consequence of God’s original creation of
mankind’s ability to do so. We might
consider ourselves to be creators on a par with God, but all we have done is to
graft our own effort on to the inventive potential that God Himself instilled
in us, late on the first Sabbath eve, knowing that we would need to actualize
it as soon as Shabbat ended, when Adam and Eve, expelled from the Garden of
Eden, had to make their own way in the World.
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This sensible and practical explanation of the tongs issue can be found in Rabbi Menachem Mordechai Frankel-Teomim's Be'er Ha'Avot. This work appears to have been privately published and must have been purchased by someone since it ran to at least three editions (the third being published in Jerusalem in 1978). The bigger question is whether anyone has ever read it, since I have never before seen it discussed or referred to in any subsequent commentaries on Avot and a Google search does not reveal its existence.
