Binary Choices and Missing Metaphors

Lawyers, and those who think like them, can easily slip into a conveniently binary frame of mind when navigating their passage through life.  Actions are either permitted or forbidden, good or bad; there is a right way and a wrong way, and so on.  One of the most frequently-used metaphors for this binary approach to life is that of “light” as a symbol of that which is good or right, and “darkness” for that which is bad or wrong.  Indeed, it is difficult to read through Psalms, the Book of Proverbs or the aggadic parts of the Babylonian Talmud without spotting this.

Uniquely among Mishnaic tractates, Avot does not concern itself with the elucidation of any Biblical laws. Its concern, as Rabbi Ovadyah of Bartenura reminds us, is with matters of morality—and these are matters where the binary approach breaks down. More recently, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz has observed that the choice of an ethical path, in one’s personal life and in business, is often a choice between different options that cannot be described in absolute terms as good because they are in reality an exercise in damage limitation: which path do I take that is the least bad and causes the smallest amount of harm to others?

Without a binary perspective of good-or-bad, right-or-wrong, the light-versus-darkness metaphor is at best ineffective, at worst completely inappropriate. In the world of moral choices, light and dark are replaced by shades of grey. Could this be why Avot, a tractate that is more richly endowed than any other with metaphor and simile, makes no mention at all of light or darkness?