Does God expect us to listen?

Do we need to listen to God at all? Does He even care if we don’t, so long as the message we receive is one that originated from Him in the first place? These questions may not be as frighteningly radical as they initially appear. Deuteronomy 7:12 states:

“And it shall come to pass, if only you listen to these laws—and keep and do them—that the Lord your God shall keep with you the covenant and the love which he swore to your fathers”.

 This is Moses speaking; his audience is the Children of Israel. But what are these laws to which they must listen? The previous verse explains: they are the laws that Moses is in the process of teaching them. Moses is not the author of these laws. They come from God and Moses has been the conduit through which they came down from their heavenly source. So why does Moses present them as “” the laws that I am teaching you today” and not as “the laws that God commanded you at Mount Sinai”?

We can answer this question by posing another: are the Children of Israel more likely to listen to Moses than to God? This is very likely so, because we have it on good authority that they do not listen to God.

A mishnah (Avot 5:6) teaches how the desert nation tested God 10 times in the desert, citing a Torah verse (Bemidbar 14:22) that refers to 

“… all those people who have seen My glory, and My miracles, which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness; they have tested me now these ten times, and have not listened to My voice”.

 What are the 10 tests? The Babylonian Talmud (Arachin 15a-b) offers a quasi-official list. In short, the Children of Israel:

(i) asked Moses, before crossing the Reed Sea, whether he had taken them out to the desert to die because there were no graves in Egypt;

(ii) worried that, since they had crossed the Reed Sea safely, their Egyptian pursuers would cross safely too, so God displayed them, dead, on the sea shore;

(iii) complained that they could not drink the water at Marah because it was bitter;

(iv) complained that there was no water to drink when they camped at Rephidim;

(v) left manna for the following day, despite Moses telling them not to do so;

(vi) went out on the Sabbath to gather manna even though Moses told them not to do so since there wouldn’t be any to collect;

(vii) complained that they would rather have died in Egypt, where they had enjoyed plenty of food, in preference to dying of hunger in the desert;

(viii) complained about the manna, which was not as pleasurable to them as the fish, melons, leeks, garlic etc that they enjoyed in Egypt;

(ix) demanded a replacement for Moses, who had not yet rejoined them after the Giving of the Torah, and then accepted the Golden Calf;

(x) believed the false testimony of the Ten Spies who persuaded them that it would be impossible for them to capture the Promised Land.

Rambam’s list, accepted by the Bartenura and Tosefot Yom Tov, is a little different (Rabbi Yaakov Emden questions why the Arachin list should need changing), but the substance is the same. One thing is missing from every version of this list. God Himself mentions this in this mishnah, where He says: “…and [they] did not listen to My voice.”

Why did God not include His people’s refusal to listen to Him as a test and give the number as eleven? Rabbi Shmuel de Uçeda (Midrash Shmuel) considers that their failure to do so is indeed a test, but he does not go on to suggest why God does not apparently count it as a test along with the others.

A possible explanation is that the omission of this test from the list of tests is deliberate and that its absence is designed to teach us something important for our own lives. We all know that active disobedience, ingratitude and non-cooperation are negative traits that have a seriously damaging quality to them. Our own of experience of family and community life demonstrates this on a regular basis. In contrast, a mere refusal to listen may well cause annoyance but it is of quite a different order.

That may be why God is giving us a lesson in best practice to adopt when dealing with others. He is showing us that, when others do not listen to us, we should emulate His example. We should not treat other people’s refusal to listen to us as being a test or tribulation. Rather, we should be patient and understanding, if necessarily seeking out other, more effective, means of getting our message across to those who have demonstrated an initial resistance or refusal to accept what we are trying to tell them.

Here comes the judge...

One of the most trenchant statements in Avot comes from Rabbi Yishmael ben Yose, who says (at Avot 4:9):

“The person who separates himself from litigation removes himself from enmity, robbery and false oaths; but the person who relishes a ruling—he’s a wicked puffed up idiot.”

There is much that can be said about this statement for many reasons, since disputes do arise between even the best of people and the Torah makes extensive provision for their resolution. Judges and lawyers may not always (or ever) be loved for what they do, but we must accept that they are necessary and that even the exemplary figure of Moses was obliged to demonstrate the skills of advocacy and judgment in his long tenure as leader of the Children of Israel.

In his commentary on Avot, Rabbenu Yonah is sensitive to the notion of litigation as a necessary evil when he points to an apparent contradiction between the words of the Written Torah and Oral Law. The Torah explicitly provides that judges be appointed and that they should judge in accordance with justice. How then can Rabbi Yishmael urge people not to judge? Rabbenu Yonah's answer is that the instruction to judge only applies when there is no-one else to do the judging but that, where there are others who are available to judge, it may be better to leave it to them since, by doing so, a person can escape the perils of falling into doubt as to which way the case before him should be judged, presumably running the risk that he will reach the wrong decision.

On the face of things this answer may seem a little weak, but it looks better if one considers an analogy with the field of medicine. Just as there is a mitzvah ("commandment") to judge, and also a prohibition against misjudging, so too there is a mitzvah to save a life but a prohibition against wounding or killing another person. A person who has never delivered a baby by Caesarean section or learned how to resuscitate someone who has stopped breathing may possibly be expected to step into the breach and have a go when no-one else is available to tackle these tasks. But that same person would be strongly advised not to do so when qualified medical assistance is on hand.

There is another way of looking at the apparent contradiction between Written and Oral Law. The Torah requires that there be judges and that they judge. However, the teaching in Rabbi Yishmael's mishnah is not saying the opposite at all: it is addressing the judge’s state of mind. He should not detach himself from judging. Rather, he should judge with detachment. This means objectivity in not taking a personal interest in the outcome. Once a judge becomes emotionally involved in the parties and the outcome of their dispute, he no longer stands above it and the danger of losing the necessary quality of dispassionate objectivity is great.

The words of the Mishnah give some support to this reading of its meaning, since it does not contrast the position of someone who judges with someone who does not judge; rather, it contrasts someone who judges with the right attitude, one of distancing and detaching himself from personal considerations that may engender enmity, robbery and false oaths, with someone whose attitude is frankly unsuitable for the discharge of onerous judicial responsibilities.

Your wife might follow you -- but the Torah won't!

At Avot 4:18 Rabbi Nehorai teaches that a person should be exiled to a place of Torah and not say that, wherever he goes, the Torah will follow him. This is because learning Torah is a shared activity and it is only when one learns Torah together with others that it will "stick". Many explanations have been given over the ages as to what this means. Here is a somewhat unusual one that does not normally see the light of day, possibly on account of the current demands of political correctness. It is however interesting in its own right. It goes like this.

The last chapter of the Book of Proverbs contains one it its best-known passages: a set of verses which commence with each letter of the Hebrew alphabet in turn, from aleph to tav. These verses, often referred to as Eshet Chayil (“A Woman of Worth”), praise an ideal wife and mother in terms that are taken by some to be literal, but by others as an allegory in which its author, King Solomon, praises his mother, the Sabbath or the Torah.

Taking this proverbial “woman of worth” to be one’s wife, Rabbi Eliezer Papo (the "Pele Yo’etz") has an ingenious and quite dramatic explanation of how the Torah differs from the Eshet Chayil. In the first place, he says, when a husband storms off in anger against his wife, she will go after him in order to appease him; the Torah, however says “If you leave me for one day, I’ll leave you for two” (Jerusalem Talmud, Berachot 9:5). Secondly, a wife has only one husband at a time and may have no-one to whom to turn if her husband leaves her, while the Torah is always followed by a multitude of admirers and enthusiastic suitors. Thirdly, it is the husband whose role is to support his wife and provide for her needs while, in contrast, it is the Torah that provides for those who are wedded to it. Finally, the wife is presumed to be less knowledgeable and less intelligent than her husband, while it is the Torah that imparts her knowledge and wisdom to those who pursue her.

This comparison reflects the social and economic reality of the Ottoman-ruled Balkans in the early 19th century but may appear inappropriate, if not offensive, to those who read it two centuries later. However, the punchline is as powerful now as it was then: don’t treat the Torah as though it was dependent on you, for the truth is quite the reverse. The Torah owes you nothing and has no need for you at all. If you do not continue to study its content and fail to practice its principles, you can hardly expect it to cling faithfully to you—particularly if you run off in pursuit of other activities and pleasures in places where the light of Torah is rarely, if ever, seen.

There is a touch of irony in the Pele Yo’etz’s explanation here since this Mishnah reflects an element of role reversal: it was actually Rabbi Nehorai’s wife who decided to live in the leisure resort of Diomsit -- and it was he who followed after her.

Source note: R' Eliezer Papo did not include this explanation in his Pele Yo'etz. It can be found in a partial commentary on Avot that is interspersed within the second volume of his Torah Commentary Elef HaMagen.

Av, Avot and Anger

A central theme of the solemn date of Tisha be’Av (the ninth day of the month of Av) is the causative link between what we lost—two Temples and two thousand years’ occupancy of the land God gave us—and the things we did in order to lose it. Put simply, we did wrong; God warned us to stop but we persisted. God, who alone knows how to regulate the scale of His anger in light of His divine wisdom, became blazingly angry and punished us. While we mourn our losses, the takeaway message of the day is not about the past but the present as it affects the future: that we should get our act together now and act in accordance with God’s will, not contrary to it. This message is alluded to in the fifth chapter of Avot, at 5:24, in a mysterious passage cited in the name of Yehudah ben Teyma:

“The brazen [go] to Gehinnom; the meek [go] to the Garden of Eden. May it be Your will, Lord our God and God of our fathers, that the Holy Temple be rebuilt speedily in our days; and grant us our portion in Your Torah”.

The status of this Mishnah has been challenged on the view that it originally marked the end of Avot, with the sentence that refers to the rebuilding of the Temple being tacked on as a prayer. However, this passage is an integral part of Avot as we have it today and, taken as a whole, it suggests that if we are meek, not brazen, and do God’s will rather than openly flout it, we are entitled to call upon Him to restore the Temple that was wiped out when we flouted it in the first place.

God’s destructive response to our disobedience was not a cold, calculated one but was accompanied by a blaze of anger. So what does Avot say about anger? For us humans it is something to avoid. A person who is irascible should not be a teacher (2:6), and anyone who is quick to anger and hard to placate is a rasha—someone who is evil. Yet anger is a divine attribute and God is twice praised as being slow to anger (5:2, 3), even though the full impact of his anger, once unleashed, can be devastating.

Avot teaches that, both at the time of Noah and the Flood and in the era of Abraham, God patiently waited a full ten generations before allowing Himself to become angry, even though each generation as a whole behaved less well than its predecessor. Is there any significance in our knowing this? If God punishes us for our sins, should it matter to us whether he has unleashed His anger on earlier generations of miscreants or not?

The loss of each Temples came some somewhere in the region of 400 years after it was established. Now, though there is no single way to measure the duration of a generation, we do see the word used colloquially for a period of 40 years in the context of the Generation of the Midbar—the refugees from Egypt who died in the desert, barred from entering the land of Canaan after they accepted the false testimony of the Spies. Taking 40 years as a generation we see that, in the case of both the First and the Second Temple, God delayed His anger for ten generations before He acted in accordance with it—just as He did so in the mishnayot of Avot.

What message does this have for us? First we must accept that, if we cannot actually eliminate our anger when dealing with one another, we should seek to emulate God’s example and be as slow as possible before giving in to it. Secondly, before choosing whether to do God’s will or to defy it, we might consider stopping to think whether we perhaps are a “tenth generation” on whom God’s anger might be vented, and then act accordingly.

Torah learning and the Garden of Eden

Avot 3:9 is a difficult Mishnah in which Rabbi Ya’akov teaches that a person who is learning while on a journey, but who stops to admire a beautiful tree or field, risks spiritual suicide.

It is possible to link this mishnah to the earliest narrative of human life in the Bible—the story of Adam, Eve and a tree that had monumental significance for the future of humanity. In short, on the Sixth Day of Creation Adam is told not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; this instruction is passed on to Eve; Eve sees the tree and declares it to be “a delight to the eyes.” After the forbidden fruit is consumed, Adam’s punishment is that he is condemned to feed himself forever more through the sweat of his brow, God telling him: “you shall eat the plants [literally ‘grass’ or ‘herb’] of the field.”

There is a long, strong tradition that, if Adam and Eve had fulfilled that one instruction which God had given them, entering the World’s first-ever Shabbat with an unblemished record, mankind would have achieved perfection there and then, and there would have been no need for God to give the Torah as a means of serving Him since they would not need to exercise their free will in order to choose good over evil.

Putting this all together, one might speculate that the teaching in this mishnah is this: here is a hypothetical scholar, committed to a life of Torah learning. He is on a journey, but this is not a physical journey: it is a metaphorical one, his journey through life. This journey is long and hard since the pursuit of Torah is an onerous task that can never be completed. Our scholar could well be feeling frustrated or dejected by what he feels is a lack of progress, or bored by the necessary revision that fixes his studies firmly in his mind.

Closing his mind to his Torah studies, our scholar pauses to contemplate two scenarios in which he is free from this unending commitment. In the first scenario he imagines what his life would have been like if Adam and Eve had never eaten from that beautiful but forbidden tree, when life would have been ideal in all respects and he could contemplate the majesty of God without the need for any effort; in the second he wonders if tilling the fields and toiling in the soil might not be a preferable alternative to Torah learning, since at the end of the day the farmer can at least sit back, admire the sight of the crops that result from his hard work and look forward to eating the fruit of his labour.

Each of these scenarios has an appeal that he may not experience in his own journey. This is because, for the true Torah scholar, every achievement is met not by a feeling of complacency or accomplishment but by a greater realisation of how much more there is to achieve. Might it just be that this hypothetical scholar of ours is precisely the person to whom Rabbi Ya’akov says in this mishnah:

“Stick to your journey! Deviate and you put your very soul at stake.”

This might seem like a somewhat harsh warning to administer to a wavering Torah scholar whose thoughts may be drawn towards pleasures that do not appear to be included in the bundle of benefits available to him, but in the next chapter of Avot Rabbi Ya’akov redresses this by describing the unimaginably blissful state that awaits him in the World to Come.

Hidden -- in full view

One of my Facebook friends is very keen to meet a “tzaddik nistar”—a truly righteous person whose attributes are not publicised and are hidden from the public at large. This poses a problem: there is no obvious way to find one and, even if you do come across one, how will you know? One might draw an imperfect analogy with the fictional character of Clark Kent, whose colleagues at the Daily Planet newspaper were unaware that he was Superman even though they worked with him on a regular basis.

Jewish tradition has much to say about hidden tzaddikim, their holiness, their special powers and their closeness to God. But what does Pirkei Avot have to say about them

The noun “tzaddik” scarcely appears in Avot. It cannot be found at all in the five chapters of mishnayot, making its appearance just once in the first baraita of the sixth chapter where a person who learns Torah for its own sake is primed to become one. By contrast, the word “chasid”, an almost untranslatable word indicating a person who is both pious and really enthusiastic about getting his relationships with God and other humans right, is found all over the place in the same tractate.

There is however more to say on the subject since being a “tzaddik” is a concept that underpins our very study of Avot--and this word, like the tzaddik nistar, is hidden in full view.

The recitation of every chapter of Avot is preceded by a statement that every Jew has a share in the World to Come. This statement is supported by a quote from Isaiah (60:21) that opens with the words “And Your people are all tzaddikim…” There is an important message here.

While popular Jewish culture conjures up the image of a tzaddik as being an old man with a long, flowing beard, a hot-line to God and an aura of sanctity and mystery, the truth is that anyone and everyone has the capacity to be a tzaddik: all you have to do is exercise your own free will in order to devote yourself to acting, speaking and thinking in a way that is righteous and in accordance with God’s will. Most of us can’t be bothered to do this since it involves too much deep commitment and hard work, so we get on with our own lives and look for other people to be a tzaddik on our behalf and for our convenience.

We are all capable of being tzaddikim, every single one of us, if only we want to—and even if we make many mistakes in the process of turning ourselves into better versions of our existing selves. This is why the Book of Proverbs (24:16) states:

כִּ֤י שֶׁ֨בַע יִפּ֣וֹל צַדִּ֣יק וָקָ֑ם וּ֜רְשָׁעִ֗ים יִכָּשְׁל֥וּ בְרָעָֽה

“though the tzaddik falls seven times, he gets up, but the wicked stumble in evil”.

It doesn’t matter how many mistakes we make, if we are prepared to recover from them, draw a line behind them and get on with leading a better life—a life in which the moral principles of Avot have a potentially big part to play. And if we are not yet tzaddikim, each of us is at least a tzaddik in the making.

So the moral of the story is this. If you want to see a tzaddik, or at any rate a potential one, a tzaddik in the making, just look in the mirror. And if you think the person you see in the mirror doesn’t look like a tzaddik, it might just be because you are looking at a tzaddik nistar.

Self-trust and self-delusion

At Avot 2:5, Hillel teaches that a person should not trust him- or herself until the day of one's death.

The point of Hillel’s teaching here is subtle. We do trust ourselves to do the right thing, even in the face of temptation, external pressure or forgetfulness. We do so on a daily basis and on the assumption that there is no-one whom we can trust better than ourselves – but this self-belief is likely to be misplaced since the experience we share with most of humanity is that we are deluding ourselves.

Consider the following. Has it ever happened to you that, leaving home to go to synagogue, visit a friend or do some shopping, you have picked up a letter that you intended to post. Returning home later, you find the unposted letter in your pocket. And have you never been certain that you turned the light off, taken the eggs off the cooker or collected your scarf from the coat-rack, only to discover that this was not in fact the case?

Episodes of this nature happen to more or less everybody if they are honest enough to admit it – but people do not consider themselves any the less trustworthy for it: they simply rationalize their error (“I was momentarily distracted;” “I was in a terrible hurry;” “It was meant to happen”) and carry on trusting themselves.

In these situations, the only thing that has gone wrong is that we have inadvertently slipped up. We didn’t want to, but we did. Now consider what might be the case when we would actually prefer to slip up and deviate from our usual good conduct. Every individual has a yetzer hara (“Evil Inclination”), a little voice inside even the best of us that occasionally tries to persuade or cajole us into error. That voice might be telling us to do something a bit mischievous and capricious, like playing an embarrassing practical joke on a friend, or it might be encouraging us to commit an act that is quite dishonest, like finding a valuable item that belongs to someone we know but deciding not to give it back. Can we really trust ourselves to do the right thing when that little voice inside us speaks so appealingly, when we shouldn’t really be trusting ourselves even when it’s silent?

Hillel offers no quick trick or easy solution. He only asks us to be aware of our own fallibility so that we can try to guard against it.

The unexpected test

The fifth chapter of Avot (at 5:4) recites that Abraham was tested by God with ten tests (all of which the Patriarch passed) in order to make a show of how dearly Abraham regarded Him. Much has inevitably been written on this topic. Questions such as (i) which are the ten tests, (ii) why any number from one to nine wouldn't have done just as well and (iii) which was the greatest test continue to be debated.

This post focuses on one small issue: the consideration that a person being tested may know perfectly well that he is being tested, but might still not know what the test actually is. The following episode, drawn from the lower strata of the world of finance, illustrates the point well.

Back in the 1980s a friend of mine was a trainee bank manager with the National Westminster Bank in London. Part of the way through the training programme, all the trainees were given a test. They were ushered into a room full of desks, on each of which was a test paper that was several pages in length, together with an answer book. The test paper opened with the following rubric: “Please read this paper carefully. Do not attempt to answer any of the questions before you have finished reading this paper”.

My friend obediently read through the questions without writing anything, even though he knew most of the answers and didn't need to think too deeply about them. He could so easily have completed those questions as he went along. At the very end of the test paper, he was surprised to read the following rubric: “Do not write any of the answers to the questions on this paper”.

It transpired that the real purpose of the test was not to see what the trainee bank managers knew but to reveal whether they were capable of carrying out the simple instruction of not writing anything until they had finished reading the test paper. My friend was the only person who passed that test.

The salutary lesson of this exercise—we may know that we are being tested but still not recognize what we are being tested on—is even more applicable when it is God and not a bank that sets the tests. We do not know how greatly aware Abraham was that he was being tested, but we do see from the Torah how his willingness and determination to carry out God's instructions as closely as possible meant that he could pass his tests whether or not he was aware of how he was being tested.

With great respect? How we view our rabbis

Rabbi Elazar ben Shammua says, “Let the honour of your student be as dear to you as your own; and the honour of your friend should be like fear of your teacher—and fear of your teacher should be like fear of Heaven” (Avot 4:15). We don't usually fear our teachers these days, but the Hebrew word mora, translated here as "fear", can also mean a deep and sincerely felt respect. On this basis the mishnah speaks of something that comes rather closer to our own experiences.

Here's a thought about how we respect some of our principal Jewish teachers, our communal rabbis.

It seems to me that, at least since the 1960s and the dawn of the teshuvah movement, one can divide Jewish communities into three broad categories.

The first consists of communities that are far from the epicentre of Jewish life, either in geographical or spiritual terms, and where the level of knowledge and commitment to learning within that community is relatively modest.

The second consists of communities where the average standard of attainment in terms of religious knowledge and practice is quite considerable, and where its members have the confidence and the capability to participate actively in synagogue services and learning programmes.

The third is made up of communities where the level of knowledge and commitment is extremely high, and where the majority of congregants may well be rabbis themselves -- or may have spent several years in full-time Torah learning before entering a profession, business or trade.

In the first category, respect for the rabbi is likely to be high since he possesses a suite of talents that may not be replicated to any great extent within his community. These might include the ability to read unpunctuated and vowel-less Hebrew and Aramaic text fluently, knowledge of how to officiate at weddings, funerals, a broad range of pastoral skills, and the like.

In the third group too, respect for the rabbi is likely to be high since the congregants, who likely share the rabbi’s linguistic and learning skills, are in a position to appreciate its quality and know how much time and effort he would have had to expend in order to acquire them. They will be able to savour the subtleties of his sermons and shiurim, and they may seek his advice with their most difficult and delicate personal and professional issues.

In the middle category, however, it seems to me that the rabbi is likely to receive less respect. This is because his congregants may have enough knowledge, learning and commitment to be able to challenge his rulings and test his learning, but may lack sufficient patience, willingness or understanding to enable them to accept his decisions and appreciate his answers. Here, superimposed upon the rabbi-congregation relationship, is something that is almost akin to sibling rivalry: he is a sort of older brother, entitled to respect and often genuinely loved, but generally vulnerable to challenge and sometimes ignored or taken for granted. It is within this middle ground, therefore, that the practical challenge of respecting the rabbi is put to the greatest test.

Comments, anyone?

Fire, worms -- and a book that never came in from the cold

The fourth chapter of Avot contains one of its shortest and most powerful messages when Rabbi Levitas of Yavneh teaches: “Be exceedingly humble, since the hope of man is the worm” (Avot 4:4). Where does this salutary and sobering message come from?

Nearly 400 years before Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi included this teaching when compiling the Mishnah (c.180-200 CE), we find broadly similar words in the original Hebrew version of the Book of Ben Sira from which the Greek translation (a.k.a. Ecclesiasticus) was produced. This Greek translation adds a little heat to the Hebrew:

“Humble yourself to the uttermost, for the doom of the impious is fire and worms”.

The Book of Ben Sira never made it into the canon Jewish holy books (the “Tanach”). It is possible that this work was excluded from the canon because it contained no explicit endorsement of the notion of a World to Come—a fundamental tenet of Jewish belief. For readers of Ecclesiasticus, the worms may have appeared to be the final port of call for the dead, with nothing to come beyond them. If this is correct, the addition of “fire” in the Greek translation may have been an attempt to make Ben Sira’s teachings more palatable to Jewish readers, presumably on the basis that even a World to Come that was stoked by purifying fire was preferable to no such World at all.

By the time of Rabbi Levitas (c.100 CE) there was no longer any serious rabbinical argument over the existence of a World to Come, so his Mishnah would not have been considered a statement that had anything to do with it. Rather, it would have been read as a message regarding the imperative importance of shiflut ruach, “lowliness of spirit.”

Avot in Retrospect: a summary of last month's blogposts

In case you missed them, here's a list of items posted on Avot Today in June 2021:

Monday 28 June 2021: Pinchas and Moshe: thinking, fast and slow. When it comes to decision-making, two major biblical figures clearly have different approaches, with repercussions for how we understand Avot.

Wednesday 23 June 2021: Pirkei Avot and Pirates of the Caribbean. A popular movie reflects the critical difference between mitzvot and middot.

Sunday 20 June 2021: Minding our language. Some teachers of Torah and other subjects are squeamish about mentioning certain body-parts and bodily functions. Is this an issue?

Monday 14 June 2021: Letting others be heard. The dreadful behaviour of some of Israel's elected parliamentarians falls foul of Avot's "golem" test.

Sunday 13 June 2021: When values shine through: Pirkei Avot from an unexpected source.  A non-rabbinical speaker at Jerusalem's Hanassi synagogue has plainly imbibed its value system.

Sunday 6 June 2021: Leadership challenges and failure at the highest level: a matter of honour. What does Korach's rebellion against Moses have to do with Pirkei Avot?

Sunday 6 June 2021: "If not now, when?" Justice through the prism of Pirkei Avot:  A note on an imaginative cultural event.

Friday 4 June 2021: Binary choices and missing metaphors: a look at how language is used in Jewish learning, asking why the popular "light-versus-dark" metaphor does not appear in Avot.

Wednesday 2 June 2021: Wise after the event: who is a Chacham? If the "right" answer is "the person who learns from everyone", why was Alexander of Macedon given a quite different answer in the Talmud? 

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Avot Today blogposts for May 2021 here

Avot Today blogposts for April 2021 here

Avot Today blogposts for March 2021 here

Avot Today blogposts for February 2021 here

Avot Today blogposts for January 2021 here

Avot Today blogposts for December 2020 here