“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.
