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.