Judging others -- again

One of the most frequently-cited teachings in Pirkei Avot comes early on in the tractate, when Yehoshua ben Perachyah says:

"...judge everyone favourably" (Avot 1:6).

This, the standard ArtScroll Publications translation, is found in the same or highly similar form in many other translations (see eg Rabbis S. R. Hirsch and E. Prins, Irving M. Bunim)-- but is this the actual meaning? The Hebrew is a little longer and more nuanced, alluding to set of scales on which a person's merit is to be weighed:

וֶהֱוֵי דָן אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם לְכַף זְכוּת

 Many English translations pick this up. Thus Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitz (Rabbi of the Western Wall) rendered it in the Jerusalem Post last week as

"Judge all men with the scale weighted in their favor".

while Chabad.org opts for the rather less idiomatic

"... judge every man to the side of merit"

Some scholars have produced not so much a translation as an explanation. Thus we find Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks offering

"...give everyone the benefit of the doubt".

There is a long and respectable tradition of taking this view of the mishnah -- and giving someone the benefit of the doubt is a noble sentiment. One wonders however if this is what the author of this mishnah really intended; he did after all speak of the "merit" of someone other than oneself, not "doubt", something we harbour in our own minds.

Commentators on this mishnah explain how important it is to see the good in others, how this is an essential part of learning how to see the good in oneself, how difficult it is to appreciate the motives that drive other people's actions, and so on. These explanations tend to be highly focused on Yehoshua ben Perachyah's teaching alone and sometimes fail to examine it within the context of other teachings in Avot.

The very next mishnah points to a problem in judging all others on a scale of merit. There (at 1:7), Nittai He'Arbeli urges people:

"Distance yourself from a bad neighbour and do not associate with a wicked person".

The very process of determining that someone is a bad neighbour or a wicked person involves not only having to judge them without first having been in their position (contrary to Avot 2:5) but also having to judge them unfavourably and in accordance with not their merits but their demerits. Additionally, the recognition and acceptance that a bad person is indeed bad is in line with the mishnah which teaches that one should concede that the truth is the truth (5:9).

Much of Pirkei Avot involves juggling conflicting ethical guidelines, and this is where the real challenge of humanity lies. There are times when it is right to judge favourably, to judge unfavourably -- and sometimes not to judge at all. There are also times when judging another person's state of mind is required in order to respond appropriately -- for example by being able to assess whether a person needs comfort and moral support, on the one hand, or solitude and personal space on the other (as in Avot 4:23). This is what makes the study of Avot so relevant today, as members of a society in which boundaries, attitudes and mores are constantly in motion.

When push comes to shove

I posted this piece initially on my Facebook page, but am posting it here too because it has obvious implications for Avot 1:6 -- the principle of judging other people favourably if one can.

Here are two incidents from last week.

In the first, I was waiting with many others for the arrival of Jerusalem's light rail train. When it pulled in, I immediately noticed how crowded it was. The automatic doors opened. Standing in the middle of the door nearest me, with obvious intent to stand, was a large woman with a wide double buggy.

As the doors opened, the crowd around me surged forward, quite forcing the woman back before she was eventually able to get off the train. The behaviour of the other passengers struck me as being not only unpleasant but also counterproductive: if they had only stepped back and let the woman with her buggy get off first, there would have been easier access for the oncoming passengers as well as more room for them once they were inside the carriage.

The second incident took place in a popular shopping mall, where I was sharing a lift with an elderly gentleman. As the door opened and before we could step out, a woman in a wheelchair propelled herself straight at us, causing an unnecessary and (for the elderly gentleman) painful collision. Again, it would have been more courteous and efficient for the woman to let us out of the lift before trying to enter it.

My first thought was that there are many people in this beautiful country who have no idea how to behave. On further reflection, I wondered whether there has been some sort of epigenetic effect at work. Many people who live in Israel are descendants of refugees from persecution and genocide in their countries of origin, people who may have owed their lives to being able to squeeze themselves on to the last train out of time or force themselves on to the last bus or boat. They may have transmitted an urge to board as a sort of survival gene that their subsequent generations find irresistible -- and this epigenetic effect may have mutated into a new social norm.

This idea may be quite wrong, but at least it gives me the chance to be less critical of my fellow humans when they practise a standard of behaviour that is so easy to criticise.

The Ages of Man -- and Woman?

The following post, which was commissioned for the Judaism Reclaimed Facebook Group, has been developed from two earlier posts (here and here) on this weblog.

The Torah reading for parashat Chayei Sarah commences with a recitation that the life of matriarch Sarah was “a hundred years and twenty years and seven years”. Regarding this unusual mode of expressing the number 127, Rashi famously cites a midrash (Bereshit Rabbah 58:1) to teach that Sarah was as sinless at 100 as she was when she was 20 [the age at which one becomes liable for heavenly punishment], and as beautiful at 20 as she was at 7. Alternatively, she was as beautiful at 100 as she was at 20, and as sinless at 20 as she was at 7 (according to Shadal, this is the original version of Rashi’s source). Either way, we can conclude that Sarah lived a long life, a life in which she remained constant in her virtue and in the quality of her personal appearance.

On the subject of age and advancing years, Pirkei Avot (5:25) has much to say. In particular, it features a lifestyle chronology that begins with learning the written Torah at five and concludes with a person being effectively “out of it” by the time he reaches 100. This Mishnah is plainly addressed to ordinary people and does not describe the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs, whose pre-Torah lives were governed by factors that applied to them but not to us. In Sarah’s case, of the three ages cited in the opening of this week’s parashah, only two of them—20 and 100—are found in the Avot list. While 100 is the age at which one ceases to count for anything, Jewish tradition makes it clear that Sarah continued to take an active part in life. Likewise 20 is the age at which one goes to work (opinions vary as to whether this means making a living or going out to learn Torah), but we do not find that Sarah had a day job at that or any other age. The only other age we learn of in Sarah’s biblical biography is 90, this being the mishnaic age at which physical weakness makes itself manifest—but it is also the point at which Sarah conceives Isaac (Bereshit 17:17).

The “ages of man” Mishnah raises delicate issues in contemporary Jewish thought, since it appears to be addressed only to men. There are at least several possible views one can take. These include the following:

• Women are excluded from the equation because this Mishnah is exclusively a men-for-men teaching;
• Women are not mentioned in this Mishnah because there is no need of a separate list. One only needs to make the necessary changes as one goes along (e.g. substituting 12 for 13 as the age of being bound by mitzvot and deleting 18 as the age for getting married, since this is a men’s mitzvah only);
• There is no need for a women’s list, or it is impossible to create one, since the biological, familial and social factors that govern the course of a woman’s life are more varied and uncertain than those of men;
• The mishnah does not actually address men in general, because it maps out an ideal course only for those who seek a life of Torah study in which everything else is purely incidental. Since it applies so narrowly and embraces only a minority of males, it is not gender-specific and there is no need to consider how, or to what extent, it applies to women

We live in a world in which women’s secular education and Torah study are facts on the ground and it is now nearly 90 years since the death of another Sarah—Sarah Schenirer—who lifted women’s education to a new and hitherto unprecedented level from which it has continued to rise. While classical and modern commentators generally avoid any mention of the absence of a “women’s list”, Judaism Reclaimed (chap. 41) explores the extent to which the biblical precedent of Devorah, and the halachic mechanism which some authorities understand it to have endorsed, can be utilised in the modern era of more widespread and substantial Jewish education for women. It would be good to hear from leading Torah scholars and thinkers as to whether there should be a parallel set of guidelines for women and, if so, as to what it might contain.

The paradigm test: the binding of Isaac

Avot 5:4 teaches that the patriarch Abraham faced ten tests and passed them all, to show how great was either his love for God or God's love for him (depending on which view one takes of the open weave of the text). This mishnah does not however say what the ten tests are. Browsing through the Torah, midrashim and commentators I have so far identified over 30 candidates for tests -- and there may be even more.

The paradigm test of Abraham is however God's command that he take Isaac to a place indicated by God and sacrifice him there. This is the only event in Abraham's life that the Torah actually describes as a test. It is therefore the test that is most frequently discussed and analyzed by Jewish scholars.

Being omniscient and beyond the limitations of time, God would have known the outcome of this test before it took place, which was why He made sure that the test was halted just before what would have been a tragic conclusion. The fact that Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son may not have been something Abraham needed to be told, since the Torah records his unswerving obedience to God’s commands. We could infer then that the function of this test was to show us, as Abraham’s physical or metaphorical descendants through Isaac, something of the quality, the steadfastness under stress and the deep love for God that the Patriarchs possessed. This demonstration of Abraham’s mettle would also act as a lesson for all subsequent generations as to how we should serve God, with love, fear and complete trust.

But there is more to this test than meets the eye. God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son and knows that Abraham will do so if God does not stop him first. However, God wants to establish why Abraham is prepared to carry out his instruction to the very end.

We have a tradition, enshrined in the Talmud, taught by Rabbi Chanina, that “everything is in the hands of Heaven—except for fear of Heaven" (Berachot 33b). This teaching appears to provide the key to Abraham’s test by giving it a clear and unambiguous purpose: to discover whether Abraham has fear of Heaven or not, this being something over which God has deliberately relinquished control. However, if Abraham was allowed to see the test through and kill Isaac because God told him to do so, this filial sacrifice would be viewed with horror by all right-thinking humans. They would not be wrong to ask: “why should we or anyone else want to know whether Abraham feared Heaven or not, if he commits such appalling and barbarous acts as this?”

The reason behind the reason

If the reason for testing Abraham with the sacrifice of his son was to establish that he was prepared to do so on account of his fear of Heaven rather than his love for God, we must ask a further question: what is the reason why we need to know why he was so motivated?

Each of the patriarchs is traditionally associated with a middah, a character trait, which became a byword for his conduct. Abraham is always associated with chesed (“kindness”) and his son Isaac with gevurah (“physical strength” but also “self-discipline”). Chesed is a by-product of love and relates to positive actions, while gevurah is a by-product of fear and relates to more negative ones. The issue to be resolved by this test was whether Abraham, whose very fabric was that of great kindness, would be able to overcome his own trait of extreme chesed and, drawing on his gevurah, steel himself to the task of killing someone as precious to him as the son whom God had promised him.

In the event, it is as a result of the test that we know that Abraham had sufficient gevurah to counterbalance his chesed and enable him to sacrifice Isaac. Since gevurah is an aspect of fear, we now have an explanation of God’s words at the very moment when He halts the test:

Don’t stretch out your hand against the lad and don’t do anything to him because now I know that you are God-fearing and did not withhold your son, your only son, from me (Genesis 22:12).

God left it to Abraham to feel the pull both of his chesed towards his son and his fear of God, and to demonstrate whether he had sufficient gevurah to carry out his task. This explanation has a take-away message for us too: we must take care to train our own characters so that we can draw on both chesed and gevurah when the need arises. It is not enough to say, “I’m a chesed man myself; I leave the gevurah to others who do it better.”

Back to work --- but do you love it?

The extended Jewish holiday period that characterises the month of Tishrei is now over. For some people -- those with jobs and who are not self-employed -- this is a bit of a relief. For the religiously observant, a succession of days off have to be sought, work arrangements must be amended, colleagues persuaded to provide cover, and so on. This leads me to ponder on an incidental work-related issue: are we supposed to love our work?

Pirkei Avot seems to suggest so. In Avot 1:10 Shemaya teaches:

"love work, hate mastery over others, and avoid intimacy with the government".

This is a broad statement, which invites us to ask questions. For example:

What sort of work should a person love?

In this mishnah the Hebrew word מלאכה (melachah) is used. It literally means “work”—and that is also the word used in the Torah to describe a large range of activities that are forbidden on the Sabbath, a holy day of rest. However, the word has overtones. While other words also mean “work,” melachah shares the same four-letter root as the word malach, an angel or emissary of God. The mishnah can therefore be suggesting that the sort of work a person should love is that through which he serves as an agent of God, in effect doing His work. This overtone is consciously deployed in a later mishnah (Avot 2:20, per Rabbi Tarfon).

Not all translators and commentators regard melachah as carrying such exalted implications. One takes the Tanna to be urging people to love “handicraft,” which conjures up slightly comical images of the Sages weaving baskets, sewing garments and crocheting kippot while they sit and learn in their houses of study. It is hard to conceive of any reason why Shemayah would wish to urge people to take up any handicraft, particularly in an era in which everything was made by hand and the skills relating to the production of clothes, shoes and household artefacts would have been far more widespread than they are today—unless he implanted into his advice some deeply encoded meaning which has since been lost.

Why should anyone love work?

A simple yet practical explanation is that work keeps a person occupied: it is a good idea to work even if you can afford not to, since work staves off boredom (per Bartenura, citing Ketubot 5:5). This explanation accepts that not everyone is cut out to spend their days learning Torah (or indeed anything else), since a person who can learn Torah and has the time in which to do so need never feel bored. However, this does not explain why a person should actually love work, rather than simply do it—and doing a job that one does not enjoy can be as effective a means of avoiding boredom as doing work that one really loves.

There is another aspect of involvement in one’s efforts to secure a living: the degree of self-respect that an individual is able to generate when he or she takes pride in their work, knowing that it has been done to the best of one's ability. This in turn can generate a kiddush Hashem (“sanctification of God’s name”) when clients or customers associate the conscientious execution of employment duties with the fact that the person performing them is a practising Jew. From the sheer brevity of Shemayah’s words we cannot deduce whether this aspect too was within his contemplation, though he certainly does not preclude this possibility.

Whose work should one love?

It is only a short distance from the Torah’s narrative of the Creation to the first mention of Man being placed in the Garden of Eden “to work it and to guard it.” From this we see that some form of useful human activity was written into God’s plan for the World. In the Torah this comes even before man’s obligation to toil on the soil (which was spelled out in consequence of the Fall of Man—as both a punishment and an absolute necessity for survival).

Shemaya does not specify whether the work which is to be loved is one's own, or whether it is that of others. Each of these positions can be justified—one’s own work, because it helps cause sin to be forgotten (Avot 2:2, per Rabban Gamliel ben Rebbi) and the work of others, because one recognizes with gratitude that one is ever dependent on the efforts of others.

As an aside, we should also recognize that loving one’s own work and doing it to the best of one’s ability has an impact on one’s ability to appreciate the quality of other people’s work—or at least to give recognition to the effort and dedication that has gone into it. An example of this effect in the Torah world is where only a person who regularly prepares teaching material is well equipped to see how much trouble a colleague has taken over the same activity; the same applies in the world of secular work where, for example, the preparation of food or the performance of music depend on experience, skill and practice that may be apparent only to the most discerning and knowledgeable diner or audience member.

Thanks for the thank-you

 Earlier this week my wife and I received a "thank-you" card from a newly-wed couple to whom we had sent a present. This set me thinking.

The card, which was printed, bore a hand-written inscription that was several lines long. It made reference both to the gift itself and to the couple's appreciation of it, and it was penned relatively soon after the wedding.

I was greatly surprised to receive this card. For one thing, it seems that in recent times many couples do not acknowledge gifts at all, so the arrival of this epistle was quite unexpected. For another, both newly-weds are very busily engaged in their work, their studies and their communal activities. It would have been quite understandable if they had printed out a standard one-size-fits-all thank-you card and posted it without further ado. We do not know the couple particularly well, though one of them is the child of a cousin.

Our gift was not a particularly generous or exotic one and I rather felt that the letter with its attendant message was somehow more valuable than our gift. It gave me great pleasure to receive and read it; I felt that the world was not quite as full of thoughtless and ungrateful souls as sometimes seems to be the case.

What does this have to do with Pirkei Avot? A great deal, I believe. We learn that we should treat even small mitzvot (commandments) with as much alacrity and conscientious application as we would direct towards the fulfilment of big ones (see Avot 2:1, 4:2). This is because we are not in a position to know which, if any, are more important to God than any others. We may think something is a trivial ritual requirement that can be easily passed over or done in a desultory fashion, but we have no idea how our performance of mitzvot is received at the other end.

I'm sure that the young couple who sent us their thank-you message do many things each day that they may regard (maybe rightly so) as being more important. However, they have sent out a message that, from their outset of their marriage, they are prepared to devote as much attention to getting the little things right as to addressing the big ones -- an attitude endorsed by Pirkei Avot.

From my standpoint, their little gesture of gratitude made a great impact. Apart from giving me huge pleasure, it has forced me to ask myself whether I am sufficiently conscientious in adequately acknowledging the kindness of others that I so enjoy (and sometimes expect) to receive.

Getting someone else's reward

Avot 5:3 is a sort of sequel to the mishnah preceding it (discussed on Avot Today here). Both describe God as being slow to anger, waiting for ten generations before responding to the continuing decline in human behaviour:

There were ten generations from Noah to Abraham, to let it be known how slow God is to anger—because all these generations increasingly angered Him until Abraham came and received the reward of them all.

This mishnah raises many questions, of which one of the most obvious is that of How could Abraham -- or anyone else, for that matter -- receive someone else’s reward?

If we accept that God is good and just and that He would not withhold a reward from anyone who has earned it, we should be able to assume that everyone who lived between the time of the Flood and the death of Abraham did indeed receive a reward or recompense from God for their good deeds, and that Abraham did not receive anything to which he was not personally entitled. Can we accept this is is so and still explain Abraham’s apparently undeserved good fortune in receiving "the reward of them all"? Here are some possible answers:

• Abraham did so many good deeds that he accomplished what it would have been appropriate for all ten generations to have done. It was on this basis that they were all saved in his merit, since he took upon himself the yoke of all the mitzvot in this World. That is why he received a commensurate reward in the World to Come (per Rabbi Ovadyah MiBartenura).
• Since Abraham taught members of his generation to serve God and to keep away from bad deeds, he is associated with their reward “as if he had received it,” and he also received the reward that was appropriate for his own deeds (per Rabbi Menachem Meiri). This explanation distinguishes Abraham from Noah, who was neither a teacher nor a role model: his good qualities did not spread beyond his wife Na’amah and his sons Shem and Japheth.
• The reward Abraham received was one which anyone in any of the earlier generations could have secured for themselves—the reward of being named as the leading Forefather, the Patriarch of what was to become God’s Chosen People. Shem/Malchitzedek nearly secured the same reward several generations before Abraham, but lost the opportunity after he gave a blessing to Abraham before blessing God (Nedarim 32b).
• The names “Noah” and “Abraham” do not refer to Noah and Abraham but are shorthand terms for the generations in which they lived. Thus when we learn that “Abraham” received the rewards of “them all,” we can take it that the generation of Abraham—in which several righteous people lived in addition to Abraham himself—received the aggregate of all the generational bonus rewards that had yet to be conferred (I have yet to find any authoritative source for this explanation).

I suspect that many readers have thought about this themselves and may have reached their own conclusions as to what this mishnah means. Anyone who wishes to share their thoughts on this issue is very welcome to do so.

A spade or an axe? Take your pick

A rabbi of my acquaintance recently commented on an extract from Pirkei Avot which, he said, was generally mistranslated. This extract from Avot 4:7, taught in the name of Rabbi Zadok, is bound to be the subject of disagreement because it exists in different forms, but the text to which he referred is that which is most commonly found in contemporary publications:

וְאַל תַּעֲשֶֽׂהָ עֲטָרָה לְהִתְגַּדֶּל בָּהּ, וְלֹא קַרְדּוּם לַחְפֹּר בָּהּ

What does this mean? These words are usually rendered as

“do not use it [i.e. the Torah] as a crown with which to glorify oneself, and not as a spade to dig with”. 

The idea behind these words is uncontroversial: no-one should cash in on their knowledge of the Torah as a means of boosting their personal prestige or as a way of obtaining material gain. It is also generally accepted that the verb לַחְפֹּר (lachpor) means “dig”. So what then is the problem?

The problem—if indeed it be a problem—is that the word קַרְדּוּם (kardum), rendered in this mishnah as “spade”, is also found in the Books of Samuel (1:13, 20 and 21), Judges (9:48) and Jeremiah (46:22) with the meaning of “axe”. The same meaning is found in the Babylonian Talmud (Betzah 31a-b). There also exists a parallel text of our mishnah in which the last four words are rendered וְלֹא קַרְדּוּם לַחְתָּךְ בָּהּ (“and not an axe to chop with”).

Is the translation of kardum as “spade” in our mishnah therefore an error? I do not think so.

If kardum can only mean “axe”, Rabbi Zadok is urging us not to use the Torah as “an axe to dig with”. This seems a little awkward, in that an axe is used for chopping or splitting something rather than for digging it. To say that he is teaching only that one should use the Torah an implement that is suitable for any given task (i.e. for chopping, as it were, but not for digging) seems narrow and may also sound a little contrived.

Even if it is wrong, among English translations the “spade to dig with” formula is the generally-accepted translation among commentators, translators and publishers. These include Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (Authorized Daily Prayer Book and the Koren Pirkei Avot), Rabbi Eliezer Prins (The Lehmann-Prins Pirkei Avoth), Rabbi Reuven Bulka (Chapters of the Sages),Rabbis Avie Gold and Nahum Spirn (Alshich on Avos), Irving M. Bunim (Ethics From Sinai), Hyman E. Goldin (Ethics of the Fathers), Philip Birnbaum (HaSiddur HaShelam) and Herbert Danby (The Mishnah), not to mention all the many editions of Avot published by ArtScroll. The version of this mishnah found on the chabad.org website accepts this translation even though the Hebrew version that accompanies it would be more accurately rendered “an axe to chop with”.

Apart from the "axe to dig with", there are other textual variants, but these are very much minority views. Basing himself on other manuscript sources, R. Travers Herferd (The Ethics of the Talmud) opts for "a 'dish' wherewith to eat", while the Hirschler/Haberman revision of Rabbi S. R. Hirsch and Samson Krupnik's Torah Dynamics both offer "an ax with which to strike". Rabbi Eliahu Touger's translation of Rambam's commentary goes for "an axe with which to cut".

Be that as it may, while it must be accepted that the majority is not always right, we cannot ignore the fact that it is the majority—and an influential one, at that. This gives me confidence to affirm that, even though kardum may mean “axe” in other contexts, we are entitled to treat the word as “spade” in the context of this mishnah and learn its message accordingly. 

Free will and floods: a lesson from Noah

There is a mishnah at Avot 5:2 that is seemingly out of place in a collection of teachings that deal with matters of morality and the improvement of one's character. It reads like this:

"There were ten generations from Adam to Noah, to let it be known how slow God is to anger—because all these generations increasingly angered Him until He brought upon them the waters of the Flood".

The obvious moral of the mishnah is implicit: if God is slow to anger, shouldn't we too make an effort not to fly off the handle? Isn't it only right that that we should temper our anger with careful thought as to why we are angry and whether a display of anger is indeed the appropriate response to whatever is troubling us?

There is however much more that can be said about this mishnah.

The world as a fish tank

The ten generations from Adam to Noah had ample time to assuage God’s anger and build the kind of World He envisaged. They did not do so and were almost entirely destroyed. This harsh judgement on the first ten generations of mankind does not mean that no decent, upright souls had ever walked the planet before the Flood. The Torah itself twice records that Enoch “walked with God,” and numerous midrashim praise the qualities of Adam, Seth and Methuselah. However, there is an irreducible number of righteous people below which God’s collective punishment cannot be prevented. This is demonstrated by the famous dialogue in which Abraham persuades God not to destroy the patently evil communities of Sodom and Gemorrah if 50, then 45, 40, 30, 20 or even 10 righteous people live here. Once he has negotiated God down to 10, Abraham breaks off the negotiation, presumably on the unspoken understanding that he has gone as far as he can go.

From the time of Adam until the generation of Noah, God waited patiently for some genuine sign of recognition, some glimmer of gratitude or respect, indeed any sort of response or interaction from His human creations. Not only was none forthcoming, but “the wickedness of man on Earth was great, and every desire in the thoughts of man was nothing but evil the whole time.”

Only Noah, whom the Torah describes as a tzaddik —a righteous man—found grace in God’s eyes. There is substantial debate as to quite how righteous Noah was, and the Torah’s account of his life after the Flood does not mark him out as a role model for subsequent generations. However, we learn that he had two particular qualities that marked him out for continuing the human race: (i) at a time of idolatry he believed in God, listened to Him and obeyed Him, and (ii) in an era of rampant sexual immorality he was a family man.

There is no way that we can understand or experience God’s perspective, but the following analogy might help. Imagine that you have purchased an expensive fish-tank with a selection of beautiful tropical fish. You furnish the fish-tank with all the accessories needed for their health and comfort, provide them with food and keep their environment clean and fresh. The fish however pay you no attention whatsoever. They have no gratitude and show no recognition of your love, your care and your efforts on their behalf. That wouldn’t be so bad by itself, but the fish become aggressive and fight, preferring to eat one another rather than avail themselves of the food you have provided.

There is no satisfaction to be gained by watching these fish swimming around in their tank. The time has come to jettison these fish and try again. But wait! There is one fish that swims expectantly to the surface when feeding time comes, one fish that refrains from attacking its fellows. You reject the idea of starting over with a new set of fish. Instead, you conceive a plan to breed them from this one fish and its mate in the hope that its less aggressive and more positive attributes may be passed on to its offspring.

The lack of any sort of positive response or recognition is almost inevitable with fish, but not with humans—sentient social beings who, having partaken of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, have a far wider scope for behaving in accordance with God’s will.

Free will, determinism and fear of Heaven

It may be that the function of this mishnah is to demonstrate the importance of free will since, without it, the repentance of sinners would be pointless. Starting with Adam, God could have created humans who were programmed to act in precisely the manner He chose for them. Their choices and their decisions could all have been determined in advance of their creation, as could their thoughts, their words and their social interactions. He could have even programmed into them the illusion that they were acting autonomously and of their own free will. The Torah’s Creation narrative however makes it plain that God did not follow this plan. If He had done, the World would have been a tidier, better-run and far more peaceful place, for sure, but the exercise of creating and populating such a World would have been about as meaningless as for an intelligent adult human being to play games with a set of toy soldiers.

For whatever reason, God created a World in which He made mankind in His image, which meant giving humans a measure of free will. This free will could be used for establishing some sort of relationship with God and for doing acts of kindness to others—just as God does good to them. The first ten generations sadly failed to establish any sort of relationship with God: they showed Him neither gratitude nor respect and had no love or fear of Him. They also failed to develop any sort of stable society in which they could act for the good of each other. In short, they were not exercising their freedom of choice in the way that God had hoped they would.

God gave humanity plenty of time to improve but, the more it did not do so, the angrier God became. Only Noah appeared to be acting along the lines that God had hoped would be the norm for humanity, so it was Noah who was saved—along with as much of his nuclear family as was necessary for God to begin human life on Earth for a second time. Everything else was simply washed away.

Greeting others with genuine happiness: what is expected of us?

Rabbi Yishmael, at Avot 3:16, teaches a three-fold message. There is no consensus as to what the first two parts mean, but the third part is both simple to comprehend and hard to put into practice: a person should receive everyone besimchah, literally "in happiness". What did Rabbi Yishmael mean by this?

On one view, a person should be genuinely happy to meet others. After all, every human is created, as it were, in God's image and there is no-one on the planet who does not have the capacity to improve the lot of family, friends or the wider community.

Another view is that, however miserable or angry another person has made you, it is still incumbent on us all to grit our teeth and put on a show of good cheer, to demonstrate that we can rise above the behaviour of others and not let them dictate how we respond to others.

Classical commentators have no doubt that Rabbi Yishmael meant his words to be taken literally and applied across the board. Rambam sees them as an upgrade on Shammai's teaching at Avot 1:15 that we should greet others with a cheerful face: now we should genuinely feel the happiness we show. The commentary in Rashi's name adds that we must speak pleasantly to all comers. Me'am Lo'ez takes the mishnah's words literally, as does Midrash Shmuel, who holds that even people who come to hurt you are in one way or another emissaries of God. Rabbenu Yonah does not even explain the teaching but merely repeats it, presumably because he regards its meaning as being self-evident.

Modern commentators, acknowledging the realities of contemporary society, are more nuanced in their advice to readers. Thus Rabbi Marc D. Angel (The Koren Pirkei Avot) prefers to apply this mishnah to 'the whole person' rather than 'every person'. He writes:

"...[Rabbi Yishmael] surely knew that it was unrealistic to expect people to cheerfully receive all human beings. Perhaps his statement should be understood as advising the maintenance of an optimistic overall view of humanity..." Receive the 'whole person' optimistically -- knowing that the good and evil will be judged by God".

Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch also qualifies the mishnah, but by reference to time, not the person being encountered:

"Do not reject anyone from the outset; instead, receive everyone gladly, and then consider whether or not he is suitable for you and your endeavours".

In the wake of the Holocaust and the many dreadful sufferings faced by Jews in both hospitable and inhospitable lands, one can appreciate the temptation to qualify Rabbi Yishmael's words. One contemporary rabbi has however held out against this temptation and his words are all the more poignant for his being a survivor of the Buchenwald death camp. Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau (Yachel Yisrael, ArtScroll translation) writes:

"We must gladly greet 'everyone': each human being... Although not everyone possesses this natural ability to empathize with others, it can be acquired, 'until gladness becomes part of one's nature' [citing Rabbeinu Yitzchak ben R' Shlomo]"".

In a world in which it is so much easier to hate than to love, and to distance oneself from one's fellow humans, but where we have come to accept that there are limitations on the extent to which we can live out the ideals of earlier generations, we should think carefully before imposing limits on any encouragement to do or to be good, so those limitations do not become norms in their own right.

Creating worlds with words

The fifth chapter of Avot opens with a mishnah that addresses the topic that begins the Torah: the Creation. It reads:

The World was created with ten utterances. What does this teach us? Isn’t it the case that it could have been created with a single utterance? Rather, this is to punish the wicked for destroying the World that was created with ten utterances, and to give a good reward to the righteous for sustaining the World that was created with ten utterances.

Taken at face value, the world to which this mishnah refers is the world that God created as a habitat for all living creatures. Some scholars have however preferred to take the view that we have here a metaphor for the “small world” that is each human being.

Can this interpretational device, deployed by the Maharal elsewhere in Avot (at 1:2), work here too? At first glance our answer must be "no". Many commentaries on Avot (e.g. example Rambam; Machzor Vitry; Commentary ascribed to Rashi; Rabbi Ovadyah Bartenura; Tiferet Yisrael) explain that, in the Torah’s account of the Creation, nine acts of divine creativity are preceded by the utterance “And the Lord said…” Added to this is the first word in the Torah, “Bereshit” (“In the beginning”) which also constitutes a utterance, making up the full complement of ten. However, in the account of the creation of man in Genesis, Adam appears to have been created with not ten utterances but just one (Genesis 1:26).

Does this mean that we must abandon the "world-as-each-individual" explanation? Not necessarily. There is a verse in Isaiah (51:16) that reads as follows:

And I have put My words into your mouth, and have covered you in the shadow of My hand, so that I may plant the Heavens, and lay the foundations of the Earth, and say unto Zion: “You are My people.”

The Hebrew word for “My words” in this verse is דברי (divarai). If you insert a space between the letter י (the yud) of דברי and the rest of the word, you change the meaning. This is because the yud represents the numerical value 10. You now have דבר י (devar yud, “a matter of 10”). Revisiting our verse, we can now learn it as:

And I have put a “matter of 10” into your mouth, and have covered you in the shadow of My hand, so that I may plant the Heavens, and lay the foundations of the Earth, and say unto Zion: “You are My people.”

The number 10 is rich with Jewish symbolism, and one of the things it alludes to is the Ten Commandments, the quintessence of the Torah and the acceptance of which can be said to complete the creation of man. Linkage of the ten utterances of Creation with the Ten Commandments is not new: it is found in the Zohar and has influenced Torah commentators ever since (see e.g. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, quoted in Pirkei Avot im Sha’arei Avot).

Going back to our Mishnah, armed with this verse, we can now postulate that it does indeed refer to the creation of the “small world” which is man, but not just any man. Here we have an individual who is initially incomplete but is created in his final form through the “matter of 10,” the Ten Commandments that God uttered on Mount Sinai. With the ultimate perfection of man comes the conclusion of the Creation which began with the Heavens and the Earth—mentioned here in our verse from Isaiah and also in the very first verse of the Torah itself.

We can learn an important message from this. When a person destroys another human being, who has been “created” through acceptance of the Ten Commandments, his punishment is in proportion to his having broken the link between his victim and all ten of them. Conversely, someone who saves another is taken to have affirmed all ten and his reward is commensurate with this.

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 September 2021:

Sunday 26 September 2021: A time to be happy, in the long run. The festival of Simchat Torah is one big party, but Avot 6:4 suggests another route to happiness. How can two apparently conflicting policies be reconciled?

Wednesday 22 September 2021: A couple of books: can you help? A pair of commentaries fell into my hands and I'd like to know a bit more about them.

Wednesday 15 September 2021: Silence is golden -- but so is speech. While several mishnayot in Avot advocate saying as little as possible, they also recognise that it can be important to articulate one's thoughts and feelings.

Friday 10 September 2021: Mazikim pt 2: are we the real mazikim? Continuing the theme of the previous post (below), we suggest that there is a role for mazikim in forcing us to take responsibility for our own actions.

Wednesday 8 September 2021: Mazikim pt 1: what are they and how do we deal with them? In Avot 5:8, we learn that mazikim were created on the eve of the first Sabbath. What on earth is this teaching doing in Avot -- and what are mazikim anyway?

Wednesday 1 September 2021:  The message on the door. Is it true that a person can really learn from everyone? Here's a lesson on behaviour from a most unusual source.

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Avot Today blogposts for August 2021 here

Avot Today blogposts for July 2021 here

Avot Today blogposts for June 2021 here

Avot Today blogposts for May 2021 here

Avot Today blogposts for April 2021 here

Avot Today blogposts for March 2021 here