The best way to learn Pirkei Avot properly is to sit down with a teacher or friend in order to read and discuss its wise and sometimes controversial content. Ideally this should involve learning the original text, together with a good translation (if needed) and at least one of the main commentaries. Having said that, there are very many people -- and possibly a large majority of students and schoolkids -- who know little or nothing about Avot and are therefore unlikely to take notice of it at all, let alone study it.
Instagram provides a means for fusing brief snippets of text with eye-catching images in order to incapsulate a point in a sharp, succinct manner. My idea is that it can alert the media-savvy younger generations to some of the messages of Avot and, ideally, raise their level of awareness and even stimulate their curiosity to know a bit more.
Two examples of Instagram memes are shown at the foot of this post. Both seek to illustrate points made by Hillel at Avot 2:6.
The first is that someone who is meek, bashful or painfully reticent is not going to succeed in his or her studies since it takes a bit of courage to ask questions if you are afraid that they will make you appear foolish or if you are scared of your teacher's response. The second is that a teacher who is bad-tempered or short-tempered, aggressive and nitpickingly pedantic will not make a good teacher since he or she will intimidate students and drain away their self-confidence.
Not all of the guidance in Avot is amenable to this treatment. For example, the same mishnah that I have used for these two memes also teaches that a boor cannot be a sin-fearing person. There are also mishnayot which abstractions that are hard to portray visually, for example Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah's teaching (Avot 3:21) that where there is no knowledge, there is no understanding.
Having discussed these Avot memes with a small and probably quite unrepresentative sample of Jewish youth, I have been disappointed at how little they knew about Pirkei Avot -- if they knew anything about it at all -- and how willing they were to engage in informal discussion about some of the memes that have already been posted on Avot Today's Instagram account. I'm sure this exercise can be done better and hope that other people who are more at home with Instagram, Tik-Tok and the various other channels for creative and interactive communication will take up the challenge of making better ones than I can manage.
Thoughts and comments, please!
Avot Today's Instagram page is at https://www.instagram.com/avottoday/
