I’ve just learned of a forthcoming series of posts on Pirkei Avot that is to be hosted by the Jewish Press. The series is titled “Psyched for Avot” and it is the brainchild of Rabbi Dr Mordechai Schiffman. According to his biographical notes, Rabbi Schiffman is an Assistant Professor at Yeshiva University’s Azrieli Graduate School, an instructor at RIETS, and the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. If that’s not enough he also practised as a licensed psychologist in New York.
Rabbi Schiffman sets out his stall by contrasting the various approaches to Avot taken by Rabbi Moshe Almosnino and the Abarbanel. He concludes:
This new series, Psyched for Avot, will combine the two approaches outlined in Abarbanel. We will explore themes within Pirkei Avot, analyzing them both through a traditional lens rooted in Torah commentaries and through the empirical investigations from the field of modern psychology. Our WHY of Psyched for Avot is to converge the traditional wisdom of Pirkei Avot with the best practices of modern psychology to help us flourish in this world and the next. The analysis presented from each Mishna will help we will explore topics that will aim to increase our self-awareness, help us manage our emotions and behaviors, understand and relate better to others, learn more effectively, increase our productivity, and develop a better connection to God.
The interface between psychology and Pirkei Avot is a field that has already been explored by Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski in his Visions of the Fathers (first published 1999) and, in very different ways, by Rabbi Reuben P. Bulka in his Chapters of the Fathers: a Psychological Commentary on Pirkey Avoth (first published as As a Tree by the Waters back in 1980) and the Krupnick-Mandel production Torah Dynamics: Pirkei Avot Looks at Life (1991), co-authored by an educationalist and a family therapist. Many other commentators have felt confident to offer their own insights too. However, from what I as a layman can ascertain, the extent and significance of the various facets of this interface is a vast topic that shifts along with social, economic, religious and cultural trends and will therefore never be exhausted.
Readers of the Avot Today Facebook Group and weblog are invited to sample Psyched for Torah for themselves. In any event, I shall be keeping an eye on it and will be pleased to draw my readers’ attention to any item that I find particularly comment-worthy.
You can check out Rabbi Schiffman’s Pysched for Torah website here. It covers topics other than Avot too, but you can go straight to the Avot link here.
