The perils of teaching and the danger of words

I keep an eye on Rabbi Dr Mordechai Schiffman’s Psyched for Avot posts, which offer a regular supply of psychological perspectives on Pirkei Avot. This week’s post discusses the first of only a small number of mishnayot in Avot to be based on a narrative rather than a quotable quote or succinct soundbite. Its author is Avtalyon, who used to say:

Wise men, be careful with your words, lest you incur the penalty of exile and be carried off to a place of evil waters. The disciples who follow you there will drink and die, and thus the name of heaven will be desecrated (Avot 1:11).

Rabbi Dr Schiffman offers explanations provided by sages from the era of the Meiri to the present day, which, in providing this mishnah with different meanings, show how many startlingly different situations it governs.

I have spent most of my professional life as a teacher and have a small personal perspective of my own to add.

Admonitions such as “be careful with your words” and warnings as to the potentially dire consequences of failing to do so are of course justifiable, but in many factual situations they may be of little or no use. They are principally of value where the teacher is aware of (i) which words may be misunderstood or misapplied and (ii) it is practicable, through taking care, to avoid the risk of such an outcome. If this is not so, a wise admonition may cause only annoyance and frustration. Think of a scenario in which a parent sees a child off to school in the morning with a well-meaning “do take care, darling”. In the course of the day the child suffers a mishap of one sort or another and is greeted on returning home with the words “but I toldyou to take care”. In instances such as this, the parent’s well-meant caution is in practice a sort of disclaimer: if anyone blames the parent for what happened to the child, the parent is basically saying “it’s not my fault”. Yet the child’s attention had not been specifically directed to any specific thing for which particular care was required and was likely unaware of the risk of the mishap. The same issue arises with warnings to be careful with one’s words.

Teachers, both of Torah and of secular subjects, can easily mislead or confuse students through their choice of words and presentational techniques, however good their intentions. It has been said that Pirkei Avot furnishes the classical example of this in Antigonus Ish Socho’s teaching (Avot 1:3) that a person should serve God as if he were not doing so on condition of receiving a reward, which his two talmidim Boethus and Tzadok misapplied for their own purposes. It is not however clear that this is so: the fault of Antigonus—if indeed there is one—may not have been founded in his choice of words but in the misfunction of the traditional technique for quality control in Jewish learning, that of getting a talmid to recite his lesson back to his teacher and explain it, so that any errors and misunderstandings can be rooted out an the early stage.

An example of a helpful and positive caution may be seen in the tongue-in-cheek warning of Rabbi Eliezer Papo, author of the Pele Yoetz,that if anyone writes a book of halachah, he should be sure to spell out all the stringencies attached to a rule and none of its leniencies. This is because its readers, in accordance with human nature, will inevitably assume that anything that is not specifically said to be prohibited must be permitted. There is no need to list any leniencies since readers are perfectly capable of inventing their own.

Finally I’d like to mention a truly sensitive area: that of teaching midrashim as though they were part of the narrative of the Torah or statements of scientific or historical fact. When teaching Torah to small children, it is often impossible and counter-productive to say: “this story is not part of the Torah but it may or may not be factually true”. But there comes a time when a careful framing of the context and significance of a midrash may be vital.

I can think of two examples where a relevant and important midrash was learned over in a manner that was clearly sub-optimal. In the first, an eminent rabbi’s statement, in the course of a fund-raising event, that the gestation period of a snake was seven years may have cost his institution a generous donation from a member of the audience who missed the important point made by this midrash because the speaker assumed that the audience would understand it without further guidance. In the second, a maggid shiur doggedly insisted that birds can fly with just one wing because the aggadah of the Gemara said so. This was treated with scorn by a secularly educated audience who would almost certainly have warmly received a deeper and more appropriate explanation of the story.